Once more unto the breach...

The first day of school. Despite this being the 13th time, the joy of coming back to school never seems to disappear. Then you realise that all the work you were supposed to do during the holidays haven't been done and panic ensures. Right now, I'm up to chapter 24-ish of the 50 or so Emma study questions and I've just taken a one hour break. I'm not sure whether I should keep going or just leave it there. It's been quite easy though, so I guess I'll push on, get as many done as possible. Our new physics teacher Mr Fearnside is kinda cool in a way. I'm guessing he will be one of the stricter teachers but the way he drops a few jokes here and there, I guess he'll be alright.

One of the funnier things that happened on the first day of school occured during Chemistry. Ms Singh was passing out sheets. I took two sheets for me and Hao, and there was one one sheet remaining, but there was still Deborah, Land and Shuai. So I tapped Land on the shoulder and passed the sheet, saying "You're two short." Now say that again to yourself a few times. Yep, that's right. I didn't realise it until Hao started to laugh. Now Land is short. That's a fact. What I said sounded like "You're too short." I started laughing and Land and friends quickly caught on to the joke. We all know how sensitive Land is about her height. So sorry about that, but damn, that was funny.

When will the jokes and laughter end for me? This is why I love going to school. The hilarity and humour.

Procrastination Nirvana

I've done. I have achieved mastery of procrastination of the higest level and caliber. Which is why I'm TOTALLY FREAKING OUT!

WTF WAS OUR HOLIDAY HOMEWORK?!!?

SHIT!

Master of Procrastination

Right now, I'm dabbling in a little game called Stronghold 2, holding off till probably the last minute to do all that holiday work. Chem prac is due 2nd week, but I haven't touched it and don't know whether I even have the sheets. There's a bunch of English questions I have to do, like 40-ish, all about Emma. I have Physics work and that's all I know, damned if I know exactly what I have to do.

Procrastination...on the eve of diving into year 12...is that smart, you reckon?

The Hitsorcist or Hitxorcist?

If the Australia Day Party is to end all parties, then why do we still have parties afterwards anyway?

And how the hell do you spell Hitsxorcist?

Radial Dreamers

I know have a, more or less, clearer understanding of my washing machine. It's probably that I'm more awake right now. I took a look at it just now, And I was probably overexaggerating the difficulty of operation. Still, I was groggy that morning and that made things worse.

Pretty self-explanatory, really. Still haven't figured out what is drip-dry.

The infamous radial dial.

Actually, I was planning on watching the entire cricket on channel 9, except my aunt came over and we decided to eat out. We went to a buffet and it just reminds me how buffets are cool. You get to choose what to eat and how much. Of course, it's partly an illusion of choice. You can only eat whats on offer and you tend to eat a bit more than usual, as not to waste the entrance fee. Still, buffets are cool.

Just a bit of time reading TIME magazine, when I could be doing school work, but that's what Monday night is for! At least Chem prac is due 2nd week and that'll give me time to organise. So, President Bush admits that he spied on American citizens illegally, and that as President, he fairly used his 'supreme power' to protect Americans from the dangers of terrorism. With all the scandal affecting him now, I don't see how the Bush administration reasserting its power anytime soon. Still, when Bush gets out, I hope we get a half-decent President. It kind of sucks that the US is the only world superpower and policeman. It's done a shitty job of late, but I still reckon it could be worse. I would like to see China rise up as a world power (it's doing so right now). A little war between the straits is what we need.

Complex Machinations

This is probably going to sound stupid, and the girls are going to laugh, but I going to say this.

I have no idea how to operate my washing machine.

There I said it, it's out in the open.

So while it does seem kind of dumb of me that I can't operate a washing machine, it's the truth. I wake up one holiday morning, groggy and a strange sharp ringing tone in my ears and find that my parents have left for Flemington markets to buy bulk supplies of veggies and fruit, since it's cheaper in bulk. So I find written on the whiteboard, in Vietnamese of course, orders to hang out the washing. Easily done, except, the washing had not been done. So it was my duty to hang out the washing, but to do that I needed to do the washing. So I dumped the clothes into the washing machine, and then stared blankly at it. It's an older machine, but there's just some much stuff on the radial dial.

You have pre-wash settings, half of it is for 'normal cycle', the other for 'gentle cycle'. Not to mention the myriad of settings for permenant press, delicates and special woollens. And what the fuck is 'drip dry'? I did managed to get the water flowing and the machine working in the end. I'll probably post a pic of the dash of the washing machine.

On to a completely different topic, I was just wondering around of the net checking out message boards, blogs and whatnot. And I came upon some words, which basically say the feminist thing, ummm, what was is...something along the lines of "women are being discrimnated...women can do stuff just as well as men' yadda yadda yadda. That little paragraph pulled out an old primary school memory. Our year 6 teacher, Ms Ward, was the coach of the junior and senior netball teams. Thus, often our class would play netball for fun and sport. Now my class had 21 guys to 9 girls. Now netball is quite clearly a girl's sport for some reason. In competitions, no guys are allowed to play netball. So while feminists say they're being deprived, what about us guys? We had lots of sporty guys in our class and, for some vague and indistinct reason, we challenged the senior girl's netball team. The result? We thrashed them like 100 points to 10. Well, maybe not, but the point gap was huge. So our teacher is like 'fine, rematch' and we take on the junior girl's team and thrash them. We then gave the senior girl's team a chance to redeem themselves and they got thrashed.
This little incident clearly shows that guys can play netball with very good results. Feminists keep saying that guys are afraid of what 'capable, independant women' can do. It probably spins the other way. Feminists are afraid of what a bunch of guys can do to.

By the way, I don't know about others, but when you answer the phone or whatever, do you get confused with someone else? Whenever I pick up the phone, my parents' friends always, always, confuse me with my dad. It's a bit pissy, but, hell, my voice does sounds quite different on the phone.

Now that's hot.

One word. Well, several words.

Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.

Good decision, channel 10!

They're big and they're cheesy!

WTF? Fat Pizza is on Channel 10 now? I thought only SBS carried the ethnic programs...
Anyway, I'm not sure if it restarted from the beginning but there was this cool little set piece. Sleek gets pulled over by this Aussie cop, who fines him for not completely stopping at a stop sign. Sleek is like he slowed down and that's good enough because he's "a top driver, bro." The cop punches him, pulls him out of the car and starts bashing him with the baton. And the cops says, as he's smashing Sleek, "Would you like me to slow down or come to a complete stop?!?"

Fat Pizza...I gotta get a DVD of this stuff.

Woman in White

Supernatural...rocks. The only thing better than it would be House.

Just a little note. Memoirs of a Geisha...looks interesting, but why is the character of the Japanese geisha played by Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese? Thoughts?

Heatness

Had a bbq yesterday arvo with family and relatives. It was pushing like 35 and I had to set the bbq up and get the fire going. Damn.

Finished Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. For all the gamers out there, the starforce protection was a bitch, but breakable. Thank you Daemon Tools 4 and SFNightmare.

New Coca-Cola Zero. No sugar. WTF? Didn't really like the taste, but the black design on the can is cool.

Emma done. Trying to summon up the discipline of start Wild Swans. I can finish it, but damn I feel lazy trying to read that. And there's still english homework. And Chem prac. The horror!

I'm wondering when MiG's WoW server will be back up. Still quiet there. If it ain't up in a couple of days, I'm ditching WoW. There, I said it.

Spent a hour, going through my computer cleaning up junk. I have a 190gig hard drive and I've somehow used up 113 gigs. Damn it, I only have like 80-ish gigs left.

Summer of Cricket! One-dayers are cool. Sri Lanka didn't look so cool against Australia. But must have been Freaky Friday cos Simmons hit the ball, bounced of Clarke and was caught out. Damn.

Blue Skies and Grey Seas

I'm just going to tell a couple of stories of my holidays. They are quite funny now, although at the time, it was much more pissy and fustrating.

On the 2nd day at Yamba, a whole bunch of us rented this...pontoon, I think is the word. It was like a platform floating on 2 cylindrical floats and it had railings, a roof (wow!) and a portable toilet. There were 11 of us on it, mainly women and teenagers, with the rest of our group out fishing separately. Now we were all pumped up to get this out into the rivers, maybe find a beach to stop buy to swim and have dinner. Back to port at around 8pm. Easy, right? Right...
So we're cruising away and we quickly get stuck in a shallow area of the river. So most of us (the guys, duh) get and push the boat back on course. We stopped at a beach and went swimming. One of the guys was trying his luck at fishing. I just stole his net and tried to net one of the flying seagulls. They were hovering quite low, but I was unsuccessful. During that time, our pontoon drifted slightly and ended up wedged on the beach. This time most of us did get out and push the boat, but too well, because it started drifting away before 4 of us could get back on. I hadn't intended on swimming but I got wet anyway. Now that sucked. But wait...
We started heading back, because the sky was getting dark and the wind was picking up. We were making our way back to shore and to have dinner on solid land. Except we got stuck in this really muddy area with seaweed. The motor couldn't turn properly because of the shallowy muddy waters and the seaweed. The seaweed literally wound itself around the motor. We tried pushing, but the ground was so muddy, we were sinking to our knees and thw wind and waves kept pushing us back to even shallower waters. And the weather was getting worse all the time.
Even managed to call the other group on our CBs (read: walkie talkies) and they came and began pulling us, while we pushed the boat. Eventually, we made it to deeper water, but the ride was harrowing as the wind and waves kept pushing us off course to shallow water. But we managed to fight our way to shore. It was a hilarious moment, now that I look back. But at the time I was more pissed off and fustrated. And a little bit scared, I admit. It's a nice memory though.

Another quickie, is when we reached Surfer's Paradise and were bring stuff up to our room. My brother, my cousin and I had loaded the elevator and pressed the floor 13 button. But the elevator doors didn't close and nothing happened. So I decided to dash back out and reenter the key code, which was 2580#. The moment I stepped out, the elevator doors closed and bam! I was stuck. I tried the stairs but the door to them was locked due to "security concerns". So I had to wait for an elevator to come down before I could get back up. Damn, eh?

Whew! Quite a long post, but those were two stories that really stood out as being memorable. I hoping everyone else is having an enjoyable holiday. If not, well, sucks to be you then.

Movement at the Station

Photo time! Just a few snapshots of my holidays to Yamba and Surfer's Paradise.

Mantaray thingy we managed to catch. We're still noobs at fishing. :(
Got attacked by this snake in my bunk bed.
Little message found on a tree in Byron Bay.
View of the beach from my hotel room.
Watching TV with my brother and cousins.
The Superman Escape rollercoaster

Back from the Dead

I got back from Queensland yesterday, and I'm just posting to let you know that I have managed to arrive home safely.

It was a really cool trip. Don't worry, I'll be posting photos up later. In short, we spent three nights at Yamba and three nights at Surfer's Paradise. Yamba was a sleepy little town, but had really nice people. We must have been the only Asians there, and I looked damn hard for some other Asians tourists, but no go. Fishing was great, except we were still noobs and the really big fish, we lost. Damn! But we caught this manta ray thingy, so it wasn't a total waste. Surfer's Paradise was...well...a paradise. This was the the sixth time I stayed there and I felt right at home. The beaches, the shops, the nightlife...it never brings you down. On a side note, they only had a 5 person room, but our group had 10 people. So what did we do? What Asians would do. Cram 10 people into a 5 person room. I got lucky this time and slept on the couch. More on that later.

Chrono Symphonic Remix Project
This came out on the 3rd of January, while I was away on holidays. So right now I'm online just to get this soundtrack. Chrono Trigger is a SNES game, created by Squaresoft of Final Fantasy fame. This little RPG was a little gem and quickly became a cult hit, even after the SNES days were long gone. Despite the flashy graphics of systems like XBox or Playstation 2, the game focused on the important things, a intriguing storyline, innovative gameplay and a wonderful musical track that complemented the game. With its quirky and interesting characters, it still remains as a must-play in today's super-high-resolution graphics games. Andrew Lee Triplett wrote a screenplay for the Chrono Trigger movie. Obviously, the movie was never going to get off the ground, but Triplett instead moved on to the soundtrack, where he collaborated with some of the best remixers at OCRemix to create an orchestral movie soundtrack to complement the script. So do a favour and visit this site and download a couple of tracks, or the whole soundtrack if you like.