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.

Boredom - The Revolution

So bored. You always fantasise about all the things you are going to do in the holidays and it, incredibly, turns out that you have nothing to do. I mean, there's reading Emma and Wild Swans, and the occasional brush-up on maths because you failed it hardcore, but there is nothing exciting. Nothing to get the adrenaline pumping hard and fast.

My holidays so far has been boring. I did go to the beach at Kurnell and relatives and all. It was actually alright, as my cousins bought this boat, with a proper steering wheel and handgear, so I was cruising away, putting my land-based driving experience to the open seas. The open seas, woo! Honestly, screw getting a car! I want to get a boating licence and a fast boat. Something that can tear up the waterways and let me go fishing occasionally.

Right now, I'm waiting for Monday 2nd of January 2006. I am going up to Iluka/Yamba in Queensland to indulge in some fishing and then a quick trip to the Gold Coast for some fun in the sun. It will be a week, so no posting on this blog for that time.

Right now, I am trying to find something to keep me occupied until then. I am capped for cable so I can't download stuff. Lucky for me, Bleach isn't coming out until the 10th of something, so I'm safe there. I might start building up my music collection, so I can have a stack of CDs to listen to during the trip, to complement my MP3 player. I wonder if OverClocked Remix has something. Maybe Anime Remix or VGMix...

On a side note, I finally have a bigger fan. Sporting a 40cm diameter, 3 levels of power and a nifty remote, I no longer have to sweat out those hot summer nights with my measly 25cm-something fan. And screw you if you have air-con in your room.

Cricketing

Just came back from cricket and I'm so hammered. I almost feel asleep, but a nice cold shower woke me up in no time. It was sunny, with some clouds in the sky, perfect day for cricket. It was year 12s vs year 11, but we got so smashed. Year 12s made it up to 150+ and when I left, we still needed 100 runs or so too match. It was dismal batting on our side. Maybe it was after lunch and having stuffed ourselves with KFC. Either way, we sucked bad. I got out for a golden duck. *sob*

It was still cool though. Getting together, playing cricket, the sun and the fun. It's hard to explain, but it feels good to get together and play cricket. Obviously there will be people asking "what's so fun about cricket? Such and such is much better" I would answer "well, what's so fun about such and such?" People will have differing opinions but I love cricket and we had a blast. Mi Zhou (Goatboy) even came, but he'd shaved his goat whiskers.

Another cricket match is in the works, but this time, I might bring an esky and fill it up with Coke and ice...lots of ice. A drinks trolley is a must for these summer conditions.

Linkage, Hilter-style

I'm reading one of my friend's blog and it's all nice and stuff, then I come along to a post. It's the results of one of those personality tests. Now I'm not really into them, but I was intrigued to learn it is a "What Famous Leader are You?" test. So I do the 45 questions to get the most accurate answer. I not expecting much, it's one of those "non-serious" tests. What do I get?

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Go figure.

Jap Happy Music

For a long time, well, a relatively long time, I've wondered why on earth people with absolutely no knowledge, or very little knowledge, of the Japanese language would listen to Japanese music. This also applies to Korean music. I can readily understand that many J-Pop and K-pop (Japanese/Korean populat music) singers, whether male or female, are very good looking. That is probably a reason for listening to J/K-pop. Sure they're hot, but you can't understand what they are saying! These people are just listening to the sounds, with maybe a faint idea of what the lyrics say, thanks to translations.

Confession time! On this matter, I'm a fucking hypocrite.

Yes.

I, too, listen to Jap music with only a very vague understanding of what the artist is singing, since I use translations.

Yes, what the fuck indeed.

To make it worse, I didn't realise that I was a hypocrite on this matter, until a few days ago, when I got my hands on the Neon Genesis Evangelion 10th Anniversary DECADE soundtrack.
This fact was furthur made clear, when I took out the Birthday of Ayanami Rei soundtrack.

So I soon sat down, horribly shocked that I was hypocrite. Never mind the fact that it was only on this matter. I was fucking hypocritical.

So what did I do to remedy this situation?

I got some lyrics translations and indulged in both soundtracks.

Well, shit.

It's no more!

MiG's World of Warcraft server just went down! Damn it! Why does have to die, right fucking now when I'm addicted to it?
Hopefully, a new test server will be up. Fuck, a Friday night wasted. Still, MTV European Music Awards...

Lost in the Cross

I wanted to post this earlier but again I didn't have time. Anyway, more important news. A couple of days ago, I did it. That's right I did it. Did what, I hear you ask? What I did was...I...skipped the canteen line.

....

No I'm serious. And it's a big thing for me.

....

Ok, maybe no that big but it's something.

WTF?!?!

Ok, so it's probably sounds kinda bad and lame, but I'm a believer that queues are the best way to get what you want. If there was no queue, there would be anarchy dammit! So despite that many friends became prefects, I never really felt right about skipping the line, bypassing all the blueshirts. Sure I got my prefect friends to buy for me, but it was sometimes and usually, it was a bottle of water. A lot of white shirts bypass the lines, so much that they just walk up say hi and step right through. Why? Because it's fucking addictive. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Imagine you are in a queue for whatever. Imagine, walking to the front of the queue, barge in and them get served. Bloody hell, I could get used to that. But it feels kinda wrong for me and so I haven't done it again...yet. Gotta control myself. Dammit, why can Nicorette make a patch or lolly for it?

Still, if you want to bypass the line, here are a few guidelines that you should abide by.

1. Watch out for teachers. They can pop out from anywhere and if they don't see a prefect badge, you're screwed.
2. It's best that you have another prefect skip the line and you follow closely. This maintains the illusion that you are important to the blueshirts. If you do know the monitoring prefects well, then walk on through.
3. As a non-prefect, you should at least say a greeting to the prefects, by their first name or whatever if possible. A simple "Hey, guys" or "How's it going?" or "Hi, Susie" will suffice.
4. During the act of skipping the line, it should be done as quickly and smoothly as possible. Remember Rule #3.
5. Don't skip regularly. It becomes a habit and you may forget basic guidelines, especially #1.
6. It helps if most of the prefects voted are your friends. Vote of them and get other people to vote for them. If you can't, be very good friends with them.

There a basic survival guide to skipping the canteen line. Of course, every school is different and rules may be different, but this is just a broad, overall guide. So start skipping.

Another Week

Arrgh...so much for my plans. What? What plans you say? To take over the world, of course! Now if only I can find those AAA batteries...

That was basically my week in a nutshell. Destined for great things but always pulled back because I forgot or lost something. Still, it could be worse.

This happened at assembly several days ago, although it's old news to most. I just want to remember this. So we had assembly in the school hall, since exams and everything were over. So it's plodding along and I'm dumping those thin Listerine thingys on my tongue to stay awake. Tripoloni was talking about the Science Olympiads and he mentioned that Yang got a HD in the Chem section. Yang was revising for our English exam later that day, so on hearing his name, immediately jumped up and walked up onto the stage. But the thing is that he already got his awards and this was just some lip service. So he got on stage and Trip was like "WTF? There's no award." So Yang had to step down and walk back to his seat, in front of the entire school. Hilarious? Absolutely, my friends. Ah school, can it get any better?

Of course, it was sprinkling this entire week and it was frickin' cold. I believe the term is "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." Never heard of it? Neither did I until a day ago. So a lot of people had the sniffles and I worried about catching the cold off other people. I hadn't been sick in ages and I didn't want to fall to the common cold. Nevertheless, I was well prepared and dressed warmly. It caught my attention on one day, it was so damn cold, and there were still girls wearing skirts. They were were stockings but still wouldn't it be really cold on your legs? Do you refuse to wear trousers cos of fashion...etc or what?

Still downloading Bleach 1-25 but I'm at 80%, it'll be finished tonight for sure. Bleach 25-50, look out!