I hate travelling

I hate travelling. It is mainly because whilst travelling, one cannot do much. By that I mean, you cannot really get any work done while on the move. If you are in a vehicle (provided you're not the one driving) you can do quite a bit, but still limited. If you're walking, nothing other than listening to music or calling a friend on the phone. I wish that some day, I can surf the net or watch a movie while on the move.

I recently travelled to and from Singapore on one of the budget flights available. It was my first time, and I have to say, I TOTALLY HATED IT. There was no entertainment, no food, and no space. Even the air stewardess were not particularly attractive. I remained quiet on the journey, as with the other passengers beside me. I can't even sleep well like I normally would. That is 5 hours I will never get back.

I had to travel light, since there was a low luggage weight limit. I only armed myself with a couple of magazines I bought at the airport and my passport to bring on the plane with me. Even that, the magazines were not enough. I got bored pretty fast and I was restless throughout the journey.

On the way back, it started out bad too. I had more magazines with me, which still didn't last me the journey. I could have bought a novel, but I couldn't decide which to buy. The most annoying thing was, I was alone in Singapore and my flight was delayed 3.5hrs. So by checking in 2 hours before the original time, I had about 5 hours at the terminal. I was dumb enough not to catch a movie or something outside, and checked myself into the departure hall. I guess I deserved the torture.

Towards the end of the wait, I even met Evelyn, whose flight was 4 hours ahead of mine. Her flight was delayed as well. I vowed that I never want to travel budget flight ever again. But for that to happen, I need to pass. You get the picture...

THEN, on the filght itself, after I got myself comfortable in my designated seat, I was disturbed by the stewardess to move to another seat. I didn't think much of it at first, but then I started thinking, why am I supposed to move? Aside from the fact that I had a GIRL sitting next to me, I didn't really have a reason to say no. So I shifted... to the emergency exit seats... There were 4 of us guys there. As I wondered why I relenquished my seat next to a girl to sit with 3 other guys, the air stewardess came to talk to us:

"I need you guys to learn how to open the emergency exit doors if anything happens. Now you do this this this, bla bla bla... More information on the booklet."

WTF.

The guy next to me looked at me and left the seat to his original seat.

So, I was there alone, occupying 3 seats, with larger than normal space for my legs. I guess there was a benefit after all... But still wasn't enough...

I hate travelling.

Racism

Another rant...

I was travelling to Freo Hospital the other day. I can't help but being racist. Sure you cannot discriminate against another race, but this is ridiculus.

They are a loud bunch, as with most of their race. Talking loudly and talking about who screwed who and who fathered who. Some things are I don't want to hear, but it is hard to ignore. And there we are, learning about their cultures and that we should respect them, etc. I do not respect them at all as they do not deserve it.

True, some of them are cultured and civilised. Some of them are outstanding, some of them soft spoken. But when 99% of the encounters with them are the same, I find it hard not to be racist.

Even in the taxis to and from the airport, the taxi drivers have nothing else to say but to complain about another particular race or foreign worker. I come from a multi-racial country, studied in a multi-racial environment, but yet... It's like they WANT to be treated differently.

Yeah, I don't know whether it is just me or them.

A Calling

Architechs are hot. So says the random chick in HIMYM. Girls dig architechs.

They build something out of nothing; like God. So says Barney.

My housemate is a budding architech. I see him spend hours in front of his Autocad programs designing his project. I see him spend the another few hours on his drawing table piecing up together the building he was designing.

It reminds me of how I loved to cut out and build models from the Quest collectible book series and the more recent publication, Build the Titinic and Build the Bismark. I also loved building toy models such as miniature GUNDAM models and planes by Tamiya.

The question is, was I ever fit to do medicine in the first place? Failing the course is a major disappointment, but could it also be a sign?

The long table...

Another birthday celebration, another dinner party. The birthday girl got a new radio, a scarf, and a box of chocolates. She celebrated with a lots of close friends and had a wonderful time. She turned 21... again...

I would like to go into my thoughts on birthdays again, but I shouldn't. However, I would like to extend my distaste for any special days, including, Mothers' Day, Valentines' Day and New Years. Why must I have a special day to do all that? These days have been highly commercialised, with card companies and florists reaping the benefit.

I used to get excited whenever I found out that a day was named a certain day, like Grandparents' day, or Secretaries' Day, or Sister's Day, or Rememberance Day, or Earth Day, or Hugging Day, or Sweetest Day, or May Day. The list goes on... I guess what sparked my awareness of this commercialization is the increase in prices of mooncake and the explosion of jelly mooncakes, tiramisu flavoured, ginseng flavoured, snowskin mooncakes and what not during the Mid-Autumn festival. While others enjoy their mooncake with their favourite durian flavour, I see a lost in the tradition and history behind them. I applaud those who can tell me straight up without referring what mooncakes started out as.

Same goes for birthdays. Why do we celebrate birthdays?

Time...

I just reformatted my HD and reinstalled all the programs that I needed...

Now I am in the process of adding sites to my bookmarks. I guess it became a habit of mine back when I was in Singapore to visit a certain series of websites, decipher.com, ecircles.com, circles99.com, communityzero.com, hotmail.com and a few more that I cannot remember. Anyway, I since it was imprinted in my memory, I decided to visit them for old times sake. Or rather I was lost to which sites I currently visit nowadays...

Surprisingly, my old circles99 groups are still there. I even checked the M203 group, which surprisingly had visits all the way since 2006 where we all dispersed from Bukit Jalil campus, albeit the once a month random visit. Last entry was Febuary this year and the previous one was August 2006.

With this feeling of nostalgia, I confided in my partner in crime, Raj, and visited old chat programs, mainly ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger. ICQ was THE chat program of the last century. I vaguely recalled my number, thus I spent 30 minutes locating ME. 41290931. I remember the time when I refused to use MSN because ICQ does it all. Anyway, I logged in... and... found no one online... (2hrs later while writing this, it is still empty). I can't really say that I am surprised, but I had a look at all my contacts, most of whom I had not talked to in a very very long time. (I also checked my 7 Yahoo! Messenger contacts, who were also not online...)

Even at one time, Friendster was a huge hit. I still see many of my contacts there log in and update stuff, but I seldom log in there now... I am putting up a message that I have permanently moved to Facebook. Yeah, Facebook... the replacement for Friendster, which replaced circles99, which replaced communityzero.com, which replaced ecircles. Facebook looks like it is going strong. I doubt that it will fall apart anytime soon. With all the applications (Graffiti, my favourite), walls and connectivity, I would give it 1 more year at least. Though, with that being said, I know of a few friends who already gave up on facebook.

Of course there is the everlasting Blogs which existed in my life since 1999. Never really got into blogs... but it's out there...

I also have a MySpace page and MSN Live Spaces. I also recently recently registered under twitter.com, pownce.com, orkut.com and jaiku.com. All ready to become the Internet's Top Community Program. Stay tuned. As for my websites, I have this blog and Picassa. And not to mention the various free porn sites. Seriously, not going to mention them.

I've come to a point where there are so many Tom, Dick and Harry Community programs, I just want to stick with one although no one wants to stick with it anymore. I used to join all these things bcause I was afraid of being left out. Frankly, I still am, but I decided to keep in contact to the people who matter and those in the immediate vicinity. I mean, like getting home addresses and occupation and stuff. It sounds like I only know a person for their use... HAHA...

I guess this is how the times have changed over the years...

Curse of the Photographer

I can't sleep. It's 1am in the morning on a Tuesday.

Anyway, I decided to blog. This is what happened last Sunday.



I can't really tell you much. By random chance, I was bestowed the opportunity to organize a gathering for the IMU student/doctors that were currently in Perth. It took little planning. I kept thinking that it was easy to organise a BBQ. Get sausages, book a pit, cook, eat, leave.

I started the invites earlier in the week, giving them notice to book their calendars. Then I started thinking of what my menu should be. This was what I started out with:
Sausages
Salad
Pizza

Easy stuff. Buy sausages, buy salad + dressings, order Dominoes on that day.

Then I decided that I crave for sushi. I didn't want to order those and decided to make it instead. I still think it's not a bad idea, but the people involved would tell you it isn't. Well... I'LL DO IT AGAIN! So, the ingredients for sushi? seaweed, japanese rice, vinegar, salt, cucumber, zucchini, egg, sugar, tuna, tartar sauce, japanese mayonese. Time taken... 2hours.

As I worry that we would not have enough food, the sausages became 3 types of sausages to a total of about 50 pieces, 20 slices of bacon/ham and 20 pieces of premarinated chicken wings.

As for salads, it became coleslaw which I made, fruit salad which I made, and potato salad which Wei Kuei made. All of which had so many left over, it was my breakfast lunch and dinner for a few days.

Luckily I didn't order the pizzas.

Also, I had Evelyn make eggtarts for me. The eggtarts, though, ended up to be eggtarts and fruit tarts. Effectively, the amount of food doubled or tripled the amount I set out for at the beginning. I had so to take home all the leftovers, it's not even funny. Not to mention the bottles of coke, fruit juice, marshmallows, gummybears and Doritoes that were left unopened.

So, the bill...

Meat stuff (sausages, bacon, chicken wings)
$39.56

Sushi stuff
$17.43

Salads
$13.98

Eggtarts
$21.60

Unopened food
$25.13

Sauces/Dip
$9.80

The look of everyone's faces and the joy of having organising a BBQ?
Priceless
$127.50

Oh yeah, the title.. basically means that as a phtographer, you will never get good shots of yourself.

Game Freak

This is a Quesionaire that I found which was meant for game developers. I've modified it to suit to the general gaming community. I'm just gonna tag it, as how every chain main starts...

Right now, my desktop...
... is in the process of a slow upgrade, starting with the CPU and motherboard. Maybe by the end of next year, I would have a totall new computer (which would probably be obsolete by then, sigh). At least I can enjoy World of Warcraft.

Games have taught me...
... so much, I don't know where to start. Don't spit into the wind. Take everything in moderation, even World of Warcraft! There is no cow level. Kane refers to Cain from the Land of Nod. Guybrush Threepwood is able to hold his breath for ten minutes. There is ALWAYS a way to solve a puzzle in PoRTaL.
Seriously. There are many lessons to be learnt from games, if you know how to look. Love, loyalty, Lawful Good, Creativity, Death.

My games are...
...ranging from 16-bit Platform games to First Person Shooters, from point-click strategy to Real Time Strategy. The only games I dont play are sport simulations and racing games. I play everything else.

My favourite game...
...has yet to be revealed to me. Top 5:
World of Warcraft
Half-life 2
Starcraft
The Longest Journey
Freespace 2
Haha, I just realised that they are all of different genres. Goes to show how diverse my interests are.

My latest game...
...was PoRTaL. Awesome game. My kind of game. Full of puzzles.
Storyline was also intriguing. You start out all alone is a test chamber with an annoying song on the radio. Really annoying. You start then jumping into blue/yellow portals completing seemingly easy tasks, level by level. Then you pick up the blue portal gun, then the yellow portal gun, and now you are on a portal spree! Then same theme playing on another radio... portal that away... nice....
Then the puzzles get tougher and tougher. By the time you know it, its the end of the tracks for you. But defiently, wanting to play with more portals, you jump away at the very end, and thus starts the actual game, with enemies and tougher terrain. At the end of 4 hours, the familiar tune starts playing again, but this time, I really am enjoying it. I downloaded it and its replaying over and over again, yet I am not one bit annoyed. Haha!

My next game...
...that I am anticipating a lot is Spore. Yes, more than Wrath of the Lich King. Its SPORE. Spore promises a game that spreads what Civilization and Empire Earth does and go back to even before humans existed. Yes, the game starts out with single cell organisms and goes on to high tech space colonization. And this is where I can guess Star Wars gets their idea for aliens. Kind of like the game Evoluion: The Game of Intelligent Life, but they are based on real fossil records. But yeah, SPORE!!!

When I go to games stores...
...I look for the cheapest games that I either want to play, or played, but would like a copy of the original.

In ten years, games will...
...mourn the loss of WoW expansions...

I will retire when...
...I die. I shall play games for as long as I live!



(the following questions removed)
i.The best part of the creative process is...
ii. I develop for PC because...