Oh, right, loonie managed to briefly reach parity with the US dollar recently. I wonder if someone's started a back when I was your age, the loonie was worth 60 something cents compared to the US dollar group on Facebook. So many useless groups...
09/21/07 19:17
Wow, sending things in the mail sucks. I just got a letter that was sent on the 1st of September. Good job Canada Post for delivering a letter in 3 weeks across a distance that takes 45 minutes to drive across.
It seems I've forgotten a lot of what I learned in first year chem. Ah, I can feel the stress and panic building up already.
09/17/07 20:04
I played card games similar to Slap Jack during the break today. My hand was stinging afterwards as half of my hand would invariably smack onto the table. Fun. Made some more crazy drawings in lectures today, one of which was a house made out of a loaf of bread.
Coming home today on the TTC sucked. I missed 2 subway trains and 1 RT today because they were too packed to get on.
Some sad news for fans of the Wheel of Time series. The author, Robert Jordan, died. I'm sure the last book will still be published, somehow, but not sure about the 2 prequels he had planned. Maybe they'll be published like how Tolkien's was. Hopefully the Pattern will spin out another author like him really soon hm?
Some happy news too, the webcomic The Order of the Stick is back from its hiatus. Can't wait to see how it'll develop from here on.
09/15/07 19:41
Stupid UT bookstore is so unorganized. Why the heck was my stats book shelved in the community health section? Took forever to find the textbooks I needed. The course reader for one of my courses is sold out. Like wtf. There's 240 students, it's custom made for the course, it's mandatory, why would they not order 240 copies? I wanted to only buy the orgo textbook and not the study guide because it was optional, but apparently they don't sell it like that. Not all of the histology and anatomy textbooks were availible either. Yeah, I hate the UT bookstore now.
How sad, first weekend, and I already have work to do. 2 of the items were my fault. Couldn't find the lecture notes online so now I have to copy someone else's notes.
Getting so cold...
TTC rides are so boring with no one to talk too. I know 2 people who go the same route as me, but I either miss them after the last lecture, or I've still got an additional class later (damn orgo...).
Say no to electoral reform in Ontario. I would support letting people cast 2 votes though, whereas the first vote gets 2 points, and the second 1 point, and they must be for 2 different parties. If the voter only wishes to cast one of the votes, they have the option of selecting null/void for one them. That'd be the best system in my opinion. Which is always a correct one by the way.
No badminton club for me at UT =( Lectures conflict with the meeting times.
I was thinking of applying for the webmaster position my class council, then decided against it. At first I thought I was just going to have to maintain an existing site, but then realized that since this will be the first year of it operating, I would have had to create it from scratch.
09/12/07 00:09
(Insert whining and complaining about class). And the anatomy/histology prof is mean and evil. I also managed to not only fall asleep in a lecture today (along with 3/4 of the class, the other 1/4 who only zoned out), but also managed to do a page long sketch along the margins during the same lecture. I'm not going to take a photo of the sketch, so you'll just have to see it yourself in person. I'll describe it though. It started at the top, with a "picturesque" scene of 2 people in some sort of flat prairie-like landscape with a road running off into the distance beside them. Along the road runs telephone/electricty poles. It's got also colour in my mind, but as it is, I was working with a black ball-point pen, and not a good one as it is. Anyway, with that done, I decided to make the other side near the margin, some cliffs with water below it. I started, then realized I didn't have a clue how to sketch water. Couldn't even do it well enough for my mind to accept it. So I decided to make it a floating piece of land, like in the first book of the Death Gate Cycle series, or the TV show on Teletoon called Skyland. I sucked at drawing the rocky cliff edges though, so it now looks more crystalline than rocky. Added 2 aeroplanes to it to emphasize the floating in air part, then underneath that, proceeded to draw a space station. So the sketch now transitions from land to air to space. There's a crappy attempt at a planet in the background we should all ignore. Landmassses are hard to do. Should've gone with a hurricane cloud formation, though the edge clouds would've been a lot of trouble. Immediately underneat the space station (in fact, it looks like the the station is resting on what's underneath), is a tractor trailer. The front has some sort of ski thing instead of a cab though. The trailer is resting on 2 rectangular prisms, which are then resting on a pyramid. That has entrances on its sides. With roads coming out of it that's lined with trees. One entrance has a mob of people instead though. This pyramid is on a circular plain that gently slopes down. Under that is a huge bridge (though it looks like it's running beside it, and huge compared to the pyramid-people-trees scale) that spans water. There's light posts lining the bridge with sailboat about to pass underneath one of the arches. There's also someone fishing from the bridge. Underneath that, but drawn to make it look like it's on the bank of the river the bridge spans, is another person fishing. He's wearing a straw hat. There's grass sprouting on the bank. All in all a nice, messed up scene.
Had quite a bit of bad luck after class today. It started pouring rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Then the subway train doors broke at the Younge station so we were delayed for quite a bit. We were ushered out of the cars, then back on, then back out again. The delay was so long that a ride where everyone got seats was turned into a rush hour type crowd. Also started raining again while I was walking home.
09/09/07 19:37
Symantec didn't detect anything, but after scanning, I did get several gigs worth of free space back. Unfortunately, it's shrinking again, so the virus is still there. :'( Still haven't figured out how I got it in the first place, and I don't think I will either. Hopefully all I have to do is keep scanning to hold it back, as I really don't want to have to reinstall/backup/update everything again. I also tend to lose some files I forgot to back up every time.
Elections are coming! And with it, a referendum on the current electoral scheme! Keep it as it is, and bring on the campaigning =) I'll get to vote finally!
Ack, classes starting tomorrow. So frustrating. Still haven't set up my notebooks and other assorted things yet. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've got enough notebooks for all my classes yet! !@#$
09/07/07 23:28
Meh day today. Stocked up on pens and useless highlighters from the clubs fair thingy today. I didn't see any badminton club table, nor did I find any useful info online. They've got a section at Hart House, but no details on it. There was a table tennis club, but once again, that conspiracy that places club meeting times during my class times struck again. Ran into more trouble with the doors in the pharmacy building today. I couldn't open the door that leads into the computer area. After observing the person who opened it for me, I think I need to pull, then push to open it. Also tried to get an exemption for 1st semester orgo on the off chance I'd succeed. No luck there. So frosh week is now over, and I'm already feeling stressed and panicked before I've even set foot inside class. NOT a good sign.
I think my computer has a virus too, because the used space on my OS drive doesn't add up to what clicking on the properties of folders says plus I've somehow run out of disk space on it without having installed/downloaded anything. Useless AVG will probably detect nothing. Fortunately it seems I'll be able to get Symantec antivirus soon thanks to UT. Still got to read the instructions for it first though.
A crazy guy was on one of my subway cars today. I had the bad luck of deciding to stand beside where he was sitting. He was sitting with his back to the wall with his feet on the adjacent seat. When I went to stand beside him and held onto the pole, he then proceeded to "kick" me. I thought perhaps I was standing too close and his foot accidently kicked me while he was adjusting his seating position. That theory got blown away when I moved a bit further away but was still holding onto the pole when he then started trying to kick my hand. Luckily he couldn't reach it and I got away before he realized that if he slumped down a bit more his shoe could connect. Crazy idiot. For the rest of the short ride before I switched lines he alternated between trying to hide his face behind his shirt and pretending the small thin metal strip he was holding was a gun and shooting imaginary targets on the ceiling. The joys of public transit.
Yep, AVG just finished scanning and detected no problems. Why is it always useless against the stuff that infects me, and yet is rated as one of the best scanners around when tested independently by computer experts??? It's another conspiracy against me...
09/06/07 23:49
Such a tiring day today. Spent it at Centre Island. It was nice that today was sunny and warm. Managed to meet a bunch of new people too, yay (and more importantly, I managed to retain more names and faces). Our group overwhelmed the restaurant on the island as they weren't expecting such a large crowd today which meant a long wait for food. It's weird that their appetizers were enough for lunch. Most people in my group just had either onion rings or fries. After that we walked around and then some of us played a game of ultimate frisbee which was what made today a tiring day. Then we went and played with the water at the splash pad thingy they had. It was merely to cool off >_> Spent a bit of time on the sandy beach, and that was basically the day. Just remembered I needed to look up badminton club times.
Oh, and the way OSAP pickup works is stupid. I need to go to one of the approved postal offices scattered around to pick up my money. Why couldn't they just transfer the funds into my university account at the university?
09/05/07 21:50
So, had two days of frosh so far. As expected, I've retained only a couple of faces and names. What can I say, I suck at remembering people. Let me give a summary of what's been going on the past 2 days.
On the first day, we were supposed to show up at 10. I got there at about 9:50, and after kind of struggling with the doors (They need to fix the entrance doors. Requires so much effort to open them. I could do exercise by opening and closing them repeatedly), I walk into the lobby and find... Like 30 people who have also showed up early and are now just sitting on the various chairs and tables looking nervous, lost, and not saying anything. I fit right in XD So after the 2nd years had eveything set up we got our T-shirts (A bright red one, I wish they had made it a grey or black colour. The comedian we had later said our shirts in combination with our seating pattern made us look like a giant maxipad from her perspective at the front of the room) and split up into randomly assigned groups. We then spent the next hour or so getting to know the people in our group and making up a cheer. Then we competed to see who had the best cheer. The winner got to go eat their lunch first (BBQ lunch of burgers/hot dogs and soft drinks. After that was a completely useless speed meeting. You had one minute to talk to someone then you had to move on to the next person. The result was no retention of names and faces, and you just kept repeating the same thing over and over and over again. I did meet the president of the badminton club last year at McMaster though, and she remembered me and my friends. Unfortunately, right now I don't recall her name, and there's a high chance that the face I've attached to my memory, is actually someone else >< The composition of our year seems to be nearly half filled with degree holders. About a quarter I think is from one year of university. Let's see, after that we had a Q&A session. Don't remember that part, and it was boring, so no more on that. We then went to eat dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant called Spring Rolls. We were early though, so my group went to the Eaton Centre for half an hour. Dinner was pretty good. We had to pay for our own meal though :( After that was a comedy show inside one of the lecture halls. One of the comedians had been on TV and stuff, but I thought the other one was funnier. That ended day one. Got home so late. Only had time to quickly scan the blogs I follow and stuff then immediately to bed after a shower.
And now for today. Woke at 6:30am and wanted to kill whoever planned my schedule. It was raining so hard this morning! Was 15 minutes early this time, and spent it talking with someone about his Macbook problems. Ha, it's confirmed, Apple computers suck! His Safari kept freezing up all the time ever and a reinstallation of the system didn't fix it. His screen cracked. Now it won't boot up properly. He was trying to print something from Safari, it froze, he tried to close it from the dock, but the dock didn't show up so he just pushed the power button. Now when he turns it on, all he gets is a grey screen and then a couple minutes later a folder with a question mark. Apple computers are no good! Yeah... Got a little off track there. So, today's activity kicked off with a 3 hour long orientation presentation which managed to scare us about how much work it's going to be and then a long line up for our key cards. Then it was on to a Pharmasave presentation (boring), and then a lunch of Subway. This time I avoided a long line up by sitting near the doors for the Pharmasave thing. Explored the building a bit (it seems really small) and discovered there are ethernet ports for my laptop so no laggy wireless for me =) Then it was off to a tiring scavenger hunt. It was tiring in that we literally ran all across campus to try to be the first to finish. We came in second. And that was the end of today for me since clubbing and pubs is something I'm not interested in.
Got my schedule today. I've got a lot of running to do thanks to my no exemptions. So sad.
09/03/07 22:03
Just glanced at some of the stats Yahoo provided about my page. One of the referral links they listed was... A Geocities page dedicated to the Armenian Catholic Church. There's no link to my page on it, and why the heck would there be??? Whatever code Yahoo is using to generate this stuff is messed.
09/03/07 21:53
Drats, first day of school tomorrow. Well, not really since there isn't any classes, but still. Missing McMaster already. I could be hanging out with friends in residence right now instead of stuck in my room typing this. Bleh. You know what I realized? Getting into pharmacy right after first year and having done first year at a different university means it'll still feel like first year, although it's my second year of university. And my 3rd year will feel like 2nd and so on. Weird huh? It's like time's been reset. So, there you have it. The secret to becoming one year younger! I really should be sleeping right now to prepare for my early day tomorrow, but we all know that's not going to happen. I wonder if I should bring my backpack tomorrow...
09/01/07 23:42
Oh no, it's September already! But I don't want summer vacation to end! It's been so stress free! i am so unprepared right now =( Still struggling to wake up early, and I still haven't looked up what time I'm supposed to show up on Tuesday. I wish I had this magic agenda that would tell me where I have to be and what I have to do automatically.
So exhausted today. Biked down to Lake Ontario with a friend to see how long it really takes. I had thought it takes around 1.3 hours, but she said it only takes 35 minutes. Turns out I was wrong. A good example of my exemplary time tracking skills. On the way back we saw an ice cream truck and decided to go buy something. The driver had other plans. When we almost reached it, it started driving off. So we followed it around the parking lot. It stopped at another part and right before we reached it, it took off again and stopped... Right where it had been before. So much effort for overpriced ice cream. It was 50 cents more than what it should've been! Oh, and we had to fix a bicycle chain that fell off. Luckily there were sticks nearby so no one had to actually touch the chain and all the associated oil and grime.
After that was tennis. Tennis is a lot more fun now since I've really improved from the beginning of the summer. Didn't have to run after balls that followed an undesirable trajectory as much.
So unfair, Blizzard likes the Horde more. Just look at their quest rewards! At the end of one quest where you return a necklace to Sylvanas that her little sister gave her, you get to listen to an old blood elf song. Or was it high elf? High elf would make more sense since blood elves are a recent thing. Don't remember if sin'dorei or quel'dorei was used. Ah well.
08/30/07 22:09
Wow, I was outside for so much today. Biked to the library to get new books, then immediately after played tennis, then after that soccer. I'll be spending tomorrow recovering.
Finally finished a good book that's not in a series I've already listed on my book list. Been a while, but I had a lot of catching up to do. Going to add it right now!
08/28/07 21:54
Wtf? My schedule just got changed! A lunch break got erased and they added an extra hour of class! ='(
Wow, it's the 28th already. Wasted my summer vacation. Again. Drats.
08/27/07 17:17
Yay for tennis!
Sucks that The Order Of The Stick will be on hiatus till late September. Such a good comic...
I feel like... Ice cream. Yum.
08/25/07 13:10
Just wasted an hour on Cloud. I don't get it. I've got a bunch of white clouds, but sometimes when it goes up against the grey clouds you can convert, it doesn't! So I gave up >< Damn instructions are useless!
08/25/07 11:52
Couldn't remember my password. Took me a few minutes of panicked guessing to log in >< I blame waking up early today for that. That and the fact that I changed my passwords recently. Ugh.
So, what have I been up to these past few days. Nothing much. Found some more web comics to follow, and 2 odd yet addicting games. They're called flOw and Pillage the Village. flOw is... Interesting. Yet frustrating. When I evolved to the circular thing, I had a really hard time eliminating the long enemies. Since I'm a giant blob and my mouth is in the centre, everytime I ate one of their parts they'd snatch one of mine. Maddening. I'm going to download Cloud later. Seems to be a pointless game, but it'll be a relaxing pointless game. If you're wondering why I didn't provide a link to those games, it's because I fricking tired right now! Go google it or something. Must replenish energy...
08/17/07 17:32
Still really windy today. Some jerk almost ran me over too. You want to make a right turn, there's a guy in rollerblades standing at the edge of the sidewalk and looking at the other side of the street. Gee, maybe he wants to cross the road when the light turns green!
A mentally challenged boy tried to hop aboard a moving freight train and was injured. The mother's solution? Remove the train tracks. She also manages to bring the race card into it too. Here's my solution. Teach your kids to not do that kind of stuff. Of course, he's mentally challenged, so here's another idea. Don't let them wander around outside without adult supervision! By the way, did I mention the fact that the kid is 9? Hm, let's think for a moment. 9 year old kid + mentally challenged + railway tracks + fence that is regularly cut to allow residents to cross easily. Does it sound safe to let the kid wander around unsupervised? I say no, but apparently the mother thinks yes.
08/16/07 17:34
I went rollerblading today, which was my first time since I got back from China. Kept being lazy, lol. So much for rollerblading more often this summer. I picked a pretty bad day to do it. It wasn't too sunny, but it was way too windy. Rollerblading against a strong wind equates to massive output of energy, but little velocity.
I switched my primary network on Facebook from McMaster to UT yesterday. So far, I'm not liking it. The load times for UT are really slow, but I've found that it's improved if I log in initially from the UT page rather than the McMaster page as I usually do. However, it still seems slightly slower. If it's still noticeably slower after like a week, I might switch back the primary back to McMaster.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before: I hate you people with transfer credits. The reason is that because I got into the pharmacy program with only one year of university, I have to take all the courses in the program. However, a lot of my classmates have 2 years, or more. Some have their undergraduate degrees. This means they've got a crap load of transfer credits. So while I'm stressing out and moaning about the huge workload, they've got it easy since they don't have to take everything. Huge unfair advantage for them when it comes time to compete marks.
The markets are falling! The markets are falling! The bubble's going to burst and bring recession down upon us all! Noooo!!! And me being stuck with a 12k in tuition. More expensive than living on res at McMaster =/
08/12/07 00:23
xkcd comic #45 is one of my favourites :D
You know what, RTM will suffice. I'm not really a fan of some words. But then, will people get it? Who cares? I finally got through all of the xkcd comics! His sketches while bored in class make mine look so crappy in comparison. Well, mine were never really good in the first place and his are published online, so screw it, I like my sketches of triangles, squares, and other random things. He had the advantage of using pencil...
08/12/07 00:23
And I'd like to add that xkcd is the work of a physicist. Yay for nerds!
08/11/07 23:58
Yorkdale may be a square, but it's a confusing square with passages springing out of the square. And why the heck is there a food court on the second level, but the stores are all on the first level? High ceilings are nice and all, but I'd rather have more shops. After all, more shops equals higher probability of shops I'd not dislike going into.
Been going through this webcomic backwards. Still not done yet. It's called xkcd. I only just remembered I can view the full length of the tooltip by viewing the properties of it (damn you Firefox bug). Now I have to start again, but at least I didn't figure it out at the very end, lol. Anyway, I love this particular one the most (out of the ones I've seen so far anyway), as when I read it, I felt like he wrote it for me XD So, if you've noticed me walking funny and want to comment, refrain from doing so and just think of that comic. Actually, the worse isn't when the sidewalk cracks are out of sync, but when the parking lot lines on either side don't match up and the road's wide enough that you can't see the other side's lines to extend in your mind over to your side without turning your head but you don't want to look like an idiot who's head can't look straight ahead and so while you're trying to make up your mind on what to do you might be stepping on the lines which will bring you bad luck but then you are stepping over half the lines which are the ones you can see clearly so wouldn't the good luck from that cancel out the bad luck but then you want good luck, not neutral luck so what to do??? I'm not crazy.
And RTFM indeed. I resolve to use this as an answer more. Damn niceness in me gets in the way most times, but it's for their own good in the end, really. Either that or it'll bring less idiots into contact with me which is always good, right?
08/09/07 23:09
Just noticed I had 2 entries switched around. Fixed it now.
About half an hour ago, I booted up my computer... And hit a blue screen of death during the bootup! Scary! It was a weird blue screen though, because it only had 2 lines and the 2 lines' length were only a quarter of the screen. The error code was incredibly short too, like 8 digits. This compared to the usual blue screen filled with text and an incredibly long error code. When I restarted, it didn't even acknowledge that an error had occured, that is, it didn't go through what usually happens where it checks the hard drive for errors.
And I'd like to say that Apple computers are not as error free as people seem to perceive. Apple computers suck!
08/09/07 20:07
Got another web comic to follow thanks to a certain hilarious blog. It's called Basic Instructions and it could well be appearing in a newspaper you read soon. Silly newspapers and their strip format and dumbing down of words requirement. I like the wordy and box format better.
As for Inverloch, I'm shocked and disappointed with the latest panels released today. Wtf happened to Lei'ella's opposition to crime??? Like a 180 in her views today. The same result could've been achieved without doing it by having Varden ask her to help him restore the boat. That's what he's going to do anyway, so there wasn't any need to mention thievery. Kind of hard to steal things when you're on a boat with no passengers and just a cargo hold full of trade goods that you own...
Sounds like everyone's started reviewing for the upcoming school year again. Once again, I'm being left behind in this... Why can't you all just be lazy like me?!
08/07/07 22:28
Jerks. I still say we should put a tax on our oil to get back our money.
08/07/07 17:28
Want to know why Horde characters like to gank Alliance characters for fun? This video will tell you why. So next time you see a Horde character, make them eat a pyroblast. Or several. Or something. Just kick their ass. Had to log off several times in the past few days because they kept killing me while I was trying to quest. >=(
You know, when I look at a computer, I still think it's incomplete without a floppy drive. CD-RW's just suck, although I guess it doesn't matter now that flash drives are so common. I wonder how much longer it'll be until they're no longer offered even as an external? Or do they not offer it already? I love flicking back the metal covering even though I'm not supposed to do that. That and the sound the computer makes when it writes/reads it. At least I can still hear the old dial-up modem sounds when I send a fax XD No one else I know except me miss the old computer noises.
08/04/07 14:09
I had my remaining two wisdom teeth removed today. This time around he didn't do as well a job. I think it's because the left side is more akward for him to opwrate on. You know, it's never a good sign when your dentist gets blood on his glasses... Or when he takes an x-ray to make sure there aren't any teeth fragments left... And now my mom is refusing to buy the antibiotics that were prescribed because too much antibiotics aren't good and she doesn't think I need them. Having a parent in the medical field is both a blessing and a curse.
08/03/07 21:47
I've just finished a book of George Orwell's stories. It had Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I had already read 1984 before so I skipped it, and I totally skipped A Clergyman's Daughter as it didn't interest me at all. I read Burmese Days up till the part where U Po Kyin reveals the reason behind his plot, and I read I think half of Keep The Aspidistra Flying and scanned the rest of that story. Burmese Days was interesting to me up till the point where I stopped. I don't know why I stopped reading it. Just didn't feel like it. For Keep The Aspidistra Flying, it's like watching a huge accident that's about to happen. You can't tear your eyes away from it. I kept reading until I finally got too pissed off at the main character then scanned the rest of the story. It had a happy ending, which was nice, but I feel the main character didn't deserve it. Would've been a much more satisfying if he had starved to death or something. Really good story though. Same for Animal Farm, Coming Up For Air, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. They're all stories with a, purpose I guess. Or a message. Or something. Don't know how to describe it in words. Oh, you know how you read Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter for fun? They're really good stories and that's why you like them and continue to read them. There's no message the author's trying to get across. Orwell's stories aren't like that. Yes they're really nice stories, but you don't get just fun out of them. You think about the message or thought or whatever the author's communicating through the story as you read and after you finish reading. I'm too lazy to talk about what I think the author was putting into those 4 stories I enjoyed, but I can say that you should read them. It'll be... Fun. Expand your mind and all that.
08/03/07 17:04
Is Blizzard nuts? Another new expansion to 80. This just means that Outlands is going to be dead like Azeroth is now. I already had enough trouble finding groups in Outlands, and now with Northrend, it'll be impossible. What I personally dislike about it is that because it's Northrend, it'll be overrun with undead stuff. And I don't like undead stuff. The only time I've gone into the Plaguelands was to grab a flight point, and just that one run through was enough for me. I feel Blizzard should've delayed another expansion for a while longer to work out all the issues Outlands has brought, and to let players catch up with all the new content in Outlands.
Going to the dentist tomorrow to extract my last 2 wisdom teeth. So not looking forward to it.
08/02/07 17:25
Had to go to the UT library to get my student card. UT library = confusing piece of crap. Buildings should be square/rectangular with hallways laid out in a grid pattern. It may not look as nice, but dammit it's a lot more functional and easier to get find one's way around.
07/31/07 21:10
I just got my tenative schedule in the mail today. My reaction was !@#$ when I saw it. For first semester I've got Wednesdays off, but I don't get lunch till 12 or 1, and with my luck, I've got class till 9 and 9:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, right when archery is supposed to take place. There goes that. For second semester I've got classes every weekday, and on 2 of them, I don't get a lunch break. 8 hours straight of classes?!?! Wtf??? *sigh So much to do... Oh, and it's 25 hours a week. Ugh. Second semester is 29 hours a week...`
07/29/07 21:55
I watched Chuck and Larry today. It was pretty funny. It wasn't super amazing, but it was worth the ticket price. I so want to see Rush Hour 3 when it comes out.
I had one of the most interesting conversations yesterday with some of my friends. It was definitely the longest, since we talked almost non-stop for 5 hours. Went to Go For Tea, and it was an interesting experience as it was my first time in a bubble tea place. I can certainly see the appeal these places hold. Pay a couple of bucks and you can hang out in a comfortable (albeit loud) environment chatting with friends for a while. I should have ordered a small though, as I felt bloated after drinking most of my drink. Because it was so loud we went to someone's house and played cards and continued our conversations there. We somehow managed to make several hours go by in a blink. It was one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I really need to stop underestimating travel time though. That and getting lost caused me to be half an hour late >< I need to get out more often. Yeah.
I found this on Facebook, and I just didn't feel comfortable not providing counterpoints to it. Here it is:
"If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion?
Read the next question before looking at the response for this one.
Question 2:
It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts.
Here are the facts about the three candidates.
Candidate A.
Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologist.
He's had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.
Candidate B.
He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon , used opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.
Candidate C
He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke,drinks an occasional beer and never cheated on his wife.
Which of these candidates would be our choice?"
Okay, so the catch is that for the first question, the next kid will be Beethoven, and for the 2nd question, the first two is Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill while the last is Adolf Hitler. I would say that yes, an abortion would be the best choice, because the issue isn't that you might eliminate a genius, the issue is that you're way more likely to produce people who won't contribute as much to society as another person's kid. See, to get Beethoven, we had to get 3 deaf, 2 blind, and 1 mentally retarded kid. That's pretty bad considering the fact that Beethoven's contribution was music, which doesn't really help us. Sure it's nice to have, but I'd rather have another great scientist. And we got lucky that it was Beethoven that came out and not another disabled baby. Plus think of all the other people who were in similar situations and didn't get a genius. Yeah, that should kill that. And don't forget what Levitt said in Freakonomics, that the legalization of abortion was what killed off the massive crime wave in the US. It's pretty convincing as the crime rate drops match for states that legalized early, plus the years match up.
For the second part, that question is just biased. Everyone has good and bad things. I could list your bad things and compare it to choice C, and it'll still turn out the same way. So if this was a valid question, then Hitler's a better person than all of us. I would so like to take a phaser and reduce the person who wrote this crap into a stain on the floor. Then toss that section of flooring into a blue-white star. The sad (and scary) thing is, is that there are plenty of people who will believe this kind of crap. It really helps one understand why we've got all the trouble and idiocy we do in the world today.
07/25/07 22:19
Finally done rebricking the driveway! Woo! The plastic sheets I placed underneath should reduce the plant growth in the cracks.
The night before I finished the last Harry Potter book, I read Freakonomics. It's a really interesting book in that using economics, it reveals to us all these fascinating (and simple) explanations of some things that we usually don't think about or already think we know the answer to. I do disagree with one conclusion he made though, that people can resist unethical acts 87% of the time if they know they can't be caught. This is from the bagel story section, if you've read the book before. See, I say it's much lower than 87% because the people stealing the bagel don't know for sure that no one's observing them. Somebody could walk in at the wrong moment, or for some reason their company installed a hidden camera in the break room. I think the percentage is closer to 1%. Or less. Really depends on how much the person stands to gain.
My reading speed's still good even though I've been reading less for the past year :D Still going at around 60 pages an hour. I wonder if my speed reading pace is still the same though. Probably not. Oh well.
07/24/07 21:39
Went and walked around UTSG today with 2 friends. It doesn't seem that big to me, just a lot of buildings which makes it confusing. I saw the new pharmacy building, conveniently located right beside the subway station. It seems too small to fit 900 something pharmacy students though. What if the other classes are in the old building, all the way across campus??? Noooo... I still like McMaster better. Layout was less confusing, and the food places were bigger. I suspect there'll be really long lineups at UTSG.
I finished the last Harry Potter book yesterday. I liked the beginning and middle more than the ending, as it was in the ending that I noticed the most flaws in the plot (Harry coming back to life was one of them). I know I remembered at least 4 yesterday, but seeing as I can't recall them all, I'm not going to bother saying them. It'd require too much work. The best part of the book was after Ron left and before he came back. Ron's useless, even Neville's better than him! Neville knowledge of Herbology is enough to rival Hermione's. Ron... Won a chess game. And has done nothing useful again. And I'm sure Hermione could've won too. It's chess after all. In my view, Ron's value is his family. It's through him that Harry gets the skills the Weasley's have. If only he had died instead of one of the twins. I should join a Ron Sucks group. I knew all along Snape wasn't evil! Though I hadn't begun to suspect the amount of planning Snape and Dumbledore had done. I thought in this book Snape was just trying to play along and not get killed since Dumbledore was dead. I have to say, the Ressurection stone was a useless piece of junk. The Elder wand and the cloak were good. Drats, can't right any more on the matter, it's sleep time. This is why living on residence is so good. Can go to sleep whenever I want.
07/22/07 11:46
Argh! Library isn't open on Sundays in July! :'( Must wait till Monday to get the book. Dammit!
07/22/07 11:30
I've got the latest Harry Potter book on my library hold shelf :D Going to pick it up after lunch. I thought I was in the 2nd round, but I guess a lot of people bought the book when it was released and cancelled their hold.
07/21/07 00:10
You know what would be an awesome ending for Harry Potter? Hermione kills all the wizards and witches in the world with a super spell she creates through her research and wits then takes over the world. Nerds ought to win sometime, and what better lesson to teach the kids of the world than that nerds should be the ones who get ahead. Who knows, it could revolutionize the next generation's culture and usher in an unending golden age of science and technology. As an added bonus, nerds are usually more environmentally friendly.
07/20/07 23:42
I just saw the 5th Harry Potter movie, the Order of the Phoenix. It was disappointing to me as the movie skipped so many scenes. It was only 2 hours 18 minutes, so it's not as if they ran out of time. They could've made the movie 3.5 hours long like Lord of the Rings, and then release extended editions on DVD! It's like they didn't even try to cover everything. Plus they got some of the details wrong. I don't recall Cho being the one who gave away the secret of the DA, and the room they were practicing in? Completely wrong. The room felt all cold and hard, but in the book it was warm, welcoming, and full of soft pillows to land on after taking a stupefy spell to the chest. In the movie they land on the hard floor and miraculously get up uninjured. When I saw them doing it in front of a fireplace grate full of sharp metal points, I thought, someone should get a nasty gash on the back of the head from that. And the battle at the Department of Mysteries? Blah. Ditto for the George and Fred stuff after Umbridge takes over. So much stuff missing... Would love to kill the writers of the movie. The huge black and white picture of Fudge at the Ministry of Magic was cool though. Immediately reminded me of Chamberlain, lol. Anyway, if you really really want to see the movie, go ahead, but I recommend just waiting for it to come out on TV or borrow someone's DVD when it comes out rather than spending 10 dollars to see it.
07/20/07 17:42
Ahahaha, I think I know what some of the remaining horcruxes are in Harry Potter. And it's all thanks to this nice article from the BBC. A sword, platter, and lance will be one of the remaining ones I think. The cup was already taken care of in The Half Blood Prince. Okay, so the cup wasn't the horcrux itself, but the horcrux was in it, so close enough. Unless of course, there's another cup too :o I was skeptical at first, but then I read what the Swedish title for the last book is: Harry Potter and the Relics of Death. Heh heh heh... Excellent... Just felt like typing that.
Oh, I forgot to mention this before when I was writing about my trip to China. Kaiping's been made a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And... There was something else I wanted to mention but forgot. Again.
07/19/07 21:13
Woo! Got a bunch of new books from the library yesterday. Should be fun. Also been reading a bunch of new web comics. One of them is a story-type where the author planned out everything beforehand. Just a few more and the entire story will be done. The twist near the end was kind of a letdown in my opinion. It's called The Dreamland Chronicles. I did manage to find a pretty funny one too called The Noob. The title says it all.
Something's seriously wrong with the management of the TTC. Toronto's the largest city in Canada, and yet it's facing massive cuts to its service, including the closure of the relatively brand new Sheppard line. Public transit is supposed to improve with time, yet it seems like the TTC is not only not going forwards, but backwards. And another fare hike? It already costs almost $3 for one lousy ride! This certainly isn't the way to go if we want more people to ride public transit. Maybe they should look at the way other cities manage their public transit systems, say, Hong Kong?
Scientists have now managed to program a computer that can either win or draw anyone who challenges it to a game of checkers because it has managed to solve every possible game of checkers that will lead to either its victory or a draw. Proof that chess is better than checkers :)
07/15/07 13:24
Had 2 wisdom teeth extracted yesterday, so now I can't eat any solid foods. The needles were sooo painful. I had 5 shots, many of which were injected into my jaw bone I think because I heard cracking sounds! My gums still bleeding a bit, my lower jaw hurts, and my gums are swollen. Oh yes, and I have to go again next week to have the stitches in my mouth taken out and have to take these huge antibiotic pills >< And people wonder why dentists are feared...
I can watch the Space and Comedy channels now! Somebody was working outside with cables a couple of days ago and for some reason we've got a ton of channels. Even the channels that were full of static are clear now, not that they're channels I want to watch anyways.
07/12/07 16:29
I got from China on the 10th. Feel so nice to be back home. I wanted to give my laptop a hug because I missed it so much, but refrained from doing so since it was all dusty. Went through a month's worth of updating instead. Catching up on a month's worth of security updates, comics, and blogs is no easy task. Took me all of one night and one morning and that's with skipping all the stuff on Worse Than Failure (formerly known as The Daily WTF). So, I'm sure you want to hear about my trip (or not, lol.) and without further ado, I will begin to write about it. Hopefully I haven't forgotten too much.
Our first stop was Beijing after suffering through a 16 hour flight. First thing that hits me when we go outside to catch a bus, the massive air pollution. The sky wasn't blue, it was brownish-grey. Had to wait outside for 20 minutes before our bus arrived. I spent that time coughing, blinking frequently, wishing I was back in Canada, dealing with a runny nose, and breathing as though I had severe asthma. After getting off the bus, we walked several blocks to our hotel. I was amazed by how wide the major roads were, and the fact that to cross them people could go over on pedestrian brides and through underground passageways. That was nice in that then there could be fewer traffic lights, and pedestrians didn't have to wait for traffic lights or risk being hit by cars. Our hotel was in a really good location. It's right beside this night time food market full of deep fried goodies and at the other end of the market to the east is the shopping district of Beijing. Then a couple of blocks west is the Forbidden City/Tiananmen Square. The first place we visited was the Great Wall of China. It's damn impressive considering how far it extends plus the fact that it's built on top of steep hills. My brother and I climbed to the highest point of the wall in the area we were in. My legs were shaking from fatigue after we got down (My mom only made it a quarter of the way up, lol). I'd hate to have been the soldiers who had to patrol it in heavy armor. It's amazing how silly some people can be. On the way down, I had a bypass a whole group of slow movers. They were all wearing high heels... I can only imagine the pain they were in and laugh at their stupidity. The Great Wall also netted me my first utterly useless souviner. The entrance ticket. About half way up, there was a store that sold a souviner card that's like the entrance ticket, except that you have to waste like 40RMB on it. Yes, you can pay 40RMB for a flimsy card when you can buy dishes at restaurants for 2RMB... While I was climbing up, I saw a bunch of tables that were unoccupied. I wanted to sit down and have a drink so I started walking towards them. As soon as I walked past a building corner I discovered why they were empty. The building beside the tables was a washroom and it stank! I almost vomited when I caught a whiff of the smell. It was like my middle school washrooms while the janitors were on strike... Luckily the washrooms at the bottom were super clean. We passed by the Ming Tombs too. I wanted to see them, but didn't have enough time to see them and the Summer Palace area so we skipped it. The Summer Palace area is really nice. The paint scheme on the wooden beams were so intricate (like the ones in the Forbidden City) and we saw some people replanting lawns by hand. Someone was also selling these really delicious green (bean?) popsicles for only 1 RMB. After we bought 1 each, a whole mass of people started buying them. We didn't go up to the buildings on top of the hill though. The highlight of Beijing for me was the Forbidden City. It's been turned into a giant museum full of interesting relics on display. The air inside was also noticeably cleaner though it was still really bad. The place is huge, we spent hours in there and still didn't see all of the areas that we were allowed to see. Not all the areas were open to the public either! The garden inside was just amazing with all the plants and decorative rocks and whatnot. There was also a pool with a ton of koi fish in it. Some kid was throwing bread into the pool and the fish were just swarming where ever bread fell. Afterwards we visited Tiananmen Square which wasn't all that fun as there wasn't much shade there. Of course, right before we exit the Forbidden City and enter the square, I manage to have a nosebleed. Yep, my blood is now splattered on the ground near the entrance to Tiananmen Square inside the Forbidden City. We also went shopping in the shopping district near our hotel. I bought an Olympics themed hat for myself. The way you buy stuff in stores in China is retarded. After you see something you want to buy, you give it to a nearby employee (there's so many there's always at least one a few steps away). They write for you a reciept which you then take over to a cashier somewhere. You pay for it, then take the stamped reciept back to the person you gave whatever you wanted to buy to, and then finally recieve your purchase. Repeat this for every item you want to buy... A vendor was selling this weird toy that I should've bought but didn't. It's like a blob of gel shaped in the form of a fat round animal (one of them was a golden pig). What you do is throw it at something, say a table surface, and on contact it goes splat. Now's the interesting part. The thin film of gel then slowly comes back together to it's original shape so what you see is an animal slowly rising up from goo. Fun. Oh, and we almost ran out of money in Beijing because we had trouble finding a Bank of China to convert our money to RMB (another stupid thing, if you didn't exchange enough money inside the airport, you can only convert currency at a Bank of China. If there isn't one near your hotel...). To get around we walked since everything was so close to the hotel. We did hire someone to drive us when we went to the Great Wall though. Anyways, here's a short summary of Beijing. Lots of stuff to buy (I didn't really notice the prices) and lots of cheap food to eat. Also lots of interesting stuff to see. Lots of air pollution to choke on too. It's also quite hot and humid. Ah, and nobody there speaks Cantonese nor English. I don't want to go back to Beijing ever again as the disadvantages of not being able to read Chinese, not being able to speak Mandarin, no one there speaking Cantonese or English, and the fricking air pollution far outweigh the good stuff. My advice to anyone going there is to bring some sort of filter to breathe through.
Next stop, Guangzhou. We stayed at an apartment some relatives own. Since we didn't have to pay for housing, it became our home for the rest of the trip. Anyways, the flight was 3 hours and I went through intense pain in my ears during landing. Plane rides suck. We hired a taxi to get us there from the airport and so was introduced to the seatbelt-less crazy driving that we were to go through for the rest of the trip. Let's just say I'm glad I didn't get run over by anything or have the various vehicles I rode crash into anything while I was aboard. It seems everyone's used to it though as there were hardly any accidents in the news and I only saw one where a motorcycle clipped a bus and caused a huge traffic jam on a bridge. Odd thing I've noticed is that the police cars always have their lights flashing. That and one driver told us that they don't have to let police cars go ahead of them. Anyway, after we arrive and set everything up, I go take a shower and discover that the apartment has no hot water... Goodbye hot water for 1.5 weeks... Except for the lack of hot water, slowness of bus rides due to massive traffic, and the sweltering heat, Guangzhou's pretty nice. Was quite happy to be back in a Cantonese area. The apartment was on the fringe of Guangzhou, but there were buses to many locations right outside. The buses in China are confusing for visitors as their routes don't follow straight lines since the routes are defined by the stops the bus goes to. This results in 15 different routes using the same bus stop so if you're not paying attention you might miss your bus as it's hiding behind the 4 buses in front of it at the stop... There isn't anything to see in Guangzhou (We did visit my dad's former house and had dinners/lunches with my parents' classmates and our relatives). Instead, there's lots of shopping. Lots and lots and lots of shopping. My mom went crazy and dragged us everywhere. As long as you don't buy international brand name stuff, everything is dirt cheap. I already had enough clothes at home so I didn't buy much. The food courts are nice. If you want to buy food you get a card that you put money onto and then go to the individual stalls to order. It's faster and more convienent in my opinion. A thing I really like about the food courts is that the dishes are all displayed so you don't have to look at a tiny picture (or no picture and just a text description) of what you're getting. Makes deciding what to get harder as you see rows and rows of delicious looking food in front of you. The subways in Guangzhou (and Hong Kong) are so much nicer than the ones here. The trains come more frequently and are quiet, the stations and trains are clean, there's TV to watch (there's also TV on some of the buses too), some of them have electronic maps, the destinations are clearly announced, and the platforms have a glass barrier to prevent people from being pushed onto the tracks (also shows where the doors will open too).
Next we went to Kaiping, where my mom and dad grew up. We stayed at my mom's aunt's apartment. Although it didn't have a TV, air conditioning, or mattresses, it had hot water and the apartment was naturally cooler than the one in Guangzhou (the one in Guangzhou was big and sunny and only had one air conditioner installed which effectively only cooled one small room) so it balanced out. In Kaiping all we really did was visit the buildings my parents grew up in, relatives, and my mom's classmates. Pretty boring. The house my mom grew up in was still in relatively excellent condition. Very nice views and built like a fortress complete with holes to shoot through at bandits, lol. We went shopping for groceries while we were there at a giant market. It was so crowded and chock full of food to buy and somebody with a bicycle behind me ran his dirty front tire into the back of my leg...
Back to Guangzhou for a full day of rest, then off to the best part of the trip, Hong Kong. We stayed in a brand new 5 star hotel called L'Hotel Nina et Convention Centre. It was only 500 something HKD too since it was brand new and they want to promote it. In fact, there was still construction going on roof. The hotel was sooo nice. Free internet access, a large LCD television, and of course, hot water. Fitting that it was here that I found out I had been accepted into pharmacy :) We only stayed for 3 days unfortunately as my mom's feet started hurting really badly. We visited the giant Buddha statue which was quite cold as it was enshrouded in fog and rode a cable car to the top of a mountain on Hong Kong island which provided us with a great view. The cable car was pretty cool with parts of it climbing at like a 45 degree angle. Also went shopping of course. I bought a Swatch watch since my other watch's strap was about to fall apart and a pair of shoes. Finally heard people speak English here too XD In fact, we visited on area called Soho that was full of restaurants and bars and it was full of white people, lol. I'd say that Hong Kong is like Guangzhou, except with English, way less motorcycles, more stores, and more expensive food. It's too bad we didn't stay longer to participate in the July 1st festivities.
We rode a ferry and visited Macau for a couple of hours on our way back from Hong Kong. Macau was utterly unimpressive. All we did was visit the ruins of some church. That and stop by McDonald's for dinner where I discovered that the french fries there taste different in a bad way and I think the Big Mac has less meat. It also takes forever to get an apple pie at the McDonald's there. Getting out of Macau was quite an experience. Imagine a stadium sized room crammed to capacity with people waiting to go through immigration because it's the only point availible to cross back into China. 30-40 minute wait I think. Glad I'm not claustrophobic. Macau: A very crappy smaller version of Hong Kong but with Portuguese instead of English.
Finally, almost 1.5 weeks more of Guangzhou then a 2.5 hour flight to Beijing then a 13.5 hour flight back to Toronto. The air in Beijing was actually much nicer on the way back. The sky was actually blue... Bought a set of headphones with mic in Guangzhou before I left since I found one for about 5 dollars CDN. And that's my trip to China. If I ever do go back, it'll probably only be to Hong Kong.
So, as I mentioned before, I got accepted into the pharmacy program at the University of Toronto. I think I passed the admissions test because of the IQ test and because it was an environmentalist was the one who marked my short story since I'm sure my short answers were totally unacceptable. I'm going to miss McMaster. Living on residence was so nice and I made new friends there. Commuting is going to suck. Going to be difficult to make new friends at UTSG since I'll be living off campus. At least the fact that everyone in pharmacy is taking the same courses and there's only 240 students will make it a bit easier I guess. *sigh If only McMaster had a pharmacy program for me...
06/12/07 22:51
A whole month without my games, news articles, and email? How ever will I survive??? I managed to rush through my 2nd novel today. It was blah. Not good, but not horrible either. Just blah. That reminds me, I need to put all my holds on the inactive list again.
Haha, another ceasefire has been declared between Hamas and Fatah. Oh, but wait, what's this? "But Hamas's military wing says it has received no orders to put down its guns and clashes are continuing in Gaza." Oh the craziness never stops in the Middle East. I wonder who's making the most money from it?
06/12/07 23:14
It seems I had a backup of my iTunes library stashed away. Opened it up and... Discovered errors in it. Dammit.
06/12/07 16:37
3-4 three hour labs every week??? *cries
06/12/07 12:44
Well, it took a while, but I finally caught up on all the The Order of the Stick comics. It's so good. Of course, since I used all that time reading the comics, I'm not sure I can finish up my last novel. *sigh There's never enough time.
06/10/07 18:25
I finally finished one of the novels I borrowed from the library. So goood, and the authors writing a sequel too! Which isn't listed in the library... Drats. Oh well, still a good read, and it wasn't written with a series in mind so it's good. The book's called Singularity and is written by Bill DeSmedt. A miniature black hole and... Other stuff that will give away the story.
Chopping fallen trees up into chunks is NOT fun...
06/08/07 22:41
The storm today snapped two trees in my backyard. And guess who has to clean the mess? Ugh...
One of my friends wrote an article disputing the notion that "nerdier" articles on Wikipedia have longer and more comprehensive entries. I however, agree that nerdier topics do tend to have more detailed articles. Writing a long Wikipedia entry takes lots of time and effort to research all the little nuggets of info and organize them into a well-written entry. People will only write about things they like, as why put in the effort writing about something one is not passionate about when one can write about something one likes? Of course, you can find someone who is passionate about anything, even chairs. This of course, should mean that a slant towards anything should not appear. However, it does. This is because of the demographics of Wikipedia contributors. These people will usually, if not always, be computer savvy. Go to a well-written article, and click on the edit button. Look at all the square brackets and whatnot. An average person would not know what the heck is going on, so you'd need a computer nerd, or at least someone with above average skills, to write good articles. It's one thing to write an article. It's another to write an excellent article with it properly formatted. Now ask yourself, how many of these people would you find that are interested enough in say,
Been reading this webcomic called WoT now?. It's so funny! Don't bother reading it if you haven't read the Wheel of Time series though. You wouldn't get it in that case.
I've run out of books to read at home. Must make another library trip. Unfortunately, the books I put on hold haven't arrived yet so I'll need to root out some new ones.
Unbelievable that it's June already. My summer vacation is draining away so fast :( I swear time skipped Friday as I thought today was Friday, not Saturday.
I started Eye of the World yesterday. It's been so long since I read the series that it's almost as if I'm reading an awesome series I just discovered. Almost. It's unfortunate that I can't wipe my memory of what happens so that I can read it with a clean slate again. Oh well, I've forgotten so much that it's good enough I guess.
What's with this campaign to boycott Petro Canada to lower their gas prices? Insanity I say! Just drive less, or failing that, boycott a company that's not a Canadian one so that we won't lose any tax money. Sheesh, it's like shooting yourself in the foot as you're basically giving your money away to the US. And you know, other countries pay way higher gas prices. So quit whining and use alternative means of transport more. The environment will be better off.
Here's the breakdown going course: 1st semester grade/2nd semester grade.
I also just applied for OSAP again. My estimate dropped this year by a thousand dollars :'(
Depressing isn't it? And rain is forecasted for the next 2 days... Joy... Not.
I finished the Temple of Time today. It was way too simple. The cut scene midway through boss fight was funny though. Link: "Yes, another giant evil creature dead just because of me. *does the twirly sword thing Wait a minute, what's that? Ewwww..." I'm at the hidden village now, sniping orcs. It's fun. The setting is like a wild west town, but combined with 007 sniping, Zelda style. Great fun :) I whacked a couple of orcs off their boars on my way there just for fun too.
This is not good. Going more than double the speed limit should make it murder. Damn rich kids and their money...
Contrary to what I said in my last entry, this page did manage to break 100 hits this month. Woohoo!
Well, actually, we got off at Osgoode so we walked a block before getting to the Eaton Centre. We walked around there for a bit, including into a pet store where we encountered a parrot that seemed to bear ill intent towards one of our party and numerous cute puppies. I managed to get accused of being the opposite of normal people for prefering kittens. Apparently cats are "evil," which lead to an image of me being evil and petting a cat like a stereotypical supervillian. I wish I could be a supervillian. Who wouldn't want great power and riches? The world would be better off with me as supreme leader anyways. We then went back to Nathan Phillips Square and picked up a tourist guide and map.
Seeing as how we had no objective to walk towards to, I suggested (rammed the idea through) we head for Allan Gardens because one, we needed an objective or we'd just end up standing around, and two, I wanted to walk outside and Allan Gardens was nice and far, and three, I wanted to look at weird plants, lol. So we headed for Allan Gardens, aided by our little map. We got distracted along the way though, including a weird mime that was trying to imitate a samurai (I'm saying this as he had a curved sword reminiscient of a samurai one and ugly costume and mask. The ugly mask was supposed to scare enemies in battle.) when you donated money but executed the act with no skill whatsoever. Yes yes, slowly twirling a wooden sword around and pretending to slice off the head of an audience member is quite the performance. And then your frozen resting pose is one that would fit King Arthur more. Quite painful to watch. Also spent a chunk of time in The World's Largest Bookstore. I managed to find a couple of Star Trek and Stargate books in there and proceeded to fascinate (bore) the people around me. For some reason we also went into a store that appeared to promise cheap clothing but was really quite crappy. I had to wonder how it managed to pay off its bills. So by the time we reached Allan Gardens, it was closing and we didn't get to go in unfortunately. We started to be hungry by then, but didn't know where to eat. It was suggested we try the entertainment district as there are supposedly a lot of restaurants there.
Only one problem. We were on the opposite side of Toronto. The district was on the south-west area, we were north-east. So we headed south to try St. Lawrence Market and trekked all the way down till we reached it near the lake shore. Turns out it's closed on Mondays >< Since we were already that far south, we headed towards the entertainment district in hopes of finding a decent restaurant. We passed through the heart of the financial district, and marvelled at the huge skyscrapers and buildings named after banks. We also glimpsed the building of the Toronto Stock Exchange too. I could just feel the power emanating from the buildings. All of the major banks of Canada were here. CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia, Toronto-Dominion, the buildings came one after another. I personally thought the Nova Scotia one looked best. At least I think it was the Nova Scotia one. It wasn't anywhere near as tall as the other buildings, but the building had an elegance that its style and age lent it. It seemed to send the message, yeah, we don't need to have a huge skyscraper. We know we're better than the rest of you. The location of powerful businessmen who gather to scheme and plot new ways of stealing more money from us, lol. Sure the major corporations weren't located here, but not that many are located in Toronto anyways I think, so it was good enough to evoke that thought. Oh, and we managed to reach the Hockey Hall of Fame, which was noteworthy because earlier in the day one of us had mentioned that he had never seen the building before. It was like our wandering steps were destined to bring us there for him to see it finally. That or he got lucky.
We stumbled upon a Greek restaurant called Penelope as soon as we escaped from the dark streets caused by the shadowing of the sun by the bankers' towering seats of power and entered with expectations of a good meal. It looked nice and clean and didn't look too expensive. Plus we were all hungry and didn't want to risk having to walk another few blocks before finding another restaurant of comparable quality. We pondered what we should order and managed to get the wine list delivered to us. I wasn't really paying attention to anything other than the menu so I don't know how it got to our table. I think someone asked for it out of curiousity. We obviously looked like we were over 19 since one of the first questions they asked after we were seated was if we wanted anything from the bar. Although I guess they could always check ID only if we actually order something alcoholic. Whatever. The price of the wines were way too expensive for us regardless. We had a complimentary loaf of bread at our table and proceeded to quickly devour the entire thing with plenty of butter before requesting another one. After walking all day, we were ready to eat just about anything placed in front of us. We ordered a plate of appetizers for all of us. It had kalamari, sausage, some sort of spinanch mixture wrapped in what seemed to be a deep fried spring roll shell, a rice/meat mixture wrapped in something green and vegetable-like, and a dip. Somebody managed to scoop out 1/4 of the dip initially and proceeded to be thoroughly addicted to it. I ordered beef souvlaki, while the others had a greek salad, roast lamb, and combo (chicken, beef, and pork) souvlaki. It was quite tasty. There was the beef of course, 2 chunks of roasted potatoes, steamed green and yellow string beans along with baby carrots, a type of rice that I do not usually eat but tastes quite good, plenty of oil, and the aforementioned dip. I had to let most of the potatoes go to waste unfortunately as I was just too full. None of us ordered dessert because, well, we were too full. The dessert called death by chocolate sounded so nice though, but then again, we would really have died from exploded stomachs, lol. After the tip the total came out to be a few cents shy of a hundred dollars. I am now owed a huge chunk of money since some people neglected to bring enough cash.
After managing to drag our bloated bodies out of the restaurant, we headed off to explore the west side of downtown since we had gone through the east side before we ate dinner. We ended up walking north on Spadina and hit College Street after going through Chinatown. Chinatown seemed so much smaller to me than in the past, though it was probably because a lot of the shops had already closed by then and the sidewalk was relatively uncrowded. The place brought back nice memories for me as I used to live in the area. In fact, we took a detour to see my old house. We then headed towards Queen's Park and the subway station there. Strangely enough, as we neared the University of Toronto, we met my grade 12 algeo teacher. Apparently he is taking a securities course there so I think he's working towards getting certified for securities trading and is going to then quit teaching. However, he strikes me as the type to just enjoy amassing knowledge and so it is also likely he's taking the course just for fun, or perhaps to work out a better retirement savings strategy. Since he was walking away from the direction of the nearest subway station, we guessed that he lives in College and Spadina area. Wouldn't it be an odd twist of fate if he's the one living in my old house? We also went into the MaRS building for a glance. The security guard saw us when I poked my head through an opening and was probably wondering who the hell we were and what we were doing in there. We left pretty quickly but that was okay. They had left the old outer facade intact and had newer, and taller buildings behind it. To me, it looked like the new buildings were trying to envelope the old one, as part of the new building filled a gap at the top of the old building such that it was visible from the sidewalk.
And thus my little adventure today ended as we were whisked home via the TTC. Fun times. Speculated on ways to cheat on taxes through business expense claims during dinner too. I hope my feet don't hurt tomorrow. Damn this entry took a long time to write. I should've turned off MSN when I was writing this as it would've cut down on the time required.
The hits on this site neared a hundred this month, but I don't think it'll go over before June arrives. Oh well, I can try for a hundred again in August.
I was reading about the Dungeons and Dragons game on Wikipedia yesterday. It sounds like a really fun game, if there's a good dungeon master. I'm already reading books that are sort of set in those type of settings, if I can control the character too... :) I doubt I'll ever play a game though, as it looks like a lot of effort to set up. Rather stick to the LOTR wargaming.
I've been reading a book on strange weather events for a few minutes at a time here and there, and it's pretty good. It's called Freaks of the Storm, by Randy Cerveny. I wouldn't recommend reading it straight through, but it's really enjoyable in during commercial breaks on TV and stuff.
Well, I've managed to waste one month of summer vacation already. Time goes by way too fast.
Since I finished my fishing goal, I went off into the Gerudo desert and started the Arbiter's section. Damn scary with all the undead screaming guys (now improved with a hugemongous butchers knife as big as my character), the masses of skeletons, and the disgusting ghost rats. At least most of it is resonably well-lit. The 4 poes and their flame stealing were a nice reminder of the Forest Temple in Ocarina, except these 4 are 3 times as tall as normal poes and have horrifying faces. Really spooked me when I first saw it. I really really want to get this temple over with, but it hasn't been scary enough for me to grab a guide to get it over with as quickly as possible. Yet.
Just burned through 1.2k rupees in Zelda today doing a side quest, and need another 0.6k more to get my magic armour. Looks like I'm going to have to go through the entire cave system in Lake Hylia so I can open all the chests I skipped, ugh. I already handed in all the bugs I had to get that 1.2k already so no easy money that way.
I don't get why the Zora and Goron domains got switched in Twilight Princess. Their relative locations are switched from what they were in Ocarina of Time. All the other locations are the same. I haven't seen the Gerudo area yet, but I'm guessing that's the huge part that I haven't explored yet (Didn't know it was there until I had a hidden skill location placed there. I guess that's where Telma will send me when I go talk to her.) and it's in the right place. I wonder what happened to the Kokiri? They should be around somewhere... Same for the Great Deku Tree... But I think I've covered all the forest areas already now so where are they?!
Starcraft 2 is coming out, yay! I can't believe Blizzard is selling a model of a marine for $250. Who would buy that kind of crap?!
Somebody said the guard puzzle was hard, but it was quite easy for me. I only screwed up once, and the other times I had to restart it was because I accidently crushed myself. Managed to solve it in a couple of minutes. It's actually quite easy if you think about it. All you have to do is keep them symmetrical with each other and then move them so you end up with them being on opposite sides of the target squares. It also helps to keep in mind that your character also has to have enough room around him so that he can move freely without being crushed by the guards.
I was surprised that the main evil guy is named Zant, as he's so Ganondorf looking. Besides, this game is supposed to have taken place between Ocarina of Time and Windwaker, so Ganondorf hadn't had the Master Sword plunged into his forehead and turned to stone so he's still around. Plus in Ocarina of Time he got sent back to the other realm instead of being killed off, and these evil things are supposed to be from another realm. It'd make sense that Ganondorf had broken free again.
Another thing that surprised me was that during the scene in the spring in Lake Hylia, it seems like Midna has special powers of her own that Zant doesn't have as he was asking Midna to help him. I also didn't get the part about the shadow realm beings being oppressed by the people living in the light realm. Did Zelda break the barrier between the two realms and send troops through? But the guards of Hyrule are so damn cowardly, plus the attack that brought on the darkness seemed like a surprise attack in the first place. Hopefully there will be another scene later on that explains all this.
Zelda had better come back somehow after disappearing to save Midna! She can't die!
Got some new books from the library again, yay! And it turns out the book I was reading before did suck, and I had already read it before too. I forgot to get a programming book, but I did pick up a book about weather. It's called Freaks of the Storm by Randy Cerveny. The couple of random pages I scanned through at the library were pretty good. It appears to concentrate on weird weather and possible explanations for them.
I wish Apple would display my Shuffle battery status on my computer when I'm charging it. It'd be nice to know what percentage of charge it's at and how much longer I have to leave it plugged in.
Starting to go nuts out of boredom. The novel I just started better not be a bad one like the previous one I stopped reading yesterday. I hate it when I get so tired of a novel I just stop reading halfway through.
Maybe I should borrow a programming book from the library and learn another language out of sheer boredom... But which one?
Oh, I caught a new fish in the Lakeside Temple yesterday. But it was "illegal" or some crap like that and didn't get recorded in my journal. Grr....
One of my friends discovered Desktop Tower Defense, a game I wasted hours on during exams when I should've been studying. But he managed to beat the hard difficulty and got to level 75 on the challenge mode. I only finished up to medium before going off to study so I'm going to try to get to level 75 too as I'm pretty sure the challenge mode is set to hard difficulty. I'm going to have rethink my tower layout though as so far it's failed pretty quickly.
I'll continue fishing after I do the water temple. Maybe the fish will get bigger afterwards.
I went rollerblading today instead of bicycling, so I'm going to do that tomorrow. Tomorrow should actually be better as it will be partly cloudy so my chances of being sunburned will be less.
I wonder... I wonder how names for people came about. "Okay, this random string of sounds don't mean anything. This will be your name then." Now obviously some names came from professions, but a lot don't. So how'd they come about? And now I'm off to think about other random stuff. It's fun.
Here's another example I just found of why the UN sucks: "Zimbabwe's candidacy is reported to have broad support within Africa. Zimbabwe's Environment Minister Francis Nheme is being tipped by UN diplomats to be elected to the post on Friday." This is for the post of heading the Commission on Sustainable Development. Zimbabwe is a shining example of sustainable development, if by sustainable development you mean 2200% inflation, huge unemployment, civil rights abuse, a dictatorship, and now electricity rationed to being available only for 4 hours a day (except for wheat farmers of course so that they can irrigate their fields). Oh, and famine.
Super super bored. If only I still had my TV channels... For some reason I feel like folding a ton of paper airplanes and chucking them off the balcony. But I won't. That'd be littering and a waste of paper.
It sure sucks to be a car owner in France. I wonder how much deploying the riot police helped? Ah yes, in case you're wondering what I'm talking about, riot police were deployed during and/or after (not sure about during) the voting process in France in case if Sarkozy won rioting would break out like last summer. Well, Sarkozy did win, and rioting did break out. So far over 1000 cars have been burnt in 3 days of rioting along with UMP party offices and a car showroom. Again I must comment on the stupidity of the rioters. You're just hurting yourselves as all the damage to public property will be paid out of state funds reducing the amount of money availible for state services for yourselves, and I think all this rioting is actually driving in more support for Sarkozy as it validates his views. He was right to call you rioters scum last summer as cars are expensive and people rely on them for many things and rioting does nothing constructive. While reading this, it occured to me that it'd be quite easy to get some money from insurance companies. Just insure an old car that has a very low trade-in value and park it in one of those troublesome neighbourhoods. Then collect tons of money from the insurance company when your car gets destroyed :)
There's also a bit of controversy going on about Sarkozy taking a vacation luxury yacht right after winning the election. I see nothing wrong because no taxes are being used to pay for it, and if he can afford it, what's wrong with him taking his family on a little 3 day vacation before taking over from Chirac? His term doesn't start for a little while, and when he does, there's not going to be much vacation time for him for the next several years. He's also worked for several years already so 3 days of vacationing when he's paying for it himself? Don't be stupid people. But that's too much to hope for. Expecting a glimmer of intelligence from people who like to unlawfully destroy people's property? Yeah right.
I managed to get a nice staff for my mage today as I luckily got invited into a high level group that wanted to do the Ring of Blood quests or whatever that ring in Nagrand is called. We kind of cheated though as we actually had an extra player helping us, but we deserved it dammit as the damn elites kept resetting! Bugged I tell you, bugged! One of them resetted 3 times in one fight resulting in a couple of wipes. And it wasn't even because we pulled it out of the ring. It resetted twice while in the middle of the ring! But we managed to finish it so I ended up leveling, getting a ton of gold, and a ton of potions.
Why does the Taiwanese parliament keep descending into fistcuffs? Shameful I say! But then again, it's nice that their politicians actually care THAT much. Plus I'm sure it makes for great entertainment. Who wouldn't want to see their local representative beating up the representative of another riding??? Take this for diverting funds from my riding! My constituients are way more important than yours! Lol. Okay, I'm sure they don't say those things or fight over stuff like that, but it's still funny to imagine it in my head. I wonder if Jon Stewart will mention this. After all, he did for the rioting Pakistani lawyers! Middle-aged and bespectacled people rioting in fine suits. Puts the other rioters to shame with their ragtag clothing and disreputable air. Lol.
The weather today is awesome. It was warm enough that I could go rollerblading in shorts and a t-shirt. I wish someone would get rid of the roadkill along my path though. I keep almost running over the carcass.
I wonder if my physics prof will email me my mark if I ask him about it? That's the only course I'm waiting for now, besides the stupid non-credit one. Oh, got an 11 in psych. If I had only gotten just a few more questions right and I could've had the 12. As it is, no 12's this semester, but maybe I'll get one in physics if my prof marks easy again?
Figures that the library would call me to say I've got books I can pick up right when I get back instead of before I left, lol. Guess I better finish up my remaining novel I borrowed from the library. The book I'm currently reading is actually 2 novels in one book, and I'm on the first of the two right now. It's not all that good, but good enough for me to feel like reading to the end to find out what happens. If the second novel is much better, I'll list it on the book list. For some reason the appeal of the Sword of Truth series has disappeared for me. I went a couple of pages into Phantom and then stopped. The weird thing is that I'm not the only one who has experienced this as some people in a Facebook group I'm in has mentioned the same thing too. Odd, maybe Goodkind's lost it. Oh well.
Sarkozy's won over Royal, which will be good for France I think. From the articles in the BBC I've read, France already has way too much in social assistance and needs a more right-wing government. Sarkozy says he'll sort of abolish the 35 hour work week, but when I think about it, I don't see how extending the work week to 40 hours will help boost employment as wouldn't that mean an employer would now need to hire less employees to cover all their needs? Anyways, I think Sarkozy will be better for France based on a comparison of their policies by the BBC here. Okay, in the salaries, benefits, and pensions section, for Royal, raising the minimum wage with such high rates of unemployement? I don't think so. It'd just put more strain on small businesses and force them to cut back on the number of people they hire. Also, raising the basic state pension would just put France in even more debt. Jobless to recieve 90% of salary in first year of unemployment?! If was suddenly jobless, that'd make me want to take a long vacation before I start looking for work again (Well, not me actually, since I'd worry about how fast I could get another job after the year passes, but I'm sure lots of people would. Hm, I just thought of a way to cheat the system. While recieving the unemployment insurance, work out a deal with new employer or employer who just "fired" you where you'd work for a reduced wages and not have it reported as you working so that you can recieve income from both the government and your employer. Both wins in this scenario. Heck, if you know your employer really well, they could give you a big raise for while, then "fire" you, so that you could get a whole ton of money from the government while still working. The extra money could be split between employer and employee). For Sarkozy, I've already said a bit about the 35 hour work week. Adding on to that, why make it totally tax-exempt? I'm sure a 1% tax wouldn't really matter THAT much. But it is more appealing to voters. Allowing workers to retire when they want will also result in less jobs for those just entering the workforce I think because then you've got a slew of jobs that would be vacant due to retirement, but not anymore. Potentially remove benefits from those who turn down work. I like the sound of that. Why should the state give people money when they turn down offers of employment? That money is supposed to help people who can't find work, not lazy people. I'll skip the international affairs section as for those points I don't know much about them. New EU-led middle east peace initiative? Bah I say. One side will always reject whatever's proposed, or in the rare case both sides accept, it'll soon breakdown in a flurry of accusations of broken promises. For housing, for Royal, build a ton of new council homes every year. Again, more debt for France. Allow councils to claim properties that have been empty for 2 years. Sounds like infringement of property rights to me. If I buy a house, I should not be forced to live in it. Maybe I want to take 3 year vacation or whatever! Capping of private rents, again seems like a violation of rights to me. If I buy a property to rent out, the whole purpose is for me to generate as much money for me as possible. Why can't I charge what I want for it? If people are willing to pay more for it, why can't I charge more? If it's too expensive, then no one's going to rent it anyways so I'd have to reduce prices. No need for the state to restrict how much I charge for rent. Caps on rent increases I can understand since it's kind of not fair for one's rent to suddenly double or whatever without giving one time to adjust or find new accomodations, but caps on the actual rent? No. Guarantee of lifelong houseing? Fine, I'll just not pay the rent. You can't do anything since I'm guaranteed housing. In other words, seems like a stupid policy to me. For Sarkozy, providing assistance to those in council housing to buy their own property. Not sure on this, as the state would lose the income from the rents, but then are they losing money in subsidizing it and maintaining the property? So if it gets bought, they wouldn't have to maintain it, but I think the property tax they would recieve from it is less than what they recieve in rent. No person forced to sleep rough within 2 years of being elected. I think this means either no homeless people, or no people living outside on the streets. In either case, it seems impossible to completely solve the problem unless a ton of money is spent in constructing housing which means more debt for France. On energy, environment, and agriculture, for Royal, reduce dependence on nuclear power. Screw you I say. Nuclear power is a safe, clean, and viable alternative. Any meltdowns happen recently? No? So stop being scared of nuclear power. It's part of the solution to the environmental mess we're in right now. 20% of energy from renewables by 2020. That's good, renewable energy is always good. Reform EU farming subsidies to favour environment and smaller farmers. Favouring environment is good. But smaller farmers? It's good as it'd mean more employment, but it's bad in that this is because of lower efficiency. For Sarkozy, promote nuclear power as a clean source of energy. Yay! Support of nuclear power! Watch out for terrorist attacks on the plants though ;) Increasing amount of tax on pollution is good as the environment is important. Industry is going to whine though. Can't comment on the other point as I don't know enough about it, but it sounds good. On economy and taxes for Royal, no increase in general taxation and lower tax burden on companies that create jobs is good, but having companies create useless jobs just for a tax break isn't a solution, assuming they do that. Sucessful companies will create jobs anyways to fill their needs so reducing their taxes would lose the state revenue. Don't know about 35 hour work week. For Sarkozy, 4% drop in taxes is... I have no clue whether good or bad. If it stimulates the economy, then yay, as revenue will increase anyways then. Exempt more people from inheritance taxes? Depends who's exempt I guess. If the rich aren't exempt, then yay. Already said something about the 35 hours thing before. On immigration, law, and order, for Royal, residency papers for people who meet certain criteria. Illegal immigration is bad, don't encourage it. Immigration is good, but not the illegal kind. Military-style training camps for young offenders? So that they can come back better organized to commit crimes? No... I prefer jail... Or better yet, hard labor! For Sarkozy, reduce illegal immigration. Yea. And how are you going to do that? Selective immigration is good, but make sure they can actually easily work in their field of expertise or they'll be pissed. Minimum sentences for repeat offenders and tougher sentences for juveniles is really good. Criminals should not be let off easy. How to pay for it, Royal, financed by economic growth of 2.5% every year for 5 years. Yea... That's not a financial plan... That's hoping the economy does well enough in the future to pay for it all... For Sarkozy, cutting of civil service which accounts for close to half of the government budget. Eliminating useless jobs is good and public sector jobs are always really cushy, but where will they now go work? A better plan than Royal, but there's going to be a big backlash if the economy doesn't really improve as then it'll just be the same, except with higher unemployment.
Yes, I was that bored. But then again, commenting on their policies was fun for me. Not fun for you to read perhaps, but fun for me to write.
Reached level 65 today, so one more level before I get new spells including pyroblast :) Starting to run out of quests though I think which is going to suck. Got a new helm that looks ugly (Who in their right mind wants half a wolf's head sitting on their head?!) but has better stats.
I got the bow in Twilight Princess today. I had so much fun sniping orcs in the Goron Mines. Still got my OoT bow skills :D Unfortunately, it seems I still got my OoT spin attack skills too, i.e., I have to hold down the damn sword button and wait a whole second which means I'm dead meat if I really had to use it. I've got like a 50% chance of doing the spin attack on demand if I'm running in a straight path, but like 5% if I'm attacking something. Weird. Oh, the shield bash is fun as now Link automatically brings up his shield when L-targeting something (which is how it should be as why would you not use your shield for protection when fighting something?) but I'm still used to pressing the R button when fighting to bring up my shield so I actually end up attacking the enemy instead of defending myself which is actually better XD Funny thing happened today in the Goron Mine. An enemy killed itself for me. It walked too close to the edge and just slipped off while I was just standing there watching. Hilarious. I didn't even attack it or anything.
The UK's got it's own Quebec now, and it's Scotland. The Bloc Quebecois is the Scottish National Party. At least they only won by one seat and don't have a majority yet.
Fun day today :) Visited my high school again and did all the associated stuff. Thought I was going to be late so I ran most of the way there and got there right on time. Turns out someone else was 25 minutes late...
Final marks for this semester have started coming out. So far, biology and calculus is out. Only got 11's. Drat UoT and there giving out of perfects at 85%. I could've had those perfects >< But the one I'm really waiting for is chemistry. I sooo need that mark to be above 70%... *worries
Nagrand looks really nice. Reminds me of Elywnn Forest, except it's more open. I'm not high enough level for it yet though, and I've just finished Zangarmarsh, so it's Terokkar Forest for me next unless I want to grind rep with Sporeggar for this nice cape they have. I'd need to collect more glowcaps though, which is a pain, so I'll probably head over to Terokkar Forest.
And doing physics questions suck big time! The formulas and calculus is so insanely complicated. Even if I do write out the integrals right, there's a good chance I won't be able to finish the question as I'm not good at doing integrals. So frustrating. I hope my exam is marked really really easily.
Oh, I've also discovered the joy of copyright violations on YouTube. I watched two television shows and a movie on it and am rewatching one of again. They're so good and I'm so bored. Cardcaptor Sakura + Ouran = Less boredom :) Unfortunately it seems I'll have to wait a while for the second season of Ouran to come out though. Apparently the first season has already used up almost all the stuff that's already been published in print form. I'm so glad the second Cardcaptor movie was up, as that one wrapped up all the storylines from the television series. To anyone reading this, watch both shows! They're so good!
Too bad about the university shooting in the US. I looked at a timeline, and they haven't failed to miss a single year without at least one school shooting for the past decade or so. Silly US. The shooter was majoring in English of all things. Why the heck English??? That prof who blocked the doorway sure was brave though. Hats off to him. I wonder how big those windows in the classroom were though. My classrooms either don't have windows, or the windows don't open. And if they did, I think our windows have mesh screens in front. It sure would suck if something like that happened here.
Btw Gary, the comment input field on your website is messed in IE. It's all the way at the bottom of the window separated from the Name etc. input fields and below your long side panels.
I finally got to try out the Wii yesterday. Great fun would be a significant understatment. I thought switching from a regular console controller would be quite a challenge as I've heard that some regular gamers become quite crappy due to the novelness of the Wii, but I did pretty well I think. So little buttons though! Anyways, there's nothing better in life than sitting around with close friends trying out a brand new fast-paced video game. Add in the fact that we were playing WarioWare and so making utter fools of ourselves while playing only added to fun. Visited the high school too. It was nice to see some of the teachers and younger students again. A guidance consellor managed to make us all promise to come in after exams to talk to the students. All in all, a super awesome day.
One of my friends sent me a debating site. It should be fun, and addictive.
What else is new? Oh yes, being swamped by projects. Having projects and midterms at the same time, who came up with that brillant idea? I think next week I might actually get some grey hairs. Midterms, projects, assignments, and 3 labs. Maybe I just have a low stress/work tolerance?
Someone messaged me on Facebook recently about the campus Conservative Party club. I didn't know we even had one, though according to him, it was quite active a few years back. I wonder what happened? I do know there's some frigging NDP booth in the student centre a lot of the time. It just irks me that they'd be there but none of the other parties. The one major party that I hate, and it's the only one that has a booth. Kind of disappointed there doesn't seem to be a Green Party club here. Of all the parties I would've expected them to be there.
Hearing about all this Harry Potter news just reminds of the Wheel of Time series. I can't wait till A Memory of Light comes out in 2008. Word has it is that it's at least twice as thick as the other Wheel of Time books (which are already substantially thick), and is going to utilize a new binding process to keep it together. I sure hope I don't get stuck at the back of the line on the waiting list at the public library for this book. Ditto for the new Harry Potter book that's going to be out this summer. I want a WoT movie series dammit! Sure it'd take like one and half decades for all of them to be released, but it'd be so cool!
Scott Adams been embroiled in a debate on intelligence in his blog recently, leaving no room for his usually funny stuff unfortunately, but it's still quite entertaining. He somehow manages to be accused by his readers of promoting both an athiestic and religious agenda. I think I read somewhere that he's Catholic. Or was that someone else? Can't remember. Anyways, I'll throw caution to the wind and stick him in a position. I think he's a believer in a higher intelligence, but not the religious kind, and leans towards the athiest side on issues.
Hm, I really am bored. What else is there? Oh, well, it seems the Israeli area's going down the drain again (not that it really came back up much). Massive strike in Lebanon recently plus a suicide bomber in Israel (Hey, they had a pretty long run, since April 2006), and Hamas and Fatah have announced a truce again, right after getting 20 people killed and over 100 injured. The Middle East is weird to me. Well, Iraq and the Israeli area anyways. Let's take the Israeli area first. So you think Israel is the enemy. You fight Israel. They try to withdraw behind a wall. Next step... Kill each other? Right... Instead of cooperating to improve the area, it's better to fight each other and destroy what's left? Don't know where that thinking came from. And then Iraq. You have a brutal dictator. Someone comes in and removes him. But you don't like them for some reason. So, throw the country into anarchy so that they'll have an excuse to stick around? And let's say they are the enemy. Again, at the same time fight each other and destroy any attempts to improve the situation? Yes, I'm sure bombing bakeries, university students (who are, incidently, supposed to be the country's brightest and the future), and gunning down people shopping for groceries at markets is really going to make the country a better place. What kind of country functions better under a dictatorship than a democracy?! Okay, so there's really not that much democracy going on in Iraq at the moment, but there's not going to be one if the voters keep dying.
I think people are finally starting to take note of the environment, or at least global warming. Maybe it took the lack of snow this year, or the spread of Al Gore's documentary, or maybe it's just because Bush doesn't support it. But whatever, it's still a good thing. At the moment though, it still seems to be a faddish thing, which is unfortunate. Everyone's going to have to wake up eventually, and realize, hey, we need to do something about the environment, and actually do it, or just about everyone's going to be screwed. Though the ultra-rich will as usually get a way scot-free as usual, and may even benefit more. New global dictatorships based on radical environmentalism perhaps? Though the rich will no doubt find ways to countinue on their merry ways, seeing as how they don't number that much. Huh. I've got a group meeting at 1pm. I should go to sleep. Well, I guess that's the end of this posting. Funny, I know how much I'll miss stuff, but never get the emotion of missing it until I do. No wait, that's not so odd. Can't feel like one is missing something unless one is actually missing something. Unless one has an effective self-convicing imagination of course.
Badminton yesterday night was fun! 3v2 with me on the team of 2. We used 2-3 birdies so it was birdies everywhere. So tiring. This morning, I was actually too tired to go to sleep. I needed to get up and get some food into me.
Well, I finally got my physics mark! I got an A+! So that's straight A+'s for first semester except for stupid bio which was only an A. :D What joy. If only bio had been an A+ too...
So, what have I been up to lately. Basically nothing. Oh, and playing World of Warcraft. People are right, it is addicting. Going to be spliting my time between horde and alliance. And horde characters are SO ugly. If only I could use the blood elf race right now for the horde side...
I see all these New Year's celebrations on television, but to me, I think a big part of New Year's should be remembering what we did in the past year. Looking back, I can't help but think of how my life would be if I had chosen UTSC instead. But of course, if I had, I would've probably just stuck with my high school friends and life would've basically been like high school. In choosing McMaster, I've met some great new friends that I probably would not have met otherwise (randomly seeing them in a mall somewhere does not count). Also, I would not have had the residence experience, nor would I have gotten hooked on WoW either. Of course, thinking of what if's is quite useless, as our fates have already been cast. Just remembering however, does bring a unique sense of joy (in fact, I recently read in a newspaper article that memories of the past actually causes our brain to release "happy" chemicals).
May 2007 be a joyous year for all. And by all, I mean me of course. Screw other people =)
Well, my first round of university finals is over. I don't think I did that well on them, but I won't know for sure until I see my grades. I'm really hoping for a 90%+ in my chemistry course so that I can apply for a lab position as a summer job and not have to go looking for another job.
Well, I'm happy yet not happy about going home tomorrow now that my last exam is over. Happy because I get to eat real Chinese food and see my other friends. Not happy because now I can't use the computer as often, I'll miss the food here as some of it is really good, I'll have to start my pharmacy application, and I'll need to reimage my laptop.
On third season of Friends and half a billion for Winterbells! Sure, half a billion isn't a lot compared to trillions, but w/e.
I don't see how people gain weight during the first year of university. Sure, the food isn't all that healthy, but all the walking should make up for it. I've lost 1-2 pounds even though I eat all this unhealthy food (Going to miss those steaks and desserts).
The RSS feed is working again! Yay!
An easy computer on Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne is so not easy enough. The easiest level should allow a player to make tons of mistakes and still win. I can win with night elves versus humans really easily, but every time I go human versus human I get destroyed. I think it's because I don't know how to use my heroes well enough and I know it's because I don't have good anti-gryphon units as humans. Dratted gryphons...
I've started playing World of Warcraft. It's quite fun, but I don't like the long walk times. Well, at first it wasn't bad when I was playing as a human mage, because every town had basically what I needed and I had the gryphon rides to most locations. But then I switched to a troll mage, and am walking just about everywhere. Things are way too spread out in the starting area. I like how there are so many quests in WoW. It makes it so fun, and the chain quests are neat, they provide like a little story to it. One thing I don't like is how some quest monsters you HAVE to kill in a group because they're way too powerful for the level the quest was designed for. I mean sure, it adds a teamwork element to it, but it's not fun when you're trying to complete a quest and can't find a group to do it with you. Otherwise, WoW's good. Oh, I've noticed that the Troll/Orc newbie quests seem a lot easier than their human counterparts. I wonder why that is?
This game at called Winterbells found here is quite fun. My current high score is 2360410. I find this game is a lot more fun if you don't go for the score, but instead see how fast and high you can go. Funny how the rabbit doesn't die from the long fall eh? The music is so nice and relaxing, and the little sound that's made when you hop onto a bell complements it quite nicely. It's a nice wintery game.
And finally, one last distraction to my studying. I've been watching Friends quite a lot lately. As in a bit over one and half seasons in just over a week. I can't believe Ross broke up with Julie for Rachel. I mean, Julie's not Rachel, wtf is that? And when he says it's always been Rachel, hello? What about Carol? Rachel's like a frigging ditz. Less so now, but still. Oh well, I guess they didn't want to many secondary characters (their relationships never last and then that old guy downstairs died) sticking around so they neatly killed off Julie with Russ. And how come the Joey-Phoebe thing never happened after Ursula? It was like the writers completely forgot about that episode. Oh well, it's a TV show. I just finished the episode where Joey moves out. I wonder how that's going to work out, as now that Joey's not just across the hall, the sudden visits to Monica and Rachel's apartment aren't going to happen as often so then there's just Central Perk left. Hm. Maybe Joey will be out of work again or won't like living alone and move back in? Oh, you know what's a weird character? Phoebe. Most of the time, she's like such a retard, but then occasionally gets these bursts of genius. What's going on? Maybe schizophrenic or something? Lol, too much psych. I wonder if Ross will get fired at the museum for, uh, sticking around a bit too long in the display case with Rachel. That would leave Chandler as the only one with a well-paying job. Oh, I love how the tech shown in it is so old. Like, that "big" TV that Joey bought isn't all that big anymore. And the computer equipment! Lol! Even my old high school used way better equipment than that big corporation that Chandler works at. And then him boasting about his modem speed being 28.8 kbps, hilarious. His call to tech support was good too since they threw in Star Trek references. Ah, the fun.
Well, I guess I should go do more calculus since I'm struggling so badly. Or not.
What is with the crappy weather here in Hamiliton?! It's December and still raining?! And my umbrella flipped like 8 times today from the high winds accompanying the rain so now half of my umbrella is messed up. Good thing I got a backup from McMaster.
Don't you love it when you show people that their stance on an issue is wrong, and then they refuse to acknowledge it, then answer all your questions with something that doesn't make sense? Something like, "Do you like to eat strawberries?" The person will then answer, "I said computers games are fun." You know, like the answer has no relation to the question? Or a better example, "So what do you think we should have done in terms of the Canada-US softwood lumber dispute?" The answer will then be something like "George Bush is an asshole." Like wtf? Even if Bush was an asshole (yes, I agree many of his policies are stupid), how the hell does that answer the question??? So anyways, some nutcase has been doing this quite a lot. Obviously the question and answers I made up, but he answered the questions in the same way. Like omg, stop being a retard.
Wow, this will be like my first Remembrance Day since I started school without some sort of Remembrance Day assembly-thingy. Feels odd. It also brings up some violent feelings towards certain retarded individuals.
Usually I really don't like poetry, but I recently read The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Tennyson. It's pretty good. I think I it enjoyed more as I read about the battle before hand. What's odd is that I notice the online versions have a comma after forward in the line foward the Light Brigade, even though the manuscript didn't have it. I understand adding an exclamation point after this line, but the comma seems to break the flow for me, as if the commanding officer had forgotten the name and was struggling to remember it. Foward, um, what was the name again? Weird...
I found out this weekend that McMaster is the most research intensive university in Canada. No wonder the science program here is so much harder than UT's :(
This weekend was fun. Sushi buffet, where everyone got stuffed, then foosball, table tennis, and Gamecubing. Great fun. And Gary lost at foosball even though he gets to practice at Waterloo, lol. And I obviously didn't do any work this weekend.
On another note, Facebook's fun. Was just made into an officer of another group. Go me! Throw in some political debates... Fun!
Let's have a nice long post on a random topic. Right and wrong. How do we decide what's right and what's wrong? Sure, we've got laws and all, but there's always these gray regions that people find and exploit. And how did we decide what to write as laws anyways? It seems to me that a lot of the new regulations we write down are just decided by a bunch of rich people. But what made them the authority on morality in our society? In fact, we all think of our opinions as the right ones, but of course, people have conflicting opinions. So how can we really decide what's right and wrong? Well, our laws are supposed to be designed to help our society, so we could say that what's right is whatever helps our society, and what's wrong is what harms it. Well, there's the problem of, is our society a good one in the first place? Every different one has it's own set of pros and cons, so perhaps, what helps our society is actually wrong, if another competeing one is the best one. So let's redefine it to, whatever helps the human race is right, but then, what if us existing is a bad thing? Well, screw that thought, it makes it too complicated. Anyways, so now we have a definition of what's right and wrong. What benefits the human race is right, and what harms us is wrong. But then we run into a problem. Here's an example. Is killing someone wrong? We'd most likely automatically say yes, it's wrong if they haven't done anything wrong. But then, what about future actions? What if eliminating that person is better for the human race in the long run? Well, we can't see into the future, so we don't know. Well, generally, letting people kill each other is a bad thing, so we can now further redefine right and wrong as such: Actions that generally benefit the human race is right, and the opposite is wrong. There we go, a perfect definition of what's right and wrong. But now, we have to define what's good for the human race, and this is a big problem. Different people have different ideas of what's good for the human race. This is because... Well, I know why, but many would disagree with me. So maybe I shouldn't go there. Don't want to piss off any readers now do I? Especially since they probably know who I am. Drats, now I don't get to finish this post off. Where was I going with this post anyways? Oh yes, I remember now. Stem cell research should be encouraged. It has the potential to greatly advance medical care and help, theoretically, an infinite amount of people, because when we've learned enough to put it to practical use, it'll benefit many generations to come. Sure, one could complain about the harm to the embryos, but really, they're unwanted anyways. They would die anyways, so we may as well not waste them. Why not utilize them to help us? The number of people that would benefit from successful stem cell research greatly outweighs the number of embryos that would be used. So, from our defintion of what's right and wrong, it's actually unethical to ban such research. Think about it. If you still feel stem cell research is wrong, talk to me so I can try and dissuade you from opposing it. I like debating anyways and it'll relieve some of the stress of university. The morality of stances on issues. Fun.
I tried the online practice calc test and did really badly. Going to get screwed over on that on Tuesday. In other news, I finally finished my chem quiz after a lot of effort, and am now working on my physics CAPA assignment. I'm stuck on the 2nd question. Still need to read and complete the impulse stuff. Also, I haven't started my psych research yet, and if I don't bring anything, my group's going to kill me. Well, not literally, but be really pissed off, so add that to the list of things that have to be done before the end of tonight. Oh yes, still got to complete the chem and bio pre-lab quiz, and set up my bio notebook. I was going to review psych this weekend, but it looks like I'll have to scratch that. So much to do, so little time. Tonight's shot with the family dinner, so I've got to work like mad tomorrow unfortunately.
Always, always proofread your wall posts in large Facebook groups. I forgot to put a negative in one of my sentences and I got blasted for it because it made my sentence say the opposite of what I meant. Not good.
Oh yes, I read the National Post on Friday and Saturday. It felt SO good after suffering through 1.5 months of not being able to read it. It just felt good having it in my hands and turning the pages and scanning the articles while munching down on some snacks.
Going to see if I can get my laptop to automatically stream 680 news at a certain time. If I'm successful, it'll replace my iTunes alarm clock. Sucks having poor radio reception.
Will finally get to see my friends again on Saturday! So excited! I've saved a copy of my physics assignment and chemistry quiz for them to mull over >=)
I found where the Wokery is! Or rather, some of my friends showed me where it was. End result, I've got a place that's close by that serves good Chinese food. They've also got all these East Asian snacks and drinks for sale there! Good times.
Crushed Gary in Civilization IV: Warlords with a massive tank army :D Air, sea, and land superiority. Will do so again in current game, though maybe this time I'll go for a space race victory.
My new Facebook groups are doing well. Growing at least.
Got a laser printer. Now I don't have to trek all the way to the library to print there :)
Changing font style of this to match what I see when I type this.
Chemistry labs start next week :'(
I came sooo close to getting into a conversation with my chemistry professor, another chemistry professor, and a non-first year student about peak oil, global warming, and other good stuff. Couldn't think of a way to insert myself into the conversation without seeming weird >< Sooo close...
Stupid integrals...
My roommate just got addicted to Japanese music and anime. So annoying... Oh well.
Why do people keep going home on the weekends? The amount of work they'll be able to get done at home will be so much less than here.
My physics lab took me 2 hours 10 minutes. In other words, if I had a class right after my physics lab, I would've been ~15 minutes late. Stupid labs...
Hee hee, a giant puff ball planet.
I went to the East Meets West Bistro with some new friends for the second time. This time around, I ordered a Cajun Steak Sandwich instead of Ma Po Tofu w/ Shrimp and Pork. The tofu was really good, though they didn't give me any rice or noodles, which was surprising. The cajun steak sandwich was really good. Yum yum. Expensive though. $9.99 for it. Came with fries. The EMW Bistro is sooo nice. One can even make reservations as it's really busy due to, you know, the niceness. When you order, you get this electronic square thing, and it flashes and vibrates when your food is ready to be picked up. So cool! Now if only I could find the Wokery...
There might be a Star Trek club starting on campus, and it's all because I suggested it :)
I hate labs!!! And math sucks!!!
Okay, being so far from my classes SUCK! In case you didn't know, my residence is the farthest residence from the classrooms. So, this morning, I timed my trip to the psychology building. It took me 15 minutes, at a fast walk. And the building my physics class is in, is even further. By about 5 minutes I think. Not sure. But, it did take me 15 minutes to run from that building back to my residence then back again. I know, because 5 minutes before class started, I realized I didn't have my iClicker with me, which is used for daily quizes. So I ran and got it. Lucky I didn't miss anything important.
SOME of my classmates really really irritate me. So far I have irritating classmates in my physics, chem, and calc class. In my physics class, I've got some asshole who keeps yelling out answers when the professor wasn't asking him. Okay, doing that once or twice, w/e. Maybe you really wanted to answer it, or it was just instinct. But really. Give other people a chance to think about the answer. Especially when it was clear the professor didn't want anyone to answer it immediately. For calc, there's no need to try and impress the prof by pointing out the flaw in someone's answer when the prof is trying to teach us by explaining what and why the flaw is. And don't say it in a way that makes it seem like the person is retarded if the answer isn't that stupid. "Infinity's a process, not a number." WHAT?! And for chem, people are trying to listen and take notes. Stop whispering! Okay, whispering's fine if you're talking about course material, but not okay when you're calling a person who asked a question an idiot. Okay, it was a pretty stupid question, but it was only one. Not several. And it didn't interrupt the flow of the lesson at all either. And if you're just going to whisper the whole class and not pay attention, there's no need for you to be there disrupting everyone around you. And stop bugging the person in front! How would you like it if when you're trying to take notes the person behind you keeps kicking/shaking your chair and brushing your hair with their pen?! F---ing idiot!!! What really pissed me off is that the guy and his friends looked like the type of people struggling in school due to no studying, not doing homework, etc. Why are you even taking a chemistry course?! Okay, venting done now. Wow that was a long post.
Dropped my second semester algeo for psych :) Didn't get my physics section change :'(
Die, rain, die! Okay, it can't die because it's not alive in the first place, but you know what I mean.
Cable's fixed now! I can now watch the Space and Comedy channel! Hurrah!
Mandatory stuff total (textbooks, goggles, etc.), ~$600+. Just under my credit card limit.
So much work to do this weekend... Ugh.
Need real Chinese food... And milk. And cereal.
I can't believe there isn't a Star Trek club here. I mean, a Family Guy club?! There isn't even a chess club either! I didn't find any clubs that I really liked. I joined a science for peace thingy and a video gaming club just for the hell of it. I would've joined some of the Chinese clubs, but my Cantonese is at like a grade one level so I didn't bother. So many religious clubs here. Either that or clubs that are like AIDs awareness or anti-landmine club or w/e. Oh, joined a club that supposedly matched people up for study groups. And there was a club that I felt should not have been allowed to be there. It was a Lebanon-Palestine group. On a huge banner they had over the table, it said, "Resistance Is A Right!" so we know what kind of club that one is...
Now that university is starting, I guess this will be the end of daily posting. Back to posting every 3 days or w/e, if that. Ah well, it's been a good run.
I just got an email on the prerequisites for the Waterloo pharmacy program. My response: @#$@%%^*&%@$!#$^&()@#!!! Their program is going to require 2nd year courses! That means my only option now is the Toronto pharmacy program. Oh, and more sad news. Well, it's kind of old, but I had forgotten about it. The optometry program at Waterloo, it's actually for ALL of Canada. And one of the requirements is a letter from an actual optometrist. And some of the requirements are courses I haven't seen at McMaster. Yet. I mean like come on, an ethics course?!
Oh sure, pump aid into Lebanon. Bastards. Israel has sustained heavy damage too. About half of Lebanon's amount, but still quite substantial.
Last day of August. How sad. University drawing ever so near...
University is drawing so close... And my mandatory non-credit online oreintation course is total crap. It's so boring and useless. It's one of those let's send the student through the maze of our website searching for itty-bitty useless pieces of information. Oh, and ask questions where the answer is the URL of the page where they found the information, but make sure that the information is found in several different pages but only accept one page as the answer.
Went to a BBQ yesterday. Great fun. Stuffed myself so much, and not a single vegetable eaten :) Played some Scrabble there too, though we didnt' keep track of points. Too lazy to get a peice of paper to write on, lol.
Well, university's started for me now. Sort of. I can now access my mandatory non-credit online course. I'm going to try and finish it before I move into residence.
You might be wondering what happened to my deity level game. Well, I've decided to not countinue it as my victory was guaranteed and it was going to take a while to go through every single city.
Getting six people together is really hard and frustrating. You think there's a date where everyone's free, and then it turns out that one person isn't good for that date. Blargh.
Nooo! Pluto's not a regular planet anymore! Dwarf planet... Blargh. And I thought that it was going to be affirmed as a regular planet along with Charon and Xena. I said as much on the Dilbert blog too. Blargh.
Went rollerblading today. Almost fell on account of a sudden hole in the road. I hate it when that happens. I'm just rollerblading along, and then my foot suddenly drops or hits something, which just screws up my balance.
Civilization IV: Warlords = great fun. More options for me in my quest to crush other civs. If only they would bring back tactical nukes... The great general's really nice. I'd never attach it to a unit though. Much more useful to use it for inceased military unit build speeds. Imagine this: ironworks, heroic epic, and military academy. Throw in the police state civic and you get a 250% military unit production increase. If the city already has military academy, use it as a military advisor for a 2 point experience increase. With barracks/drydocks, vassalage, and theocracy, and a military advisor that's 11. 13 with Pentagon, a whopping 17 with West Point too. So let's assume you replace ironworks with West Point. That's 17 experience and 150% military unit production. Pwnage. Since that's two great general, let's compare that if you had attached those two generals to unit stacks. That'd be 40 experience plus access to some promotions that other units don't get. My city builds three units, and that's already more experience. No Pentagon, 4 units. And the special promotions? Doesn't matter if the unit gets buried by like 10 units. I really need to try out vassal state. You know what's fun? Sudden attacks from the sea. Draw the target's forces off to the other side of their continent with a massive stack. Then send in a force to raze their weakly defended city. Fun. ;)
Bicycled to the library to drop off some books that were due today. Wanted to pick up a book I had on hold, but the last day to pick up was yesterday >< I actually got a ride to the library first, but I forgot to bring the books I needed to return, so I had to bicycle there later.
So, the MPs who called for Hezbollah to be taken off the terrorist organizations list is now claiming that they did not say that. However, the newspapers are sticking to their story that they did. Personally, I think that the MPs did say that, but didn't fully realize the implications of what they said. So what the MPs are now claiming to have said is what they meant to say, though they actually accidently said something else.
I picked up Warlords from Gary today, along with a book he had 2 copies of. Also got BFME2, but I won't be able to install it until I put all of that stuff into an image and then stuff it into a virtual drive. Needless to say, I won't be doing that anytime soon. He also installed for me TweakUI and showed me Teamspeak 2RC2. Played a game of Warlords, crushed him in it :) Great fun. Also did some CoD2 but the good servers were down. The Teamspeak program is great, letting us have a private voice channel in-game, though the sound notifications of other users logging on and off were annoying (I've disabled those now). I also got a chance to see his new MacBook Pro. It's so... Silvery. And big. Personaly, while I liked the OS on his MacBook Pro more, I think my XPS M1210 looks better. Less wasted space since everything's jammed in. The screen looked so big, because on the MacBook Pro, there's less of a border. The optical drive was neat too. It's just a slot, much better than mine, as I'm afraid I'll break my optical drive everytime I push the CD down onto the drive. It seems so fragile... But mine had an emergency eject button. His might have had one too, though I didn't notice it. My laptop's thicker, but it's got a smaller width, which I like, because then my laptop's basically a big textbook in size. Oh, tested out my wireless. It works. Oh, and I raced Gary in booting up our laptops. My laptop hadn't even reached the Windows log on screen and his MacBook Pro had already finished booting up ><
Stupid federal Liberal and NDP politicians. Some of them visited Lebanon and now want Hezbollah taken off the Canadian terrorist organizations list. Their reason, to "help" negotiations along. Apparently, labelling them as terrorists will hamper peace negotiations. Well, why not take all groups off the terrorist organizations list? It'd help negotiations with them too. Sure, it'll let them legally raise funds for the deliberate murder of innocent civilians, but the negotiations would be a lot less awkward. That way, we wouldn't be negotiating with terrorists, we'd merely be negotiating with a brutal politcal entity that our closest allies regard has a terrorist organization.
So, Singapore has a problem with it's low birth rates. I've got the solution. This solution will work for any country who needs to get their birth rates higher. Let immigration from China make up the shortage. This way, the strain on the education system isn't increased. Well, except for countinuing education courses. W/e.
My keyboard is seriously pissing me off with the stiffness. Maybe it's just because my fingers are still weak which will go away as soon as my digestive system finishes digesting my breakfast.
Civ update: I played two turns yesterday. I captured and razed a city, the AI destroyed my oil well and iron mine again. Their stealth bombers are really annoying... Oh, and I mentioned in a previous post a huge list of improvements the AI destroyed. I actually forgot to include a spice planation and sheep pasture in there. Yea... I hate their stealth bombers... Especially since mine have all been shot down...
My laptop display is so shiny I can use it as mirror. I've solved the light coloured problem thing. All I have to do is tilt the display back and make sure no direct light glares off it.
Israel has been accused of breaching the ceasefire by staging a raid into Lebanon. Israel claims they were trying to stop a shipment of illegal weapons. So who broke the ceasefire conditions first? I'll be waiting for the article in the National Post tomorrow. I knew something would go wrong...
Look! Paragraphs! Well, sort of anyways.
Lol, France, the great architect of the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, is now refusing to contribute more than a token amount to the UN peacekeeping force. 200 soldiers out of 15000. Wow.
06/08/07 13:32
Slowly getting through my novels. Will probably pull a couple of 6 hour long reading sessions to finish them.
06/04/07 18:46
I finished the Cave of Ordeals today. It was longer and more difficult than the Ganondorf fight. Knowing how to kill all the monsters in each room doesn't really help when there's a whole mass of them coming at you all at once. I didn't count how many rooms there were, but there were a lot, with no hearts to pick up. The most annoying fight wasn't the last one, but one where I had to take on I think 6 armored lizards and a poe at the same time. I couldn't get the wolf to target the poe so it made attacking the lizards really difficult as the poe would take a whack at you when you went for the lizards. Oh well, I passed it without dying, and that's what matters.
06/03/07 20:36
Finished rereading Eye of the World today. *bounces off the walls in anticipation of The Great Hunt
06/02/07 21:30
I finished Twilight Princess today. The boss battle in the Palace of Twilight was fun! The last part with Zant was funny when he just flails about like a madman trying to cut you to pieces. The final battle with Ganon was tiring on my L-targeting finger. The last part dragged on for so long as the camera angle made it hard for me to make Link roll behind Ganondorf. It was fun nonetheless. All I have left to do now is check out the Cave of Ordeals. No way I'm going to try to find all the bugs and poes. Too damn difficult and time-consuming. I'm at 17 hearts and 2 pieces right now, so I missed 13 heart pieces along the way. The Twili were creepy with their misshapen bodies and red eyes. Reminded me of redeads way too much.
05/31/07 00:38
My grades and program application results for McMaster has all been released now. I got accepted into all my choices, and will go for Biological Chemistry. It'll be interesting to see how the 2nd year chemistry is broken between biological, synthesis and structure, and analytical. I hope biological is the smallest one! So, the grades. I've got an 11.1 overall right now as 2nd semester completely ruined my average. I didn't get a single 12 2nd semester :(
Bio: 11/11
Chem: 12/8
Physics: 12/11
Psych: 12/11
Calc: 12/11
05/29/07 19:12
I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End today. It had many illogical things in it, but I didn't mind, it was funny. I can see why people said it sucked, as I doubt it was originally intended to be comedy, but that's what it was to me. I was cheering for the British while I was watching. Screw the pirates, because, well, they're pirates.
05/28/07 23:02
What a fun day today was! Was wandering around Toronto with friends all day today. Although we had planned on only going downtown, we took a detour up to Yorkdale first (I can't remember the reason. Do we really need a reason?). We wandered around the mall and visited stores, including the Apple store where my view that Macs were of inferior quality was further rammed into the folds of my brain. Its game section was just one shelf shoved into a corner at the back of the store which was pathetic, and it didn't help that there was an EB Games store right across from the Apple store. Haha, Macs suck. Lol. Anyway, then we had lunch at the food court as we were hungry even though we had all eaten lunch before we left. After lamenting the fact that no Taco Bell was present, I settled for A&W. We each ordered our respective meals and proceeded to get thoroughly stuffed. After that we almost went to see Pirates 3, but decided against it (Sitting in a movie theatre for 3 hours straight? Not all that appealing. It appears I'm being forced to watch it tomorrow though. At least I'll get a tennis game out of it beforehand.). The fact that we would've had to wait 45 minutes for it start may have factored into our decision. A lot. We're just not all that patient I guess, and not all of us were enthusiastic about watching movies to say the least. So we hopped onto the TTC again and went to the Eaton Centre. Half of our party somehow managed to fall asleep on a noisy subway train. Amazing how some people can sleep anywhere.
05/27/07 15:45
Ewww, it started to rain just as I started rollerblading :( At least I made it home in time before it started to come down a lot.
05/26/07 14:28
Sucks that it's going to rain soon. I was so enjoying the sunshine before. Cloudy days just sap the energy right out of me. It'll also cause a growth spurt in the grass which means more lawn mowing for me, ugh.
05/24/07 23:53
For any Wii owners out there getting frustrated by a lack of a keyboard when accessing the internet, one could be coming out soon. Even if Nintendo themselves don't make one, I'm sure some people will come up with one soon enough. Either that or they'll release an update to so that the DS can be used as a keyboard, though for people with bad handwriting/printing (me), the DS makes frequent mistakes.
05/24/07 22:46
Snowpeak Ruins boss intro sequence is scary! The way the face just turns and screams right at you... I flinched when that happened... On a more positive note, the snowboarding game is FUN! Beating the two yeti is easy, so now I'm just trying to beat my personal records. I got the highest score possible already in the fruit popping game. Still got to try to get on the rotating platform in the cucco flight game. Oh, and I got the sinking lure today (finally, geez). I actually prefer using the other lures. Using a sinking lure is no challenge at all and the thing sinks off the screen too. Next up on my list of things to do is find that cave with the Great Fairy Tears that Jovani mentioned when he gave me a bottle of it. The entrance is probably what the bridge in the Gerudo desert was hiding as I think I saw a hole there when it got lifted up and I didn't notice any cave in the western desert the first time I was there. After that I'll continue the Temple of Time. For some reason I found it funny when the bird things ran ahead of me into the temple.
05/23/07 21:31
I finished Arbiter's Grounds today (yay, the undead dungeon is over with), and am right outside the "boss" room in Snowpeak Ruins. I say "boss" because I got the compass and map but there's no boss marked on it, so maybe I get to get away without having to fight a boss. The fights are fun though. The mini-boss in Snowpeak almost killed me though. Kept getting hit when he twirled the damn metal ball around. It was easy enough avoid when he threw it though. The 3-block puzzle where you have to get a block to stop in the middle stumped me for a while though. Then I got the idea of playing it out on my chess board first and solved it really quickly after :) Chess, now fun and practical.
05/22/07 20:03
I caught the damn fish finally!!! I caught the damn frigging loach finally! Also managed to snag a new bass record too, 21 inches. Still haven't gotten the sinking lure, but w/e, I caught the loach without it :) It took a while though, as while I kept casting in the right area (it likes frogs, there's frogs by lily pads, it has to be there), I wasn't casting far enough in. As soon as I moved the boat closer after wasting like an hour, I got it on the first cast :) So happy.
05/21/07 22:14
Why does it seem like everyone else has more exciting lives than me? Oh well, I've still got the internet and Zelda. Though the fishing is starting to piss me off. It seems like I caught all the record breaking sizes the first time around as for the past 2 days none of my catches have been record breakers even when they're huge. And I still haven't gotten the damn sinking lure or caught the adult loach yet. I know they're both out there somewhere... Okay, I don't know if I can get the sinking lure, but it's on the wall and it was obtainable in Ocarina of Time so it should be in here somewhere too. Grrr... Stupid fish... I think I'll just continue on to the Gerudo desert tomorrow instead of more fishing.
05/19/07 19:12
I went bicycling with my uncle in Edward Gardens for several hours today. I wish I had bicycle trails that nice near my house! There were so many trees and stuff that made the scenery so good, and along a big part of the trails there was a river. The temperature was perfect for bicycling too, not so cold you couldn't wear shorts and t-shirts, but not so warm that you'd get soaked in sweat after a little while, and no wind either. It was so fun! We were planning on going all the way downtown, but we got lost for a long time after we took a wrong turn at the beginning so we ran out of time. But next time we won't get lost!
05/18/07 23:45
Just got the Master Sword in Twilight Princess today. It was nice being able to hear Saria's Song again as it was my favourite song in Ocarina of Time. I had given up hope on hearing it after it didn't show up initially in the forest in the beginning, but then, Sacred Grove? Yes! There's still a forest part! Another run through the Lost Woods, but this time, instead of following the sound of music, I had to follow a Skull Kid, and they're even more annoying in this game, as they summon giant freaky puppets to attack you.
05/18/07 17:29
Just finished playing some civ. Oh the memories. My friend and I were just about to invade Genghis (well, actually him since I didn't bother building up an army) when the game crashed ><
05/17/07 13:15
I don't get art. Why do all these paintings sell for millions and millions of dollars? I mean like, this painting by Warhol of a car crash sold for like 71 million dollars US. And then there was this ugly painting of Marilyn Monroe that sold for 23 million I think? Like wtf? Those paintings don't even look nice! Artists and the people who collect their works are crazy... I can think of much better uses for the money.
05/17/07 11:09
I could only laugh when I read the news today. Sure it's not good news, but it was the type of funny you get when watching videos of stupid criminals. The head of the UN's commission on sustainable development has just managed to reach 3,731.9% inflation, up from 2200% in just one month. And the other item, Hamas is threatening to renew suicide bombings after Israel launched air strikes against them in response to continued rocket fire into Israel. It's totally ridiculous that Israel be expected to just sit there and let the rocket barrages continue, but that's them.
05/16/07 23:57
Plastic, what would the world be like without them? Give it some thought, just for fun.
05/16/07 13:59
Got a call from the library today saying they have a book on hold for me. I think it's the next book in the Company series :)
05/15/07 13:58
I got back from a, as always, painful teeth cleaning session. Turns out all the sugary drinks at university also netted me a cavity too. But that's not the worst part. I have to get 4 wisdom teeth removed soon in a very painful process. It was already bad enough when I had 4 canine teeth removed. Canine teeth are near the front and aren't attached as strongly. Wisdom teeth on the other hand are at the very back of the mouth, are quite firmly attached to one's jaw, and, in my situation, they're lying on their sides... So the dentist is going to have to remove the gums coating before it gets removed... And it's a very long procedure... And it'll take me at least a week to recover... And I need go through this twice to get them all out... *cries
05/14/07 20:36
From the BBC: "Rival Palestinian factions are reported to have agreed a truce to end fierce fighting in the Gaza Strip." "However, past agreements have failed to hold." That's quite the understatement. Let's go on to see what the end of the article says. "Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the strip has seen a wave of infighting, armed robberies, deadly family feuds and kidnappings." But you know, I think Israel's been better off since the withdrawal. The Palestinian area however, has just gone downhill. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion from the last two sentences. Which brings us to the mess in Iraq. Perhaps the US administration should look at this and take a hint. Either that or go read Scott Adam's blog entry for today for a better idea of what to do. It's basically what I've suggested, except that he makes the profits help Palestinian children or w/e, which I actually hadn't thought of. It's a brilliant improvement on an already brilliant plan.
05/14/07 18:00
Had some fun in the Arathi Basin battleground today. I think I'm improving with using a druid considering in one bg I managed to get 2nd most damage dealt and most hks. And most bases defended. And 3rd most assaulted and only 5 deaths :D Got a bit of healing in too. We won that round by only 40 points, so it was the most fun AB round I've ever had.
05/13/07 17:21
Took a 3 hour bicycle trip to Lake Ontario and back. I got lost twice on the way back after taking two wrong turns. It was fun :) It didn't seem as tiring this time around though, probably because it was a lot cooler today than the other times I went. I love going down that giant hill to get down the bluffs. I don't see why they never put in a sidewalk, so I had to ride down on the edge of the road where the asphalt was crumbling or had turned to gravel and filled with potholes. Unfortunately, it was either ride there, or get killed by a passing car, or fall into the deep ditch on the side. Still fun even though I was thinking, gee, I hope I don't die going down this road. I did meet two jerks on the way back though. I'm guessing they were in grade 4 and 6. It was these two fat white kids. One of them tried to toss a twig at me as I was going by and the other pretended to try to whack me on the head with his skateboard and laughed. What those two need is for someone to beat the crap out of them. Oh yeah, my bicycle chain slipped off the gears the second time I was lost, so now I've got faint oil marks on one of my hands. That part was not fun, as I knew that if I couldn't fix it, it'd be a loooong walk back. Like maybe 3 hours of walking? Yeah. Good thing I got it back on. Oh, that reminds me, my kickstand looks like it's about to fall off too. I'll have to remember to tighten the bolt on it next time so that it doesn't fall off or tangle my wheel causing me to fall and injure myself or wreck my wheel.
05/12/07 19:12
3 straight hours of badminton equals great fun. Of course, it did mean my bicycling plans were postponed again. I'll do that tomorrow.
05/11/07 22:53
And Zimbabwe gets to head the United Nation's commission on Sustainable Economic Development. And to answer the ambassador's question of ""What has sustainable development to do with human rights?"" my answer is nothing. It has nothing to do with human rights. But it has everything to do with economic progress, and Zimbabwe has gone backwards, way backwards. From being one of, if not the most, the most economically successful countries in Africa to the worst. 2800% inflation, electricity rationing, huge unemployment, your country sure is a model of sustainable development that we should all aspire to. Congratulations to the United Nations for allowing this to happen, and congratulations to the African nations who supported Zimbabwe for this position for selecting such a highly qualified country to head up this commission. Here's the BBC article that had that lovely quote from the ambassador.
05/11/07 20:12
Fishing in Zelda = Great fun. I love how there's a picture of the fishing guy from OoT on the wall as the master fisherman. I wonder what the remaining fish is? I've caught 5 so far, and there's only one spot remaining. Going to try out the frog lure tomorrow as I just got it today.
05/11/07 15:06
I'd like to share something I found funny today. I was stuck in traffic and a shiny new car (a 2006 Hyundai Accent I think) pulls up in the other lane (it ended up almost a car length's in front. The front windows were all rolled down with rap blasting out of the car. Now normally this would just be annoying, except for one thing. The car was bouncing up and down due to the driver dancing to the "music." I know it was doing that because of the driver as he stopped momentarily to check something on the passenger seat and the car stopped bouncing up and down. The bouncing resumed when the dance resumed. It's hard to describe the movement pattern the driver was doing, so I won't attempt to, but it was funny, especially since the driver looked like the main character from the Blade series. The sunglasses were larger and wraparound though. If only I had a video of it...
05/11/07 14:28
I'm predicting a full day of fishing for me in Zelda today if I manage to find the fishing hole. Fishing in Zelda is always fun for some odd reason :)
05/10/07 17:03
I just spent the last 4 hours reading. Woo! 300+ pages in one hour, not bad :) I'll have to put the next Company novel on hold now.
05/09/07 23:03
I'm so bored right now. I think some several hour long bicycle trips are in order as soon as the bad weather passes.
05/09/07 13:17
Didn't bother finishing the novel I was reading and went to the library today. Got some new books including a new one in the Company series by Kage Baker. Should be awesome.
05/08/07 23:38
Argh, have to get used to a new attack system now that I've gotten both pyroblast and ice lance. Also had to move around some of my spells to make room >< My system's all messed now. Before it was (at 41 yard range) fireball, fireball, arcane blast, then if target had low health then either fire blast and wand to death or arcane missile then either fire blast or wand to death. If I'm low on health then replace wand with arcane explosion. If less than 41 yards away then move to 30 yards, fireball, arcane explosion, then repeat for 41 yard range. Now it's pyroblast for first spell, fireball and arcane blast, or just arcane blast depending on range, frost nova, then ice lance while hoping it doesn't crit (weird that I find myself hoping my spells don't crit so that the target doesn't get unfrozen) then do whatever I usually do to kill it. I keep hitting the wrong buttons too as the spells are moved around. I see a problem with the frost nova/ice lance part though. As I get my critical hit percentage higher, I'll do less damage in this area as one crit will only net me about 1.7k damage right now and then the target's most likely unfrozen. So do I wait 6 seconds for a pyroblast then? Or go for an arcane blast then arcane missile (though this means I'll have to wait for cooldown on arcane blast to go before using frost nova)? Frostbolt is so useless to me now, I haven't used it in such a long time... Long cast time, low damage, and the only benefit is lowered movement speed. But by the time I cast it, the enemy will be out of range, meaning I'd have to waste a Presence of Mind to use it, but I could just spend it on a pyroblast as I'm assuming I'd be using it on a low on health fleeing enemy (the only exception being flag carriers but I don't do battlegrounds often...). Anyways, I'll stop boring you with newbish thoughts on a game you probably don't even play. Congrats, you just lost a part of your life you'll now never get back thanks to me >=) I wonder if ice lance spamming is better than wanding? Need to look up cooldown time between spells...
05/08/07 21:13
Nothing the smell of a good deal on delicious food to bring people together. Today was Pizza Nova's annual pizza sale for charity, with medium pepperoni pizzas going for $3.99 so of course I went to buy some at the local Pizza Nova for dinner as we have for quite a number of years. So I was standing at the back of a long line up and I'm looking around for something to distract me from my boredom momentarily. I glance back and then turn to see if the line had moved yet. Then I thought, wait a minute, that face behind me looks familiar... It took me a few seconds before the though fully processed because I was like no way, what are the odds of them being right behind me in a line up to buy pizza??? I ended up meeting 2 friends I hadn't talked to in a while, one who was just passing by and another who was also buying pizza! It took 50 minutes before we got our pizzas, but it sure didn't feel that long as time passes by really quickly when you're chatting away. I wonder if anyone else I knew also stopped by today.
05/07/07 23:26
My email account was down for a while. Suffered a bit of anxiety as a result of that. Good thing I had another email account to check and then retreated into a computer game for a while. It's like being isolated from the world, though not really since I didn't have any email messages to send. I just don't like it when my stuff doesn't work. I am so addicted to technology ><
05/07/07 16:50
Oh, and about the World of Warcraft Visa deal thingy, CIBC offers something similar to it for their Dividends card, except that you need to spend over $3000 annually on it to get the 1% back. The WoW Visa appears to be a good deal for people who know for a fact that they'll be playing as it just translates into free money. I don't know what the value is for an equivalent amount in reward points for other programs, the most common being air miles, but how many of us really use our air miles (assuming we have any). I wonder if any site will post up a comparison of relative values between earning air miles and 1% of purchases back. Don't forget that the WoW Visa has no annual fee.
05/07/07 16:26
I find it amazing how fast tulips bloom. Just 2 days ago all of the ones in my backyard were still all green, and now, almost every single of them have opened in a riotous display of colour. Maybe I'll take a picture of it soon. Or not, depending on how lazy I am. It looks best from my window, but then there'll be a screen mesh all over the picture though. The grass is growing pretty fast too. Ugh, that'll mean I'll have to cut it soon. :(
05/06/07 14:21
Just finished rollerblading for the first time this summer. Fun and tiring. The road conditions in the area that I rollerblade appear to be the same as last summer so that's good.
05/04/07 23:46
It's nice that Zangarmarsh and Terokkar Forest are about the same levels, as since I've done all the quests in Zangarmarsh except the dungeon ones, I'm right on the upper limit of Terokkar. That means I don't have to worry too much about dying as I'm questing, and there are a TON of quests in here, non-dungeon, non-elite, which are my favourite type of quests :) Had to abandon a bunch of grey quests to fit them all. Just accepted one that will upgrade my helm when I complete it.\ :D I expect to again at least 2 levels by the time I'm through which means I'll have my pyroblast ready for the next area AND I'll be 2 levels higher than the recommended starting level so once again, it'll be easier for me to quest. Fun fun fun! What wasn't fun was me camping in Everlook waiting for the Runecloth Gloves pattern to spawn over the course of 1.5 days before finding out it got turned into a trainable pattern. At least my tailoring's in the 300s now so I got rid of the netherweave that was eating up bank space. Making the bolts meant I got to replace some of my bags with netherweave bags too! Got my fishing up to 200 so now I get to use a graphite fishing pole that was formerly owned by a little kid and gives +20 fishing and +54 stamina for some reason. Hm, leveled up my enchanting a few levels (almost 280 now) and tried Eye of the Storm for the first time. Alliance got owned sooo badly as we were outnumbered 9 to 15, but I still snagged highest damage dealt with 20k more damage than the next person :)
05/03/07 23:38
I have now finished my first novel of this summer's vacation. I'm surprised it took so long, but I was distracted by all my games and stuff. Also didn't start the day I borrowed it. Oh, right, the book was The Graveyard Game by Kage Baker. Super awesomeness. I need to look up on the Internet whether the series continues further or not. I'd really like to find out how the Silence turns out. Well, got 2 more books waiting in my backpack. Which one should I pick... Decisions decisions...
05/03/07 18:14
Just started second temple. Combat on horseback was FUN! And I managed to collect enough heart pieces for a new container today :) Now, 5 more pieces till the next one! I wonder why a giant skeleton that looks sooo evil is teaching Link new skills? Seems odd. And the wolf turns into the skeleton O_o
05/02/07 23:46
I hope this Doan thing comes back and bites the federal Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, and NDP in the ass and tears a chunk off of them. Glad to see the Green and Conservatives party not getting sucked into this. Politicians should be required to take a course on checking facts before blabbering. Ugh. As for the Chamberlain comment by May, I don't see a problem with it. There wasn't anything wrong with the analogy she was trying to draw as she was going for the failing to realize a critical threat thing.
05/02/07 23:06
Chem marks just came out. I managed to get an 8, so I'm super happy right now :D Physics and psych still not out yet though. Grrr...
05/02/07 20:14
Chem marks still aren't out even though they should've been by today. I'll send an email to the registar's office tomorrow if I still don't see it up.
05/01/07 22:40
From a recent BBC article: "The huge rise in the price of maize comes after inflation in Zimbabwe reached 2,200% in March." Ouch. Those land reforms sure worked... And yet Mugabe remains in power...
05/01/07 10:34
Okay, so I searched up the two times I died and it turns out I didn't have to die. The one with Midna I just needed to wait a couple of times and then she'll jump down to help. That means I've missed a cutscene/conversation :( The one with the hawk, w/e. Should've just ran out of the area and then try again without entering the light. But of course, if I had done that I would've missed the cutscene of the guy spotting me :)
04/30/07 21:29
Tried Twilight Princess for the first time today. I've just reached the entrance of the first temple and it's pretty good so far. Haven't found any heart pieces yet though :( Midna's starting to piss me off though. I wonder how she and Zelda met. The horse is much more difficult to control unfortunately, and it seems that I won't be able to summon it in the field whenever I want to. If I want to call it over, I need to find and pick up some horsegrass. Either that or go back to where I left it and mount up. The hawks are not the brightest. You call them with another type of grass and then can aim them and they'll fly straight towards whatever you were aiming at, even if it's a wall or the ground. The chickens in this game must be on steroids or something. Even though your character's an adult, the chickens will still make you glide. I haven't tried attacking them till they get mad, though I will later to see what happens. Already got some goats pissed off. One thing I really don't like in this game is that it seems in some situations you HAVE to die and restart the game. I've already died twice. The first time, you have to take down a group of creatures at the same time because if there's only one left, all the others get revived. So that meant I had to use a special attack that Midna does. BUT the first time I encounter the group, Midna goes you can handle these yourself or something like that, and then disappears, meaning it's impossible for me to take them down. So I die and restart and then she appears and tells me that I have to use her special attack to take them down and helps me out. So death was unavoidable there. The second time I got attacked by an unkillable hawk. In retropect I guess I could've survived by running out of the area, but the first time around Midna says deal with the guy who sent the hawk so I was running around trying to find a way up while being attacked by the hawk. With only 3 hearts, you don't get that much time before you die. It was only after a restart that a cat comes up and tells me what do. Ugh. Oh, I almost died a stupid death once. I kept jumping off the tower/ledge while attacking a bird in wolf form. Took me two falls to learn to draw the birds back to the middle of the tower before doing a jump attack. Can't wait till I go through the first dungeon tomorrow :) Forest ones were always fun.
04/29/07 22:44
I picked up Twilight Princess on my way back from the library. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet though. It was so nice being able to bicycle to the library today. I missed my books :) Got 3 books to start off, will be searching up the internet for continuations of some good series later on.
04/28/07 13:13
The library has started calling me about books on their hold shelf waiting for me. Joy :) I'll probably bicycle there on Monday, and pick up Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess from Walmart on my way there.
04/25/07 21:09
So fricking bored right now. The cable's broken, so no sci-fi/comedy shows on TV. It's too cold and rainy outside and will be for the next several days so no going outside. I've got no library books to read, and it's too cold and rainy to bicycle there to get some. I've got no newspaper to read. All I have left is computer games. Unfortunately, I'm getting pissed at the amount of time it's taking me to level my character (The levels after 60 in World of Warcraft take wayyy too long. Have to complete like 15 quests before I level. 15! And one quest I'm on has a stupid stupid drop rate, and the monsters are scattered everywhere! Argh! I don't want to fill out tax forms!!! Frustrated...
04/25/07 11:15
I come home for summer vacation and... It's going to rain for the rest of the week. Figures.
04/23/07 01:00
One of my friends tried out checkmessenger.net and surprisingly, it actually does work. When I deleted him, it actually showed up! It was quite unsettling as I didn't expect that site to be actually able to get that information from Microsoft's servers. However, it seems that it only works if you delete the contact. If you leave the contact on your list but blocked, it doesn't show up. Put we didn't really test it. I'm only saying that because it didn't work until I deleted too, so it may only be a time lag. It's odd, as I expected Microsoft to be more careful about their clients' privacy.
04/19/07 20:32
Exams are not good for one's health. Especially really difficult exams worth 40-50% of one's grade. Got a chemistry one tomorrow morning and things are not looking good. Almost the entire exam is focused on organic chemistry stuff, which is really confusing. I had my calculus exam this morning. I went into it sleepy and not feeling well as I couldn't sleep the night before and I woke up early and what I ate for breakfast didn't agree with my stomach. Ugh. I've really fallen behind on blogging, but with summer vacation soon to start, I'll be free to write rubbish more often. Can't wait till I get my hands on the Twilight Princess game!
03/23/07 15:37
Reimaged my computer to deal with that Firefox problem. Everything's back to normal except that Windows Update keeps telling me to download and install this update over and over again for unknown reasons. Unfortunately, I just discovered that I had forgotten to export my iTunes library prior to the reimage so now I've lost all the ratings, play counts, and organization to my library. All the updated info I had painstakingly written in for some songs that didn't have titles is now also gone. :(
03/22/07 00:07
I updated my Firefox browser to the latest version. Result? Firefox can't connect to any website while IE can. Playing around with the FF connection settings didn't help. Oh, throw in a blue screen too. Now I'm looking at a reimage over the weekend. Joy.
03/20/07 14:33
I've been getting such shitty marks that it's sad. I think I might have become more stupid. I took CBC's Test the Nation test, and I got a much lower IQ than what I got from the Tickle results, though this is most likely because of the damn time limits and memory questions. I made several idiotic mistakes because I was forced to randomly guess from lack of time (and solved it 1 second later after I had submitted my answer). My results are here.
03/12/07 20:55
This semester has been going so poorly. To give you an estimate of how poorly, think about this. This semester has actually drained my will to argue about stuff online. How sad is that?
02/27/07 19:53
This is one of many things wrong with our society. Like, wtf? Click the link to see what I'm talking about if you haven't yet.
02/21/07 22:48
Screw university. My marks this semester are so crappy! And my chem lab TA hates my partner and I! Yes, hates!
02/03/07 03:21
So sad, I'm doing so poorly this semester. And I found out that I could've taken Physics 1BB3 instead of 1BA3. I can't figure out why I stupidly chose 1BA3... *sigh So anyways, it seems I've done poorly on both my chemistry and physics midterms, and my calculus midterm is on Monday (which I'm not confident about either). This semester just isn't going my way. Add in 2 messed up chemistry labs too, though thankfully I still managed to get a decent mark on the first one since that one wasn't that bad. I wonder if I'm burning out. I sure hope not. But it does seem that way. Everyone else is doing better this semester, but I'm doing a lot worse, which is a worrying trend.
01/15/07 10:03
Why the frig is classes cancelled?! It's not even slippery outside here! Now my classes will be even more packed to make up for missed materials AND I have to wait till next week for my calc tutorial now! At least I don't have a lab today.
01/09/07 21:38
Just came back from playing badminton. Fun. At the end, we did 2v3 with me on the 2 team, and we used 2 birdies at once. I got hit on the head with falling birdie once because I was looking at the other birdie and not paying attention to the other until it was too late, lol.
01/01/07 21:43
I was trying to wait till all my marks came out before I wrote this entry, but the physics department is being stupid and still hasn't released them yet so I'll just tell you how I did on the other 4 subjects. I got A+'s in chemistry (hopefully that means a good summer job), psychology, and calculus. Unfortunately, I only got an A in biology. How frustrating. If I had gone to UTSC, I would've still had a perfect average since their top mark is 85%+ rather than 90%+.
12/16/06 23:51
So sad, I made at least one mistake on the chemistry exam. The mistake was so obvious too *sigh And I should have realized something was seriously wrong when I couldn't reverse the equation around to get another answer. Oh well, hopefully I'll get part marks for it. I better do really well on this exam, because I was forced to study more for it than all my other exams combined.
12/09/06 14:33
So, I don't want to study, so I'll update this again. I wrote my psych exam this morning. It didn't go too well. I kept getting all these questions where I had it narrowed down to two choices but couldn't decide which was right. And now, I have a calculus exam tonight that I'm totally not ready for. I mean, I had to use Wikipedia to see how to use a log function if I had a=b^x.
12/01/06 17:57
Eww... My laptop is messing up. It sometimes freezes and won't show the Windows log in screen. I so do not want to do a reimage. So much effort...
11/22/06 17:05
My x group is now larger than my y group. How'd that happen? The membership growth rate of the x group is weird. Unlike all the other groups, it doesn't grow smoothly, every time in sudden jumps. I wonder why that is. Let's analyze Facebook group dynamics! I'm thinking that every time there was a jump, it was all because of one new member who invited a whole whack of people. Yes, I'm bored. No, I'm not saying what the x and y groups are. W/e.
11/11/06 03:58
Woohoo! Got a perfect on my chem test! Now if only all this other work would disappear and if only my psych group didn't get screwed over again with a crappy topic.
11/05/06 21:54
I hate my psych TA!!! An "excellent" project gave me a mark 5% below the average! WTF?!?! This is a negative consquence of having TA's do the marking. The marks one recieves can vary by quite a lot between the TAs.
11/01/06 23:56
I performed "a first" for my chem lab TA today. I set my J-cloth on fire without a single open flame in the whole chem lab room. So whoever's unlucky enough to choose the J-cloth I used today, now has to deal with one half the original size and with singed edges. I think I must have accidently touched my J-cloth to a hot plate as I doubt the glass flask I was using it to hold was that hot. But even if it did touch the hot plate, it would've only been for half a second. All I know is that as I was walking to put it back, I realized that the J-cloth felt quite hot in my hands. So I glanced down, I saw some orange light. So I decided to look again. At that time, I saw smoke being emitted from my J-cloth and started smelling the smoke. So I presented my lab TA with a burning J-cloth to deal with. What a fun lab! I doubt my chem lab TA will be forgetting me anytime soon!
10/25/06 22:08
I just want to say that university work sucks. And most of the time, division by zero results in too much work, as does anything involving infinities. Look at those zeros. Just mocking us with their ovalness. And the infinities, with their fancy Mobius loops... A couple of mathematical rearragements and cancellations, and look who's laughing now!!! DIE!!!
10/21/06 20:48
Well, just one more midterm left, the psych. I did reasonably well I guess on the chem midterms. Compared to my friends, I did pretty good. However, I did really bad on the physics and bio midterms. Just wrote bio yesterday, so I don't know the marks, but I'm not expecting anything good. *sigh I do hope I do well on next Friday's psych midterms.
10/14/06 21:06
Got screwed over on the chemistry mid-terms! Blargh! University sucks, but not going to complain. No point. It's always bad.
10/08/06 19:04
Had a really fun Saturday! Spent almost the whole day with my friends. First we went to have dim sum. Unfortunately, the menu was all in Chinese, so we made do with the food that was pushed around on the carts. Eventually, Ada and I managed to find the entry that corresponded with steamed shrimp dumplings and steamed beef with rice noodles. Yum. Then we wandered around the nearby mall, split up the prom pics, and went over to my house. Played table tennis, foosball, and GC. It was nice having a chance to catch back up with my friends.
10/06/06 13:48
!@#&#@*!@ So fricking mad!!! I was being a retard on the midterms and got 2 super easy questions wrong!!! I tripled checked the answers too! When someone asked me what the answer was today to the 2 questions, I immediately gave the right answer. Then immediately realized I put a different answer on the midterms! %$$%#^$^% There goes 14%! @#$!@#%#$
10/05/06 20:56
I got 39/40 on my first calculus test. Ordinary, I'd be estatic. BUT I made a totally stupid mistake. I put +/-5 as the answer for question number 3 when it should've only been +5. It was such a silly mistake! End result, other people get perfect, but I don't. Just want to strangle them! I just finished writing my physics midterm. I think I aced it, but I'm afraid of these stupid mistakes creeping up and costing me on it. I almost made a totally stupid error that would've been even larger than the calculus mistake. I was trying to find the distance an object had dropped after 3.2 seconds. I kept multiplying 9.8 by 3.2 and wondering why my answer was so off it didn't even appear as a choice on the test. So I sat there for 20 minutes and stared at it. 5 minutes before the test was to end, I finally realized that acceleration multiplied by time was not equal to distance! The retardedness is that I used acceleration multiplied by time to find velocity in previous questions. But, at least I got it in the end. Next week, I've got another calculus test, bio lab, chem lab, physics lab, and chemistry midterms. Oh, and a physics assignment, chemistry quiz, and lab pre-quizzes. Toss in a current psychology project and the biology and psychology midterms later on for a fun fun high stress mix.
09/30/06 00:15
Hm, haven't been here for a while. Not much to say though. Lots of work, midterms coming up... Yea. Guess I should go to sleep now. Not looking forward to doing laundry tomorrow.
09/20/06 21:33
Been so busy with school work I haven't had time to write anything for the past little while.
09/15/06 18:06
So much work to do this weekend...
09/12/06 21:46
It appears that I'm not the only one being swamped with a huge workload and missing sleep >=) Muwhahaha! I feel happier now. I hate 8:30 am starts. That means I have to get up at 7 am to get ready...
09/12/06 18:14
Bio skill labs and quiz will be killed off tomorrow morning. Bio intro quiz will be killed off tonight. That'll take care of that stuff... For a little while anyways. All my safety stuff is now complete. Still have to do 1B00 though >< Stupid orientation course. Still got physics crap...
09/11/06 17:02
Going crazy from all the labs and quizes... Still have to go through all the CDs that came with my textbooks. So many things to do...
09/10/06 10:06
Woke up a little while ago and went down to Commons Marketplace to find something to eat. I'm still hungry. Why? Because for some reason it's not open this early. Like really, do they expect all students to sleep in? 9:30 is so not early. That's like a normal time... Hungry!!! I wonder if it's open now...
09/08/06 22:32
Just watched a hypnotist show. Fricking amazing. Guy was Mike Mandel. Pure fun. Of course, kind of freaky that people can actually be hypnotized to such an extent... But fun nonetheless.
09/07/06 16:18
Hm, let's see... Classes suck. Oh, and my psych course consists of video lectures. I don't get to see my prof in class again for the rest of the semester. Spent over $200 dollars on physics supplies. Compare that to ~$30 for psych supplies >< Going to get the rest of my books tmr as there's a huge lineup now in the bookstore. My calc class time sucks. It's 5:30-6:20. My physics lab time sucks too. It ends on a Friday at 5:20. Friday's commencement night too! >< And on all days except Monday, I have classes at 8:30. At least in most of my classes I know at least one person.
09/03/06 19:55
Basically finished unpacking now. Been a fun day I guess. Stupid rain... The line up for lunch today was crazy because only one area was open. Just went for a hotdog instead. I hope there's a place I can get free National Post newspapers daily. I need my daily quota of news! Fixed Jacky's computer, got dual monitors working... Yep. I'm set. Got the nicest residence at McMaster :D Only a few things wrong with my room. The florescent lights on my side of the room look like a bunch of bees were caught inside and shredded up, the window latch on my side of the room is half snapped off, and construction workers had used my toilet before me >< But other than that, woohoo!!!
09/02/06 19:43
Packing, mixed emotions. *sigh Must get to residence room earlier than Jacky! And packing sucks! Keep worrying about forgeting something.
09/01/06 21:19
September already. How depressing. Will have to start packing tomorrow.
08/31/06 20:12
Today, I just discovered that my current backpack is actually a laptop backpack. Yea... Because I was pondering whether I should get one, then I remembered that my backpack had a padded section, but there seemed to be a strap that divided it in two, thus preventing a laptop from being inserted there. I decided to check it out, and sure enough, the strap came off. It was velcro. So now I don't have to spend any money buying a laptop backpack because I already have one! Oh, and I bought a laptop lock from Staples today for ~$40, ehich is $10 cheaper than Best Buy. I could go all the way to Tiger Direct, but that'd only be a $10 difference which would've been erased by the gas I'd use up getting there. And I don't want to search through computer stores at Pacific looking for one either. The lock's nice. Combination, so no key carrying for me :) Now my risk of having my laptop stolen is reduced should either my roommate or I accidently leave our residence room unlocked.
08/30/06 18:24
Had an optometrist appointment today. Good news. My eyesight hasn't gotten any worse. Too bad my eyesight is really crap right now >< It's really annoying when they go to check the surface of one's retina, because they use these eyedrops that make your pupil expand to it's maximum size and stay there for the next few hours. This means that for the next three hours, any bright areas, i.e. outside when it's sunny, is super bright, causing your vision to be even worse.
08/29/06 17:42
Heh. By the time I won my space race victory, every single civilization was involved in a war. See, I had just gotten out of a war with Alexander of Greece, in which I was winning so badly that he became a vassal state of mine, when I just finished the Apollo program. As I started building the space ship parts, the United States declared war on Russia and that countinued all the way through to the end of the game. One turn before my last space ship part, I declared war on the Ottoman Empire, which dragged Greece into the war since it was my vassal. The Ottoman Empire had all the rest of the civilizations not in a war as it's vassals, so they all got dragged in too. End result, 9 nuclear explosions occured in the cities and surround areas of my enemies. Then I won. Fun. I've started another game now, huge map again, but continents this time. By pure luck, my rival from last game is on the same continent as me (Ottomans), but this time, I've converted all the other civilizations on my continent to my religion instead of his >=) This time I'll be the one with all the vassal states! Oh, and he's got a 100 point lead on me again ><
08/28/06 12:11
Yay, I'm an officer at my university's Facebook Star Trek group! Snagged the title of Lieutenant Commander Data, my favourite character in all the Star Trek series. It's too bad Brent Spiner's gotten too old to play Data anymore (since Data isn't supposed to age). I'm sure there'll be a way to somehow rewrite Data back into Star Trek. After all, all his memories were recovered. Just need a body to put them in...
08/27/06 12:08
19 inch LCD monitor! Woo! Dual monitors! Now I can play games while still having a video chat and surf the internet or w/e! :D
08/26/06 19:55
Busy, busy day. In civ that is. Playing on a huge map is much more challenging than standard or any of the smaller sizes which I'm used to. Was actually behind in score, power, tech, everything, to an AI. Damn vassal states of his... I've caught up in tech and score now. Going to go for a space race victory. Nobody better invade me or I'll be screwed. So far I've had two wars with China, one with Mali, and one with France, all of which I won. Was about to crush France but they capitulated to my rival so I couldn't do anything. At least I got one city out of it. Going to crush Mehmed II! In the space race anyways. No way I could stand up to him in a war. Not with everyone hating me. That's a first for me. Not a single civ in the game has been pleased or higher with me for most of the game. Not a single friendly either. Plenty of annoyed, couple of furious, some cautious... Quite dangerous.
08/25/06 17:32
Got my student card today. I don't like the layout. It looks weird because the layout is vertical, but one doesn't wear it like a name badge. It's a swipe card. So now it's weird. Also, they put the validation sticker so that it's on the other side of where the magnetic strip is. So now we run the risk of the sticker being rubbed off when we go swipe the cards. Such poor design >=(
08/24/06 20:27
I'm at the second highest difficulty level on CoD2 and the Russian level I'm on is really pissing me off. It's taking me so long just to get to the next save points.
08/23/06 20:03
Sorted my iTunes into classical, english, jazz, and files with no singing that I know is boring music.
08/22/06 14:58
Song transfer complete! After getting rid of duplicate songs, there are now 1144 songs in my iTunes library. Took me two days, but I did it. As an added bonus, every time I put an english song on it, I looked up the song title and artist and put the info in. I'm thinking of sorting my songs into playlists. Depends how much time on my hands I have, and more importantly, how lazy I am.
08/21/06 19:02
Only about 12 more CDs to go before my music transfer is done!
08/20/06 14:03
Okay, so one of the things in the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal was that 15000 UN troops would be sent in. Now, I already told you that France decided to contribute only 200 troops to the force, basically nothing. Now we know their excuse. "French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie defended the decision. "You can't send in men telling them: Look what's going on but you don't have the right to defend yourself or to shoot," she told RTL radio." Direct from BBC News. Yea, you guys approved of the force having no right to self-defence, so you can't really complain about it. Another thing that's irking me. Countries that do not recognize Israel as a nation has pledged troops to the force. That's just stupid, but knowing the UN, they'll probably be accepted into the force. It's like asking the People's Republic of China (China) to be a peacekeeping force between the Republic of China (Taiwan) and, I don't know, some other nation. Just pure retardedness. A pretty good description of the UN.
08/20/06 11:53
Game installation complete! Nothing like a reboot to solve computer problems! Just need to add music on now, which I will try to finish by today.
08/19/06 18:08
I bicycled up to Pacific Mall today and bought a keyboard and optical mouse for my laptop. I got them for a total of ~$28 after taxes. I should've tried to negotiate for a lower price, but I was so surprised and relieved to find a USB keyboard and mouse for so cheap that I completely forgot. The keyboard is a Vstar one, and the mouse is a Logitech one. The mouse is smaller than normal, but not too small, so it's good. 2 buttons and a scroll wheel, optical, USB. The keyboard is also small as it's designed as a laptop keybaord replacement. I would've prefered a full size one, but I guess this will help me get used to my laptop's smaller keyboard. The keyboards good except for a few things. The keys are a bit stiff so I have to use more force to press down which is annoying and feel's weird, not to mention the fact that I'll get tired more using this because of the extra force required. Also, the shift key and backspace key is a bit to small for me, so I hit the keys beside them more often. Also, the damn function key has switched places with the ctrl key, so a couple of times I've accidently pushed the fn key instead of the ctrl key. Annoying. My installation of games would've been completed if it weren't for the fact that my Call of Duty 2 CD keeps running into errors during installation. Keeps telling me to check certain files are on the CD and if I can access them. So frustrating. So, just need that and my music on, and my setup will be complete. Stiff keys are really hard on my pinky fingers...
08/18/06 21:55
Microsoft Office is now installed and updated. The image is also completed. All I need to do now is get an optical mouse and keyboard for my laptop, install my and update my games, transfer music from a large stack of CDs onto my computer via iTunes which I still have to install, and then my laptop is ready. Oh, maybe an extra LCD display... Maybe.
08/17/06 15:51
My laptop arrived yesterday around 1400h via Purolator (something like that). I was so excited because I didn't expect it to arrive till tomorrow. So, I opened the big package and went wow, because they gave me some stuff I didn't expect. They were a CD case, a large bag (for carrying around the AC adapter I guess, and a small felt bag (for the earbuds). Also, they sent 5 CDs. One was the standard OS recovery CD, the other one was for drivers and diagnostics, the third was for a program called Sonic CinePlayer, the fourth was for a program called Roxio Creator MyDVD Combo LE, and the last one was a WordPerfect Productivity pack. The WordPerfect Productivity Pack was absolute crap. I didn't even bother installing that software after I reconfigured my laptop. It gives you WordPerfect 12, and 60 day trials of Quattro Pro and Presentations. As if I need another word processor when I've got Microsoft Word. So anyways, after reading the manuals that came along in the package (Yes, I always read the manual. Very useful things in there.), I booted up the laptop. As we all know, there was a lot of crap already installed on the machine. AOL and stuff like that. I was however surprised that they also put a lot of Google products on too. There was Google Desktop, and some other ones I don't remember. Okay, maybe it was just Google Desktop and one other Google product. I'm not sure. I was too surprised at seeing that stuff on my laptop to check exactly what they were other than the fact that Google desktop was on there. Anyways, I checked that the speakers, mic, keyboard, camera, etc. were working properly, then I shut down the laptop. Also checked the hardware to see that they did give me the right amount of RAM, right video card, etc. Can't have them ripping me off =P Next I booted the laptop off a BootIt NG CD that I had made the day before in anticipation of me obtaining the laptop. With BootIt NG, I wiped the partition of the hard drive that contained all the pre-installed crap, then proceeded to make 2 partitions from the newly acquired free space. With BootIt NG, I also discovered that my hard drive was only effectively around 70GB because Dell had created 2 partitions totalling about 10GB that contained Dell's image of my computer. Of course, I didn't delete those partitions because I feel that 70 GB is good enough for me. Besides, I wanted Dell's image saved on the off chance of me screwing up the laptop really badly (really small chance, but it's good to be prepared with Windows ;) ). The partition creation and reinstallation of Windows Media Centre took a while because somehow I messed up in the partition creation and boot edit sequence. I got it working in the end, though with a funny result. I now have 2 hard drive partitions that I can access in Windows, which was what I wanted. This way, after all the critical stuff is installed, I can create a small image of it so that if something goes wrong in the future, I've got a nice image availible. Hm, I should be more clear. One partition is really small, and will only contain the OS and critical programs like anti-virus, Microsoft Office, and stuff. That one will have an image. The other partition will take up the rest of the hard drive space and contain all my data and games and other non-essential applications. This way, if something goes wrong, I reimage the OS partition, and if the problem still exists or conflicts start to crop up from the sudden reimage, I can then back up all my important files onto USB keys, reformat the hard drive, then put a clean image on. Result: Laptop is functional again, and I still have all my data. So anyways, the funny result. It's that my two hard drive partitions are C drive (that's standard), and E drive, with no D hard drive. I doubt you've seen a computer with it's hard drives like that :D Oh, and my optical drive is now D drive. Funny, huh? As long as my laptop doesn't screw up because of this and everything runs smoothly, I'm happy with it like this. Makes it unique. So, in the end it took me 12 hours to get everything except Microsoft Office and the image done. I just need to pick up MS Office from my uncle, install and update it, and then take the image. Then all I have to do is reinstall my games and music and stuff. The musics going to take a good chunk of a day, if not more to finish. What annoyed me during my reconfiguration is that all of the necessary drivers and applications were not on the CD they were supposed to be on. In fact, they weren't on any of the CDs at all! Okay, so it was just one driver, but that driver was important. Without it, my webcam would not work. I had to search on Dell's website to get it. Oh, that reminds me, I also found a BIOS upgrade on the Dell website too. That's been installed. Wait, actually, 2 drivers, because under hardware profile in My Computer, the USB ports don't have their drivers either and I haven't found them yet. I'll search again after I finish this. The USB ports still work though, so it's not that big of a problem. Also, with the CD with the drivers and diagnostics stuff, it doesn't automatically install the ones you're missing. I had to search through it to find all the applications (like battery management) I needed. Well, that's Dell. Oh, I'll also be getting a new mouse and keyboard so I don't destroy the touchpad and keyboard from too much gaming =P The webcam on this is really neat. It's only 1.3 megapixels, and so the picture really sucks, but it can flip all the way around, so I can record my university lectures easily (assuming that the mic and webcam's quality is good enough). I don't really like myh laptop's screen though. I have to turn the brightness up to be able to distinguish light colours in the screen. I really like the brightness at minimum, but then the light colours kind of disappear so, for example, when I'm checking my Hotmail account, I can't see if a message is read or unread. Yea, that's basically all for today. Oh, tip for people using laptops. Maybe it's just me and I suck with touchpads, but disable the option where tapping the touchpad causes a left click. It's annoying when one goes to move the cursor and it ends up clicking first. Yea... That's all. (Haven't be able to check my wireless card because I don't have a wireless router >< It better be working.) Ah yes, I don't know if I mentioned this or not, I think I did. It's taken me 12 hours to reconfigure and update my laptop. Yep, that's really all for today.
08/16/06 11:44
Laptop still hasn't arrived yet... But I did get the invoice that lists what's in my order. Odd that it doesn't show an AC adapter though. I'll be very pissed if I actually had to order a spare AC adapter to get one.
Cleaned out my MSN Messenger contact list. It's now been reduced by 49 contacts. It looks so much better now.
Civ update: I got tired of waiting and declared war. My naval fleet has sunk any enemy forces within range and my land forces are rolling over enemy cities. In the air though, I'm getting crushed. I had 9 jet fighters covering my city area, but they still managed to destroy my aluminum, iron, banana, and sheep resources. They also got a town, and destroyed my fish and clam resources multiple times. So my city dropped 3 population points >< My spys are doing great too, I've put them onto of enemy uranium and oil resources and use them to keep sabotaging it. The odd thing is that I can't build anymore spies. It's switched back to explorers. Bug in the game, or is there a maximum number of spies I can have at one time? Oh, my mechanized infantry are so useless at air intercepts. Haven't intercepted a single plane yet.
There's been a bit of a fuss about lowering the age of criminal responsibility in the newspapers. My view is, reduce it. Reduce it to 10, and toughen up all the sentences for everyone. Capital punishment for repeat offenders! They've already been given a second chance. No reason to waste more resources on them.
So, Hezbollah needs to be disarmed. Who's going to do it? No one has agreed to yet, and all are determined to make it someone else's responsibility. Well, guess what? Israel was doing a fine job until you stopped them! Supply them with free weapons and they can finish the fricking job so you won't have to!
08/15/06 12:18
Laptop still hasn't arrived =(
Will probably go rollerblading soon, seeing as how nice and cool the weather is right now.
08/14/06 17:58
Please let my laptop arrive tomorrow. Please let my laptop arrive tomorrow. Waiting sucks.
Civ update: Nothing much has changed, other than the fact that my borders now completely surround the city I want to flip. It had better flip soon... I mean like, the city's 57% my nationality! I've got a fricking majority! Oh, and now I can probably flip a Malinese city soon, and my border is touching another city too, though I doubt I'll be able to flip that one. Too far from my city. My city's got a population of 28 or 29 now, though it's starving by one food per turn. If only I could get a great merchant... I bumbed up the population from before because I realized that if I replaced the lumbermills next to the rivers with watermills, I could get a higher population with state property. It'd make up for the loss in production by letting me have more specialists.
I wonder where I can buy those plastic containers that are used to hold milk bags. If I can find one, and the fridge in my residence room is large enough, I'll be able to make Ovaltine. Mmm... Chock full of instant deliciousness.
08/13/06 20:10
Civ update: I've built up my invasion force quite substantially. I currently have like 50 units in it at the moment. It consists of a mix of modern armor, mechanized infantry, gunships, and artillery. Still trying to culture flip that one city, though it should happen soon. My culture per turn in my city is over 1k, while the target city is only 210 something. It's currently 50% my nation, so the anarchy in that city should start soon =)
Sunday sucks, as I don't get any newspapers on Sundays. I'm deprived on a valuable experience.
Dell's website says that they've shipped my laptop, so it should arrive soon. Hopefully tomorrow? I just realized that my laptop won't have a floppy drive, so I'm going to have to burn BootIt NG onto a CD and boot from that. Now if only I could find a blank CD...
08/12/06 23:02
Civ update: As I mentioned before, I managed to sign a defensive pact with an AI. Well, today, I wrangled a permanent alliance out of the same AI! Take that Gary! Now my victory is assured. Thanks to that permanent alliance, I jumped from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to having all the techs in the game except future technology. When the alliance was initially formed, that AI was the highest ranked individually (two AI were higher due to there combined scores from their permanent alliance). Unfortunately, the AIs who had paired up completed the Internet wonder as soon as the ink had dried on my alliance deal so now they're on top in technology too. Anyways, I switched to democracy, took 80k in gold (the AI in my game are fricking rich! They've all got gold per turn in the hundreds! My AI partner has a 580+ gold per turn!) from my ally and rushed all the buildings I was missing. I've maxed out my city size at 26 now (no unhappiness or unhealthiness), so every single square in my city radius is being worked (the desert tile too thanks to a watermill-state property combo) with, I think, 5 enginner and 1 priest specialists. Barring a great merchant being generated, my city's not going to grow any further. I'm currently gearing up for war with the only AI not to have signed a permanent alliance. My naval fleet is ready as is my air force. I've got 3 jet fighters on intercept around my city, plus a stealth bomber just for the hell of it, and 2 stealth bombers and a jet fighter in one of my ally's cities (I'm using it to target the uranium resource in it's range and to provide extra cover for my invasion force in that area). I have 1 transport (galley upgrade), 2 destroyers, and 2 battleships guarding the only water entrance to my city, 2 submarines for pillaging of sea resources, and 2 attack fleets. Each fleet consists of a carrier, 3 jet fighters, 2 destroyers, and 3 battleships. I'm going to be using the two fleets to target 2 uranium resources and an aluminum resource. It should prevent the AI from nuking me, as I don't think they've built any ICBMs though they might once I start the war off with a nuclear attack on their capital. I would've prefered not having to using nukes, but my target has so many units in his capital that I can't even get the full list when I scroll over it. Will need to have a good supply of ICBMs to get past the SDI they have. Not a good sign, especially since that AI is also highest in the power graphs. I'm currently building up my invasion forces, but I can't start the war until I culture flip my target's remaining city on my area of the map (already did that to his other city :) ) because that's the other city that has so many units in it that I can't get a full list on scroll over. Not a good idea to start a war with that many enemy units within striking distance of my only city. It shouldn't take that long though, as my city's got a massive amount of culture and that city's already almost fully surrounded by my nation's border.
Yea... Did some more driving today. I hate cyclists who insist on riding on the road when I'm driving in the right most lane. So scared of accidently hitting the stupid cyclist. I know, you're supposed to bicycle on the road and not the sidewalk, but I don't like that rule. I would've made it so that you had to bicycle on the sidewalk if there was not bicycle lane, and if there was, then the bicycle lane. Fricking scary. I mean, what if the bicyclist accidently falls or swerves somehow? Can't stop in time...
Yep, Israel is definitly running out of resources to support their war, what with their expensive weaponry. After all, they just agreed to a ceasefire where the UN increases the size of their useless Lebanon peacekeeping force, the UN peacekeeping force is NOT authorized to use force against Hezbollah (What a joke. Hezbollah is going to walk all over the UN again.), Hezbollah has still not been destroyed, the deal does not require the return of the kidnapped soldiers, and the deal does not require the disarmanent of Hezbollah. The return of the kidnapped soldiers and the disarmanent of Hezbollah is to be negotiated later
08/11/06 18:19
You know, my support for the federal Liberals wouldn't have had dropped that much if they had issued a release saying that they didn't support the actions of the Liberal MP who marched in that anti-Israel rally I mentioned previously, but so far, nothing. No press release, nothing. So screw them.
Hezbollah is launching rockets from the second floor of your apartment building. Hmm... Maybe it's an indication that you shouldn't stay there as if I were in charge, I'd bomb the crap out of your building. Lucky for you, Israel risks 30 of its troops lives and sends in a commando team to take out just the room after it's been identified. Innocent civilian casualties, pft. So not Israel's fault. Well, w/e.
It's another potpourri post at thedailywtf.com, and I just laughed. Seriously, it's funny.
I attended Welcome Day at McMaster today. It was okay. Attended presentations, got some free stuff (including a frisbee! I was early so I managed to snatch one before they were all gone!), explored the campus and some of it's buildings. The science library's got that nice smell libraries get when they've got lots of old books crowded together into narror spaces. Mmm... Such a nice smell. Oh, and I saw the outside the nuclear reactor building. I hope no one messes with the controls and causes a meltdown while I'm at McMaster XD Les Prince Hall still isn't fully finished yet, as they still have some interior stuff to do. They better hurry, as they've only got about half a month left before I move in. I found out that it'll only cost me around $10 to get back to Toronto from Hamiliton by GO transit. Isn't that cool? It's $8 dollar something for a ticket to Union Station, then I have to pay for a TTC ticket back to my area. Oh, wait, it might be a bit more, if that $8 doesn't include taxes.
08/10/06 21:24
Played a bit of civ today. I finally managed to sign a defensive pact with an AI. That's a good sign, as the next step will be permanent alliance, and then... War! Heh. It's all thanks to me choosing that AI's favourite civics.
Went to an orientation session for McMaster today. It was okay. Most of it was boring, but there were some funny stories. Starting a fire with a breadmaker in one's room on the second day. Lol. Also ate lots of free cookies. Yum, chocolate cookies. I also managed to meet a couple of new people. I've already forgotten their names, and they're not in my program, nor are they in my residence, but that's okay. It's to be expected, what with my poor memory for names and such. I do remember they're going to be in Widden though. One is in engineering, another some social science/humanities program, and the other is history/political science. The history/political science guy is interesting. He claims to be related to 3 cast members of the original Star Trek series, specifically Spock, Scotty, and I think, Kirk. His last names Nemoy. Apparently immigration screwed their last name up. Cool eh?
I now no longer like the federal Liberals. Actually, it started yesterday. Marching in a rally for Lebanon with Hezbollah flags present... Pft.
Well, got to go sleep now, as I need to wake up early tomorrow morning to get to McMaster's Welcome Day.
08/09/06 13:29
I passed my driving test! Woo! Now I'm fully licensed for all G class vehicles! Yes!
United Human Rights Council... Forget it. It's not even worth it anymore. So tired of typing out the damn stupidity of the UN.
Damn right that negotiations should be cancelled with the Caledonia natives. They're still unlawfully occupying the disputed land.
08/08/06 21:39
Nothing much happened today. Played some civ. Doing pretty well, although I was surprised that two of the AI formed a permanent alliance. It's going to be bad if the remaining two form one with each other, as that means that I'd have to destroy the AI with no backup. Shouldn't have put it on marathon. Research taking so long.
Driving test tomorrow. Nervous!
Lol, Hezbollah attacks UN peacekeepers' Lebanon headquarters in Henniye, and not a peep from the media. Had to dig around to find that story. On the second last page. And the article only mentioned it briefly. Nice. Starting to notice how one-sided media coverage is? Lucky that only 3 UN personnel were injured as they evacuated it after the accidental Israeli strike on an UN outpost previously. Why did the injured have to be Chinese though? It would've been best if they were French.
08/07/06 19:12
With my driving test coming up so soon, I decided to get a little practice in. Everything went smoothly... Until I tried to parallel park. I discovered that I suck at parallel parking. I tried practicing it, but to no avail. So I gave up and went back home. I'll be hoping that I won't be asked to parallel park on my driving test.
Went bowling today, with the same people I went to play billiards with yesterday. It was fun. We managed to get 3.8 games in one and a half hours, so we saved like $8. The last two games (one full game and 0.8 of a game) went great. I scored 94 on the first of the last two, and 79 on the 0.8 one. Came in first for those ones. The first two though... Were total crap. Like under 40 crap. For some reason, this time around when I bowled, the ball curved right instead of left, but occasionally it would curve left. Haven't figured out what was different this time around. Oh well. I got one or two strikes I think, and a couple of spares. Got some zeros too XD
Ouch. Another record high oil price. That's going to hurt.
When I get my new laptop, I'm going to go on a Civilization IV spree. CoD2 spree comes after I obtain an optical mouse and separate keyboard for the laptop. Maybe even a separate LCD display =) Ooohhh, can't wait to get my hands on it! Too bad I'll have to first go through a reformat with it to get rid of all the crap that'll be bundled with it initially.
08/06/06 18:45
I didn't go rollerblading or bicycling. Instead I went to play billiards and watch a movie with my brother, cousin, and one of her friends. We watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby. It was hilarious, and I say a good movie despite some huge flaws in logic in the plot. But that's to be expected in a movie, especially a comedy.
I was told that on the highway test, one takes the highway out, then local streets back. The scary part, they test you again on things like three-point turns and stuff like that. That's what I was afraid of ><
08/06/06 12:52
I didn't get a big discount on my laptop order unfortunately. Or I did. It depends on how you look at it. Got $20 off the price. Not much, but if you add it together with Dell's weekend deal, it's about 5% off. Of course, everyone who ordered got the weekend deal so... I also got a free warranty upgrade, $99 value. If you add together the weekend discount, the $20 off, and the warranty upgrade, it's 10% off. Not bad. Also got some sort of program that teaches you how to use a computer, or something like that. Useless for me, but good for my parents I guess. So I can either look at it as I got 10% off, or I got a $20 discount. The 10% sounds better, so I'll be repressing the $20 thought =P
Such nice weather today. I do believe I'll go out for a bicycle ride. Or go rollerblading. One of them.
08/05/06 18:24
I think all of my nervousness about my driving test on Wednesday is giving me nosebleeds (had two today). I do hope I pass. I'm pretty confident on the highway when it's not rush hour, so I think I'll do fine on that part. The thing I'm worried about is screwing off the highway. The left-turns, that sort of stuff. Passed the test for that stuff but I'm more worried about that material than the actual exam material, how funny.
I changed my really really long ethernet cable from a crossover to a straight, so now it can connect directly to the modem. Decieded against a router. It would've enabled me to secretly play games online, but too much of a hassle. That and the $50 price tag. My laptop's going to have a built in camera and mic, so hopefully I'll be able to record lecture videos in university. Too bad it's not able to swivel around, as if it works, I'd have to turn the whole laptop around to be able to record the video of the professors' teaching.
08/04/06 21:37
Did my teeth cleaning today. It didn't hurt as much as last time. All the flossing and stuff paid off =D
Okay, actually ordering laptop now. The XPS M1210 is my choice thanks to the free video card upgrade and weekend discount dropping the subtotal price to $1619 after my choices.
The stupidity of some people amaze me. No, I'm not talking any stupid political opinions a lot of people have. Getting bored of venting about them as I can't really do anything to change those views at the moment. Actually, I should've said the stupidity of one particular person amazes me. Not going to say a name, but some people will know who it is. Let's just say his name is Al Smith. If you've had the bad luck of interacting with him regularly during his high school career, I'm sure you can figure out who Al Smith is. This person has managed to get almost everyone in his grade in his (former I should now say since he just graduated) high school to have a negative opinion of him. I think it's more difficult than normal for me to form a negative opinion of people as I kind of live in a "bubble" and am oblivious to many things if it's a social thing according to my friends. But he's managed to annoy me too. It's a gift he has. Anyways, recently, he's sent out a series of emails demanding that people give him their MSN Messenger contact lists and threatens to reveal "dirt" about us if we don't. No one, or at least I'm pretty sure no one, did. So he carries out his threat against one person as an "example." The "dirt" consisted of an image of a, perhaps real though I doubt it, conversation insinuating that the person is gay. It was laughable as even I, with my crappy photoediting skills, could create that image with MS Paint. The target was also a well-liked person. I really didn't see the point of the emails as it just created more negative feelings towards him by everyone. At least the emails were entertaining for me to read.
08/03/06 12:26
Well, it seems that my computer's been fixed. Still don't know what the problem was. I thought it might have had to do with a malfunctioning peice of hardware, so I took out everything I could, and started the computer up. It worked fine, so I started putting the stuff I took out back in one by one. Each time everything went fine, so now my computer's exactly the way it was before since last reformat (but updated) and I still have no clue what went wrong. Maybe it overheated that day? O_o Well, now I have to reinstall my games and stuff... My computer was toying with me. My MSN Messenger looks all weird now because it's a different shape and the contact list doesn't have the three groups it used to have for some reason, online, mobile, and offline. Also, the background's all funny. And all my display pictures are gone ='( *sigh At least I've got lots of free space on my hard drive now.
08/02/06 23:30
After erasing hard drive (several times) the same error still happens! I tried installing Windows again off my CD, but it still shuts down in the middle of boot up! Luckily I was able to restore the OS through a program I use for partition work, BootIt NG. Very useful. So I guess I'll have struggle through with this problem until I manage to get it fixed. Have to reupdate Windows from my last reformat where I made the image, no games installed... *grumble Also lost all my MSN Messenger display pictures, my favourite one is completely gone as I forgot to back that up. ='( Also lost all of my bookmarks, live and static. ><
08/01/06 18:24
Computer's on the fritz. As always, it started after my brother used the computer today. When he logged off, I tried to log in. It kept saying password incorrect, then my computer just shut down. I couldn't get to the log in screen after that, as the computer would just suddenly shut down. After many repeats of this, I just reimaged my OS drive with one I had made after my last reformat. The same thing happened, but after a couple of times, I got a blue screen saying STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error} The Windows Logon Process System terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x000004202 (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down. So I tried rebooting a couple times, the computer just shut down without the blue screen. I finally managed to log in, and downloaded some updates as this image was a really old one. I required a restart, and I did restart it... But same problem, sudden shut down during boot up. I have no clue wtf is going on, so I'll be doing a complete reformat of the computer as soon as I transfer some important files onto my iPod Shuffle. So pissed right now.
07/31/06 13:48
Woo, back from mosquito central (cottage). 3 days of no computer games and no internet access. No books either. Such horribleness. Got bitten by lots of mosquitoes. At the cottage I basically went canoeing, ate lots of BBQ food, and played nuclear Risk. Not much fishing this time as the dock was getting replaced and I knew all the noise would scare all the fish away anyways. Besides, then I�d miss all the food. I fail to see how people can canoe for such long distances and times. My shoulders are aching from all the paddling. At least I didn�t tip the canoe. There were several times that felt like the canoe was going to tip because whenever water skiers pass by, especially when they make a turn, pretty big waves are created. Or at least they seem big when you�re sitting on an easily tipped canoe. I played two very long nuclear Risk games with my brother and uncles. I won the first one, and came in second the last game. It was quite fun, what with the huge armies and the destruction of said huge armies with the use of a single card. I won the first one thanks to my opponents having no cards that would decimate my huge army on my last turn and thanks to the fact that I had lots of reinforcement cards. 40+ armies on a single country� Mmm� I would�ve won the second one too if it hadn�t been for the fact that my uncle had a crucial time stop card that allowed him to have an additional turn, and thus, double the reinforcements. Fun times.
Got the new residence building, Les Prince Hall, yay. I will be the first to use the beds, desks, drawers, toilets, etc. in my room. All nice and clean =) Probably a nice view too since my room number is 500 something as that probably means fifth floor.
Will be attempting to win a deity level Civilization IV game without cheating.
New monthly unique views record. 3 off for total views.
So, let�s talk about the conflict in the Israel area. I�d like to point out to those people wringing their hands over the civilian casualties that the Allies during WWII firebombed many German cities. By firebombed I mean completely destroyed. And note that the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Nobody went, let�s call a ceasefire, too many civilian casualties. Okay, so the WWII casualties were deliberate. But mistakes happen in war operations. Look at the campaign by NATO in Kosovo. The Chinese embassy was bombed. Don�t forget all the friendly-fire incidents that have happened. You can�t have everything go perfectly. Nothing this complicated ever does, and we have to accept them and push on. And another thing, what is with all these countries, like France pushing for an immediate ceasefire? I wonder how France would react if Belgium continuously launched rockets and sent suicide bombers into their cities after the opposing side has broken numerous peace agreements? A ceasefire now would only result in a victory for Hezbollah. Also, what were UN peacekeepers doing at their posts if Hezbollah was using them as shields? They should�ve gotten out of there immediately so that Israel could operate without worrying about UN personnel.
07/27/06 13:34
I'll leaving for the cottage tomorrow, so there won't be any posts on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Well, maybe Sunday, depends on when I get back. 3 days of peace and quiet. And boredom. No computers, no TV, no books (I don't want to risk accidently dropping my library books into the river). Going to be a lot of fishing... And I'm still sick today. So it looks like I'll be spending my time at the cottage sick AGAIN. *sigh I hope I catch more fish at least.
Ah, the UN. Let's take another look at that UN post destroyed incident. According to an email by one of the UN observers killed, Hezbollah had been deliberatly operating near the UN post in order to use it as a shield. Basically the same idea as using civilian centres as bases. Operate in those areas so that if Israel does target them, their operations maybe destroyed, but at least get good propaganda out of it. The UN of course have denied that Hezbollah had been operating in that particular UN post's area even though the email suggests otherwise. Let's look at what the UN said. "To our knowledge, unlike in the vicinity of some of our other patrol bases, Hezbollah firing was not taking place within the immediate vicinity of the patrol base." Lol. So even if we were to believe what the UN said is true, they just flat out admitted that Hezbollah IS using their posts as shields. Just not this one. Lol. Congrats to the UN for helping Hezbollah in their war efforts.
You know those Tetra Pak's that the LCBO is now using instead of wine bottles for environmental reasons. Well, it turns out that switching to Tetra Pak's may actually actually harm the environment even more. So the result, we get ugly packaging (I'd rather recieve wine in a bottle than a Tetra Pak. Looks nicer.) and the environment is worse off. Good job LCBO. Of course, I could be wrong about the wine bottle being more environmentally friendly, but still, the end result is that Tetra Pak's are less environmentally friendly than we've been lead to believe. Such liars.
Lol, those fat Americans. Now they can't fit into MRI machines. I think that if your body fat is so dense that X-rays and ultrasounds can't penetrate enough to scan you, you should do something about your weight. Like maybe, eating less and exercising more?
07/26/06 20:15
I can't believe they named the new McMaster residence Les Prince Hall. To me, it sounds as if someone plastered Les in there to make is sound French and "fancy." Like, ew. I still want to live there though, as it is a new residence. Oh, got a double with washroom too. No nasty public place every night and morning.
thedailywtf.com had a new entry today, featuring part of university registration program. It's my kind of coding, with lots and lots and lots of else if's, bracketed by an if and else, of course. I'm estimating at least 150 of them in that little code section that they posted. Having a fun little arguement with Gary at the moment as a result of this. Stubborness will prevail, muwhahaha.
Had a pig out on CoD2 today. After getting creamed in mulitplayer, in which I managed to kill Gary once (plus one if it weren't for lag, plus another if the round hadn't suddenly ended) while he killed me twice (one of which was the lag one. The round end one I was shooting him from behind), I went into single player. Finished the Russian campaign and started the British one. I keep getting killed when I rush into a mass of enemy troops as I have to reload after a couple of kills. Unfortunately, I have to do that as the lag won't let me snipe properly. You know what annoys me in CoD2? The game doesn't beep or anything, or put the objectives/instructions right in the middle of the screen when they're updated. I keep missing commands because I don't hear them. Busy concentrating on aiming. So when the commander yells out destroy the bunker entrances, I'm still looking for oil barrels to destroy and wondering where they are. Or maybe destroy that machine gun position on the left and I run off to the right. Meh.
Still sick, ugh.
New Iraq gov't refuses to condemn Hezbollah. Hmpf. Figures. This is why the US should just secure the oil and let the rest of the country sort itself out. Could see low tech weapons to them to recoup some of the costs of the equipment used up.
Let's look at this article here, "The UN and Israel." Large picture on top, Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah shaking hands with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, June 20, 2000. Oh dear, not a good start, but maybe the UN had just brokered a new peace deal. It obviously hasn't worked, but they tried I guess. Let's see what the "new" UN Human Rights Council has done so far. Hm, indefinite continuation of a group to examine only Israeli violations. And that's the only group granted indefinite continuation. That's bad. Let's see what else. Rentention of Jean Ziegler, co-founder of Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize. Won it in 2002. Hey, that's good isn't it? A peace prize. Oh, wait, French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy also won it, also in 2002 I think. So, that's bad too. It's only resolution that named a specific country was directed at Israeli, ordering all Israeli violations to be written on agenda at all fuure sessions. That's bad too. Other bad points too. And this just in the inaugural session. Woo! Go UN Human Rights Council! Oh, what did Canada do on the first two points I mentioned? It approved along with all the other countries in the Western group. And people complain about the influence of Jews... Not sure how Canada voted in the other point. The UN is so impartial and useful huh?
07/25/06 21:04
What a waste of a day. I've been out of the house practically all day. Went swimming in the morning, returned for lunch, then spent 5 hours in a dental office with my family. We were getting our teeth cleaned. Basically spent 1 hour getting it cleaned, and 4 hours waiting around reading Reader's Digest and Canadian Family, and watching CNN. Of that hour, it was 45 minutes of pain while they cleaned. My gums are pretty sensitive as I don't floss well enough >< Unfortunately, I have to return again next week for another round of cleaning. Next time being a "deep" clean, as in clean under my gums. Sounds quite painful. At least my teeth are looking quite good at the moment. Oh, then went out to eat dinner, hence me getting back only now. Looking forward to some civ with Gary tomorrow.
Anyways, a UN observation post was destroyed earlier by an Israeli bomb. Isn't it a bit odd that the UN, without any investigation whatsoever, would immediately accuse Israel of deliberately targeting the UN position? But hey, the UN's been pretty good at condemning Israel anyways. All of Israel's strikes are 100% accurate. No room for error. Right... Of course, there's a funny side to this too. Perhaps it was Israel's comment on what it thinks of the UN, especially the UN peacekeeping force that's been in that area for decades =P
Hee hee, blackouts in California and New York. Some superpower. At least we know how to keep the electricity flowing. Sure, we're nearing the limit too, but we haven't crossed it yet. Bring on the nuclear power. What we need to do is invest more in solar power because if we can get to work economically, then hydrogen economy, here we come. Once that happens, we can leave the Middle East to self-destruct on their own as we wouldn't need their oil for energy anymore. Oh shoot. We'll still need oil for plastics. Okay, so after we get our hydrogen economy and plastic replacement up we can let the Middle East destroy themselves. Did my chemistry summative on this you know. You know, now is either the best time or the worst time to be born so far. This is because we'll either solve our oil problems and enter a golden age, or implode under a global depression that we don't ever get out of.
If there are aliens out there watching us and they have really really really long life spans, I'll bet they're watching us for entertainment. What will the human race stumble over now? Oh, they came so close to solving their food problem. Too bad the guy got killed in a car accident. Awww, they almost had a viable fusion generator going. That little miscalculation just screwed over their fusion research for the next decade. You get the idea. Probably even betting on when we self-destruct and how.
07/24/06 21:33
Well, another day gone. Spent like 2.5 hours playing billiards with my cousin and brother. It was fun, even though I'm not that good at it. You know, experience from online billiards does help with the collision angles, assuming you hit the ball straight.
Woke up with a sore throat today. Too many late nights in a row. I hope I get better in time for the cottage trip.
07/23/06 21:49
I don't really like Sundays. No newspaper. At least I finished the book I've been reading. Started a new one too. I'll add it to the book list if it's good.
Wore contacts today, and it sucks. I can't go out and rollerblade or anything with them on because I'm afraid they might fall out and I'll lose them, or they'll suddenly shift position and cause me great pain and I can't fix it outside. They're also a pain in the neck to put on and get off.
I hate it when it's rainy. I hope it won't be rainy when I go to the cottage on the weekend.
Israel announced that it would accept a European peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon (note that he didn't say UN, because there's been a UN one since 1978 and it's obvious that it's ineffectual). I'm pretty sure I know the reason for this. The hi-tech weapons Israel is using is expensive. It's kind of like destroying a straw hut with a laser-guided bomb. The weapon used costs more to build than the target, which really sucks for the attacker.
07/22/06 13:35
Well, I've just calculated my final mark in my economics course. It's 93.5%, which means that I won't be getting a larger entrance scholarship >< This makes my top 6 (not really top six since English isn't on of my top 6 marks) average to be 89.5% 0.5% off. How frustrating. Average of all my courses is 87.125%. So, breakdown of economics mark. 95% in term marks (homework assignments) being worth 70% of final mark. 90% on exam, worth 30% of final mark. Well, did better on exam than expected, especially what with that final essay being only a paragraph. If only my English mark had remained at an 87% instead of dropping to an 83%...
Civ update: Gary's captured 2 cities, kept one, razed one. My blockade's been decimated. I've only got 4 frigates around their continent now thanks to their damn ironclads. On the plus side, I can build destroyers now, so that blockade will be reestablished soon. We've got 3 oil deposits on our continent, so that's good. Greedy Mali canceled the coal deal and demanded a 140% increase in price for the coal. I traded a clam instead. Big mistake as now my capital is starving from unhealthiness. Oh well. Silly Gary left the domination vic on, so now we have to watch Mali. Make sure they don't get a domination vic since everytime we raze, they move in with a settler. Oh, and Mali now has 3 coal, so Gary can get one off them if he wants to.
07/21/06 15:03
Hm. What a boring day. Nothing new to talk about.
Civ update: My naval blockade has really hurt the Aztecs research rate. We actually have like 4 techs that they don't. Unfortunately, just as I was about to successfully cut off all the coastal water tiles for every one of their cities, they got ironclads. So now there's a huge spot where I've got no frigates >< Just when things were going well too... Oh, they tried to cut a peace deal with us too. Too bad they demanded a tech from us in the deal, so we rejected it. Still haven't captured a single city yet. Oh, ane we've discovered we've got no coal on our continent. It seems that the Malinese have all the critical resources. We better have lots of oil to make up for it... At least I managed to buy a coal off of Mansa for 10 gpt. He only had two though, so Gary's screwed in terms of coal.
07/20/06 16:12
Today has not been a good day for my digestive system. Sure, I got to eat dim sum, and that was great. Too bad I've swallowed like an entire glass of chlorinated pool water. Oh, and then I ate a steamed bun while reading the newspaper. The steam bun wasn't bad. Eating half the paper attached to the bottom of the bun was.
Can swim 4 lengths now. Yay.
I think I'm starting to feel withdrawal from too little social interaction.
Been reading SO much lately. Of course, they're just continuation of series so no updates for book list yet.
07/19/06 19:11
Woohoo! Just finished writing my economics exam. Sure, two of my three essays were crap, one essay being a single paragraph and missing half the points, but it's over and I'll be getting the credit and that's what counts. My chances of a 97% in this course are now near zero thanks to my last two essays, but w/e. Feeling elated now. Jumping around screaming elated. The window's open though, so I won't be jumping around screaming. Predicting a final mark of about 87%.
Did another CoD2 mission again, Russian campaign still. It wasn't hard, though the tank part took me a couple of tries before I realized that I needed to shoot all the infantry from the window before going outside to destroy the tank. Actually, that was only because I lose my orientation too easily in the smoke from smoke grenades or else I would've got it on the second try. Oh well, saved two smoke grenades. That was my first plan. Two smoke grenades then kill the tank. Unfortunately, I kept getting lost/stuck in the smoke and got killed every time trying to get away from the tank ><
Mmm... Dinner time. That two hour exam has made me hungry. Banging away at the keyboard uses a lot of energy =P
Oh right, Gary gave me a RSS subscriber counter. It's right underneath the RSS feed url. Of course, if you made your own feed of this blog, it's not there. That was a useless explanation, as anyone who knows how to create one probably already knows that. Meh.
07/19/06 14:17
7 subscribers... Wow. That means 4 people other than Gary and I read this blog. And this increase is recent too, as the last time Gary checked, it was just me and him who used the RSS feed of this blog. Record high subscribers for Gary at this moment too.
Hooray for Harper! I think I've been turned into a Conservative supporter now. Well, federally at least. I still like the provincial Liberals. I must say I'm quite happy with his stance on the current crisis in the Middle East. It's a refreshing change from all our previous ones. Of course, count on the NDP to have the opposite statement. The Liberals haven't stated their position yet. If they have, I haven't read about it yet. I think it's because they haven't chosen their leader yet. *sigh It seems to me that the Conservatives are going through their term without any credible opposition. It'll be interesting to see who gets to lead the federal Liberal party.
Silly Bush, trying to block stem cell research...
Economics exam in a few hours... Emmm.... Nervous, sort of. After 3 more assignments marked, I'm now pulling a 96 point something. 6 more assignments to mark.
Oh, lol. You know all those calls for a peacekeeping force in Lebanon lately? Well, apparently, there's been a UN peacekeeping force there since 1978. It seems peacekeeping hasn't quite worked in Lebanon. Isn't that funny? I guess our politicians should conduct more research into the issue before opening their mouths again. Lol.
07/18/06 20:35
So, Gary and I are at war with the Aztecs. Since the AI gets research bonuses against us, we're using grenadiers vs. riflemen. But the AI has so many riflemen that all of our invasions have been repelled without us capturing a single city. The AI could basically steamroll us if it landed an invasion force onto our continent. But this being the AI, teh Aztecs are too stupid to build up a naval fleet and make a mad dash towards us. Meanwhile, I've got my massive naval fleet blockading the Aztecs, and hopefully, starving their coastal cities. If we could just raze one Aztec city, this whole war would be worthwhile. Oh, and in case you're wondering, they declared war on us, and went on to capture all of our cities on their continent. So they gained a city plus razed one of ours, and we've... Done nothing. Go us. I'm kind of hoping the Malinese Empire will declare war against the Aztecs and weaken each other while Gary and I try to catch up.
So far at a 95% after 5 assignments marked. Still plenty more assignments not marked yet, so hopefully that my economics mark will increase much more.
Well, back to the Middle East. I'm glad the Conservatives are supporting Israel. Somehow I get the feeling that the Liberals would've just remained neutral. The Akhras family, one of the Canadian victims, blame Israel and called Hezbollah their protectors. Sure. "Protected" them by starting the whole conflict in Lebanon by kidnapping and killing the Israeli soldiers. "Protected" them by delibrately and continuously launching rockets at civilians.
07/17/06 23:59
Yes! One minute before midnight! That means this post counts as today's post and so I haven't missed posting today! Woohoo!
Can swim up to 3 lengths nonstop now =)
Got some more books from the library today, countinuation of series. That's good, so I can wrap them up before heading off to residence.
Civ update: Gary and I scrapped the previous civ game as it was obvious we were going to lose. We were stuck with redcoats while the enemy had marines (except for Eygpt, we were in the process of dismantling her civilization), but we wouldn't have had been able to go after the other two AIs after. This was because for some reason, we had NO oil on our continent. Eygpt had one, but Japan grabbed it. So we were stuck with no oil. Which meant we were screwed, so we just started a new game. Same settings, except this time, only 2 AI and the only victory conditions allowed were conquest and domination. We've got a pretty good continent this time around, unless we get hit by no coal or oil or something like that. We don't have stone, but that's okay I guess since I'm not going for wonders this time around. We got circumnavigation of world first this time, so that means we're not that far behind the AIs. Our enemies are the Malinese and the Aztecs. I'm the Incans this time and Gary's Greek. We're almost filled in terms of our continent, so we can start prepping for war as soon as we get astronomy. As always, I'm always chronically short of worker units. Maybe it's my laziness seeping into the game, lol.
The dailywtf.com is providing me with laughs right on schedule. 600 integer parameters, and not in an array either. Variable names go from "a" to "zz". That's funny, because even I would get tired of having to type all that in and put it into an array. Me. Use an array. Lol.
07/16/06 16:46
Been going through the Russian campaign in CoD2 single player. It's quite hard to aim when one keeps lagging you know? I was stuck for a long time on the railway station part where you have to disable a tank then 3 machine gun nests. It was because I got cornered into a building by like 12 enemy soldiers with only one AI ally with me and I had to get out to blow up a tank. Unfortunately for me, there was only one exit, through 12 enemy soldiers... I made it by shooting a couple, throwing a frag to distract them, then run like hell. Good thing their accuracy stinks or I would've never made it. But of course, there wasn't a save point immediately after that. No... I had to go blow up the tank first for that. Only 20 enemy soldiers hiding behind barricades with a machine gun nest plus a tank to get to... Good thing I had 4 smoke grenades. The frags were completely useless in that situation. Anyways, I've passed it. The next mission better not be much harder or I'll be quite frustrated. The lag really kills your aim.
Stupid UN, calling for ceasation of Israeli military activity. I say they shouldn't stop until the soldiers are returned to them and after Hamas and Hezbollah is completely crushed to reduce future aggressions.
07/16/06 14:03
Only the exam left now before I finish my economics course. Yay. It sucks that I don't know many people who took economics and mos of the ones I do know won't be availible to help with my exam. *sigh
I've found a new website to give me doses of laughter. It's http://thedailywtf.com Isn't it weird how there's no www.? Oh well, w/e. It's quite funny. Most of it is, hell, I think all of it is, programming stuff, but I understand most of what's so funny, so it's good. And it is hilarious. It's nice to know that there are programmers out there who program like me (Stupidly, so that other people get frustrated trying to understand/debug the code. It's nice when you're the only one who understands the code, even if that's because the code is so convoluted.) =)
I wonder how many people actually read my blog? Like read read it, and read the ones they missed too. Not much I don't think. If only there was a way for me to track time spent on this page... Geocities Statistics isn't that great...
07/15/06 22:49
Can swim 2.5 lengths now. Yay. That's a 2 length increase from the beginning of this summer.
Navigation bars go on the left Gary. Having them on the right is just wrong. =P
All my reading for economics is now done. Only two assignments and one exam left and then I'm done my economics course. =)
07/15/06 14:42
Bicycled down to Lake Ontario today. Fun. I especially liked the part after the sidewalk ran out and then you have to go down this really steep road down to the lake. That was fun, didn't need to pedal at all. I think that if I hadn't used my brakes most of the way down, I couldn've gone as fast as the cars. Maybe faster. It was tiring though, especially going back up that steep section. I had to walk my bike up the whole way and had to stop several times to rest. Still worth it though. I think I'll go back down there again sometime this summer.
Ah, the new Middle East crisis. Let's comment on some of the comments. The Lebanese envoy to the UN said called for an immediate ceasefire and said that without intervention, Israel's "barbaric aggression" would adversely affect Lebanese civilians. Well, my response is that all the years of Lebanon's barbaric aggression has already adversely affected Israeli civilians. And you started this in the first place with your kidnapping, and now you're firing tons of rockets into Israel, and not at military targets either. Oh no, it's always been directed at the towns. And your rocket's aren't even carefully aimed at bridges, or military buildings. Nope, just fire them into the towns and cities and hope it kills something. Killed a bunch of Israeli civilians? Good aiming. Who's harming civilians now huh? Here's another one, "The Israelis are destroying everything - we don't know why." I'll tell you why, because of your country's countinual aggression towards Israel, even after unilateral withdrawal from all of your territory. Of course, Lebanon still claims a strip of land that hasn't been returned to them, but, funnily enough, that piece of land actually belongs to Syria. And finally, one from Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader. "You wanted an open war, and we are ready for an open war." Correction, you wanted an open war. After all, it was your organization who planned and carried out the inital raid across the border into Israel resulting in the kidnappings and murders of several Israeli soldiers. Feeling kind of pissed that your house and headquarters has been destroyed huh? Well how do you think all the Israelis that have been left homeless by your rocket attacks over the years have felt? And thus ends today's comment on the Middle East.
07/14/06 15:45
Didn't go bicycling today unfortunately. My mom wouldn't let me go outside as she's afraid I might collaspe from the heat or something, lol. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.
Still have lots of economics to do. *sigh
07/13/06 21:32
Just finished another round of economics. Ugh... Can't wait till this course is over...
Been wearing my contacts today. It feels weird and the lower 1/8th of my vision is always kind of funny whenever I wear contacts. Really sucks how I can't go out and exercise with contacts as it would really suck if they slipped out of place while I was bicycling or something, or worse yet, fall out.
I played both Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII. What a difference the scores were. On CoD2 my scores were 10-48 and 11-22. On BF, it was somewhere around 25-3. Or something like that. Got silver medal in the BF game (second highest score out of all the players). Would've got a gold medal if it weren't for a frigging fighter pilot ace flying around so fast it was near immpossible to shoot him down (got him once) strafing all the infantry and then going on to a suicide run onto someone. >< Tried to do a suicide run on me several times while I was in a tank. I was lucky, he missed every time, but he did strafe me once while I was running towards an empty tank. Revenge for shooting him down earlier I guess =P CoD2 was fun too. Accidently killed myself with my own grenade a couple of times, but oh well. The 11-22 score was on the Moscow map. That was fun, especially whenever I sneaked up to some snipers and then just shot them from behind/the side. That's what you get for looking through a scope the whole time and ignoring what's behind you. Oh, you know what's funny? I threw a grenade at a sniper once, and it killed him, but the sniper also got me too. Now the odd thing, was that the kill list showed me killing him first, and then him killing me. When I looked at it through the kill cam, apparently, the grenade exploded while the bullet he shot was in the air, hence me killing him first. You know what'd be fun? Me running around CoD2 with unlimited grenades. Of course, I'd probably kill myself with my own grenades, but it'd still be fun.
I think I'll go bicycling tomorrow.
07/12/06 21:36
The UN has once again proven itself a worthless organization. It has both condemned the Israeli offensive in Lebanon and called for the captured soldiers release. The Israeli offensive is entirely not the fault of Israel as it was the raid into Israel from Lebanon that resulted in the capture and deaths of Israeli soldiers that prompted it. And they can't even say the raid was in retaliation of current Israeli operations in the Gaza strip (which is also not Israel's fault) as Hezbollah's leader has said that the raid was planned months in advance. He also said, "We are not seeking escalation, we don't want to lead the region into war." What the heck was the point of the raid then if not to provoke Israel and cause a war? The stupidity of those people...
07/12/06 19:00
You know that nursery rhyme rain rain go away, come again another day? Well, I was thinking about it earlier today due to the abysmal weather over my area the past little while, and I thought, if we don't like the rain, why are we telling it to come again another day? Then we'd have more rain! After all, if it's already here, and you're telling it to come again, that's 2 days of rain we must go through. So it seems that for it to be useful, we must say it when it's sunny, but that makes one look crazy, telling nonexistent rain to go away. So in conclusion, this rhyme sucks. And I was bored.
I spent several hours going through my economics stuff again, which I will have to do tomorrow again too because, as I've mentioned before, summer school is being cut short. It seems as if everythings being piled on to the end. We had such an easy start...
I played some Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII today. It's just about the only FPS game I'm good at. Anyways, it was quite fun, especially since the server didn't point out to you where your killer was when you died, so I was happily spawn point sniping away. The only problem is that as soon as the other players pop into a nearby vehicle at their spawn point, I couldn't shoot at them anymore as you can't harm a tank driver with a sniper rifle, and it's really hard to shoot through the side window of a fast moving vehicle. Still did relatively good though. Didn't get any medals as I joined the current game too late to rack up a good score.
An update on the civ game. Gary and I have filled up all the good spots on our continent, but we're really behind in tech and military power. That's going to hurt if the AI delcares war on us, and 2 of them are annoyed at us due to the religion difference. At least we're holding our own in terms of wonders and great people I think. So we'll have to rush to rifling so I can pump out some redcoats to protect us against any invasions and hope we can pull off a conquest/domination victory before the AI gets a space race victory. How we do that though is going to be quite a challenge. I'm thinking of killing off Eygpt first since they have the lowest military power of the other AIs. We'll most likely have to resort to nukes against the other two.
As for my laptop, I've decided to wait for the XPS one to drop in price and then snatch it. Hopefully I won't have to wait long.
07/11/06 17:12
I'm just taking a break from my economics work. Quite frustrating these assignments as they involve a bit of research unfortunately. If only we could do the crossword puzzles as assignments instead of the current stuff.
I've been out for most of the day. First I drove up to Stouffville for my mom's medical appointment. Quite freaky as when I was leaving, the exit area had a wall so you couldn't see if anyone was coming from one side of the sidewalk. So I slowly pull out and some jogger just springs up in front. Almost ran him over... Luckily, nothing happened and we went along our merry way. Had to do a right turn on Main Street again because all the traffic prevented a left turn... Oh, and there was a new set of traffic lights between the CIBC building and Summitview Public School. Like finally! Now people don't have to walk for 10 minutes just to get across the busiest road in town at a traffic light. Then we went to a restaurant in Richmond Hill to have lunch with my grandfather. Had 5 pieces of hai gow, yum! Highway 7 can't be called a highway there anymore. Should be renamed 15th Avenue, as the speed limit was 70km/h, but the fastest anyone could go was 60km/h. And this was at like noon on Tuesday, which is supposed to be one of the unbusiest times in the day. We left at 2:30 and by this time it was like freaking rush hour. At most we went at about 50km/h and in some sections, even though it was green light, you couldn't cross the intersection as the cars in front of you weren't moving so you'd be stuck in the middle of the intersection if you did go. So there was no way I was going to drive on Highway 7 anymore as it'd just be a waste of gas and time, and so I went onto the 404. First time driving on a highway without my dad beside me, and it went off without a hitch. Lot more cars than I expected though, and you can tell by the fact that I was never able to go faster than 100km/h and at times was reduced to 70km/h. Good thing I didn't need to go on to 401 West. It was clogged to a standstill as the express lanes were closed off, probably as a result of a car accident or something. Well, that's all I have to say. Guess I should go back to my economics work... Or play civ with Gary if he's free.
Oh, and as for the laptop, I'll be discussing which one is best with my uncle tonight, so order will probably be placed tomorrow. Hopefully. And why is it that all the small laptops that are not made by Dell have such low batter lives? I mean like, 3 hours max? I need way more than that for my university classes.
07/10/06 22:20
Have you ever thought of all the black holes in our universe? I was just thinking about them after reading an article on them at msnbc.com, and it got me thinking. Wouldn't it suck if a black hole came along on a collision course with us? I mean like, an asteriod or comet is bad, but at least we could try to blast it out of our path or something, but a black hole? It'd just keep coming and suck us all in and there'd be nothing we could do about it. Makes life kind of pointless doesn't it? And even if that doesn't happen, our sun will eventually swell up and swallow the Earth anyways. Okay, fine, maybe we'd have developed practical interstellar travel and it won't matter, but there's still the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy always increases. Eventually, it'll get to a point where we are, again, screwed. So it doesn't really matter what we do does it, as everything will cease anyways. Oh, or the universe collaspes again. Only the future will tell. Perhaps, as in Douglas Adams' sci-fi novels, we will find a way to reverse entropy, and maybe we were the ones to start the Big Bang. Or something odd and wonderful like that. Only the future will tell. Besides, I'm pretty sure we'll all be long dead by then, though I am hoping that some new advances in technology will enable me to be immortal. Pretty faint hope, but better than nothing.
07/10/06 19:28
Update on summer school. Got a mark of 93% currently. Unfortunately, I was aiming for a 97%. Ah well. Summer school's being cut short by a week. As a result of this and the slow start we had, I have 8 assignments to be done and 4 units read by the end for Friday this week. Geez... All this pressure. Final exam on Wednesday, and even though I've gone through all the notes, my head still seems really empty of material on this course. Ugh... At least it'll be over in just over a week.
The rain isn't helping my mood. Been stuck in the house all day. Planning on a trip to Staples on Wednesday to look at wireless routers and microphones. I wish wireless routers weren't so expensive. Cheapest I've found so far is $40 and I need it at like $10-$20 or I won't be able to get one. At least ethernet cables aren't going to be a problem. I've found a place to get them for about $3 each.
07/10/06 18:28
Parents want me to get a lighter laptop >< I'll have to settle for the Inspiron 640M I guess. Integrated graphics though, ew. Either that or the XPS M1210 which is so dratted expensive.
Gary and I started another civ game as we knew we were screwed in the other one. This time, we've got a continent to ourselves, but unless Gary starts expanding and filling up those empty spaces we're going to be screwed again. Unfortunately I can't expand further as the distance penalty would kill my finances. That and Gary's borders would just eat into the city and kill it. We're at Monarch difficulty I believe. I hope the AI wars between themselves and not against us, though that seems a faint hope as we're always lagging behind a lot in the power charts.
07/09/06 15:51
Well, just finished a round of CoD2 where I got owned at. I really need to watch out for grenades...
Started another civ game with Gary. We set it so that each team had it's own continent... But all the continents except one were connected together >< So we're screwed in that game I think.
I caved in and ordered my new laptop from Dell. For $1329CDN I get the Inspiron 6400 Dual Core, weighing 6.18lbs (before addons). It has a Intel® Core™ Duo processor T2600 2MB Cache/2.16GHz/667MHz FSB, Windows XP Media Edition with backup CD, 15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA Display with TrueLife™, 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm, 120GB 5400rpm Hard Drive, 8X CD/DVD Burner DVD+/-RW with double-layer DVD+R write capability, 256mb ATI Mobility Radeon X1400, 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery,
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card 54Mbps, 1 Yr Return to Depot Service with 1 Yr Tech Support, etc. Basically I just had to add on a better video card and a backup CD for $30CDN more. Pretty good deal huh? Much better than an Apple laptop for the same price =P
07/09/06 13:17
So, my highway driving test date is set. August 9th at 11:35am. It's a Wednesday so there better not be much traffic or the test will be more difficult for me to pass. Hope there's no construction or anything either. It'll be difficult enough as it is staying at the speed limit as it's difficult to change lanes when you're moving so much slower than everyone else. Hm, I'm bored. Perhaps I'll go read a book.
07/08/06 16:15
Just finished rollerblading. Fun. I think I'll go for a long bicycle ride sometime this week. Haven't done that for a long time.
3D transparent windows in Vista. Cool. Too bad Vista will be quite expensive and take 40GB. Oh well, I could always just use Vista on someone else's computer or something.
I'm bored again. At least I got some new books from the library. Oh, that reminds me, don't read The Fifth Sorceress by Robert Newcomb. It wasn't that good and was totally unoriginal. At least that's what I think.
07/08/06 13:23
Wow, so the word Oreo can't be used in advertising even if the advertisement is for Oreos. Apparently it's got a racial meaning to it. Can't use the word banana in advertisements anymore either I guess. Might offend East Asians.
Such a nice and sunny day. Perfect for rollerblading =)
I've been getting frustrated with CoD2 lately. It's so hard for me to find a server that works as they keep either disconnecting from me or are different versions. Why would the servers countinue to run old versions of CoD2 anyways? The lag is sometimes a problem too, but that's my fault for using a crap computer. That problem will be fixed when I get my new laptop.
About the laptop, I want to get it now, so I can use it, but then I want to wait for the price to drop even more. On the other hand, it's a really really good deal right now and I'm kind of apprehensive that Dell will raise the price after the deal expires. So conflicted.
07/07/06 22:14
I glanced at some of the reviews of the podcasts of Prime Minister Harper's speeches. I must say, if you don't want to listen to them, then don't listen to them. No need to flood the reviews with your political views, especially ones that don't add to the discussion. It's like responding to an opponent's arguement by calling him/her a Nazi when the issue at hand has nothing to do with their views, wrong as the views may be. Go vent somewhere else moron. And in case you're wondering, I don't think I'll be listening to them anytime soon either. Quite unlikely it'll be a balanced view on the topic at hand. Rather go listen to CBC radio programs instead. Some of them are quite good.
07/07/06 17:44
Went rollerblading again. Fun.
University course selection stresed me out so much. They suggested I look at the course timetables and complete a worksheet before I chose courses to prevent conflicts. I tried doing that, but the charts were so confusing I gave up. I relooked at the requirements for Honours Chemistry and I had forgotten to include another physics and math course. End result, I dropped a psychology and a statistics course and added the required physics and math course. So, I'll be taking 2 bio courses, 2 chem courses, 2 calc courses, 1 algeo course (
The natives in BC are getting their own school board. Some how I don't think that that's a good idea. After all, with all the money we give them, they still can't fix their communities. Okay, so maybe the natives in BC are different, I'm not sure, but I still don't like it. I'm predicting the school board will be a cesspool of wasted money and fail. But hey, maybe I'll be wrong.
07/07/06 13:13
One of the courses I wanted to take was full, health studies =( So I dropped the health sciences one too and took 2 psychology courses. How could health studies fill up that fast?!
07/06/06 13:49
Microsoft is going to be releasing its own mp3 player! Woohoo! Time to crush Apple! Though it won't be easy, with Apple already dominating the market.
I think I'll go rollerblading again today.
Lol, rare orchids cut down by highway workers who assumed they were weeds. That's what you get for not posting signs telling people about them. When I saw the picture I thought they were weeds too. Western prairie fringed orchid? Come on, it looks like a weed.
07/05/06 18:21
Yep, went rollerblading over lunch and I didn't get hurt. It was close though, I almost fell when I rolled over a pothole. Fun. I could've easily done 3 laps today since it was much cooler than normal, but I wanted to get home so I only did 2. It was enough.
My splendid army of 50+ tanks are steamrolling Cyrus now. Oh, there's a cavalry unit in there for the medic promotion. I just finished wiping out France. Gary meanwhile got invaded again and may lose an island city. We've almost got nukes. Just need to finish off fission tech, then build Manhattan project, and then it's nuclear war time! Fun... I guess we'll try for Emperor level next time.
Heh heh heh, I've found an even better Dell laptop. Cheaper too. Waiting for price to fall.
Oh, funny thing happened on the report card. You know how there's a comments section by each subject where the teacher puts pre-determined phrases on? Well, last time, under compsci, the comments had the wrong gender. This time, the gender was right, but the name was wrong. "His strong interest, involvement and participation have led to excellent results. He demonstrates good independent work habits, and should countinue staying focused when working independently. Gary shows a thorough understanding of relationships between concepts." I'm not Gary, lol. I wonder why people keep getting us mixed up. It's not like we look that similar. My hair is totally different.
07/05/06 10:50
I've finished my economics assignment. Sure, it was done crappily, but at least it's done. I just tried some CoD2 single player. I lagged a bit at times which is very bad, so I guess I won't be playing single player much. I feel like... Rollerblading after lunch. Arms are sore from swimming so I guess rollerblading wouldn't hurt much. Unless I fell. That would hurt. Or unless I crash into something. That would hurt too.
07/05/06 08:34
Server connection reset just caused my latest post to be lost. Bleh. Report cards have arrived and I did okay in my opinion. Need a 97% in economics now to get a 90% average. Kind of hard but... Oh well. Guess I should start on my economics assignment now. *sigh
07/04/06 21:20
Yep, procrastinating on my assignments. Just listening to music and typing here. And discussing bug killing with Gary. I got aphids. He's got giant flies. I think my kills took more skill. My targets were smaller.
So what shall we talk about? Oh yes, I had trouble updating my iTunes today. Stupid Apple software =P The Quicktime installation part just kept repeating and repeating. Eventually I just stopped it through Task Manager, restarted the computer then restarted installation. It's working now thankfully. You know, there was something else I really liked about the Mac OS. I can't remember at the moment though. The window manipulations were cool though.
I saw a video, um, really recently, that showed a new way to organize desktops. They represented every shortcut, file, w/e, as a little icon on a big wooden desk. You could manipulate them as if they were real paper, so you could crumple them up, stack them, flip through them, etc. It looked really neat, but I'd stick to the current way of representing desktops as I would probably find it easier to use, nothing's covered up or anything.
Can't wait for new laptop... Must wait for price to fall more though...
07/04/06 16:25
I didn't post yesterday as I was too busy swimming and playing computer games. MP on CoD2 has been kind of frustrating as not only do I have to find a server that is the correct version, but I have to find one that isn't laggy. Oh well. Anyways, I'm starting to really hate the rifle in CoD2. In the game, I would either get multiple kills, or... Get sniped 5 times in a row. Yep, frustrating. The timing on the grenades aren't good either. I would prefer a 3 second timer, but it's more like 8 seconds. Plenty of time for the enemy to get away. Update on the civ game, I've got destroyers and battleships blockading every French port and am starting on the Persian ports now. We just got flight so I'm building airports now to transport troops directly over. The French wiped out my initial invasion force of cannons/infantry/redcoats got wiped out as soon as I stepped out of the protection of the forest. The attacking troops were inferior, but damn there was a lot of them. 16+ tanks took care of that though. Now my 20+ tank army is starting a little campaign =) With airports, now that means that reinforcements will arrive at the rate of about 2.5 tanks a turn. Yay for me. Gary's cities are... Unhealthy and angry. But my health situation is pretty precarious too. They'll get unhealthy as soon as those airports are done. 100 turns left to do a conquest/domination vic. The score vic is pretty much guaranteed now.
I've got a one page article on John Keynes due tomorrow at midnight. Ugh. I hate having to researching stuff. I'm looking at my possible elective choices right now. If I end up taking 2 social science/humanities, I just might drop economics. After all, I just went through a whole year's worth of notes. My learning's pretty much done unless the notes are missing sections.
07/02/06 23:50
You know, Gary's dog is the best dog I've ever met. It didn't once bark or growl at me. It did keep trying to jump on me, but that was okay, it's a small dog. So much better than other people's dogs =P If I could have a guarantee that my dog would be like that, I'd raise one too. Mmm... Tribbles...
Didn't rollerblade today since I was fixing my bicycle. Tomorrow then.
I want a Mac now that I've seen Gary's setup. It looks so... Functional. I wish Apple would return to its fruity coloured computers though. They looked so nice. I mean, now it's so, monotone. Black and white. Like, ew.
I went through a whole year's worth of economics notes in 1.5 hours. Go me. If only I could get through the online stuff this fast too...
I notice I've been blogging a lot since summer vacation started. This is the result of too much boredom, lol. Sleep time, maybe.
About the Dell thing, at least my second choice laptop has drastically dropped in price, so I guess I'll get that instead. It's almost as good. Waiting for price to drop even more though =)
07/02/06 18:43
Well, got my bicycle tire fixed. That took a while, but it was worth it. Now I can bicycle around Scarborough again, and most importantly, I can bicycle to the library again.
Got Call of Duty 2 now. Looks good, want to use vehicles though.
Gary showed me his Mac. It looks so neat, all the smooth transitions, the funny little icons, the nice little applications and functions, the uncluttered desktop. Yep, thanks to this neat little program, you can just type in the name of document/application and it starts searching for matches. So basically, that means you don't need shortcuts or important files saved on the desktop anymore. The result, Gary's got 6 icons on desktop, I have... 112. Good thing I know where everything is.
07/02/06 00:23
ARGH!
07/01/06 23:21
Just splurged on putting Kage Baker's books on hold at the public library. I should get some interesting reads this summer =)
07/01/06 19:00
So, another day is nearly over. I went rollerblading today, and I have my rollerblading route for the summer all planned out now. Two laps, with ups and downs, about 40 minutes of rollerblading total, depending on how fast I go. If I rollerblade enough, perhaps I'll be able to do 3 circuits. Going to get so tanned this summer from the rollerblading =)
I don't really have anything to talk about at the moment, but I don't have anything else to do, so here's an update on the Civilization IV game Gary and I have been playing. It's tiny, continents. Gary and I versus two Prince-level AI. Gary's Egypt, I'm England, the AI are France and Persia. Each team has a continent. Since they're Prince-level, they had a slight lead over us technologically so we were planning on waiting till we had battleships, tanks, and airports before attacking. The battleships would be stationed outside every single one of their coastal cities to prevent them from invading us while we used our airports to send over the invasion force since Gary managed to get two cities on to there continent while they had none on ours. Unfortunately, while they were in the cavalry/riflemen/cannon stage they declared war on us. Guess they got pissed off over our different religions and Gary's border tensions. So anyways, we were still in grenadier/catapult stage and some of my cities had either no defence or warriors defending them. My most powerful unit was a single longbowmen unit. Go me. Oh, I had a galley too, lol. So basically they overran Gary's two cities on their continent and sent a fleet of frigates over to pillage our sea resources and starve our coastal cities. Our naval fleet consisted of caravels and galleys. Great, huh? Luckily we had high research, so we were able to quickly get to the machine gun/riflemen/cannon stage. We had democracy so I set my research down to 30%, upgraded my defending units to machine guns and sent machine guns over to the undefended cities. Needless to say my cities were all unhealthy and some of them starving thanks to enemy frigates. Ditto for Gary. So Gary built ironclads to chase off the frigates, but at that moment, they landed a massive invasion force on Gary's side and a minor one on mine. My riflemen arrived in the nick of time. We had railways so I was able to transfer my forces over to Gary's side and I wiped out the forces on my side. It was close though. Good thing I was England so I got to use Redcoats instead of regular riflemen. They kicked cavalry ass. So now the tables were turned. We got destroyers and transports and I sent over a massive force and razed Paris. Gary captured an island city, and one on their mainland. Not sure if he razed the mainland one or not. Sure hope he did since he only had two units to hold it. Anyways, my forces got battered taking Paris, but reinforcements are on the way. Lot more razing to be done =) I've, as always, got a super city going, Triatlantis. One military unit per turn, plus like a dozen wonders, near (and at most times, over) a hundred great people points a turn. I love my super specialists =) The AI is so screwed. I need to get battleships soon though as they might get destroyers soon. Got to keep my naval blockade going. So next step is to get tanks and airports. Whoops, dinner time.
07/01/06 11:29
Happy Dominion Day! Fine, it's currently officially Canada Day, but I think Dominion Day sounds better. More... Formal sounding? Anyways, it was originally called Dominion Day anyways, until Trudeau's gov't changed it. You know what I'd make it called? Dominion of Canada Day. Much more descriptive. So, happy Dominion of Canada Day! Hey, why don't we have a Elizabeth day? We've got a Victoria day. I wonder if I should go see any fireworks. Maybe I'll just watch it at home on the TV. That's almost as good, without having to be outside.
06/30/06 22:08
Got frustrated being killed in Counterstrike, but still wanted to do fps, so I got Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons. Kind of out of practice, but still good. Fun.
06/30/06 17:42
Well, just did another session of summer school, and now, yet again, I'm going "what the...?". I'm really wishing I had tried to borrow an economics textbook now. Perhaps I could get some notes off a friend? I'll go ask around. Yep, learning online is proving more difficult than I imagined. Like, the content isn't hard, but I just can't concentrate when I'm staring at a computer screen so the info just flows right out. In fact, I haven't actually read read anything yet. More of a scan of the words then onto the next section. Not much learning for me going on right now. If only I could just print off the stuff, then I'd immediately get it, but no, printer's busted at the moment and the ink is way too expensive. Ah well. What computer game should I play now? Civilization IV? Sim City 3000? Starcraft? I know, Counter-Strike 1.6! Sure I suck at it, but still. Fun. Hm, maybe I should get Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons again. I was always in at least the top 5 in every game. Nah, I doubt anyone plays it anymore. Or do they?
06/30/06 12:14
I have over a hundred unique views this month! Woohoo! What a record breaking month in terms of views and posts. Go me =)
A person who dropped a basketball-sized rock off a bridge killing a bus driver who was driving by isn't going to jail because the driver's family doesn't want to him to. According to them "He's not a bad person. He's just a stupid kid, and it would wreck him." Now there's an understatement. Hm, dropping this huge rock wouldn't kill anyone. Sure, they're driving by at least 60km/h+, 100km/h+ if it's a highway, but what's the worst that could happen? I mean, it's only a huge rock.
I was watching The Colbert Report yesterday on the Comedy channel, and he was discussing the anti-flag burning legislation being proposed in the US Senate. He suggested a self-defending flag, made of, I forget what, but explosive materials so that anyone who tried to burn a flag would get burned too. What a good idea. I think that it could be the new weapon of choice against anti-American terrorists. Just drop a ton of them over suspected hotspots of anti-Americanism, and watch in glee as they try the burn the flag. Kaboom! There'll be less flag-burning after that! =P Of course, I wouldn't want to work in the plant that made those flags...
Oh, I just read a truly amazing book. It's called Gentlemen & Players, written by Joanne Harris. A real masterpiece of literature in my opinion, and no, it's not a sci-fi or fantasy book. For those of you who are scared of chess, though there is a chess theme running through the book, the novel in no way deals with chess. It's just a neat little way of looking at the characters and actions of them, as pieces in a game of chess. And such an amazing ending. Totally unexpected, but then, as you look back, you wonder, how could I have not seen it?! Ah, the characters, they were wonderfully done. I think this book will go right alongside Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan, as one of the best books I've ever read. I actually read for 6 hours straight, resulting in me going to sleep at 3 am, as I couldn't put this book down. It was simply fascinating. Fascinating I tell you...
06/29/06 20:12
Now I remember what I wanted to talk about in my previous entry today but forgot to. It's about the current Pope wanting traditional Gregorian music back at Mass. So, when I first read about it, I was like, lol, but hardly anyone understands Latin anymore. Then I was like, that'll kill off converts and retainment. Ah well, I'm not the Pope, so oh well. But you know, there was a reason the music was modernized. It was, oh, um, because it was boring and it's in Latin. Lol.
I just mailed in my university stuff. I do hope that it doesn't get lost or delayed in the mail system. That would be quite unfortunate for me.
98 unique IPs this month! Just 2 away from triple digits for unique IPs!
06/29/06 15:45
Two whole days without internet! The horror, the horror! Thank you grade 12 english class =P
So, anyways, as I just mentioned, I went through two whole days without internet access. See, it was because we were switching back to 1st Access from Sympatico (which sucks), because it's so much more expensive. Sure there's a 20 GB bandwidth limit on my type of account, but I've never used more than 2.5 GB anyways (I don't download stuff like crazy unlike you guys), and it's SO much cheaper. Only 27 something dollars after tax (Canadian, in case you didn't know), and the speeds good enough for me. I can't remember what the speed is, but it's DSL, and it's fast enough for my purposes. Sometimes it's annoying that you have to log in to use the internet, but one gets used to it. On more than one occasion while using Sympatico, I tried signing into the 1st Access service, lol. It just becomes habit that as soon as the computer has finished booting up, to move your mouse over to the icon and double click then press enter. During this internet free time, I was so bored, but I got through thanks to lots of the Space and Comedy channel, books from the library, Sim City 3000, and a round of AI ass kicking on Civilization IV. Hm, I seem to have been side-tracked. So, we were switching, and then, stupid Bell cut off the service one day early. I told them to switch it off on Wednesday, and they agreed, but then the internet stopped on Tuesday. Another reason why Sympatico sucks. So anyways, I tried to sign onto the 1st Access account, but I kept getting an error that the username and/or password I used was invalid on that domain. I was, of course, going "WTF?!" as I knew I had them right. Turns out over the last 3 months, the @whatever part after the username had changed from @pppoe.ca to @1staccess.ca which was my problem. Got that figured out today after calling tech support, so now my internet is back online. Along with a dynamic IP. And look, Gary's comics page says "Welcome David" again =)
About the whole Israeli soldier being kidnapped thingy, I fully support Israel in their actions. As for the outcome, I highly doubt that they'll get their soldier back alive. See, Israel's wall is justified. Once it's completed, the chances of these things happening will be greatly reduced. Funny, after withdrawing from the Gaza strip, weapons pour in, and now the Israeli forces face even more danger. Gee, who knew that this would happen
I wanted to talk about something else... What was it? Hm... I just can't remember. Oh well, I'll just say something else. Did you know that Nova Scotia still bans Sunday shopping? What ridiculousness. Separation of church and state my ass.
I just read about Google Checkout on Gary's blog. It's interesting. Another step towards Google taking over the world. Microsoft really needs to hurry up and start crushing Google =P Mmmm... Windows... Hey! Did you hear about that new powerful laptop from, what is it, Vaio? Or something like that. It's a really really good laptop, and it's only an inch thick. I read about it in the National Post, and according to the writer, the cincher was that it runs Windows, not some crappy Mac OS =P Take that Gary, Microsoft > Apple. > meaning better, but if you taught the ><= symbols as one of my elementary teachers did, Microsoft < Apple because Microsoft is eating Apple (note the chunk taken out of the apple in the Apple logo).
06/26/06 22:22
I haven't got anything to do again. Let's talk about stuff. Oh, wait, never mind. Gary just offered to play civ with me. Civ time!
06/26/06 18:50
I was hanging out with some of my friends today. Great fun. Got Chris' yearbook signature finished (finally), picked up formal pictures, talked about random stuff. Oh, I saw part of Cheaper by the Dozen 2. It was a weird movie. I can't believe Chris is more scared of dogs than I am now. Come on, he wasn't the one that was chased twice by dogs trying to take a chunk out of him. You know what I'd like to have as a pet? A Tribble. If only I could somehow genetically engineer one. Tribbles are the perfect pets. Of course, if one every got out into the wild, its bye-bye environment as the Tribbles would eat all the vegetation up, unless we also had lots of predators for the Tribbles here. Oh yea, I snagged some binders when I visited ACI today. Now I don't have to go shopping for binders for school now. That's good as I hate shopping. So boring. Unless I'm shopping for computer parts or games or similar stuff =)
06/25/06 19:05
I started my summer school course today. The material was pretty easy, comparisons between market and command economies, but the assignment is confusing the heck out of me. I'm supposed to compare the economies of Canada, US, and UK in this little chart, but all of my answers for each of them are exactly identical. Like, wtf? Oh well, as long as I pass...
In other news, I've just finished 3 straight hours of Civilization IV. It was fun. I declared war on Japan 3 times before killing them off (Hooray for China!). I could've crushed Germany, my final rival (it was a small map, my computer lags with larger maps), but I decided to have a little fun. So I waited until I got nukes and tanks. Then I proceeded to nuke Germany 11 times while overruning all opposition and razing German cities with a massive tank army supported by helicopters, fighter aircraft, and a relatively large naval force. I didn't actually need the aircraft, but they looked cool. Also, it was a Pangea map, so the naval forces weren't required, but I didn't want any German ships to feel left out =P The helicopters were necessary however as I needed them to get any enemy troops that got past any gaps in my tank attack since my cities were being defended by archers (the archers were ceremonial guards =) ). Great fun. I'll have to repeat that again soon. Got Charlemange for leadership ability. Probably would've gotten Augustus Caesar if I had attacked Germany earlier. Oh well.
06/24/06 22:46
I mentioned in a previous entry a long time ago, that I thought that toads sounded like someone saying "wat" very rapidly. Or a rapidly repeating dial tone. The memories of the conversation still brings laughter to me. In fact, it just did five minutes ago, which is why I'm writing about this. It's just so weird. It's one of those conversations you suddenly remember years later then laugh out loud about and confuse everyone else around you because they have no clue why you're laughing. Thanks a lot Justina, now people will think I'm crazy a few years later when I suddenly laugh when no one around had said anything funny. Well, I don't have anything more to say at the moment, so, civ time! Oh wait, I just got a haircut. It looks nice. At least I think so. Who cares what you think?
06/24/06 18:45
Went and played tennis for an hour today. It's quite tiring when it's so hot outside. Managed to beat both my brother and my cousin, go me. We played some billiards after too. I did better than I expected. All those hours spent playing billiards on the computer really does help as then you know approximate angles to aim for. *bonk Woohoo! Stupid 8-ball. I accidently knocked that in a couple of times I think. What else did I do today? Nothing else really worth mentioning here. Ah well, civ time! Summer school can wait =P
Oh yes, I've had a sharp increase in site traffic this week. It's like double my previous weekly high. I wonder if it has anything to do with my posting comments on Gary's blog. After all, with him getting hundreds of hits a day, surely some of them will click on my comment link. Hm. Guess I better keep posting comments there huh?
06/23/06 00:38
Today, er, I guess it's yesterday now since it's past midnight, I went out with my friends and had a really fun time. We went bowling then ate at a sushi buffet. Bowling was especially fun as it was my first time. I think I did okay, I didn't get past a hundred points but I was close, with 96 points. Anyways, I managed to get some strikes and spares, though they were few and far in between (at least I didn't throw it into the gutter everytime =P). My thumb started hurting after a while though, and I don't want to really think about who wore the bowling shoes before me or handled the bowling balls I used. Stupid Jacky won every single game, everytime with a score over a hundred. We initially cheered whenever he got a strike or spare, but then we stopped. We cheered when he messed up (evil, I know, but he's too good). Oh, remember, don't throw the ball until the guard is up *cough Jacky *cough hitting the guard so hard that the ball rolled all the way back up the alley. Dinner was really nice. I felt so full afterwards. 20 dollars for all you can eat sushi and w/e. Really good. Driving was also pretty good. Except for the part where Chris gave me bad directions and I wasted 20 minutes wondering where the hell the bowling alley was. Good thing Gary gives good directions. Why didn't you just say Old Kennedy Road Chris?! Why?! Lol, good times, good times.
You say I'm disorganized? Well, at least I know where my wallet/cellphone is =P
I finally got my virtual school account working. But I log in, and there's a ton of reading and an assignment already. Grr... Ah well, at least it's only due on Wednesday, so I slack off till then. Summer school should be fun.
I started playing civ with Gary again today. Fun. But really, 3 AI allied against us? We're so doomed!
Anchors added to this blog now, starting with this one.
06/21/06 23:56
I just wrote my algeo exam today. I did better than I expected. Sure, I did horrible, but at least I passed for sure I think, and all I needed was a 40% to get at least a 70% average in that course, so it's all good.
I ended off the school year on a great note. Okay, so it didn't happen at the end, more like right before the exam, but close enough. I arrived at school early in the morning, ostensibly to study for my exam, but I ended up arguing with Simra for like an hour over Iraq and stuff. Fun stuff. I ended up only studying for like 5 mintues for algeo, lol. I love a good arguement.
On the technology front, I've found the laptop I'll most likely be getting. It's a Dell laptop, the XPS M1210. It's great as it's got awesome performance, is small, and is relatively cheap (I get a 10% discount). At current prices, it'll cost me about $2100 before taxes, shipping, and discounts. I would've gotten an Apple laptop (yes Gary, I was considering it), but I decided against it because it's video card was crap. The pro version had a good enough video card, but it was way too expensive. Also, I want to be able to play Civilization IV on my laptop, but if I got an Apple, I would've had to rebuy it for the Mac version, which I am unwilling to do. Besides, it's still in the beta stage. So, despite all the bad reviews and publicity Dell has gotten, I'm getting one of there laptops. Microsoft Windows forever! Lol.
Korea's ahead of France in the standings! Yay!
Going to be driving for a bit tomorrow. Don't go out of your house people! Lol. I so need to book an exam date for G test, but too lazy to. Maybe later. Going to be FUN tomorrow!
06/20/06 21:29
One last exam, then I'm done secondary school, except for the summer school course I took of course. Tomorrow's exam is algeo, and I think I'll probably do really badly on it, but I don't really care at this point. I haven't even attempted to study for it even though it's my worse subject. Oh well. I've calculated that all I need is a 40%, then I'll get at least a 70% average. *sigh Stupid algeo.
06/19/06 21:27
Righty-o, I'm bored again. I'd go play civ, but I don't want to wait for the load times. And web games aren't appealing to me at the moment. What should I talk about?
Did you hear about that guy in, I think it was Turkey, who is trying to get every single answer on his university entrance exam wrong to protest the difficulty of the exam. What an idiot. Going to university is a privilege, not a right, if there isn't enough spots for all graduating secondary students, which there aren't. If you can't be bothered to try hard enough to get in, you don't deserve to be in it. Yes, I know, there are exceptions, some people just moved here and don't know the language or just aren't smart enough, but I doubt that's the case with this guy. He's just being stupid.
I need to find someone to go bicycling with during the summer. Or play tennis with.
06/19/06 15:18
Did you enjoy my 56 minute blog post? Lol.
I just finished writing my calc exam today. It didn't go good. Dratted box question... Oh well, I can't do anything to change it now. I just hope my mark doesn't drop too much. Maybe it'll even increase! Just have the dreaded algeo exam left. Too lazy to study today. I'll start tomorrow.
Anti-violence rallies... Pft... What a waste of resources. The people committing the crimes aren't going to stop just because there was a rally against violence. The resources spent organizing those kinds of rallies would be better spent convincing the gov't to increase jail times/police budgets/reinstate the death penalty. I like that last option.
I really don't like how we countinually reward the natives for bad behaviour. Those Caledonia natives will now end up with some huge compensation package even though they broke the law, several times seriously (attempted murder, among other things, like assault), and even though they are diliberately hiding fugitives from the police.
Korea tied France. Woohoo! Ditto for Japan, though they tied Croatia.
06/17/06 23:44
I'm bored. Time for another post.
I've been going through some MSN Spaces, and I must say, people don't update them often. Or maybe they use a different service to blog. But if that's the case, can't you provide a link in the last blog entry to your actual blog? *cough Jerry *cough
Anyways, I'm really bored. So let's get philosophical. Hmm... I'll need a topic. Let's try... Friendship. Hm. What to say. Oh, I know. I remember reading this somewhere, where, I won't tell you, but it was within a picture frame. It went something like, the best kind of friend is one who you can sit down beside, each of you not saying a word to each other, then walk away feeling you just had the best conversation of your life. I totally agree with it. If you can do that with someone, then that person is a really good friend. But what kind of me would I be if I just left it like this? I just got to poke holes in that statement. It's just something I like to do, lol. Okay, first, what if both people can't speak? They could always communicate with sign language or maybe telepathy or maybe email or IM. Then they could have the best conversation of their lives, without being friends or saying a single word. Secondly, what if the reason they didn't say anything was because they really hate each other and so just being able to sit there without trying to kill each other is a big improvement, which leads to this, maybe every cotact they've ever had with people resulted in said people trying to kill them? Then walking away without an attempt on their life would be the best ever. Or what if the two people were talking to other people who are far away through email or IM or something? Lol, I'm done now. Several of my "arguements" could be shot down by interpreting saying something as communication in anyway. Oh, I just remembered something now. How can it be a conversation if there's no communication between the two people? Doesn't the very definition of conversation require it? Lol. Yep, I'm bored. Okay, I'm going to stop poking holes now for the remainder of this post as it takes effort. You know a funny definition of friendship? It was said by the character Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He defined friendship as this: "My neural pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns." Or something like that. My definition of friendship is someone who will help you even though it'll cause them inconvenience. Of course, the level of inconvenience that they'll accept decides whether they're a friend or not since most people will accept some sort of inconvenience to help most people. The actual level also varies by person because some people will naturally show more inclination to help others. I think this is where those sayings that times of crisis shows you who your real friends are as your friends are the people who'll help you when you need it even if it'll cause them some harm. People say family is more important than friends, but I disagree. This is because I also define family members in terms of friendship. After all, I think most families have some member that's a prick (by family I don't mean immediate family of course, but include in-laws and aunts/uncles/cousins/etc. that you don't really know) and is a liability to our society so why choose them over a friend? Anyways, I think we're all related some how (go evolution) so we're all related to our friends so... If all friends are family members and then some family members are friends. Therefore, choosing family over friends is idiotic. Heh. I love logic. Or whatever. Anyways... Let's go for another topic.
This post sure is becoming long. The power of boredom :p
Anyways, let's choose lying. I think that lying is unacceptable in all realistic circumstances (someone threatening to kill you if you don't lie is unrealistic). Every lie causes more lies. Just look at how far our politicians have fallen. We've gone from (mostly) honest politicians, who were our friends and wouldn't dare lie to us, like Washington, King, Macdonald, Lincoln, etc. to the politicians we have today, where we expect them to lie. If Laurier said he'd do something, I think that chances are, he meant it. One the other hand, if I heard, say, Layton saying something, I'd think, I'll believe it when it happens, and even then, there's a catch somewhere. All the lying in our society has created an atmosphere where lying is expected and/or required in order to survive (think salesmen, though they've always had to lie or embellish the truth a little bit usually). If we all decided to suddenly stop lying and did it (which won't happen due to the massive advantages successfully decieving someone gives you), then we'd truly create a better civilization. Of course, we might just all end up doing what Aes Sedai do (I think that's how you spell it. It's from the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Basically a group of women with magic and who, supposedly, can't give away the plot, actually can't tell lies) where we twist what we say so hard that technically it's true but where it's been so twisted that one believes the opposite of what really is, so same result as lying, you get decieved. Maybe instead of not lying I should say don't be deceptive. Yea, that'd solve that twisting words and leaving out parts of the truth out problem. Anyways, when people start lying enough, people expect it, and so lie in return to even the field, and then more lying comes along for extra advantage, and the cycle countinues. This should stop, so that we can fully trust each other, work for the better good, and create a new golden age. Of course, if this happens, then basically we've gone to communism and it actually works since we wouldn't be corrupt, or rather, would be immediately caught if we were corrupt. See, corruption is the only obstacle to communism actually working, but that's another story. Anyways, that's why I usually tell the truth (usually, hey, I'm not about to get myself creamed for ideals that hardly anyone else will follow) even if it'd benefit me if I lied instead. Even if everyone dropped down to my level of lying, boy would the situation be improved. So maybe I'm being a bit arrogant, but screw you, only my opinions matter :p Ah yes, who's opinion matters, again, that's another story. Anyways, to anyone reading this, try to reduce your lying even if it's just a little bit. Every bit helps. What about those, what are called "white" lies I think they're called? Those ones where you lie to spare someone's feelings. Like if your friend painted a horrible drawing and you say it looks okay. Well, those ones are bad too. So your friend is briefly happier. Well, if he/she believes you, what if she shows that ugly painting to other people. They'll say it looks okay too, but really, they're laughing at her horrible art skills. Would that not hurt your friend more? Even worse, if your friend finds out you've lied. Then you've just lost a lot of that trust you've gained over the years. Now they'll have to think about what you say, after all, maybe you're lying again. See, any lie really is greatly harmful. You know, the funny thing is, I wrote a two paragraph thingy on this very topic for English class. If I find it, I might post it up here for you to read. It's quite good, in my opinion. This post was kind of disorganized to say the least, though that's the nature of my blog. I just type whatever comes into my mind at the moment and screw structure and organization.
Well, I should be going to sleep now. This one post took my fifty-six minutes to type out. If you, the reader of this sentence, actually read this whole post, good for you. If you didn't, I shake my fist at you. I actually just did shake my fist at the computer screen, so if you didn't read this whole post, that fist was directed at you.
06/17/06 22:14
My brain just exploded from too much calculus. I just tried to absorb half a year's worth of calculus in, what, a couple of half-hearted hours? Needless to say, it didn't work. Like I said, my brain exploded. I guess I'll go through the review questions tomorrow. I'm really worried about algeo though. Even though I'll pass for sure and my mark in it doesn't matter, I still need to it keep my parents happy. Okay, fine, and to prevent further battering of my pride :p I normally don't even try to study for these things and will only scan through my notes once, these marks are important. Especially calculus. Especially since my other marks seem to have fallen. If my mark drops again in calculus, it's bye bye 90% entrance scholarship as I've just calculated that I'll require 98% in my summer school course to get that 90% average, and well, 98% is already pretty much impossible unfortunately. I'm currently questioning the wisdom of taking that summer school course in light of the 98% goal. After all, I'll still probably be forced to take two social science/humanities credits in university as back-up anyways so... Yea. Hm, oh well. It shouldn't be that hard. Hopefully.
Oh yes, I had a passport photo taken today for the university registration. Pick up on Monday, though I'm not looking forward to that as weather forcasts call for rain. That'll put a damper on after-exam parties.
06/16/06 22:26
Still missing a few people that I wanted to sign my yearbook, but oh well, I guess I can't always get what I want. Unfortunately. I'm sad. Today was officially the last day of high school for me and my friends. At least I'll get to see them during exams (mixed feeling about that, I get to see them, but I have to write an exam) and over the summer hopefully. *Sigh I should study for my calc exam since it'll actually affect my top six average, but looking at the list, it seems that I know what to do for them anyways. I'm quite worried about algeo. I've been struggling in that course and I still am now. I don't want to study for it though, it's so hard and boring. The annoying thing is that I'll still pass even if I get a zero on the exam, and it won't affect my top six average, but I have to do good or my parents will get really pissed off. Hm. Summer school. Hope I do really well in it and I don't get stressed over it. Still need to get that passport photo for student registrations. Probably go for it tomorrow.
PS3 went onto pre-order sale mode today. But who cares? Not me. I hate the PS controller and it's way too expensive. I mean like 700 something dollars (it's actually on sale for 1000 something dollars but a couple of games are being bundled in).
It seems the markets have recovered somewhat, though I'm still kind of worried about it. Ignorance is bliss. Too bad I can't remain in ignorance.
06/15/06 20:13
Yearbook signings still not done. Ugh. So hard finding everyone. Still got lots of space left. If I manage to find everyone I want to then those spaces should be perfectly filled I think.
Still have to contend with the calc and algeo exams :(
US warns against protectionism. Ha I say. What do they call those tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber. Damn US...
Racism accusations were made at the Creba trial yesterday. But really, if you show up late, you shouldn't expect to be able to get in ahead of people who have been waiting hours. Geez. And people with drug and weapon charges are good people just because they didn't kill anyone? Like whatever, are you retarded? Marijuana is illegal, and what "good" person carries a handgun around with them huh?
Go Korea! I don't think they'll win against France or Switzerland though unfortunately.
Drat your high blog stats Gary! I'll win, one day, when I take over the world!
Woah, posting hate messages so extreme that they were edited out of a neo-Nazi forum is extreme indeed. Lol, Craig Harrison deserves whatever punishments are meted out to him and then some.
06/14/06 21:26
Corrected some spelling mistakes in my last post.
To clarify, the sessions I mentioned refered to summer school orientation sessions. Luckily I got there on time and the thing only took me one hour once I got there. Summer school should be good, get to learn at my own pace as long as assignments are handed in on time. One problem is that I'm not supposed to read ahead and the teacher can track that so I really can't read ahead. Drats. Getting back was another matter. It's scary driving on the 401 during rush hour!
See, refuse to negotiate with the natives until the blockades are down and they go right down. Following the law works dammit, so do it quicker next time and don't let the natives walk all over us.
Uh ohs, market meltdowns. Hope we don't get hit by recession. That would be bad for me.
Hope I get everyone that I want to sign my yearbook to sign it before 1500 on Friday. People not showing up to class kinda complicates things for me. That and that writing an entry takes a while, lol. Nice that I got into the yearbook so many times. I count 12 pictures with me in it :) That nerd specimen is me at computer yearbook one. Note the backpack, the hair, the gap shirt with the zipper all the way up :p
06/13/06 20:59
Got new songs, yay. And they were English ones too :p
Ugh, going to have to go all the way to Etobicoke right after school tomorrow, and I mean right after school. Damn sessions start at 1600 and I need to get there early to line up for them. *grumble
Mmmm... Free pizza...
Oh yea, I'd like to know who actually reads this. Could you email me? I'm just curious.
06/12/06 17:08
Friday was so fun. It was the formal, and yea. Had to dress up and stuff, that was annoying, but it was good. The salad sucked, but that was okay, the chocolate cake made up for it. So good... Mmmm... Chocolate... The music was excessively loud though. I only danced for about 0.5 of an hour, then I left as one of my ears was actually hurting. I think it's because I never turn my music player volume loud so my ears are kinda sensitive. The courtyard was really nice, especially at night. All the trees, and the fountains, and the lights... Fun. I wonder how many people went up to the second level of the courtyard? The stairs were kinda blocked off by benches, but I just moved them over. It was really nice up there, no smoke smell and the view was great. The only drawback was that there weren't any chairs up there. Well, there was one plastic one, but that one was covered in soot or something. The afterparty was fun too, after all, how can one not have fun playing video games? Lol. The movies kinda polluted my mind though, lol. I actually stayed up all night till 0700, my first all nighter ever. I paid for it though, especially since I hadn't had enough sleep all week so I already had a sore throat going into the formal, and when I left... Well... Yea. I'm recovering now though, just have a slight cough but lots of phelgm is it called, called tam in cantonese, stuck in my throat. Ah well, it was fun.
Went to the cottage on the weekend, that was good, although eating out at the cottage sure is expensive. 7 dollars for a single fish burger (no drinks or fries), 50 dollars for some salad, a steak with trimmings, and apple pie slice with whipped cream. Went canoeing and fishing for the first time ever. The canoeing was okay, though I spent most of that time worrying that someone was going to tip the canoe over (very bad since I can't swim and had my cellphone and wallet in my pocket at that moment. Fishing was okay, though I can't see why people like it so much. I spent several hours and all I caught was a sunfish the size of my hand, though at least I caught something. No one else caught anything. I also had a pike that was almost the length of my arm follow my bait all the way back to the pier, but it didn't bite unfortunately. I had several bites but kept losing the fish :(
School's been good, though stressful. I skipped third period today to walk to the public library and Wal-Mart. It saved me a trip to the library this weekend. Time well spent.
06/06/06 20:15
I wish people would stop attacking Islamic centres every time some terrorists get arrested or something. Just causes more trouble. Stupid window-breakers, I hope they trip and fall...
ACC interviews were... Interesting... Being an interviewer is much more fun than being the interviewee.
Video games are fun! Still missing 3 stages from SSBM, but they're like impossible for me to do. I really want that final destination stage, it's all flat with no elevated platforms. Such a nice flat simple stage. If only I could get someone to unlock it for me.
06/05/06 18:54
A Scarborough imam accused the charges against the terror suspects recently arrested here in Canada, as politically motivated and anti-Muslim. But of course, my question would be, isn't it kinda odd that all, if not most, suicide bombings in the present are conducted by people claiming to be Muslims? Also, if the suspects did order large amounts of high-grade fertilizer and neighbours report frequently hearing automatic gunfire... Yea...
Iran has threatened to use their countries oil supplies against the US, and therefore us. Is this not another good reason to take over Iranian oil facilities now, rather than wait for the supply to be cut off?
I just finished writing my bio exam today, so if it weren't for algeo, I could miss every other day of school and not miss any lessons at all since my chem stuff is also done and I have a spare. And after Thursday, I can also miss the other days too if it weren't for calculus. See how bad calc and algeo is? Prevent ing me from skipping school. *sigh My algeo test sucked. I lost so many, and I mean many, marks from my test from stupid errors. So frustrating.
You know what fruit tastes really good? Mangoes! They're easy to prepare, and taste soooo good. So sweet and juicy, and it's no hassle cutting them. Mmmm... Mangoes.
06/03/06 22:29
I've been reading an article on the economics of MMORPGs, specifically Ultima Online, and it's really interesting. I highly recommend anyone who has some free time to read it because it's such a neat little analysis of an aspect of computer games that most people probably don't think about. It'd be interesting to know if economists actually sometimes use these games to come up with theories and to test scenarios as it'd be an easy way to speed up the effects rather than having to wait like 70 years before seeing results. The article is located at http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html
Hm. Police conduct massive anti-terrorism raid here in Canada. Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, no matter what people say.
Kinda stuck on Eng summative.
06/02/06 22:29
Just arrest all the native protestors in Caledonia. Just kidding. Since our laws don't apply to them, cut off all funding to them. That's a better solution.
My compsci project is starting to piss me off. Everything looks nice and good, but it still runs into errors in certain situations for some unknown reason. I guess I'll just have to ignore them. On the plus side, almost everything is GUI and everything is text file based. Also, I didn't, as some people refer to it as, "spaghetti code" it. All of the variables also have properly descriptive names. With proper indentation. All that's missing now, other than getting the erros fixed an finishing the admin part, is java docs. And comments. But screw comments if I have to do java docs. Well, not me, Jen-wei :p
All the stress is really getting to me. I actually slapped Adam's cellphone away in calc and yelled at him during compsci. It was kinda funny watching Adam struggle to catch the cellphone. You know how in the cartoons the character keeps trying to catch it and the object keeps jumping up away from his hands? Well, it was exactly like that. Then Adam missed a catch and the cellphone dropped to the ground. I'm not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that the cellphone was still operational. But at least I don't think he'll be annoying anyone with it again anytime soon.
Oh, and I'm in the 90th percentile in that bio contest I wrote and first in my school. Go me. Got a nice little piece of paper to store with my other pieces of paper in a bag in my drawer. Chem I heard I'm second in my school in the contest. Pretty good.
06/01/06 20:25
Woo! Just compsci and eng summatives left with bio, calc, and algeo exams along with calc and phys tests.
Pets have now been included in rescue plans in the event of another disaster such as Katrina. I think that's just retarded as I feel that the effort should've been used in better helping people instead. I would think that humans would be much more important than animals.
I knew this would happen. The US has buckled and are now offering Iran a new deal in return for cessation of nuclear activities. Damn weak gov'ts.
05/30/06 22:28
Tech Fair was good. Missed all my classes :) Now at 8 lanyards :p
People have criticized the Pope for not criticizing Germany more during his visit to Auschwitz. But like really, how long do they want to keep bashing Germany for? Forever? It's been so long now, and they seem to have apologized enough over it already. Let the past lie now. Remember it so that it won't happen again, but there's no need to countinually shove it into their faces. Geez.
05/29/06 19:37
Wah! Going crazy from all the stress!
Yay, Edmonton advances to Stanley Cup finals!
I say bah to CUPE's boycott of Israel. They're not the ones setting off suicide bombs and deliberately targeting civilians. The wall will save lives by helping prevent attacks. Some stupid people never think things through before taking action. I guess the CUPE people who voted for this boycott are some of them.
Oh yes, book list is updated. Haven't updated in a while because one, I've been busy, and a couple of the books I read weren't that great.
05/25/06 19:42
Lol, reporters are so funny. You know that report on Iran? WEll, see, apparently, someone informed the reporter about it, but that someone went on vacation before it could be confirmed. The reporter then called a rabbi, who said the story was true. The reporter then called the Iranian embassy who refused to say anything, and on and on this goes. So, end result, those provisions weren't in the actual bill, it might have been mentioned, maybe not, don't you just love the media? :)
You know that Everest story? The one with the guy with no legs climbing to summit, and the dying guy? My opinion is that the guy should have been left to die because one, he was beyond saving anyways, and two, he was being an idiot when he bought his supplies and when deciding to go on without sherpas.
So stressed. Algeo test tmr, and chem, phys, and compsci summative pres next week, eng summative next next week, and bio exam and calc, chem test sometime in the near future.
05/20/06 21:49
Correction to yesterday's post on Iran. Change "going" in first sentence to "considering".
I saw the Da Vinci Code movie today. It was okay, as expected. It wasn't better than, nor worse than my expectations.
Parking at Pacific Mall today was hard! It took me like 10-15 minutes to find a spot to park. I had to follow somebody with a shopping cart to her car and then wait there to get a spot. It was crazy.
05/19/06 21:34
I forgot to mention this before. Don't you find it annoying how people keep calling for more after-school programs and stuff to reduce crime? Maybe you don't, but I do. I grew up without any after school programs or going to any community centres and I'm a law-abiding citizen. So there isn't many after-school programs, so what? Why not go home and study, or watch TV, or go to the public library to read, or go play some road hockey with friends? I say bah to those calling for more money to be wasted on more youth programs. It's like rewarding people for bad behaviour. Those that commit criminal acts are bad people and aren't worth investing in. Better to just get rid of them. And another thing that bugs me, those that say, oh he/she's had brushes with the law, but I know that he/she wouldn't be involved in
05/19/06 19:09
Lol, my bio summative was screwy. I forgot to study for a major part of it (turns out to be like 90% of it), but luckily, I got one of my studious friends as my partner in it so I think we did fine. Either that or we crashed and burned. Hopefully we did well.
Well well, Iran is going to have badges for non-Muslims. Hmm.... Sounds similar to something that happened in the 1930s... Anyways, here's the really really interesting thing. Colours like red, yellow, and light blue are considered too "gay" and the devil's colours. Guess what colours the badges are for non-Muslims? Red, yellow, and light blue! The Jews get a yellow strip of cloth, Christians get a red badge, and Zoroastrians (w/e the hell they are) get light blue cloth. See, we should just invade them and take over their oil facilities. That should those assholes a lesson.
I heard the Da Vinci movie was a bit disappointing. Oh well, I'll be the judge of that when I go see it tomorrow. I hope there isn't too many scary scenes in it.
05/17/06 16:23
One of my friends, Gary WK, was speaking at the mesh conference in Toronto yesterday. I wished I could've attended, but unfortunately, classes and a several hundred dollar ticket price prevented that. Oh well, he had his mesh, I had my enterprise.
The chem summative today was surprisingly easy. All the questions were laid out step-by-step. Very likely that most people got perfect on it. If only this titration part could've been made to be worth 10% total, 5 practical, 5 calculations. Then reduce the other summative portions to 3 presentation, 2 written.
Comp sci summative is going really badly. The GUI is difficult to handle and partner and I, even though we're trying two separate ways for a login, keeps running into errors. And this is just the first part. This is going to be a very difficult summative to complete. I think a lot of people are trying to look for source code online to copy/modify, but that seems like cheating to me.
It's really sad how an anti-spam company recently had to shut down due to threatening emails to its clients and that it was being attacked by spammers. The solution to this would be to introduce harsh sentences for spammers. Of course, spammers are usually in other countries so we'd need some sort of international agreement/committee to deal with that, but of course, looking at the UN, that's not going to happen. Or if it does, it'll pretty much be ineffective and a drain on our resources.
I'm stressed.
05/15/06 16:23
I was just looking at the police blotter section in the National Post today, and we had people go on a crime spree this weekend. The list used two pages and still had two more crimes to list. Number 43 is odd. Cable and copper wire stolen from Hydro One Networks. Why the heck would someone want 5000 dollars plus of cable and copper wire?
Chem titration lab was easy, but the calculations will be difficult I'm afraid. Oh well. Got to catch up on physics.
05/14/06 16:04
I've decided to clean up some of the useless parts of my site. So, delete button time.
05/14/06 16:04
Happy Mother's Day!
Just got back an hour and a half ago from the Rotary Club Camp Enterprise thing. It was fun, 2.5 days away in Claremont. I feel so out of sync now, need to catch back up to reality.
05/11/06 20:51
I've been watching more Zelda on the Wii videos, and I've been thinking, the Wii controllers must make it very easy in melee combat since you can quickly do the shield shove, and especially deadly, the spin attack. Too easy maybe. But it must be hard using the bow and arrow since you can't quite hold your hand steady. It must really kill the precision on the bow which really sucks as one of the things I really enjoyed in OOT was sniping things, especially the guards in that desert fortress, from as far away as possible. I sure hope they make both Zelda versions the same for the GC and Wii. If they did something like in Windwaker where you had to have a GBA to access everything in the game, then I'd be quite unhappy to say the least.
05/11/06 19:41
I would've posted yesterday, but Canadian Geocities was down.
Anyways, did you watch the E3 videos??? They were so cool! I am of course talking about the Nintendo ones. The other ones don't matter. My eyes were so strained yesterday after 3 hours straight of videos. I can't wait for Twilight Princess to come out. I probably won't be able to play the Wii version since it's unlikely my parents will let me buy one, but at least I'll be able to do the Gamecube one. I just saw a trailer for the new Smash Bros. title, Brawl. It looks really nice. I wonder why they put in the no-suit Samus character? All of the Metroid games had her in full suit. Link got a costume upgrade. It's funny, because in the trailer, Link had a new totally new look from the Twilight version, Mario seems to have his denim upgraded, Pikachu was only made a brighter yellow, and Kirby... Well, Kirby looked the same. Lol. The new super attack looks quite cheap, especially if it's only activated by getting the item first. Quite unfortunate for me as my defence sucks. I use almost no defence in my games, so if someone launches one of those attacks, I'm screwed unless I get really lucky.
Lol, so now city coucillor Michael Thompson was "attacked" by a homeless person in Nathan Phillips Square. I thought it was only begging for spare change. I guess it was an attack in the context that it shattered those damn politicians little world where everything is okay. Notice how no bills were put forward regarding homelessness until one of them encountered a homeless person asking them for spare change? It seems that politicians will only do things if it affects them personally. We don't count for most of them. Oh, and an anti-poverty group is staging a protest against city coucillor Jane Pitfield for "hate-mongering, and attacks on the poor" when all she did was propose a bylaw banning panhandling on city streets. Well, I'd like panhandling banned too. It's one reason why I don't like going downtown.
Ooooo... Russia may start the arms race with the US again... Fun... I guess they didn't learn their lesson from the collaspe of the Soviet Union, that being that militaries are expensive and can cripple the economy.
Boooo! The US caved in and will start sending aid to the Palestinians. Sure, Hamas will by bypassed, but I'd bet all my money that the aid sent will still help Hamas. Even if they stuff sent doesn't directly benefit Hamas, it'll indirectly benefit them. It's telling them that if they wait long enough, everyone will eventually cave in and help them. Hamas or some other terrorist faction will of course take the credit for bringing much needed supplies and gain more support. Our national governments are so damn weak!
05/09/06 19:16
Ow, my elbow is still sore from the chem summative. I did not do well on that. I had to cut whole sections out of my essay or poorly condense it into a single sentence then shove it into a disorganized paragraph. Not good at all. Might even fail :( although I don't think it was quite that bad. But it was pretty bad. At least now I can relax for a couple of days before I start on the other bio, chem, phys, eng, and comp sci summatives... Al geo is really confusing me at the moment.
I've mentioned previously the bias in most media outlets against Israel. Further proof of this on the BBC website. I'm looking at a side banner on the website titled Features & Analysis (inside an article on the Middle East), and out of the six articles on it, there is not a single pro-Israel article while there are several pro-Palestinian articles. In fact, an entire article on this list was devoted to the grief over the accidental death of a West Bank woman. Of course, there was not a single mention of the many civilian casualties suffered by Israel through rocket attacks, suicide bombers, etc. You know, at least Israel was not diliberately trying to kill civilians while the other side is.
As for the articles calling for the release of funds for the PA, I still say don't. Don't even let aid through. They deserve this for electing a terrorist organization as gov't. It's not even like Hamas took over the PA by force, they were voted in.
On the issue of Quebec independence. In my opinion, we should let Quebec separate from Canada and not try to stop them. The only thing is that they must allow us to fly through their airspace with no restrictions and provide for us an adequate highway for us to go through from Ontario to the Atlantic provinces, and cede to us all it's water rights regarding Hudson's Bay, Arctic waters, Atlantic waters, and the St. Lawrence River. They must also take responsiblity for the federal debt in porportion to their population compared to the rest of Canada. After all, as long as we still get adequate access to the Maritime provinces and keep the St. Lawrence River and the waters surrounding Quebec then we don't lose anything. In fact, it would help Canada as we would no longer have to spend extra money on bilingualism nor pay them transfer revenue and our national debt would be reduced. As for federal revenue, it should be offset by the elimination of transfer payments to Quebec, the reduction in education costs with the elimination of French in the cirriculum, and the lowered interest payments on our debt.
05/07/06 21:46
I'm really busy right now, and yet lazy, so I'll just leave you with this: did you know that toads sound like a rapidly repeating dial tone? I didn't know that until today. In fact, if you rapidly say wat, it'll sound somewhat like what a toad sounds like. They do not go ribbit. Frogs do, not toads.
05/06/06 00:20
Ugh, just finished physics summative. Need to proofread though. I've backed it up, so will print it on Monday or something then proofread on paper. 2039 words. Go me. Still need to get chem research photocopied this weekend, and study for another killer physics test. Gary had better not forget the internet sources...
Will go to library tmr. Er, today. Or Sunday. For photocopying. I'm dreading the cost. Still need to look through the 12 books first though.
Too sleepy/tired for larger post.
05/04/06 22:05
Bleh, didn't work on my physics at all today. I was stuck talking on MSN Messenger and trying to complete my algeo assignment the whole time.
iTunes crashed twice on me today, along with Firefox once, and MSN Messenger once. I blame iTunes since it crashed first. Stupid Apple software.
My team won by one question today in Reach for the Top. Go team 8!
I was talking to one of my friends yesterday about a new idea I had for a website. More on that another day if I remember and have time to talk about it. He's talking at the mesh (Canada's web 2.0) conference. Go him :) Nice to see that at least one person I know is going to be really successful, although I did read that one's happiness is largely based on one's success compared to one's peers, so maybe not so nice for me, lol. I'd attend too if it weren't for the fact that it's not free and I'd have to miss school. Personally, I like the first day better, he likes the second better. He's more interested in the tech sections, me the political ones. Ah well. Perhaps he will go the future of newspapers one, as he's not going to the mashing the vote one.
I did my comp sci presentation today. It went well I think, although I took longer than expected. One of my friends neglected to print out his powerpoint presentation and found out too late that he made his background and text too dim for him to read. Ended up that I had to whisper him the titles of the slides. Ah well, he still did good I think. Had me a Star Trek background for my powerpoint presentation :) It looked so nice. It was the one on startrek.com that has the Starfleet logo carved into wood. Really nice.
05/03/06 21:33
It's May! Happy happy joy joy happy happy joy Lol. Nice warm weather. Perfect weather for my field trip down to the Ontario Science Centre today. We did DNA fingerprinting. Fun. Even though our end result was messed up (My group's DNA didn't replicate, we blame the fact that one of the chemicals they gave us froze and we had to warm it by hand). We had about 3 hours of free time, which I used really well to explore the various exhibits and go hiking. Yes, hiking, I'll explain. During our 1.5 hour long lunch break, I had lunch with 2 of my friends in an outdoor lunch area of the Ontario Science Centre. We saw a racoon about 3 metres away from us. It looked like it wanted to jump onto the garbage can on our level (it was on an eleveated part), but was scared of us and all the other humans eating lumch around us. Eventually it went away, but when we were leaving we saw that it did get some food. Anyways, then we spotted a path through the "Hope Garden" (that was what the area was called), and we decided to follow it as we didn't really want to go back in. We were enjoying the fresh air and had seen the exhibits many times before. The path led us long the edge of the building, and eventually, we came to another lunch area. We peered over the railing and noticed two people down by the side of the lake that was beside the sci centre. We were wondering how they got down there when I spotted a path that led down, so we followed it down. Long story short, we kept following it even after it petered out to a tiny dirt path, had lots of fun going up and down the very steep slopes (my 2 friends had to crawl up a section, but I didn't as I figured out a way to walk up the hill without using my hands or falling :p). We concluded that the path went all the way around the lake (and so discovered a way of getting into the sci centre for free as the path would lead to a cycling path that anyone could use), and headed back as it was almost time to go back to our lab. The cave exhibit was fun, espically when you manage to scare people. Fun day!
The new federal budget. Good stuff. But nothing really wow. As National Post said, the Liberals would've come up with an almost identical budget. The GST cut was stupid. To help pay for it, income taxes were raised, so it's like no tax break at all, but what can you expect from politicians? One Conservative said it was a tax cut because the GST was lowered now, and it'll be a little while before the Liberal income tax cuts were reversed. Lol. One of the writers for the National Post criticized the budget for not being a deficit budget. His arguement was that it was like not being able to buy a home until one had all the money required. The money invested now would return in the future. I disagree because for the federal gov't, it'd be like buying another house with a mortgage when one still had a huge one to pay off now. Sure you'll get more rent money, but that's assuming that the market is good and you're able to rent out the place, and that interest rates on your mortgage don't go through the roof, or that you won't have unexpected financial difficulties like a huge lawsuit or medical bill. I feel that the surplus the federal gov't should all be spent on debt reduction to pay off our current mortgage so we have less interest payments in the future and so save more money to spend on other things. I think that budgets should only go into deficit when extraordinary circumstances, like war or a major disaster, warrants it. If the gov't can countinue to delivery quality services without going into deficit, then it shouldn't and use the money to pay off the debt. If all of the debt is paid off, then use the money to fund scientific research so that everyone, including future generations, can greatly benefit. Gotta love the budget cartoons, lol.
Drats, a Canadian team got beaten out of the playoffs, specifically the Canadiens. Canadian, Canadien, lol.
Need 697 more words for my physics summative. Unfortunately, most of my good ideas are gone. *Sigh So stressful. What with calc test tmr, physics on monday, chem summative on monday...
04/27/06 20:03
Ahaha, I paniced on my chem test today because I wasn't sure how to do the questions. I'll be ranting for a bit in today's post. Need to get some frustrations out.
Wii?!?! What the bloody hell was Nintendo thinking when it named its new console Wii!?! That name sounds so pathetic! Revolution was by far a better name. It sounded cool. Wii sounds... Stupid.
As always, the US is being unfair in its trade deals. After ignoring, all the NAFTA and, I'm pretty sure, WTO rulings in Canada's favour in the softwood lumber dispute, we're still going to lose out on the tentative agreement reached yesterday. Of the 5 billion dollars in illegal taxes the US has imposed on our lumber, we only get 78% back. The US keeps 22%, with 11% going to US lumber companies. We also get all these restrictions that let the US impose huge taxes on the lumber, such as the anti-surge part and the part where the taxes increase if the price of lumber drops below 360 dollars per thousand board feet. That is so stupid. That's like saying, oh yea, I admit I robbed you of 100 dollars. Tell you what, I'll give you back 78 dollars, I get to keep 11 dollars, I'll give your enemies 11 dollars, and you have to let me rob you of more money once in a while. Our negotiators are useless! The US needs oil. We have oil. Why can't we just start imposing additional taxes on our oil exports to the US if they don't agree to our terms?! Free trade my ass... More like free trade for the US and US protectionism for everyone else while having to listen to US rants about how unfair other countries' trade practices are. Damn the US.
Ah, yes, Zimbabwe, Africa's breadbasket, a thriving nation, a shining example for other African countries. Now lets see what land reform has done, after all, it's hardly fair that 4000 white farmers own most of its farmland. It's been six years, so surely the nation has only improved. Hm. No working relationship with the IMF or the World Bank after refusing to make payments on 4.5 billion US dollars in loans five years ago. Cut off from most forms of foreign aid due to rampant corruption. World's fastest shrinking economy, a 333300% increase in price of basic hospital visit in a week, 1 million Zimbabwean dollars worth 10 US dollars which is also how much a hospital visit in urban areas cost now, hospitals short of supplies and run by Cuban/Congolese doctors as local doctors have fled the country, ox-drawn ambulances, highest inflation rate in the world at 913.6% but expected to go over 1000% a year by the end of this month (unofficially, its at 2000%), costs 35 million Zimbabwean dollars for family of six to survive when six years ago a luxury apartment cost 1 million, Zimbabwean dollar losing half its value every 20 days due to collasping economy, 500 dollar bills nicknamed Ferraris in reference to how fast value is lost, 25% dependent on international food aid to survive, 2500 deaths a week from AIDS related illnesses, 8 out of 12 Zimbabweans at risk of death from starvation/disease, lowest life expectancy in the world at 34 years for women and 37 for men compared to 58 twenty six years ago, 80% drop in farm output since land reforms, 80% unemployment rate, 90000 dollars for loaf of bread compared to 20 cents 26 years ago, and 5 years in a row of food shortages. Great... Nice to see those land reforms worked so well... At least that policies gone now, as the gov't has agreed to lease back land to the 300 white farmers left in the country. Of course, that land used to belong to them before the land reforms caused them to be taken away with no compensation. Now we can assume the gov't has learned its lesson and won't be seizing anything more without compensation right? You wish. The gov't recently announced that 51% of all foreign-owned mines will soon be transferred to the gov't. Half of them without compensation. Gee, I have no clue how that will go. Ah, Africa, the black hole of foreign aid. Money goes in, and almost nothing comes out.
Quebec language rights groups are being retarded again. Wait, not again, they've always been retarded. Anyways, now they're filing over 800 complaints to the gov't about the lack of French in video games, appliances, and Web sites. CompuSmart and Office Depot have been fined for selling English only video games. Seriously. Quebec's stupid. I mean like, these aren't even gov't websites or games. Just don't visit those sites or play those games if you're that offended by the lack of French. Such whiners. And no good excuse for whining either.
You know that triple murder that was splashed across the front page of the newspapers a couple of days ago? Well, more details have come out. The 12 yr old girl and the 23 yr old guy were dating. Like, wtf?
Keep the first past the post system you asses! No to proportional representation! I'd rather not have crazy parties gaining seats and fractured minority gov'ts one after the other.
What the US should do: Withdraw from all Iraqi areas except those needed to export oil, destroy the leadership of Iran and immediately take over Iranian oil facilities to prevent sabotage whilst searching and destroying Iranian nuclear facilities. Not only will this lessen the amount of casualties in Iraq, it'll remove the Iranian threat and get more oil from the Middle East. Repeat for any Middle Eastern countries that try to restrict oil flow. After all, we only need the oil.
Go abortion. The fetus won't mind, its brain isn't developed enough.
04/25/06 20:10
Waaaaaaahhh! Algeo ruined my day today. I literally FAILED, under 50%, my algeo test today. I didn't get the last two questions, nor any of the mulitple mark questions, except one, on the front side. Failed by 3 marks :( I calculated it. Even though I think I did amazing on my bio test, it still didn't make me happy as it was pretty much expected while I didn't think I'd do THAT badly on the algeo test. Apparently, I could of solved those questions on the front side by using a variable for missing info, but I didn't think of it that way as it wasn't calculus class, so I was struggling to find a way just using the numbers... Damn algeo!
04/21/06 18:30
Carnival was fun, but I still think it was a waste of money. 1.25 hours in line for free popcorn...
Stressful few days ahead. Need to finish comp sci proj today, sat and sun will be used for physics.
Oh, and yearbook's problem been solved. Sort of. Not solved in that part of the network still isn't working. Solved in that its not my problem anymore because the problem was with the connection, not the computer or wire.
Watching Voyager being digested by a bio-plasmic organism :)
04/19/06 18:19
Mmmm... A nice and cold Fudgsicle after rollerblading...
InkLink!
Hm. RSS feed not updating. Wonder why?
Yearbook's computers are so frustrating!
04/19/06 17:11
There was something I wanted to talk about, but I forget what. Oh well.
Going to have a really busy and stressful 6,7 days. Damn school.
Today was the Euclid contest, which I didn't sign up for for the same reason I didn't sign up for the physics one, you have to show your work/proof. I can't do that. I can tell you what the answer is, but ask me how I got it and I'll have no clue. SO anyways, they were using my algeo classroom, and my teacher was also supervising it, so we didn't have algeo class. But he neglected to inform us the class before so I showed up and had nothing to do. Keep in mind I also had a spare first period, so I actually could've not come to school till 12:15. Oh well. So I spent first period studying for bio quiz which I did really bad on, and I forgot to ask Mr. Burns for a free answer, so there goes one mark. 2nd period was good. I went outside and solved bio and algeo problems. The fresh air and sunshine was nice.
04/18/06 21:27
Most things I talk about can be found in the National Post of the day I posted.
Oh, and something else. Two teenagers in New York launched a lawsuit in 2003 against McDonald's. They claim that McDonald's food made them fat and want McDonald's to fund a program telling people the dangers of eating some of McDonald's food. That's just plain stupidity. Sure the food is unhealthy, but so is Harvey's food, and Burger King's food. In fact, all fast food is unhealthy. But then, what about this? WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP EATING THE FOOD YOU IDIOTS??? McDonald's didn't force you to eat it. You ate it of your own free will. You could've also exercised more. I've eaten plenty of food at McDonald's but I'm not fat. In fact, I'm quite skinny. Idiots I tell you! Blaming McDonald's for their own unhealthy choices. I support the elimination of such people from our population. What they take from our world vastly outweighs what they contribute, what little they contribute at all.
My school has been fundraising for the Brick-by-Brick campaign to build a school for needy children. We got to vote on a country. The choices were Seirra Leone, Kenya, China, and I think, Sri Lanka. The outcome of the vote is near guaranteed with like 90% of the students being Chinese. I swear, if China doesn't win, that voting process was rigged. I heard some people say that China is a rich enough country, but that's not true. All of the wealth is concentrated in the cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and even then, in a small part of the population. The vast majority, especially in the rural areas are really poor. Like subsistence farming poor.
04/18/06 20:45
I've started rating the songs in my iTunes library, with the objective of being able to select the 'choose higher rated songs more often' for my iPod Shuffle (the Shuffle is the best version as it has the best mix of size, value, durability, weight, and visual appeal). Unfortunately, every song I've come across so far I've given the highest rating which isn't going to help. In retrospect, some of the songs I gave the 5-star rating didn't deserve it, but... What can I say? My songs are so good!
Wow, FIFA has condemned Israel for an air strike on an empty soccer field even after repeatly refusing to condemn other more horrific incidents in other countries, also involving soccer by the way, because, according to FIFA president Sepp Blatter, "We're not going to enter into any political declarations. We in football, if we entered into such discussions, then it would be against our statutes. We are not in politics." But of course, double-standards have existed for Israel in most areas. Any condemnation from FIFA from rocket attacks by Palestinians on an Israel soccer field, which did injure people (this actually only happened a few days before the Israeli air strike)? Nope. None. Any toward Iraqi torture of its own players for losing? Nope. What about the turning of soccer stadium into jails in Argentina? Nah. The detainment of about 7000 people in Chile's national soccer stadium? No. What ahout when the Taliban was using UN-funded soccer fields to publicly flog and kill people? Not a peep. Hmm... How about this one? Israeli players on teams like the English teams Bolton and West Ham had to stay home while their team played in Dubai? Nope. Many other examples like this exist. The media isn't helping either. In fact, it's doing the opposite. When the FIFA story first ran, Associated Press, al-Jazeera, LA Times, CBC (wtf?!?! CBC?!?!) only mentioned the Israeli air strike but not the rocket attack on an Israeli soccer field. Remember, the Israeli one took place when the field was empty, no injuries/deaths happened, while the rocket attack on the Israeli one resulted in injuries. Makes you think doesn't it?
04/16/06 13:41
Rollerblading makes me hungry.
04/15/06 22:46
I finished my taxes today. Yay. I really don't have much else to say. I'm bored.
Starcraft was fun though. I made a map, but I never managed to test out the triggers because somebody kept suiciding in the game. If the triggers work and the players haven't peeked at the triggers, they're in for a few surprises... Heh heh heh... Maybe I should put a few more in... Nah, too lazy.
04/14/06 21:02
I can't believe I've never mentioned this before. Isn't it funny how the tree was the tree of knowledge of good and evil? I thought knowledge was a good thing, especially if it let you tell good from evil. And why wasn't the tree surrounded by an impenetrable barrier? That would've prevented any eating of the fruit. Odd isn't it? I'll leave you with those thoughts :p
04/14/06 17:49
I got my first piece of spam in my Gmail account yesterday. Darn you people who put my gmail email in Friendster or whatever other network you've signed for! Use my Hotmail one!
On a related note on emails, I recieved an email today about "The Meatrix." Well, in response to the movie, I'd like to say that the closest "good" grocery store in my area is over 10 km away. So if I were to shop there, I'd have to drive there and pollute the environment with car emissions, use up valuable petroleum, have to spend more money on gas, and waste more time grocery shopping. Also, the factory farms increase the efficency of production of food products, thus lowering our grocer bills. Farmers benefit from the arrangement because they get a salary from the corporation, ensuring a steady supply of income and peace of mind, in return for work that they would normally do anyways. One solution would be to start competing with the corporations in buying farms. You can buy the farms and run it your way. Let's see how long you last before you go bankrupt. As for the animal cruelty part, well, we're already raising them for the sole purpose of being killed for food. May as well ensure that food tastes good. And not kill our bank account. Besides, you're not going to be able to feed the world on, er, family farms, unless there's a drastic drop in human population.
04/13/06 21:17
Ah, the four day weekend. Too bad I've got English questions to do, a Calvin cycle to memorize, comp sci stuff to do, and if I wasn't so lazy, but I am, physics and chem research to do.
Liberal leadership candidates are dropping like swatted flies. But Ignatieff is still in. My prediction is on track :)
Oh, you should have read that section in the editorials in the National Post yesterday, or was it the day before? I don't know. It was recent though. It was an excerpt from a web bulletin thingy for parent's living in a certain section in New York city. Someone had found what they called a missing boys hat and wanted to return it to its owner. But of course, there are morons in the world, and the replies turned into a debate into how did the person know it was a boys hat, why couldn't it have been a girl wearing that hat, how do we know what a hat really is, blah blah blah. This is what's wrong with the world today. Everything is turned into some issue about gender-equality, human rights, or some other thing that should be totally unrelated to the initial topic.
One of these days, I'll get myself a Starfleet uniform. Probably a blue one if I manage to become a doctor.
04/08/06 15:35
Just noticed I had added the previous post on the bottom, lol. It's been fixed now.
There's been so much traffic on Sheppard going west that I've decided to drive to the library tomorrow. There's too many books on hold for me to bicycle there and back as I don't want to risk the books not fitting in my backpack. I wonder why there's so much traffic today. It's a Saturday. Not even rush hour either.
I'm surprised that Belinda dropped out of the leadership race. I think she would've had a good chance of being a finalist at least. I think Ignatieff is probably going to win. The only blemish for him is that I don't think he's got that much experience in politics and he's lived in the US for the past 30 something years I think?
Gary's comic page has been so useful, just one link for all my favourite comics except Dilbert. That I get through email.
I'm thinking of going to McMaster now. I just looked up Ottawa, and it's campus doesn't look too nice from the map I saw. It also seems to have a problem with their French students basically hijacking the language there. According to Wikipedia, I don't know how reliable this is, all newsletters and stuff have to be done in French then English. If it's English then French, it's destroyed and a new copy is made. Doesn't seem a very pleasant atmosphere for someone who can't speak French fluently. It does give the highest scholarship money, and it's students are, um, stupider. On the other hand, it's also larger. McMaster is in between in terms of student intelligence I think, it's campus looks nice, and it's the smallest. It's scholarship is the second-lowest or the lowest though. As for Western, it's really nice in everything. But, it's students are probably going to be the smartest, and it's offering either the lowest or second-lowest scholarship. Western's scared me off (too good for me). So right now McMaster looks to be ahead of the other two. If only Ottawa wasn't bilingual... Then it'd be ahead of McMaster.
The counter keeps jumping around. I was expecting it reset when I made this new page, but it went to 560 something. Now it's at 99. Weird.
04/06/06 21:43
Doing pretty good in SMG. Not bad considering I hadn't logged in in like a month. I make good stock choices, none of them fell drastically and I had a net gain of over 9% :) But those Gloucester kids are amazing. Or really lucky. One of them had over 139% gain, and they've got a lot of other people near the top too. Ditto for Lasalle although they aren't as high. Damn, how do they do it? They must trade and sell their stocks during class time, but still, the there's an hour delay and prices can drastically change during an hour so that benefit shouldn't be THAT much. Oh well, I guess it adds up over time. Least I'm top at my school :p Those poor teachers, they're getting owned in this by their students, lol.
04/06/06 21:25
Haven't posted in a while. Too lazy. Anyways, starting from now on, new entries will be posted on top so that RSS feeds can handle my page.
Danny Williams plays hard ball with oil companies :) Go him.
It's nice to know our gov't isn't completely stupid by bowing to pressure about the seal hunt like they often do on stupid issues.
Red Green show will stop taping new episodes. So sad. Oh well, it's had a good run, being the longest running Canadian comedy show. And I heard the Canadian Tire guy has been dropped. While I did find him slightly annoying, I've gotten used to seeing him, and now, another chapter of this era closes :p Looks like shows like Royal Canadian Air Farce will have to find another source of inspiration for their advertising jokes, lol.
I'm so rambling, but what are you going to do about it? Nothing! That's what, ahahaha. Oh, right. My counter's going to be reset again. ****, that's annoying. What, I'm not allowed to type asterisks? What's wrong with asterisks?
Oh yea, third place in regionals in Reach For The Top :)
Site Map-ish Thingy Links
My IQ according to Tickle from their classic IQ test.
My IQ according to Tickle from their Super IQ test.
My EQ according to Tickle from their EQ test.
The type of dog I am according to Tickle.
My CBC's Test the Nation results.
List of books I've read and remember and were good. Will be updated.
Television shows I watch. Will be updated.
Sim City 3000 screenshots
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