I've been to two birthday dinners this week, and boy am I stuffed. First was at Cinta with Charlotte, second at the Flying Burrito Bros with Ritu, both with lots of people and food and delicious moist cake. Ritu's cake was from Cha, which surprised me because I heard the Cha cakes were traps, but apparently not. The cream does taste rather artificial though, so as long as it's in moderation, it's okay.

I'll be burning off all that food at the badminton court tomorrow anyway.

Last night at 1am, the couple in the apartment above me decided it would be the opportune moment to have a domestic argument, firing F-Bombs every second word for a good 30 minutes or so. Being in the semi-conscious state I was, my first thought was "oh geez I hope I don't have to call the cops" followed by anxiously waiting for gunshot sounds. Sigh.

My horrendously bad Starcraft II streak continues. FML. I'm pretty sure I'm the worst player at work :(!

The weather has taken a turn for the worse, with bitterly cold wind and rain attacking the city for most of the week. Today was the first day I had to wear my polyprops. I have to say, the awesome jacket and gloves I bought from Hong Kong have definitely come in handy! I don't know how I survived last winter without something as snuggly and warm.

I just downloaded and watched the youth skit that the Ignite crew put on for the service on May 16th 2010. Great job guys! I felt compelled to share that with you.

I'm tired. I just got home from badminton. Whee~!

Portal is on Steam for free until May 24th, so I took the opportunity to download all 3.8GB of it. I'm still somewhere in the test chambers, but it's a very interesting (yet creepy) game.

Also on the gaming front, I finally gathered enough courage to play my first placement match in Starcraft II. I did a quick build for a banshee, got one out with a few more on the way, and took out all my opponent's SCVs with my lone banshee. When he realised what was happening, he sent some marines over but I had cloaked it and pretty soon after he quit. Victory was mine!

Yesterday I barely spent any time at home. It was an early start with badminton for an hour with Surya, Tyler and Leighton, a quick lunch at home, then the Wellington Food Show at Westpac Stadium with Mel and John. There was a lot of tasty things to sample, including oils, vinaigrettes, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, cheese, pizza, bacon, sausages, smoked chicken, clams, mussels, ice cream, wine, fruit cider, cocktail mixes... We spent around three hours there, tasting and taking pictures, before heading out and going for dinner at this pub on Tinakori Road. Yum!

I am the proud owner of one of these delicious babies, which I bought at a BARGAIN (under $450 NZD), AND it kills two birds with one stone (I needed new speakers...). So the hard part is finding out how to take one of these back to New Zealand...

Summary of the past few days: went for tom yum, met up with Sunni, ate some good old Malaysian kueh, walked pasar malam, had roadside durian, tried cold longan tau foo fah, had mango milk tea, played badminton and bought dinner for my extended family.

I have to go home soon! T_T

Thanks to a speedy recovery from the food poisoning and all the other FML items, I was pretty much 100% yesterday - good enough to have a very good appetite and also play 3 hours of badminton.

Anyway I've been doing a bit of site work (zomg!) so that it's easier for people to contact me. I only just realised that the contacts page doesn't work so that needs to be fixed first and foremost. I also merged the Websites and Programs sections into my Portfolio to save room on the menu.

Edit: And the Contact Me page is now up and running again.

Some things I forgot to mention last week: I saw Hamish Carter, Olympian, Gold Medallist and Auckland Grammar old boy, at the BNZ Food Court. He was buying sushi. I wanted to say hi to him but I was too shy and he was talking to someone else and it would have been cool to get a picture with him in retrospect but there were so many people around I would have looked really stupid and touristy and Azn.

Speaking of Azn, I got interviewed by some Azn magazine so if you see my mug somewhere, you'll know why. She asked me if the Government should be spending more money on the defense force.

Anyway, it has been a pretty bad start to the week. Yesterday I spent the whole day battling with freaking Metrowerksfail over some stupid access paths problem. Apparently, if you have two files of the same name but in different directories, and each of the directories are in your access paths, they are treated as duplicates. What a load of fail.

Following that, I played pretty badly at badminton. I was just smashing the shuttlecock in anger most of the time :p

Today I was just fixing some stupid sound problem and it boiled down to nothing to do with sound, but rather the directories in which the resources were located. Blah.

Yes I have strung those random words together purposefully.

I've been pretty busy this whole week - been out late every day except Wednesday when I was on cooking for the flat. Monday was badminton as usual, and that was great because one of my workmates joined me and Sunni for that. The weather was cold and miserable, but I had the car so that was sweet.

Our favourite oboist, Alex, was down from Auckland with the New Zealand Youth Orchestra, so we enjoyed a night of classical harmonies and a touch of opera. Quite cultured, indubitably.



Epic fail on Thursday as our team gathered to submit our game to Sony. The requirements are eight authoring-quality DVDs, which means disks are $25 and burning takes up to two hours on a 1x speed burner. We were five disks through when we realised they didn't boot, and that we had some extra files on there that we shouldn't have. So that was a good $125 down the drain, thanks to my epic fail, and so I stayed late at work to help finish the disks. On the brightside, they were eventually completed and we couriered our precious cargo to Sony. Phew.

Also, I finally finished Braid - the best puzzle game I have ever played. It is an incredibly well thought-out game, with extremely clever puzzles and mechanics that will explode your mind. Braid is available on Xbox Live Arcade, and I highly recommend it for dedicated gamers who live for the satisfaction of solving intense problems.

Oh, by finished, I mean I got the 60 puzzle pieces as well as the Closure Achievement. I didn't get the stars or do a speed run ¬.¬