It's always good when I go back up to Auckland to catch up with friends and family, and certainly Easter this year was no exception. The weather was warmer than Wellington, albeit a bit wet, but that didn't stop any of plans. Thursday night was spent at Momo's, naturally, and all of Friday I was helping my father build a deck. We made some pretty good progress - the remainder that we didn't finish required the use of a jig saw that we didn't have at the time.

On Saturday, I met up with Wellington-related people for yum cha: Jordan (current workmate), Bryce and Vaughan (ex workmates), Will (workmate's brother), Charlotte (flatmate), Jono (flatmate's boyfriend) and Mel (flatmate's boyfriend's ex-flatmate). The restaurant was extremely busy but we were finally seated at 12.50pm where we proceeded to enjoy a plethora of prawn and pork dishes. Excellent!

The Sidhe guys relocated to the Cock and Bull after lunch for a few drinks, until I left to return home via two bus routes. It surprised me that the Link bus now costs $1.80! I remember the good old days when it was $1. I met up with my CompSci friends at Sri Mahkota for dinner, and Movenpick in Newmarket for dessert.

On Easter Sunday, I was at KCC catching up with the old youth group and various other people, before heading to Wing Wahs for another yum cha, then Yifans and MCC in town for some gaming. DotA... so good. Sunday night was family dinner night, so I got to spend some time with my adorable three month old nephew.

Monday was pretty wet. I met Mat for a bromantic lunch in quite possibly the most inappropriate suburb for two males to socialise in - Ponsonby - and we made plans to meet up with Peter, visiting from Canada, that evening. I wanted to take them to KK but unfortunately that was closed so we ended up dining at the Thai restaurant across the road. We stopped by Ollies on the way to the airport, and then just like that, my four day escapade was over.

It's a busy time for me. Only three more days...

Okay I haven't died yet, it's just been pretty boring on the news front for the blog.

Let's see, I've spent the last two weeks practically home alone: two flatmates in the South Island, one in Australia for a week, means one Jeremy at home cooking delicious food for himself, and playing absurd amounts of DotA. Not that either of these things are bad. I brought DotA to work on my iPod in the hope I could attract some interest and get my workmates to play as well.

I had a flatwarming for three of my workmates last night too. They live about 20 minutes up the road from me, so maybe I'll see them on the bus or walking home or something. But it was a pretty cool party, got to hang out with people and socialise and stuff. Woo~. Got caught by the rain as I went home, but luckily the bus was on time and I managed to minimise the wetness.

I've been doing a lot of web development lately. I fixed some spam bot problem with my Shoutbox a few minutes ago, and I thought I'd blog about something that's been infuriating me for the past few weeks.

The majority of the world have this program installed on their machines and actively use this malicious application. I do not know the exact numbers, but whatever the statistics are, it is far too much for people to being using such filth every day.

I am, of course, talking about Internet Explorer.

Who the hell at Microsoft decided to make a substandard browser with so many security flaws and a blatant disregard for web coding standards just to piss developers off? Morons. Absolute bloody morons.

In this site I've been working on (You know the one, Stephen :O), I have this search box that appears onmouseover, and it disappears when you click outside the box, but should remain visible when clicking inside the box. The easiest way to implement this was to cancel the bubbling effect that events have, that is, clicking inside a table will trigger its onclick, its parents onclick and continue up the chain until there are no more onclick handlers.

So, if the table onclick is specified and the event.returnValue parameter is set to false, I can use this value to prevent subsequent calls to the onclick handler. Thus, when it gets to the body onclick, inside the handler, I just return prematurely if event.returnValue is false.

Yup, that's all great. Works wonderfully on Firefox. This behaviour also works on Internet Explorer too...oh, wait. Hold on a second. By specifying that the event's returnValue is now false in Internet Explorer, all onclick handlers no longer work. That means onclicks for anchor tags and submit buttons. What kind of stupid system is that?

I resorted to using the following code:



Clicking on the innermost <div> with "Click" calls myFunction. myFunction sets eventHandled["onclick"] to be true, and prevents bubbling up by halting execution of the onclick in the <table> and <body> tags. Finally at the <body> tag, the states are reset to ensure that the next onclick can be processed. Phew!

Stupid Internet Explorer.

(PS: I should look at getting some syntax highlighting...)

We watched the failed kayaking races on Friday and Saturday night, much to the surprise of John, Jono and myself as we listened to Dave's enthusiasm for the Kiwis in Beijing. Good effort though, but not quite the result we were hoping for. After that, we decided we would drown our sorrows with some feijoa vodka...so we went to New World and bought some mixing drinks. White Grapetise and feijoa vodka = epic win.

Andrew had cooked a whole pot of rice on Friday night that he didn't use at all, so on Saturday, I decided I would use it in the most Asian fashion possible - fried rice. I will let the pictures do the talking.



Weng-Hao and I also had a 90 minute DotA game where I was Zeus and he was Clockwerk, and we were against Mortred and Spectre. We didn't get sassed, but we just had serious issues trying to break the towers while defending our own. In the end, we broke all three lanes for Mega Creeps and for the win \o/

Went swimming on Sunday again - this time to Freyberg Pools on Oriental Parade. Good exercise, yay, whatever. But more to the point, we went to the Parade Cafe afterwards for a good hot chocolate and some wedges \o/!!! Good food, yay.

Poor Andrew had been stuck in his sleeping bag all afternoon, so when I got home, he was still watching the movies he had rented. I went into my room to do some work on my websites when I heard a crash from the bathroom. I thought it was just the clothes horse that had fallen and made a noise, since I thought Andrew was still lying on the couch...but around 30 seconds later came the call "...Jeremy...". I was rushed out to the bathroom where Andrew stumbled out, saying he'd just passed out, when he started blacking out just as I grabbed him and stopped him from faceflooring. Turns out he was dehydrated and dizzy from sitting in his sleeping bag for so long. Geez.

John came home pretty soon after and started diagnosing all sorts of problems. I offered my advice - clearly it was cancer or AIDS.

Also, FF3 sucks.

I am taking a break from packing... I'm trying to pack light so I can take some nice-to-haves back to Wellington like Pictionary, possibly Cranium (although Suni has Cranium already), a badminton racquet and possibly a shelf (A small one, of course).

Congrats to John and Wei for graduating in a Bachelor of Engineering today - I'm glad the weather held out during the day! Hopefully it'll fine up next week.

See you guys in Auckland soon! *sneaks off to play DotA*

We resolved on Friday night that we would go for yum char, since some of us hadn't been in a long time; or in the case of Jono, never been at all.

We chose to go to Majestic Cuisine, since it's such good value for money and the quality is pretty much up there. We had so much food.. prawn dumplings, scallop dumplings, vegetable dumplings, siew mai, rice noodle, char siu bao, glutinous rice, deep fried squid, pork ribs, pork pastries, mango pudding, tofu fa, custard buns, coconut cubes...simply awesome. However, there were not enough egg tarts and no more durian pastries :(



We had so much fun that Jane and Andrew could not contain themselves.



The rest of the day was spent napping and playing... DotA! Yay! :D

I walked home for the second day in a row. It was a really good walk..until it started raining. Then it became a run. A not-so-good run. But at least I ran home in time to play DotA, which is always good. Yesterday, though, I stumbled upon this cute little thing:





It was so cute. I clicked my finger and it bounded towards me, all happy to see me, so I patted it...while trying to take another picture. It wouldn't face the camera though, but you can see my hand extending out to scratch it. So cute 8d

I finally got put on a project at work. So starting Monday, I actually have some hard-out things to do! Hooray. No more extensive reading of the Intranet Wiki. I also got to know some of the QA Team on the 9th floor. One of them has this:



Epic, epic win. It's so cute T_T.

Anyway, we also had a company quiz after work, because one of the guys was leaving. We didn't do too badly, we came second out of five teams. One of the categories was "Wellington" -.- and another category was "Southland". In the end, our prize was $15 to spend at a bar of our choice, and we gave that to the guy who left in the spirit of..his..leaving. Or something. Yeah.

Lately I've been out of the flat a lot, so it was finally good to come home and play DotA with Weng Hao, Debs and Matt. Too bad the school kids couldn't join us... go to school and get a degree so you can get a cool job like mine!

Anyway, on Tuesday we went to another flat for dinner...friends of Andrew. Last night, I was peer pressured into going for Ceroc lessons. It was fun, but it was also the most awkward situation I have been in, in a long time. I was a bit late, and when I started, I had no idea what I was doing. And when you're the guy and you have to lead, and you don't know what you're doing, it means you tend to screw things up.

Anyway, we made a hasty exit from Ceroc to go to the pub, to drown our sorrows. Well, I didn't feel like spending $7 on beer, so I just sat around and chatted. We also went to McDonalds and I got a strawberry sundae there.

Hm, today is Valentine's Day (It's about time to end) and I got some chopsticks from Debs as a present. She got a box of Lindt as a present from me. Tomorrow is our first anniversary :3

As another week draws to an end, I finally got put somewhere at work. I think I'm going to be working on some internal framework, so while it won't directly affect the games you see on the market, it'll make a big impact to the games that we output. So I will try to sneak my name onto the credits some how.

I dunno, I've been really tired lately. Like I've been going to bed between 12am or 1am, and I've been waking up at 9am. And when I go to bed, I'm exhausted and doze off almost immediately. ¯\(º_o)/¯

Anyway, on Tuesday we all congregated at Uni again. I dropped by Admissions and gave Anna some resources to touch up her computer skills (Oh I need to send her some files too...). I paid IRD some overdue tax (*shakes fist*) and we basically just hung around town doing random things. We went to iMax and Yifans and...yeah. I was captivated by Advent Children playing at that game shop in iMax. After that we met up with the workers (Ted, Ray, Han) for dinner at Daikoku Ramen on Victoria St(the one with the white toilet *_*) and then we went to play random Warcraft mini-maps and DotA in -wtf mode.

Yesterday I went with my sister to visit Waikumete Cemetery (It's been 9 years >_o), just to clean up the plaque and make sure everything was alright. Then we tried to go to Yaruki for lunch but it was too packed, so we went to that place on the corner of Railside Ave and Great North Rd.. I think it was called Asuka?

Later that day I picked up Reuben from town and we went to Alice's place for dinner, where we were treated to the fine talents of the three girls that we cooked for last week. Dinner was overall superb, presentation was well done and the performance was....um.... yes. Uhm. Unique.

I've decided I need to be frugal. Overdue tax, speeding fine, new phone, birthday presents, Parachute...I can't wait for my first paycheck >_o

Wow..it's 2008 already. Happy New Year indeed - I hope you all had a wonderful celebration with family and friends.

I don't know, I feel a bit down. I'm uncertain of what 2008 holds for me, especially with moving down and starting work. I miss Debs, because I would have liked to spend New Year's with her. As I write this, she still has another 3 hours to go lol.

Anyway, in summary of what I have done: Burgerfuel was closed so Sam and I went to this takeaway called Alligators where they serve huge burgers; spent time with the youth group just chilling and playing games; went to Point Chev beach and watched the fireworks at the Sky Tower; made a toast (with Grapetiser) with the youth group to the New Year; got locked inside Coyle Park (damn Auckland Council); got let out from Coyle Park; went to Momo's :D and played DotA. It's been a great night.

Poor Sam. He's leaving tomorrow, so we had last Momo's forever tonight. I had a Taro Milk Shake with Mango Pudding. Alice got a Taro Milk Shake, with no pudding, but they gave her free pudding anyway -.- And Reuben got free pearls in his drink, and Deanna got free mango pudding in her drink too. And, in the Christmas spirit, we spent over $50 and got a free gift from Momo's! It was a doggie keyring that went straight into Sam's pocket. Haha, parting gift indeed.

Well, time for our last DotA game while Sam is in New Zealand ever! :3

We had a good LAN. There were nine computers at the peak time (Thursday night), with a few more people than that. It was more of a gathering, we didn't play that much DotA as one would expect. Rather, we went to Momo's, we went for a run, we cooked our own brunch...yeah it was pretty great. We even played some Mario Party DS (Yes! I know how it works now. Only one person needs Mario Party. All others use Download Play.)

Okay, so yeah, Momo's was great. I had a Papaya Milk Tea with Mango Pudding (One of Debs' favourites). We had stuffed ourselves sick with KFC for dinner, so we decided not to have any sticks.

As for the actual LAN, we had ups and downs. Networking was a breeze this time, so everyone was connected within a few minutes. DotA was great at times, and bad at times. Haha. Thomas thought he could be sneaky and stop screenwatchers by closing the laptop. So, he did. And the laptop hibernated. And he dropped from the game.

We had music practice immediately after the LAN, and by the time we finished it was around 9pm, and we hadn't had dinner so we went to Burgerfuel. I had a Three Degree Burn, and spud fries. I swear I've never demolished a burger that fast before. I was seriously hungry. But it was awesomely delicious, so it was all good.

Tomorrow, we're heading to a beach in Orewa as our end-of-year youth group activity. I hope it's good weather. I haven't checked. Also, shout out to ANDREW LONG: Happy Birthday! Hope you, Steven and Uncle Paul have a good flight to Malaysia. Eat lots and stay healthy. Don't get fat!

Anyway..Grammar traditions never die. One of the long-standing traditions between me and my Grammar friends is to congregate sometime around December 6th (preferably on that day, but generally ) at Auckland Grammar School and play some games...like handball.

Following that, we usually head to BK and stay late before going our separate ways. Anyway, this time, since we actually had a proper place to hang out (ie, the flat), we opted for Domino's and took it all back to the flat where it disappeared within around 10 minutes.

After that, we proceeded to play Cranium, using the pristine unopened box from my 21st that all my friends had so generously given me..but that didn't last long. Question: If you had to act out "tour guide" for charades, how would you do it? :O

Finally, we had a huge Mafia marathon until 5am where there were epic battles and epic frustrations and epic idiocy. I even enjoyed the times when I wasn't the overlord, because unlike SOME PEOPLE WHO I PLAY WITH, my Grammar friends don't kill me off in the first round.

So yeah, with 7 hours of sleep, I woke up groggily and proceeded to watch Simon play "Stalker", and get owned. Apparently he's making progress on that, so good on him. He kept getting shot on the first mission, and he had to use like 8 bullets to kill everyone and blahblahblah. When everyone had finally woken up, we had two games of DotA where we were royally sassed, then I finally drove home to beat the traffic. \o/

Tonight! We are going to Momo's because Ted is leaving for Taiwan tomorrow. I have to remember to get some money off him for his Parachute ticket. Oh yeah, we're going to be playing Mario Party DS at Momo's... haha. That'll be fun :O

So for the past two days I've been moping a lot. Why? Because I'm like that. I mope over bad grades. What is a bad grade? It is a grade that is below what I expect of myself.

*sigh*

Okay, okay. When it comes to grades, no one ever takes me seriously. I think that's fair, I think my expectations are high. I set them high. I aim high. If you aim high, and come short, of course you're going to be disappointed. Why do I have to settle for mediocrity? God has gifted me with an ability to learn, so I should put this ability to good use.

At the beginning of the year, I set my goal to have another year of all A's. I expected to achieve that goal. I have done so for the past two years. Furthermore, my grades, with respect to Computer Science papers, have been perfect, bar CompSci220, which I got an 'A' in.

Until now.

Sigh, yes, I got a B+ in CompSci367. OMG says everyone. It's really depressing. My transcript looks ugly with A+ A+ A+ A+ A+ A+..............................................B+. I've been really screwed over in this course, for reasons beyond my control. More than once, actually. Furthermore, I don't think "this is a conglomeration of two courses" is a good enough excuse for the poor administration and organisation. You know what I'm talking about.

Firstly, assignment 1 screwed a lot of people over. 4% is not trivial, and it is probably the difference between... a B+ and an A-? Hmmm.

Secondly, what the hell was with this challenge problem crap? What is the point of forcing this "optional" material on us? Hoff trees were not mentioned ANYWHERE in any of the lectures. Only students in CompSci709 would know what a Hoff tree was. Wait, what? CompSci709? Isn't that a graduate course? Why yes! It is! Doesn't that mean that all the undergrads who can't take that paper are disadvantaged because there are postgrads that took that paper? Why yes! Prove that mathematically. I dare you.

lol im angry on the internets

Anyway, what else have I been up to...I had SHOUT practice today, went to Momo's after. There was 11 of us, and of course that meant chaos because of the orders and the payment and yadadada. But champagne and grape nata is awesome. And so are lamb sticks. And so is DotA. So I'm temporarily happy.

I really want IS330 back. So I can mope about that too, if I don't get a good grade.

I have never heard of anything so cute or adorable as this.

It's been pretty blah these past two days. I've been quite lazy because I've been out late and gotten home late and woken up late and felt lethargic and so the rest of the day is blahhhhhh. It's hard to get myself to do things, so I've been bumming around playing Phoenix Wright 3 mostly.

Yesterday, Sam randomly decided he was thirsty so I took him up on that offer and we went to Momo's with Weng-Hao after our game of DotA. Momo's is so great.

Grades Update:
CompSci367: Pending
Maths315: Pending
InfoSys330: Pending
-.-

I was invited to have dinner at 'the Flat' today - that is, Mat, Simon, Richard and Tom's flat. Poor Tom was being a drama llama the whole day over not being present at this dinner. Andrew was there too, as well as their friend Natasha.

Dinner was actually really delicious. Mat cooked a prawn and avocado risotto, with tiramisu and chocolate mousse for dessert. Absolutely fantastic, and compliments to the chef. I helped to prepare o/

At the moment we're just waiting for Richard to sort out his wireless so we can play DotA. Yes, Simon and Richard are hellbent on DotA and Richard has revealed that he has an addiction for it, and can't sleep until he has had a game.

So I was invited to join the "CSC" (The CompSci Crew, not the CompSci Club. Ask Sonny.) for dinner tonight. We went to the Thirsty Dog on K Road for a meal where we spent half the time talking about DotA, and the other half of the time observing a prostitute opposite the bar, trying to nab a client. Yeah.

Apparently she got a client after we left, says Daniela.

As with all normal computer scientist gatherings, the night was not over until we had gone to a Net Cafe and played DotA. We had two good games: I was Leviathan in the first, and Razor in the second. Great stuff.

Oh yes, as you can now see, I'm fully operational on a domain name, mrowr8d.com, so make sure you bookmark my site.

And I finally got a wireless router, so I can wi-fi with my DS! My Pokeymanz. Let me show you them :O

So yesterday, I had my last undergraduate exam yesterday ever. Providing I pass all my exams this semester. But everyone seems to have some kind of belief that I'll pass, so I guess I will.

To celebrate, we had a LAN at church starting Friday night and lasting until Saturday evening. Big success, lots of people turned up and quite a few people were keen to learn to play DotA, and even those who weren't keen stuck around and played table tennis, or some board games.

Oh yes, check out the LAN November 2007 Gallery Page for some pictures I took with my webcam.