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.

It has come to my attention that instead of playing "placement" matches, I have been playing "practice" matches.

Epic. Fail.

Sigh. So I have to do all five of my placement matches, which equates to more stress. Aughhh :(

In other news, that damn damage calculator is finally done, with the first iteration going live approximately 1.5 hours ago. The second iteration will include the option to override a Pokemon's type and ability (due to effects from Color Change, Camouflage, Conversion, or Skill Swap, Role Play and Trace), and probably fix whatever bugs people find. It's taken so long, but it looks hot, and the code is pretty damn clean too.

The Eigenvalue is off!

Happy Chinese New Year to you all, and wishing you wealth and prosperity in the year of the tiger! A bunch of us from Sidhe had yum cha at where else but Majestic Cuisine, where we proceeded to devour plates of dumplings, rice noodles, tarts and buns. Of course, I made everyone have the durian tart, and much to their surprise, it was tolerable! It was unlike anything else they had ever eaten...

It was good that Chinese New Year was yesterday and not today, because today was Epic Fail Monday. Fail #1: car rear ends another car in moderately heavy traffic outside the bus stop. Fail #2: I spent the entire day trying to get a build done to our level designer, only to have the machine have a major spazz and refuse to work. Sigh.

Nevertheless, I did manage to complete a build and deliver it, at approximately 6.45pm. It means I wasted the whole day on this instead of finishing my prototype which needs to be done by Friday... SIGH.

Arrived safely into New Zealand yesterday afternoon after a shorter-than-normal flight - it was less than 10 hours, and during that time I managed to sleep, watch the remainder of Bolt, see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Aristocats, enjoy a Nasi Lemak and horde some Ferrero Rocher.

I was surprisingly quick through New Zealand customs despite being questioned by three airport security staff. They all asked the same thing: can I see your passport (I guess...), what's in the box (an LCD monitor), and how much did it cost (dirt cheap). Was picked up by Reuben and we went to Cornwall Park to catch up with the rest of the church, who had conveniently decided to have a picnic that day.

Spent the rest of the afternoon with my sister and had dinner at her place before she dropped me at the airport for my flight back to Wellington. Unfortunately for me, Wellington had decided that summer sucks so it shrouded itself in dense fog, preventing the plane from landing and, an hour after we were supposed to land, we had to divert to bloody Palmerston North International Airport (I didn't know it was an international airport...) where Air NZ kindly put us on a very air conditioned bus back to Wellington.

Stupid city.

First day of work for the new year and not too bad really. It was really hard waking up this morning and until about 1pm I was quite groggy and not concentrating well. I think my colleagues appreciated the love letter rolls, the green tea and lemon lollies and the mango chewies. It's Spicy Food Tuesday tomorrow!

Couldn't resist posting this.

Today was my tenth consecutive day at work. I'm just so pissed off at everything going on, but the rational person inside of me is saying it's because I'm tired and overworked, etc. So many issues to resolve...

I heard (from the grapevine) that two of my good friends split today, which really worsened my mood because the timing and circumstances were not ideal and I just feel really sorry for them. I don't really know what else to say. It damn bloody sucks and I wish I could do something to help.

I was looking forward to having a weekend off, but now I'm not so sure.

Quite the drama for me this Easter trip, although I didn't lose my glasses like the last time I went away for Easter.

Firstly, I was working overtime on Wednesday night and we got curry from Dawaat, which lead to a rather bad case of indigestion. I was still up at 3am on Thursday morning, lying in the foetal position in bed when I remember my parents had given me this miracle Chinese medicine for general stomach aches. It worked so well I even went to work on Thursday and made it to Auckland safe and sound.

Secondly, on Monday night, I got a text message saying the flight had been delayed by an hour; Juliann and Surya were already at the airport so had to wait out the hour. They decided to check in and asked for my booking reference so we could all sit together, but to no success - they kept getting some errors and couldn't do it. So I decided I'd get to the airport early-ish to get a good seat, so I got to the kiosk and swiped my card; it said it couldn't find my e-ticket so I went to the counter. The lady there took my ID and put in all the details, then looked at me quizzically and said I didn't have a ticket. With fears growing, she took me to the ticketing counter and the lady there put in all my details, looked at me, looked back at the screen, looked back at me and said... "You've booked Wellington to Auckland."

Oh man, I have never been so mortified in my life.

But the end result is that they changed me to Auckland to Wellington, free of charge, and they still fed me apple pie and chocolate ice cream. So huge props to Qantas for doing that for me T_T

Anyway, the weekend was great, I got to catch up with everyone and ate some great food (Photos of the food to come soon). It was hard to do stuff because places were closed on the two public holidays, but I still managed to play some pool, some handball, some Trivial Pursuit and of course some piano. It was really relaxing and a much needed break from all the overtime I had been doing.

We have two IDEs at work: the awesome Visual Studio .NET, and the extremely incompetent "why the hell would anyone use this, oh, wait, we are because it compiles our PlayStation and Wii code" CodeWarrior. CW is a world of pain of its own, and here's a handy little tip for you.

Templates in C++ have the angle brackets as delimiters. That is, std::vector<int> or std::pair<int, int>. In Java and C#, they are refered to as generics, but for the sake of this post, they are essentially the same concept. (Check out the differences here).

Anyway, say I require a map of ints to a vector of ints. I would declare it as so:

std::map<int, std::vector<int>> mapping;

Looks okay? Wrong. Look again:

std::map<int, std::vector<int>> mapping;

That's the bitwise shift right operator. Of course, the fix is easy:

std::map< int, std::vector<int> > mapping;

Thanks Codewarrior.

Alright, so I finally finished that piece of crap game called Final Fantasy III for the DS, and let me tell you, the final dungeon would be infuriating if you had died and had to start ALL over again and beat ALL those bosses. It's utterly ridiculous. And it had the lamest ending ever. It wasn't even a proper FMV. It was just them running around dropping all their friends off around the world. Sigh.

Anyway, there's been two things that have really been pissing me off lately.

First is the Australian forest fires, and the fact that they've been started by arsonists. I mean, for crying out loud, do they KNOW what the hell they've done? Do they comprehend the number of deaths they've caused and the number of lives they've ruined? Do they feel any remorse for what they've done? I don't understand what goes through the minds of these retards when they decide to have a bit of "fun" at the expense of a thousand lives. It's tragic, it really is.

Second is the story about a thirteen year old brat who has become a father. I quote from the newspaper article:

Asked what he would do to support the child financially, Alfie asks in a small, high-pitched voice, "What's financially?"

Does this guy even understand the responsibility of bringing up a child? Will these freaking brats stop breeding like horny rabbits and creating evil spawn that are there to steal our oxygen? Why the hell would you even have SEX with someone who has BARELY gone through puberty? Not only is this morally wrong, it's also incredibly disgusting.

NOTW also says that there may be as many as eight possible fathers, including 14-year-old Tyler Barker, who claims to be terrified at the possibility.

If you're so freaking terrified, why don't you STOP HAVING SEX WITH THESE SLUTS SO THAT YOU DON'T GET THEM PREGNANT? And furthermore, EIGHT possible fathers? What the hell is wrong with this sex-starved girl?

And the fact they're getting so much bloody media attention isn't helping. The guy is completely oblivious to the responsibilities he faces in bringing up this kid, but yet there's suddenly this incentive of tens of thousands of dollars from these moronic tabloids offering him money for an 'exclusive' documentary. Isn't that some kind of INCENTIVE for him to breed more? What is wrong with this world?

UGH.

Okay yeah, I've been pretty much working on the BIG SECRET EXCLUSIVE SITE every night of the week, so of course that means blogging gets pushed out.

Anyway, Friday Fail is a term used by our senior programmer, Steve, on Fridays when we meet for our daily meeting at the couch area at work, and browse FailBlog. Steve left us on Tuesday, and now there is a failure of Friday Fail, and as a result, team morale was lower than usual and heaps of things ended up breaking.

Last week, in recognition of Steve leaving, we booby trapped our game for his last Show and Tell. He demonstrated our progress on the game and spoke about the various changes we made. As he wrapped up, we got him to go back to the main menus and *bam*, we sprung a picture of him in his "underpants costume" from Halloween (this was from his old work place), accompanied by Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On". Needless to say, his mouth gaped open for a good half minute and he scurried off stage. We'll miss you, Steve.

Show and Tell usually happens on a Friday, but as you're all aware, last week was Waitangi Weekend, so immedately after Show and Tell I had to rush to the airport and catch a flight back to Auckland. As tradition stands, I made a beeline to Momo Tea in Mt. Albert, and hung out with my youth group, having some hearty food and some delicious drinks.

Friday morning I had music practice, and following that, Bob's unsurprise barbeque at Ray's place. This pretty much lasted the whole day, with some awesome food and lots of Rock Band. No Stephen, this was the PS3 version so we didn't play Still Alive. We played some outdoor badminton too, until we started getting attacked by the mosquitos. Towards the end of the night, we hung out for more drinks at EasyWay and played last card, until we were pretty much sick of last card and headed our seperate ways.

On Saturday I pretty much lazed around, but in the afternoon I met up with Mat and Will and took a stroll around Albert Park, just observing the lanterns and inhaling the wonderful aromas of the roadside food. It was a gloriously hot day, and I am often reminded about the surprisingly large temperature difference between Auckland and Wellington.

I spent Saturday night with family for our reunion dinner, which I would say was the main purpose of the trip. I dunno, I kinda feel very sentimental about these things, I was a bit disappointed about missing Chinese New Year last year. Family's important to me, and reunion dinner is just one of those symbolic meals that you share with family, a bit like how Christmas is so important to some people.

Sunday was pretty much church and lunch at (where else) Ha Long, before I caught up with my sister, who insisted on showing me various painted windows, her coffee table, her new laptop and her photo board. And before long, it was time to head back to the airport and start the journey back to Wellington. Sigh.

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...)

I had a fantastic Labour Weekend. So good catching up with all my friends. As a result of the excessive fun, I have caught a cold and am suffering at work. Today was terrible, I couldn't concentrate and I kept sneezing and after drinking that disgusting Lemsip crap I felt like throwing up.

Anyway.

I finished up at work on Friday and met Laura and Raymond at Cha for dinner. It was still relatively early, so Raymond and I went back to his apartment and Laura went back to hers at around 7.40pm. Then Raymond wanted to have a shower and by the time he finished...it was 8.05pm.
Picked up Laura at 8.10pm
Got to the flat at 8.15pm
Picked up Jono at 8.25pm
Arrived at the airport at 8.30pm
Boarded the plane at 8.40pm
Took off for Auckland at 8.50pm

Yeah, rushed, much. In the chaos I left my keys at the flat, but that wasn't too big an issue. I got picked up by Casey at the other end and met Bob, Ted, Amber and Han at Momo's, where I proceeded to knock my glass over and cut my hand in the process. After bleeding profusely, they decided to give me a free drink (YAY).

I turned up at church on Saturday morning, much to the surprise of the music team (apparently Jin hadn't told them I was on). So yeah, I got to play piano, and that was great jamming with the boys again. So much fun, far more fun than at Central Baptist. Afterwards, we distributed some flyers for the Light Party before I headed over to St Heliers to meet the Grammar Gang for lunch at La Vista. Great food there, so good to catch up with everyone. I was free for the rest of the afternoon and it was still early, so we went down the road to play Mini Golf. There were so many fails there, it was awesome. Props to Amnon for beating Richard!

It was still early in the day so we went back to Mat's flat and just hung around for a while, watching Family Guy and playing some Smash Bros Brawl. I really can't stand the Wii control scheme (and that's not because I've been working with it for the past week). The Wiimote has so few controller buttons that they could not possibly encapsulate all the techniques into a user-friendly scheme. Once I started with the Gamecube controller, it felt so much better. MetaKnight and Dedede are awesome! :3

Left the flat and went to Cinta's place for dinner with her, Alice, Jo and Reuben. We had apricot chicken, some cheese and cauliflower, boiled vegetables and roast potato, and Oreo cheesecake for dessert. Awesome stuff. We spent the rest of the night solving those stupid take-apart-shape-and-put-them-together-again puzzles.

Sunday morning was church, had heaps of fun on the piano but it wasn't my best day (I screwed up the offering piece) but I think people just appreciated me being back on the piano, which was really nice. We had testimonies from our group heading to Cambodia for a short term mission, as well as a delicious curry lunch for fundraising. I hung around for a few hours for BASIC and then the guys went to play pool. All I can say is... black ball fail.

I went out with Dad and Uncle Tony and family to this teppanyaki place in Ponsonby called Fuji. Entertainment was fantastic, food was delicious, but unfortunately not as filling as I would have liked. Really had to work for our food as well! I caught a piece of egg in my mouth, and two bowls of rice flung in my general direction.

Met up with the youth group guys at Momo's (haha, again). I didn't cut my hand this time, which was great. I had a taro milkshake with mango pudding, but didn't feel like eating much more. We were keen on going out after that, but nothing happened and we just went to bed.

But Matt, Sam and I ventured out the next day in the blazing sun to Mission Bay, where we enjoyed some unhealthy breakfasts in the form of ice cream, waffles and pancakes. We hung around Bastion Point before heading into town. We took at stop at Yifans where Matt played the new Street Fighter - I really like the art style, with the black paint strokes. I had to rush off soon after to meet Casey, Bob, Laura and Raymond for yum char at China. Good food, again, but unfortunately I was still a bit stuffed from breakfast. However, I did manage to cram a durian puff and a mango puff, so all is well.

Spent the rest of the afternoon fixing dad's computer, then met up with my sister for a chit chat. Her cat is adorable <3 and very vocal too. Being the awesome sister that she is, she managed to get me this:



It was a quick dinner at Uncle Tony's before heading to the airport. What a weekend. Catch all the action in the gallery.

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.

I've apparently survived my first Wellington winter, and to remind me of the days to come, we were on Oriental Parade with Nats and Ben, who were visiting from Auckland.



Of course, Oriental Parade immediately implies The Parade Cafe.



Which rounded out an awesome weekend of food.



I've been recovering from a cold lately. I had to give a presentation to my team at work on Friday, and that was extremely difficult. On the brightside, I got another Show and Tell prize - a Rubik's Cube keyring! Not that I care much for those things anyway. I need to remember to buy borrow obtain, using unspecified methods, Spore the game - some guys at work were playing it since its release on Thursday.

I finish this post with some muffins.

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 ¬.¬

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.

In case anyone is wondering:

No I did not create a Facebook account. Go away.

EDIT: lol urfacebook

I wanted to make sure I got to work on time on Friday, so I spent Thursday night at the Hub because of the trucks protest. They took so long coming down State Highway 1 that they only got to town around 8.30am, so there wasn't any traffic at all. But once they got in...there was epic honking and blasting of horns. They certainly made their presence known in Central Wellington. I heard there was mayhem in Auckland as they blocked up the Southern Motorway and Queen St too.



We'd also learned that Team Puppyguts, led by some guys at work, had won the 48 Hour Film Festival. Congratulations to them! In celebration, the company got a treat.



I spent most of the day finishing up the Ignite Website..and sneaking in a few games of DotA. Sigh I'm so rusty. But the website itself is making good progress, and Ignite Youths 2.0 will definitely release on time :p

I just got back from watching the game at JJ Murphy's. What an epic game!



We had a good meal as well. They were unfortunately out of steaks, so I ordered some delicious lamb shanks. Still a little bit hungry, Sunni, Andrew and I decided to share a chocolate mud cake (We were looking at Raewyn enjoying hers and wanted one too). My first comment upon its arrival:

"...This tastes meaty...."

Yeah. Some one had confused chocolate sauce with barbeque sauce. Awesome.

Last Tuesday, the company had the Speed Racer premier at Reading Cinemas. While most of us concluded that it wasn't as bad as everyone said it was, it was certainly...epileptic and corny in some places. Overall, it was entertaining and had some action-packed shots, but I wouldn't say it was fantastic-fantastic. Oh, there was an after party too, and that was pretty good. I got to play the game for the first time (I highly recommended it) and got to hang with some workmates, so that was pretty cool.

Amy was down in Wellington again, selling dumplings at Pak n Save, again, so we met up for dinner on Wednesday. I took her to Great India where we had some awesome curry and some not-so-awesome Indian dessert dumplings. We went over to Strawberry Fare to make a booking, where I saw Sunni and Raewyn. I told Raewyn that Amy was on the Jet program as well and the two couldn't stop talking. Go figure.

Anyway, we met up again on Thursday night with Peter and Laura, and we had dinner at this place called Piccolo on Vivian Street. It was small and empty, but the food was pretty good and the owner was really friendly and talkative. I advised everyone to eat less because we went to Strawberry Fare afterwards YAY. Between the three of us (Laura had to leave), we shared a Jaffa Tower and a Lemon Chocolate Cheesecake.

Friday night it was time to head to Auckland. Due to bad weather, the flight had been delayed by 30 minutes, so it wasn't until 8pm that we were actually boarding. However, some retard had decided that he'd check in his bags, but not show up on the aircraft. So we waited an extra 30 minutes for him to show up, and Qantas finally decided that they wouldn't wait and started to unload his bags. So yup, just as they finish unloading, aforementioned retard shows up and boards the plane (with heavy glares from the other passengers) and we finally fly off at 8.50pm or something like that.

It was around 10.30pm when we finally got to May's house. After the initial greets, I started scoffing some food that John had saved for me while the speeches started. It was a really good party, quite cosy and really friendly. It was midnight or so (time really flew by) before everyone started leaving, so I texted Andrew and the others to see what they were up to. No one wanted to drive out to Te Atatu to go for milk tea, so we canned the idea and made plans to meet up on Saturday afternoon.

On Saturday morning, my sister and I went to this place called Fuze on the peninsula for brunch, and I ordered some bacon and eggs with an extra lamb chop. It was good to catch up with her, especially over such good food.

I met up with Andrew, Richard, Mat, Nat and Jono at Benediction, just off Newton Road. I was still full from brunch, so I didn't eat anything, but I had a milkshake and watched the others enjoy their meals. Jono had to head off, so we split up: Nat, Mat and I went to Dress Smart, looking for a jacket for Mat, while Andrew and Richard dropped Jono home. We reconvened at the flat, which smelled like rubber thanks to Richard's ingenuity, and just hung around. Pretty soon after, Mat went with his family to see Kung Fu Panda, so the remaining four of us went to... MOMO'S! So good. So much better than Wellington milk tea.

Pretty soon after, we were at the Blockhouse Bay Tennis to celebrate Matt and Andrew's 21sts. It was...strangely familiar. But there were lots of people, lots of good food (again) and lots to do. There was music, there was dancing (no Singstar though), there was some alcohol (I went totally pink...but so did Matt), there was a really good atmosphere about the place. Great time.

Sunday was church, lunch at Wendy's with the youth, a quick catch up at Amy's place with her, Ted and Bobby (the food looked awesome :/) then dinner with my parents. We had beef stroganoff and roast chicken, plus my sister had made some apricot choc-chip muffins and my dad had brewed some feijoa wine. It was awesome.

One of the best weekends ever. Sigh.

If there was any Monday to choose to demonstrate how bad Mondays can start out, I would choose today.

In retrospect, the day itself wasn't bad; rather, just the bus ride to work.

Some guy thought he would be funny and make a joke about how the bus was full and how he'd have to sit on the roof.

If that wasn't enough, this clown started singing.

Yes, singing.

Badly.

Singing badly about how he had to go to court and try get a not guilty verdict and something about being hit on the head with a beer bottle, and how the bus wasn't going the right way to the courthouse.

I thought my ears would bleed.

I've had a pretty damn awesome week. I got to spend time with family and friends, eat lots of delicious food (that I took pictures of, don't worry) and I graduated in two degrees that were the result of four years' hard work and divine intervention.

Fantastic.

I spent all of Wednesday with Debs. We went to see Iron Man, which was rather disappointing in my opinion. The story and the villain was predictable, the fight scene was short...and the physics were completely wrong. Also,
1. Build robot arm and leg.
2. ???
3. SUCCESSFUL ROBOT!
I got to spend some time on the Internet (which explains the rushed post below this one) before we went for dinner at St. Tropez. We shared escargot; I had a nicely done steak for mains and a tart au citron for dessert - she had braised duck and creme brulée.

I wanted to meet up with Casey and Jesse on Thursday, but neither of them were in. Instead I spent half the day fixing the Internets for my dad, since he'd decided to ditch Woosh for ihug. I spent the rest of the day catching up with friends and lecturers at Uni, before going with the family to Mikano in Mechanics Bay for dinner. Tom wasn't working there that day. Whether this is fortunate or unfortunate is for you to decide. But the dinner was nice and dessert was superb - I had another steak and a nut trifle. Trifles for the win, seriously.

Friday graduation brought about some weather uncertainty. Andrew picked me up before picking Deanna up. We were a bit strapped for time, so he decided to drop me at Uni so I could rush in for the Maths breakfast. And what a delicious breakfast it was as well - there were fruit kebabs and toasted croissants and danish pastries and garghharg*drool*. There was also some champagne but I decided to take the sober route for the day.

I rushed to the CompSci breakfast two floors above and to my delight I managed to swipe the last custard tart as I entered. It was good seeing lots of people I knew and catching up with more of my lecturers - telling them I'd gotten my dream job, and thanks for putting me through all of that, and so on. Many thanks to Ann for including Python in the CS111 cirriculum, it has become quite useful at work :p

Rain threatened to cancel the procession at 9.30am but a window of opportunity arose and we quickly marched down to the Town Hall, a bit wet, but still jovial. Upon arrival, who should we find but HSIN-YAO?!, who had previously not existed for the past three years or so. We have pictures as proof, in case you don't believe us.

Trudging back up to Uni, I took some photos with some of my lecturers and old Clock Tower workmates, before heading to the Science brunch for some delicious chocolate cake, and finally to Albert Park for some more photos with the youth. It was all too short lived as we rushed down to the Town Hall again for the ceremony. Mad props to Andrew for high-fiving the chancellor!

Dinner was with my CompSci friends at Santa Lucia in Mission Bay. It was a really good atmosphere, with live music and dancing. I was in such a good mood that I asked Debs for a dance. Only to be refused. But apparently Amy was keen, so I tried to teach her some Ceroc moves without looking too uncoordinated, and it seemed quite good O_o So hooray for that. We migrated to Amy's house for 4 hours of mafia (again, I was promptly killed in the second game I played. I blame you, Casey!!).

I spent Saturday with Mat, Tom and Richard, playing Ticket to Ride in the afternoon, then heading for dinner with the CSC + Mat and Richard at Jimmy Wong's on Lorne Street in the city. It's some kind of fusion east-west place, and I had some wagyu beef which was really disappointing. My parents can cook better stir-fry than that. Unsatisfied, we went to the dessert place next to the Civic Centre for some ice cream and pearl milk tea (I had a double scoop of mango and cheesecake ice cream!).

Sunday was a chance to say goodbye to the youth group. It was a Mothers' Day service, then a quick lunch at New Lynn Shopping Mall, before spending some time with Debs and then my family. We rushed to the airport at 7pm, to find out my flight had been cancelled...engineering problems, or something. I was really lucky to get a flight at 9pm on Air New Zealand, for no extra cost. What's more, my luggage was overweight so I had to stuff some clothes into hand luggage. So while the flight was a bit chaotic to start with, I managed to get back to cold, cold Wellington without further troubles.

I wish I could relive this week again. :3

Instead of Ceroc, me, Jono and John (The three J's) went to a pub quiz on Wednesday. Our team name completely and perfectly described the events that night.



Anyway, today I completed a program in Python, which is rather new to me. My exposure to Python consists of CompSci111 lab exercises that require you to figure out the area and circumference of a circle or to create a random number guessing game. But Python is a neat language, I've yet to fully discover its benefits and quirks. I still don't really like that indentation thing though.

I might have an epic update for tomorrow. We'll see...

I TTLY LUVZ FACEBOOK I CAN POKE YOU LOLZ DO U WANT TO POKE PERSON BACK U CAN WRITE ON MY WALL AND DRAW DOODLEZ TOO YAY FACEBOOK *~*!**~^_^ ^_^*~*!**~

EDIT: Click here for a recollection of the day

So it's the end of my first week at work. Good week, I'd say. Still training...I've been working on this application that animates shapes, just to get used to the company style of coding and its conventions, and all that. It's a bit slow though, because everyone's busy and all, and no one really has time to assess my work immediately, as such.

Anyway, I was introduced to everyone at show-and-tell on Friday. It was a "We have a new person, Jeremy Lai, he's standing over there" and a "...Hi..." in response. Eh. But show-and-tell is great, I got to see a bit of the projects currently in progress, and I can tell you now that they're really awesome. If I had a console, I would buy those games :O </shameless plugging>

I also had dinner with Ritu on Friday night, at an Indian restaurant. And that was nice, because she's like one of three people I know in the city. I should have taken a picture of what I ate (because that seems to be the thing with my CS friends) but I forgot. I had mango chicken, with a spicy level of "Indian hot", as opposed to "Kiwi hot". Yeah, it was pretty hot :p

As I walked around the train station, waiting for Ritu's train to arrive, I saw this epic failure:

It's really hot today x_x We had Stanley's Roast for lunch, and then I went to Auntie Val's house to fix up her computer (Intarwebz troubles). Matt and Holly stayed in the car with the radio/fan on, so when I went to start the car...yup...flat battery. So I called Cinta and Brendon came over to jumpstart me and I was on my merry way home.

Anyway, Friday was Sonny's 21st party thing, so we went to Dolce Vita on High Street for dinner. And I was incredibly hungry so I ordered a steak with parmesan cheese on it. And after devouring it within a few minutes, I was still hungry, and Sonny couldn't finish his pizza, so I had some of that as well. The cake was good though :3 (The cake was not a lie). And after that, we went to play pool at the same place, where I proceeded to fail miserably and lost a 5 ball lead to Jess -.- But at least me and Jess beat Sonny and Steven, so all in all, it was a good night.

Sam has been bugging us to play pool, so, finally, after music practice yesterday, I took him to Breakers on Lincoln Road and we had three games. He was winning the whole way through for all three games, but when it came to crunch time, he just couldn't sink the black ball and I ended up sinking all mine and the black ball for the win. He managed to win the last game though...haha..yes..I mean I let him win ¬.¬ In case you are interested, there were several hax shots, including one where a cue ball hit the white ball twice and went into a pocket \o/

Anyway, there were like 7 youth at church today. Brendon disappeared soon after the service, and Philly had to go somewhere too, so the remainder of us went to Subway (Eat Fresh) for lunch. Following that...we went to play pool! :d The first game lasted a whole three shots as Weng Hao pocketed the black ball accidentally (Me: "Oh you're bound to hit something in if you hit it in that direction!" WH: "Okay!" *hit* *black ball goes in*). The second game was going well until I pocketed the black ball ¬.¬ (FAIL) By that time some other dudes wanted to play, so we left and went home.

Wow it's New Year's Eve tomorrow. 2007 has gone by pretty quickly.

My hair is getting long, so I thought I'd try to spike it out the back and see if it bore any resemblance to Phoenix Wright.



Not too bad I'd say. A bit of hair spray or gel would make it look really good. All I need is a blue jacket, a white shirt and a red tie, and I'm all set. I already have the attitude :3

By the way, my jumper isn't actually that colour. I just photoshopped it to make it look a bit more bluish for the Phoenix Wright thing.

My auntie left for Malaysia today. I find it amusing that whenever relatives come over, they always take back groceries..my auntie managed to stuff a 2kg cabbage and 1.5kgs of avocado into a box and take it home. Her luggage was overweight so she left behind some clothes. I'll miss her awesome cooking and stuff. It was really great having her around, and it's just a pity that the hot water cylinder had to flood her room like that >_o

I have finally finished the long-awaited Graffiti Wall, so you can stuff that lame urFacebook site and come and draw stuff on my wall instead. Hooray! Comments and suggestions and bug reports are always welcome.

Oh yeah, I fail at relationships. ^_^

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.

Hello this is my first blog post and it fails lol