Flehrad's Operating Plant, Morgue, Range and Dojo

Homebrewing

2012-01-04T00:52:00.001+11:00

So, it isn't illegal in Australia to homebrew, so long as you don't distil your brew. I started my 3rd attempt today. My first attempt was a kiwi based concoction, my second a mango and apple, and today, an apricot and apple.

Each batch has had its differences, besides the obvious differences in starting fruit base.

The kiwi was a 1:1 weight ratio of fruit to sugar. Bakers yeast. Small container, limited air interaction. 10 day ferment and rapid cooking off to kill any further ferment. Quite sweet, and after about a month, the flavours changed due to the yeast bodies still present. Hint of kiwi present, alcohol content unmeasured.

The mango apple was no white sugar, but only two tablespoons of honey as yeast food. A waterlock method to keep all air interactions out. Ferment until no further gas exchange occurred. 2 month aging, with a secondary ferment after some raw sugar was added for balance. The result was quite sharp, definitely not as palatable as the kiwi. Definitely no mango or apple flavours present. Measured at 2.5-3% alcohol by volume.

This latest is a 1:1:.75 apricot:apple:white sugar. Also with bakers yeast. I am currently fermenting using a vat which is more similar to traditional wine type making, so I will periodically stir the mash through until the ferment ceases, probably around 10-14 days. Then I will bottle into plastic bottles to age slightly before a filtration through a rough filter, then some further balance and ageing before a fine filtration. The sugar content was 1kg to 1.5kg total fruit weight, hopefully it won't be as sharp as there is plenty of sugar to digest without the yeast producing acids, but not so much to make it super sweet, like with the kiwi.

Only time will tell how it goes.

Fresh for 2012, wrapping up 2011

2012-01-02T09:12:00.000+11:00

So, 2011 was a rather interesting year for me, and now well into 2012, besides having to get used to writing dates with 2012 on it, I'm not quite sure what will befall me in the coming period of time.

2011 saw me do a lot of shooting. Probably not as much as I could have ultimately done in the last quarter of the year, but certainly I did more shooting in the year than I had ever imagined I would ever do. 2011 also saw me spend a significant chunk of my savings in going overseas for an earnest experience of international level archery. Certainly expensive, but well worth it.

Friendships developed and changed over the year also, and I am amazed at how I have been able to sustain, and even develop friendships between people that I didn't see on a regular basis at all.

Life goes on, and so do jobs also. My employment at the university is currently over, but a grant application has been submitted. While it originally seemed rather positive, some kind of miscommunication and misunderstanding of our concept means that it isn't anywhere as positive as we had originally though it would be, so its hard to say if the grant will be successful in the end or not. To that, I have applied for at least one position currently with the Australian Public Service.

I guess the only other major thing for the year of interest and note is me dabbling in watercolour art, having painted a few pieces now, I really do find it enjoyable but frustrating at times in terms of developing my technique and getting pieces to look how I wanted. I don't do too much of it at the moment due to space availability to set up painting, but we'll see how 2012 goes for that too. You can see my works on my deviantart profile (same ID tag as everything else).

So, happy new year, and perhaps I will be more active in blogging again.

Cheers~

Shanghai or shang-nay?

2011-09-08T21:22:00.000+10:00

So, of late, I've been doing my shooting thing, working still at the university conducting research. However though, in a recent state of affairs, I went overseas for two months to train and compete at a variety of events in the USA and Canada.

Prior to me heading overseas, the same week of my departure, I was contacted by a research group leader from a division of Firmenich, one of the worlds largest fragrance and flavours companies in the world, with the person interested in my for a position in their company, located in Shanghai, China. Poor timing to be honest, and I told them that they'd have to wait for 2 months essentially since I would be away. No problems, send us your CV they told me, so I did.

In any case, when I returned, I sent off an email saying I was back, if they were still interested in talking to me after having had my CV for two months, and bam, same day response wishing to arrange a telephone conversation as soon as possible.

I had the phone conversation today with the fellow, lasted nearly an hour and twenty minutes. Quite an extensive discussion, mostly him with questions regarding my chemical engineering related matters, how I got to the PhD when I didn't have a Chem Eng background, what I did my project on, equipment used, my experiences at Lang Technology, research methodologies and so forth. It was so long I don't really remember it all.

I don't know what they were exactly after and I'm sure I probably am not realistically 100% what they thought I would be, but, they did have my CV for two months, so if they weren't sure about something, they wouldn't have taken the time to talk to me for so long, though he took extensive notes since he used speakerphone so he could write.

Now comes the waiting. One to two weeks, if I haven't heard from him, contact him to follow it up.

Though while I wait, I dug around the internet for information. Their company pays approximately $81k USD for positions of that nature in the US, whether it will be comparable in China (ie, payscale to US rates, or to Chinese rates, or heaven forbid, Swiss rates since they are a Swiss head company) or not is to be seen. If it is a direct translation across, then that comes to quite a 'well off' rate in China. My cousin lives and works in Shanghai and earns ~$42k Australian a year but his housing and meals are covered by his employers. In my situation, it would not be, so the package values would need different considerations.

My parents recently where in China in GuangZhou for my brothers wedding arrangement matters, so they said for that area, meals are cheap, around 5-6 RMB/meal, where you could eat like a rich man at 30 RMB/meal. Well, put that into perspective, the current exchange rates put $1 Australian at 6 RMB.... which, the US is also a 1:6 currently. However, housing is one big cost issue dependant upon locality, and can cost in the thousands of US/month as they are 'expat' buildings which communities of foreigners live in.

While I have no problems working overseas, my primary concerns for working in China be health ans safety. The pollution, quality of food (e.g. fake foods, poisoned foods/pesticides etc), and healthcare (health insurance? pay-through-the-nose medical bills?). There is also the great firewall of China, but I have been told that a adequately set up VPN will fix that problem fine and dandy.

Of course, all of this is idle speculation if they are not actually interested in making an offer, but if they do make an offer, I ponder what kind of package would I accept to make a very large leap to somewhere I had not really considered working prior to this situation.

Delta Force Paintball - Appin

2011-04-26T10:45:00.000+10:00

So, I went paintballing again for someones 21st yesterday at DeltaForce paintball, at their Appin location in NSW, just south of Campbelltown.

I must say, their facilities and course, along with the packages available, were pretty ordinary.

First impressions of the place was pretty mundane, a tin shed with loud obnoxious music blaring in the side of a light forest environment with zero signage on the main road leading in is pretty bad. Its very easy to shoot past the entrance road to the place from the main road, very lacking in clear signs and direction.

Once you head inside, the appearance of the place is also quite ordinary, just a counter bench with racks of masks and packs, a single fridge and some lockers, with a marshalling area. In the marshalling area are some picnic tables, and a small toilet block (for the male toilet it was 2 stalls, 1 urinal, 2 sinks, on tank water, personally I would say it was non-potable water).

You get overalls and a chest vest standard along with a waist velcro horizontal 4 pod pack (very old and crappy pack and crappy pods that were extremely hard to close and open, in terrible condition. The velcro on the packs had gone to crap also, and during gameplay several people and me inclusive had pods fall out due to the velcro not holding, so either lost paint from pods opening up on impact, or completely losing pods and not realising it. Lame.)and a fully enclosed mask (very dirty lenses, they 'wash' them every day is the claim for the reason why the straps are wet, but they are in terrible visual condition. I can accept that they would be scuffed up and scratched etc, but clean they were not. Especially if out on the field all they do is use a ratty towel to wipe with), along with an Inferno field Mk2 (http://www.arrow-precision.com/infernos.html) that has probably seen slightly better days (hoppers with bad lids, with chunks of plastic broken off lids, hinges that came off the hopper completely like mine did at one point when I was trying to field reload, and these markers jammed incredibly easy, not a single game went by that I didn't have to clear the chamber manually).

They supply paint to you either in pods filled (lots of 100) or bulk (in multiples of 500 as the boxes of 2000 are split as 4x 500 bags inside). Lockers are supplied at $5 with a $1 refund upon return of key, while gloves and cups are available for purchase also. For those who have glasses, they offer half-visor masks, but this was not told to me until the end of the day when I commented about spending the day without my glasses on.

Course-wise, the terrain maps were reasonable, nothing spectacular but most courses are like that. The maps used in our session was Speedball (old barrels and a big gas tank, set up like a tournament speedball with inflatables), London (old double-decker bus with phone pill boxes), Tomb Raider (timber and fibreglass pyramid with sphinxes), Graveyard (big sarcophagi that they called crypts, technically incorrect since you can't actually enter these if they were real, with big gravestones of wood that had cross-shaped spaces cut out of the middle) and Prison (timber huts with lookout towers you couldn't get into with mesh fencing and hay bales).

Game wise, we had speedball (team deathmatch), capture the flag (where you had to take the flag to the opposing team's base), domination (most players touching the sarcophagi at the end time), deathmatch (every person for themselves, they called it total annihilation but that was pretty lame actually), and tomb raider (4 blocks of 'gold' in the pyramid, 1 person is designated raider, only they can take the gold, must take gold back to base and you can raid opposing base, end of time most gold wins). The best one I felt was tomb raider, the worst was total annihilation.

Tomb raider worked pretty well as you could bunker down and cover for your raider, while at the same time allowed you to push around the map to contain and retrieve gold from the opposition if needed, very dynamic if your team was willing to do some teamwork since only the raider is allowed inside the pyramid.

Total annihilation was utter crap as it was a free-for-all melee with everyone on the day (i.e. people who weren't part of your group) and you only had 10 seconds to scatter in a TINY space (for the number of people involved, it was the London map) before the paint went flying. I personally got 2 before my marker jammed and I got nailed, but it was over very quickly for most people, before those remaining had a long standoff while everyone stood around and waited. It literally took about 10min for the game to be setup and start, about 20 seconds of play for 90% of people, then another 5 minutes of waiting before we headed back to the marshalling area to wait again before the next game. Worst game they did.

In terms of service, lunch was domino's pizza from the local pizza joint like 20 minutes away. It wasn't hot when it arrived since it was so far away to get to the paintball location, and had to be ordered at the start of the day or prior to the day, I don't know how much it cost but I ponder if the paintball place placed additional cost on the pizza for their commission/profit. The counter staff took ages to process (a good 3-4min to give me 50c change) a purchase of water ($3.50 for a 600mL bottle of spring water, $3.00 for 365mL Coca-cola varieties, $5.00 for 600mL powerade).

In terms of marshalling, the marshalls were terrible at it. You couldn't hear them (no whistles or signals, just their weak voices), unprofessional behaviours (dry-firing rapidfire bursts at people, threatening to shoot people in the neck, not knowing the rules to the games to be played and deciding then and there what to use as rules, forgetting game rules while explaining), and just in general didn't really make them well suited to the role. I felt that they were people who where just players standing around watching a game of paintball, rather than actual marshalls.

Overall, while it was an okay experience, I felt that this place could have done a lot better. Experience wise for those who have never played paintball, it's enough to know what paintball is, but isn't really a great experience to know what paintball could be like at its best. Some small changes and improvements could be done and they would probably be a much better venue.

Status update

2011-03-29T21:56:00.000+11:00

So, my folks went off for a three week trip yesterday to Taiwan to take care of our ancestors graves. Taking along with them 20kg of presents in typical Asian fashion -_-; Hopefully they have a great trip and come back safe and sound.

In the meantime, I am being fairly home-bound for the purposes of anti-burglar protection, even though we have an alarm and neighbours who know my parents are away. We typically have someone at home almost always, so for piece of mind I guess I am consciously choosing to do so too when I can.

It's been a while since I've 'cooked' since I was away in New York, not counting occasions at parties etc. I made a simple tomato rice tonight, standard rice in rice cooker with a dash of salt, and a few chopped up tomatoes (chopped quite fine) and set into the cooker. I put in extra water so it would be a little spongey since if the rice was really dry, the tomato flavour wouldn't really have any opportunity to seep and infuse through the rice.

The rest of the meal was fairly ordinary since it is leftovers from yesterday though I did make my brother's lunch, which includes sweet scrambled eggs (Japanese style) with some shredded fresh carrot marinated in chilli oil (I made the oil in 2006, so it's steeped a really good portion of the chilli flavours) along with the tomato rice so hopefully he finds it relatively edible lol.

I got some potato, pumpkin, eggplant and zucchi today at the supermarket and the checkout lady told me I was really healthy as everyone else is just buying junk food and chocolate, and I should keep it up XD...

Hmm, besides my errant shooting, and the usual watching of television shows, nothing else is particularly new that I have to discuss except that, as it is, life is good, nothing to complain about though financially I'm in a slowly sinking hole, but thats just how it is when your income isn't as fast as your expenditure. But, I have a little while before I'm in trouble thankfully. Then I guess I'll have to really look for work proper instead of my shooting dreams.

I guess thats it for now. Though, I had a thought, I entered the 2012 Diversity Lottery last year... it's not May yet... so... if I get a letter from the US State Department.... uhhhh what will happen to my short term situation >_< Well, no point thinking bout it til it happens anyway :)

Over n out~

Colgate 360° Acti-flex

2011-02-15T11:17:00.000+11:00

Its yet another review~!

Today, we have the Colgate 360° Acti-flex toothbrush. The claim is that the bristles on the central portion of the toothbrush swivels and flexes side to side, providing a better angular clean.

Initial impression from holding it is that the handle is as bad as all the other ones from Colgate of late, I think I still far prefer the design of the Reach toothbrush, nice and simple but effective. The swept back arch is too curved for my liking and the grip pad of soft-gel material is pretty useless in my hand.

The brush head is bristle only, no rubber bits for polishing or nubs to do goodness knows what else, but that suits me fine. Medium stiffness (as by choice). The swivel part is really a unsupported base of the bristles that is connected by a thin bridge of plastic on the edge of the base that allows it to wiggle. I wouldn't so much call it a swivel but really a wiggle. The rigid plastic behaviour returns the segment back to the central neutral position if force isn't applied, though I wonder if prolognued use will fatigue and soften this so that it ends up not returning to the middle.

As for brushing sensation, it's actually quite nice. The bristles are firm and provide what feels to be a good clean. I can't physically tell any difference in how the head flex changes anything to the brushing sensation, and brushing while looking in the mirror also doesn't really show much difference in bristle action since the angular change of the bristles is I'd say maybe 15° in either direction at best.

I wonder if by providing angled bristles would provide a similar affect upon the teeth and gaps being brushed, without the swivel base.

That said, I bought it on special anyway, so it wasn't a big deal though, I would say its not the best brush that I've experienced on first impressions.

Current drives

2011-02-04T18:33:00.000+11:00

At the moment, there really isn't a huge amount of things going on in my life. I guess the biggest part is the continuation and development of my shooting goals.

I have come to realise quite early on that my chances in achieving what I'd like to do is quite small, and I am not terribly daunted by it.

Putting things into perspective, after a particular post on Archery-Forum, by Andy!, someone that I have a lot of respect for, is that, my goals are probably more towards a long term strategy than short. While it is quite fanciful to think about making it for Olympic selections in 2012, at my age, being turning 30 years year, it is actually not that far fetched to consider I may still be contentionable even in 2016, at the age of 35. I say this because Michael Naray was born 1970, and was 38 when he attended the 2008 Olympics, and Matthew Gray, born 1973, attended the same 2008 Olympics at the age of 35, not to mention the 2010 Commonwealth Games in India.

So, while I am working hard to raise my level to somewhere for next year, if I fail, especially due to the minimum fitness requirements, I know I'm not going to be heartbroken, but it will give me another 3 years to slowly work through things and continue to look forward. How long? I don't know, but, the Silver Medalist in 2004 was a 42 year old gentleman from Japan.... never too late to start, right? Right.

At present, if you have a look at my shooting blog, I'm putting down a reasonable number of arrows a week. I don't know how long I might be able to sustain this since I am feeling a little bit of fatigue and shoulder tenderness, I hope that I am not pushing it too far and causing injury, but only time will tell, since I unfortunately lack the support that the people who do have AIS support, and better resources, have. I don't really even have much coaching support either since I'm a little-known nobody.

That said, I've made the executive decision to spend a large sum of my savings in upgrading my equipment to stay current with the 'competition' as it were. It's been over five years since I've changed my gear, and so, I think investing heavily should suffice for a while to come.

I look forward to my next QRE, though, the Metro's should be interesting in a few weeks, to see what my 70m and 50m combined score gives.

I realise that this should really be posted on my shooting blog as it is related, but I felt that it was more appropriate for those who read my regular life, to know what I'm thinking as I go through this, since the readership of my shooting diary is... so small, that it's not worthwhile. lol.

But, thats okay :) So, this Sunday is a club tournament at Sydney Bowmen. 800+ is the goal. Do-able? Yes. Lets just see if my body can take it....

Hooray lol

2011-02-01T09:50:00.000+11:00

So, I got this email today...

**
Hi Don,

You've just made a sale on RedBubble! Your work was so brilliant that someone showed their appreciation with their wallet. Unfortunately we have to mark this event with a very boring email but it is full of Useful Facts (TM) about the sale.

'But when will I get this money?' we hear you cry, and rightfully so. Well you can find out here: http://support.redbubble.com/faqs/top20/when-do-i-get-paid

------------------------------

---------------------------------------
1x T-Shirt of Ghoti
http://www.redbubble.com/works/show/2746973
Style: T-Shirt
Size: XL
Body Color: Light Grey
Print Location: Front

[removed]
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The sale details:

[removed]

Thanks for being who you are and doing what you do, we love having you around RedBubble.

Mr Baxter - Chief Officer of Sending You Good News

**

^_^
I have no idea who, but hey, who cares!

Airport fail and general matters.

2011-01-21T08:50:00.000+11:00

So, my brother and his girlfriend were planning to go to China for two weeks. I woke up early this morning to drive them to the airport. So, I get to their apartment and discover that her passport was expired -_-; So, now they still wanted to go to the airport to see if they could get away with it. Drive to the airport, 45min via the M5, not too bad. Turns out, passport expired = no go. Fail. I kind of expected that to happen but oh well. They're now going to try and get her passport emergency expedited so they can get it in 4 days and go over with a cut short holiday.

In general affairs of life, I've been still shooting a lot. I've shot 1164 arrows this month, with still one more week, compared to 1150 odd for all of December. So, there is today, Sunday, next Tuesday, Friday, Sunday to see if my count gets to a reasonable number.

I've taken the step of deciding to be much more serious about my shooting, as you kind of have to be, and as part of that, I'm obtaining quotes for a new shooting rig. I know it's kind of unnecessary, but there is a mental game involved, a subconscious aspect of knowing my gear is up there instead of nearly a decade old etc, and so I hope it boots my confidence levels somewhat in a way. It won't be cheap, but considering the last time I actually bought new gear besides arrows was like in 2004-2005, it's not a bad investment, kind of like a computer in that you spend to a certain level so your upgrade times aren't so short between each cycle. I certainly know people who switch bows yearly -_-;

Kendo, has been a little interesting in that I have pretty much come to the decision that I'm not really prepared for grading, and right now am 90% sure that I will not grade at Picton. With my shooting concentration in gear, it means I probably won't really be focusing on my Kendo for a while now until after my archery goals/dreams are met or shattered lol.. But I'm okay with that, everything has it's own time.

Ramping Up

2011-01-15T00:03:00.000+11:00

So in this edition of Don's life...

Been shooting, a lot. I shot QRE's on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with additional shooting at uni today also. In looking at my score progressions in the QRE, I started with a 475, 526, 553 and 569. Steady rise, and while I won't shoot a QRE over the weekend, it will be interesting to see what might come about from the QRE on Monday, if I manage to shoot a similar 560 area, or if it will dip somewhat.
In the last two weeks I have shot 728 arrows, quite a solid amount by comparison to other periods. Quality shooting however is also important, so that is something to take into consideration that I am shooting with a purpose, be it strength training or form.

Kendo hmm, there is training tomorrow and a mock grading on Sunday that is being held by Itakura Sensei. I will hopefully attend both though my shooting tiredness is demotivating me a bit. I really need to work a lot on my Kata. It has me more worried than my jigeiko component for grading, only three weeks away or so. Nidan would be fantastic if I could pass it this time round, thats for sure.

Socially, I've been out a few times with friends, mahjong party that turned into cupcake baking (with a Mega Cupcake mould from Catch Of The Day) but it was a really great time. New Years morning at Maroubra beach was good, along with a BBQ breakfast cookout following. Other than that, not much has really happened terribly so on the social side, went to Karaoke for a friend's 21st at Mizuya, and then to Echo Point on Pitt St for a club social event : )

My guildies have seemingly stopped playing DDO, so once more alone in the world, but I'm now 15k xp from lvl 18 with my half-orc barbarian lol... slowly grinding away....

Work, has kind of started again, the spray dryer is back and running again, and I ran one trial experiment while I wait for some microscopy support to be organised. My supervisor got promoted to full Professor so thats fantastic for him.

Hmm, other than that, not much has happened in the last month or so.
Questions? Comments?
Toss em my way : )

Current state of affairs

2010-12-07T21:44:00.002+11:00

So, what am I up to these days?
About 176-178cm really, hasn't changed much....

Anyway, at the moment I have some rather random work, a few hours a week except that I can't conduct the work unless the spray dryer is working, and right now to my knowledge, it's not, therefore it's a bit challenging to actually do the work if thats not working. So, no work, no pay. But thats okay, I still got money stashed away.

I've been shooting more, as those who might read my shooting blog would have noticed, and last weekend, I won the City of Sydney Recurve Div 1. I cleared the event with a 783 and 799 double Canberra round. I've also been coaching a Junior at the club and their progress has been going well.

Kendo, is Kendo, somewhat a bit on the flat side of development, still training when I am motivated to go since there are some points within that are hampering motivation at times. I made the conscious decision to not compete at the State championships this weekend, I only hope that perhaps by the time Grading comes for Picton that I might be ready for it and actually grade, otherwise, I may skip it and wait for the next one.

Hmm, besides that I've been playing DDO again, running around with a Half-Orc barbarian on Khyber with the guild Tooth and Claw, currently level 14, not too bad.

Other than that, life as usual.

Family Histories and Parenting

2010-11-27T21:30:00.000+11:00

So, after a certain incident occured, I had an opportunity to talk with my father, leading onto some family history that I had never known before. Normally it isn't really a big communication channel between my father and I, but it was interesting to hear what was said today.

My patenal grandfather was a worker for the police, his job was to repair telephone electronics and the overhead wires. It was a arduous job, long hours, bad weather, tricky conditions. In order to cope with this job, he drank every night with his meals. Rather, he ate with his drinking it would seem, eating vegetable dishes with his bowl of alcohol. This of course wasn't really the best way to live, but thats just how things were.

At that point, he became an alcoholic over time, drinking daily, and slowly his mental states also changed. When he was drunk though, he was an aggressive drunk where he would come home and throw rocks at his own home. He never beat my paternal grandmother or his daughter, but rather would pick on his son, my father. The problem was in the morning, he wouldn't remember doing any of it at all, the drunks amnesia. This continued for some time in my father's childhood until my father learnt Judo, and one night when my grandfather grabbed my father, my father reflexively begane a throw, causing my grandfather to let go and back off. He never touched my father again in an assault again. This didn't quite really make sense until then my dad went further in his explanation.

My paternal grandfather was a genius apparently in his youth. However, somewhere along the way, something just came off the rails. When he was young, he was excellent at martial arts. He could hand-stand walk 4km... 4km! He was really strong and used to get into fights all the time (which probably related to his aggresive drunk behaviour I guess) at school. He used to particpate in the Dragon Dance martial arts competitions of the past.

To explain this in more depth. Dragon dance for Chinese New Years back in those days was also a martial arts competition. Basically the teams of dancers danced up a path lined with people (shops) who had basket loads of cracker fireworks. They would light it and throw them to explode on the dragons. The dragons were made of cloth, so the fireworks would explode and burn the dragon body. At the end of the pathway, you were scored on form in the dragon dance, and also how badly your dragon was burnt (the less the better).

My grandfather was seeing how much explosion was happening, so he pretty much said, stuff the dance form, stop the fireworks, so they went all kung-fu dodging/kicking/punching/deflecting etc the crackers so they wouldn't damage their dragon. At the end of the pathway, and event, his dragon won the award for the least damage to the dragon. It was apparently a gold medallion, of real gold, since back then, gold was pretty darn cheap.

So getting back to the point, somewhere in his drunk frame of mind, he knew that being in a Judo grip and about to be thrown meant danger, so he backed off, the innate self-preservation kicking in. It wasn't until many years later when stomach ulcers turned cancerous, my grandfather stopped his drinking, but by then it was too late. He refused surgery, but when the pain got too bad and he wanted surgery, it was of no use due to metastisis.

My father at this time of his life was 17-18 years old, and being the son of the household, bore the brunt of this. He told me that he wanted to run away from home to escape his drunk father, on a nightly basis but he had no-where to go, nor would there be anyone to prevent hands-on activity from his father to his mother and sister. He had no choice but to endure this until the behaviour stopped.

To this day, my father has never ever really been a physical person and I don't recall being punished in any physical manner in my childhood. He also doesn't really drink, and to my knowledge has only ever been drunk once when he tried to drink all this beer that was accidentally left in our freezer after a party, because the beer was breaking the bottles from the freeze expansion.

I guess the point I'm leading towards is that, the behaviours of our forefathers passes down to us in some way. We accept it in our own way and manipulate our reactions to our own and pass it forth. My father being subjected to a difficult time of his life, with alcoholism and physical aggression has decided to focus more of his life in spiritual pathways while not being physically aggressive or drinking past moderation.

Passing this down to me, I've never really felt a peer pressure to drink, and in fact didn't drink until I was well past the age of 21. To this day, I've only been tipsy once, and never drunk. Physical things, I have had one bad incident that was situational, no excuses really, but I tend to try and keep my temper and behaviour into check. I hope that in the future, things too from me will pass down to my children in a positive manner, and the things that I found from my father that I disagree with in a strong negative fashion may find an alternative and better pathway, since there is always best intentions at heart present, just the path of executing those intentions may not have necessarily been the best.

A few additional things in regards to parenting:
Tigers are fierce but never eat their cubs. This saying indicates that no matter how angry and upset with their children they may get, parents don't wish to harm their children.

Parenting is like cooking a steak. Insufficient experience means undercooking the steak, leaving the chance of germs, but at the same time if you are afraid of having a raw steak means you end up overcooking it. In parenting, undercooking means having a wild child, but overcooking means you end up being too restrictive and controlling. It takes much experience and skill to cook a steak just right, like parenting.

Parents never want to apologise to their children since they always want to be right in what they intend for their children, to mould them into the 'perfect' beings. Being willing to forgive your parents is always the first step to resolving issues between them and yourself since you have to understand their sacrifices to bring you to where you are today.

People who do not respond, will respond slowly. If you say hello to someone and they don't respond, then try try again. Eventually, when you say Hello, they will respond (how they respond, I don't know but you'll get some response). If your parents do not wish to respond, then take the soft path (soft attitude, meaning not provocative and verbally aggressive) and slowly slowly work to gain that response. With this response, then you will have communications opening to resolve things with.

So, I hope that perhaps some of these things might be helpful for people out there :)

Reach Total Care review

2010-11-20T23:39:00.001+11:00

So I've had this new toothbrush for a few days now, and thought to shed some light upon it.

As the title says, it's a Reach branded toothbrush, the model being Total Care, and its a medium bristle stiffness.

The first appearances was it looked pretty thin by comparison overall, there is a hole in the middle of the handle, and the bristle design is all bristle without solid plastic nubs or bars (typically polishers is what they are called?).

It is quite light in the hand, and on the back of the head is a uniform pattern of ridges as the tongue scrubber.

Upon first use, and then comparison is that the head is quite small, it looks about 1/5th shorter than the Colgate heads, though the width is of comparable size, however, it is very noticable in difference when brushing far into the molar reaches. This being the first Reach brand toothbrush I've had, I can understand their adverts now that it really does get back there quite nicely.

The medium bristle stiffness isn't particularly noteworthy until you start to apply firm pressure with the brush. The thinner handle on it flexes quite considerably and deflects so that the overall pressure on the gums is reduced, so you can still get a good scrub without hurting your gumline at all.

The only thing that confuses me is the hole in the grip. Its meant to be the thumb position hole, but I don't grip my toothbrush to use the hole. Further more, I don't see how the hole helps anyway.... ~shrug~ gimmicky to me. The only other thing of note is that the tongue scrubber is pretty poor. I prefer the slightly flexy ridges and pattern from the Colgate, it seems to actually do something instead of just a bumpy surface that the Reach brush provides.

So, for me, it's a good head due to the size to get in easily and around, light and flexy grip to provide comfort when brushing firmly, but, has unnecessary points about it.

Yet another toothbrush.

2010-11-16T19:34:00.000+11:00

So, its time for another toothbrush review. I haven't used it yet, I only just bought it. This time, it's a Reach branded toothbrush, a slightly different design of head and bristles to the others, and also a different grip. More as I actually use it.

In other news, not that it's really much news, but I've been given some casual research work, and may have opportunity to tutor/demo again for anatomy depending on how things go. Besides that, not much else has really happened thats terribly exciting.

Hrm

2010-10-31T08:35:00.000+11:00

So I haven't written in a long time. It's a overcast Sunday at this present moment and not much is going on. The weather plays upon my mood somewhat, and I guess I reflect upon the month that has gone by.

Life is a funny thing sometimes, things happen when you least expect it, things you expect don't happen, and just day to day, life keeps on rolling by.

I've been watching the tv series How I Met Your Mother, and in a way, it has been an interesting show from the perspective that it actually contains really solid relationship perspective, to the point where you could take it with a grain of salt as advice. At least if you look at it in the right perspective.

My life right now is a bit of an up and down, but life is always like that. The best you can do is to look up, and look forward. Things happen, generally for a reason. It's nicer when you might have input or control in why and how it happens, but sometimes you simply don't. When these kinds of things happen, going with the flow can sometimes be great, instead of being afraid to plunge into the great unknown. Name it a sense of adventure perhaps if you will, but much of history is filled with that adventure, be it exploration, or experimentation where people were not afraid to rally against the norm.

While I am not exactly fighting any social norms at all with my behaviour, it is more against a self-restraint that years ago would have blocked me from enjoying parts of life that I do enjoy today.

So dear reader, like the Jim Carey movie, Yes Man, be open to everything in life. Life indeed can be short, you never know when your time may be up, so don't go around saying "no" to too much in your life.

._.

2010-09-25T05:46:00.000+10:00

Aich.
||

New York Travel Diary 12th May 2010

2010-05-13T12:22:00.001+10:00

Wednesday 12th May 2010

A wet and miserable day from any normal situation, an early wake and off to catch the subway. The 6 train is packed, we switch at Grand Central/42nd to the other platform onto the 4 train to get to 161st street, Yankee Stadium. Today is the 178th NYU graduation, where all graduates for 2010 pile into the stadium and have a whole university graduation while family and friends attend in the bleaches and stands.

When we get to the gates however, trouble struck. No video cameras, no water, no laptops. Oh uh. Well, so now I’m sitting at McDonalds waiting for the ceremony to be over lol. Bag check exists by looking at it, it seems to be quite limited and I don’t trust it since it’s done from the back of a truck on the street -_-; Well, I guess I won’t be missing much since she isn’t receiving any awards and you are basically just looking at the stadium. Her friend Lori also came along so she has my camera and will take pictures in lieu for me lol.

Sitting here at McDonalds I’ve also finished writing up the blog entries for the other days so far, chatted with some Asians whose brother finished a Masters in Continuing education, while an older couple next to me told me that they are attending for their son who is graduating from law, and they are from San Paulo, Brazil, where the temperature in NYC is too cold for them. They will be staying for 15 days only, and their son is dating a NYC girl. Their daughter however lives in Sydney and is a teacher of some kind. Hmm.

Only a little bit longer to wait before they come out I think XD. This McDonalds is packed, must do pretty good business I think, though it needs to be bigger to accommodate the flow of people through it, especially in bad weather.

Well, after spending some more time in the McDonalds, the ceremony was over and they came out from the stadium. We went via the station again to catch the 4 train, and boy oh boy was the train situation bad. Totally packed trains... you’d expect that they’d have a better way of controlling the human traffic and trains with the Yankee stadium events there on a regular basis, but no... they didn’t. Eventually we got back into Manhattan and got off at Union Square for some shopping and lunch.

Lunch was in a place called Angelica Kitchen, just off 12th and 2nd Ave, next to the Italian place called John’s (2nd Ave heading towards 1st Ave). It was a totally vegan/vegetarian place (no animal products) but the food was pretty good. I got the lunch deal that was soup, bread, simple salad and tea. Good size portion too for the price.

Post lunchtime, we went back to the apartment to chill out before heading back out for the PIT, otherwise known as the Peoples Improv Theatre. A comedy/improve place that had free shows on Wednesday nights in 1 hour blocks. The first group was called Local 154, and the second called Borialis. Well, improve is something I’ve never seen before, and a lot of it was “huh?” to me, and a lot wasn’t funny at all, but these people are amateurs in training, though there were certainly bits that were really brilliant.

So, then after that came dinner, at CPK, California Pizza Kitchen, in New York City (like the Philly Cheese Steak in NYC). I had a grilled Dijon chicken focaccia with minestrone soup, also well priced for the size. Feeling quite full and tired found us back at the apartment, getting ready for bed, for another full day out tomorrow with the second graduation ceremony in Lincoln Centre on the Upper West Side.

New York Travel Diary 11th May 2010

2010-05-13T12:21:00.005+10:00

Tuesday 11th May 2010

The morning was also fairly relatively uneventful in a sense, with me doing job searching to start with. Not much has really appeared of late, though I did apply for three positions this week. Laundry had to be done, and while Fang went out to deal with some administrative matters, I stayed in job searching. Her friend Elina, I believe Armenian/Russian, came over to exchange graduation tickets (so they could attend each others) and we had lunch at Roxy’s Pizzaria. I had a chicken parma pizza, that was interesting, but it wasn’t filling enough so I further got a pastry wrap. I thought it actually only had a hotdog inside as that was what I saw being made, but when they cut it and plated it for me, it was a solid block of chicken inside. So I was pretty darn full after finishing it.

Returning to the apartment, I set about doing the laundry, having to make multiple trips as the first trip I loaded the laundry into the washing machine, but when it was done, there were no dryers available. There was someone occupying four dryers, drying blankets/quilts by the looks of it, setting the drying time to 99 minutes per cycle. I came back down twenty minutes later to get one machine, with a standard 54min cycle before finally returning again to pick it up. Mishap happened later though in that when I left the apartment to pick up the laundry, the roomie locked me out when she left, so I ended up sitting in the corridor for half an hour sleeping until Fang returned. No-one questioned or looked twice at me with me sitting at the end of the hallway with a grey bag against the wall though. I guess I just don’t look that suspicious lol.

We then got ready for the graduation dinner formal. The NYU Medicine Class of 2010 Formal. It was held at Gotham Hall, at 1453 6th Ave between 36th and 37th streets. It used to be a bank, Greenwich Savings Bank before it became a function venue in 2002. The building is an impressive sandstone building with an upper section that overlooks the oval downstairs space, where they had set up two bars for pre-dinner drinks and finger foods. We mingled, had photos taken, met academics and researchers, before shuffling down to table 21 where we sat with others. I had already met Will and Shalla before, and seen some of the others there from the other dinner at the Brabecks residence, so I wasn’t a total stranger to them.

The appetiser (entree to me) was a salad on a nest made of noodle, with some yellow baby tomato with a balsamic dressing. Entree (main) was a choice of char sea bass with vegetable or a seared pepper crusted steak, where I took the sea bass, while dessert was a pastry wrapped and deep fried banana sliver with vanilla ice-cream coated in caramel dressing and shaved nuts, served in a raw sugar rim coated margarita glass having a strawberry slotted on to the rim. Coffee and petit fours followed also.

There were speeches and awards given from the students to the staff, and a speech by one of their academics, congratulating them and giving them a vote of confidence in their abilities, even if four years seems to be a short time to become responsible for making life-changing decisions. As he said, you’ve been trained at one of the best universities in the US for medicine, and trained with hands-on experience at the best hospital in the country (Bellvue) so any fears and doubts should be gone since they could not have had any better training leading to it.

Afterwards came the dance. The band/orchestra was the Alex Donner Orchestra, but, I must say, I was pretty impressed. During/before dinner they played the classicals, along with jazz pieces for the mood and what not, but then broke into golden oldies for the slow dances during dinner intermissions for those who wanted slow dance, before rocking it out with classics like “You Shook Me (all night long)”, “Simply the Best” and some John Mellencamp, but then pulled out all the stops by switching into the modern era doing a pretty good rendition of Black Eye Peas, and even Lady Gaga. They were still rocking it out when we left, the noise was deafening however and I probably have suffered some minor hearing damage/loss. Though, what they say, work hard/study hard, play hard. These med people, they know how to party hard.

It was a light drizzle falling on the way home, and we walked in the cool breeze, chilling off and looking good in the dark of night before getting home and going to bed.

New York Travel Diary 10th May 2010

2010-05-13T12:21:00.003+10:00

Monday 10th May

Waking up in the morning, our crashers were there, and chilling out, socialising some more. Food was the order of the day, so I whipped up a spinach and carrot omelette that fed them some, served with lactose-free milk, regular milk, and soy milk. We talked more until the middle of the day or so, where I did some job searching while Fang was filling out forms for her residency position coming. It was a fairly uneven ful day in all really.

Later on however, there was a dinner party to go to, on Park Avenue, at the home of one of her advisors that had helped write the Deans Letter (a assessment and observation of her life at the university over the years under the watchful eye of the advisor). The gentleman (and I mean gentleman, a true one at that) was Dr Brabeck, and his wife, Dr Brabeck. Their home was a civil war era building, and their apartment was on the back corner of the first floor, with a private sunken courtyard that was amazing. Their home, furnished tastefully with antiques and art, including Asian arts such as Tibetan tapestries and beautiful pictures of life and people in S.E. Asian countries. They also had an incredible sculpture done by a family friend, who had got to know a prisoner and sculptured their face. The only problem was being sensitive to their Jewish friends, so they would cover the sculpture when they visited since the prisoner was one of Hitlers generals during the 3rd Reich. Even still, it was really nice, a bas relief carving of an old man with a sorrowful face, and a hand held up as if pressing against the stone itself being an invisible wall, in almost a Han Solo carbonite style.

The dinner was nibbles and drinks to start with, and a very talkative Dr Hopkins, an attending surgeon who also serves with the MSF, or the Doctors without Borders (MSF is French, its Medicines san Frontiers or something like that). She has been divorced from what she said, single still and probably will be for a long time, neurotic, and very verbose. Gave lots of advice and I could see her being extremely cheery if she got drunk. She apparently also takes hip hop lessons weekly and is learning how to “pop” at the moment. Dr Brabeck and his wife however were much more quiet, but giving a gentle presence. He was a hospitalist and practiced internal medicine, while his wife was an applied psychologist and also the Dean for the Steinhardt School at NYU. Talking to them was good, albeit conversation brief. They gave me their support with words for anything that I chose in the future, and should I decide to do the DPT (Doctorate in Physical Therapy) at NYU, Dean Brabeck would help as best she could if I got back in contact with them. Nice of them to offer, and I might take it up. Dinner food was catered food brought in, noodle, sushi, broiled vegetables, rice, with chocolates and cake for dessert and fortune cookie. My fortune cookie was the usual nonsensical material you often find, pretty unmemorable (I had to look at it just then) that said it is better to light a small candle than curse the darkness. Fangs said “What is the speed of dark?” to which, I would think, the same as the speed of light since once light is gone, darkness returns at the same rate.

The end of the dinner was a group photo, even with me included, so years down the track, someone may look and wonder who I am, and where I ended up, pondering my medical career that simply just does not exist, yet. It’s really a photobomb in the sense that I shouldn’t have been there lol not that I ruined it though.

We walked back from Park Avenue in the wind and slight chill, and pretty much settled down to go to bed for the night.

New York Travel Diary 9th May 2010

2010-05-13T12:21:00.001+10:00

Sunday 9th May 2010

Sunday was mainly spent house hunting. Apartment hunting more really than anything else. Fang needs to find new lodgings by May 31st and move out, otherwise she is moving home to Brooklyn until accommodations can be found, and thus commute the time sucking distance every day to do her work as a resident at NYU hospitals’ pathology department on the 4th floor of Bellvue hospital.

There were some leads and she had arranged to go see some, all mainly found through Craigslist. The first one was undoubtedly the median of NYC type of apartment, with better, and worse. The guy who showed us was Keith Knight, from Citi-Habitats, a realtor firm. The apartment asking price was I think from memory $1300 a month, a studio apartment in Midtown area. The floors were black linoleum or vinyl by appearance, dirty. One wall was exposed brick, the bathroom dingey, the real only redeeming feature was a gas stove and stainless fridge. Heat and hot water included as standard. Apparently they wanted to fill it soon and quickly since there was meant to be a tenant but they had pulled out at the last minute. Personally, I thought it was reasonable for the area, but would have definitely preferred better. Size wise, it was reason really for two people to live in, it just prevents hoarding.

The second property was shown to us by a guy called Carlos, who was the superintendent for the building. There was in fact two properties in the same building on the Upper East Side. First floor, apartment 1 was a studio apartment. It was clean, polished light wooden floors, gas stove, dishwasher, bathroom. Asking price was $1250ish as Carlos wasn’t sure since he was only the super and not the realtor. While it was slightly smaller in feel to the first place, it was nicer, and probably similar sized but just arranged different with how the kitchen and bathroom space was orientated. Carlos then took us up to the 5th floor (10 flights of stairs lol, no elevator) to apartment 15, a one bedroom apartment going for an undisclosed amount. Well, lets say, it was beautiful. The bedroom was all the way through to the back of the apartment with a door separating it from the living space. In size, it’s quite similar to my room back at home in Sydney, so I knew I would definitely be able to live in there. Its big enough to fit a double bed for sure plus a closet, and from memory I’m pretty sure it has a small closet inside I think. The living space was similar sized to the bedroom but I think a little thinner in width, but I think you’d be able to fit in a two seater sofa plus a single and perhaps a small tv cabinet if you wanted, or a desk for a computer, while there was still kitchen/dining space that would be able to fit in a small four person table and chairs. The kitchen was very small however, with a gas stove and supposedly a dishwasher also that I didn’t notice. The fridge was present as an older white enamel thing. The bathroom wasn’t too bad either, small, but usable. No laundry but a Laundromat was available just down the street with brand new machines and at $2.50 a wash or dry (so pretty much $5 a load since the apartment has not much space for hanging dry space outside) was reasonable. At the dorm at the moment, it’s $1.75 a wash or dry.

We then traversed back down to the Village area, a more trendy place, kind of the “hip” part of young people’s hangout areas. A Russian lady showed us two places, and man, were they shitholes. Unbelievable prices also required for them at $1400 and $1300 for two studios. The first one, similar size to the first place with Keith, but a wooden floor, and the rest was comparably bad, though Keiths apartment was worse as there was an exterminators sign saying to leave your doors open for extermination of rats whenever the exterminator came. But, the Village apartment downstairs smelt like urine. Not sure which one was particularly worse. The second studio that the Russian showed us was.... so incredibly bad that I was amazed that anyone would really even want to consider it, though I guess if you were desperate and had the money too burn, you’d take it. To get to it, you had to pass through a front building, cross a courtyard and enter the building behind. The building door in the second one was busted so you had to have pretty strong fingers to pull the stub of a door knob to open it too or be stuck inside. The apartment was... abysmal. Enter the door, immediately in-front is a door and to the right is the kitchen, and the studio space. Well, let’s say that if you put a single bed in it, you’d have filled half of the space. Virtually no space for a table or anything else let alone where you’d put your clothing... Then of course comes the question of amenities. I suspected the door was the bathroom and I was right, but even then I got a second shock. Opening the door, left was the toilet, direct forward was the sink, no shower?.... wait for it, turning right progressively is a wall, wall, wall, gap. Wait, what? The gap was about maybe 50cm/20 inches wide, I could just squeeze in, where a plastic shower base could be seen. O_O; I stuck my head into the space, and yeap, that was the shower. It was a virtual deathtrap, though if you wanted to defend yourself against medieval attackers who had no explosives, it would be perfect since you could just stab whoever tried to come into the space as they passed into the gap. If they threw in a grenade or bomb, you’d be screwed, though they could smoke you out if you had no water running to knock out the smoke. Un-fricken-believable. So then, we wandered around more calling numbers on signs that said apartments for rent, talking to people who picked up, to find that they pretty much didn’t have anything in the price range that we were looking for. One place, Stuyvesant Town, had no studios, but one bedroom places starting at $2500 a month.... yikes.....

So in conclusion, the further you live from downtown, and trendy places, the better and cheaper if you’re willing to commute. The requirements we were working with pretty much covered a 30min travel time by subway or bus, and was around the $1200 +/- a little bit a month. So, at the moment, the one bedroom place was the fore runner and an application has been placed with the realtor. The original price was $1400, but after some haggling, we hope to get it for $1250 but they told us that they had some more interest in the apartment, so we might lose out should there be people willing to pay the $1400 price tag. Just have to wait and see.

Later that day after the walking around and movements looking at apartments, we headed back down to the Village area, and met up with some friends to have dinner on Bleaker St. We ended up going to a Italian place called Tattiora I think, I’ll have to check. Hand-made pasta supposedly, very fresh ingredients, very classic Italian. Prices were reasonable for such a place and the dishes ordered by the others included gnocchi, ravioli, fettuccine and a vegetarian penne of sorts. For me however, I ordered a spinach and cheese, wrapped in chicken, with portabella mushroom sauce, that also came with a side dish of spaghetti with a simple tomato and basil sauce. It was really good, and very filling. The atmosphere of this place was cosy and dimly lit, but it felt good and it was quite full when we arrived after 9pm. By the time we left, close to 11pm, there were still people there eating.

For dessert, we went to a place called Rocco’s, a patisserie place. There were lots of cookies, biscuits, biscotti, cakes, tarts, sweets and dessert goodies. Being so full from dinner, I pretty much only had a hazelnut steamed milk while the others had drinks and also some food, including a chocolate mousse cup, a fruit tart and a raspberry chocolate pie (pretty much raspberry chocolate cake with cream on top, cake with a pastry base/wrap around the edges of a pan is called pie I think). After dinner, two of them came back with us to the apartment and crashed over for the night chatting away before going to sleep.

New York Travel Diary 8th May 2010

2010-05-13T12:20:00.002+10:00

New York Travel Diary 2010

Saturday 8th May.

In my typical fashion, I turned up to the airport with plenty of time to spare and checked in my luggage without problems. This time, I had two full suitcases, and when I say full, I mean full, where I had weighed in at home at just over 20kg and just under 20kg. The limit for me is 23kg/bag with two bags per person plus carry-on luggage. The check-in counter scales weighed the bags in at 21.1kg and 18.5kg, so pretty good. What I had to bring in terms of goodies for other people this trip was a big woollen blanket (thankfully shrunk with a space bag, you know, the kind you use with the vacuum cleaner to suck out the air), plus the usual stash of Tim Tam biscuits (of different flavour variety), some miscellaneous items and a twelve pack box of Lanolin wool oil moisturiser. I ponder what the true weight of my clothing and accessories weighed, but it would still be quite a lot since I brought along both cameras and bits.

What did however fill a considerable bulk in volume but not weight, of my luggage was two suits, my nice suit I had bought last visit from Brooks Brothers, and my Kelly Country dinner suit/tuxedo. The reason why I had both this time was because the primary function of my trip was to attend the graduation activities of my girlfriend, Fang.

So, checked in, through customs without fault, into the waiting area where I dozed at the same gate, Gate 31, as last time. They have been doing renovations at the airport, and the new area is much better as the seating is no longer in the walkway but in an alcove that has been built/extended next to the gate. Considering the size of the airplane, it is actually still too small to accommodate the number of people waiting to board, but as usual, people will come at the last moment, and be happy to stand in line to board first.

Since last year however, I had purchased Marco Polo membership, the frequent flyer program for Cathay Pacific, my preferred airline of choice. This gives me certain privileges and one of them is preferential boarding, so when they call for the First Class, Business Class, they also call for the Marco Polo Club members, i.e., me. Even though I’m riding in economy, it just lets me get on board leisurely and have a half decent pick at stashing my carry-on near me since these days, a lot of people have crazy amounts of carry-on and they generally don’t even check for the size or weight of them unless it is insanely obvious that it shouldn’t be onboard, and even then, they will check it into the hold. My carry-on is actually about 5cm too big in one dimension due to the wheels, but it still fits within the overhead locker space, and it isn’t generally crazy heavy.

So, away the plane goes, my first segment, in my usual 70G seat, I’m next to two Asian guys, one of them sleeps the majority of the flight, and is obviously not familiar with western utensils as during the meals, I see him trying to eat his yogurt unsuccessfully with the tea/coffee stirrer spoon (LOL, Fail...) and basically poked about at the bits of meal that were obviously asian (e.g. salad, cakes etc, only eating the rice/congee options). Meals were usual, service was usual, some slight turbulence but nothing really of note.

Entertainment on board was pretty standard also for the Cathay flights and I had seen the majority of the New Releases already, so I ended up watching through some older content, classics if you will, and tv shows. It’s all a bit mixed between the two segments but I do know I ended up watching through all the Family Guy and CSI/CSI:NY episodes, plus movies, but besides that, I did sleep, and was tired enough (since I didn’t sleep that night before) to fall asleep during the boring start of the Godfather XD.

Arrival in Hong Kong was fairly ordinary, passed through the transfer section, but then discovered that my jeans set off the metal detector. While the metal studs alone singularly didn’t raise much of a blip with the hand-held metal detector scanner, their overall amount tripped off the metal detector fierce and I got hand-scanned and patted down before they let me in.

The highlight of my stop-over in HK was however the first time I’ve been to the Cathay Pacific Lounge. With my membership, to advance to Silver level, you need to accumulate 30 000 miles in a 12 month period. For me, a return trip to NYC-JFK accumulates 24 000 miles, so while I had flown in April last year and December, only my December trip was a fare earning class (Doh), so I had 24 000 miles. I had accumulated lots of other miles through work as each eligible return flight was 424 miles. By the time I boarded my flight on Saturday, I only had 1914 miles to go to make the Silver status (up from Green) and the Sydney to HK route is worth 4000 miles. I had previously emailed the Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Club customer service staff about this, if upon arrival at HK, if I would be able to use the lounge due to my points earning. While it is normal for them to take two weeks to process points, they told me that it would be okay for me and they would inform the lounge people about my situation.

So, when I went to the lounge desk and showed them my boarding pass, they told me I wasn’t eligible. Well, I then explained the circumstance, and they called up someone to ask. The reply was that I shouldn’t be allowed in but they’d make an exception for me. I was a bit hmmm at this, and thus, opened up my email on my netbook to show them the communications I had received to let them know that their system had faults. Then headed upstairs.

I had seen pictures of the lounge before, and they reflected nicely. It’s a beautiful open space, soft leather lounges everywhere, a cafe bar with drinks/coffee/cake and small sandwiches, and a restaurant inside. The first thing that I did however was head straight to the showers section. The showers are nice self contained units, a overhead shower with a massive shower head, granite floors. A toilet sink and mirror, with towels, cotton buds, toothpaste and tooth brush, hair dryer and coat hangers. It was a really nice feeling to have that shower and be refreshed after a nine-hour flight first thing in the morning. I then went back and settled in a cubicle to do my emails with the free wireless available within (no different to wireless outside though) while having a iced milk tea, a brie sandwich and some crackers before heading back out to the boarding gate.

At the boarding gate though, they’ve now changed procedures slightly. In the past, you could pass through the gate and boarding pass check, then get your carry-on luggage inspected for liquids and aerosols by the HK security. Now however, they’ve switched it around by roping off the segment for flights going to the US, and your carry-on is inspected prior to entry to the gate area, after all the shops. This makes it smoother and stops the blockage of passengers boarding, a far better way than before thats for sure. So, back on board, this time in 66C, also by choice, where the lady next to me was a US citizen, and a Catholic as she did the usual cross symbol by hand across her chest, twice in fact, upon take-off and landing. Possibly a slightly nervous flyer maybe.

The HK to JFK flight segment was the usual long 15-16 hour flight, but there was a period of some quite strong turbulence where I think we had the seatbelt sign up for over an hour and the staff were shutting down peoples attends to get up for anything. I actually managed to get some sleep, about four or so hours overall I think, but I wanted to be awake for the standard US time to try and reduce the jetlag effect. It was however a bit bizarre though since it is now approaching the summertime here so the flight over the Artic was pretty bright, where it was pitch black last time in December.

Landing and passing through customs was pretty standard, no problems at all. I asked the immigration officer how long I could stay and they told me 90 days, with my last day being August 6th, should I decide to stay that long, but advised against me staying the full duration on a regular basis as it would raise suspicions of the immigration officers of strange activity if I did. Fair enough, so at the moment my return date ticket is still the 26th May, but I can extend with given time/space allowances on the same fare class.

The weather in NYC has been a bit wishy washy, being cold and windy at times, with spots of sunshine, though in a way, it is fairly typical for a spring time type of behaviour though. Pretty much that was it for the Saturday, I got to the apartment, unpacked the goodies and offloaded, had a shower and went to bed. A long day, a very long day.

Life Rolling On

2010-05-06T11:45:00.000+10:00

So, I haven't updated for two months. Those that don't know yet, I resigned from my job the other week and it's been relaxing to just chill and look for work again, especially since I am heading overseas in a few days for an unknown period of time.

My learning experience from work was interesting, and I have taken a lot from the six months that I was there for, with lots of hours on-site at the plant, and experiencing the industry side of things instead of academics. At the moment however, I am looking at all of my future options, more study is even on the books with the WES (World Education Services) certifying my transcripts for the US education system.

Not much else has really happened lately :P

Prius + GPS

2010-03-01T16:26:00.000+11:00

I got a GPS on Saturday (well, my brother got it for me while I was at the SKC competition) and I used it on Sunday to go to a 21st party, then the drive from the airport to the work site today, then from work to the hotel. The particular model I have is a Garmin Nuvi 1390T, and it took a while to update the software (two updates erquired) and one map update ( a 265 mb update required).

The screen is a 4.3" size and not too cluttered at all, and volume wise, is reasonable, where I have the radio on and can clearly hear the spoken addresses given. The lane changes and directional changes are typically given in advance between 500m to 1km and at the start of long stretches (e.g. turn x onto y in 9km). Navigation is fairly simple, but I couldn't seem to use it to find Lidcombe train station using the railway location finder....

So, today, I got "upgraded" to a Prius from a Hyundai Elantra... I've never driven a hybrid car before, and it is a different experience indeed. Keyless entry requires insertion of the lock tag (so uh, how is that any different to putting a key in??....) and foot on the brake before depressing the ignition button. The information panel shows you when the engine (petrol) is being used to drive the car, or when the battery is powering the system. The fuel use from my driving ranges from 0.0L/100km to 14.6L/100km..... I found that kind of really strange... One thing about the Prius is that it lacks any real acceleration. It's a bit annoying really by comparison to the usual movement in petrol engine cars, as you kind of crawl for the first few seconds before "something" engages and then you gain speed. Interestingly, it is a drive that feels like a high-ride. I.e., when driving, the speed that I was driving, didn't feel like that speed, where as in my own car (a Subaru), I feel like the speed I was driving at. To that effect, I had to keep constant eyes on the speed indicator to ensure I wasn't speeding...

I think it was a comfortable drive, but, if I was to buy a car, I wouldn't get a Prius....

New Youtube Vid

2010-02-27T19:33:00.001+11:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No6yZY3AICU

Federal Government Home Insulation Debarcle

2010-02-17T20:28:00.000+11:00

Honestly Mr Abbot, give it up.

The government has tried to do the right thing in providing much needed insulation to people to help lower their heating and cooling bills, as a once-off deployment of taxpayer resources, so that our climate related carbon costs can be combatted. In regards to the knowledge that certain types of insulation should be checked up on due to potential hazards, I offer these points.

1) Potential hazard DOES NOT EQUAL DEFINITE HAZARD!

Example. A toothbrush is a potential hazard. You might stick it down your throat accidentally when someone surprises you by walking into the bathroom one morning, causing you to choke and die.

Are you planning on banning, suing and causing toothbrush makers, toothbrush retailers and associates to lose their jobs? I don't think so.

2) Limit of liability stops at the home owner.

If you are going to get insulation done on YOUR home, how is the government responsible for your choice of contractor? In my neighbourhood, after we had insulation installed, we've had multitudes of people asking if we have had it installed, because they were wanting to install and cash in on this scheme.

Half of them, I wouldn't even let in my home, let alone my roof. A white pickup van with hasty printed stick-on signage of "Free Insulation!" does not inspire me with any great confidence at the quality of service you are about to receive. This brings me to point 3).

3) Recommendations to ensure followups on installation. Yes, in an ideal world, this would be the best thing to do. In an ideal world, you'd only also allow accredited companies with experience to install the insulation. Feasible? No. The amount of cost the government would then have to pay to have all the homes inspected would balloon immensely. Limiting the people who can do the installation then means that the weath going to the trade is limited to those who are accreditted, which, mind you, probably isn't such a bad thing, but those smaller, accreditted companies are probably not going to be able to get as many jobs as those who have well known reputable names.

Here is an example of the foil problem, from my opinionated perspective.

Young electrician gets electrocuted on foil insulation. It was conductive. The question is, why did he die? Besides the obvious that he got electrocuted, it isn't that it was because the insulation was foil insulation, it was because the foil was electrically live. The question then is, why was it live? It was live because the retards that installed it made it so. Now, then lets step back. Is the foil dangerous? No. What killed the young man? Electricity. How? Retards made the foil live.

Ok, so, you might say, it's the same thing, if there was no foil insulation, he would have been safe. Well, there was an example of this retardedness on the news, where this woman had foil insulation installed, and when she got it checked after the news about these deaths happened, it was discovered her foil insulation too was live, and after investigation, the dumbtards that installed it had driven one of those U shaped nails through the foil and THROUGH LIVE WIRING UNDERNEATH. So, had it been installed properly by people who KNOW what they are doing, it would have never become live in the first place.

Stepping sidways on this situation. You could say, if it was regular insulation, it'd be fine, right? Wrong. There is the same risk but this time, it is fire. Insulation burns. It might be fire retarded, but it will still burn given enough heat and the right conditions. Above my head is Earth Batts, a natural fibre insulation. My roof gets over 50C in summer for sure. If there was an electrical fault causing resistance, I'm pretty sure there is a good chance it would burst into flame. What does this mean? Dodgey home wiring in old houses, trades people who install insulation who accidentally damage wiring. Roof wiring isn't always the neatest or best done job, because it's assumed people don't go into the crawl space regularly. It isn't that hard to kick it around, step on it, and depending on how they secure the batts down either, to do the same thing as to the foil, i.e., damage wiring to cause electrical faults.

Then, draw current through the wiring, generate some heat, get some heat trapped in the insulation, poof, fire.

So, really, at the end of the day, the blame doesn't lie with some minister, or that he was given a report about potential hazards, it comes down really to two points in my opinion. The homeowner who allowed someone who looks like they belong in highschool (some of them coming to my door look just like that) operating out of a dodgey van (many of them did) to install the insulation not checking on the quality of work, and the tradespeople who did the bad job in the first place.

So, give it up and go back to learning how to iron shirts Mr Abbot.

/steps off soapbox

Followup on Toothbrush review

2010-02-17T20:11:00.000+11:00

As my previous post, I have recently started using a new toothbrush, the Oral-B Pro-Health medium.

It's been a few days now since I started using this particular toothbrush, and I think it is good to always give a bit of a breaking-in time to get used to the brush and wear it in. The handle has now softened up some with the flex experienced, the grip is quite comfortable actually and there is sufficient bend and flex in the main backbone that the brushing force is not as "hard" as if it had stayed the same initial stiffness.

The brush head itself has softened slightly, but as a medium hardness, I still find that it is still harder than the Colgate brush I previously used. Perhaps it is due to the higher bristle density and pattern, still not sure. In terms of foaming action, the softening has increased the lather, and pleasing to say, it seem that with the higher bristle density the foam is a much finer/smoother consistency. Now it might seem strange for me to mention, but when I spit out the residue, you can usually see the bubble formation in it, and surprisingly, it is a finer aeration of the tootpaste mixture than before. Interesting. I'm not actually sure if means much if it is just purely a bristle density function however.

The fatter head is still a fatter head though, nothing is really going to change that besides use time and getting used to it. It doesn't seem that big a deal, but you really do have to open your jaws wider and distend the cheeks more to get to those back molars. The hard tongue scrubber is hard as ever...

Stay tuned for my next brush review in another three months or so, when I decide what brush to get next and trial.

Yet another toothbrush review

2010-02-14T22:05:00.000+11:00

So, I bought a new toothbrush yesterday. Kind of past the three month recommended period, but eh.

This time, I got an Oral-B Pro Health medium toothbrush. Immediately from opening out of the packet, you can see and feel some solid differences. The contour and grip of the toothrbush is very hard. What I mean is, the material is harder/solid/stiffer than the colgate toothbrushes. The next difference is that the brush handle is very straight, the actual contours are formed by the grip, not the main "backbone" of the brush. Thirdly, the brush head is much larger than the colgate ones that I had before, much fatter in width. Seems much fatter in height.

The brush head features white firm plastic rods on both sides while there is a .\/\/\/\ inter-crossed bristle formation in the middle. The tip has a fairly standard longer bristle for the slightly deeper penetration.

In first brush impression, their "medium" hardness is harder than the colgates. I feel that I have to press much harder to get the same surface contact with the bristles. The other thing of note for me was that, while I used the same amount of toothpaste on the brush, there was no-where near the same amount of lather being produced by the brush during the brushing period. This seems to indicate to me that the bristles really aren't working as hard (and therefore aerating the toothpaste) as the other ones before.

It is still early days yet. Oh, on the back is a tongue scrubber, but it's actually made from hard plastic like the grip is, and doesn't feel very comfortable on the tongue at all....

Picton Grading 2010

2010-01-30T21:23:00.002+11:00

I refer to my latest posts on my Kendo blog for what I have been up to.

http://kotemendo.blogspot.com/2010/01/random-52-picton-grading-2010.html

Slow motion/High speed video

2010-01-11T07:04:00.000+11:00

This is a repost from my archery blog.

I busted a nock today doing some shooting with my new high-speed video footage device (Casio Exilim FC-100). It can record up to 1000 frames/second with a playback at 30 frames/second, but it requires considerable lighting for good footage to be taken.

I have taken some of my release, etc, on youtube. The links are below.
No, you will not get rickrolled, I promise.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vN4Ml8BRn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00NJeRoh3Kg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnWUlda9vfM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY1DcxPJYg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyMpyadmC7o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_exL2J1u2c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NBgnFaJamo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLpobg1SDN8

Omegle

2010-01-08T22:51:00.000+11:00

So, I've known of this site for ages, but never went or tried it.

I was super bored, so tried it LOL.

It's a random hookup chat thing based in the web browser between yourself and a "stranger".

I got some rather short conversations with strangers, typically along the lines of "Hey, asl?" then when I reply "Hi, 28 m Sydney" , it says Stranger has disconnected"

lol.... too many people trolling for girls? 28 is too old?... Sydney is undesirable?....

Anyway, after several bogus conversations, including a short one with a /b'tard who was trolling (lol, I asked if he needed /b'lackup and he said yeap, meaning he knew what I was talking about straight off) I had a proper conversation with someone. For the point that I'm bored, I'll paste the whole conversation below. You can CTRL + to enlarge if you actually want to read it. I won't put anything after it incase you don't want to read it. But, omegle is some harmless fun if you don't get trolled or arrested because you were grooming some underaged kid for sex.... XD

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: Hey

You: hey

You: are you going to ask my asl too?

Stranger: I'm male, 16, from Washington State

You: and then disconnect when you find I'm a guy?

You: lol

Stranger: No

You: nice, I'm 28 m Sydney

You: Seattle?

Stranger: Everett. So near there

You: I just came back from New York City on wednesday

Stranger: Really. Why's that?

You: visited my gf for chrismtas and new years, but had to come back for work

You: she's a med student at NYU

Stranger: Cool cool

You: so whats a happening in Everett?

Stranger: Not much.

You: it's like.... just past midnight right now?

You: 1am or so?

Stranger: Yah. It's 3 right now my time. I go to school in a few hours

You: why aren't you sleeping?

You: crazy kids lol

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: Well I just don't feel like it

Stranger: And

Stranger: I have homework later

You: but won't you be like tired as during school?

You: you know, the whole, impeed learning thing

Stranger: Probably. I find that I'm more calm when I'm tired. And I took nap when i got home from school today so I got some rest. I do well. Get my A's (mostly) and take French. So all's good.

You: awesome

You: so, you're in ... year 11 then?

Stranger: what do you mean

You: senior high

You: freshman senior high?

Stranger: I'm a sophomore

Stranger: I graduate in 2012

You: Australian system has highschool starting at year 8, roughly when you're 13... so when you graduate highschool you're in year 12, which is around 17/18 years old

You: oh, so you're year 10 then

You: I don't know the terminologies for US highschool, regardless of how many teen flicks I've seen XD

Stranger: Hehe, I understand.

Stranger: What is your occupation?

You: at the moment, I am a Development Engineer

You: but, technically, I'm a loooooot of things

Stranger: Nice

You: my hmmmm "career" path has been all over the place

Stranger: hehe. Writer?

You: well, I was an academic

You: Postdoctoral researcher, Honorary Research Associate

Stranger: Wow

You: but I also used to dissect human bodies as a Prosector and Anatomical Technician

Stranger: Interesting. How was that?

You: I also used to work at the Cinemas too lol

You: prosection is AWESOME

Stranger: Lol

You: it is so much fun, really interesting, artistic too

You: like, people tend to get grossed out by it, but human anatomy is really facinating

You: I'm a bit strange I guess

Stranger: Well the human body is so complex and is more than just a mystery. How it evolved and came to be is fascinating.

You: it's not like I'm just randomly hacking up peoples bodies, what the job is for, is producing specimens either for museums or for teaching purposes

Stranger: Yes. It's carefully done.

You: do you have any interest in the bio sciences?

Stranger: Yah!

Stranger: I'm in biology now and love it

You: thats really good

Stranger: We're going to disect a cat or a monkey in a month. Not sure which

You: lol

You: I didn't do any bio until I was in university, and then I didn't even do like normal bio, jumped straight into human anatomy and histology.... I also ended up as a microscopist specialist too

You: in case you think I'm bs'ing , I spent 10 years at uni >_< and have 3 university degrees lol....

Stranger: Lol you're dedicated

You: a Bachelor of Science (Anatomy & Histology major, psych and physics minors), Master of Applied Science (Microscopy) and a Doctorate of Philosophy (Chemical Engineering)

You: well, I worked after each degree, but then got offered a tax free scholarship for 3 years for the Doctorate, so took it lol

Stranger: That's cool. I hope to get a grant cus I don't have much money in terms of college and what I want to do.

You: what do you want to do?

Stranger: I'm thinking majoring in journalism and the communications. I want to be a writer.

Stranger: A novelist

You: hmmm

You: not easy

You: in reality, you don't need a university/college degree to be a writer

You: it helps if you want a job to support your living when you are writing your novels

You: lol

Stranger: Yes

Stranger: I'm writing a book now

Stranger: but i've been stalling

You: what kind of genre?

Stranger: SciFi mixed with fantasy

You: your inspirational authors?

Stranger: Erin Hunter, Walden, Pierre Teilhard, the guy who wrote Brave New World (can't remember his name)

You: all unknown to me, except I have heard but never read the Brave New World book

Stranger: Brave New World gets disturbing, haha

You: I guess that might depend on your definition of disturbing though :P

Stranger: I suppose

You: some people find it disturbing to be wrist deep in someones guts

You: or the sound of the bone saw when you take a skull cap off XD

You: ... though, the first time I put a head through a bandsaw was a little unsettling....

You: but I got used to it

You: XP

Stranger: Haha. I get squeemish around the thought of human guts, not animals. But you're one of the few then that can beat that fear.

You: the strange thing is, I can't watch gore movies

Stranger: haha. too fake?

You: I got sensitised to them after watching Saving Private Ryan

You: no... it's just the blood and bleeding

Stranger: I've heard of that movie

You: dead people don't bleed

Stranger: Ah, I see

You: and their blood is all... solid

You: Saving Private Ryan is a good movie, but it's quite sad in that it depicts war like how it really was

Stranger: Eh

You: when I saw it, a lot of older folk left, crying, because of the realism

Stranger: What happens in it, briefly?

You: army has register of soldiers

You: realises that 1 family has lost 3 out of 4 enlisted sons

You: decides, for the sake of the family, they'll locate and pull out the surviving son and send him home

You: so, they get a unit of guys to retrieve him, but the problem is, he's deep in the war

You: so these guys have to fight through a heap of shit to get to him and bring him back

You: and along the way, they loose good men in their unit

You: *lose

You: gah, my spelling is terrible

Stranger: For the sake of one individual...

Stranger: They lose more men

You: yeap

Stranger: heh, not surprising

You: but thats just how it is

Stranger: I'd like to see that movie soon

You: the tragedy of an entire family line being wiped out

Stranger: That is sad. But it happens

You: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120815/

Stranger: Is that where i can see it for like free?!

You: 1998... when I was in final year of highschool, so long ago...

You: no, it's just a link to the Internet movie database website which details the movie

Stranger: Oh alright thank you

You: wow

You: I didn't realise it won 5 oscars

Stranger: Don't think it deserved that?

You: oh, I think it did, but just wasn't aware it was that accoladed

Stranger: 53 nominations

You: yeah

You: so I see

You: well, it's a pretty grim film

Stranger: I'll probably convince my mom to rent it or something.

You: I still have in my memory the machinegun scene.... T_T

Stranger: That must of hurt lol

You: the guy was pouring blood out of his body from the bullet holes while the rest of the unit are jabbing him with morphine as he dies

You: ~shudder~

You: and thus why, I can't handle gore -_-

You: lol

Stranger: lol

Stranger: Haha. Finally someone else who uses "thus"

You: so what do you do in your spare time besides write ?

You: lol

You: ye olde english

You: I have written much myself, in fact, I met my gf through fanfic RPG of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time

Stranger: Wheel of Time!!!!

Stranger: : )

Stranger: I so want to read that

You: ohhh, be prepared to spend a lot of annoyed hours towards the end of the series

You: it has a tendancy to drag on a bit as his plot threads escalate in number dramatically as the main cast split off in different activities

Stranger: Yah my friend is reading the series and recommended it, and I thought I'd give it a try

You: I really loved it up to book 9, then it started to get a bit tedious in bits

You: but it's good solid fantasy

Stranger: Yah

You: but, he was dying at that stage (Robert Jordan) so I guess his writing kind of deteriorated somewhat

Stranger: Oh yah... forgot he isn't around anymore

You: yeah

You: another one that is interesting is George RR Martin

You: it's fantasy with a heavy medieval background, but what makes it very different is that the author isn't afraid of killing off characters that you get attached to

Stranger: Never heard of him

Stranger: Have you heard of the show called Lost

You: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin

You: yeap

You: I watched the first season, then stopped

Stranger: Haha. Been watching for .... five years now

Stranger: And i totally understand why you stopped

Stranger: lol

You: lol

You: it was interesting until the bunker and finding the other group

You: then it just kind of stopped making much realistic sense

You: even if you are on an island with some weird stuff going on

You: I don't like the show Fringe either

You: too much crap "science" in it

Stranger: I don't like Fringe

Stranger: Yes

You: hmmm

You: Mentalist is good

You: I like House :P

Stranger: Yes!!!

Stranger: I love Mentalist

You: Dexter is okay in it's 4th season, better in 1st n 2nd

You: Burn Notice is good

You: Better off Ted is hilarious

You: Loooooooove Mythbusters

Stranger: Hahaha. Nice

You: I don't do much besides Facebook and watch stuff

You: cos my desktop got lightning fried, so I'm using a netbook now -_-

Stranger: Ah that sucks. I don't have a facebook. have a myspace

You: I don't even know what happened to my myspace

You: lol

Stranger: Haha

You: dead n gone no doubt

Stranger: I wonder if it was cancelled or something.

You: perhaps

You: in any case, I'm going to go have a shower and then bed, I have Kendo training in the morning :)
If you are inclined, you're welcome to drop by my blog and read through my ramblings lol
you can find it if you google my online nick of Flehrad

You: and with that nick, you'll find all other traces of me online

You: cos... it's pretty unique

You: lol

Stranger: Flehrad. Ok ill check it out

Stranger: Sounds cool.

You: omg

Stranger: what

You: google even found my myspace page

You: lol

Stranger: Haha

Stranger: Awesome

You: when I searched Flehrad it came up with 5100 results

Stranger: I love google too

You: roflol, 6 friends! wooooot

Stranger: :))

You: anyway, it was a pleasure talking to you, Male, 16 from Everett

You: thank you, I hope you have a great day at school and good luck with your dreams

You: never give up on them, since they'll never give up on you

Stranger: Thank you! You actually talked to me tonight, so thanks. I had a good time.

You: you're welcome ^_^

You: Goodnight~

You have disconnected.

New York City Paintball

2010-01-04T15:47:00.001+11:00

So, my first NYC paintball experience.

It's located on Van Dam St, in Queens, just around the corner about 3 blocks from the 33rd-Rawson St station on the 7 train (you need to take the 7 circle, not the 7 diamond cos the express will skip 33rd-Rawsone) from either NYC Library/Madison/5th, Times Square, or Grand Central Station if you are coming from Manhattan.

The place is painted bright yellow so when you walk down Van Dam St, you can't miss it. It's also just one block down from the Correctional Facility there. Once you get inside, you start to feel the seediness of the place. The stickiness of the floor, the smell of paintball paint, the not particularly well lit ambience. A counter presents itself to you where you sign the standard liability waiver, and then you pay, get issued your mask, pack (2 tube only, which is really little), and a foam chestguard. Depending on your payment choice, you get issued your paint in bags of 500, two bags for the 1000, or a box which has 4 bags in it for the 2000. If you want extra paint, its $20 for 500, $35 for 1000 or $65 for 2000.

There is a picnic table arrangement inside where you sit around, have your drinks or food, and wait for your turn. They come and get you when it's your turn, and you come into the armoury where you pick up a paint marker, any random one on the bench, since they are all virtually the same. The markers that we got were tipperman style semi-automatics with non-electronic triggers. Gravity fed hoppers sit on top. As part of the safety brief, we are also told that we have to have the safety switch on and the barrel sleeve on until we are instructed to take them off, fair enough. The no-shoot distance is 10 feet, or about 3 meters roughly.

So, in this place, there is two fields, one big, one small, and a side laser tag field. Since we had 18 people in our group we got "private" play in the big map. It's filled with speedball barricades such as cans, the snake down one side, doritos and cubes. The field size in fact is TINY. You could easily throw a paintball across the entire distance... Anyway, the masks are dirty as, even when you try and clean them, it's still pretty fuzzy with them on.

Well, you play in four end rotations. So you switch sides four times, then get off the field, wait, refill your pods, then get back on etc. In the first round, I was given a warning for shooting someone who had surrendered to me under 10 feet. I was like, uh, I didn't hear him?? This was because you can't hear ANYTHING in there, even the referees have to yell multiple times for any instructions to get across the sound of paint markers and paintballs hitting surfaces... In any case, I backed off in my aggressive running push style and stayed back to lay down suppressive fire. I did pick it back up a few rounds later, one round where I cleared straight up the middle in a sprint and cleared out the entire right side of the field before I got shot crossfield on my back shoulder. On another round I cleared down the snake while standing, then got to the other end and ran out of paint LOL, and well, no surprise, got nailed by three guys down the end... >_< XD

While the paint prices are awesome, it's a bummer that the markers are so crap. The other thing is, 3 hours on the same field, even if you switch sides, gets kind of boring even if you try different tactics. I prefer the outdoor rounds more for the entertainment value. If I was playing tourney, it would be different, and the field is actually also much larger. The only other issue I have with the venue is the lack of ventilation. From what I could see and feel, there is very little moving air at all. The heat, the sweat, the respiration from players, and the paint, it makes for a very moist, wet, and sticky environment. The walls in the waiting area is disgustingly sticky and it doesn't even have any paint on it -_-;;;

But, I guess it's okay for the odd occaision, not a every day thing.

So, if you're in New York and you're after something to do for a few hours, then you can head down for some paintball action. Good prices, kinda friendly staff of sorts, basic play no frills no fuss paintball.

Oh, I forgot

2010-01-04T10:59:00.001+11:00

I forgot to mention in my last post that we also went to Pearl Paint, this awesome place near Chinatown, which is a 5 floor art supply shop. Like, if you were into your art, this is where you'd go and get your gear from, seriously, mind boggling amount of supplies there lol.

Past Week, New Years, and a Return to Come

2010-01-04T03:23:00.000+11:00

Hmm, so what have I been up to since Jeebusmas? Really, in a sense, not much.

I've watched a lot of movies, including Sherlock Holmes (which was okay, not fantastic) and I've eaten a lot of food, including some of it my own cooking.

Entertainment wise, I went outlet mall shopping with some friends, we went to the Elizabeth Gardens, New Jersey Outlet Mall, next to Newark Aiport on the west side of the Hudson river. This place was pretty darn big, two floors in a "H" formation, which had it's own power grid connection. We wandered through this place over the space of about 6 hours, yes, 6 hours. I ended up spending quite a bit of money on some shirts from Saks Off 5th Ave, a suit from Brooks Brothers, and two suitcases from the Samsonite shop.

Oh, before that, the day before actually, I went to B&H Photography and Video, on the West Side of Manhattan. It's this multilevel shop, technologically advanced in proceedure, that sells photography, video, audio, optics, electronics, consumer goodies and gadgets, and professional things too. After wandering through and speaking to some of the sales people, I came away with a heavier credit card, a pair of Audio Technica M50 headphones, and a Casio Exilim FC-100 (in white, though it's technically silver). So instead of my dSLR, I've been using the FC-100. It's easy to use, 9MP, and compact. I haven't seen any of the images off the camera, so I don't know how they look yet.

Anyway, getting back to things, after outlet mall shopping, we had dinner at an Indian place in Flushing, a lot of food, not too badly priced, reasonable taste, and a lot of "freebies". It was pretty empty so they probably gave them to us since otherwise they'd have to toss it out.

The weather has been okay here, some days are bone-chilling cold with knife edged winds, others, "warm" by comparison. We had snow appear on New Years Day, and snow the day before and yesterday though it is all melted now.

Other things that happened, like New Years Eve. Well, it was cold and wet so we stayed in and watched the broadcast online. It seemed actually fairly boring lol.. perhaps I'm getting old >_<. There were some crazy people shirtless in the virtually freezing rain.... not for me... not for me. We had gone to Trader Joe's on 14th and Union Square (it's like Aldi) and the lines were huge, they went snaking around the aisles before you got to the counter... But we got some food and what not so we could cook something.

New Years Day itself was pretty packed out in Times Square also. There was still confetti bits floating in the air, bits that had been caught on building tops, that were being blown around and recirculated by the air. Cruised through the Hersheys and M&M stores to get some chocolate, before heading down to Koreatown for dinner with some friends. The place we ate, Kunjip, seemed to be the busiest place on the strip since it had a line of customers outside it, in the cold, willing to wait their 20 minutes to get inside. It took us about that time to get inside the building, where the line continued around the edge of the eating tables, so when you ate, you had people watching eating, with the feeling of, hurry up! lol. I got a ricecake and mandoo (dumpling) soup, which was okay (only 3 mandoo!) but there was plenty of side dishes at least.

After dinner, we eventually (LOL, all these places listed on Google Maps don't exist no more) found a billiards/pool parlour on the 12th Floor of a place in Koreatown, and we played for an hour ($17 for a table/hr), max 4 people, min $10 charge if less than 1hr) before heading up a few blocks and singing two hours at Karaoke Duet, a Japanese run Karaoke bar upstairs on the 2nd floor. During that, the friends ordered drinks and I ended up with a Long Island Ice Tea, my first time having it. It didn't actually feel or taste that strong, just as people had said, it's one of those cocktails that you can get hammered on very easily since it's hard to tell how much alcohol you are imbibing. Anyway, at the end of the night, I still had most of it left, and I threw it down with some water, only to find about 20minutes later, my voice was going, possibly from the alcohol >_< interesting experience to say so.

The only others of note. City Crab and Company on 19th and Park Ave South is a nice crab place. $24 gets you 2lbs of garlic sauteed crabs. 2lb = 900g, doesn't seem much? It's a lot... There is like 6 half crabs in the fridge right now lol. My crab allergy seems to still be around, but I have a better tolerance of it since I managed to habve 3 half crabs before it kicked in.

Today, we're going to Queens to New York Paintball. It's an indoor facility for paintball, easy access via the 7 train and a few blocks walk. The prices are fairly cheap ($42 for mask, marker, gas, and 500 paintballs, $6 for disposable overalls, $55 for 1000 paintballs) compared to the prices back at home. You can even buy markers from their pro-shop with basic tippermans starting around $65 apparently! LOL. Should be fun methinks.

Tomorrow, I shall be back in a taxi to the airport, and thus end my trip for this time. Oh, I can't remmeber if I mentioned the Samurai exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, well if I did, sorry, if I didn't, we went there too and looked at a lot of Taichi, Katana, some Kodachi, Wakazashi, bogu, and other funky things like Saya's and banners.

I didn't really play tourist this trip, I don't feel the need to be a tourist. I mean yes I could have been, but if I kind of plan and attempt to be living and working here at some point in the future, I need to be seeing and experience life as a regular person. I think I got a lot of that here by going grocery shopping a lot more and cooking (in a tiny terrible kitchen).

One thing for sure is if I get a place here, I'll need a bigger fridge, new stove, and a separate freezer. I'd also get some new knives and cookware for sure.....

So, now as I finish this, going to go look for a Jack's 99c store to buy a lock to use at the paintball place (otherwise they sell locks for $3). Ciao~

Jeebusmas

2009-12-26T06:03:00.001+11:00

Well, today is Jeebusmas (derived from people calling Christmas, Jesusmas, then Homer from the Simpsons saying "Save me Jeebus!" in one of the episodes) here in New York, there has been some rain overnight which has melted some of the snowfall from last weekend. It is still pretty white out there, but very grey and overcast at midday while I write this.

The last few days hmm, well not a lot, and a lot, has happened all at the same time lol. Monday when we got back from Minnesota I already wrote about. Tuesday, we went and saw "Up in the Air" starring George Clooney, about a road warrior who works for a company that specialises in laying off workers because their bosses are too scared to do it themselves. Ryan (Clooney) loves the travel and the detachment, so much so he is even a presented on guest talks where he gives his philosophy on the "backpack" idea, which is that the more stuff you carry in your "backpack" (your life), the more weighed down you are, and the less you can move. Humans have to move to live, thus if you are weighed down with family, house, payments etc, then you are not living since you are standing still. Interesting philosophy.

After the movie (which was very good, recommended to see if you haven't, it's very .... thought provoking) we had dinner at a mexican place, Caliente Cab Co Cafe. We had a fiesta platter and a grape margharita, that came with a bowl of corn chips n dip. The platter had fried ravioli (weird concept, a bit dry but otherwise okay), taco, burrito, fried chicken of some kind, and shrimp skewers. There was a mustard and a tamarind sauce to go with as separate dips. The drink came in a souvineer glass that you could keep if you want to. I now have a glass. It's real glass too, not plastic like the Bubba Gump hurricane glass from my last visit.

On Wednesday, the main thing of the day was the awesomeness that is James Cameron's Avatar. Oh My Goodness... this movie has got to be one of the BEST films ever to date. I don't know how to describe it, but the experience is phenomenal. We saw it in Imax 3D, and it was so incredible. The plot is simple and complex. Humans go to Pandora, want to dig it up for Unobtainium (lol), natives don't like this, conflict ensures. Add the complexity of how they try to resolve the conlict, through communication and force. The animation, the blending, the cinemaography, inspired. I can't really do it justice in words.

After the movie, we wandered around and visited B&H Photo and Audio. This place is HUGE, multiple floors, but it also has these moving tracks that push containers around of goods that customers order. It's pretty funky, and the prices are fairly reasonable too. It's run by these Jewish guys apparently, so yeah, good deals all round supposedly lol. Then, we wandered around some more to Best Buys and also to Staples to check out things before we went home and cooked dinner.

Thursday was fairly uneventful too. I popped down to get some bagels for breakfast and had a conversation with a lady while waiting about things to do in NYC. She highly recommended to NOT go to the ball drop at Times Square, and listening to her reasons, I think I won't go now lol. Waiting for HOURS in the COLD with NO Bathrooms available and a mad crush of people.... yeah, doesn't seem to sound like a great idea to me so much lol... Then went shopping for food and cooked a seafood marinara pasta for dinner before watching the Incrediibles, Cloudy with Meatballs and Zombieland lol.

At the moment, Twilight is playing on the laptop off some website, and we might head out later to catch another movie. Thus is how it is ^_^

There and back again

2009-12-22T15:00:00.000+11:00

I'm back in New York City now, after spending a weekend in St Paul, Minnesota. I went for the weekend to visit my brother and his family who live there. The flight departed from JFK Airport at gate B20, a Delta flight, operated by Northwestern, carried by Compass. It was a two hour and forty minute flight to get there. There was forcasted snowstorm for the New York area, and we were lucky to get away on time as snowflakes were starting to appear as we waited on the tarmac to leave. Hearing from friends later, the snowstorm apparently delayed over 700 flights, and someone we knew had their flight to LA delayed until Wednesday due to it.

The landscape of Minnesota is very flat. Flying in, the buildings were quite low, not much highrise or skyline blocking towers. The density is also low by comparison to even Sydney. My brother came by the airport (Minnesota airport is a combined international and domestic, which made it huge and confusing to get around) and picked us up. We headed straight to the Science Centre to take a look at the Titanic exhibition.

The exhibition had a collection of artefacts from the recovery of the Titanic, along with re-creations of the staterooms, pictures and tales from the events that had happened. We all recieved a boarding pass when we started the walk through and at the end you could see what happened to the particular passenger that you were following. I thought it was pretty well done, and the preservation work was pretty important in that due to the high pressure of the sea water the artifacts had been in for so long, a lot of long and painstaking work was required to maintain them from degredation. All of the displays had regulated humidity and temperature sensors inside them. One of the more entertaining peices was a boiler room wrench. In my younger days, there was a Half-Life multiplayer Mod based loosely on 007, where you could use a "40lb monkey wrench" well, this wrench was probably more in the vicinity of 200lb lol.

It was amazing to see the list of people who died and survived, with the largest amount actually being the crew that died, staying aboard to help passengers off. The gallantry of the passengers also, such as a sailor picking up a child and tossing it into the lifeboat as it was being lowered, to ensure that the child survived, or the lady who chose to stay onboard with her husband since she had no-one else to be with if he died. For me, my passenger, some woman, survived. We then took a look around the rest of the science museum and had lots of fun playing with the interactive displays that they had. It was actually pretty cool, and in a way, it is something that we do actually lack distinctively in Australia, the presence of "science" museums where kids primarily, but adults too, can learn and have fun. I went to one in Taiwan back in 1999, which was lots of fun too.

That night, we had dinner at a "Hmong" place, and it was okay, I had a green chilli pepper and it was so strong I practically couldn't feel my tongue and was crying T_T;;;;;

After that, went to bed, for another day ahead. On the Sunday, we drove to a local place called Battle Creek, where there was a hill next to the community centre where people go to ski and play snow sports. We went down the hill a few times on a cardboard box, which was quite fun except for the part about going backwards most of the hill LOL, I rolled a few times butt over head (backwards of course), and kind of decided to stop before I hurt myself since my travel insurance didn't cover "snow" activities.

In the afternoon, we then went to the "largest mall" in the country, called Mall of the Americas. It used to be a football stadium, then it got converted into a shopping mall when the team moved elsewhere in the city with a newer facility. It has five floors, and well, it's big enough that it has a full-time running amusement park in the middle of it, and also the worlds largest underground Aquarium in it. We had lunch at Chipoltes which was pretty nice, their burrito's are MASSIVE and pretty cheap too. After some more cruising around through the mall, we were actually pretty tired, so went back home for some rest.

Dinner was home-cooked, we had some photos taken, and then bed. The return flight back to NYC was a 7am flight, so we had to get there pretty early. Passing through the security checkpoints was pretty long, time consuming, pain in the arse really. Then the long long hike to the gate before hopping on the plane. We had to get de-iced also before take-off with an anti-freeze solution. The flight was fairly uneventful and we touched down in NYC on time pretty much.

A comment about security. On the way there, I managed to use my Australian drivers license at JFK as ID for my boarding pass check. I also was allowed through with my 160g tube (partially used) of toothpaste. This is in NYC, you know, site of 9/11 right? So, on my way BACK from Minnesota to NYC, I couldn't use my Australian drivers license but had to use my Passport as ID, AND, they confiscated my toothpaste... -_-; Talk about inconsistency...

So, yes, NYC was blanketed in snow. We caught the Air-train from Terminal 4 via Jamica Station, then the E line, transfered to the 6 line, then walked from Lexington and 33rd. Lots of snow on the curbs and sidewalks, lots of snow on cars that haven't been used, lots of snow in gardens. It's quite pretty actually from afar, but at the street level, it's dirty and grey slush lol, kind of loses it's romantic aspects of it quickly if you have to avoid stepping in the puddles.

So, no real plans as such for the rest of the trip thus far, going to play it by ear. My USYD Kendo Jacket kicks ass, as combined with my other clothes, it's kept me reasonably warm in Minnesota conditions, (it was as low as -13C) and seemed to be fine in todays 2C conditions when we got back. Just have to see how it goes.

Cathay Pacific – Business Class Comfort?

2009-12-18T18:44:00.002+11:00

18th December 2009.

My morning began at four o’clock when I prepared for my journey to New York City via Hong Kong, flying Cathay Pacific. After a rather pleasant journey in a taxi with an Iraqi driver, discussing the benefits of living and being an Australian after receiving citizenship here ten years ago, I arrived at the International Airport Terminal in Sydney. The morning was still quiet, the skies dark, the check-in counters empty.

I had checked into my flight the day before, printing off my boarding passes for both flight segments, so joined the rather short line (two groups of two people) before me in the baggage drop for online check-in. Two counters opened up with two gentlemen to start the check-in procedures. The group that ended up on the counter before me were actually not online checked-in and I could see the slight irate expression of the staff as he proceeded to check them through and tag their luggage.

For me, it was rather straight forward, pleasantries exchanged, luggage placed onto the conveyor belt, which weighed in beautifully at 22.9kg, just short 0.1kg of the 23kg limit. The gentleman was quick, efficient, and wrote on my boarding pass the gate, the boarding time, and stamped the tickets that my documents had been checked properly. Then I was merrily off on my way through customs and to the boarding gate.

I had a minor wait at the boarding gate, but on my way through, I checked the departures boards and saw that there had been a gate change from gate thirty-three to twenty-four. It wasn’t much of a problem since the divergence point between the two gates was still in front of me, and I didn’t have to backtrack. Once I got to the gate, I took a seat to wait for boarding with about an hour to go.

With about ten minutes to go, there was an announcement of the speakers requesting that I make myself known to the customer service desk at the gate, and so I did, not really sure what was the problem. The lady behind the desk asked to see my boarding pass, and told me that she had a slight seat change for me, and that it was much better than the one I had. I was handed a boarding pass with the words “Business Class” across the top. I was rather surprised, and thanked her profusely for the new seat.

Now, getting down to business, Business Class, that is. We boarded first, fairly standard for First Class and Business Class flight passengers. This flight (CX110) was on an Airbus A330, and did not carry First Class seating. My seat was 19K, on the right hand side of the plane, with my seat orientated at forty-five degrees towards the center of the cabin. Sitting down in the seat, you could feel immediately that it was a whole new level to Economy Class that I have flown previously with Cathay Pacific on the same flight schedule.

The seats are cubicles in their own, with dividers that reached about my eye height when I sat up straight. Why you would do that is beyond me because it feels natural to just “relax” into the seat and the slight recline of the back-rest. To my right is a large widescreen LCD panel, controller for the panel, electric socket to power devices, a light boom, and push-button controls for the seat. The seat controls allows the back-rest to drop to a sleeping position, a movable lumbar support (up/down forwards and back), and a leg-rest that can be raised and lowered. Standard buttons for light and assistance also are part of the panel.

In front of the seat is a raised foot-rest with a small space underneath to stow things like your shoes. For me, I had a pair of steel-cap boots (being an engineer), and they kind of didn’t quite fit. I had to flip one upside down and squish it in, but during take-off, they vibrated their way out of the space.

The tray is stored vertically underneath the LCD panel, and is a two part flip-out arrangement that can be moved up and down. The LCD panel is meant to be latched into the cubicle wall but my much loved unit didn’t latch properly and jolted itself loose and swivelled slightly out during the bump take-off. In retrospect, I think the take-off was rather bumpy due to the tarmac, and us being over the front wheel, and not to do with the actual plane or pilot skill. The acceleration sensation was also a different experience, being sideways instead of front on as normal in Economy. But I digress.

The only complaint I have in regards to the tray table is that it feels really flimsy, more so than how the rugged “can take all sorts of abuse” trays used in Economy feel. Perhaps it is also an age issue since its ratchet mechanism was also a bit sloppy and loose in its movement and locking. It probably has seen a lot of pulling out and putting back in.

Moving along into the service side of things. Since my flight was an 8:35am departure, breakfast and lunch are included in the flight. Breakfast was serving in a multiple step process. A simple but clean looking, and rather chilled tray of utensils, fruit, a small pat of butter, and stone salt and pepper stone shakers was laid before me, with my name being used at every greeting, being checked on a list attached to the serving tray. Courtesy was standard with a smiling face with every interaction. A cold plate of fruit started the meal with juice (I took apple, orange was the other choice) and also a fruit smoothie, I had a slice of orange, red grapefruit, a wedge of melon and a strawberry on my plate, while tea and coffee was offered to me in a stone mug. Another member of staff passed through offering different breads to go with my fruit, which was then followed by another staff offering cereal and yogurt. With a short break to eat and digest the starting course, the main part of breakfast came along.

A choice of eggs hollandaise, spinach, bacon and tomato or dim sum noodles was presented to me, I went with the eggs. The menu staid that there was also congee with prawn and fish fillet but it wasn’t on the cart, but I saw a staff take it from the galley for someone else, which I suspect was because congee has to be prepared prior to serving, as it isn’t something that is served well as a reheated pre-cooked item. The meal was reasonable, but the eggs were a little over-cooked as the yolks were a bit harder than I think they could have been.

The clearing was pretty quick and efficient also, with them whisking away from me my tray, leaving behind my glass of water. Had I still had some tea or coffee in my mug, I am sure that they would have left it with me to finish.

At this point, there is a break in the service, as we are left to our own devices and entertainment. For me, the difference in entertainment options is staggering. In the Economy Class Studio CX system, there is a wide range of programs and movies, games and so forth, but in Business class, it seems to run off a different system, as the booklet listing the programs had specific boxed programming in blue, that was only available in the “widescreen systems”, i.e. Business of First Class. If you believed it without counting, it claimed over 100 choices. I would believe it since I didn’t feel like counting. I started to watch the movie “The Hurt Locker” about a group of bomb demolitions soldiers in Afghanistan (I think) and their experiences, based off journal entries of a journalist that travelled with a real life group of bomb specialists during the war. At this point, we’re only an hour and forty minutes into the total flight time. So far, the experience has been very pleasant. For someone who was expecting to be in the so called “cattle class” seating, it has been very pleasant indeed.

After a few hours of chilling out in the reasonably comfort of the chair in a dimmed cabin, the cabin lighting was brought back up into full lighting through a few colour changes of blue through the oranges and intensity. Not long after, the process for lunch began. Once again the service was exceptional. The tablecloths out, settings, the table settings put down. The lunch was pretty nice also, a salad with French dressing, and I chose a lamb dish that was reasonable. I had some French red wine also to go with my lunch. Then came cheese with fruit, port, followed with lemon and lime flan cake which was very nice. At the moment, the journey is nearly over with less than one hour to go in the flight time.

In picking out a conclusion for this review, I would like to say, it has been a real pleasure. I don’t know what the price difference is for a Business Class seat from an Economy Class seat, but if you have the money to spend for some very good service, I would say to definitely give Cathay Pacific some consideration. The space is plentiful, the food is plentiful (I am feeling very full from the two meals provided) and the entertainment is the same high standard to be expected. The staffs were also very friendly with lots of smiles, with constant patrol up and down the aisles to provide service when required.

My only other experience in a Business Class flight was many years ago in 2000 when I also received a bump upgrade on a journey from Vancouver to Tokyo with Japan Airlines. In contrast to the JAL experience, Cathay Pacific does not have self-serve facilities, preferring to provide a full-service service to their customers. The seating arrangements in the Cathay Pacific cabin is also more efficient as the JAL space was more conventional and not compact, which while providing better atmosphere in the cabin, means that the passenger to fuel ratio on flights (and their own profit margin) is more expensive to run with less passenger numbers in the same space.

In some other observational remarks, while having fully powered and motorised seat changing abilities with the previously described control panel, the amount of motor weight and hydraulics required (since it moved my 81kg around with ease) means for the number of seats with this mechanism, it is a lot of extra weight to be carrying. I don’t know if we would get the same quality of service if you replaced it with something else, but it would certainly increase the fuel efficiency of the flight service at least.... It does make me wonder about how “green” their service is.

All in all, it has been a fantastic flight segment for me, an experience to keep in mind for the future when I either have sufficient Asia-Miles points (their frequent flyer scheme) or when my salary permits trips at this level. As much as I really don’t like to give numbers, I know that a lot of people like to have numbers, so I will give some tentative numbers as part of my final conclusions. For comfort, decor, space, I will give a 4/5, for the quality of the food, drinks and meals provided I would say a 3.5/5, and for the service, which I found exceptional, a 4.5/5. It would certainly be possible to do better I think, how that might be is hard to describe, but I think it might be found in the First Class services. So, with this, I finish my experience on this flight, I hope this review has been of some entertainment and interest to you the reader. Thank you for reading.

Up and away... eventually

2009-12-18T07:10:00.001+11:00

~~yawn~~

I'm back at Sydney International Airport.

Been a while.

Anyway, my ride today to the airport was wih a seasoned driver of 7 years who lived in Belmore. From Iraq, fled the country as a political refugee as they were a member of the opposition party during Saddam Hussain's power rise. He settled into Melbourne for two years before coming up to Sydney since there were family and friends who had been settled into Sydney.

At the airport, check-in was fairly uneventful. I said to the security screening guy that I'd probably get explosive trace tag tested like I normally do, and what do you know, it actually happened lol, AND they frisked me XD

Ah, such a seasoned passenger am I that when the guy waved his stick to me, I unzipped and held out my hands...

Well, I bought a Raspberry muffin and a frappe at Santos drinks, and settled outsiee gate lounge 24. Me thinks I may need to nap a bit since I've only had 2hrs nap this morning since I kind of feared missing my flight.

This are rather uneventful here really, just that my boarding pass said Gate 33, while the displays show Gate 34. Gate 24 goes to HK, where I want to be, 33 goes to Noumea, which I'd rather not be unless if someone was paying for me, which since no-one is, I won't.

So, now I want and wait.

Well, now after a 30min nap in this hard chair, the flight crew have arrived and are waiting for the security gate clearance to open. As usual, on Cathay, it is a predominant asian crew, though the pilots appear to be of caucasian origins.

The crowds of people are forming, and there is a young girl with impeccable English reading an article to her father from Readers Digest, asian family, but I have no why she looks REALLY familiar to me -_-;.... There is also another dude near me who looks really familiar to me also.....

I think it must be from lack of sleep or something lol.... Or I must have seen them earlier in the airport from my wanderings >_<..

Well, back to waiting...

A wasted day

2009-12-09T22:19:00.001+11:00

Well, today was a waste.

We didn't get to do anything that was planned, and it is all blamed on Goss Brothers transport. We wanted some stuff that would be picked up and delivered to us by 9:30am. Then we found out we should have got it by 11:30am... It didn't get to us until 3pm. When we asked the driver what happened, and told him what their office told us, he was pretty surprised. He wasn't even told to pick up our stuff until 10:45am..... like, W.T.F. Then he was told to pick up a pile of other things first before delivery to us LAST.... Totally messed up. In any case, we shall no longer use their services, because this is the 3rd day in a row that they could not keep their time promises for delivery. You simply can not run a business if things do not come on time when expected.

So, yes, while doing other things around the place to pass time, including making a work of art with shovels and processed stuff from the other days, I managed to burn myself on a hot pipe (uninsulated or labelled) but it was just a small contact burn and the redness is almost completely gone. I then cut myself accidentally on my pinky, and then on the way back to the motel, had my foot run over by the car. Thankfully my steelcap boots bore the brunt of it, so I only got a little squished on my left side of the left foot, no damage done since it was so quick.

We got back and I watched the news for once, since we got back before 7pm for once, then had dinner. I got Fish of the Day, that turned out to be Salmon with a wasabi-plant blended sauce, potatos, chinese broccoli and snowpeas. It was actually really well cooked, the salmon with a tenderness and still very moist and pink. In answering the question, yes, I will be reimbursed for my meals, and I haven't been eating extremely expensive meals...

So tomorrow, we will have a very early start, we will leave the motel 30mins earlier than normal, and skip breakfast to get the stuff going so that we can fit in two runs of stuff in, todays and tomorrows material if possible. So yeah, shower then bed.

Rinse and Repeat

2009-12-08T22:51:00.000+11:00

Well, today was virtually a rinse and repeat of yesterday at work. Had some unfortunate news in the morning about stuff and stuff, stuff came way late, then ran the stuff, which was the same stuff as yesterdays stuff, but by the end of the day, it was a much better and more efficient operation, which, is good.

Came back tired as, and had the Confit of Duck tonight for dinner. The duck was superbly cooked, very tender, meat came off the bone very easily, and the mash was otherwise reasonable. We talked about stuff, and well, have another three more days of stuff to do.... -_-;

First day in real industry

2009-12-07T23:05:00.000+11:00

Well, there isn't much that I can really say, but my first day of work in real industry involved a very early wake thanks to the joys of peacocks.... damn peacocks...

Breakfast happened at 7am at a local cafe that opened at 6:45am for coffee but the kitchen wasn't open until 7am.

Then a 30min drive down to the site.

Well, there was a lot of stuff going in, stuff coming out, stuff being in the right place, in the wrong place. Interesting safety issues, like, oh my god... field day for OH&S lol.... I mean, our work was fine, but the guy who had other stuff on site... dodgey as hell... I wouldn't go near it with a 20 foot pole, literally because of how bad it was. It was a long day, we finished at 6:30pm and raced back to the motel for dinner before the kitchen closed at the hotel next door. Tonight I had a confit of pork belly, that had sold out last night, and it was really nice, though the pork belly could have been a little crispier. But, it was still pretty good.

So, the data collected was okay, reasonable for a first go. Tomorrow is another day.

I do not look forward to the peacocks....

The last 48 hours

2009-12-06T22:54:00.000+11:00

Well, tonight is a Sunday and I'm sitting on a small 2 person sofa in a motel room somewhere in the mountain of Tamborine (or Mount Tamborine for those who can't get that point around their heads lol). I have a reasonable sized room, which encludes a ensuite with shower and toilet, signed with a 4 minute warning since we have no town water here. The view is faboulous at least, but I don't know if I'll get to see much of it at all considering the work schedule that they want to keep is a 7am start.

Rewinding time though, the events in the last 48 hours.

Saturday mornign I got up nice and early to prepare for the 2009 NSW State Championships. I had breakfast in a leisurely fashion before heading to Lidcombe station to pick up a friend. We then went down to the event and waited for it to start.

I helped out with being a official on the table for the juniors event (U12 and U16 events) before getting ready for my own match in the Kyu event. I won't say too much about the Kendo event since I'll put it at my Kendo blog for more detail. I had a pretty good day, in that it went better than expected, which is always a bonus to say the least, before going home for lunch instead of hanging around to watch the Dan events and free jigeiko. Which turned out to be a very good idea.

Later that evening I came down pretty sick. I had a headache and a sore throat when I finished the competition or so, which I had attributed to the competition, energy, kiai etc. But then after I had a shower, I developed into a sense of nausea, chills and feverish sweating. It was pretty bad compounded by the thought that I had to catch a flight on Sunday (today) for work purposes.

My parents were pretty worried, but my friend who is in St Johns First Aid told me to take 2 panadol and sleep it off, so I asked for Panadol (paracetamol) but we didn't have any, so my mum went and borrowed some from next door. It's been years since I've taken any, and well it kind of worked. I went to sleep under my blankets and started to sweat a bucket or so, I could feel the sweat down my arms and it was getting really drenched. I woke up about an hour later and my parents had called a family friend who was doctor and I spoke to them on the phone, and had my temperature measured also. Their advice was the same, but in the morning if I was still crook, to get my temp measured and if it was over 38 or 39, then it could possibly be swine flu and I shouldn't catch the flight at all.

Well, I got changed and my parents also changed my blanket because it was soaked..... had some water, then went back to sleep, when I got out of be around 10am feeling much much better. In which, all I had was a bit of bodily ache.

So, thus I survived the evening.

The rest of today was spent making sure my packing that I did on Saturday before I came down sick, was okay, and I wasn't short of stuff. Then waited for the taxi to come along before getting to the airport.

The flight was okay, had a Qantas flight, sat in the second back row, got a savoury scroll (tomato and olive) thingy with a multivitimin C drink before watching a show called My Family and then we landed. There was a bit of a wait at the Avis centre for the car, and we got a Mitsubishi 380 apparently. The boot was fairly big, but not big enough to get all of our luggage but it wasn't a problem sine there was only three of us in the car. The drive down to Upper Coomera was fairly easy, we had a GPS unit that someone had brought along, but our driver knew the way anyway fairly well.

Checking into the moutel was fairly easy, nothing out of the ordinary. They claim to have wireless, but I was told there was no wireless, thus why I bought some 3G wireless with Internode. Well, I tried their wireless but I managed to connect with low/no connectivity, and lets say, I'm glad that I brought my wireless along....

Dinner was at St Bernard's next door to the motel, not connected so you can't get it added to your tab. I wanted a pork belly confit dish, but it sold out so I got a sutffed chicken breast. A little pricey, but didn't have much choice really since all of their dishes were all fairly pricey. it came on a bed of cous cous with some greens, and a white wine and cheese sauce, with a cheese stuffing. Fairly decent but the cous cous was rather bland. We also had some wine, it was a sauvingon. There was talk of work and other things, before we settled on the time to start tomorrow, and then we retired to our rooms, which has seen me here online lol. It's now nearly 10pm, so I guess I should get to bed soon, going to be an interesing day tomorrow I'm sure.

Night y'all.

SwitchEasy Capsule Thins(Special Edition UltraClear) - 4th Gen Nano Hardcase Kit Review

2009-11-30T23:25:00.000+11:00

I bought one of these kits from PCCaseGear.com, located in Victoria, for $25.00, with combined shipping for other bits for my desktop, but thats another story entirely.

I was after a clear hardcase for my refurbished 4th Gen Nano that my brother had generously bought me as an early Christmas Present. It's a beautiful green colour, and unlike my previous 1st Gen Nano I had, it's actually nice to look at in style and shape, thus getting a clear case was what I decided upon.

Looking at the options on eBay, they all looked kind of dodge to me, so when I found this one on PCCaseGear, I thought, eh, why not. My previous case was a faux leather magnetic fliptop one, which is pretty much near dead now, and it was $15, so $10 more for something half decent wasn't too much of a push on the budget.

So, I got it in the mail and popped it open. The clear case is a two halves construction with a "slide" open and close mechanism. It's a very snug construction, mis-alignment of the rails for sliding the halves together will probably mean you've destroyed it by the looks of it, but due to tight manufacturing tolerances by the looks of it, it's hard to mis-align it without putting quite a bit of force into it. You can feel how it should move when you pull the two halves apart, any more putting it back together means you're possibly doing something wrong.

It comes with a single screen protector, which you are meant to put on before enclosing the iPod, as well as a wheel protector, which, you could apply afterwards if you wanted to, but that would take some skill. I did both the screen and wheel before slipping it into the case. With the case shut and "locked" (it clips in with a very solid "click", and I don't know how much force would be required to separate the halves again since the halves weren't clicked in when you get it), it looks really nice. Of course, once you start to get scratches and scuffs, it might not look so good, but it's still a protective case.

It also comes with a 3.5mm jack extension, because with the case on, any non-iPod headphones won't fit, a data port plug, to protect the data port from dust etc, a standard iPod dock adaptor (which you would normally get with an iPod anyway), and a cute "video" stand, which is designed to hold the iPod nano at a comfortable viewing angle on a flat surface for your video viewing pleasure. Neat accessories to make it complete. Oh, I don't think it waterproofs your iPod, just had to say it, so don't go splashing or dunking your iPod into liquids....

I just popped it open again to see how easy it was to open, and it didn't take a lot of force, but it was held quite firmly. Closing it back up again, it still gave the very satisfying click.

Well, it looks good, functions well, has a few neat accessories. It won't break the bank to buy (though shipping might lol), so if you have the need for a case, take a look at them. Their website can be found via google, and they do support the whole iPod range.

Both thumbs up ~ d ^_^ b~

Parties, paperwork and peregrination

2009-11-29T20:59:00.000+11:00

It has been a little while since my last post, so I thought I should update thus not all of my readers would abandon me, if they haven't already.

Lets start with the not so interesting bits first.

Paperwork. Well, having done two weeks now at my "new" job, where I am technically not even officially employed yet (yes, naughty) I have produced quite a bit of paper, and will be doing more over the coming weeks and months. I have been developing protocols and proceedural checks, to ensure that what we plan to test in the coming weeks and months is going to provide us with the data that we are after, and will have some kind of integrity with it. Not actually that hard to plan, but to implement is hard, especially when scientific methodologies have to be compromised in the world of industry. When you consider that for statistical development of a bell curve and good standard deviations require n=25, when you are told that the maxiumum n can be is 3, it makes you really cringe to draw "conclusive" results.... Of course, they actually know it is conclusive because they've done more than n=25 runs in the past, they just didn't actually log the data at the time. Good thinking. The reason why it's being done now is because they have a official purpose to meet, and also it's time to up the market penetration so having numbers is always good for sales purposes.

This then leads me to the peregrination. I was told that I'd get to travel. Hmm, looked forward to some travel. Well, now I get why they told me that most of them hate the travel. Up on a Monday morning, back on a Friday night, weekend back home, rinse, repeat. Doesn't sound too bad right? Well yes, until you factor in that I shall be potentially doing this cycle from next week. excluding a holiday I am taking over Christmas and New Years, then from when I get back, to mid-April. Yeap, a good four months of out and back. Living the suitcase life. To make things more entertaining at least, I'm also travelling away for my holiday, so I will have five months of travel. Hmmm, fun.

So, thats work in the industry lane.

With parties, I went to two. One a birthday, the other a 21st birthday.

The first one was a combined birthday party for two girls in the same family, but of different age bands, none of them being a major (18, 21st, 30th etc), so it was combined to bring a larger crowd and what not. It was advertised as a food test, and it didn't disappoint. There was a lot of food, and for entertainment there was cards, foosball, Guitar Hero and Singstar. A good group in size, and some interesting conversation to be had. And, oh my, the chocolate mousse.... ~thumbs up~ totally awesome. I also came home with a six pack of Hollandia beer because someone brought a slab of it, but the hosts don't really drink much, let alone beer, so I took some home to help out lol. Hollandia is actually a higher % alcohol than VB (Victorian Bitter) at 5% vs 4.8%, but it is probably about the same level of bitter. But it's quite a light coloured beer though.

So, then the 21st birthday party. I dropped by the end of Kendo after work on Friday, didn't train. I was going to, but then got caught up in some rehersals for one of my PhD students upgrade seminar. I ended up hearing it twice because I heard it with him once to give him feedback so he could fix it up before presenting it to our entire group and supervisor, then sat through the second time to see if he managed to pick up what was suggested. I think he did okay, he'll be fine so long as he doesn't rush it and calms down when he gets to the tricky parts.

So then, I get stuck in traffic on my way out to Burwood where the event was being held, but because of the time I got there, it was fairly late. I got a little bit of food to eat (some sausages, chicken wings, bread and softdrink), and then had some conversation with a few people I didn't know, taught someone how to tie a tie (with amusing results), played one hand of Mahjong, and then went home. They actually went to Karaoke, but I didn't feel like spending more money in the situation than I already had done so. While I shouldn't really gripe, I put a bit of effort into things, only to really not see much occur... oh, there was cake, I had some blackforest from Breadtop by the look of the box the cake had come in. So, they went to K, I went home.

And thus, that was pretty much the extent of things in the time gone by.

Comments in general.

Juice. I will never look at it the same again. Now, I will always ponder certain aspects about it depending on how I aquire the juice that I am drinking or seeing.

Industry is going to be an interesting experience.

Resveratrol is good for you kids, eat your fruits and nuts.

People in China are suspicious when it comes to online journals, or Zooster online reference manager is suspect. Either that, or I co-incidentally managed to lock out the entire univeristy access to ACS publications LOL (not so long story, but if you ask me for it, I'll tell you what happened).

So, the next time I update, it may be a little while from now again since I'll probably be working moreso, and well, confidentially confidentially and confidentially. Fun eh.

Oh.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs - Awesome.

New Job, New Beginnings

2009-11-17T22:02:00.000+11:00

Well, I honestly can't say a lot about my new job at all. There is so much confidentiality going on that it's like I'm self censoring lol.

What I can say from my first day's experience is: I had 5 meetings today, where the meetings only involved 3 other people. Some singular person, some two people, some all four of us. Thats a lot of meetings. I am going to have a lot of reading to do. Bleugh.

I'm a very hands on person, so it's hard to remain focussed and keep my attention going if I'm just reading and writing. I anticipate it will be difficult indeed to stop my brain from shutting down when I'm not actually doing anything. Problematic indeed.

The work environment is actually a little creepy. It's not the people, it's the building. There is this constant "howling" noise, which I think comes from the wind, but I don't know exactly how that works unless it is due to some kind of space in an atrium like void.... but... it's a constant howling with changing pitch and volume. I can tell it's windy outside because of the tree tops moving around. Other than that, it's okay.

I've been given a Lenovo Thinkpad SL500, all set up for me. I have a restricted user account on it. I hate the keyboard on it. I keep hitting Capslock instead of shift, and instead of Ctrl, I'm hitting the Fn key. I'm going to try an old USB iMac keyboard on it tomorrow and see if it's going to help, otherwise I'll have to get a cheap keyboard. There is a moniter I could output to, except I can't seem to get it to output. I might call the IT guy about it. Other than that, it's a desk, which the only downside is that I have my back facing the hall space. It's not like I'm going to be looking at porn, but I like to see people coming, and not have someone 'sneaking' up from behind. There are 4 workspaces where I am, and the other person, she is facing the hall space. I could try and shift, but my network socket is fixed -_-;

The atmosphere is relatively relaxed. I can't complain too much. Other than that, I'll just have to see how I go, and hope I don't faceplant into my keyboard at some point >_<;

The Fun Theory

2009-11-15T21:46:00.000+11:00

I came across this site, and concept today via my other 1/3rd. It was a link to a youtube clip about piano stairs. You can see it via their website (http://www.thefuntheory.com/). I then also watched the other two clips on the worlds deepest rubbish bin, and the bottle arcade.

I think it's fantastic. Simple concepts, but from singular instance testing, the novelty factor of a fun activity certainly draws more attention and use/practice of that specific activity than regular. My only complaint about this is that their testing does not seem to be extremely thorough, only in short "1 day" periods. Had they done this more say for a week or longer, it would be seen if the novelty effect wears off, and if so, does it still maintain some form of novelty that the increased rates of activity remain?

Nevertheless, I applaud those who put in the effort for this work.

~Applaud~

DJ Hero

2009-11-07T14:49:00.000+11:00

Well, we finally got out DJ Hero on the Wii and played some of it today.
It's a lot harder in co-ordination than guitar hero f'shizzle.

The turntable has three track buttons and free-spins, there is a slider switch that has a L-C-R orientation, a dial that turns to change the "tone" (low to high frequencies) and a "Euphoria" (think Rocking-Out in GH) button.

There is buttons to push in time, scratching (rotation of the turntable) in a up, down, or up-down motion, and then there is the slider movements either in pulses (a quick C-L/R-C) or sustain (C-L/R----------C). All in all, it seems easy, but really, takes a bit more skill I feel.

Some pictures of it are below.

Headphones

2009-11-05T18:35:00.000+11:00

I think it may soon be time to get some new headphones. Recently, my headphones I use on my very old iPod has started to buzz on the lower register, and at one point, it completely ceased to generate noise on the right bud, but I tapped it and then it started to generate sound again.

I think they don't make headphones like they used to. These ones were from back in 1996, made by Aiwa, from my first ever CD player that my father brought back from Taiwan. The CD player was long superceeded by a better player, but the headphones were still good so I continued to use them on other devices. I got a pair of headphones with the iPod but the white headphones were terrible mass-made bits of junk, and the wiring of poor quality, thus I continued to use the Aiwa ones. But, I fear the drivers may have reached the end of their lifespan at over a decade of sound production.

Hmm, well with the possible employment and increased financial earnings, I may be able to afford some nicer ones soon enough, but I guess we shall just have to wait and see as usual.

Dumbass alert

2009-11-03T12:30:00.000+11:00

While I originally wanted to call this post a retard alert, I felt it would be unfair towards retards who are actually retarded and can't help themselves.

I went shopping. I found a car park spot. Then I found a dumbass.

This is their license plate. So if you see them, you know they are a dumbtard

Why? Because, you can see how close my bumper is. Why is that exactly? Just look for yourself.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, they manage to park their entire front engine section into the next space...

~shakes head~ I ponder how they manage to pass their license test... yes people, they drive amongst us....

Be alert for them.

Time in review

2009-11-02T07:35:00.000+11:00

What has happened since my last entry:

I have been working on my book chapter with some moderate degree of progression. There is now less than a month left before I have to submit the document to the editor, and while I am relatively happy with it, there is still some additional work to be done on it at the recommendation of my supervisor such as expanding discussions, adding references and the alike. Personally, I don't think it's that important since the chapter isn't a very high powered one, and it is going to be the second issue, meaning most likely there will be future issues also if it is going to be continued as a successful publication. This means there will be for sure some kind of review and advancement of the topic area, probably also more material in each area added and changed as things progress.

I also had a few meetings with a few different people, and am now waiting for a written contract to be given to me to review. If I'm happy with the offering and I sign off on it, then I will start with working part-time on two jobs until my contract at the university ceases, then full time with Lang Technologies. It is something, it would give me experience in working in a non-academic setting, and while it is kind of daunting, I hope and believe that I would be up for the challenge. The company itself is very small, less than ten people in it total, significantly less than ten people actually... in fact, the on-contract staff all fit on one hand while there are two additional contractors who are not based in their office location. I don't know what my title is, but I have a reasonable idea of what I will be doing so we will just have to see how it goes.

Socially, I haven't been out and about much.

Kendo has it's last training today this afternoon for the "semester" since on Friday they will be putting the tables and chairs out in the hall for exam period. This means no training at our club for three weeks roughly. I've felt that my Kendo has been a bit flat-line lately, and at times, I haven't had a lot of energy. What though I have been doing is just working on one thing or two at a time during jigeiko, and I'm fairly happy with the results.

Archery is still a bit on and off. Shooting at home when I feel like it. Switching to the open ring is good, but at times still have some issues with getting through the clicker easily. I feel like shooting more at times and wanting to compete, but at the same time, it isn't easy to do so.

Digital entertainment wise, I've been playing a bit of Counter-Strike:Source GunGame on the GameArena servers (#1-4). Been a while before I was playing, and it's a lot of fun. It's different to Call of Duty 4, which, I was playing a lot before going back to CS:S, and CS:S takes different skills. I think strangely though, my reflexes are perhaps getting a tad sharper LOL. In addition to that, I've also been on DDO, and played through some of the new content in the Inspired Quarter with The Harpers guild. Therev is now up to level 18 and picked up Wail of the Banshee spell yesterday. Two more levels before I can start trying Epic challenge quests. Ippon is my new sorceror to play with Ben, Luke, Muz, but they haven't been on in almost a week now. Other than that, I've also got Fudoushin as a Favoured Soul that I fiddle with.

In other things, I've had some discussions with a few people about a few things, met my brother's first ever girlfriend when he brought her home for lunch, had a cold (which I probably have still some linger of) and that is about it.

Not really that exciting huh? Thankyou to all my stalkers out there for reading, you know who you are :P Yes, you, the one reading. LOL.

Harajuku Gothic

2009-10-25T10:17:00.000+11:00

I went to a 30th birthday party last night, and the theme was Harajuku Gothic. Having little clue, I got assistance from my friends, both in shopping a few weeks back, and also in obtaining the look. You can see the process of sorts here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dchiou/sets/72157622527393197/

At the party, I was easily the most effort put in by the looks. Some of the others did do makeup and hair, but just not to the extreme I did, and by the looks of it, for most part, they didn't really get what Harajuku was for guys, to point point where someone said that there is no actual Harajuku fashion for guys..... -_-;;

It was pretty funny for most part, especially when some of the costumes started to get mixed around with a terrible blond wig on different people, and a spiked collar..... Food wise they had a spit roast that had been going for about 7 hours before it was carved up and boy, was that good... I got some crackling from it too and man, I love crackling.... It was a good turnout, not too many, not too few, familiar faces and it was good to catch up with a lot of people I hadn't seen for a while. All in all, a pretty entertaining night.

I didn't use my own camera at the party, but there will probably be some pictures popping up eventually on Facebook somewhere by someone...

Magpie Defence Study

2009-10-21T08:43:00.000+11:00

I grew up in Brisbane many years ago, and the prevalence of magpie attacks was quite high. Magpies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Magpie) are a quite dangerous element of the Aussie landscape during their breeding and young seasons since they are very aggressive in defending their territory. In fact, it is not at all unusual to see children running through magpie zones with ice-cream buckets on their heads for protection, and being attacked. It is in fact quite a statistical probability that you will get attacked by one if you enter its zone.

So, how do you ward them off? Well, there is the adages of having eyes, bright coloured things, scary looking things on your head, to fend them off. Do they work? Hard to say, at least until some portion now.

A group of people, in Canberra by the looks of it, did some testing using a helmet and bicycle, through a magpie's territory, and recorded their results. The youtube video shows the results with some interesting effects.

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wHreVKgOT4

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES_n4DgJDHs

The moral of the story is... Don't wear a helmet??? Be old or have afro's.... LOL.... More conclusive work needs to be done I suspect.

Thanks to Hel for sticking up the links on Twitter.

Oriental Tea Society

2009-10-16T14:59:00.000+11:00

I'm sitting here in the Isabelle Fidler room inside Manning House at the first time I've visited the Oriental Tea Society here at the University of Sydney. It's a new society, only made this year, where people gather to socialise and drink/appreciate asian teas. The room is pretty big and not a lot of people at the moment, but it isn't like the room is silent. There is discussion going on in regards to comic heroes, movies, anime and geeky stuff. People are just... chilling out. The atmosphere here is pretty relaxed though.

Apparently though people sometimes also play card games and stuff, they've had Go boards and stuff at times, and have events like hotpot or yumcha etc. In any case, I should be more social instead of typing on this blog lol. Seems like a nice group though.

Wedding Weekend

2009-10-11T11:30:00.000+11:00

Well, it's now been a week since I went to the wedding, and being a lazy Sunday morning, I shall recap some of the events.

Friday morning, I took the train off to the airport, and there were no dramas involved. The flight was fairly uneventful and I touched down pretty much on time, which was good. I was only carrying with me a small carry-on case, so I didn't have to wait for the luggage to come off the plane like a lot of people were. Once I got outside I called the person who was going to pick me up, to discover that they were running late and stuck in traffic. Not much choice but to hop into a taxi and find my way to the rehearsal to get there on time.

I arrived about forty-odd minutes later, working through the traffic with a quiet taxi driver who didn't seem talkative, so I listened to the talk-back radio there. Uneventful, but traffic. When I got there, the others were just coming into the car park, so timing wise, it wasn't too bad. We milled around for about ten minutes before the Father (minister) arrived and we trooped inside.

The church is pretty old, and it's been a while since I've been inside one. The architecture was simple, stone with high wooden arches, plaques on the walls with memories and names, remembrance of those before who had been patrons or devout members, those perished in wars or in tragic times. There was no air-conditioning built in, but they had modernised somewhat by putting small cooler units on stands at regular intervals along the pews to combat the ever increasing summer conditions that we face in this country.

Father Stephen was the person conducting the service, a nice person, firm handshake and a white beard of sorts (the kind that is the sideburns that connect with the goatee and around the lips moustache, whatever that's called). He made some jokes, funny guy. We told us the order of proceedings, where we should stand, and then we ran through the mock ceremony with how we should move from here to there, and sit, and back again, and then move to there and back and so forth. Simple movements, but just complicated enough for him to reassure us that he would provide prompting subtly for everyone.

For me, my bridesmaid partner was Elena, who was a wee lass of five years, coming to my waist in height, but she did her duty just fine, holding onto my hand as we walked up and down the steps, around the back alter and aisle and so forth. She was very cute and took it very seriously. Her mother was the second bridesmaid while the bride's younger sister was the maid of honour.

That afternoon after the rehearsal was over, we went downtown immediately to buy a new shirt for the groom because he didn't like the shirt that came with the suit hire. A bit of fuss really, and thankfully the Myer in the mall had something to his liking, so away we went. By the time we got back to the house, it was early evening, and we started to go over things that needed to be done for the morning, since the wedding ceremony itself was at 1pm. We ordered pizza from Pizza Capers, which for mass made gourmet pizza, was pretty nice, though the pizza size was a little on the small size. We only got two pizzas and a single thing of garlic bread between four people, so I was still a little peckish after. We did have icecream though so that made up the difference to my usual volume of meals lol.

There was bustle and hustle, and three laptops open and running. Cleaning of the house, packing of things for the wedding night. Telephone calls to find people and things, and also to arrange a hotel room and car hire. Organised chaos is really how I would probably describe it. By late evening, most of the things had been done and things had settled somewhat, and a DVD was put on, where we flopped on the couches and watched Iron Man in it's DVD quality (the Blue-Ray HD is so much better haha) before everyone retired for the night.

I was up in the morning pretty early, Elise making herself breakfast because she had to be off to the airport to pick up the rental car that was going to transport the bridesmaids to and from the various locations. I went and had a shower and made my breakfast also, eating before I got changed. The groom to be got up not long after and then continue to compose an additional list of things that had to be done in the next four hours, such as cleaning the car, cleaning the house, buffing his nails and so forth. I pretty much had nothing to do, so I just sat at the table with my netbook surfing the internet and what not, while watching the hustle and bustle. Elise disappeared to get the car, then Peter the best man arrived with water and food for the photoshoot. We pottered about some more before finally getting dressed to head out.

Traffic got in the way, but we didn't arrive late, only because I ensured that we left 10 minutes before they thought we were leaving LOL, I have a habit of getting to places early, so when I said, it's time to go, I didn't say what the time was, I just said it was time. They didn't check their watches, they just said, ok. Good eh? :D

What can I say, the wedding went smoothly. People arrived, we milled around a little before we were ushered inside by Father Stephen, and I took my spot at the front with the rest of the guys. Once the crowd had settled into the pews, there was quiet talk before Father Stephen appeared at the back, and asked for silence. The organist started to play, and the progression began.

The ceremony didn't take that long, there were several readings, prayer, and a short sermon. But what struck me the most was the vows, where the intensity of the atmosphere just swelled. You could see by how Peta looked at Jame's face, her eyes locked in, with such strength. The love was so solid you couldn't have cut it with a oxyacetylene torch. From what the bridesmaids said afterwards, it was the same on their side, seeing how James looked at Peta. It was a very warm day, predicted 33°C, and in a full tux with vest and undershirt on, you could feel it.

Post ceremony, there was much more milling, conversation, photographs, drinks and so on. The official photographer took a series of photos before everyone then dispersed for the few hours before the reception, while the bridal party went off to the Botanic Gardens for the photoshoot. We drove down, and then wandered around the gardens for a few hours where the photographer took lots of pictures at a few different locations. Since it was a really sunny day, and predicted good weather originally before the dust storms, there were lots of groups wandering around along with us, in fact, we spotted six different groups also picking prime locations in the gardens for their photos. I guess the advantage is that it's a free location to use with nice scenic value.

We then drove over to the Riverside Receptions centre, where after a brief rest period in what appeared to be the managers office (who seemed to be a sports fan, with AFL/Football and Racing posters on the walls) we proceeded into the reception. More mingling, finger food, and then we sat down for the meal and speeches. Dinner was the standard three course meal, a few speeches from the two families and best man, MC'd by the two brothers, one from each side.

It was a long evening, the food wasn't too bad, good portion sized too. I had a simple garden salad, then fish, and then pavlova with fruit. The wedding cake was also pretty nice, I had some of the orange and almond, and the chocolate mud cake layers, with the third layer being a gluten free layer since there were some people present who weren't able to have gluten.

Music came on and there was some dancing, more milling before the new couple left for their wedding night. After that, I left with my school friends to a hotel room where a couple were staying, where we chatted and watched on youtube a movie about gamers since we were all gamers of old pen and paper dungeons and dragons. After that, it was home to where I was staying, where then I proceeded to stay up the entire evening because I was afraid if I slept (this was 4am at the time) I'd oversleep and miss my flight, even though I had already booked a taxi. So, I drank tea, ate some toast for a late night snack and breakfast (without anything on it... just toast) and watched some drama on my laptop and that was pretty much it.

The taxi came, I got to the airport, slept on the plane, trained home and then got my 2nd wind, so I didn't sleep until when I was in bed that night.

That was pretty much it.

OMG Did I just invent a new term?

2009-10-08T11:50:00.000+11:00

I just used the term "textfection" as a mix of text and affection, the action of doing things like
~hug~
~cuddle~
~kiss~
etc in text over chat or message and so forth.

But, upon google, it seems that there is only 1 search result, which isn't even in English....

Is this a new wonderful term that I have coined? LOL.

Smooth and rough riding

2009-09-29T20:22:00.000+10:00

So, after I blew a tyre out the other day, I went to get some new ones today. I went to the AGR Tyre Centre in Sefton, just down the road from me, at practically opening time. It was pretty deserted and their sign vehicle (New Cheap Tyres from $69!) wasn't even driven out of their internal yard yet.

I spoke to a older guy who has a hunched back, and explained I needed two new tyres, one to replace the blown, and one to match. Ok, no problemo. Drove up the ramp onto the pneumatic jack, they inserted protective plastic chocks under my car frame and lifted the car off the ground. Pneumatic torque head later, my wheels are off, getting de-tyred inside.

Then I wait. While the rubber treads are being taken off mine, these people appear out of no-where. People who just so happen need to replace single tyres, including some guy who drove in on a flat, in a white van, and needed to be in Maroubra for a job ASAP, but blew a tyre and this was the first place he came across. So what ended up happening was, they got their tyres done, and mine were forgot about for a brief moment, until the old hunched guy saw me still hanging around, and yelled at some guys to do my tyres.

Then, while that was happening, I asked to keep my tyres, the guy who was working on my car said no problems, but I couldn't use the tyre because it was busted. I explained that my father wanted them for the garden and he then asked, did I want more? Well, yes, thanks for asking, I do!

We grow some tuber plants, and currently they are grown in sacks that are hung up. The problem is, the sacks break open and split and that kind of stuff as the plant grows... so my father wanted tyres to stack up, and fill the inside with soil to plant, and then when it's harvest time, just pull the tyres apart and go through the soil for the tubers.

Well, they were quite happy to assist, and I went home $200 lighter for the new tyres (Nixxon tyres, strange tread, made in China) and 8 older worn tyres (including my own 2). Not too bad.

Driving around on them home, and to uni and back for archery, was nice. The new tyres drove very smoothly on flat road surfaces, but it was actually quite rough on the not-so-smooth roads. From the profile, they are quite "thin" and thus have less air cushioning on them. They respond really well and do have a lot of traction, as you would expect since they are new, but it feels really nice to drive on them.

So, that was my day. I went and shot at uni also, which, you can see the results of here: http://theroadto1220.blogspot.com/2009/09/tuesday-29th-september-2009.html

Write Protected USB -_-

2009-09-29T08:16:00.002+10:00

From what I can tell, it appears that it is truly dead. A few other people have commented that they have had similar behaviour occur from their products with the same error, to which the result was that they be dead as a Dodo. I don't have the original receipt nor could I be bothered sending it to Taiwan... So instead, I just bought myself two 4gb USB keys instead. I never really filled the full 16gb capacity of it with regular use, just when porting mass photos around..

Write Protected USB??

2009-09-27T16:15:00.000+10:00

I used my USB stick (16gb ADATA) on Friday night and it worked fine.

Come Sunday (and 2 x-ray machines later), my USB now claims it is Write Protected, and won't allow me to view the contents, nor copy stuff to or from, or even format it...

Bwuah?!

~sigh~ well, at least it was useful for the 5 months I used it for, sending it around the country with 14gb of wedding photos lol...

Bucks Party Weekend

2009-09-27T16:02:00.000+10:00

My taxi driver this morning was a Pakistani gentleman, who I had a good conversation with in regards to being a taxi driver. He was pretty friendly and started off by asking and apologising if he had woken anyone up when calling for me, since the booking system has you put in a telephone number when you book. I didn’t catch his name, nor did I really need it. We talked about the crazy dust storm that we had recently, and then onto being a taxi driver.

What I found out, at least from his perspective, being a taxi driver isn’t a lonely job because you get to talk to and meet a lot of people all the time, and the hours are good because you can choose to work whatever hours and where you like. I knew that most taxi drivers didn’t own their vehicles but other than that I didn’t really have any details. What I did learn today though was that there is generally an “owner” of the vehicle, that the drivers “rent” the car from on a daily basis. The deal for him was $140 a day and the car must be returned at the end of a 12hr period with a full tank of petrol. What he did with it in between was up to him.

What this means though, is that with the government and company set fares, the earning potential is on luck of what fares he picks up, and also how much he wants to work. He said, if he doesn’t feel like working that day, he doesn’t rent the car, simple. If he gets the car, works for an hour, then says, hmm, don’t feel like it, then he just goes home, parks the taxi for a few hours, then takes it back again etc. “It won’t make you a millionaire but it pays the bills” – Pakistani Taxi Driver. He had been doing it for thirteen years.

The conversation ending was pretty funny with him asking me when I was going to be married...

At the airport, I had no luggage to check in, so I went straight through to the security checkpoint, and yes, lo and behold, as usual, I got tagged and tested for narcotics and explosives. This seems to be a regular occurrence, perhaps because I take my boots off or something, but as soon as I took my bag, shoes and laptop off the line and saw the guy, I knew he was going to ask me. He said, blah blah, I said, yes, I’ve done it before and help up and out my palms without him asking me. Then the inside of my bag, and wow! Like you wouldn’t believe it, my stuff, my hands, my boots were clean! /sarcasm.

I went to the food court and got some hash browns to eat because I was going to be hungry being awake at 3:30am and having some cereal wasn’t really going to help me make it until whenever I can get lunch.... And I also got some nestle iced tea from a vending machine at the gate (39 Virgin Blue terminal). The boarding went smoothly, sat next to a quiet couple, and I had a window seat (no, I didn’t select it since I intended to sleep the entire time). My seat was slightly broken in that it wouldn’t stay upright whenever I put weight on the back. The flight attendant thought I was deliberately leaning back but I wasn’t and I had to demonstrate to her that it was broken before she stopped asking me to put it up. For the flight, I slept, fairly okay, no turbulence to speak of, though I may have been sunburned on my lips by the feel of them since I had a window seat... Then, when we were coming in to land, another male attendant told me to put it up but the female attendant told him it was broken. Which, you think that was fine, but he went and made a quip about me being fat! Well, he said, joking, at the end, and it’s obvious I wasn’t that fat, but boy, I hope he wouldn’t have said that to someone who actually was fat in a seat like that.... ~imagines the indignity and complaint to be filed afterwards~.

I disembarked fairly late because the quiet couple next to me were similar to me, in preferring to sit and wait for the mad rush to get out, before smoothly exiting their seats and getting their carry-on luggage. I wasn’t really in any rush either so it didn’t bother me in the slightest. Walking across the tarmac this morning to board and disembark from the plane, I noticed that the line markers that the ground staff uses to keep people away from the engines were attached to wheelie bins. Specially modified wheelie bins with these hook bits on them. They look funny as, as if they are too cheap-ass to use proper markers or something, but thinking about it now, it’s probably a god thing because they can store the actual lines inside the bin and move them. But still, they look funny as.

Popped over to the train link, paid $19.70 for a ticket to Fruitgrove (same price to Altandi or Runcorn...) and boarded the train with 9 minutes. The seats at the station claimed that there was free wireless hotspot, so I tried to connect to it with my netbook, the rather slow boot it has now, I had 5 minutes once everything had loaded (I was running on power saving mode), but while I could connect to the wireless signal, I couldn’t get my browser to connect to sites, so I don’t know if it was a proxy issue or something, which it doesn’t matter I guess, only for four minutes I was just wanting to see if they actually had a half decent connection. Though the connection said 300mbps when I connected O_O Talk about a huge booster, when most places are like a 54mbps connection...

The dude directing people told me that I should stay on the train and change at coopers plains to get to Fruitgrove since the airport train to the Gold Coast ran express to Coopers Plains. So I’ll try that. I traditionally just get off at Central and then switch trains for the usual all stations service down the line. ~shrug~ so thats what I’m doing, writing on the train. I’m now at Central and the time is 8:28am. An hour out from when I landed, not making too bad a time even if I was going to be originally going to paintball. Heck, haha, I could go paintball by myself, and still make the 5pm Lasertag :P

So, now I’ve just made it past Roma St, then it will be South Brisbane, Southbank, Park Rd, Coopers Plains and then I’ll have to change stations, so I’ll save off now.

It’s now 4:41pm, and I’m here at the laserzone place waiting for the friends to turn up to have some low tech fun. Interestingly, paintball technologies these days make it more high tech than lasertag is..

What did I do today? I ate a lot, and I also napped. Arriving at my cousins place, I had a lot of food pushed upon me, which I ate some of it, not all of it, then the rest of my uncles and aunts and cousins came around, which then they had lunch while watching a drama on satellite tv, kind of a weekly occurrence. What made it funny though was my cousins daughter, so I guess still my cousin, who is four years old.

She speaks Chinese and English and is very energetic. Besides the fact that she was a little afraid of me because she had never seen me before in her life, she was fairly outgoing. She had her own rules to play Connect 4, which, if you followed, would have allowed her to win every time LOL. My cousin Daniel, who is a bit of a ‘tard and likes to mess with her, was helping her colour in a poster of Dora the Explorer, but he was messing it up deliberately, to which she then called him a terrible terrible man, in perfect English ROFLOL. She was also very courteous and methodical when it came to dispensing the Bio-Feel (ripoff of Yakult drinks) to everyone after lunch, looking around to see who had one, who hadn’t had one, and even replying “you’re welcome” when thanked for the little bottle she gave to people. Very cute. She has some kind of skin blemish condition which is on her face and on her back, a pigmentation issue, which isn’t bad or harmful, but the skin on her left cheek is darker, and the skin on her back between the lower edge of the scapulae is lighter. But, because of how people would be like “aww” and touch her face, she’s been taught to “show them the hand” (i.e. put her palm up to them in a stop sign) and say “No!) because she doesn’t want their pity.

I think she exhibits behaviour of a intelligent kid, so we’ll see how she turns out when she gets a little older. The rest of my cousins seem to have ended up in the accessories market, with my aunt shipping over from Taiwan a bunch of accessories for them to sell at market and online. They needed a table to use at the markets that they are going to (their first venture) so we went to the Logan City Recycling Market, and browsed through a lot of stuff to find something suitable. In the end, we got some folding stands and some boards to form a table which they will throw a table cloth over the top to make it look nice. The whole lot came to $22, which my uncle thought was expensive, but I thought it was quite reasonable considering the folding stands probably would cost that much each if bought new, say from K-Mart or something.

After that, I went back to the other cousins house, where I helped her look through a cover letter for a sponsorship proposal. The university society she was in is holding a fundraising event to raise money for the Taiwan Earthquake victims, similar to what the Taiwanese Students Association did at my own uni, but they are having a major event with music, performances and a fashion show, which she is co-ordinating the fashion show. Then I got driven over here by my uncle to the lasertag place.

It’s been a long long time since I’ve been here, but I know I’ve been here before for a marathon 12midnight to 6am session in my school years. Long long time ago. It’s good to see that it’s still looking to be a popular place with lots of kids and adults still playing and roaming it’s halls. I don’t actually know how many people are going to be here tonight though..... hmm. In any case, I’ll wrap up for now. 4:53pm.

It’s now Sunday and I’m at domestic airport in Brisbane waiting for my flight home. Unfortunately for me the flight has been delayed for 45min, quite possibly due to roll on effects of the dust storms or something hmm. Now, how do I recap the events of last night hmm.

If I was to make sound effects to cover the events, it would perhaps go something like this.
“Suit Activated”. Pew pew pew “Game Overrrrrr Maaaaan”. Zvroom. Clink clink, glug clink glug, trudge trudge. Pow, kabam, hahahaha. Zroom, blah blah, Zzzzz.

Now to expand it in my customary long winded epic descriptions. The guys turned up a little late to the lasertag venue, but I was used to that, it’s a Gauvin thing LOL. We hung around outside for a little chatting while waiting for the others to arrive. It didn’t take too long, but all in all, there were seven of us. We then trooped inside and put in for the games. We had to sit through an ultra ultra lame briefing thing video that told us how the game worked etc, which, I would have hoped they would have skipped since most of us had played before, and those who hadn’t were old enough to probably figure it out with simple spoken terms and not the 10 min wasted watching this terrible video.

We strapped on our packs and each pack had a name that would be on the ranking lists at the end of each round. I got mine and it had the name Zim. Simple enough. First round was Free For All individual, second round was a Team Deathmatch, and then in the last round, once again it was Free For All that we played. The course inside apparently has changed a little since I was there last, but it didn’t feel that different. There was upstairs and downstairs sections and three zones to accommodate up to three teams (red, blue and green) at a time.

Running around in the semi-dark was fun, even though you’re not meant to run. It’s not like we were sprinting, but a light jog in some areas to cover ground to get into cover as soon as possible. It works the thighs also to duck and crouch around to find cover and so forth. At the end of each of the rounds, we popped out to check the scores, with each round running 10 minutes. For my results, I came in third, then first on my team (still third overall for the round) and then in the third round, I came in third yet again. Consistency lol. We got pretty sweaty from it because there was no moving air inside the actual play zone, and only a single air-conditioning unit in the main lobby area.

Once the rounds were over, it was time for dinner and drinks somewhere. The location was apparently the Lychee Lounge on Boundary Rd in West End. We went back to the house in Indooroopilly where we got changed for dinner. The drive back into West End was dusty, real dusty. The dust storms were still floating around and right now at the airport at 10:30am, there is still a visible dust haze here, and it was apparently tasted in the air this morning also. We found parking on a side street and walked to the lounge. I had gone with the bride’s father and brother, and waited for the groom’s boys to come. Eventually, after an extended wait, we were all finally there and headed inside.

The place is very cosy, very small but packed full of tables and block benches, stools and high tables, with no bar to sit at, the entire bar was for placing the made drinks so they could be served. There was a kitchen off to one side, and that was pretty much it. We ordered some food and drinks to begin off the evening. For me, I had a mojito, a cocktail based on soda with mint and lime. It wasn’t too bad, alright but probably not really something I’d drink on a regular basis as such. For the meal aspect, I went with the tapas option and got three dishes. A sourdough bread with pesto and sliced onion, a dish of sesame tempura prawn with cucumber tartare sauce, and one of the specials of the day, pork belly with a raspberry confit/jus. The others got a variety of others such as eye fillet steak with mash and shitake mushrooms, pad thai, and also another dish that I didn’t pick the name of. So we ate and chatted and had our drinks, reliving the days of yesteryear when the groom to be was up to crazy things, drinking stories and what not.

Post food wise, I had another cocktail, which someone picked for me, called a Bloodthirsty Blizzard. It was a citrus based cocktail with blood orange, cuirass alcohol, orange zest and some other stuff. It was slightly bitter, but alright. Very citrus. A few hours later, we decided to wrap it up and got the bill. The whole lot came to $543 for the whole table. It wasn’t actually as high as we thought it might have been. My share for it was $58 + the special (the pork belly, which was labelled as Misc, but it had 4x, where as it was only two of us on the table that had it, but the price was lower, so I think it was 2x price of the lower price, and thus 2x2 was the 4x). Reasonable because the quality was very nice. Murray, who was a chef was very impressed with it, it exceeded his expectations of what it would be, so that tells you something.

We ended up walking over to Murrays house in South Brisbane because they were going to get a few more drinks from a bottle shop down the hill from his house. By the time we got there, and someone went for a jog to buy it, they had actually already shut shop. We then just ended up playing Murray’s Xbox360 console on his very nice big flatscreen Samsung LCD. We played Street Fighter IV, then played Bully, Left4Dead, Puzzle Fighter and then Castle Crashers. It was pretty fun. But then it was getting pretty late, so we went home.

Once we got back to the house, the groom crashed out, and I stayed up for another hour or so talking to one of the guys because I didn’t manage to catch up during the evening, before he went to bed, and I too bunked down, but not before I made a booking for the taxi.

In the morning, after three hours of sleep, I was awake because the bride to be was up in the kitchen before her morning exercise swim. I stayed up to do my emails etc, before saying goodbye to people when they had got up, and caught the taxi. The taxi ride was pretty uneventful and my driver was non-talkative, so it was very quiet and I was nodding off to sleep, having only six hours in the last 48 hours. The taxi fare came to $59.70, $3.30 cheaper than how much it cost me to get to the airport in Sydney. The taxi driver was also a little strange in that he kept changing lanes at times, which resulted in no change, because he just changed back without doing anything (like overtaking etc). Still, I got there in one piece so, nothing to complain about.

Once I passed through the airport security, I discovered that my flight had been delayed by forty-five minutes, ~sigh~ and then thus I started my writing in the food court. Well, it didn’t turn out to be as epic as I thought it was. I could make it more epic I guess, but I don’t really feel like writing that much. Hmm, so I’m pretty much done for the moment. ~waits for the flight~.

Post flight, I must say, it was the scariest landing I have ever had, even counting the strange European flight where people clapped and cheered once the plane had landed. The winds today in Sydney are really strong and gusty, and we experienced significant turbulence on the approach, but what made it scary was not the turbulence, but the speed that we came flying down on the runway at. It was the fastest I have ever experienced, watching the buildings coming by, as we made the south-north runway approach. The actual touchdown was very smooth, but we hovered above the tarmac about 1-2m for quite a distance at very high speeds before the wheels touched (with some wing rocking motions) and then the loud roar as the engine speed was cranked back. I knew we were going much faster than usual because when the engines kicked in, I was physically pushed forwards into my seatbelt more than normal and the engine roar lasted longer...

Other than that, it was a rather uneventful trip home. Besides the crazy strong winds making the wind-chill factor high, dropping today’s temperature to only 17°C even though it’s nice and sunny.... Had a shower and am feeling much more refreshed. A good weekend.

Mahjong!

2009-09-24T01:03:00.001+10:00

: )

http://mahjongtaikai.blogspot.com

Inert Loop

2009-09-21T19:21:00.003+10:00

Another failed experimental attempt today. I tried to use the Buchi Inert Loop system today to spray some stuff under CO2, but it couldn't get under the 6% oxygen content it requires. The best it managed was only 10.1%, then it came back up to 15%. When atmospheric conditions are ~21.5%, it is pretty poor.

The system works in "blowing" mode, but as it was explained to me by my boss, all closed loops will have a suction point, and thus the air leak into it is somewhere past the positive pressure section. Now it's just an issue finding the leak where the air getting in and seal it.

Snip Snip Snip

2009-09-20T00:02:00.002+10:00

No, I didn't get a circumcision lol.

I had a haircut today at Kippo on Quay St in Haymarket/Ultimo, my usual place I go when I do get a haircut in the city. My hairdresser today was a Japanese lady who was a bit cute and we had a good conversation throughout the service.

She had apparently come to Australia for a year on working holiday, liked it so much that she went back home to Japan, and then came back over again and has been in Australia for the last four years and is a permanent resident now. Conversation continued onto Kendo where I discovered that her boyfriend actually actually does Kendo and is a member at SKC lol. Conversation continued to travel and other things, but it was interesting to say the least.

My haircut turned out okay, I ended up with a fringe and I need to use a little bit of wax to make it shape the way it's meant to. It's okay, lighter, shorter than before, looks I guess as normal. But then again, it's just hair.

Slow Service

2009-09-18T20:22:00.004+10:00

I went and had an x-ray and ultrasound today on my wrist. The location I went to was the Central Sydney Imaging service, located in the RPAH Medical Centre, Lvl 1, entrance via Missenden Rd, Newtown.

I got there early, my appointment was 11:30am, but I check at the reception at 11:18am and didn't have to wait long before a young lady came and got me for the x-ray. The two imaging services were for my left wrist, since I was still experiencing intermittent unknown caused pains, where I wasn't even sure how I was using my wrist to cause it, and with such a long time I was given a referral to have the imaging done.

The x-ray took about two minutes, my wrist was laid upon the plate pad, she aligned the cross-hair and closed down the shutter so only the minimal amount of ray space was exposed, took one, moved my arm and turned it slightly, took another, moved and rotated perpendicularly before taking the final shot, so that all three images were on the same one film.

Then I was taken through to the ultrasound room where an older gentleman gelled up my wrist and used a very small head scanner to run some scans of my wrist from the dorsal and plantar planes, and also along the radial aspect. He said it looked pretty normal.

Then... the wait. I was told that it would be about 40-45 minute wait, I could do that or come back. I figured by the time I went back to my office, I'd get about 15 minutes before I'd have to walk back again, so I might as well just wait. I read a magazine (the ABC publication of Delicious), and then started to watch the movie Mask (starring Cher, about the life of Roy L "rocky" Dennis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_L._Dennis]). Then an hour and a half I checked again and was told it was still being looked at by the doctor. Then at the two hour mark again, before finally someone went in and got it at nearly two and a half hours. She said that it looked like it had been done, but was just sitting on the desk. -_-;

Honestly, I think that's quite pathetic for service. Had I gone away and come back an hour later, I still would have been stuck for over another hour waiting for it.... Don't tell people it'll be 40-45min if it takes more than that, and if you can't actually *ask* someone instead of just saying, it's being looked at by someone in the future please?.... Not that they will ever read this, but I guess venting it slightly is of assistance.

So, I took a look, and sadly for me, the report said that overall, all findings were normal, meaning whatever is causing my problem was not visible from the x-ray or ultrasound. ~sigh~

Talk about divided...

2009-09-18T20:18:00.001+10:00

Came across this article in the newspaper.

Man, these people take their shoes way too seriously in the past....

http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/culture/town-divided-by-tale-of-two-shoes-20090918-fv01.html

Wedding Rehersal

2009-09-16T21:27:00.002+10:00

Hmm, it appears that I shall be attending my first ever wedding rehersal (no, not mine lol). However, it's come at a monetary price since I've had to change my flight to attend it, being a grooms man for the event.

I don't mind the cost, but, thankfully that there were still seats available for the change. Money isn't a huge deal since I have savings, and money can always be earned back, but if flights had been unavailable, then I wouldn't have been able to be there, where being there is probably a good idea so I don't stuff up whatever role I have at the wedding.

Now I'm still stuck for an idea of wedding gift....

9 for the price of 1

2009-09-16T17:37:00.002+10:00

Well, last Saturday I won Division 5 of the $20 million lottery, and my reward was a $12 profit. I bought a new toothbrush, toothpaste, and on a whim, a $3 scratchie ticket.

Well, I've had some awesome fun with it.
The 1st ticket I bought was a grid star game, which netted me $4.
So, I pocketed $1, and bought a $3 Treasure Hunt ticket.
Scratch scratch scratch, hey, scored! I won a $8 and a $4 symbol, $12 total.
Well, to the newsagent again, and I bought four more$3 Treasure Hunt tickets.
Scratch scratch, hmm, two duds, and 1 Free Ticket ($3 value) and a $8 symbol. Sweeeeet!
So, back again to a newsagent and I got three tickets of the same type yet again.
Hmm, two more duds, and finally one more Free Ticket.
This means when I go redeem it, I'll have had 9 tickets for the price of 1. :D
It doesn't matter if I don't collect anything from it, since I've pocketed $3 already ($1 from the first, and $2 from the last set), I'm back to zero for this run.

In any case, observations, the two tickets out of the 4 batch, one was a serial number 33 6 and the other was a 34 1. Then the other one was 8 2 2. I didn't pay attention to the first two so I don't know how they fit into the scheme of things.

Doesn't matter, some fun ^_____^

New MSN Messenger

2009-09-16T08:35:00.003+10:00

MSN forced me to update today. Grr.
What was wrong with the old version? Nothing... so I had to download a 68.8mb version, install it, and then they tried to fob onto me additional program installs....

There was nothing wrong or broken with my previous msn version, but they now have my minor ire by bumping me onto msn windows live.... ~grumbles~.

Wow....

2009-09-16T08:24:00.003+10:00

If he had chopped off the guy's right hand, the first thing I would have said was, does he do Kendo?....

http://www.smh.com.au/world/student-uses-samurai-sword-to-slay-burglar-20090916-fpyv.html

If anything, he could do any of the other martial arts that use the katana, kenjutsu, iaido, iaijutsu, aikido, battoujutsu and the list goes on....

Colgate Maxi-White Toothbrush

2009-09-14T00:17:00.003+10:00

Well, they recommend a new toothbrush every 3 months, and the last time I got one was the 4th June 2009, therefore being the 13th, it's over 3 months.

I went and had a look and thought I'd try out the Colgate Maxi-White (or is it Max White?) toothbrush with it's "Polishing Star". The cost was $1 more than the Colgate 360° I had previously bought, so $1 over three months is practically 1c a day.

The appearance is different, noticeable in that the head shape is slightly different, the 360 is a regular rectangle shape, while the maxi is more a pear shape/bulge towards the bottom with thinner tip. The bristle count seems to also be lower in the maxi with these soft plastic flat bars that are the polishing bits. There is a five pronged star formation in the middle roughly, with six more in a circle formation around it. I bought a medium brush stiffness since the 360 was also medium.

In a single use, it is very obvious the difference in them. While yes, the brush is new, I could feel that the medium stiffness was stiffer than the 360. This may be to compensate for the lower bristle count, in that the stiffer brushes will scrub harder to remove a deeper layer per stroke, vs more bristles scrubbing per stroke. I can't physically feel the polishing strips actually doing anything during the process. Biggest difference is when brushing the front of my teeth since brushing the tops and insides felt virtually the same.

What struck me the most though was the grip. While the length of the brushes are the same, the grip is markedly different, in almost opposite directions. While the head angle and support leading away from the head is the same, once it reaches the point where your thumb would sit, it changes.

If you read my post about the 360, you will find that I didn't like it. Well, I like the style on the maxi. The curve direction is the correct direction for my preference, in that it comes back towards you. I'm too lazy to actually show pictures so I'll attempt to ascii it instead.

The 360:

IIII___/`````````` \___

The maxi:

IIII___/`` \_________/

For me, I find that having the dip back towards you is much more comfortable for how I grip the toothbrush relative to my thumb and fingers. ~shrug~ Personal preference really.

In any case, it's a toothbrush, does the job hopefully.

And the winner is.....?

2009-09-11T07:31:00.002+10:00

The controversy in regards to the person (since their gender was in question) has taken a whole new twist...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/sport/secret-of-semenyas-sex-stripped-bare/2009/09/11/1252519599453.html

Internal hermaphrodite? Dang thats freaky....

But from a evolutionary/embryonic development aspect, I ponder if it has much application beyond the term of a reverse cougar..... internal male organs for the purposes of making the body stronger, so they can hunt down...... guys? What that does mean for them is... they can't have kids without donated ovum... though, the question to be asked is, do their internal testes produce sperm?....... ~ponders~

Don't you just hate it when....

2009-09-10T07:43:00.003+10:00

You know you have something, but you don't know where it is, but you want to find it?

I've been trying to sell one of my spare risers to raise money for purchasing new gear, and the unique thing about the riser compared to the rest of the risers of it's generation (since other bows have locked limb formats) is the use of a screw locked pocket. The limbs have these adaptors for it, and I had a spare set, but I didn't know where they had gone.

Man, I looked in the places I knew it to be last, and I found the bubble-wrap that they had come in when they had been posted to me, and I looked in a lot of places where my archery related gear was before I found it eventually hiding behind some cotton wool in one of my containers in one of my bow cases (I have a lot of gear...). But it was just bugging me that I know I had them, I know I had seen them recently, but specifically where had been lost upon me. Of course I remember seeing them since I had obviously only recently transferred them from the bubble-wrap to where they ended up, but it had not been of high importantance to me (since I didn't expect I'd need them anytime soon at that point in time) where they had been put....

Well, problem solved, but now I hope that I will get a much more reasonable offer for the riser.

Another week or two gone by

2009-09-06T12:58:00.002+10:00

Well, not much to report really.

I attended a fitting downtown at the store where the tux I will be wearing is being hired from. It was a pretty quick procedure really, the woman measured my neck, my shoulders, my waist, arm length and leg length. Then pulled from the rack a selection of clothing that fitted neatly, though the jacket had to be changed to one size larger because I have "broad" shoulders as it were. Then I got charged $22 for the fitting -_-.

In other things, I made a wooden string jig to make bowstrings for myself. It's a simple design, can't handle much tension at all, but after some frustrating attempts, I finally made a half decent string. It does the job, cheap, but... time consuming since the size is smaller than a telescopic one, so there is a lot of post-moving involved.

I attended a seminar for a PhD upgrade for someone in our department that was very interesting, where they discussed their work in regards to using supercritical carbon dioxide gas as a solvent, catalyst, and plans for its use as a carrier, in the development of biomedical tissue scaffolding technology. I understood most of it except for the chem reactions (organic was never my thing) but it would be something that I wouldn't mind getting involved with if I didn't have to deal with the nitty gritty chemistry aspects.

Kendo training as usual, where Itakura Sensei came along and gave us some training advice, and then pretty much the usual ho-hum of life.

Multiple trips to Brisbane in the near future?

2009-08-26T17:36:00.003+10:00

I am attending my best friend's wedding in October. What I didn't realise was that I would actually be a groomsman for the event. It had been vaguely mentioned in passing, but nothing actually discussed.

Well, I got an email today from the brother of the groom, with detail for the fitting, and also bucks party. The set entails that I have to attend a fitting (which will cost me to be fitted..) then, a final fitting in Brisbane... with the bucks party the weekend before the wedding.

Initially, I was going to fly up the morning of the wedding (since it's a midday wedding) in my suit, attend the wedding and reception (late afternoon reception), and fly home on the last flight of the day available. This would mean I could still get my day of work on the Friday, and training too.

Now, if I attend the bucks party, the final fitting, and the wedding, that is three trips in the space of a week. I could do it, fly up and back on each of the days.... I don't know if I have the ability to take an entire weeks holiday like my mother suggested however -_-, in either case, it complicates things ever so slightly....

Whatever I do however, I am sure it will be appreciated lol... it better be!~ XD

Student Mutiny

2009-08-24T19:34:00.002+10:00

Well, the title might be a bit strong, but thats what it feels like is building.

Today, I found out something interesting had happened in the department over the weekend. Someone, mysteriously, had come into the building on Saturday and stuck a two page letter on all the doors of the postgraduate student offices, along with leaving a copy in the pigeon hole of the head of department. For the record, it wasn't me. LOL

The letter was written anonymously by someone, who raised issues and concerns regarding how postgraduate students, especially some international postgraduate students, were being treated by some specific members of staff in the department. One complaint was specific to a named person, while others were generalised.

This person mention, even I have problems with them. I deal with them in as minimal contact as possible, as my experiences with them have also not been of the positive nature. According to the letter, they are "two-faced" seemingly nice and polite when there are staff around, but when alone with the student, they are very rude, abrupt, and just generally not a nice person at all. I fully believe this since I have had interaction with them of a similar nature, when they believed that I wasn't a member of staff, to the point where I had to show them my Staff Card to prove that I was.

Of late, the new staff in our general office are terrible. They might get the job done, but they are far from friendly, or receptive. The general office, when I started was a great place. Sure, they were busy, but they always had time to chat if you needed someone to talk to about random things happening you had to get off your mind, and there were always smiles and laughs, jokes and general good cheer. One of them left for a better position, and their replacement was nice too. Then the other left for a better position, and their replacement was nice. But then, the entire office staff changed very quickly, to three entirely new people, and now, the office is a very dead zone space in my opinion.

In any case, I was only alerted to this when one of my students told me about it and showed me the email and letter that had been sent. I suspect that they may visit 4Chan with their usage of the phrase "rage" in the letter LOL, a /b'tard in disguise. A meeting was held about it today supposedly at midday, but I haven't heard anything in regards to any results of it, so just have to see what came from it, if anything.

I have my own suspicions of who it might be... but I'll keep that to myself lol.

>_<

2009-08-23T22:15:00.002+10:00

Lately, I have been obsessing over equipment. Those who have my FB will have known my rather strange commentary about wanting patrons, sponsorship, deliberation over equipment etc.

To inform those who don't, there is a thing called bow envy. In a way, it's kind of like penis envy for some guys (I have never had it), but I do get bow envy. When people turn up with new gear, it twinges your desire to keep up with the joneses, if you get what I mean.

Anyway, one of the guys in my club, who is kind of like my non-hostil arch nemesis (lol) recently got some new gear, and darnations, do I have a case of bow envy. Putting it into perspective, I used to shoot very gear to him, and I think that while yes, he is a better archer, he is kind of goal to aspire to. I know he trains harder than me, shoots more arrows than me etc, but at the same time, he doesn't work in a regular schedule, so his freedom to do that is better. Putting that aside however, his gear is very nice.

I haven't bought new gear, like capital equipment (non-consumables like fletches, arrows in part, nocks) in a very long time. Like... 4-5 years. Limbs, same situation. The advancement of technology in this time for archery is a lot. Of course, this is all justification talk lol, but, I had a go with his bow... and -_- makes me want even more.

~sigh~
Cost wise, it actually isn't too bad. New riser goes for $1k, new limbs go for $900 odd, then postage. I have money in my nest-egg savings, but at the moment, I am paying off the last instalment of an aeroplane ticket, and if I was to save up, it would be probably another month and a half before I could afford it outright without credit-carding it. I wish I had sponsorship, or patrons, or something. My friend got his gear through the love and generosity of his friends and family who paid for it as Christmas and birthday goodies.

I'm sure my friends care about me, but probably not to the point of pulling a good $2k (rounding up here haha) for me. Though, I must admit, the people I am with, when enough are gathered, they do manage to get $300+ easily for birthdays.... on two separate occasions that I know of... But in any case, it's not something I would expect happen for me, it's just one of those things that never do/does.

I also don't shoot high enough to get any sponsorship from companies or shops ._.

I did come up with a funky idea of getting money.
I will shoot an double Olympic Round (2x 72 arrows @ 70m, 122cm face, for a total of 1440 points).
People pledge money before the shoot, and they can come watch/support/barrack/heckle me during the shoot.
Post shoot, calculate the money owed, and arrangements for money to be paid/transferred.

Of course, how much money is pledged is up to debate and variable lol.
I was originally thinking 1c/point, then 10c/arrow that scores a 10, and also another 10c/arrow that scores an X.
With that in mind, if I scored a perfect 1440 with 144 X's, then the max payout would be $43.20 per person.

Of course, I don't shoot perfect scores. If I was shooting very well, I'd be doing perhaps a 1200 score, so it would probably more around $20 per person lol.... I'd still need 100 people pledging for that to pay off.

Well, nothing stops me from daydreaming :P

Oh so true...

2009-08-23T11:49:00.001+10:00

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd082109s.gif

Two Weeks in One Post

2009-08-20T10:51:00.002+10:00

I haven't posted in two weeks because I wanted to leave my Blurb books as the top item on the blog. I clocked up nearly 200 views on the books with zero sales, but that was kind of expected lol.

Two weeks have passed, and not much has really happened. I had a few meetings in regards to the research work and projects I'm working on, a meeting with forensic engineering clients (powder coating problems), trained Kendo, trained Archery, didn't go out and socialise, and pretty much bummed at home a lot.

I recently re-installed and patched Battlefield 2 and played that a little, watched tv, the usual things in life. Applying for jobs and so forth. Nothing really exciting.

WTF LOLZ

2009-08-16T19:06:00.003+10:00

I saw this thing called "slamball" listed on the tv guide on One HD (the dedicated free to air sports channel here in Australia, recently released), so I tuned in and was like WTF.... Wiki comes up with

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slamball

LOLZ.... Whoever thought of this must have been really bored as, but it looks fun :D

Books by Me on Blurb

2009-08-07T00:17:00.002+10:00

Only 12 days left to order Behind the Men before I would have to re-upload it. So anyone interested should buy now...

14 days left for the 50mm Travel Diary

Behind the Men

My Journey with Kendo

By Donald Chiou (Ph....

Book Preview

And

50mm Travel Diary

New York City in Sp...

By Donald Chiou (Ph....

Book Preview

2nd Photoshoot Session

2009-07-28T17:22:00.002+10:00

Popped over to Kensington/Randwick area again today for another photoshoot with Darren. Nice guy. Today I did a shoot for him as both an archer and as a fencer. I had all my gear with me and it took about four hours without break to do the whole lot.

It was a little different today in the sense that he had done more research into typical shots used in photography of the sports, and had formulated what he wanted, but he also didn't have an assistant today so there was a lot of time spent setting up the lights, adjusting and tweaking (for him) while I stood in one spot.

The results looked really good, like, really good. He used a Nikon with a 50mm 1.8 since anything lower in aperture would be too soft for portrait photography unless it was specifically to be very soft, and at one stage we had 4 lights/flash units going with multiple reflectors to get the lighting right for the shots as an archer. Lots of work, but also fabulous results.

There will be an exhibition on the 17th November at Ultimo TAFE for the 10 pictures the students have to submit each, and with Darren planning about 10-12 different subjects to be shot, to submit 1 from each sport, having 3 in there means I have a good chance that I'll be in there somewhere LOL. He didn't provide me with images yet, but hopefully if he is a man of his word, I'll get them as TIFF format, which I can do whatever I want with, except make money off them. I think that's fair enough considering the time he spent taking them in exchange for no money (when his regular services are $$ as previously mentioned).

Good fun, good experience, and good photos.

Slice n Dice of Fingers

2009-07-27T20:57:00.002+10:00

I cut myself and sliced my fingers a bit yesterday crafting. It wasn't the most pleasant experience as you could probably appreciate. One thing for sure though is, the edges of drill bits a fricken sharp. Sharp to the point of cutting skin without you even telling it happened. So in any case, I made a two things over the weekend with bamboo, I'm quite happy with how one came out, the other could have been better but there is unfortunately no way I can re-make it due to the materials used in it and how it was made. I'm not displeased with the result, but just pondering how it could have been better.

Having better tools would be great, like having a plunge drill mount for my dremel tool would be awesome since it would then let me do straight 90° drilling instead of by hand like I currently do. Having the router attachment would also be nice I think. Having a clamp mount so my dreme becomes a mini-bandsaw/circular saw would also be cool. The versatility of the tool is fantastic, but unfortunately I don't own enough of the accessories (yet!) to have the full utility of it.

At some later stage when I have time again, I will probably try again to make something else in similar fashion to what I did over the weekend, and perhaps see better results.

Archery gear

2009-07-21T19:03:00.002+10:00

Well, I was originally going to get myself some new gear to play with, but now my plans have changed somewhat and I won't be doing that exactly. If I spend anything, it would definitely not be at the same scale as I had originally planned.

But, in lieu of it, I got myself some custom made wraps for my arrows lol. My last set of wraps was bright pink, with clear vanes, but this time they will be yellow and blue with my initials and a small logo on it. $40 for 24 is reasonable price for a custom job I think.

In addition to this, I will be snapping down some 110gn (grain, not gram)points to 100gn so they match the ones I already have in my current set that I use, so I will have a set of 20 instead of ten, but I will be short of vanes, so I'll have to get some more white spin wings, and also more beiter nocks for them.

Just got to do what you can with the situation ^_^

BBQ At Bicentennial Park

2009-07-21T18:37:00.002+10:00

On Sunday I went to a BBQ at Bicentennial Park, as part of the Sydney Olympic Park area, out at Homebush. I've never actually been to the park before, and from what I saw of it at the BBQ and driving through it, it seems quite nice, only if the ground wasn't so particularly soggy and poor in drainage. It has a lake, and is also near some mangrove swamps (where I have lost an arrow in before after putting one clear over the target at 90m lol) and it is located between a major arterial road (Homebush Bay Road) and the water of Homebush Bay itself.

I got there early from home by car after I stopped off to buy some salads for the BBQ. At this point, I got there just about 9:30am. BBQ's are generally "lunch" and "dinner" things, but out of the eight BBQ spots available (free electric BBQ's), 6 of them had already been taken. That early in the morning. A block of four had been taken by a gentleman who said that there would be a group of fifty people taking it for a youth organisation group, while when I shifted to another spot, there was two women who had staked it out already. Even more so was that one of the women, a Korean lady, started cooking not long after.

She ended up cooking an insane amount of food, and it wasn't until later when a tour bus turned up and disengorged its contents of Korean tourists that we realised she had been in fact making their lunch, thus the sheer volume of food.

So, we got our stuff out (the organiser got dropped off by their dad with all the food and drinks) and then people came progressively from the train station or carparks as they came. We cooked up a lot of food, which while we had 24 people, we didn't even eat it all.... There was also uncooked food also that was taken home...

We had cricket, baseball, soccer, badminton and kite flying as entertainment. Talking, lazing in the sun. The usual BBQ thing.

It was a nice day, and we finished off by feeding the left over bread to the fish in the lake that had been built there. The fish and eels in that place are HUGE, probably from all the people that feed them......

'91 Promotion~~~~~~

2009-07-17T22:47:00.004+10:00

My cousin Joy Lee in Brisbane has taken the step to start her own business while she is also studying at university. Her business is called '91. It is a accessories business for the ladies with things like necklaces, earrings, stockings, hair clips and so forth. I think it's great that she has an idea, some passion to throw into it, and that her parents are also supporting her work.

There is no official website for it as far as I know of yet, but there is a Facebook group, which can be found at this link here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=98339367289 and an image gallery with the pictures in the FB group : http://www.wretch.cc/album/jOyee91

So, if you are inclined, take a peek (there is already 133 members of the group, so you know she's got good support already!), join if you want to see more, and contact Joy if you would like to get any of the products ^______^v

Shameless plug, but hey, that's what family is for right? Right!

Stepmania + StayCool Dance Pad

2009-07-17T22:30:00.002+10:00

A very generous person sent me a StayCool dance pad in the mail. They didn't tell me about it until I poked them about it once I received it. It has been something that I had mentioned previously after playing on a few different varieties of them at friends places etc, and it is actually a good form of exercise that can be a challenge, and also probably fun if I wasn't concentrating so hard LOL.

The only problem with my setup at the moment is that the floor space in my room is tiny. I have to remove my chair onto my bed to have enough space, and even then, not the entire pad is sitting on the floor with the bottom right corner sticking up against a container I have as my nightstand of sorts. It still works fine since when using StepMania, you only need the U D L F and not the angled corner keys in normal dance mode, while pump mode uses the corners.

Another problem, not so much with the setup but the actual pad, is that it shifts quite a bit. When you are going very quickly, it slides in small amounts and ends up moving sideways, or turning since for me, one side is restricted in the corner. While it comes with five "grip" pads, I don't think they are particularly effective in keeping it from moving. I know some people have taped them to heavier things like boards, but I need to keep it foldable for storage purposes.

Regardless though, I played quite a bit, about thirty minutes through random selections of my collected StepMania songs, and I can sort of stumble my way through light and standard modes on some of the songs. I'm sure over time I will hopefully improve my co-ordination, and it will probably provide even more exercise for me ^_^.

Typical council work

2009-07-15T11:05:00.002+10:00

This morning, before I went off to work, my internet died for no apparent reason. As part of the usual routine, I checked that our phone line was working, and for once, it wasn't. I was totally WTF at that. After all, having a phone line die isn't actually that usual in my neck of the woods. So, I popped outside, lo and behold, there were two guys about two houses down from mine in each direction (so I was smack bang in the middle), working on wiring. Barefoot (and bloody cold, since it was only 9°C inside my room, must have been less outside) I padded down to have a chat with one of them.

It appears that due to the council having redone the footpaths and driveways, they had displaced the wiring by a little bit. They hadn't damaged it, or destroyed it or removed it, but shifted it off to one side. It was still working perfectly fine, but they had to replace a section of the wiring underneath every bit that the council had worked on, so that when the council workers come back (after more than a month of nothing) to do the rest of the footpaths, the manhole cover for the communications bit would be in line with the wiring and in the line of the footpaths, not to the side. Really unnecessary but, thats the way council work is. Like everything else, and replacing gutters and driveways and footpaths when they were in perfectly fine shape....

Well, at least there were no emergencies that needed the phone line thankfully, since my father doesn't know how to use a mobile, and often my father is home alone, and only has the regular phone line...

Classic! Serves him right~

2009-07-14T10:57:00.000+10:00

Ah, got to love classic croc dundee quotes

http://www.smh.com.au/national/you-call-that-a-knife-this-is-a-knife-20090714-djcx.html

Snipers for penguins? It happens

2009-07-13T23:53:00.000+10:00

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/manly-penguins-get-sniper-bodyguard-20090713-diep.html

How cool is that?
lol

Compressed air gaming vest

2009-07-13T10:24:00.003+10:00

I came across this at PC Case Gear's website. The link is to the product directly.
http://tngames.com/product_detail/3/3rd-Space-Gaming-Vest-Bundle-Black

Interesting concept, a vest with zones that delivers up to 5 pounds of pressure during gameplay to simulate action. According to the FAQ, there is 8 pockets of actuators, 4x front and back. This is what they say in regards to how much 5lb feels like.

How strong is 5 lbs of impact force?

Take a single roll of 50 pennies. Lay on the ground face up. Hold the role of pennies end on (up and down) 6 inches above your stomach, then release the roll and let the roll strike your stomach. That is what 5lb of force feels like.

Interestingly, the PC Case Gear website says it delivers 10lb of force.... I wonder who is right....lol.

I think it'd be fun to use one, but besides the two bundled games, the only ones I have from the supported list is Crysis, Bioshock and Call of Duty 4. It does also support WoW, and I'm wondering, does that mean if you're getting pincushioned by missile/ranged attacks, you'd feel it? And if you're tanking in melee in a zerg mob, you'd also feel every hit? I could imagine that for some situations (Leroy Jenkins style) that you'd feel an initial impact, and then the actuators would stay inflated the entire time due to the rate of hits you'd cop, meaning you're just feeling a tight vest being worn and not multiple impacts lol..

Price little sucker though, so definitely not something I would get myself lest someone is being generous, or lady luck comes my way.

Update on projects

2009-07-13T10:11:00.000+10:00

Well, it seems NSW Police have pulled the job from us and given it to another "institute". I have no idea who this other institute is, but it is annoying since we already made moves into the project with literature and even buying glasses for testing. As quoted from Grosse Point Blank "but preparations have been made in good faith!"
Gah.

However, Orica have given their project the green light and a service contract is being prepared for them and we will begin testing once that is signed.

Win some, lose some.

Friday, shooting, Saturday training

2009-07-11T21:56:00.002+10:00

Friday morning, I went down to Rewards Distribution, who are a company that sell hospitality items. Plates, cookware, glasses, utensils, and so forth. For the NSW Police project in regards to the tempered glass vs polycarbonate we went there to buy some glasses. It was apparently "difficult" to find tempered glass, but it took me less than 15 minutes to find a distributor for it, and locate them. ~wonders at how bad they are at finding stuff~

In any case, we found them, and bought five glasses made of normal glass, tempered glass, and polycarbonate. They wouldn't sell us five glasses of normal glass alone because they are in cartons of 24 normally and wouldn't break it up. Then we had to find a slightly different version that was available in individual sale units.

Other than that, my day at work was pretty ordinary.

I then went to archery to do some shooting since Kendo had been cancelled thanks to the National Conference Games (which is like a Malaysian International Students only uni games).

I did some shooting, and it was mixed in terms of how the shooting quality was. It was pretty tired by it though. I did some scoring at the end of it with a 30m distance end, coming in with a 311. It's reasonable, not crash hot. It comes in at a rating of 65. Backward converting it comes to a FITA-90 score of 1020. At least it's over 1000 LOL...

Well, today, I woke, went to Kendo training, got beat by Master Choi, went home, and then built a rack to hold my target to shoot at home. Nothing exciting really, but stuff got done.

Blog ressurection!

2009-07-09T22:39:00.001+10:00

I've brought back alive one of my older blogs that has not been updated in an age. ~mwuahahahahaha~

Whirlpool Customerlink

2009-07-09T19:24:00.002+10:00

Whirlpool appliances (not the internet/broadband website) have a customer service centre that field calls put to them through their 1300 number. They are utterly useless and lying heaps of crap. I had the displeasure of talking with them today.

The situation was, that our washing machine had packed it. A service techie had been out and checked out the problem before reporting back to their base of operations that the fault was unrepairable. Thank you Mark, thank you Sydney Home Appliances Service, you guys were great, prompt, professional, helpful. We were referred back to Keith from Bing Lee. Also helpful, doing his part by letting us know what was going on.

In any case, the situation had dragged on. It was Thursday with no calls yet. My father called the customerlink number and spoke with an Anthony. I know that our case had already been received by Whirlpool, and we had a case number assigned. This was obvious to us because we had the case number to give them when we called. My father asked if there had been any change in our case status, no, it was apparently still being decided. My father then waited a little bit and called again. This time, someone called Pure answered. She said that it was still being held by a case manager and that we would have to wait for it to be reviewed. I then told my father who was still on the phone that he should ask to talk to a manager. He was told by Pure that it wasn't possible since their systems didn't allow transfer to a manager (yeah, right, like I believe that crap), in which my father didn't want to push it and ended the call.

At this point, I was fed up by being a bystander as is, and my parents were fed up also. We had lodged the issue almost a week ago with nothing coming back at all. So, with less than 2 minutes delay, I called back to the customerlink number, with full intentions of speaking to a manager. This time, I got a woman called Edz (WTF is with these names?? Pure? Edz? Honestly, Indian Call centre staff should try using their own names instead of this shit... did I mishear Edz? No, I asked specifically how it was spelt, and E-D-Z was what I was told) who, after reviewing my case, told me that it would be 2-3 days for a decision. I then asked to talk to a manager. She then said it wasn't possible. I said, I don't believe that. I would like to talk to the highest supervisory person possible. She then said, that all of their managers were in a meeting, and she was unable to do anything except note my call. I called BS again, and demanded to talk to someone in administration. She tried to fob me off about it saying that she couldn't give me anyones contact number at all. So then I said fine, I'm going to make a complaint. Give me the number to make a complaint with. She then gave me the receptionists number at Whirlpool Australia in Melbourne, and the email address for the Australian customerlink mailbox (au_customerlink@whirlpool.com).

I ended the call, still pretty peeved. It's total crap that all of their managers were in a meeting. So, I dialed reception in Melbourne, and a polite voice greeted my call. I explained that I would like to talk to a case manager and I was calling from Sydney. The receptionist transferred me straight away onto a different line and in less than 5 minutes I was talking to Chantelle Rose from Whirlpool, who was a case manager. Now, I do not believe that in the 6 minutes from talking to Edz, to talking with Chantelle, they got out of their meeting in a convinient manner to be back in her office to talk to me. In any case, I gave the case number to Chantelle, and said, what was going on. She, after reading the case number report, without asking me about anything said she would call Sydney Home Appliances and asked if I would hold, so I did. Not long after, she got back to me on the line and said that they would send me a disclosure form regarding the warranty, and once the form was signed and returned, delivery would be arranged for a replacement unit either tomorrow or Monday next week depending on their consignments, which unfortunately she was unable to control since it depended on the number of delivery jobs and units already in line infront of us.

The whole situation was examined, reviewed, decided upon within 10 minutes of talking to the receptionist at Whirlpool. To which, I spent that much time with Edz attempting to talk to a case manager.

Now, is this a situation that would piss you off? Of course. I hate customer service that isn't service, screws the customer around and wastes everyones time.

When our washing machine arrives and is in full working order, the first thing I'm going to do is make a complaint by email.

Orica + NSW Police Projects

2009-07-06T14:16:00.002+10:00

While I am not involved with them yet since they are not active projects, there is the possibility for me to be involved. I think this is great since it would give me more experience in working in forensic engineering and science consulting.

The Orica project I think I have mentioned before, in regards to testing of some HDPE used to transport Nitric Acid. They sent some samples over from a good container, and a container that was starting to fail. Upon flexing the peices by hand, you can already hear cracking noises, and seeing ripple lines from the cracks happening inside the plastic. Definitely not a good sign, and thankfully they haven't had any breakages causing leaks and spills of the 60% hot nitric acid that is put into them.

The second project is commissioned by the NSW Police, and they want a recommendation into glass. Or specifically, tempered glass vs polycarbonate plastics. More specifically, to replace traditional glasses in bars, pubs, taverns and drinking spots. This is their method of combating alcohol fueled violence, and reducing injuries since tempered glass shatters into square-ish bits with much less sharp shards for lacerations and so forth. The polycarbonate is practically unbreakable though could still be used to beat on someone or thrown. It sounds interesting, and I know that some places have already started to use plastic cups after a certain time of the night to reduce the number of "glassings" (where someone gets a glass smashed into their face or body in a fight). The only difficulty so far is that, they haven't provided any tempered glasses or polycarbonate for that matter to permit testing. The only things that are available are reports and studies in literature. Which, in my opinion, is pretty weak if it was ever taken to say court, when the bar association members try and oppose the move to use plastic instead of glass.

In any case, more news of them if they develop.

ShittyRail

2009-07-06T10:33:00.002+10:00

Well, for those who live in Sydney, and have to put up with CityRail, you know my pain. Shittyrail as it is called by some quite aptly.

My morning experience today involved me getting to the station a little later than usual but that generally wasn't a problem. The indicator boards said, next train was a "special", and the train after that was 4 minutes away. Well, nothing was said about the special train, and then 4 minutes stayed at 4, for 12 minutes. Then the train rolled in. Normally, this train would actually go all stops via Lidcombe to the City Circle, well, this train ended up being an Olympic Park train, so it terminated at Lidcombe before turning into a Olympic Park train on the wrong platform... OP services run off platform 1, this stopped at platform 3, and everyone bailed out of the train and crammed onto the platform to wait for the next train in 5 minutes.

Waiting waiting waiting, the next train is an express, Strathfield, Ashfield, Redfern, Central, City Circle. Hop on, train is crowded. Little kid asks if my shinai bag is a didgeridoo case. I say no, it's a sword bag and show him my bokken and shinai. Little kid thanks me because his mum told him to, kinda cute haha. But wait, the train stops ..... at Homebush! Then proceeds.... I wonder who was at Homebush station that was so important they had to stop the express just to let them on.... So then I got into Redfern and trudged my way in.

I don't know why our rail system is so plagued with inconsistencies. Having travelled Japan Rail, Hong Kong MRT, Taiwan MRT, Melbourne trains, Queensland Rail, New York Subway, I just don't get it.... we are meant to be a 1st world country, and the major city in this country, and yet our rail system fails consistently. That is the true definition of fail.

You suck balls Cityrail.

Bamboo Charcoal Attempt #3

2009-07-05T22:52:00.003+10:00

Well, being such a nice day, and not so windy today, I went for burn attempt number three.

My mother was also quite interested to see how the setup worked so I showed it to her. I actually modified it slightly today also, in hopes of increasing the initial air intake to assist with a better ignition and burn. What I did was to drill some holes and then cut out a space similarly sized to my exhaust chimney hole, but on the direct opposite side. This, in theory would allow a straight through flow of intake, and output gas flow if the lid was shut. In theory.

So, I lined the bottom with a lot of newspaper and made a tail sticking out that I could light, meaning it would allow me to have a burn from the bottom upwards, instead of attempting to make the burn go from top down like previously, but I also loaded up the top gap with paper also. At this point, I should mention that I have not used any new bamboo, it is the same stuff that has been un-charcoal/ashed from the first two attempts, so for most part, it is already quite dry and some is partially burned.

So, I dug out the hole again, stuck the vessel in, lit it and left the top lid off. The bamboo caught on fire quite well this time, with a good amount of flames kicking in. There smoke was pretty heavy coming out but it did die down a little, so I put the lid on to control the air intake otherwise I would end up with a lot of ash and no charcoal.

Well, I think I controlled the gap better today, and with the extra port hole on the side, the chimney did produce a better plume of white fragrant bamboo smoke (kind of like a new smoked shinai smell lol). Once the smoke lightened up some, I closed it down so only a small stream of smoke was pouring out from the lid, and then filled in the side hole with soil to close the gap. Then I waited some more. Once the chimney smoke lessed further, I then yanked it out, and filled up the hole, closed the lid and buried the whole lot.

I left it to burn out the air inside, and to cool down before I opened it up and emptied it. This time, it was much more successful than both first and second runs combined. I washed it to clear off any ash on it, and then dried it out. Once it was relatively dried, I weighed it and I had about 120g of charcoal this time, with some very large peices compared to the previous attempts. So, at least with this time, the burn was better, and the control was also better for air flow that allowed the bigger peices to be formed.

My father was pretty impressed and said that I could keep burning if I wanted to, and if we had enough, he might even use some haha. Well, next time I have a day off and the weather is fine, I might just do that.

Wagaya Dinner

2009-07-05T10:06:00.003+10:00

I went to dinner after Friday night training with friends from Kendo. It's someones birthday on Tuesday and so we decided to have dinner for their birthday. They nominated a Japanese restaurant called Wagaya and so when we called, they told us that the earliest room booking available was 8:30pm, a good two hours wait. Well, it was a weekend I guess and nothing really happening since the Jay Chou Concert was on and lots of people had disappeared for that. So, we bummed around Galaxy World (an arcade centre) in Market City at Chinatown for a little while talking before going across to Wagaya.

It was my first visit to the place and some of the others have been there several times. One of the features that makes it a trendy eatery is that you order through touchscreen whenever you want, meaning that you never have to flag down a waiter, and when you want to go, you touchscreen your bill and they bring it to you. You can also bring up the bill on the screen so you know how much you've ordered and how much you need to pay etc.

We had eleven people for dinner in one of the rooms. The seating was cushions on a wooden floorboarded surface, with a table and pit underneath (so you didn't have to sit cross-legged if you didn't want to. There was also a LCD TV, DVD player and a heater. Someone had a kendo DVD of the Japan highschool championships, and that got loaded in. Food wise, we ordered $225 dollars worth or so, plus a $30 room booking fee being a busy Friday night. For me, I got $33 worth, with a Uni Chawanmushi (Sea Urchin Roe in a steamed egg mix), Salmon Otoru Sushi, Scallop and Garlic Fried Rice and unlimited Hot Green Tea.

The quality of the chawanmushi was really good, the flavour was gentle and penetrated through the whole egg mix, and there was a peice of fake crab meat on the bottom with some broad beans, and mushroooms. The salmon was ok, wasn't exactly the freshest, but being 8:30pm when we got into the room, that wasn't too surprising. It was fresh enough to not make you sick. The wasabi that they had also was pretty mild, and the white pickled (because sometimes you get yellow and red/pink ginger) was very thickly sliced ginger (I prefer the thinner sliced ones) and quite strong. The fried rice was served in a hot stone bowl, and boy was it hot! It keep cooking for about ten minutes by my estimate, so I ended up flattening it with my spoon and letting it cook a nice hard crispy side while watching the DVD before I could eat it. It was very tasty, the strong blend of the garlic and the very small (like 5 cent peice, so around 15mm diameter) scallops were scattered throughout. Having the crispy cooked rice also gave it an excellent texture contrast too. The green tea was okay, it smelt good, but tasted pretty ordinary, but I guess considering it was refill available, they wouldn't exactly make it out of highly expensive stuff.

So, we ate, talked, watched the DVD of highschool kids wallop each other. Those kids are scary good, scary fast.... and the girls were very butch looking lol. It was a little sexist in a way because some of the commentary about the girls matches weren't very flattering like how that person wasn't a girl, she must be a man...... and then their reactions on seeing their faces when they were interviewed lol....

Post dinner, we went to the Capital Theatre for icecream at Passionflower, where they kindly set up a table for the eleven of us, but then through circumstance, it only ended up with five of us sitting there and four of them ordering (I decided not to have any due to cost and weather conditions). Then back to the car and home.

Long night, long day, but not a bad way to finish it.

Bamboo Charcoal Project

2009-07-02T18:24:00.002+10:00

So, I've been trying to do this for ages and I finally managed to get a vessel that would be suitable for making bamboo charcoal. I found some instructions online on how to get the setup done and the basic procedure.

Then I tried it.

Man, it is much harder than it looks. It really is.
Controlling the burn so that it burns enough, but not enough to reduce the bamboo to ash is hard. Then closing the gap down so that it still has enough air to smoulder away, without bursting back into flame, or dying off completely....

In any case, I spent about 4-5hours today all up with two attempts, and I only got a handful of what I would call charcoal. I then promptly sewed together a pouch and put the charcoal into it, and then the pouch into my kendo bag. Lets see if it does anything.

I took some pictures. You can find them on my flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dchiou/sets/72157620708379575/

Oh Starry Night + Pomelos

2009-06-30T17:14:00.002+10:00

I took a picture a few nights ago when I had returned from a late night out. The stars were bright out, and so I decided to take a snapshot. The other photos from that night didn't actually turn out to be any good really and thus, I didn't upload them anywhere in particular. The star I think must be venus since it was the brightest star that I could see, but not being of astronomical education, I am probably most likely wrong. It was in the northern direction of the sky though, about north-east to be more precise.

The direct link to it on Flickr is here but I have also put it onto the blog directly here:

The other photo is a picture taken today of some of the Pomelos that have become ripe enough to be picked off our tree today. As you can see, there is a lot of them lol, we'll be eating these for a while. They can be either sweet or sour so I don't know what they are until we open them up to eat them. Not a bad haul huh? There are still more on the tree that are small and green, yet to be ready for consumption.

Karaoke, Mahjong, Hotpot

2009-06-28T11:38:00.003+10:00

Not in that order, it was actually Mahjong, Hotpot then Karaoke.

However, firstly to Saturday morning training.
Got up, ugh, tired. Got my stuff together, hopped into the car and went off to uni. When I got in, I found a park thankfully and saw that the rugby games hadn't started yet but people were around warming up, so it was to be certain that sooner than later the parking spots would fill up. I was also the only one for Kendo there at that point in time, but I wasn't *that* early....

There were some girls inside training basketball with someone from the Sydney Flames, the womens basketball league team, and I think it was their junior squad training or something. More people came for Kendo, and by midday when we started, we had several people but the basketballers were still in there. We had to ask the staff to tell them that they had to finish up before we could get started.

Warmup was normal, a little vigorous to get warmed up because the weather has turned cold now for winter, and then we did the usual footwork, hayasburi bursts and kiai. When we do the hayasuburi kiai practice (as many as you can with the strongest kiai you can muster), I always end up doing a very small amount, but I feel my face becoming fully flushed, can smell the smell of blood, and my throat ends up hurting. I think that my kiai is more intense for the smaller amount, but it is hard to say.

Then we went into doing waza rotations as usual, but we were told to put more energy into our rotations and have a mini rest as we rotated. I certainly thought I did because I was a bit tired and right now the morning after I'm also a little muscularly sore. My kiai also changed since I asked someone afterwards and they commented that they had noticed that. Since we didn't have training for three weeks, I've also been doing some weights with 15lb weights on each hand and I wasn't sure if I was generating more power or speed, but someone said I did hit harder but it felt more of a kensen whipping action with the shinai digging in. Hmm.

After training I went home for a shower and then to pick up some stuff before I headed out again to the hotpot gathering. A group of us converged on a friends place for some socialising with hotpot dinner being the main function at hand. We were waiting for a while so we played a poorly understood game or three of mahjong. When I say poorly understood, it is that we don't know the rules and setup properly, but play just to complete sets and hands, basics pretty much. In any case, it was fun, while others played Big2 and the xbox with Soul Calibur 2. Then everyone came along and we got the hotpots going. There was twelve of us around the two tables put together, and we had three burners going. There was quite a substantial amount of food to be had and we chatted idly through it. We ate most of it too which was rather surprising, but then with seven guys, it isn't that surprising.

Once we finished that and packed it all away, the mahjong table came back out, and so did the mic's for karaoke. Well, there doesn't really need to be a descriptor for the events happening, but lets say there were some rather frustrating hands played, with the final round that we played, we had three people waiting for a 7 stone to win, and the fourth player had it for twenty minutes not wanting to give it up....

Lots of fun really, the singing, some of it was good, some of it was bad, and some people are just plain tone deaf >_< lol but at least they know it, but they enjoy singing so they still did it anyway and you can't really fault them for it.

So I got home pretty late, but I slept in this morning which made up for it just fine ^_^

Chinese Construction Work

2009-06-28T11:31:00.001+10:00

My brother found this and sent me the link

http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/06/28/construction-chinese-style/

It's pretty scary really. Another good reason to not invest in property in China...