Boredom + Assignments

Assignments and boredom simply don't mix. Imagine this, I have a handful of assignments to complete, and I'm bored. What do I do first? I fire up my games. And then I go to bed at 3 am. Ha. So how the hell do I get my assignments done?

Anyhow, it's time I did something. I should go back and do up my various assignments, but I have good reasons not to do them. Procrastination reasons:

#1. Creative nonfic piece - No inspiration, so I can't do it up this week.
#2. ESD report - Not enough Matlab experience to do it up properly.

So I'm gonna stone for a while before heading back.

KL transport against Melbourne transport

"Wednesday April 29, 2009
Time to revamp KL transport system"

-theStar online, 29th April-

As if we don't already know. Bloody system has let us down since God knows when. Even KTM is worse than Connex, and Aussies consider Connex's train system as bad. Even with >95% efficiency, they aren't happy with that. Imagine Aussies living in KL. They'd kill us first.

Hopefully when I get back I can look forward to improved transport in KL.

Burnout

I think I'm slowly burning myself out.

Seriously.

I mean, I set all my alarms for 6.30 this morning. I got up all right, then I went back for a 10 minute nap. I ended up sleeping for another 2 hours. And this considering I slept at midnight last night, I think I'm seriously sleep-deprived, and burning out. I used to be able to survive on 6 hours or less sleep, but now...

Sleep is good, but not sleeping is better. And no sleep is... FAIL.

Poker night

I sense fail in the air. I spent $9 to enter, and then to enjoy lots of b33r. I also now know that it's not necessarily good to hang out with your cousin's friends, you never know what they do. Oddly enough, there were many higher year students around. Only a handful of first years were around, and if I wanted to make friends with them, I already know most of them. So it's kinda defeated the purpose of looking for new friends. But then I got to know more third years, most of them through my cousin.

Oh well, gotta make more friends. My little gang is kinda like the first years who actually attend most of the events and meetings, so I guess we'd stand a better chance of running for posts in the general committee.

Random quote: Russian search engine ranks amongst top 10 search engines in the world. It's ranked 9th, actually. -ABC radio-

Triple dump

Ok, imma dump all the stuff from the last few days in one long post. Forgive me if it sounds like rambling at the end, I was really emo at that time.

Tuesday:

IESS info session - kinda interesting. On one side of the theatrette you'd find these first years, and on the other side you'd get all the committee members and higher year kids. My friends and I seem to have a good plan for getting posts in the IESS general committee. Let's see:

Jun Yeu - publicity officer [cushy job, all you'd need to do is to get more members for the society]
Kee Ching - IT officer [even cushier, if you're good at web management and Photoshop. All you'd need to do is to maintain and update the society website.]
Shu Jie - welfare officer [as the President himself put it, the big mom/dad of the society - just need to take care of everyone]
Michelle - [crap forgot. for some irrational reason I forgot what she's running for.]
Me - Editor [why I'd run for this isn't exactly clear, but it's kinda apparent to some of us that I can write. Hope so, I'd just be updating the society newsletter.]

We've now gotta write policy speeches, just to advertise ourselves. How to do that isn't clear yet, but I'm hoping somebody would write it for me XD. Two weeks until the AGM, so that's a lot of time still - it's next month.

Yesterday:
Yes, I did what I said I'd do - wake up at 5 am to study for Calc 2. Thank goodness for Coke - the black liquid, not the white powder - for helping me through the morning. Slept at 11, got up at 4am for my study plan. And this turned out to be a reasonably good plan, since I manaaged to spot one glaring error in my workings. Not good if a similar question came out, since quite a number of people relied on me teaching them the right stuff for the test. But I managed to let those guys know about the error, so it wasn't too bad. It looks like it will be worthwhile coaching uni students in calculus, it's gonna be a repeat of SAM.

Afternoon, before Chem tute - I still need to release some stress over this:

Michelle: Where's Camberwell?
Me: Wait a moment... [digs in pocket for timetable, gets it out]
Me: Ok, this is the train line, Camberwell is somewhere... [fingers dancing]... over here.
Michelle: That's far wei.
Me: Ok, if that's far, try me, staying somewhere around... [fingers dance again]... here.

End of conversation. Silence reigns supreme.
I must be some kind of conversation breaker, whereby any one of my statements would just unbalance everyone in the conversation and thus kill off anything anybody can think of saying. I kinda hate it, it makes it hard to carry on a conversation with anyone.

Damn, it's hard being me sometimes.

Early this morning - around 1am to be close:

Emo problem T_T. Started around early last night, culminating in the following conclusion:

One part Wednesday night, one part emo songs, one part kitchen knives, one part semi-depressed state. Stir well until blended. Guess what you get? Suicidal thoughts.

Anyway, my dad's in town for the next 3 days or so starting today. Ohshi- gotta behave like a uni student - wait - what's a uni student supposed to behave like? Just realised that's a good question.

Pray I get to enjoy meself at poker night this Saturday.

Calculus

Sleep is good for the soul.

But not when you have a test tomorrow.

Especially when after your exam you have a bloody mind-splitting assignment for a workshop session.

So I think I shall sleep early, get up at 3 and do things. Otherwise I might just keel over and sleep during the test or the assignment. That would be pure WTF material.

Or maybe I should get up even earlier. I dunno what I'll do then.

Suburbs

There are some good suburbs, and there are some not so good suburbs. Guess where I stay.

Surrey Hills is a nice quiet suburb, yes, that much is true. But after Friday, I've had to reassess my own thinking about my place now.

1. There's no shopping centre nearby, oddly enough. No Coles, no Safeway, no Kmart. Very odd. And so my groceries come from 3 different places - Box Hill, Camberwell and anywhere from the CBD.

2. It's at least 25 minutes to the city by train. If you're late on a weekend, good luck - next train is in 30 minutes time.

I mean, at least places like Chadstone or Doncaster are still liveable - you've got somewhere to do your weekend shopping within 5-10 minutes walking. But I guess the advantage of staying somewhere where almost nobody has heard of is good - not many people are gonna bother you. I've lost count of the number of people asking me "Where's that suburb?" It's kinda repetitive now, I just say "Look it up, it's on the Lilydale/Belgrave lines."

Imma need a new place next year, gonna look for somewhere near the city. Any suggestions?

an art

I can't help but say this: I'm officially a slacker. Not becoming a slacker, but I'm a slacker.

At least some of my friends are hardworking enough not to fill up their Easter week with outings every day of this week. Unfortunately, I'm not following their stellar examples. My Easter week is full of activities, almost every day. Thank goodness I get tomorrow off, then I can spend some time doing things that matter to me, such as revising for Calc 2 [even though there are some people who think I don't need to revise Calc 2].

Anyway, let's see what is upcoming in this week:
Thursday - Lunch, Sofia's in Camberwell
Friday - Lunch + mini-reunion, somewhere in the city
Saturday - Swimming + possible touch rugby

That's three days of stuff. Where's the time for studying? Non-existent, hence making me a slacker.



Quote: Do you like her? - Yes. Does she know? - Yes. Does she like you? - Yes. -anon-

Night out on Lygon

When you want Italian or Greek food, go to Lygon Street. Where else near the CBD can you find good Italian food without breaking your student budget?
And so me and my friends went down to Lygon last night for dinner. There were lots of Italian blokes out to drag unsuspecting customers into their shops. Of course, with such a big group, those blokes would try to catch our group. Luckily we had plenty of will power not to listen to offers of 25% discounts and free drinks on the house.
Dinner was reasonable, pasta and pizza as usual. The real hit was the dessert - ice cream, drinks and poker at one of my friends' place. Luckily nobody took my suggestion to play strip poker just for the fun of it. Instead we used nuts, which was kinda safe and boring IMO.

I think I should invest in a bottle of vodka.

Professional stalking

I'm now blogging from Animal Orchestra with my Creative Writing tutorial group.

Creative Writing is fun. We get the license to stalk people as part of our observation of people project. And the observations and speculations that you get, wow! Anything goes. You can stalk almost everyone and anyone for our project. So, there were people in my group who stalked a couple. The resulting conversation they recorded was something odd I've never heard of before. Pauses, unnaturally long pauses. And some of the other conversations they recorded were weird. Like how some people were flirting, and it was as though they didn't know how to flirt. That was funny as well.

People watching is fun. Watching people is fun. And making speculations is fun as well, it teaches you something about people in general.

Rain

It screws everything up. Especially the trains. I guess that's why the lecture theater is so darned quiet early in the morning. Usually around this time [8.30 am] the theater is already half packed. Anyway, the trains were screwed up this morning. I had to wait something like 10 minutes for a train to Melbourne Central from Richmond due to a power fault at Parliament station. At Richmond, the Connex staff shunted us passengers around. First to platform 3, then to platform 5. Bloody hell. To top it off, it was drizzling, making the temperature drop to single digit regions [I reckon]. It was so cold, you'd see the condensation blowing out of your mouths.

Well, I reckon I have to get used to this.

I-Splat - engineers' way of having fun!

I know this was last week's event, but what the heck, I'll just post about it.

So last week I went for paintball at Oakleigh, just outside of Clayton. Of course I got shot up, quite a few shots, to be honest about it. Partly due to something called Highlander mode, which I'll elaborate in due time. The place is called World Series Paintball, near Huntingdale station, even though it's in Oakleigh. That caused a little confusion when we got on the train to get there.

Leader: Ok, we're getting off at the next stop. [we were at Oakleigh, the stop before Huntingdale]
Someone: I thought the place is in Oakleigh, shouldn't we be getting off here?
Leader: No, this shows you haven't done your research before coming.

Me: OMGWTFBBQLOL

Anyway, we managed to find our way to the place. The inside is damn modern, it looks way better than most outdoor places. There are four different fields inside, with four different layouts for playing. There was only one difference in the playing style - instead of deathmatch, we played normal respawn mode. Which ultimately led to lots of dodging. Anyway, there were quite a few new playstyles I saw that Sunday - money rush [grab bags of cash], poachers [grab furry toy animals], border crossing [like bombing run] and the highlight of the day being the WTF Highlander mode. That mode ultimately led to most of my soreness, aches and pains of the day. Basically in Highlander mode, you become a Highlander who can't die. You can get shot over and over, but if you don't like the feeling, then you can opt to retreat. Like heck we'd retreat that fast. So of course, whoever decides to go in charging, you'd amass lots of bruises and shots. Such as these shots to my forearm and neck.
At the end of the day, the guys gave us these little tags to vote for satisfaction. Guess who was the lone mad guy who dropped his tag into the green box. No prizes for guessing correctly, though. All in all, I think I justified my expenditure for the entire trip. Fun the whole day long FTW.

Rushing

I think I know how the rest of my assignments may go from now on. Take my Creative Writing assignment for example:

Final changes done - 7 am
Printing assignment - 8.30 am
Dropped assignment into chute - 8.45 am

I think this is gonna be a small problem for me. Help anyone?