mRO is a disease
Mood:  irritated
Well, there are times where a person can express his happiness, sadness, worries and now its time for angriness. If there is even such a word. Well I am not really that angry but irritated and significantly annoyed.

Well it all started when I was still oblivious to online games. Yes you know? Online games where you play with a bajillion other people online probably from all over the world. One fine day, I went to my cousin's house and watched him play mRO (malaysian Ragnarok Online). I thought it might be interesting to try it after all it was free for that time. Then I slowly got hooked on it making me neglect everything else that needed attending. Everyday playing this game with my cousin online was kind of boring because I had to wait for him to actually be free and sometimes he would rather go adventuring with his own friends and leave me alone to play by myself which of course defeats the whole purpose of playing these kind of games online. I had a rather smart plan to actually get more of my own friends to play with me this game. Little did I know that it would actually cause so much damage and eventually backfire on me.

I first introduced this game to Shawn. Yeah that's right. The guy who I'm sharing a house with here in Australia who is studying the same subject as I am at university. He did not seem really keen on playing it so I got ahead of myself and introduced it to 2 other people from my college. In the end all three of them were adventuring with me. Little that I know that these people have been spreading the information of the game around when I had suggested them not to.

Well I do not know about them but for myself, this game slowly took control of me, the way how I think and affected my daily life severely and even turned me into an anti social and somewhat rude person. Anybody that would have disrupted my time playing this game would have been told off in a rather loud and rude way. I saw them as disturbing my concerntration as well as not giving peace but in reality I was being controlled by the game and to repel anybody who would potentially release me from this bondage I was suffering unconciously.

Hours turned into days, days turned into weeks, weeks turned in months. I was almost constantly playing that game neglecting my friends, my family, my college work and even God. I was under a spell I could not break free from. While being under this hypnotism I even lost my girlfriend. Well it was not directly us breaking up because I was too addicted to the game but more rather that I kept making up excuses not to spend more time with her or anybody else. I always had arguments with my mother over me spending too much time on the computer. Little did she know that the game had its endless pull on me.

But God did not let me drift away just like that. Somehow someway He made kept drawing me back to Him. Towards the end of this bondage, I suddenly became busy and occupied with other works that just could not be let down for the online game. The more work I had the less time I would have for the game. Eventually enabling me to lose the obsession for the game and I would only play it once in a while. When I was finally free, I could see all the damage that I had done to those people around me, the people whom I spreaded this disease to.

Two of my classmates constantly had arguments and ruined their friendship over this game. One of those two classmates failed some subjects and could not graduate the same time as the rest of us for she had to retake some subjects. One of my apprentices in music became moody, short tempered and anti-social while under the control of the game. He was even anti-social online! He did not want to share his problems to anyone. Keeping his anger to himself and thinking that playing that game would make him feel better. It is like a drug. You think taking more of it will help you feel better but it is actually destroying you.

The final blow that made me quit mRO forever was the unethical conducts that the players were practicing and they were so rude that I just dropped the whole thing and forgot about the whole game.

Shawn is still ever loyal to the game because he claims his friends are still playing as well. He does not realize or remember that I introduced the game to him and actually I helped him alot in the game and actually helped him formed a guild which he quietly self appointed himself as founder and head of the guild and just forgot about me like I was a nobody.

Today I found him playing mRO in his room. On our shared DIAL UP line. That really was like a slap to my face. He is the kind of guy who would keep himself in his room for hours just to play games and shuts himself off from the rest of the world not caring what is happening. Now he is starting to play the game after more than a month of us being here without internet. He is going to be in his room a whole lot often and I will be like living in this apartment sort of like alone because he will not interact with anything besides that game.

It also pisses me off when I hear people complain about the game and the unethical players in it, when they still go back into the game playing over and over again and complaining when they dont.

* * * * *

Our friends dropped by while I was typing this blog. They wanted to see how we were settling in this place and also passed me Doom 3 installer. NYAHAHAHA. What a temptation to play it now when I have a design to submit tomorrow. Nah, I have strong will power. When I set my mind to do something it will stay on that course till its finished.

Laying The Bricks
Mood:  flirty
Well today started off normal I guess. Went for User Experience Design class which was so dry. I don't even know why I bother still going for this class. Week by week there seem to be less students attending it.

Shawn and I bought a printer today from the nearby computer shop. When we opened it we found out that the printer does not include a USB cable. I mean... what the heck is up with that!? What kind of printer does not include the cable to connect to your pc!? Canon laser printer. Sheeesh although it did sell for quite a good price.

Well the night seemed boring and ordinary until Eunice appeared and said 'Hi' to me. Usually when she is online she will not bother if I was online or not but this time she actually said 'Hi' first.
Chatted a bit till she and I got cut off. I got cut off because of this darn temporary dial up connection I have. Hers is because her computer crashed. I thought of ending it by sending her an sms. Right after I sent it, she came back online. D'oh. Oh well. Suddenly everything seems so fine.

Furniture & Appliances are the bomb
Mood:  lazy
Well I was woken up by Shawn saying that the appliances were coming. I did not know he meant few seconds later so I quickly got up and helped him help the guy move the stuff from ground floor up to the second floor.
First it was the washing machine and it was heavy stuff. Second it was the fridge was not so bad then it was the tv and dryer together as they were quite light.

After that I made myself breakfast and was eating half way when the Ikea people arrived with our furniture. So we had to go down and bring each of them pieces up ourselves cos we did not want to pay for them to take it upstairs as they charge per flight of stairs which is absurd.

These were heavy stuff. My desk, my bed frame and the dining table.

We fixed the dining table first and it required a wrench which we did not have so we just assembled it first and set it aside for later. Shawn wanted to go back to Ikea at 2pm to exchange his incomplete lamp set. While waiting I assmebled my bed only to find out that I have to screw on the bed feet without any holes provided at the specified place so I did not want to do that. I also found out that the bed frame does not include the base support for the mattress.

So I went with Shawn to Burnley train station and from there walked almost 2 kilometers of straight road to Ikea. I bought the base support which was wrapped up like a square block of wood much like the one you see The Rock swinging around in Walking Tall. I lugged that thing all the way back to the train station and back to the 2nd floor of my apartment. It was a good work out.

After that we assembled my desk. It is quite cool actually. It is like the one I have back home in Malaysia except that they sold black here which I got. After that we tighten the nuts on the dining table wit the new multi purpose pliers we bought.

Cleaned up the place of the boxes and plastic wrappings and disposed of them. We had so much to throw away that we actually used 5 out of 6 recycle bins. Our apartment has 6 units so 1 bin for each unit. But hey who's telling. Haha.

After that we watched some Olympics male singles table tennis gold match. China vs Korea. Shawn and I were rooting for China. It was a good match China looked like he did not stand a chance but slowly gain a draw but then Korea won in the end. Guess the China player was not playing as aggressively as the Korean dude.

My computer was acting up again so Shawn decided that we swap RAMs to see if the RAMs were the culprit. Well I switched with him and so far so good no hangs. Probably the RAMs werent fitted in nicely previously. I really really hope that this would fix everything.

Drunk + Losing = Bad
Mood:  lazy
Well today has been somewhat interesting.
I think I found out what caused my PC to hang during playing games. My onboard sound device was having a conflict with my sound card. So far so good. Homeworld 2 does not hang anymore and if it hangs it usually means its serious. Unreal Tournament 2004 and warcraft still hangs. Maybe its because they are not installed properly on my computer as I simply copied it off Shawn's computer.
I just hope that my theory is correct if not I have to spend more money on hardware. ARGH.

I was feeling down today because of my computer's problem. So I decided to follow Shawn to Planet Shakers in the city. I felt better after that somewhat having a heavy burden lifted from my shoulders.

On the way home in the train a bunch of australian football fan was singing stupid stuff. Obviously they were drunk. I could even smell the beer off them from a few feet away.

Getting off at our stop, I heard a car alarm and was wondering what caused it. Then I saw this guy walking like a zombie in the middle of the road hitting stuff in his path. I notified Shawn and we both crossed the road and walked on the other side not to get tangled with that drunk guy. At the junction a police suddenly emerged with his car and came out to examine those drunk guys. That was fast.

I'm A Leprechaun's Nightmare
Well I have decided to share the apartment Shawn is renting. We moved during the weekend and have even more unfortunate events. I fell down the stairs while carrying a stupid box, tore my jacket while it got caught on my computer's dented edge and now I have to reformat my stupid computer because the motherboard conflicts with the windows.

One Month of Crap
It's been near a month since I arrived in Australia.
I've noticed that I am not really studying in Melbourne cos... Melbourne is like the Kuala Lumpur of Malaysia. Kinda like a city or a district or something like that, you do the math.

Well the reason why I have not been blogging is because I did not have a chance to blog. Here is a short recap of what happened after I landed.

- i landed
- stayed at Shawn's mother's friend's place for one night. the next day went to look for apartments with no luck. after that moved into Shawn's mother's friend's son which eventually became our friend. he isn't home around often in the day time so i guess it was cool.
- for the entire one month we have been looking for apartments and getting screwed by a major real estate company called Woodards. bunch of pricks. they say they will get back to use after we applied, 3 working days later which they never do and when we call to find out about the process they will tell us the units we applied for is already taken or still processing. pricks.
- our friend's place was near the city. Shawn went to like the middle of the city where hey had computer shops and bought a monitor, and carried it on his head all the way back to our friend's place attracting alot of attention. i am surprised it did not come out in any news media.

- i like this one best. my computer finally arrived somewhere in week 2 of my semester and it was damaged. it must have either been the pos laju or customs people that wrecked my motherboard and my video card. and to think i just bought new ones before leaving home. my casing was dented so badly that the edge couldnt be bent back with hands, probably with a hammer.

- oh yeah there was on incident where one of the campus building had a fire caused by those science students with their chemicals so we all had to leave our classes and assemble in the car park. a girl that looked so much like kirsten dunst came up to me and asked me if it was a real fire or a drill. mesmerized by her looks i just said a fire drill. i now regret every moment for not talking to her more that day. could've made friends with her but now i will never know. i don't even know what her course is.

- uni work suxx... so much to do... and yet i don't have a place of my own to do my work in comfort and in peace.

i hope i have better news up head

Weight Limit SUXX!!!
Tuesday 6th July 2004.

Since I found out the weight of my luggage was under the limit I continued putting in my normal clothes and the suitcase came to 20kg. Crap. That was not good. My hand luggage could've stuff more clothes in but there is where I put my sleeping bag which took up alot of space.

I realized today that my sense of taste is quite dull. I do not know why. But it really sucks.

2 out of 6 of the places I am interested to rent when I get to Melbourne has already been taken. It is quite a discouraging thing but I shall not give up. There are four more places left. Hope they are still available when I get there.

Custom Made Box Padding and Weight Limit
Today me and my dad took my mom's epson printer box and cut our own styrofoam boards to form paddings for the box so that I can use it to transport my computer in. It was a great fit. I could even put my keyboard, webcam, mouse, modem and utility cds on the top of it.

I weighed my computer and it was 13kg. I was like... wow... that was heavy how on earth would I be able to be within the limit of 30kg along with my luggage.

Later I re-weighed my luggage and wooot I found out it was only 15kg. So I am still within the weight limit. Yeah!

The Last Sunday 4th July 2004
Today has been a busy day and I kinda liked it.
Just wished that I could've done this more often before I had to fly to Australia.

Today was my last Sunday in church and Audrey's first time after 6 months in America. She's going to replace me in drumming in church. Well the good thing was that she did not change a bit not for worse anyways though she got a tan. My exit her intro. Althrough her intro had more attention, not many people gave a damn when I left. Oh well. Suits me anyways, I usually like to leave without people making a big fuss.

I headed to Red Box at Sunway Pyramid as my friends were waiting for me there. They were in room 44. Can you believe it. Those rooms I think 5 people were the maximum but I made 6. The systems was so loud that I had to shout instead of singing which made me go out of tune and after that I was almost going to lose my voice.

My movie started at 4:25pm so we walked around, alot seeing stuff. There was this motorola promotion going on about a mobile phone that has surround sound. Actually after a long investigation by Zen, it turns out the phone has stereo left and right loud speakers. What a load of crap.

Spiderman 2 was kick ass. They maintained the quality from Spiderman 1. I could've enjoyed it more if the family sitting behind us did not have their kids walking left and run knocking the back of my head while they were at it, when they drank they even like sprayed water on my hand I don't know how the hell they did that and they sure could've told their kids to shut the hell up while the movie was on.

After that I thought we were going home but then I overheard some cantonese conversation about Bak Kut Teh at Jalan Raja Laut. So I thought what the heck just go with it. I sat in Jin Fu's car and we were suppose to follow Zen's car. But that bugger drove so fast we lost track of his car. He's car was a silver Waja. Yeah he and other silver Wajas were everywhere all over the highway. There was one time we followed a wrong Waja into a housing area. Jin Fu even highbeamed that guy and that guy was wondering what the heck and pull over to make way fo us. After we passed that car and realized it was not Zen, we were like 'Oh Shit!' and sped off and met up with Zen at the toll. Zen was suppose to lead the way but he sure did not drive like it. He was driving as if he was trying to lose us. I'm quite impressed with Jin Fu's driving skills.

The journey to KL was crap jam here and there and when we finally got there, Zen led us against a one way street. By that time I was really pissed. The Bak Kut Teh there wasn't that fantastic. I still liked the one I usually go to in Old Town.

During my time there, Enoch called me and said that they were waiting for me to come. At first I thought it was just Enoch and Alice wanting to meet up with me. I did not expect the entire YA group to be there. Well my high school friends really talked alot... about nothing. But it was fun. When I finally manage to persuade them to leave, I saw a lot of girls like standing outside the closed shophouses. Later I realized that they were hookers. First time I saw hookers in Chow Kit cos I never been to Chow Kit at night before.

I did not really like this Bak Kut Teh Experience as I had to suffer jams just go there and Zen ordered like pig's livers or kidneys, and feet and we all had to pay equally. I ate the less there and I just gave RM10 and said "this is more than enough from my share". The only thing I like about KL is Low Yat.

So first of all Jin Fu had to send Kok Kong home. When we reached there, Kok Kong realized he did not bring his house keys. <_<. So we waited a while with him till his sister came back. Of course we left before his sister came back. Had a nice chat with Jin Fu and his college life.

He dropped me off at Enoch's place. Well at the guard house. Time for me to test my cross training shoes. I ran from the guard house to Enoch's block and up 3 flight of stairs. When I got to his apartment the first thing I did was apologize for being so late and ran to use the washroom. I had not been to a toilet the whole day.

The YA group gave me a steel cover bible which I wanted to bring with me to Australia as it was smaller than my current bible and looked hardier. But not being told to close my eyes and got slapped in the back with it by Enoch.
When I was there, Leon and Bee Lee had already left but then suddenly Leon came back after sending Caroline back.

Leon, Enoch and me went to McDonald's Centerpoint to eat. Well I did not eat much of the Bak Kut Teh as it was more of the other parts of the pig that I did not really want to eat.

After that I got home.

Neighbours Suxx
I was just enjoy the peace of the wee hours of the morning when the neighbour at the back of my house which my windows are facing, started screaming nonsense. Oh yeah it would be unethical of me to blast my music at these time of the night while they can go on screaming crap.

My friend said they probably got possessed by a ghost or something. Well I feel like possessing their ass with my size eleven foot.

Other times around 3am in the morning the neighbour cooks food! I don't know what is up with that. But it really disturbs me from trying to sleep.
I hope I can afford a bungalow next time.