More exciting adventures!
Now Playing: Sheryl Crow - All I Wanna Do
What a day...

I woke up this morning at 11am and cooked pancakes for breakfast. You might be thinking 'Wow can this guy actually make pancakes?' Well the answer is... No. I cannot make pancakes. I said I cooked pancakes as in merely pouring the substance into the pan and letting it turn brown and flipping it over and pile them up and eat.

Went for 3D lecture just in time before the guy actually started lecturing cos at the beginning of every lecture he would show us a video of 3D animation. I kinda like his lectures, he explains things in a way that it is easy to understand and actually demonstrates in a way that is also seem interesting enough for me to wanna give a go at it. More to say than what I had in my college <_<.

After that I headed off to the city to get my Swatch watch design, printed on A3 paper full colored. It was quite crap actually but what the heck it was my first time there with nobody to actually instruct me what to do so I guess i was pretty kick ass for a first time job.
It went something like this, I went to the counter to purchase a swipe card. It is the type of card where they put credits in it, and all you gotta do if you wanted to use their computers or printers were to just swipe the card on the machine by these nodes. So I paid enough for 30 minutes session with one of the computers. I went and found an Apple computer and set there figuring out how to swipe the thing which took me a couple of minutes. After that I wanted to load my file onto the computer but that crap computer did not seem to have anymore USB ports for me to plug my usb drive in. So I left and found a normal Windows PC. Then I realized that you actually have to pay 16.50 an hour to use the Apple computer. When I checked on the Windows PC for my credit it showed I had 15 minutes left. So I thought okay 15 minutes would be more than enough for me to get my stuff done. Now this Windows computer couldn't read my USB drive which was like... crap. So with quick thinking I got online and ask Shawn back home to send me a copy of my file I left on my desktop and I managed to get it over. Now I had to wait at the counter again (wait cos there was nobody there) to reload 5 dollars for a print out. It was 4.50 for an A3 full colored print out. When it finished printing, my name came out as Noel Chang Jin Xi.. without the AN and a part of it was sorta like smudged but I was already like what the heck man, I ain't gonna pay extra 4.50 to get it right cos I'm not that loaded.

Fortunately me lecturer said it was okay for the name to be like that just as long as I had my student ID there which I did.

On the way home by train, the train just went passed my stop. So I decided to be patient about it and get off the next stop and take another one back the other way.

There were alot of high school kids at this stop. I think their uniforms are smart and nice. I wonder how come Malaysia never had the idea to do this. Hmmm...

The train came, I boarded it and you know what? It was slowing down at my stop so I got ready to get off but then it started picking up speed again and stopped at the station after that which was my university's stop. Having enough of this I just got off and walked home from the university.

When I got home I wanted to test my USB Drive, through enough, both Shawn and my computer could not detect it. But hey after all the shit I've been through do you think I would just give up that easily? I manually activated it and formatted it and got it back buahahaha. I am the roxorz.

I have screwed up my sleeping pattern again which is bad. Especially when you don't have sufficient aspirins.

Life just sucks for me
Mood:  accident prone
I accidentally deleted my entire history of blog.
Why? Because I thought that particular folder was only to store images. I was trying to delete the image I accidentally uploaded and ended up deleting my entire history of blog. Well this pretty just wraps my day.

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

Update, I managed to get it back woohooo with my smart thinking. I made a new blog as a dummy and duplicate its content into this blog's folder and just let the system smooth over the holes and now we're back in business.

Double-Yoo Tee Eff is Spring?
Now Playing: Fastball - Out Of My Head
1st Of September is suppose to be officially Spring for Melbourne. Oh yeah? Why I don't see any sign of it coming at all? Its so freaking cold nowadays. I think I did mention that is quite difficult to get out of bed. Now I understand how bears can hibernate throughout winter. It is not that difficult to do.

I had food poisoning 2 days ago, and I don't really know what gave me that cos 2 days ago I made some fries that were left in the freezer for a long time so it could be that, or it could've been dinner.
Yeah I am proud to claim that I cooked Kurma Chicken. Well it was nothing really, all I did was cut the chicken and stir fry em, and after that pour the bottled sauce into it and keep stirring until it was done(hahaha). Although it was alright, it didn't really taste like the kurma I use to have back home at the mamaks. See back home, the kurma is like yellowish-greenish kinda sauce while this one I bought at the supermarket was orange and looked a lot like chutney.

I woke up at around 1 something in the afternoon cos I was still recovering from my food poisoning.
Today I was suppose to make myself try to at least get some work started on my Internet 2's assignment about making a webpage loaded with all the javascript in it with minimum of 7 pages. Instead of getting to work I spent 2 hours plus playing Super Mario World on my computer and got a headache after that.

Before I knew it, it was time for dinner, I went out to the nearby pizza place and ordered a combo meal consisting of 2 family sized pizzas, 1 garlic bread and 1.25 litres of coke. All for just AUD$24.50. Shawn and I managed to finish the garlic bread and half of each pizza. One was American, the other was Meat, well both had meat except one had more than the other but I couldn't tell the difference. But hey you gotta admit 24.50 can maybe last for 2 or 3 meals. So I say its worth it plus they even offer free delivery and our place is like 5 minutes walk from there. Its called Ronaldo's Pizza, and the guys in there were pretty friendly.

Next week is gonna be full of datelines and I am still wondering how I am gonna pull all of this through.


Oh yeah here is a little something for you to look at.

Finally It Came... On Second Thought
Now Playing: Michael Penn - No Myth
You know the weather is so freaking cold today.
It is suppose to be officially spring now! 1st September!!! But this morning it was so cold that I found it so difficult to get out of bed.

Today I had two classes. One 8:30 in the morning and the other later on 2:30 in the afternoon. I went for the first one because it took attendances. While the other, a lecture class does not because I was waiting for the broadband guy to come and settle the internet connection. Turns out Shawn had been using a second phone line which we never knew existed which explained the reason why we couldn't connect to the broadband internet for the past few days. No touching that second line as it ain't ours.

After that guy had left, Shawn spent hours figuring out how to connect my pc to his pc so that I can use the internet. Why so complicated? Well because he wanted the modem in his room while it would have made perfect sense to put it in my room, as my room actually had a telephone outlet and its by the wall so it wouldn't be so messy with wires. However he wanted it in his room and now we have wires all over the hallway waiting to trip some unaware victim. So as I said, he spent hours till I finally decided to intervene and suggested to him that he takes my network cable and plug it straight into the modem as well. Which obviously worked. I mean c'mon the modem has 4 ports, why not he use one and I use one? Maybe he likes being in control. Bah.

Now the problem is the microfilter. You see Australia's phone wall socket is very weird. It is not like our (Malaysia's) phone socket where it is just one hole. Australia ones are like a different shaped hole with connectors to a receiving plug. Kinda complicated well yeah it is complicated so I shall continue no further about that.
So the current situation is this, we can't use the telephone till we get the appropriate plug because the adsl line will make it very noisy to use the phone. That is why the microfilter is needed and you know how it goes.

I was glad that broadband finally came but then now I think I'm being ripped off. For AUD$100 a month, we're suppose to get 512kbps flat rate a month. But my download is as fast as dial up. What is up with that!? If thisi continues being this way, I'm just gonna stick with dial up. Never again will I talk bad about streamyx. They are the bomb. I mean I only pay for a 384kbps line but I get download speeds so much faster than what I pay for. But hey I ain't complaining for that.

Next week and the following week are full of datelines for assignments from various classes and most of them I have not actually gotten around to even complete half of each. They are so tedious and I don't know how to make heads or tails of them sheeesh. Probably hopefully this weekend I will try to lock myself in my room and not come out till I have finished at least 75% of each of my work. Sigh.

University life is what I don't need.


OH yeah lo and behold, most of all my quicktime videos taken from my digicam are corrupted. The visuals will freeze at a certain time in the track but the sound still goes on like normal. ARGH... all my memories gone down just like that.

(That's...) WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR?
Now Playing: Limp Bizkit - My Way
You know what?
I am so sick of dealing with people's screwed up behaviour. God only knows how they were brought up.

I just came back from the supermarket. Well I would say with Shawn but technically it is wrong. We both went in the same time but did not left the same time. Why? I will tell you why.
We both went in to get groceries but then later realized that the bottle cap opener was quite hard to find. So I decided to take an extra round on the aisle to make sure I did not miss it. When I was going to pay for my groceries, I saw Shawn waiting outside. Went I finally paid everything he disappeared. So I called his mobile asking him where did he go. He said ' I jalan already '. Isn't that just nice?

See that is what I don't get about him. When people wait for him or do things for him it is alright. But he just can't do the same for people. I wonder if his whole family was brought up that way or not. Maybe he just doesn't "feel like it". Screw this la. I've had enough of this. When people do something to him similarly then he would keep quiet about it and keep angry over it. I know this because the last time when I asked him what was wrong with him, I got a free verbal assault for nothing. This time, if he is pissed, I'm just going to not give a damn about it. If he wants to start something with me, I say bring it on. I am sick of being nice and not retaliating when being picked on.
I had enough of people saying the word 'sorry' to me. Apologies don't mean a thing to me anymore. It has been overused until the meaning itself is not there in the word anymore to me.

I heard somewhere saying that; If apologies really worked, there would not be wars in the world.

Maybe to him it is nothing. Well if him and his friends and families behave this way on not waiting for people then what is the difference of being just merely an acquaintance?
Yah then it just tops it up when you see him being nice and courteous to a girl he likes. Oh well perhaps that is normal human nature. Whatever it is, I'm done tolerating that kinda shit.

I can't expect him to be like me. So I won't give a damn about him no more. As far as living under the same roof is concern, everything in the public area like bathroom, kitchen and dining room is neutral grounds. Anywhere else, he's on his own. Since he likes it like that.

He is such a lame ass square.
When with a group of friends, he rarely even smiles or looks interested in the conversation. He doesn't even reply nicely. If he meant to, it does not give people the impression that he is being nice.
And if he is reading this, which normally I assume he does not, hmm I wonder if he would get offended by what I say and experienced. Quoting from him "I am telling it like it is"

The world is full of different people. He is one of them. I am on of them. The challenge is not to get into a brawl with him.

I came here predicting what I am living now.
I predicted that I would share a place with him, but then I will only be sharing the place with him and nothing else. He lives his life, I live mine. I thought that my prediction was off, but then it is starting to fall into place.

I will be so glad that when my time in Australia is done.

Watching My Step
Mood:  accident prone
I got back my computer today. My friend had to actually get off work to go all the way to the computer shop to pick it up and bring it all the way to me. Mind you these places are very far from each other. So in order to show my appreciation I made for him a burger, Malaysian style. Like Ramly's Burger Special where they wrap the fried egg around the burger patty. Good thing he liked it.

Well the casing he picked for me was not really what I would go crazy over about but hey, I guess it is okay. At least it was not ugly. It scaringly looked like a dell casing @_@. but hey its black with some silver lining on the side. Well its hard to explain. So maybe when I am free I will take a picture and show it to you guys. I'm planning to take a picture of my workplace here because most all my computer parts are black and it just looks so cool!!!


I haven't tested out the performance of my pc yet. It usually hangs when I'm playing those heavy graphics game like Unreal Tournament 2004 and
Doom 3. Will test it later and if it does hang again, I'm just going to leave the games alone and get on with my assignments. Maybe it is a sign from God for me not to screw around and get serious with work.

I find it hilarious reading other people's blog especially when they post entries that nobody really likes reading. I don't know, what I know back home in old asian ways (well I learnt in high school) is that it is not good to laugh at other people's misfortunes or disablities. I don't care. I just laugh as I wish. I have the rights to express myself and nobody has the rights to tell me to shut up. Well unless they wanna get my boot up theirs.

Don't you just "love" reading blogs where a person keeps entering blogs about his/her own miserable life day to day and expressing their misery? It is as if that we do not have our own crap to handle everyday. I don't know if I do that often or not in my blog but I do my best to pick a topic and make it sound as interesting as possible.

Also I'm sure people like to read other people's minds. So I've opened a bit of my mind here for all to read. Hmm... maybe thats what those depressed people were doing as well. But the mundane-ness!!! Oh well.

I won't be having Merdeka Day because I'm not in Malaysia but 1st September marks the official first day of spring here which reminds me that I have to get a fan soon because it is quite warm already during day time.

HARDWARE REALLY BLOWS
Mood:  don't ask
ARGH you know I really hate dealing with computer hardwares... I really really hate dealing with computer hardwares. It is so time consuming to actually determine which piece of hardware is faulty and those crappy time frame of warrantee the shops give do not help much either. Who ever heard of a 7-day warrantee. It is not enough time for me to diagnose my system! I mean yeah if I had the whole 7 days of nothing else to do, sure I could get it done shorter than that but I have univershitty work to do on the computer.

Can you believe they charge AUD$50 just for them to take a look at it!? I thought RM30 already was daylight robbery in Malaysia.

So far I've narrowed the hardware trouble makers down to the motherboard and the video card. All I know is the shop better not think of charging me service fee to take a look at it or even think of selling me new hardware to replace these faulty ones.

I really despise problems happening to my important things that plays a large role in my life. If I did not need my computer to do my assignments I would just forget about it till later.

Datelines datelines and more datelines. Each subject's convenor does not give a damn about your other assignments or projects they just want their's done on time. Well if 4 or more of them think that way, wouldn't it just be 'nice' ? Well they do so its inevitable.

There is no place in life for 'if's. Everything happens whether we like it or not. The ball of life will keep rolling you cannot stop it only determine where it will go.

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.