Haha can you believe this email?

Hello,
the late fees were posted to your account because of the system; I could explain but I don't think you would care why , isn't it ?

Thank you for letting us know, I did reverse the penalty and if you incur more in the future, just let me know and I will take care of it.

Actually I AM interested at why the lousy system screwed up; in particular, I'm interested in figuring out who the heck did SFU (over)paid to setup this broken system. And why was this email not sent to my SFU email but the email I used when I first registered for SFU?

Wow man I feel like a pig. I spent so much money this month. Even after ignoring the mobo, I went way over budget (37.5% to exact). Though most of them are really gifts for people... hmmm.

Summer Nose Bleed Count: 2

It was a minor bleed, but I decided to count it anyways. I went downtown to get chocolates as planned. I bought 6 boxes of hedgehogs and a bucket of assorted, or 1280g of chocolate; total was ~$23. Good deal says my mom.

I got chapter 5 of Probably Models copied for free; daaaym I'm smart ;).

Summer Nose Bleed Count: 1

Damn you SFU. I can't believe they didn't just reverse the stupid interest charged for my award. They have to "investigate further" before reversing it. They better resolve this before I have to pay the deposit because I know as soon as I pay that $3 of interest, I'll be screwed; I'll never see it back.

Haha I saw Peter on FTV today. He's being interviewed for PNE. I also saw Erica, some girl I remember from one of my business class... 251 tutorial I think?

OMG I dropped my iPod.

Raymond's iPod was left undamaged today after hitting the hard pavement outside Braid Skytrain Station. It happened at approximately 5:30pm. After having disembarked from a skytrain, he saw the unexpected image of the 159 Poco Station bus. Excited, he rushed down the stairway while weaving through a crowd of slow moving people. At ground level, he broke into a jog and disaster struck. His iPod flew out of his vest pocket, leaving the earbuds still anchored to his ears. THUD! It landed screen first. His heart skipped, though he quickly picked up his iPod, noted that the LCD was still displaying the information of the current track, and ran into the waiting bus.

He was scared as he plugged his earbuds into the iPod's headphone jack, but was relieved when music began blasting his eardrums. There was no damage to the screen. Raymond believes his iPod was unscathed largely due to his iPod's silicon case, along with Apple's ingenuity.

China - from Justin

Yesterday I went to Justin's house to pick up the shirt he bought for me in China. He showed me all the pictures that he took and we had a nice long conversation about our motherland. There are for sure a lot of "problems" in China. The poverty gap is very apparent. On one hand, there are people living in crappy concrete/brick boxes with mouse turd on their beds. But on the other, you have people living in high rises with a $300 RMB maintenance fee (most people make ~1000 RMB a month). Pollution is very bad in the cities. In all of his pictures of the cities, you can't see the blue sky at all. It is basically a grayish brown NO2 haze during the day and his night shots look like the result of a Photoshop blur filter. He told me stories of how his families and coworkers were all amazed by pictures of the blue Vancouver sky on his laptop. I think the people there are just ignorant because of all the censorship that goes on in China. Apparently they are lucky enough to get HK news. BUT, it is dubbed, traditional changed to simplified, and censored! Whenever an "inappropriate" story is about to air, it will get cut off, and a totally different news clip will get inserted, with a different anchor and a different set! The Internet there is also censored as everyone should know. Haha, he had such a hard time with the Internet. In additional to all the 404s, he had weird people who kept trying to add him to their MSN.

I think the biggest thing that irked him is the whole facade that the CCP maintains to glue it's regime together. He volunteered at some government organization that visits orphanages, senior homes, and other needy places during his stay. Everything there was for show; everyone was there for the final photo op. Most of the effort was spent setting up the donated goods, the food, moving children to the right places, etc., and then *click! Immediately after that, everyone runs away and some even with the stuff that they supposedly "donated". At his office, everyone was so relaxed; the guys play MMORPGs and the girls eat junk food and talk on their cellphones. Communist complacency at its best, though government jobs here are just as bad ;).

Anyways there are some good things: cheap counterfeit goods :). He showed me some of the funniest pictures, like a fake Chinese Echo and a fake Benz haha.

CD reviews

范瑋琪 - 我們的紀念日
Another GREAT album by Fan, though her last one is slightly better. But seriously, her last one was sooo good, with songs like 如果的是, that this is to be expected. My biggest peeve about this album is the last song: it's terrible mess of stupid lyrics and a lousy percussion track. Oh in one of the songs, there is a background vocal that says "Ooooh la la" , which made me burst out laughing the first time I heard it.

謝安琪 - Ksus2
Something good from HK? I guess it's still possible ;). Great lyrics.

Another Week

Man this blog is turning into a weekly journal.

Hmm, I guess this wasn't a bad week. Work is tiring but bearable; even though it's a big stack of stuff, at least I am progressing through them a bit at a time. I have a nasty habit of being stupid, which causes me to crawl along tasks at a snail's pace and making me frustrated. I really should slow down and think before charging into a task, think about how to "get Excel to work for me instead of me working for Excel". On Friday we went to Fish on Rice for lunch; I don't know why they kept calling it Sushi on Rice. The building looks pretty delapidated but the food was cheap and the portions were big. Service was slow, however. The seafood udon was not bad, but I wish they would use more seafood than just salmon cubes, three pawns, and a cuttlefish.

Weekend was spent watch football. I watched the entire Sweden vs Trinidad and Tobago match on Saturday morning. Trinidad's defense was excellent; I really liked the plays of Edward Carlos, Whitney, and Yorke. Hislop, their keeper, was also spectacular and robbed what otherwise would have been a beautiful goal by Wilhelmsson. Great game. Tried getting Joyce to watch Cars together but no luck--ended up BT-ing it. The rest of my weekend was about moving tables and cleaning my basement. See flickr for photos of my new work area. It's pretty gnarly and spiffy, especially with the chess set ;).

Oh I almost forgot. I played quite a bit of Total War as well. And it FARKING SUCKS MONKEY BALLS!!! My king will always die the turn after my last save and my oldest heir is only 12. That means civil war and kissing half of my empire good bye. Who the fuck designed this game!!??!?!

Also check out flickr for my new Logitech Flight Force Force Feedback joystick!



$9.99 at XS Cargo on Lougheed and Westwood. It says 'for Playstation 2' but it works fine on the PC; basically it is the Wingman Force 3D but for much cheaper!

Eventful Weekend

I am feeling that I am falling behind in work. I have three tasks piled up at the moment. My biggest peeve right now is that there is just no end in sight for the quarterly report: I'm missing data; my numbers aren't balancing, though that might be due to the missing data; and I still can't exactly see what the end IS yet--and this thing is supposed to be on RUSH. As for the other two tasks, I'm not too worried about them--I think I can finish them both in a day, though that's assuming everything I've done so far is correct. Gawd please balance!

Anyways this was a pretty good weekend--up til the ride home on Saturday night I guess. On Friday night, I went to George's CSMA choir concert. It's pretty funny watching little kids sing and remembering the similar experiences when I was an idiot in elementary school. Watching a kid looking confused as the kid beside him pulled him into position just made me realize I am such an old fart now--I wish everything can still be so innocent and direct. The latter performances by the adult choir was very good as well. There were selections from Les Miserables and the woman from Nova Scotia had a very powerful voice.

On Saturday I woke up at 5:40am to go volunteering at SFU Open House 2006. Waking up at 5:40am was easier than I thought. So after grabbing my T-shirt I went to the ASB looking for my station. I talked to a lady who looked important because she was wearing a sash and she directed me to table full of boxes. Confused, I opened them up to find, OMG, instructions! Other people showed up later on and we got everything setup. Amy the extrovert was great and broke the ice around the group; nice meeting you! I met up with Ryan and George and got lunch... hmmm donairs. I actually began to feel pretty tired from all the standing so I went to IRMACS to watch the presentation on open source. It was average; the presenter wasn't too charismatic and the information wasn't really 100% correct either. But hey, at least I got to sit for about 20 minutes. Afterward I walked around the campus and took some pictures and met up with Joyce. We walked around, dinner at White Spot, VSO (Very nice pieces by the way, I only thought the last piece was weak and the 'Avant le Descente' had too much dissonance.), blah blah blah, okay let fast forward the part where I was weak and the evening fell apart.

We were walking to Burrard, trying to find a bus home. Ugh gutless. It was a silent bus ride and I didn't even sit with her. I was tired yes but I was even more nervous. See the real sad part is it didn't really hit me until George said, "Why didn't you talk to her at all on the bus?" Ugh. Last time with Jenn I was a lot bolder with the compliments and the flirts; I don't think I've even told Joyce once that she's cute. WTF happened to meeeeee :(.