I’ve got firmwear on!

Today I headed out to have lunch with Shivon and Kishon. It was their first time at a KBBQ restaurant and they really liked it (even if we did eat about six times the amount of meat they’re used to in one meal).
Shivon was running late but about five minutes after sitting down across Kishon, my dad walked into the place looking for me. He asked me “Where’s the PSP?” and so I handed him my thigh-warmed PSP wondering “WTF? He came all the way out here to get the PSP?” I didn’t pay it too much thought.
When I got home, I went into my dad’s room to look for… I don’t even remember anymore but I found my PSP on his bedside drawer/counter thing with a note. Apparently he found the latest homebrew firmware hack for the PSP compatible with update 3.5 and below. I couldn’t do anything about my PSP before because I’d upgraded to 3.5 without checking whether anyone had yet found a way to hack it (that was a couple months ago).
Anyway, long story short, I can now play my PlayStation (that’s the FIRST PS console) games on my PSP along with, obviously, PSP iso files. This might not sound too significant but I’ve got two words for you. Final Fantasy.

Let the games begin!

My last exam went down not without a hitch yesterday. What can I say, Math is a beast. It wasn’t difficult for the most part, I just did not know the formula for one of the questions at all which meant I spent a lot of time recreating the formula from scratch. The rest of it was fun. Anyway, English was also pretty smooth but I’m sure Olsheski will find one or two spelling mistakes worth >25% of deduction.

I spent a good two or three (if you include the morning session both the exam) hours playing Tekken yesterday as a sort of preemptive strike on summer, getting the juices flowing early. Of course, I don’t plan on playing games all summer… Here’s my unofficial to-do list of summer 2007:

• start/do/finish insurance classes for driving
• learn to drive from an instructor
• work on my extended essay
• read up on C. S. Lewis’ life (biographies)
• read works by C. S. Lewis (novels, apologetics, etc…)
• get in contact with an English professor at Tyndale who will be speaking about exactly what I’m writing about (sweet!)
• go downtown to Burrito Boyz with some friends from school for a feeding frenzy
• get a lot of practicing done for retreat worship
• get a crackin’ on reading through Romans twenty times**
• watch each and every installment of Lucky Star to come out
• rest and relaxation
• finish off the third season of House and get caught up with Arrested Development
• make some more shirts
• (to be announced once I figure it out/think of it)

** I did 1 Peter until around… seventeen times before I chickened out.

Finally!

A fight scene that hasn’t been botched or cut up to achieve cool effects. Have a gander at the video below and note that it’s all been done in one take. That means no fancy editing to pull of the insane stunts.

What I’ve Done

Linkin Park, although not being very blatantly religious, does manage to sound so very often. Have at the title for a listen.

In this farewell, there’s no blood,
There’s no alibi, ‘cause I’ve drawn regret
From the truth of a thousand lies.

So let mercy come and wash away…
What I’ve done.

I’ll face myself,
To cross out what I’ve become.
Erase myself,
And let go of what I’ve done.

Put to rest what you thought of me.
While I clean this slate
With the hands of uncertainty.

For what I’ve done, I start again.
And whatever pain may come…
Today this ends.
I’m forgiving what I’ve done.

What I’ve done,
Forgiving what I’ve done.
- Linkin Park, What I’ve Done

Kinetic Auto Re-P-lay

A while ago (it’s been at least a year I think) my Seiko Kinetic Auto Relay wristwatch died for no reason. This was a gift from my dear uncle Keith (my mother’s younger brother) and I’d never worn it when I was smaller for fear of breaking or losing the watch. Someone told me (I can’t remember if it was my father or my uncle himself) that the watch was very expensive. Anyway, it broke (as in stopped ticking) for no reason one day and I hadn’t gotten it fixed. Today, my dad came home after forking out $40 for repair fees with a ticking and reanimated Seiko. It’s now firmly attached to my wrist again.
It’s surprising how many of my favourite and dearest possessions actually belonged to other people before. For example, there’s my little bouncy blue ball which used to be Herman’s. Then there’s my green pencil case that used to be Keith’s. My old school clear plastic ruler used to be my mother’s and my Sony digital camera used to be my father’s. Even random items like my umbrella of choice was, incidentally, my uncle’s from HK. I’d say most of my stuff (including my PSX, the first gaming console I really played) belonged at one point to my uncle or some other person before. So here’s me saying, thanks family and friends, for letting me have your stuff.

Half-baked

If there’s one thing I like, it’s a good baked potato with chives, cheese, and sour cream. I had four exams to do and did two yesterday. By the time I finished the chemistry exam (after a 2 hour biology exam finished in 40 min flat) I had the makings of a headache. Tomorrow I’ve got to write an English exam. There are two possible outcomes, one of which I doubt will ever be the case:

1. I write an exam, a stellar commentary on a sight piece, and Ms. Olsheski has a brief revelation and realizes all the potential or even just validity of what I’ll say in my analysis and she’ll give me a great mark of 85% and up.
2. I write the commentary and Ms. Olsheski, upon reading what I have to say, will be reminded of all the times she’s circled and underlined random words and phrases (much Ms. Quejada) and continue with her fiendish ways of being petty, stubborn, and tunnel-visioned, landing me a mark no greater than 75%.

As for any marks landing between 75% and 85%, I’m willing bet that she won’t even consider it. If she’s in on of those “Oh I love this but I don’t know what it is” moods, then I suspect success, otherwise, she’ll pick my commentary out of the entire two classes’ worth and dump on it. I’m actually not too worried since it is grade 11 (read: not IB) English and she is a stubborn toad. Usprech went “WTF?!” at my first term English mark (as did I) and I expect to do so again at my final. Does this count as fatalism or just expecting the worst?

info @ the P.Pole 06.20.07

I don’t know why I need to stay up so late but I don’t have anything tomorrow (actually it’s today since it’s 1:30 am).
When I was small, I watched one too many vampire movies and a Discovery Channel special that either disproved or confirmed various urban legends. Their final chilling piece was about vampires and, calling all other urban legends false, the program actually cited real, unexplained cases of what seemed to be vampires roaming the night, hospitals, and whatnot. Needless to say, I was mortified at the thought that a reliable source would confirm my greatest fear, that something out there was out to get me (specifically, get at my neck) and had sharp teeth to boot. Perhaps that explained why for the subsequent years of my life I could not walk through a dark hallway or room without first pausing to weigh the risks and flipping on the light switch whenever possible. I seriously could not take myself around even remotely dark or shadowy places.
I remember one habit of mine was to look over my shoulder every so often and especially right before starting to brush my teeth to check for said vampires. As a foolish child I would look intently at the mirror as I brushed at the spot just above my right shoulder, waiting for something to jump at me from behind. I have since then grown up and I no longer check in the mirror for vampires. Want to know my secret? Well, as one grows up, one learns to overcome one’s own fears, gaining wisdom and rationality. In my case, I grew up and learned that vampires don’t appear in mirrors, which is why it is futile to look for them in mirrors. What a fool I was.
If one were to come at me today, I’d be ready with my beloved wooden Katana (which serves as a stake of sorts I imagine) and my mostly fit physical stature (don’t look at my hips, they really don’t lie). I’ve been preparing mentally for just such an encounter all my life, practically, ever since I decided years ago that I would not allow myself to be run by my fears of something I’ve yet to meet. I’m totally prepared for an attack by a vampire. Either I kick his ass or he bites mine. What’s the worst that could happen? So I get bitten and turn into a vampire, big deal. Now I’ve got an eternity to get revenge and scope out the wicked-awesome fempires lurking around… It’s either bragging rights or undead superpowers. This is what we call a win-win situation.
Of course, I never much bothered thinking on the possibility that the one to attack me might turn out to be a fempire to start… Now that’s an interesting one. Would I even bother fighting back? I mean, winning a fight like that would be like beating up a girl (something I’d readily do in Tekken but not in real life… not again anyway). And I mean, if she wants to bite me that badly I ought to be a gentleman about it and let her have her way with me. A woman’s got to satisfy her cravings right? It’s the only noble thing to do when you think about it.
Now I’m off to bed before my insane nocturnal patterns make you suspicious of my secret night-prowling life… Blah! I vant to suck your blood!

Amateur

Blueprint

…was the name of this year’s edition of the Vic Park yearbook. It was a long year of hard work and to be frank, I’m not sure it payed off. Before I go headlong into a rant about all the things wrong with it, I want to at least give congratulations to Amreet in particular since his sports section was nuts (in the good way). I also want to mention that the cover is pretty neat looking and some other pages (few and far apart) are pretty nice too. Now, let’s get into the heart of things: why does this yearbook suck?
First off, let’s just get this out of the way: not everyone on the committee/team was cut out for the job in the first place. When working on pages that are going to go into a yearbook, graphics and a good sense of design is very very necessary. I’m going to come right out and say that nearly everyone on the yearbook committee this year, honestly, had little to no experience working with Photoshop/digital image manipulation software. This isn’t coming from having to field questions about how to do things (which I did) or from having them admit the fact (which no one did), but from just looking at the kind work put out by some of the members.
Designing a page around the theme of “blue prints” is a little more than tacking on a graph-paper background and throwing text on top (well, at least not for every single page). I did that once, but the idea of the page was to keep things clean and simple (the page was titled “Basic Principles” and it was the principals’ page). This also happened to be the page I had to rush because the head editor “forgot” n times over the course of 6 months (while being reminded by me quite often) to get the photos and write ups I needed, not to mention losing the write ups once after finally getting them.
Lesson #1: Only take people onto the yearbook committee who actually have Photoshop experience. The reason those people (mostly Indian girls, not that that has anything to do with anything) even got on the committee was because they all happened to be Sheliza’s friends. Therefore, the blame falls mostly/completely on Sheliza for this one.
Next we’ve got the fact that many simple things went completely catastrophically wrong for no good reason apart from negligence on the part of people doing administrative work. The way we do things is as follows: first, pages are mocked up and then created as semi-roughs which are sent for “proofing” to the plant which sends us back what the page would look like in the book so that we can make corrections and send back the good copy with changes and extra info (such as spot colour hue and positioning). For one thing, I had pages with spot colouring that I didn’t even want to be coloured (thus effectively wasting the colouring we payed for) since it’d look better without it.
Whoever was on admin decided for me that these pages would receive spot colour treatment anyway. To make matters worse, the tones of blue chosen for my pages were completely off. For example, let’s take an example of graph-paper blue vs. a dark but not quite navy blue. Those two are both blues but the latter makes black text placed on top completely illegible and reading painful to do. To make things even worse, the positioning/shape of the colour (which is printed separate of the first B&W printing) was totally off/not quite enough, leaving blank white bits all over the place. Ugly.
Another thing that admin screwed up on was the submitting of corrected pages. After getting the proofs back, we make corrections and then send the plant finalized versions. I remember correcting and resubmitting a candids page (basically a page with loads of photos) to be resent to the plant. Well thanks to the awesome admin people we’ve got (who are still remaining nameless until I finish ranting about this) the plant never got the updated/fixed page because of, well, nothing. I’m guessing the person doing the collection and distribution of corrections just… never got around to it and sent out “corrected pages” (the same pages we got back with all the mistakes) without actually repackaging the final pages. Way to stay on task.
Lesson #2: Make sure your administration staff/person is reliable and knows what they are doing. I do believe this year’s admin person was mainly… oh that’s right, Sheliza again, the head editor. Thanks for screwing with my pages Shez, you’re the best.
One thing that was told to me and everyone else on the team by both Ms. Leung (the staff supervisor) and Sheliza our head editor was to make sure not to put loads of photos of ourselves in our own sections since that is generally frowned upon. I actually got told off for putting three photos from the yearbook camp/retreat of not only myself but other members too on my candids page (which had at LEAST 100+ small thumbnail sized photos). Then lo and behold, we find about a zillion pictures of certain people on yearbook in the final section of the book (which is devoted to messages from the yearbook executives). That wouldn’t be a problem since those pages ARE to recognize the committee members, but when 99% of the photos include either only the head editor (who is responsible for the section) or photos of the head editor and her friends, then we’ve got a huge problem. Can you spell hypocrite?
The messages themselves were all written up and handed in, but some people were given much more page space than others for no reason. Sheliza had tons, but she’s the head editor so she’s supposed to have lots of stuff to say. Mona, on the other hand, was just another editor but also had an ass-load of space to write up, whereas other people–who, in my opinion, did much more work–had to settle with very little. Simply astonishing.
I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with hypocrisy (since we are all tempted into doing it from time to time) if the rest of the messages from the committee were at least typed up properly. Scanning through the messages written, I found a few people’s messages (including mine) were completely screwed up. This screwage includes double typing some sentences as if the copy+paste went completely berserk or something, irregular text formatting (e.g. making some letters within a word black instead of white when failing to highlight the entire paragraph for formatting), and even cutting messages short, in mid-sentence! It’s almost as if… hm… the pages were done in the final minutes before the due date. Great work ethic, whoever was responsible.
Lesson #3: What can I say? Teams can only work as well as the heads. And when leaders are petty, sloppy, incompetent slackers who play favourites, well, you can guess at the kind of final product you’d get from it all. This year’s head editor was… Surprise! Sheliza! Let’s have a round of applause!
So all in all, I’m pretty angry about how this yearbook turned out (especially at how some of my pages look). The spot colouring was off completely–in my defense, I mentioned not having it on those pages because they’d look better than way but Sheliza ended up doing it anyway because “we paid for it” and what kind of reasoning is that by the way? The corrections I made weren’t even submitted. My message at the end of the book was one of the ones that were completely raped, hands down on the ground. This whole year’s worth of working under Sheliza has been by and large a huge hassle. At this point I’m pretty much miles past the line of diplomacy and I’m just bashing her but really, find one argument I’ve made that wasn’t valid. I’m sure I haven’t nailed everything in this one post but I doubt we need anymore to work with. This rant is ending here and I hope I never have to do this kind of thing again.
Final Lesson: Get rid of Sheliza. Really, just, do it. Get her gone. That is all.

NOTE: I’ll post some photo evidence/examples after Mediamax gets back online from maintenance.

EDIT: Here are the pics of what I’ve been ranting on about.
The Good:

• Alexander’s Cover
• Amreet’s Sports Collage
• Amreet’s Sports Pages
• Mustafa’s Division Pages

The Bad:

• the numerous “ZOMG HAND IN SOMETHING!” Filler Pages
• the botched Yearbook Committee Messages

The Raped:

• Candids Page
• Grade Nine Day (1, 2)
• Principals’ Page

I think that about sums it up. I’ve only got one or two pages that I am proud of in the entire yearbook, and one of those is the World Events Spread (click here for my original digital render). I’m pretty sure the only reason that one turned out the way it was supposed to was because I didn’t leave any part of it to anyone else to take care of. Sorry, but that’s how I’m saying it.

Final Exam Season 2007

Next Monday will mark the beginning of exam week at VPCI and as I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve come down with something like an auto-immune problem. Nevertheless, here’s the run down:

• Monday – Exam Review Day = massive skippage
• Tuesday – Biology (2 h) at 9 am and Chemistry (1.5 h) at 1 pm
• Wednesday – No exam! Break day for sleep and some review I guess.
• Thursday – English (2 h) at 1 pm
• Friday – It’s the big one, Math (2 h) at 1 pm

So that’s what I’ve got lined up for the coming week. Tomorrow night I’ll be heading to Hosanna to have a night’s worth of guys’ sports without girls around (win win!). I’m actually quite glad we’re having a guys’ night since we never get to actually compete for real with girls around… (this opinion of mine is also why I could never play mixed for badminton).
We were reviewing old tests in Biology today and I was quite surprised to find my results weren’t half as bad as I’d thought (I’ve a terrible way of being relatively under-prepared for this class). Obviously, the marks weren’t amazing but really, I’d say I did quite well. I could’ve done better but sometimes I don’t really think it’s worth the extra effort.
While walking through Fairview Mall today with my good friend Shivon, I came up with a pretty neat idea. I’m not going to say what it is since I wouldn’t want to give away this kind of thing but I am pretty fortunate to have friends like Shivon (and Kishon, even though he’ll likely never read this) around to keep me company. I mean, they may not be the most tactful or comforting friends at times, but they sure are honest. Seeing as how I’ve shared maybe only 2 classes with Shivon in my entire high school career, I’m pretty surprised that he and I are good friends to this day (I tend to not keep friends with whom I don’t have things in common very well). I guess it’s all thanks to Frisbee and ranting about school stuff.
Speaking of Frisbee, I’ve joined the TUC and the Junior’s league in that club. Today was the second skills and training session of two but the first session I attended since I missed last week’s. League games start next week and we get our stuff (rulebook and more importantly, one of their 1337 standard size and weight Frisbees) next week too. Today’s scrimmage was pretty good and I think I played pretty well (not to mention the fact that my larynx burns when I breathe). See what I did there? I named the part that was on fire with Biology knowledge. These exams are going to be interesting. I just hope I get better sooner before later.

NOTE: Click title for Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” covered by Kanye West. This one was brought to my attention, rather appropriately, by Shivon so yeah, have fun.