Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Phew TIRING man..... I've had my second lesson of Business, Government & Society, and i take back whatever i said about the prof. He IS brilliant, and he STILL has that sardonic sense of humour. But he wasn't so boring, he got slightly better in the 2nd class. Perhaps because this time the topic wasn't so boring, AND he was genuinely good at provoking your thoughts. Started off with an issue regarding cloning, and coincidently the whole class was totally (and i MEAN totally) against cloning, which suited his aims. He proceeded to wax lyrical about our life experiences, how life has made us who we are, how our diet made us what we are, and how our history has made us who we will be etc. And just when u're beginning to think "here we go again...." he shoots back and says, so even if we can have a genetically identical clone, identical down to the comma and dot on the "i" in our genetic make-up, the point is that our clone cannot relive our life experiences. No Beatles, No BeeGees, No Rolling Stones, No Britney Spears, No Backstreet Gays -i mean boys-, No Monica Lewinsky, No George Bush, and of course most importantly No Saddam Hussein. Even if he (or she) did get that opportunity to live it up, the gap will be there, ask any 30 year-old and compare what a 10 year-old would say about Britney Spears. So we have a clone who isn't really our clone. He looks like us, but may be fatter because of a different diet, may have
a scar coz he fell off the bike and you didn't, he then has a phobia of riding bikes which u would casually snigger at. So if he (or she) is different from us, why do we call it a clone? If so, why should we be against cloning? Of which i could see most people agreed with him, but were just SO totally against the word cloning. If he had used the word copying or cutting & pasting of DNA instead, maybe we would've given in :)
I bought a new Micro Hifi system to replace my old mini compo that had been dead for eons over the weekend. I managed to convince my dad to pay for it, so hooray, i can put my ang pao money to other uses :) I'm quite happy with it, though occasionally i think back and wonder why i didn't buy the Sony one i've been drooling over all month. Strangely i can't find the damn model on the internet, i can only find it on this brochure i got, and according to the fella down at the shop he says the
Sony mini compo costs RM300+, and its got pretty nifty features, though i wasn't too sure on the sound quality it was going to produce. The one i got for my room was this Denon one, and the model closest to the one i got is here. Its not exactly the one there, coz mine is the ancestor to that one, so mine has a cassette deck, and has i'd say less than half the features there, but damn it can make SOUND man. I love the sound system it produces, i mean heck, Denon had always been known for their speakers, not their hifis :) It fits with the decor of my room as well, and it cost me only RM380, which come to think of it is about the same price as the Sony one,
so occasionally i just sit back and wonder u noe.... :|
Yesterday was an event my Uni marked as Patron's Day. I haven't the foggiest idea its significance, all i know they hold it every year, but this year it so happens they used it to launch some new system the school pioneered or something (oh so SUE me for ignorance, bah.. =P ) The theme for this year was "Let's Get Loud", and ooh boy, did people get down and DIRTY man :) The grand prize for the LOUDEST dressed person was a Microsoft X-Box, and the lucky draw grand prize was a 29" Samsung Color TV. My hostel f**kers went ALL THE WAY to get that X-Box. 2 of them cross-dressed, one as a supposed hot babe and the other evidently a flat-chested, hairy-legged, husky-voiced transvestite (of which in either Tamil or Hindi they call it Chakka apparently). The rest of them were dressed up for weddings, full-blooded saris and whatever the guys wear, all sequined and shiny and oh u noe.... The other ahem, err, woman, insisted he (or she?) was a Miss and available, all geared up with spaghetti straps, toilet-paper-stuffed bras, a flimsy looking batik skirt
of some sort that was SO obviously haphazardly tied up to make sure it DOES fall off, and to top it all off, platforms. The woman won the X-Box (mumble grumble curse curse cough cough). The other finalists were this guy (very popular apparently) wearing this neon orange suit, making him look like a pest exterminator, and his reason for his being "loud" was that people could see him from JB if he were in that suit. There was a cowboy with pink hair, and a few others that didn't really catch my attention. The way for the finalists to win was the amount of cheering they got, obviously the NONSENSE my friend the woMAN did gave him a disgusting lead over everyone else, like TOTALLY stripping down to his tights under the skirt, and lying on the floor, legs all wide and open and ok, i shall stop here, basically in my opinion he won the X-Box skirt down - i mean hands down. And considering that his winning the X-Box is beneficial to ALL hostel people, i have a feeling this term my resolution to study hard will take a LITTLE bit of a battering... :|
There were bands invited to play at Patron's Day and i must say a few of them were outstanding. East India Company was first up, a guitar duo playing contemporary and alternative hits like John Mayor, Coldplay and Train. Nice guitar and vocals but just didn't really catch attention. Next was Soul Circle, now they were GOOD, they basically revamped old hits like "Killing Me Softly" and "My Girl" and other oldies into very progressive R&B and Acid Jazz styles. TOTALLY cool and beyond words. They were so good they got everyone up from their bums and dancing till everyone was shouting "We Want More" when they ended. All the high people started doing all kinds of shit, ESPECIALLY the 2 idiotic cross-dressers who did they nonsensical Egyptian or whatever they were dances to the music, completely out of context and out of beat. But next up was the main attraction, regional hotshots "Urban Exchange", so when they came up the "We Want More" instantly died out to manic WOOHOO's. Extremely good vocals coupled up with a SMASHING DJ, these guys ROCKED. After that was the lucky draw with some pretty good prizes, compared to my College Prom lucky draw that consisted of food vouchers that we'd never use, here there were VCD players up for grabs and other pretty useful goodies. Of coz the main attraction of the TV was a heart-stopping one, coz the first number picked was scrapped coz apparently no-one claimed it, and when the 2nd number was read out this girl came screaming all the way from the back to the front. Her enthusiasm wasn't even enough for her to PUSH the TV, that's how BIG the damn TV was.... Last up was an all-girl Gothic Rock Group who called themselves Playing In Traffic (PIT, get it soleil? Private joke, ha-ha... nevermind for those who don't get it). They reminded me of early Cranberries coupled up with Garbage and Portis-head, very cool stuff, but by then i was too tired to notice, and the headache of a presentation today, and other school stuff sucked me back to reality (boohoo). Which reminds me, i better get back to my presentation, considering it constitutes 30% of my final grades. Toodle-doo for now.
Dr@n|xX at 6:58 AM
Thursday, January 16, 2003
Only an alliance of Men and Elves will stop the physical manifestation of the dark lord now. =D
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Disclaimer : This is not meant to offend any nationality, race or religious following.
Dr@n|xX at 7:21 PM
Woah been a long time since i last posted anything. Terriblement désolé! School's started for 2 weeks now, and so far everything's going pretty ok. I have a feeling this term is gonna be REALLY boring looking at the subjects i have this term and the professors i have as well... ;( Got a new housemate, this guy from Perlis. Extremely good badminton player, should ask him to start coaching me =)
Business Law : Fantastic subject so far. Very broad, very loose, room to argue for your point, yet not TOO broad for you to lose sight of your target. Very encouraging professor as well. We had lots of fun in our first lesson when we were discussing this nudity thing. Some public nuisance act or something (i'm getting old), you cannot dress in a manner that will offend in a place that is open to public view. So we were arguing a few scenarios where Ah Meng likes to walk around naked in his flat, and his flat has a lot of windows that people in the next block have a clear view of his -ahems-. Is that a crime? DUH. What if Ah Meng has a kitchen that the people in the next block had a clear view of, but it was a HOT day and he decide to cook naked. And would it make a difference if he did not KNOW that people could see him (he'd be pretty stupid of course, windows work 2 ways u noe dum-dum, they're for you to
look OUT as well as for people to look IN). And if someone were to complain about it, lets say Ah Ling complained that it disgusted her, but apparently she was the ONLY one who complained, can we then say that the PUBLIC was offended by his manner of dressing then? A few of the delinquents in class eg. ME, turned the tables and argued that Ah Ling probably enjoyed looking at him for all we care, she just didn't admit it (i mean WHY would she? "Your honour, although i have sworn to tell the truth, only the truth and the whole truth in this Court, and my testimony was that i was completely disgusted by his nudity, i actually enjoyed every moment of it......") Fun. Definitely :)
Financial Accounting : Bleahz. A guy not much older than me is actually my professor. Graduated from Nanyang Tech Uni with First Class Honours (yeah yeah.....) in -check this out-1999. Bloody reads off his slides (i can READ mind you), his notes are straight off from the textbook (someone should sue him for copyright infringement darn it), and uses the word OK as a form of beginning, end and punctuation. "OK, liabilites are called credit-balance accounts, OK, because liabilities and stockholders' equity usually have a credit balance, OK?" Notice that sentence didn't make much sense at all either even to accountants. Yep, that's my prof alright.
Business, Government and Society : I seriously don really know what's going on in this course at all. Our professor is simply BRILLIANT. Seriously. Speaks Queen's English, tells a joke and still pull a long face, quotes facts and information from the top of his head like it didn't matter, and has this particularly sardonic sense of humour. If u REALLY want to know how good he is, i dare you to search Pang Eng Fong in Google. Or if u're too lazy, just check this out. All that aside, he's SERIOUSLY boring. Talks as if he's afraid of being misquoted by ensuring no one can hear him. And he being the intellectually superior being he is, claims anyone born after 1982 has an attention span of no more than 16mins, every now
and then he raises his voice over the most insignificant of words such as FOR or BE to try in vain to regain our attention from us making visions of ourselves pulling out a tommy gun and splattering his 11.5% usage brain (most people don't use more than 10% of their brains - just a matter-of-fact note for those who are intellectually inferior of course) all over the wall.
Analytical Skills : I've only had one class so far, and it seems ok to me, contrary to what i've heard of the professor. Our first lesson was the usual "What i expect from you for the rest of the term" flish-flash, then a small little exercise which was absolutely interesting. I hope it continues this way. Here's the question, slightly
bastardized of course due to my aging brain and slightly less than 10% usage brain :
At a certain prison, there was an inmate with normal vision, an inmate with sight in only one eye, and a blind inmate. The warden tells them that he will put a hat on each of them out of 3 white hats and 2 red hats. If they could guess correctly the colour of their hat, they're be free to go, but to prevent wild guesses, he'd execute them for a
wrong answer. He put them in a triangle so that they could see the other 2 hats but not his own. The guy with normal vision went first, and he obviously couldn't guess. The guy with only one eye couldn't either, but the blind guy, full of confidence proclaims "The colour of my hat is ___________." What was the colour of his hat and how did was he able to guess?
A few points for you to note in case this question even excites ur brain cells, since u'd probably ask the same questions we did. Yes the blind guy guessed correctly, and yes, the answer in the blank is a colour. And yes, u're supposed to infer from why the 2 previous guys were uncertain of their own colour to come to the conclusion of how the blind guy managed to guess his own hat colour.
If no one posts up the answer in my tag-board anyway, and if there's enough response in my tag-board, i'll post the answers up the next time i update, hopefully sometime soon ;P
Finally, hey people, check this site out. My house-mate introduced this to me. Sick, gross and gory, but insanely funny with a strange cute factor. You have been warned. =) -= Happy Tree Friends =- Au revoir pour maintenant.
Dr@n|xX at 1:21 AM
Monday, January 06, 2003
Hey people, check out
Charmane's site, and look at her Sunday entry. Quite interesting.
Me? Without my surname, it says
i cause a lot of trouble (HELL YEAH!!!), i'm an exciting person ( i hope so =| ), i'm a close-minded person ( hmmm... i'm not too sure about this one ), and i like to work but i always want a break ( i'd agree with Charmane on this, who doesn't? =D ). If with my surname as well, then it clashes a little, coz then it'll be that i have a partier side ( DeFiNiTeLy ;D ), i'm not judgemental ( i'm not? =) ), i'm open-minded (ah-HA, see? clashes here....), and i have excellent ways of viewing people (ooh my head's getting bigger... :p ).
Dr@n|xX at 5:48 PM
Well school officially starts tomorrow, and its a free day for me coz I planned my timetable to have Mondays free = long weekend. And man am I overflowing with aNtIcIpAtIoN. I have waited for so long throughout the whole holidays for this day to come, and finally it looms ahead. Its this strange amalgamation of both excitement and apprehension of the life I'm going to lead from now on. Yep, its back to my shitty diet (not that I had a much better diet back when I was home anyway, my mum can't cook for nuts, she hates cooking, and half the time my meals consists of bread or biscuits becoz she was too lazy to cook. Which makes me envious coz my housemates certainly brought a few kgs of flab as souvenirs from their holidays back with their families.). I either don't eat enough coz my meals are so irregular either because of school or that I just don't have the energy left to cook or walk to the food centre nearby to eat; or I don eat enough nutritious food for me to gain any substantial weight at all. A few friends who've met me recently (as in for the past 2 months) claimed that I've grown skinnier. Perhaps they're right. My watch (which was my pride and joy when I earned enough money to finally afford a Swatch Irony without squeezing some from my parents) was a snug fit on my left wrist, loose enough to slide around a little, but not too tight as to leave the Swatch logo and a "stainless steel" on my wrist for the next hour or so. Of late the watch slides down to half my arm length and even spins AROUND my wrist and plays hide and seek whenever I want it to tell time, it defiantly shows me the clip holding it in place with a smug "Swatch" expression on it.
Diet aside, it'll be back to the routine of wake up, go school, try to study but end up playing, sleep, wake up etc. Quite evidently this needs some revamping, if I'm going to make the money spent on my education of any worth. I'm all armed with my new 2003 diary, a new addition to my daily roster of things to bring to school. I will force myself to record everything in my diary, from homework all the way to my mum asking me to buy undergarments for my sis (if she ever does). No more forgetting meetings, no more forgetting assignments. Well I'll try not to, whatever the outcome at least I know I've tried. Waking up will need some training coz somehow my brain has incorporated alarm bell ringings into my dreams such that they do not seem out of place, perhaps I'm in school and suddenly realize the bell is ringing for a fire, and we run around in panic, but I bump into say a VERY pretty girl "oh HeLLo... can I direct you somewhere miss?...." and the alarm bell slowly fades away... an hour later I wake up wondering whether there was a fire at all, and only because this time I'm awake due to the ringing of my phone with some very displeased team-mates on the other end of the line. Ah yes, welcome back to school Yee Sen.....
Went out with Ahmed today. Caught up on so much stuff, as usual, poking fun at our previous schools, ACJC, the staff of ACJC, the ACJC compound, the students of ACJC, did I mention we laughed our head off talking about our motley crew of teachers back in ACJC? I mean yeah, thanks for getting us this far and all, but hey, no matter how you look at it, we've got a pervert for a maths teacher, a totally absent-minded "homework? wat homework?" economics teacher, a tai-tai for physics, and a frigid though dedicated (I'm saying this coz I was the class-representative, sorta like the monitor, so I do respect her) form teacher. He went on about how -ahem- attractive he was back in the Maldives, and how he felt good back in Maldives coz apparently the girls there like mini-skirts and skin tight jeans, unlike local girls who were either too hot to handle with their purple hair or too boring with their I-am-so-ashamed-of-my-body clothes and i-may-not-live-in-Afghanistan-but-i-sure-as-hell-am-not-showing-you-my-legs jeans. Well though I may not totally agree with him, especially on the part of him being attractive, he does have a point of girls being very conservative here. As a friend had once aptly brought up, girls here don't give guys enough -crudely put- opportunities, which is probably why guys here are despos or so I've heard. Very controversial I'd agree, but me being a guy I certainly wouldn't being at the frontline of the war for women with longer skirts.
Checked up on that M1 promotional One+One Supplementary line. Very tempting $5 monthly subscription and the negation of a lot of initial start-up costs such as admin, but as usual full of catches. I did not qualify coz I was already using a promotional package, which makes me wonder why are they so discriminative, coz if I'm already a customer, hey, if u can squeeze more money out of me, why not? But no, for once they are righteous enough to tell me "I'm sorry sir, you have to be with at least the Prime plan to be able to sign up for the supplementary line." In any case I already pay a painful fortune to M1 every month, so fine, if u don't want more of my money (not that I had much to start with anyway), that's alright, maybe it'll be put to better use with Pod then.
"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." -Doris Lessing
Dr@n|xX at 2:12 AM
Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Sheesh... its a few more minutes to a brand new year, and gee, i'm here on my com, writing my blog. Makes me wonder if i've got better things to do with my life =p
School's starting soon, and for some reason, i actually feel excited about it. What with all the boredom and the sense of entrapment that's been lingering around my head like vultures all holiday. Botched outings, totally boring festive season family dinners and so many more mishaps are certainly helping fuel my enthusiasm for school.
Today was a more fruitful day than usual. My dad brought back 2 huge bookshelves yesterday, and guess WHO'S the one supposed to fix it up ( its those DIY ones u see).. spent about 2 hours on the 2 bookshelves. My dad has always had a flair for both the unusual and the unpredictable. He's the kind that can call home and ask us to wait for him to buy back dinner for the whole family, and he happily comes back 2 hours later, EMPTY-HANDED, resulting in a piss-poor Maggee-mee SUPPER, to the joy of my sister (as all kids are, instant noodles are just somehow more palleting than food); OR, just when u think he'd do the same thing, u prepare urself for a LONG hungry night and start stuffing on biscuits and snacks so that u'd last the 2 hour wait, switch on the telly and watch the climatic action movie on HBO and just when the door creak opens and the hero's about to jump in all guns blazing to save the damsel in distress, HeY-hO he crashes through the chimney immediately after hanging up, silver sleigh bells and all, with SIX packets of food (for a family of 4) slung over his shoulder, usually just as distasteful as maggee mee (imagine dry dry dry DRY (grrrrrr) white rice with fried fish, DEEP (and i mean DEEEEEeeeEEEeeeEEeP) fried till there's so little uncharred flesh left to savor.) Yes, but as i was saying, he brought back 2 bookshelves, totally without warning, without even noticing that the house had books the day before, all of a sudden, he reverses the car into the porch instead of his usual haphazard "i-need-to-go-to-the-toilet-and-FAST" methodology, mutters a grunt that vaguely sounds like my name which i totally filter out because to me i just thought he was clearing his throat until my mum corrects me, and strangely he helps me carry the 2 huge shelves out of the car, instead of either showing his Herculean strength or his Napoleonic commanding skills.
And so today, i get kicked out of bed an hour early coz my mum says my dad casually left orders to fix up the shelves. Initially i grumbled and silently cursed everything for taking me away from my bolster, but when i started working on the shelf, i cursed everything openly. Staring at an instruction sheet that made absolutely no sense coz it made no distinction of which planks were for which, and which nails for which, so i spent the first 45 mins counting nails, making sure i knew which went where, seperating the planks, and using the instruction sheet as a fan rather than for reference. But thankfully it was quite easy once everything was sorted out, and everything proceeded quite smoothly, without any sudden "Oh SHIT" realizations of a missing nail, a misplaced plank, or the conclusion as to why there is an extra dowel. The second shelf was even less of an effort as i finished it in half an hour. Makes me think, if i had only had one practice earlier, and i could do it in half and hour, i wonder how long a serious professional would've taken, 10mins? But when u're done, and u sit back and admire what u've done, boy u feel good. I was extremely proud of my first effort as though i took so long, it was no different from the second effort in terms of quality. Past experience would tell me that my first attempts would always crumble, thankfully the first shelf stands firm, stoutly holding wine bottles for its worth. Hmmm.... now that i think of it, NO BLOODY WONDER my dad bought the shelves, but then again it was my mum who put them there, and my dad had no part in it, so heck, i'm happy i built 2 good shelves, and spent my time differently and more usefully today. =) What a way to end 2002. But i can't say the same for the way i'm starting my 2003... =|
Dr@n|xX at 12:46 AM
