Month: July 2002

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

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I picked up my Mt Buller V/Line [vline.vic.gov.au] coach transfer ticket today.
It’s A$103.60 return. That’s pretty steep but it’s the cheapest coach transfer to Mt Buller that
I could find.

Anyway, one Good ThingTM happened today. I bumped into my IE Project coordinator
today and got enrolled in the subject. =D It turns out that you can’t start IE in summer starting
from this year, so I can either do it now, or wait till March ’03 to do it and graduate November
’03. IE takes two consecutive semesters to finish, and it requires ITPM as a prerequisite.
Unfortunately, I only took ITPM this semester due to failing SDI the semester before, and SDI is a
prerequisite for ITPM. I hate these “chain prerequisite” subjects. Fail one and it could fuck you
up. But I did pass SDI last semester, so I took ITPM this semester. Back to the situation, since I
only took ITPM this semester, it seems that I’m doomed to graduate in November ’03. However, the IE
Project coordinator was kind enough to enroll me into IE even though I haven’t done ITPM because I
would have graduated in July ’03 if I wasn’t held back by IE. Woo hoo. =D Apparently, you can get
special consideration for IE if you’re going to graduate otherwise. Cheers to my mate Vivek for
informing me about the “no starting IE in summer” rule.

Well, I can’t overload while doing both IE and ITPM at the same time, so I’ve dropped one of my
subjects. The IE weekly meeting clashes with my ITPM tutorial too, so I was hoping to go to one of
the earlier tutes to see if I can get myself into one of them. But even better than that, I just
happened to log into Allocate+ (our tutorial allocation system) and found a space for tomorrow’s 12
pm ITPM tutorial! There wasn’t space in those tutes a couple of hours before. Heh. It seems to be a
day of Good ThingsTM today. I shudder to think of tomorrow when Newton’s Third Law will
be invoked. =D

Zzzzzz…

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I only had about four hours of sleep last night, so it was a record 30 minutes after waking up
before I started nodding off again, in the shuttle no less. I dragged myself to the first lecture
of the day and had several micro sleeps, which prompted the guy beside me to look at me smugly
while taking conspicuous sips from his Coffee HQ mug. Hmph…I got myself a large latte (which I
downed in three long swallows – my poor, scalded tongue) and a Chunky Kit Kat during the break.
It’s either that or fall asleep on the nice carpeted lecture theatre floor. Perked up a bit after
that and even managed to catch a bit of the really interesting lecture about the different
grades of twisted pair cables. Long day today…I had two tutorials after the lecture with a one
hour break in between. I grabbed a turkey ham/pineapple/raw onions sandwich on sour dough from
Merlin’s Cafe and camped outside my course coordinator’s office during my one hour break to discuss
some course issues with her.

Merlin’s Cafe

No sign of her though. Oh well, at least I got 10/10 for my graded exercise during my last tute.
I’m going to catch an early night and pick up my Melbourne -> Mansfield -> Mt Buller V/Line
coach ticket tomorrow after my single lecture. I can’t wait…I’m chomping at the bit for some
winter sports action already. Heh.

YHA Travel

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I’m feeling rather nauseous now for some reason. The remedy for nausea for me is to eat Poh Chi
Kit pills. Now, you can’t bring this stuff into Australia because one of it’s ingredients (Radix
Angelicae) is a protected herb or something. I had to smuggle some in by putting it into my
pockets. Pretty sad to have to do this with legitimate drugs, eh? Anyway, I went down to the city
today to pay for my
Mt Buller YHA [yha.com.au] accomodation.

YHA Travel in Hardware Lane, Melbourne.

Prepaid Hostel Booking slip. Mt Buller [mtbuller.com.au]…here I come!

I also applied for a Hostelling International [iyhf.org] card while I was there. Thus,
I paid the members fee (for the accommodation) of A$50 per night instead of the normal A$55.
Actually, I’m only eligible to apply for a YHA card, which can only be used in Australia, but at
the kind agent’s discretion, I got a Hostelling International card instead, which is A$32
instead of A$52. A Hostelling International card can be used all over the world too, and it has
all the same benefits as a YHA card in Australia.

Hostelling International membership card.

Anyway, after all that, I went in search of a backpack. I went to 5 or 6 shops before deciding
to settle for the one I saw at Kathmandu [kathmandu.com.au]. It’s a large backpack with
a detachable daypack. Pretty nifty. The daypack is rather small though, but I have the option of
getting a larger Gluon daypack and attaching it to one of the straps. The original price of this
backpack is A$459.50 but I got it for A$229.75 (50% discount). That’s a very good price for
backpacks of this size.

Well, I had dinner at Hungry Jack’s after that and took the train to Caulfield. I managed to
miss my lecture and ended up in the labs reading today’s lecture notes instead while waiting for my
7pm tutorial. I was waiting outside the (locked) tutorial room for 10 minutes before decided to
recheck my allocated time. Sure enough, I’m in T317 and I saw another tutorial in the same timeslot
at B457 so I decided to pop over and check. Nope, there was no one there too. I think it’s because
the labs and tutorials are on alternate weeks for this subject. No wonder, I had thought 6 hours
for one subject seems kinda stiff. My laboratory is tomorrow, so I’ll have to read up on the tute
notes and get ready for the graded exercise tomorrow.

Bend It Like Beckham

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I just finished watching this, um…brilliant movie. It’s about an Indian girl who is
living in Hounslow and her desire to play football. Being in a conservative family, her parents do
not approve and just wants her to be able to cook and get married to a nice Indian man. She meets
up with another girl who is playing in a local women’s team and the story goes from there. I won’t
spoil it for you, but if you like soccer, British humor or watching women soccer players changing
into their kits, then don’t miss out on this one. Oh, and if you have a foot fetish, you’ll enjoy
this one as well. Plenty of feet shots, and there’s even a scene where the coach massages the feet
of one of his players, if you like stuff like that. =D Interesting fact, IMDB [imdb.com] says that Keira Knightley (the girl
who plays Jules) was also in Star Wars Episode I as a handmaiden of Queen Amidala.

Slops

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Tomorrow is Monday again. It seems that the weekend has slipped by without
me realizing. Cliché, but true. Since I didn’t manage to go to the city
yesterday, I’ll have to wake up early at 12 pm tomorrow to head down to
the city to pay for my Mt Buller accommodation. My class only starts at 5
pm, which I take is a pretty good start time for Mondays. =D I’ll be in
classes till 9 pm though. Not as bad as my 8 pm – 10 pm lecture last
semester, but 9 pm is pretty late coz I need an hour to get back from my
campus. Anyway, I haven’t been up to much today…just read my lecture
notes for a bit. Pretty hardworking huh? I had dinner at the halls dining
room. Saw a tempting cheesecake but decided to eat (relatively) healthy
and settled for fried noodles with fish and a fruit salad. Heh.

Halls dining room aka slops

Oh, and my
newest Mirror Project submission
[mirrorproject.com] is up. This one is pretty uninspired, but hey, I’m
feeling pretty uninspired today.

Wah Kee

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Oops…I overslept this morning and didn’t bother to go down to the city
coz the YHA office closes at 1 pm. By the time I woke up, it was already
11:30 am and going down to the city takes around an hour, so it’ll be
cutting it pretty close considering I still need to walk to Hardware Lane.
Thus, I’ve decided to go down on Monday after my classes. Speaking of ski
trips, frostee at
2boredblog [2boredblog.tk] is going snowboarding sometime this season
too. He’s a fellow Melbournian (living in Clayton as well), and from what
I gather, is a Malaysian too, though he has been working in Singapore.

Anyway, I haven’t been doing much work today. Lazed around a bit, and
managed to read one measly set of lecture notes. I went out to Wah Kee for
dinner with Adrian and I had a plate of Yang Chow fried rice and another
plate of boneless spare ribs. The fried rice is pretty good, though my
girlfriend’s helper fries up a mean plate of Yang Chow fried rice as well.
Headed down to the Asian grocery to get some Pocky (I like Mango Cream)
and also some dishwashing liquid. Hmm…this blog is starting to get
food-centric again. =D

Scans from the Pocky box with my CanoScan N670U. The Z-Lid feature is
pretty nifty. Please don’t ask me why the scan of the back is shorter than
the scan of the front. I just cropped it wrongly, that’s all.

Outback Passion

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My workload this semester is depressing. I’ll even go so far as to say that there’s a shitload
of work this semester. I don’t know the empirical value of a shitload versus a normal load, but
I’ll postulate that a shitload is significantly more than a normal load. One of my subjects even
has a graded exercise starting from Week 2! After my dismal grades last semester, I have decided
that I need to bunker down and study hard this semester if I’m going to do well. Tell you what, I’m
even going to read through one set of lecture notes after this and I’ll sleep early and wake up
early and sync another set of lecture notes to read on the train tomorrow. In fact, I’m even going
to START MY ASSIGNMENT TOMORROW NIGHT! *gasp* There you go. Seriously though, I’ll have to work
harder this semester. It is my final year of university after all. Anyway, I’ll be heading down to
the city tomorrow to pay for my accommodation booking at Mt Buller [mtbuller.com.au]. Yeah, I’m heading for the
slopes next weekend. =D I’ll be there for 3 days and 2 nights, which should be heaps of fun,
considering that my trip coincides with the Victorian Uni Championships and the 3rd Quiksilver
Interschools GP. It’s not the Mountain Dew Shredfest, but it’ll be entertaining nevertheless.
I’ll be staying at the
YHA Lodge [yha.com.au], which is probably the cheapest on-mountain accommodation at A$55 per
night. It’s the peak season and I can’t afford anything better. It will be a fun three days up at
Mt Buller and I’m already looking forward to it. Heh.

Images taken from McDonald’s Australia [mcdonalds.com.au]

Anyway, my friend Adrian came by today to download MP3s and burn some CDs. We headed to
McDonald’s after that and I tried the new Outback burger on their New Tastes Menu
[mcdonalds.com.au]. The McDonald’s here has this New Tastes menu, which changes every month to
give a bit of variety. I’ve had the Pavlova Passion before but I couldn’t fit an Outback burger
into my stomach that time, so I’m glad I had that today. Pretty nice, there is an egg in there
too. I love burgers with eggs.

The real thing doesn’t look so vibrant. Outback burger meal with Pavlova Passion dessert.

The Friday Five [fridayfive.org]

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1. How long have you had a weblog? I registered sixthseal.com sometime in April and my
first post was on the 19th of April 2002. That’s just slightly more than three months. =D

2. What was your first post about? It was a message saying sixthseal.com is officially live
and the story behind my domain name. It’s based on a Revelation passage. Read the entry here [sixthseal.com].

3. How many changes (name, location, etc.) of your weblog have there been, if more than
one? The major change that I made ever since I started was to put all the images in an
images directory about a week ago to better organize things. I also started the weblog with
the intention of it being a webcam page too, but unfortunately my university proxy does not allow
off-campus FTP connections, so that idea was nixed after a while. I still have my
Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000 [logitech.com] though. The webcam image has been replaced by a
Picture of the Day (look above) and a POTD archive [sixthseal.com] which
has the previous 7 days worth of Picture of the Days.

An old capture from my non-streaming webcam dated 05/09/2002.

4. What CMS (content management system) do you use? Do you like it or do you want to try
something else? Plain old Microsoft Frontpage. I update my blog manually and FTP the files to a
Unix server on campus where I have an account. Then I have to SSH to the Unix server and FTP my
domain from there. This is because I don’t have direct off-campus FTP access. Everything needs to
be done through the on-campus Unix server. I’m not too happy about this arrangement since it makes
updating a bit tedious, but I’m stuck with it because I live on campus. I might look into some CMS
packages like Greymatter though.

5. Do you read people who have both a journal and a weblog? Or do you prefer to read people who
have all of their writing in one central place? I didn’t know that there is a difference
between a weblog and a journal. I read a couple of weblogs, around six, and I usually prefer all
the writing to be in one central place so I don’t have to browse around the menus.

That is some damned brisk walking indeed

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There I was, walking to the bus loop to catch the shuttle to Caulfield, when I caught sight of
the line. It was really long and I started counting before I reached the loop. There was 24 people already waiting in line and the shuttle fits 25, so I picked up my pace a bit and walked briskly to the bus loop. When I was about halfway to the waiting bay I saw this guy walking from the other end.

He caught sight of the line too and started to trot a bit as well. Not to be outdone, I started to walk faster as well. I needed the stability whilst running but must keep the pace too so the shoes I had on proved to be very helpful. Unfortunately, the waiting bay is closer to the other end of the bus loop so naturally he reached there first. Grrr…I had to take the bus and the train to
Caulfield. Oh well.

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