Merry Christmas: Snow, Snow & More Snow

メリークリスマスにゃ～

Christmas Day - we had Christmas dinner at my Auntie Lily's place like every year. Though this year, we had two particular cousin kids who are part of the not-liked-as-much branch of the family join in on our celebration to end up NOT participating in it but instead to just sit around. The thing is, their grandparents (aka. their mom's parents, meaning their dad is my dad's brother) told them NOT to eat anything. Okay, what is the point of them coming then? Oh right, leech ice cream and get their DAMN PRESENTS. They were totally missing out so it's not of my concern really. But I need to mention them because they still stand to be the most disliked part of the family.

Family stuff aside.. onto presents. To add onto the awesome 2010 Olympics Mascot collection, I now have the whole mascot keychain set as well! On top of that, I also have that super chubby extra mascot thing called MukMuk for the rest of my 2010 family. It's all thanks to my mom and her passion to expand this collection!

I got a lucky pocket from my grandma and a Future Shop giftcard from my aunt (why not best buy?? I want ze points??!).. also received a scarf from my BFF. Her note basically said she saw the scarf and saw me. LOL THAT MEANS I HAVE TOO MANY SCARVES AND SHE'D ALWAYS SEE ME WITH ONE OH WELL! I like scarves so I'm not complaining~

I believe I'm still missing one more gift from another BFF cough ;b but I'll let her take her time heehee.

About the snow... it's still around. It's like supar high right now and it rained, however not enough. I need to drive in it tomorrow feck.

Winter Break Thus Far...

I'm about 2 weeks into my winter holiday and it has been quite eventful this whole time. There was a lot of chauffeuring and errand doing.. there was a bit of hanging out here and there.. then I try to squeeze in as much gaming as I can (you'd think I'd be able to get to do this the most...).

It's been snowing like mad as of late. In fact, it's snowing some more now. It'll be a white Christmas indeed but it's rather inconvenient for traveling in. I walked in it the other day from Victoria & 41st to Knight & 57th and it wasn't as bad as I thought. It was late that night and it wasn't snowing at the time, so it was nice and peaceful. I also had a great evening with the ^2 gang that night, having crappy bubble tea and spicy hot pot.

Watched "Yes Man" on opening day the other day during the coldest day (negative 12 degrees celsius) of the season. I actually wanted to watch the Despereaux movie about the cute CG rat but we gave into Jim Carrey instead. The movie was alright... I've kinda lost interest in the guy, just as for Will Smith.

Just today me and my brother decided to hook up the old TV that's been sitting in the living room with the plasma so we can essentially play at the same time. I originally thought the TV was unpluggable due to the lack of plugs we have back there (the power bar already has to handle the plasma, 360, ps3, ps2) but there was a free socket on the other wall I never noticed. Now my beautiful ps2 graphics look so much more proper on a normal tv rather than the widescreen plasma. I also don't have to worry about the game burning itself onto the screen with its automatically placed black borders. The downside is that my brother talks a whole damn lot when he plays when I'm around in the same room as him. He's recently started tackling my Resistance 2 as a medic so he can't stop complaining about other players and complimenting himself about how great of a player he is *rolls eyes*. I'm gradually getting used to it by zoning him out and focusing on my game. At least this setup is good for when we need to play the ps2. This'll work until I need to switch back to HD gaming.

I also want to make a snowman. But not by myself.

I can't find anyone who wants to do it with me.

Except a friend who lives across the continent.

One of the many fine quotes in Wild ARMs 5

Chuck(♂): Rebecca, I got an idea! Can you hit this?

Rebecca(♀): All right! Ready anytime!

Holiday Part-Timers...

I had the most frustrating phone conversation today.

I called up this jewelry store for my mom today to ask for the availability of this particular ring she was looking to get. It was unavailable at the closer location, so this lady kindly wrote down the details of the ring for us.

This is where it begins. I called up the other location... I get an obvious heavy Chinese accent salesguy on the other side. It starts off as usual, I enquire about the ring that was shown in their catalog. He disregards my question completely and instead asks me what my name was. And I was thinking, don't waste my time guy, and so I asked back, "Why do you need to know my name?" He answers it helps him serve me better. Grr okay fine, I give him a name, and then he goes into a full introduction of himself. AMG.

He continues, "So how can I help you today?"

"..." I thought, I already told you when you first picked up.

Okay, he asks me for more information about the ring, say, how it looked like.

Okay, wait, what was this serial number the other lady at this other location wrote down for me?? Apparently, the number is largely USELESS. And better yet, the "name" of the ring written down for me said, "10KW FANCY RING". Apparently that wasn't the NAME, in fact, it was a "description" the other lady probably wrote down that only SHE understood.

So here we have one or two useful clues, it's 10K and it's white. Obviously not enough information for the salesguy. So I went on saying it was a thick band, with jewels only on the front, and had small jewels etc... Again, he ignores what I say, constantly saying, "I'm sorry, I do not know which one you're talking about."

Well, sir, if you listened, maybe you would know.

He asks me for the first few numbers of the serial again. And he then asks me where the ring was located. I told him it was located at the front of the store and he was like "no, that area's 438," my ring being 418.

"That was where it was at the Richmond center location."

"Are you a salesperson working there or a customer?"

"..." Would I not address myself as a salesperson at the beginning of the conversation if I really was one? "No, a customer."

Then he prompts me to tell him where I saw it in the christmas catalog. 3rd.. 4th page maybe, I didn't remember.

"3rd page are all coloured."

"Then 4th page."

"No, there isn't any 10K white jewelry on this page."

Holy shit then look for yourself FOR ME, why don't you.

He gives me the description of a completely different ring. No, didn't the information I've given you already tell you enough that it's completely white??

He then throws a question at me, "Is it a channel ring?"

The first thing that crosses my mind was, you mean that ring in Tales of Destiny I had no idea what it was for? Channeling ring was it?

Mister, don't use terminology your average, typical jewelry-dumb customer would not know, so I ask "What's a channel ring?" And he tells me to ask a sales person what it was. I was like, uh, I'm not at the store right now... so he goes onto explaining it.

NO, it's not a channel ring. I JUST said the jewelry is only on the front half.

He asks another question using terminology I didn't know, though I don't remember what the word was (started with a g). The word had to do with whether the jewels were small or big. I already said they were small the first time.

So... this rant being longer than I expected, he finally did find the ring and kept it on hold. Judging by the time he got off work, he was a part timer for the holidays. So perhaps it was a good thing I didn't get to see who he really was. Dear Allen.

The actual ring, btw, looked like total crap. Didn't end up getting it.

TF2

k something short because I'm exhausted from a whole day of chauffeuring....

So Steam was kinda evil and put Team Fortress 2 on sale for the weekend. A friend saw the opportunity and tempted me with it.. and without much effort I went and got it.

It was kinda strange for me to jump right in without going through some sort of tutorial or something one would usually go through to get used to a game... but anyway, I've tried CTFI and follow-your-cart modes thus far and haven't played the latter one long enough to say much about it. Not that I'd have much to say about capture the intelligence either. It got better when I kinda figured out what some of the lingo was (spiral stairs? long stairs? WUT?) but I've still got lots to learn, especially since I haven't even tried all the jobs yet (Scout, Spy, Handyman Dude). I'm terrified to try the handyman job. Where exactly should I be building 'em turrets? In fact, go back a question, how do I even BUILD a turret?! Something about using someone elses WEAPONS? How the fff--

Maybe I'll just stick to burning the crap out of people.

XBL and AGH SNOW

It's 3AM and it's the weekend.

It's been a rather unexpected so far.

First, Kozu somehow convinces me to use a 48-hour gold trial for XBL with him Friday. He should been studying, but that's another story. My timing and his turned out rather bad on Friday, so I ended up not playing with him at all. Instead, I ended up playing Gears 2 and Castle Crashers with Derek (I guess I'll call him by his real name now?) until 4am ish. I was surprised we (and the rest of the team) shredded through normal horde waves up until wave 39.. that was when we all died all of a sudden.

The next day, I suddenly had the urge to play Fable 2. So I ripped that out and was going to go online with Neku but with Kozu's bad timing, I ended up playing Gears 2 again. This time, we tried everything else but horde which was rather interesting.

My original plan for the weekend was Wild ARMs, MegaTen and L4D but now I don't know how my Sunday is going to be like due to the following...

Second, SNOW. WUT THE FFFFFF is going on. WHY IS IT SNOWING! We were planning on watching BOLT Sunday (John Travolta! and funny pudgy hamster in a ball!), but now with the snow packing, I don't see that happening anymore! I absolutely hate driving in the snow. Though... I still do need to drive my mom tomorrow morning so I'll still need to venture out into that nasty white stuff. Speaking of which, I should head to bed so I can wake up tomorrow.

2010 Olympic Tickets

So we didn't get picked for the first round of 2010 Olympic tickets. The next thing to do is to fight for the leftover seats during the priority access period which started at 9AM this morning.

9AM I woke up and logged in.. lo and behold I was directed to a VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM and it says:

What is the Virtual Waiting Room for?
In an effort to be completely fair to all Canadians we have developed the Virtual Waiting Room, used to randomly allow access to the ticketing system during busy times such as this when all visitors cannot be served simultaneously. You are currently in the pool to be randomly chosen to register your account and build your ticket request.

By 11AM, after reading up on the latest news as the usual places, I was still waiting. I didn't get to sleep in as I would of liked to today so I crawled back in to bed.

I got up again at 1PM to find that I was redirected to the main page. When I tried to get started with the booking and buying, it timesout and redirects me back to an effing waiting room.

It's now 3PM, I wasted all morning waiting in this stupid room. Time to move workstations closer to the PS2. My retarded monowheel bike is calling for my attention. Well, at least the weather's crappy today so I'm not missing much.

EDIT: 4PMish - I get redirected to a page saying they SOLD OUT. Next round of tickets is in May. D:

Hello Christmas Holidays!

It's heeeeere! It has officially arrived!

I've been working on my final project for Monday's class the past Saturday and Sunday evenings (my mornings are given to sleep) and decided to keep it simple, thus being able to sleep early the night before. Turns out mine wasn't as boring as I thought, as my all Javascript website outweighed all the Flash-ful ones. My website ended up to be a Myst-like "game" where you walk around a made up town where different areas played different music. My images were taken from about three different eroge and my songs sourced from about maybe 3 eroges and 4 'normal' video games. My images were strictly backgrounds only (lol yes there's no pr0n) but if I had the time (or I should say, if I wanted to spend the time) I would've put some actual characters in there to interact with but NO that's okay, I decided against it. All in all, it was a fun mindless project to end the semester.

After class was over, Vee had a last minute bday gathering for her special day however we got off class early so we separated and met up again at her place at 5:30. I got to experience Eminem's amusing FACK song for the first time. Her bf got off work early and offered to drive us all, so we made our way to the restaurant, Grub on Main St. More "gang" started to show up to fill up the 10 person table. The place was rather quite different than we all expected. The place was "cozy" (aka. small) and the food was light rather than heavy (e.g. healthy organic wheee~), which equals to $$$. Our PUNCH was 19. Bread was 8. Pasta that looked like instant noodles was 17. BUT the pizza was good. Only the artichoke one.

The service turned out crap so we gave less to no? tips and left. Some gang left while the left over gang went to find a place to eat the cake (cuz apparently Grub charged for bringing in foreign food - 2 bucks per frickin person)... we ended up at Esquire to have some tea/coffee/chai with the cake. There was the cutest and most obedient Chow-Chow mix dog sitting outside our window.

PORTABELLO MUSHROOM.

This morning I woke up early to catch some of the 4th year's major presentations. To be honest, only half of the ones I saw were impressive, even though I only did see 7 of them (I came in late to miss the first one). The stuff they were doing was already what we just finished doing plus more. However, the better ones felt like they had a better foundation of their company/concepts as a whole.

Later that day I checked out that over-advertised Hello Kitty jewelry made by Simmon's. 495 for the prettier necklace. Screw that.

Onto better usages money - So I'm beginning to make a list of things to get at HK and AX. I'll put it here for my reference:

[ HK ]
- Code Geass Relations Illustration Book (OH GAWD! THE PART TWO!)
- Mutuality Illustration Book - CLAMP stuff in Code Geass

[ AX ]
- Hayate (Alter)
- Haruhi Rockstar ver (Max Factory)
- figma Lelouch (so I can abuse him)
- Mitsurugi Meiya (GSC)
- Yashiro Kasumi (GSC)
- Kagami Sumika (GSC)

Left 4 Dead: Round 2

Ok so I mentioned I tried L4D demo on 360 and it didn't wow me at all. At the spur of the moment and after people convincing me, I got the PC version instead and yes, just like they say, it's different when you play with people you know. The AI's.. just... boring. You need to verbally yell at someone to be satisfied, seriously. Like this one kid we met who coincidentally lives in Vancouver too is like.. so retardedly silly. He purposely goes out to FIND trouble and we're like WTF what are you doing! Why are you purposely looking for the witch?! And then he likes to run off and gets himself killed. Yet we still play with him... I don't know why we can stand him though. I guess he's harmless besides the fact that he's a troublemaker. ;b

Oh and also, I love shooting my teammates.

Being used to playing with friendly-firing that doesn't hurt, L4D is kinda hard. LOL.

Last Week +1 Day of School

This week was insanely brutal.

I decided to start on my project early (as in on Sunday, the day after I came back) for the Tuesday infographics class. I only did figure out what topic I was going to do just last week so I knew I was already pressed on time (considering we had it assigned a few weeks ago). I ended up doing a timeline slash character relation chart of .hack series (specifically Project .hack) because I already have the knowledge and the [somewhat] resources sitting around. When I first started, I actually wanted to do the whole series (that is, including the G.U. stuff) but after I slapped on just the timeline without the characters, I could already predict it would be way too much work on my end. I actually wanted to include G.U. considering all the old characters that took on a new persona in the new chapter but regretfully, for the sake of my health, I decided against it.

K so even just Project .hack was a pain in the ass. I've had to refresh my memory for almost every series and had to do additional research. It was during my research I found out the awesomeness that seems to be brimming from G.U. and actually makes me want to finish those silly .hack games.

After working on it all Sunday evening until 4am, I even skipped Monday's class to get more of it done and didn't end up sleeping until 5am that night. Well one thing was that no one in the class would know .hack (minus one person who has played but hasn't finish the .hack games), so I was safe from anyone pointing out any glaring errors.

Thursday was presentation day. I missed the first batch of presentations last week as I was out of town so I didn't know what to expect or whether my presentation was enough. Either way, the presentations went all right. I felt that no one really grasped my concept as well as I'd hoped but it seems like the teacher at least knew... but that was only because he was with us one-on-one, developing our concepts. Soo I felt disappointed in that sense, but at the same time, I figured it was already over anyways, so I shouldn't care anymore. After class, we treated ourselves to all you can eat sukiyaki at Posh. And additionally, bubble tea next door at Pearl Castle. It was a great way to finish this week.

Though, there's still one more project/class left too... AND I've yet to start. I don't see myself starting until at least Saturday though. I NEED A BREAK.