Hydraulics Fail

Just returned from the insanity that is downtown Vancouver and watched a fail of an opening ceremony to the Olympics. I met up with Moni, Braman, and [new challenger] Andrew downtown after helping out at Bonchaz. We munched at Yaletown Brewery during most of the beginning of the ceremony. We were unexpectedly visited by a professional magician while we waited for food - Yeeri was his name (found him!). None of us experienced a magician first hand before and it was more amazing how every trick he did was illogically mind bogging AND he had his sleeves up. There were your card tricks but he changed a pile of cards sandwiched right in my hands into a block of plastic (?!), folded a $20 bill into a $5 and back, rubber bands that passed through each other when normally they couldn't... it was an amazing 10 minutes.

After food we decided not to stay (though we should've) and wandered around outside, eventually finding dry and warm place to stand and watch the outdoor TVs that broadcasted the ceremony. The whole white attire was almost ghost/clone/robot-like. That aside, the first building of the crystal campfire sadly failed which I bet will be one of the hotter topics in the next little while. When the secondary campfire was finally lit, we went to give the real thing a visit. On our way we stopped by the Royal Canadian Mint museum and encountered the one million dollar coin.


Thiiis big.


Now that the Olympics are here, that means I have two weeks of no schooling. Sadly it won't all be just break as there's still a crap of school things to do during this time. Our grad show progress is still a disaster, there's a workshop to prepare for and then there's also my major project to worry about. I'll see how well I can pace myself between school work and play.

My previous weekend was devoured by the revampment of my portfolio. It's in a working order I can say I can be pleased with for the time being (before I probably get bored of it) and it seems like my prospective design firm for my practicum has also thumbs up'd it. It's up to the creative director and his schedule during that time. Crossing fingers and toes. While working on my port, I've also realized once again how difficult it is for me to merge my online identity with my offline. My type of people does not seem to translate well.

Monday we had a field trip to our future grad show location. Looks fancy but smaller than (I think) most of us expected. The view from above the residential building is nice. After our short field trip we went to the Granville Brewery and uh did some tasting rounds just for the fun of it.







Few days ago we had some more fundraising activities at school and a fellow classmate did henna. I wanted something different so when the idea of Sasuke's cursed seal came up I went oh what the hell and got it. She didn't have much experience doing something out of her norm but it was a pretty interesting interpretation. Because of its relative obscurity, I've been getting a lot of comments on how they thought my arm caught a bad burn. /narutarding it up. This geek thing is doing me no good.

Caaake.

Salty, Bitter & Sweet

What I had for breakfast yesterday. Usually the instructor brings in food for us when we have big presentation days. This time cheese was added to the plate which was different from the norm which consisted of usually just bread and fruit. I found that it was a pretty interesting combination: a bite of cheese, a bite of banana bread and then a sip of coffee to help it go down. Very nice~

[insert Olympic picture]
So, data recovery programs are pretty spiffy but still not advanced enough to retrieve all the photos I accidentally deleted off my phone memory card. It somehow managed to save my breakfast picture though... But anyway, imagine a photo of a mural made with stacked Coca-Cola cases. It was pretty cool. An obvious sign that OHSH-IT'S NEXT WEEK.


I offered to help out at Mike's upcoming bun shoppe, Bonchaz, by doing the menus. It's interesting how menu drawing turned into an interesting designing opportunity and amazingly enough, two blackboards took a whole day to do. But it was really refreshing to design something using a completely different medium. The official opening day ETA is next Monday. Look out for it!!

The day has mentally exhausted me. I had to help facilitate a focus group today at the Surrey campus. Driving to Surrey was a nerve-wracking experience. The focus session was an hour and a half long and, as usual, the conversation went on a tangent but we got some pretty interesting feedback out of it. But ugh, focus groups are so energy consuming...

I've been putting this off for as long as possible, but it's finally time for serious portfolio revision action. I've been having difficulty narrowing down a mentorship opportunity for my practicum class but I finally got a few leads. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the placements are of pretty high caliber so I have to [somehow] show a certain level of skill that's at least close to their standard. Unfortunately my half-assed port done just for the sake of completing the course req's from last year won't do.

While gathering my port stuff, I looked back at my old layouts and damn, I must've lost my creative skills somewhere. I think I'm jealous of my past self. Whatever happened to me after I entered post secondary?? It feels like I can't seem to design anything I'm happy with nowadays... These graphic design standards/expectations of "reality" really does bind you down.

Okay, must stop typing. I foresee a busy weekend. Portfolio first.

Portfolio, Traveling, Eating...

With some additional effort, I finally put my revised portfolio up (after a possible future employer and an uncle requested it all on the same day). I'm not completely happy with it but it will do for now.

Friday night I had the Griffon at the Vancouver Hotel with Uncle Pond, Auntie April and my grandpa. The food there never ceases to amaze as usual. The bread, especially, rocked. But then again, I love freshly baked western bread in any restaurant. I had myself fish because I remembered the awesome prime rib I already had earlier in the week at Chops. I also delivered a dozen cupcakes to my uncle by request, though he has yet to tell me what he thinks of them.

Sunday, the Team Cupcakes (+Mina's sister) went to Seattle for a day. Met up with everyone at Mina's place a bit after 7 (Lisa forgot to wake up and we ended up waiting in front of her house for a while). Mina and sis brought us awesomely disgusting mcdix breakfast and we were on our way.

Our first stop was the Seattle Premium Outlet. The museum and tours we were going to visit don't open until later, so we decided to do shopping first. Unfortunately it was only 9am and it didn't open for another hour so we went next door to visit the casino. Everyone played at least a dollar worth of penny slots and only Vee 'earned' anything (which she got rid of by losing it all). After the amusing diversion, we split up to do some personal shopping for an hour. An hour was not enough for me, even though I only wanted to visit 4 stores, but I barely made it through. We continued on our way down the i-5 to the glass museum (for Chihuly) in Tacoma but we lost our way. I regret not bringing the GPS. It was a bit past noon already and there were other places we wanted to visit, so we decided to skip it and perhaps leave it for another day.

We found the EMP|SFM (for Frank Gehry!) and ended up unintentionally spending a few hours in there. We also found out that the penny stamp machines don't do well with Canadian pennies. As much as we wanted a shinier and newer penny for mushing, they're too thin for the whole imprint to fit. The Canadian penny attempts turned out to be rather awkward shaped circles instead of ovals.

Our next stop was the Underground Tour, which we made in time for next scheduled tour at 5pm. The lady we ended up following was rather monotone and talked rather fast, so we didn't really catch most of her jokes. The way she spoke felt quite memorized so it did feel rather boring. However! The story itself about Seattle was rather interesting. They tried to worry us about the rats but we only really just saw one (and that was outside in the back street) and another, which was already dead. I got a bit of a headache from all the smell but I managed.

The Mcdix breakfast was rather filling for me so by the time the tour was over (~7pm), I finally felt hungry. They wanted to eat at the Cheesecake Factory so indeed that is where we went. MOAR BREAD. I did some serious bread hording and that kinda prevented me from finishing my meal and having dessert but no fear, I brought some to go!

Before we continued on, we stopped at the gas station for a refill. There were some rather frustrating complications but we managed to get gas at the end. The gas was also a lot cheaper than we expected (damn you amerikans and your cheap gas *shakes fist*).

The last stop was Walmart - yay for 24 hours! They did some serious shopping but I only ended up getting a drink and some USA-exclusive Iced Tea flavoured Ice Breakers. Though I do regret not getting Kingdom Hearts RE:Chain of Memories when I saw it there. I was turned off by the exchange rate but now that I think about it, the game's rare now. DAMN. I'll probably never see it again.

We took Pac Hwy back to avoid the rather frightening 80+ min wait that was shown on the announcement board on our way to the Peace Arch... even then, we still didn't get home until after 2am. The day after, I did some serious sleeping. Serious. 12 hour serious.

Marchtastic

Before I start typing away at my review on Skies of Arcadia Legends and while taking a break from posting up (aka. tagging) my old LJ entries, let's talk about this week and stuff in general.

I suddenly had this itch to clean yesterday night, at like, 1am SO I went and cleaned out the whole front room that used to be my computer room, which used to be the gaming room, which also used to be my brother's room before that. The room's now a giant closet slash the place where I put all my empty figurine packaging. The room was once piled messily with huge empty boxes (my computer parts, my mom's laptop box, my mom's massage machine box) and clothes but now they're neatly sorted and organized thanks to moi. I then followed to vacuum the place the next morning (earlier this morning). My room was recently cleaned too... Hm, I should seriously take a picture of it before it piles up again.

The server my domains are currently sitting on is officially mine. My friend (Mike) who was sharing it with me for the last 10? years has decided to give up on it for good. It'll be a bit of a toll on my wallet, being unemployed and all still but I will continue to keep it. I am considering hosting other people to balance off the bill but I don't know anyone who needs it. That just means I'll need to work harder to find a job... that is, if I'm aiming for both AX and PAX...

Speaking of which, AX days planned are July 1 - 7. Just waiting on more better hotel announcements and Shi2 to hurry up and find time off to buy plane tickets. Not to mention, they need more guest announcements. Effing smile.dk, Yamaguchi Kappei and Nozomu Sasaki's appearance at sakuracon d-doesn't faze me one bit...!!

PAX's "limited number of badges" is a bit concerning... But budget is not confirmed so I better not yet.Semester end approaches and I've got some serious revamping to do for most of the projects I've done thus far. Been quite unsatisfied with how most of them have turned out so I'll be (hopefully) dedicating this weekend to do just that.

While on the topic of projects, my upcoming portfolio revamp turns out to be the same colours I used in my current. I was having trouble figuring out what colours "suited" me, and my classmate kept urging me to use orange because I was an "orange person." She can imagine me wearing orange (I have no orange clothes) and said it was perhaps it was because my hair is orange?! Either way, I didn't accept such a crappy answer so I kept looking for a colour combo. I somehow ended up poking around the Pantone community and (re)encountered the colorology page to find that my colour was indeed orange. That wasn't the only thing... Back at school, while I was working on my portfolio, I began looking at my old portfolio site just to see what stuff I plan on keeping and in fact, I've forgotten that my page was actually already orange. So finally, hey, what the heck, sure orange it is. So it's official, I'm orange.

First Winamp Skin!

I just finished a CCS winamp skin two days ago.

Click.

Orange up your life.

I'm ever so PROUD of myself, I actually finished the winamp skin~!!! Err, no screenshots at the moment, but feel free to download and just imagine me in your head dancing around happily... Clickie! It's CCS themed and is VERY orange. But the results were pretty pleasing either way.



Currently, I'm missing a friend's birthday party right now. I'm not going because I don't know anyone there except the birthday boy. Joy. And I found out sort of last minute that Sach might be going. Ah... well then. Which reminds me, I could go to a praise a worship thing tonight that May asked me to go to too. Gee, I feel like staying at home though. And.. HAPPY BIRTHDAY FLO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We're going to SO celebrate it BIG TIME throughout the holidays.. w00t w00t!

The day before, I was desperate to find an Ayashi no Ceres wallpaper, but there wasn't one decent enough (for me anyway XP) so I went and made my own. Thus, you may see new desktop pikucha! Also on that very same day, I had the urge to make my own winamp skin to match my wallpaper, which I failed on doing so the first day though. Err, I'm trying to do my very best but bah, I haven't made any before in my life and I suddenly decide to make some now.. ish difficult (to me cuz I don't really know how to get it all perfect n stuff x_x).



Server died on me all morning... o_x

The day was rather hectec (rather prefered than tedious)... I was overjoyed when I got 19.5/20 on my S.S. maps of Canada! I got .5 taken off for not colouring NFL! Ahahaha... anyway, I was worried because my colouring seriously sucks (especially with pencil crayons >_<). So again, last block I had it free because Price told me to take the block off. As Jonathan and I walked around boredly, after taking a stop at my locker --- the fire alarm rings! We stood outside for a whole 45 mins and when we got back in, they announced that someone chucked a smoke bomb into the Art room that stunk up the whole 3rd floor. That's pretty cool.. XP



It was weird how I got home and I suddenly thought about KOS-MOS. Me thinking... nice perdy blue hair, and the helmet thingy.. ooooh. And I thought, hey, I know Xenosaga's gunna kick ass and my fav. character so far's the main char, Shion.. so so like, why not make a shrine? Lots of thinking involved when I was thinking. So after a big bunch of thinking, I might even make one. But when it'll start... well, that'll be a while before I figure that out.