Sunday 20 April 2008

The Post-Exam Beginning

School's out, the holidays are in, and already the post-exam activities are starting to pile up such that I'm having trouble keeping track of them. Not that I'm particularly adept at keeping track of most matters in a non-last-minute kinda way, but it's still wreaking havoc on my schedule nonetheless.

Like waking up at 12pm today to SMSes telling me that I have to be in school for OCIP meetings at 1030h tomorrow.

Anyhooser, the laptop problem's now solved so I've got a computer to use, and I've been spending a huge part of my time the past few days sorting out my data, which has amounted to quite a fsckin' great deal of effort to anyone who might observe me. It's not an especially important endeavour but it's just a personal hang-up if I don't deal with it, so in a 'the best way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it' kinda way, I've been facing the screen in loserish fashion for quite a bit.

The story behind the laptop is this. To make things simpler, the laptops in question shall be dubbed Quasimodo and Immortal II (courtesy of Angie). I've been using Quasimodo since late J1, which was back in 2003. About 3 months or so in January, Quasimodo died for the first time. What ensued were 4 attempts to revive him, and each time he died again. Along the way, the technician upgraded his hardware because hardware glitches were suspected, and I switched to using Immortal II as a makeshift computer, which was actually my dad's but he doesn't use it either because it had slowed down quite a bit and its system was so unstable it couldn't do much else other than simple surfing and MSN, or he's got another laptop provided by his office, or both. To survive the 3 months, I subsisted off whatever minimal things I could do with Immortal II and pimped off the computers in the library, so for once the library became a regular haunt of mine. After the 4th death of Quasimodo, we decided enough was enough so the technician transferred the goodies and upgrades from Quasimodo to Immortal II and, in the process, Immortal II got pimped into Immortal II Hyper.

So yeh that's the story. Quasimodo is somewhat comatosed now in a bag next to me, while Immortal II Hyper sits pristine and pretty on my table. Angie thinks that I'm heartless and that Immortal II Hyper sucks and doesn't deserve to exist because he killed Quasimodo. I think we shouldn't anthropomorphize and humanise computers and other relevant technological apparatus. :] Getting emotionally connected to stuff that can die on you either so easily or so suddenly is like creating little potential suicides.

Saturday marked the end of the exams with the 2hr BGS paper at 9am. My aim was seriously to finish the paper as fast as I could, and that I did, rounding off my last bit of work by the 45th minute. We can't leave until an hour passes, so I waited til 10am, handed in my paper, and then joined a bunch of random people - Eleanor, Peihua and Clara - who were all early-submission champions, for some neither-here-nor-there meal at Raffles City's Mos Burger.

Eleanor is really funny in a kok way. Let's just say that she never knew social science exists as a faculty in SMU; the rest is up to your imagination.

Headed back to school to meet Angie and Isaac, and we whiled the time away by going to the arcade and playing our trademarked Time Crisis II and other random games. Isaac had to join his girlfriend for a bit, so Angie and I ended up catching The Forbidden Kingdom which stars Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Liu Yi Fei.

The movie marks the first time the two martial arts maestros Jet Li and Jackie Chan have starred together. Richard said he heard or read somewhere that the cameras were having trouble keeping up with their fight scenes and stunt sequences.

On first impression, I thought it was gonna be some rather serious Chinese-style show, but it turned out to be really funny and somewhat crappy, but not in a bad way. Some of the dialogue and scenes, though serious at times, were really laden with downright spastic and slapstick content. And the funnier thing is that it might not have been intentional hahar. It was, on the whole, not too bad though. Stuff that homes should have on standby so that visitors can watch on occasions like Chinese New Year.

What really sucked was whenever the Chinese actors and actresses had English dialogue. What's more painful than that is when Jet Li and Jackie Chan both engage in English dialogue coversation.

Liu Yi Fei is quite alluring in a 耐看 kinda way. Her prettiness just grows on you.

We then headed down to the airport to send Yitwen off, forming the biggest fanclub in the house that day. Dude's headed down to Dubai for 3 weeks at least for his business study mission trip. After which we had quite a neat impromptu BBQ-cum-steamboat dinner at Rachel's place.

There was more running around today - meeting Chinhong at Seng Kang, getting my laptop sponge casing at Ang Mo Kio, then meeting Mikaela and Isaac to get the KL trip tickets - and there'll be more running around tomorrow.




Failure is not an option; it comes bundled with the software.

Audio Candy:
Tenacious D Vs Sum 41 - Things I Want

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hahah slapstick bad-english kungfu movies are the bomb!
And Quasimodo deserves better than to be left comatosed in a bag beside you HEARTLESS. ):