Falling and Gambling
The last 2 days or so I've been quite active outside. Yesterday, due to the nice weather, I decided to get a few things done. I stayed home long enough to get through to the tax enquiry line to find out what my unused 2004 RRSP deduction limit is. I know, last minute like usual. We have until May 2nd but the telefile is pretty easy so I'm not worried. My brother had gone to pick up his keys from Oakville (he is moving out of course) and since he usually isn't proactive enough to get certain things done, I decided to exchange his monitor for him. I had a few packages to send out to Japan as well. I was lucky, there was an older man working today at the Post Office at Woodside Square. He saw what I was trying to do (ship re-using the Chapters box containers) and he suggested a way to save me money. I think he saved me about $10 and I managed to get all the books into one package. I really appreciate retailers who are willing to help their customers out and I think he deserves special notice.
There's a Staples near where Alison lives, down by Sheppard Ave. and McCowan Road. I called before hand to make sure they had the Samsung 930B in stock. It was a little ackward roller blading with the LCD monitor (in a box) in one hand but since it really wasn't far this was the best way for me to get there. The exchange went well, except the new box was missing a DVI cable (for the digital connection). When my brother got back in, he set it up right away with just the D-Sub cable and told me this one did not seem to have any dead pixels. I called the shop and arranged to pick one up from the package I had returned. By the time that I left and returned, my brother had gone through one game of UT 2004.
I met up with Horace, De, and Carol just after. They had invited me along with some friends to roller blade at Milliken park. I was looking for something similar to this, who would have thought it was so close to me. I enjoyed my day roller blading, and coupled with the running I did the previous day I was actually feeling a bit of it in my legs by the end of the day. Looking forward to going again though, I like roller blading near the water, and at least there's a little pond in the park. Oh, and I was the only one to fall... like 3 times. Not that I'm clumsy per se, I just try to experiment more to move out of my intermediate stage of roller blading. I warned a kid in the park to always use protection.
We had another poker night at Judy's house that night. It has been a long time, but this time Simon and Calvin brought poker chips. The feeling is so much better instead of playing with cash. I managed to win just a little bit this time (I think overall I'm still at a loss) but there was a little tension centered around money. This is the first time this has come up, but I'm not sure how I should have dealt with it. Judy mentioned that my brother still owed money for a snowboarding trip we took. I thought at that time it was all settled so I think I've nearly forgotten about it now. In this case I know Judy and Kenny are good people and would not try to intentionally cheat me so I can only have faith in their statement. Though for some reason I thought it was all solved before and that feeling is hard to shake. We had adjusted the payment scheme to make it more reasonable. I believe when we went Simon had owed me money and my brother owed Kenny money. Since I see my brother all the time and the cost of the tickets are the same then I remember saying that Simon should owe Kenny and my brother can owe me instead. At least, that is what I feel really happened. Poker is fun with friends, but maybe mixing money in isn't such a good idea. But technically I was up coming out of the day so I can at least be happy about that!
Wendy surprised me in a conversation this morning. She's always looking out for me, and her latest warning was that maybe I might be heading towards being CHAV. Apparently this is some frequently used derogatory slang being used in the UK. Though the definition still isn't clear apparently you have to be a cross between a prick and a poser. For instance, I guess a CHAV will buy many fake Burberry items. Luckily for me I am a fake CHAV since most of my items are real... except 2 that are questionable. Thanks Wendy, you are always making me worry about something new! I think I should ask Karen, she spent some time in England working (She was mugged by some CHAVs I believe...).
I wasted most of the day swapping PC parts with my brother. He just recieved his
new 19" Samsung LCD monitor yesterday. It really is nice, the total size is smaller than my 17" NEC LCD (because of the housing) but of course it is 2" larger in terms of viewing area. The model he picked up is a
930B I believe. It is digital so the images are quite sharp. He has a dead pixel and I encourage him to exchange it quickly before his no hassel return policy date is up. I had to exchange my LCD at least once when I bought it originally. It really bothers me having dead pixels.
Some other good news, I recieved my
Toshiba webcam for my notebook today. I have to say, it really is hard to beat the Japanese when it comes to good looking designs. This is just a rebranded Logitech Notebook Pro camera but the white and silver match my computer so well. Also Yoji sent me 2
carrying cases, one for
SD media cards, and the other for
compact flash media. My father has a tendency to misplace his extra CF card so I wanted him to have this case. These cases are designed so nicely. The look is actually quite cute.
I finally found a program to allow me to enter unicode characters into my mp3 ID3 tags. I spent most of the morning fixing my mp3s but I will probalby give up soon, there are too many to fix. I'm a little disappointed, the weather turned
Talks of marriage
I recieved some good news that my friend Christine Wong is now engaged. This is probably a bad sign for me who isn't even close to that stage in life but she is a great girl who has had some unfortunate problems in recent years. Already a bad sign, this makes 3 people this year who I know have gotten engaged. Karen, Pascal, and now Christine. I'll miss the girls, Pascal.. well his girl friend stole him from us long ago.... actually only like a year ago. It was pretty funny, though he might not want to admit it. When he was single, he wanted to go out and club every weekend. As soon as he found a girl, he settled down right away, his desire to go clubbing disappeared over night.
I should get to bed soon, I've wished Helen a happy birthday, and after I decide if I want to go downtown early tomorrow then I'll head to bed. Maybe finish off a few episodes of Voyager.
I guess the question that is starting to move in my mind... where will I be, when all my friends are married?
So far this month has been the busiest for birthdays. Today is Yoji's birthday, or was it yesterday since he is in Japan. He's been nice enough to send me the webcam that matches my notebook from Toshiba, though Canada customs did a strange thing. They rejected the package because there was no English for the sender's name. That obviously means Yoji used only Kanji. English using countries make it very difficult to use other languages. Even the Windows OS in English doesn't allow for unicode the way my Japanese Windows OS does. It is virtually the same thing, and many of the Windows applications support unicode now, why does it have to be so difficult?
Yesterday was a busy day. I was already very tired for no apparent reason all day. I woke up early and accompanied my mother (who is visiting along with my father) back to my grandmother's place. I wanted to use the gym at her condo. Afterwards my father and I returned back to my house here to pick up my brother so we can go out to eat. Like usual we head to Congee King which actually isn't that great a restaurant, but we always go when my father arrives in town. The rest of the day my father and my brother are moving items to Oakville while I was trying to plan things for the evening. CW had contacted me and I think I annoyed her with my indecisiveness. I really had no desire to go downtown to eat Indian food, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to play her little games. I ended up with a good meal at my usual favourite restaurant; Magic Wok.
Sai and I had worked out kind of a plan and we made an agreement that night. He'd head downtown with me to go to Helen's birthday clubbing event, and then I'd hang out with him when we go over to his friend's karaoke event. It started off pretty bad, I even wanted to cancel The weather was horrible, and I just felt tired. CW didn't finalize any plans so instead of waiting around I finally decided to just stick with the original plan. Originally we were told to meet up at 10. We left just after 10 and ended up downtown more around 11. Surprisingly Helen and the gang still weren't there, contacting her was no easy feat. I'll know next time that she has a super delayed Chinese time that she runs on. Over all the club, Havana, wasn't bad. There are two floors, niether of them were big. I was impressed by the dancers they had hired, caucasian girls who had good looks and could dance well. The group finally arrived and it was all good. I little slow because I didn't know anyone, but I managed to be introduced to most of the girls by the end of the night. It was a pleasant surprise to run into Debbie again (Helen's old roommate). Another pleasant surprise was running into Andrew. Just Sai and I amongst a sea of strangers was a bit uneasy, but throw in Andrew and it was bad at all. He was somewhat distracted by a fairly attractive female paying him a lot of attention on the dance floor. Lets wish him luck.
We had to ditch close to 1. My "hot" friend (quoted from one of the girls) and I headed over to Focus, the new Monopoly. On our way out near the coat check, he runs into his ex. It seemed like all the girls wanted a piece of him that night.
Karaoke was a big surprise as well. We headed into the wrong area and ran into Coral and Doug! This night was full of surprises. We left it a mystery how we knew she was there and she pointed us over to the birthday girl in her group. We walked over and proceeded to wish the wrong girl happy birthday. After we were corrected, we wished the right girl happy birthday and shamefully returned to Coral. We said our quick hellos and goodbyes and went to find Sai's friend to wish her happy birthday. Already at 3 birthdays for this weekend not including Yoji's!
The night was a success. I enjoyed the club, and the people. Met a lot of girls which I haven't done for awhile, and it was always a good surprise to see people you know.
Late Night Roller Blading
Today was pretty confusing. I guess my parents might come tomorrow to help my brother move his things. Which means I should get ready myself. I've started to get a feeling of prices for China so that I can create some sort of budget before I go.
I e-mailed Carol today, because I found out that SANS has changed their volunteer policy, in the past, it was free to volunteer. A perk for volunteering is that you get to take the course, but this year apparently they are charging $500 USD to volunteer. I was told this was to pay for the course material. I was looking forward to helping them out, but seriously $500 USD to volunteer is pretty insane. I have a feeling I won't be attending anymore SANS conferences. This frees up my schedule for the week coming up at least, I guess I can go to that Winternals conference Tuesday.
Crazy Helen from UWat looks like she's having her birthday party coming up this weekend. I almost forgot about the evite until some Jason Li decided to threaten me with an Ong Bak if I didn't reply. From what I hear.. it hurts to be Ong Bak... needless to say I replied. I'm going to try to make it out, but I won't know anyone else so hopefully I can find someone else to tag along.
GTO is still downloading slowly, bit torrent hasn't been great for me these days. I've finally finished nearly every episode except 7. once I get that downloaded I can finally burn it off to free up space on my desktop computer. Eventually I want enough space to image my notebook again. I was out rollerblading at 1 am this morning, just coming back from Sai's. I dumped about 5 gigs of music and videos to his file server. Now I need to get it off my notebook hard drive. 40 gigs really isn't a lot, I need to learn to not use this thing like I do my desktop. But what should I do? Should I get a new drive?
Good luck to Sun Qiang on his exam tomorrow, he's still up talking to me about how Pandas don't know how to make love. That will help his Micro econ lots!
A jobless schedule
There has been a number of times in my life when I have been without a job for a duration of time. The earlier portion of this current period seemed like any other; relaxed and wasted. Recently though I have noticed there are always things to do, enough that I can even feel busy dispite having no "job" to go to. The housing situtation has been basically resolved, I think it is pretty much a sure thing that this house has been sold. My brother has been making arrangements to move out to Oakville, and I have spoken briefly with Sai about moving into his basement. After I confirm with my parents that it has been sold and the process of closing has begun then I will start reducing the amount of material items I possess. Over the last 2 or 3 years I seem to have accumulated quite a bit of junk. Well, not really junk I have a lot of spare computer components, and a lot of old clothes. I hate the feeling that I have wasted money on buying these things, but truthfully I need to admit that if I do not plan to use them again, even keeping them around for emergencies is costing me space. When I move out to Sai's I plan to have only what I will bring with me to China.
My Mandarin course has been going well. I was a bit rusty yesterday in class due to lack of practice during the week. It is fairly hard by yourself not living in the environment to focus on studying a foreign language. The restaurant we went to (Sichaun Garden) was decent, I thought the food was acceptable and the fish dish recommend to me by Mingjian was good. We had a dish that looked just like streaded beef with pepper, except it turned out to be very spicey. Sun Qiang brought out a friend, Jerry, that came to Canada from Shanghai. He was a nice person, very helpful speaking with my classmates. He made some good recommendations about doing business in Shanghai.
I've been recieving a few e-mails from Akira recently who is still out in Montreal. He has been studying hard and plans to return to Japan sometime in November to December. I guess he can't stand the cold, Montreal being a great place to experience cold weather. He mentioned something interesting in his e-mails, that when he spoke to people in Montreal and informed them that he just arrived from Toronto, they often ask him which city is better. They then proceed to bring up positive points about Montreal as to sway his decisions. He likes both cities and made an analogy to this situtation, it is similar to people from Osaka and Tokyo. People in Tokyo and Toronto do not care as much about Osaka or Montreal (respectively) but the reverse does not seem true, the smaller city seems more self-concious in the shadow of the bigger one.
It has been a slow process redownloading Great Teacher Onizuka. I think the effort is worth it, this is one of my all time favourite dramas. Rewatching it agian has strengthen that thought, there are many points or "lessons" that are good for me to focus on, including the thought of Travelling to China. In one of the episodes
Kuroda Miki (黒田美樹) who plays Nomura Tomoko has to make a decision to drop out of school in her hopes to become an idol, or to play it safe finish her schooling and live the normal life of a Japanese women. Of course everyone recommends that she do the sensible thing, except
Sorimachi Takashi (反町隆史) who plays plays the teacher Onizuka forces her to leave class, because doubt stopped her from taking a risk. He doesn't want her to regret not trying something because of her inability to make a decision. When I reflect on the fun I had traveling to Seattle by myself, I know this is a chance I may not have again.
This afternoon I recieved a surprise call from Carol Calhoun of the SANS institute. I have worked with her twice before in separate SANS conferences. Apparently they had a drop out a week before the conference in Toronto so I agreed to fill in for the volunteer position. The volunteer work is actually hard work since the time period is so long. But I enjoyed my previous experiences and the information has always been good for me. I will be monitoring SECURITY 504: Hacker Techniques, Exploits & Incident Handling this time, so I will be downtown all day for next week starting from Saturday.
点心 and broken cars
Yesterday I went down town to find the Chinese restaurant my classmates and I will be trying after class. I took a few pictures that I attached to an e-mail to them. Since it looks like a nice enough place I decided to go ahead with making a reservation for Tuesday evening. On the way there the Spadina streetcar was stuck and a crowd formed waiting for it. We were amused by a mixed couple playing with a Japanese Albo dog. The crowd must have really confused the sensors, it was not very interactive, the highlight of his movements being when he knocked over a ball.
Takeshi was also downtown waiting for me, and we walked back to Eaton Centre to catch up with Rui since I knew all the stores were closing. They were a bit delayed getting out but We got together for supper with some of the other Artizia girls and headed to Milestones. Of course Mielstones is very busy on the weekend and we were forced over to Montana where I found out one of the girls, Tanya I believe, actually grew up in Sarnia! In fact, she went to the same school as I did, and her older sister should have been in my grade. My memory must be really going, we threw out a million names before we settled on one that we both knew in person.
Right after we proceeded to head to Rui's place, but Takeshi ended up forgetting is cell phone at Montana so when he found out infront of City Hall, we ended up turning around to go back to retreive it.
I had another engagement that night, it was a friend of Mike Yam's birthday (Susan). They had just finished dinner and asked to meet us at the intersection of Yonge and Queen. I was surprised when I got there because DJ Lee had showed up with his girl friend. Yun is a good person, but can be a bit abrasive with her bluntness. It seems to have caused a bit of tension with the birthday and we ended up splitting up after walking, yet again, along Queen street looking for something to do at 11 before everything closes. I took DJ Lee and his girl friend back to meet Rui and Wei and we hung out for a bit before they drove me to catch the subway.
On the way back I actually fell asleep several times. I swear I don't know how it happened I was a block or so from McCowan and Finch when I closed my eyes briefly. When I opened them again I was just past Markham road. It was so late I think there was only the Blue line left. I ended up walking back home (which really isn't that bad). I stayed up a bit later to find out what really happened that night and then turned in.
I wokeup to my mother's phone call. She had been in town the whole week helping with getting the townhouse sold. She was on her way downtown to head back home to Sarnia. I was lucky though I had almost forgot about a previous commitment to go eat Dim Sum with Simon, Judy, and another girl Natalie. This weekend has been a curse running into women that I don't ideally get along with. I wasn't exactly looking forward to eating with Natalie even though I've only met her once but it is always fun to be out with Judy and Simon.
I ended up rollerblading to meet up with Simon and we headed over to Hwy. 7 and Woodbine for Dim Sum. It was a fun time, and the food was only acceptable to me. After we had decided to go to Yorkdale but along the way Simon's Type R ran out of oil and we were stopped dead on the DVP. Simon's mother dropped by with some oil and we were on our way. We headed back to Sai's place and I introduced him to the wonderful drama Great Teacher Onizuka. It was a relaxing evening.
My body has wasted away
Yesterday I found out truely how bad my body has wasted away to. For a while now people have been commenting on how I seem much skinner. It started with someone at Pacific and recently at Kel and Amy's all you can eat Japanese birthday party Kel mentioned something when he went to grab my breasts. Err.. I'm very close to my friends...
So now that the weather is warming up, I plan to do something about it. I needed groceries so instead of going to the Food Basic 2 blocks away, I decided to try to run 7 blocks up to the Chinese grocery store near my Grandmother's place Big Land Farm (金山). The run was rougher than I thought it would be, I only really made it 3 blocks before I felt I had to slow down. Of course I really didn't have much to eat that day so the low blood sugar level didn't really help. After a small dinner I rested and went to use the gym at my grandmother's condo. I didn't do too much, but I did something which is a start, hopefully I can get up to speed. I've decided that I will try to make this a regular thing now that the weather is a lot nicer. It is fairly easy for me to rollerblade up that way and I can train for running on the treadmill. Let's hope it goes well. My Grandmother is always complaining that I don't visit so this will solve two problems.
Now, I still have the problem of finding a good Chinese restaurant downtown. MingJian recommended Chuan Wei Xuan (川味轩) to me, I believe it is just north of Spadina and Dundas but I need to confirm this before next week. I appreciate other people's opinions though so if you know a spot, leave me feed back.
Mandarin Class Lessons
Lucky for me the TTC strike has been postponed. I hear they'll have talks on Thursday. My Mandarin class every Tues is going well. It really is basic, but since the stress is on oral it really is still a lot of hard work. We ended up covering the rest of the sounds after zi ci si (so zh, ch, sh, r, etc) A few of my classmates talked last week about getting together for Chinese food. There is one lady, a highschool teacher, who never eats Chinese food. Yet she is learning Chinese! This lady, Sally, is doing quite well, I was impressed on the first day she's not afraid to really try the sounds, so most of the time she gets it. Now the problem, which restaurant to go to? If anyone has a good suggestion please feel free to leave me a message or leave a comment. I need a place open after 9, that we can easily get to via the subway or walking. Sally doesn't eat seafood except fish. Nor does she eat pork. She's just as bad as Rui, if I took those two out together I have no clue what I would feed them. Mandarin is coming along slowly, I can't even pronouce Sun Qiang's name properly.
Weekend downtown
This weekend was kind of busy. I'm going to include Monday into this as well. Saturday was Amy and Kelly's birthday party. In the morning I ran downtown and met up with Takeshi. I dropped a few things off with Rui (my MD player and DVDs with the Japanese dorama 'Pride' [プライド]) and noticed he was actually behind cash for once. It was a busy day so I'm sure he was enjoying himself with all the women in the store. Takeshi helped me translate a few of my Startmenu customization items and I raced back home to meet up with Daag who drove in from Waterloo for the birthday. The plans were a bit messed up because I was a bit confused who was going to pick up Alison and Jesse from Scarborough Town Centre, but it turned out that Simon went to pick them up. In my haste I forgot to bring another DVD copy of 'Pride' to someone else. It was ironic that we were told to arrive at the restaurant(Yang's Kitchen) on time but the people arranging the party arrived late. It was all you can eat Japanese, which is great. I wanted to invite Takeshi originally, but really bringing a Japanese guy out for all you can eat Chinese run Japanese food really was a bad idea. The Japanese food was really not that great, though you can't really mess up raw fish. The maki wasn't good, a bit soft, no firm texture and even made strangely sometimes. I almost couldn't recognize the Futo Maki. Someone ordered way too much beef as well, I think we had about 7 plates of beef left over, but the white tuna was great and so was the company. The rest went on to Karaoke, while Daag and I went over to mess around with Simon's new Media PC. It really is a beautiful thing on HDTV.
Monday Ming Jian came down to visit. She picked up a few Visa forms for me at the Chinese consulate and then we went to eat over at Asia Legend. The quality of the food was pretty poor surprisingly, my first time there was much better. We had a lot to talk about, and she has some difficult time ahead of her. I will be here to support her because she deserves support, she really is a great girl. Hopefully nothing will get in the way of our Shanghai trip this summer.
Afterwards I went to see Rui at work, ran into Anna whom I haven't seen for a while. Rui was about 2 minutes away with Takeshi so we met up and took Takeshi to pick up his first Krispy Kreme donut. I helped update Rui's computer while Sora and Rui cooked me Pasta. Okay... sorry Sora the pasta was a little over cooked. Don't worry you'll get it next time, just get that sauce stain off of your white shirt. I almost didn't make it for the last subway, but I ran which I haven't done for a while. I'm thinking about doing the Nike 10k. Anyone interested in joining me?
A short update after forever.
I know it has been forever since I last updated. Speaking about myself has never really been easy for me. I get embarassed easily and self concious. Things that have happened? My plans to go abroad have not been going well at all. I had gone through a month or two of depression with my lack of success and have been re-evaluating my alternatives. This year started off with a lot of bad luck. First my Philips DVD player remote seemed to die on me. There are many options which I can not access without the remote. The player has been great, I download DivX/XVid versions of asian dramas and old StarTrek episodes and watch them right on my TV. After buying a universal remote to fill in for the broken DVD player remote, my TV breaks down. It is a nightmare going through Prima America. My TV was out of warranty by just over a month. I called to complain that it really isn't fair, and after half a month of me chasing the guy finally does something and managed to extend my warranty for repair. I just recieved the repaired unit yesterday.
Something else I picked up yesterday, was my camera again. My camera has been broken for several months. You can laugh but I broke it taking a picture of myself. I had just purchased my new HellyHanson winter jacket and wanted to grab a picture to show some friends (with my snowboard). I setup the camera on my brother's desk and set the self timer. When I walked away the case dragged the camera off the desk and bent the barrel. I waited to get the reciepts from Yoshiro, and after sending it away I thought it was lost because Canada Post did not track the package. I had to wait 20 days for them to investigate, and it ended up at Pentax on the 9th of March. each week after I found it's location I called to chase them to work on it, they finished the job in 2 days (but they have a 4 week turn around time).
The lesson learned? Dealing with Type B personalities can be extremely stressful for Type As. What I should know this already? I know... I know...
What started me to blog again was the fact that MSN Messenger 7 is out. Is it really worth upgrading to? It certainly has a few nice new features. The full screen video conferencing mode, and even the attachment blocking can be useful to a degree though I wish they made it easier to unblock file types that I want. They started something called MSN Spaces, which looks like a combination of a 6 degrees community and a blogging community. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I hate the fact that MSN Messenger auto opens Internet Explorer for a lot of the builtin links, Firefox has been a great browser for me with plugins like Adblock.
Things that have happened recently. The previous weekend I went to Hamilton to visit Ming Jian, she was nice enough to invite me over to visit and stay the evening. She brought a classmate along who originally is from GuangZhou. I had a little bit of a China lesson there. Speaking of China, I currently plan to travel with her when she returns to Shanghai this summer. This has become my alternate plan. I am in week two of my Mandarin beginners class at the Toronto District Board of Education. The class is very simple, but it stresses me to perfect my pronouncation. I have been meeting with Qiang Sun on occasion, he is a great guy who has been very helpful. Maybe I can get by this mental block learning Chinese and actually dig into my roots a little bit.
In the words of Kimura Takuya... 'Maybe...'
