Posts for 'Personal'

I thought I’d just fire off a little post on what happened today. XD

I went and bought an iPad 3G 64GB. 😀

While I’m extremely happy to have an iPad now, what I had to go through to actually get one as of today miffed me a little bit.

I originally ordered my iPad from the Apple website, however I was told I wouldn’t receive it until June 7 (Still more than a week away!). When I jumped online today, I found that most electronic consumer shops in Perth were fully stocked to the brim with iPads, ready to purchase right then and there. So I immediately jumped up, ran over to my nearest JB Hi Fi and bought my iPad from there. I then returned to my desk and instantly canceled my June 7 pre-ordered one.

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I had a rather enlightening experience involving editing a page on Wikipedia last month. When an edit conflict arises, it’s a pretty interesting situation. Wikipedia is set-up not as a voted democracy, but such a way everyone reach a consensus on the changes, else you incur the wrath of the admins. Here’s my story on my first ever foray into it.

When I was building my MicroPoints iPhone app, the primary source of information on the Microsoft Points conversion rate came from the Microsoft Points Wikipedia page. At the time, the article had displayed a chart on the MSPoints conversion rates.
Of all the research I had done online, this was one of the most comprehensive places on the internet that dealt with the conversion rates. As such, I based most of my conversion metrics on this chart. 🙂

Shortly after I released MicroPoints, I went back to the page to find this chart missing. 🙁
Checking the editing history, I found that another Wiki user had deemed the chart as a potential advertising and deleted it. I thought this was in error, and undeleted it stating it was a demonstration of currency conversion, as per any other currency page on Wikipedia. The other user said that this didn’t justify its presence on the page, and proceeded to remove it. In what I could probably call a rather n00bish move on my behalf, I nearly sparked an edit war by continuously restoring it,  with the other user removing it.

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An interesting item arrived in the mail today. It was an A4 envelope addressed to me, sent from a PO box in Los Angeles.
As I opened it, I was wondering what the heck it was… until I noticed the yellow highlighter markings. 🙂

It’s a signed page from one of the copies of the shooting scripts to the movie Clerks 2, specifically, the one that belonged to Jeff Anderson (The character Randal). ^_^

Now while I am overly very thrilled to now own what I’d like to call ‘a piece of film history’, I must remember that the origin of this script page coming to me is quite a sad one indeed. Instead of re-paraphrasing what happened, I’d like to quote the story that Jeff has written:

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I did a lot of thinking on whether I should write a blog post about this, but after the behest of several friends, I figured what the hey. ^_^;

After the cryptic statements in my Twitter, Facebook and MSN, some people are slightly aware that I spent a week in hospital in December last year. It’s a pretty long story, so I haven’t really elaborated on it at all beyond those comments. But since quite a few people have sent me messages asking WTF happened, I’ve decided to come clean and write the whole shebang here.

Just for the record, if you’re squeamish about surgery and blood and graphic detail and all that, you may want to skip this one. I’m not holding anything back here, and some parts might be a bit icky.  XD

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Woohoo! We’re back in business! 😀

So, I’m sorry to say that EpicLensFlares no longer exists on the internets. Long live EpicLensFlares.
In its place is this lovely new blog here, built on a totally new copy of WordPress, with a new name, of which I now plan to simply call ‘my blog’. 🙂
Now, at this point, I’m sure you’re a little confused as to what happened exactly… why I basically stopped posting in the middle of last year, and have now come back with a totally new system. There are a multitude of reasons, most of them stemming from my lack of experience, for why I changed everything and I’ll briefly mention them here.

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Ugh…. midnight on the next night, and I’ve only just recovered enough to actually write a blog post. XD Whoo what a weekend!

So, Thursday night was the family celebration, and Saturday was the celebration between me and my good friends. 😀

My parents had left for the weekend to go down to our holiday house, so I decided that this year ’round, so I figured, we’ll do it at my house, but this time I was going to take matters entirely into my own hands. This time, I’ll set up the house, I’ll buy all of the food, I’ll prime the entertainment systems, get the cake, and eventually do all of the cooking. 🙂

So, invitations were sent out about a week out beforehand (and sometimes less for a few who I couldn’t contact straight away lol) and the planning went underway. Dad was kind enough to sit down with me and help draw out a huuuge shopping list of stuff to buy including meat, salad, meat, cake, meat, chips, wine, coke, beer and all that stuff and on Saturday, I went out to Garden City to go and buy it all. 😀

It took a good hour or so of return trips from my car to the shops and back, but finally, I got it all loaded into my boot, and safely back to my house. 😀

It took some pushing, and shoving, but I somehow managed to cram all of the perishables into the fridge. I’m not quite sure how, but I did (TARDIS fridge…? XD )

30 minutes later, the guests started to rock up! One of my friends, Peter also brought some ingredients along as he was going to help out by cooking his world famous Bagna Càuda, quite possibly the most delicious as well as unhealthy foodstuff known to humankind. XD

After the majority of the people rocked up, we opened the presents! This year, I was very lucky to receive a copy of KoToR 2, Dirty Minds, a dirty game involving clean words, a copy of books and manga, Red Steel, as well as a plushie version of the virus, Chlamydia. XD

We played the Dirty Minds for a bit (of which I reeeeally couldn’t help myself but to blurt out extremely profane words 😛 ), and after I won the first round on account of the cards not being shuffled correctly, I raced off and set up the games room, and started the food.

Once all of the guests arrived, the cheese was promptly dispensed and we played some video games. The first game we played was Taiko no Tatsujin on the PS2, and after which we played some Rock Band. After that, we kind of drifted away from the games and focused more on chatting. By now, Peter was looking at putting together his deadly dish and I was going to cook the meat.

Sadly, some of the guests had to leave at that point due to jobs and other commitments, so we took a quick snapshot (sans one who had to dash) and the remainder of us set out to dinner. 😀

After a bit of futzing around on the barbeque and putting together the salad, we finally came up with a full course meal, including Bagna Càuda for starters, followed by the main course which was steak and sausages with a side of potato salad and Caesar salad.

By this point, we were well and truly stuffed, so much so that the concept of the birthday cake itself made our gag reflexes twinge. XD So… we decided to go off and watch Futurama to let our stomachs empty a bit.

After an hour or so, we came back, lit the candles, sung obligatory songs, and then extinguished said candles on the cake. Sadly, we were still quite full, so only a smidgen of the cake actually got cut at that point. XD

And finally, at which point, it was time to pack up, and everyone went home… with full bellys and thankfully happy thoughts of the day. ^_^

I’m very proud of this birthday. Normally for birthdays, we usually go to a restaurant (Where people cook for us) or have it at our homes, where the parents refuse to not help haha.

This was truly the first time that the entire event was my own machination, and the fact it didn’t blow up in my face makes me glad.

On reflection, I definitely bought too much food lol. At the end of the party, there were still around 45 bottles of beer, 2 bottles of wine, a full platter of sushi, 2 liters of ice cream, 3/4 of the cake, as well as half of the supply of meat and salad was left over. I suppose too much is better than too little, but I think this was pretty ridiculous haha.

Either way, when my parents returned today, they said they were very glad to see all that food, and they’ll glady help get rid of it post-haste. XD

All in all, I think that was a good 22nd birthday. 🙂