It's been a while

WELL, it has been a long time since I last blogged. Needless to say I was very bored and decided that writing about nothing in particular is more productive that reading through these optimization notes of which I should be doing.

Today was meh. Everything about it was meh. Productivity, gym, basketball, and I almost managed to break a bowl while doing the dishes today.

I need a new hobby.

Advice

I'm not writing this because I want to.

Actually scratch that, yes I am.

Back by popular demand(if one person counts as popular demand), one of my friends of whom shall remain anonymous asked me: "Yibo, how the SHIT am I meant to stop liking someone who doesn't like me because they like their games too much?"

Well fear not, you've asked the the absolute wrong person for this kind of advice but I shall still give it nonetheless.

True, I do like playing my games and for that reason it shall be a very long time before I get truly laid but NEVERTHELESS, I still stick by my initial statement that I am the wrong person to ask for any sort of relationship advice as my life has been a story of failed crushes. Anyway here are the various ways I would recommend for you to stop liking someone:

1.Play some DotA
2.Play some Starcraft 2

Out of the two initial options above, I would definitely recommend the second one as Starcraft 2 is more than a game. It is for that very reason why I will fail all my exams and end up as a bum on the streets but I hope I will dive into this enough so that Aiur will save me and make me a zealot.

3. Try talking to that guy and maybe the relationship will work out(unlikely)

4. Play some more Starcraft 2

5. Exponentially increase your social life so that you stop thinking about that person

6. Play even more Starcraft 2

7. Try to mentally block that person from entering your thoughts and train your mind to be so that inception does not happen to you

8. Just play Starcraft 2, best option by far

I'm off to play some Starcraft 2 and I hope this post helped whoever you are with any possible relationship problems you have.

NOTE: This post is solely intended for amusing myself and any others who may find this amusing and should be actually be taken to any degree of seriousness. However do play Starcraft 2.

Work, work...

As time wears on in the Department of Engineering, I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel to my first year at the University of Auckland.

Well, not quite but you know what I mean. What comes now is something I've always been bad at.

Planning ahead.

I've never been good at it. I've just always been too lazy to do something that's due in two days rather the night before wear my concentration levels sky rockets. That may explain my abysmal results last semester.

And for engineers, planning ahead involves getting an engineering job. Of course, this may seem simple and in truth it probably is a lot more than it should be.

However, I'm doing engineering science.

In all honesty, one of the main reasons I've been putting off finding a job is that I don't quite really know how to. If I was doing civil then sure, everyone knows what civil is. Everyone knows what electrical and software are as well. But when I tell someone that I'm doing engineering science, what generally follows is me saying: "No it's not a conjoint".

To graduate from engineering you would need 800 work hours, 400 general and 400 sub professional. The general 400 hours I'm fine with. It's the sub-professional that gets me.

Last semester I went on a field trip where I visited 2 companies and a power station. Sewage modelling is NOWHERE NEAR for where I plan for myself to go into. Also, if I go for an operations research job which requires excel modelling, it might not count towards my general 400 hours as engineers are very picky.

Thank god we're not like that with our food otherwise we'd all die of either starvation or malnutrition.

Either way I now find myself writing up my CV for a summer internship program at the engineering company OPUS which involves traffic modelling and storm water modelling and stuff. Not quite what I had planned but I guess if I view it as problem solving then it's seems better.

Exam marks anybody?

With the passing of the calamity known as exams, I now currently await the post apocalyptic disaster known as the exam marks. I have already gotten one mark back and to tell the truth, although it is far from great, I'm stoked that I passed.

Now onto my actual blog post.

I initially started this post last night but due to some complexity with distinguishing between hours, I decided to leave this until when I could see the screen without artificial lighting. As a result I completely forgot what I was about to write especially after two games of DotA.

I'm just using this as a space filler.

Anyway, since I can't remember what I was about to rant about I've decided to write about what my plans are. I don't care if you don't care about just how much I don't care about how much you don't care about what my plans are because this is MY BLOG :D. Anyway that was childish and for that I apologize but as I've said already this is just space filler for the length of time that I have not updated this.

Onto my plans.

Since it's the table tennis nationals today, I've decided to go over and watch the teams events today after mowing the lawn and pruning the trees since according to my mum they look ugly. Personally, a tree is a tree to me and most of them look pretty ugly with or without trimming. As for the lawn, what's the point in mowing the lawn when all that happens is that the grass grows back again? Absolutely pointless. I've also begun to have extreme cravings for barbecue pork bread that they sell in this Newmarket bakery in the alleyway where it feels like you may get stabbed. However for the barbecue pork bread, it is completely worth getting stabbed to enjoy that heavenly taste.

Adios, my bread awaits, as does the lawn and the tree.

I hate numbers, especially the floating point kind

One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints, and were stuck in the thick head. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer, and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink, held it out over the beer, and started yelling, "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT YOU BAS***RD!!!!"

Ah British humour, my favourite kind of humour. Many days I sit in front of my television and only see blunt and stupid jokes of which there is no depth, no racism, no inventiveness and most importantly, no ability to create laughs. The greatest ability of humour and jokes is the way we can laugh at ourselves and everyone around us of which can also be used as a form of reflection(this is of minor importance).

More importantly I am about to sit the most excruciatingly annoying and erroneous exam tomorrow.

It has a lot to do with numbers. Big numbers, small numbers, fat numbers thin numbers. Real numbers, floating point numbers, numbers of single precision, numbers of double precision binary numbers, bits, hexadecimal numbers and the list goes on. I always thought accountants were bad enough with their over 15 ways to count a dollar but when I came into engineering science OH BOY did I realize that I only caught a small glimpse of the world.

I think this is due to the fact that engineers, believing that they are a superior life form(me inclusive) decide that in order to segregate ourselves more from modern society, we need another counting and storage system. Not just one system in fact but several hundreds more of these cryptic data storage and arrangement methods which will leave many befuddled and unaware of their present self.

There is also the part we have to nitpick our own errors in these very so-called ingenious methods we have designed. And, as compliant with engineering characteristics, these errors cannot simply be defined as simply "mistakes". Instead, they are given sub-categories to promote and isolate them from the other errors.

The whole flippin' thing is an error if you ask me.

Anyway, I had a lot to write about before but I seem to have forgotten all of it in about the space of approximately 1010 seconds approximated using Lagrangian interpolation with a time step of about 0.001.

If you don't see me after tomorrow, just assume I got lost in the land of numbers.

I'm a genius

After 3 years of procrastination and almost 1 failed paper I have finally come up with a solution to get my work done.

Procrastinate BEFORE I study, not WHILE I study.

I feel smart right now. I just wrote 2 hours worth of pure bullshit into my engineering design exam and I'm quite pleased with it. A combination of lots of computer games coupled with the occasional 10 chapters(200 pages) of manga every 5 minutes and having my books open in front of me seemed to have worked this time round. However, through superior understanding and certain powers of prediction I have also deduced that this ingenius strategy may not work so well in the future.

That's because my future soon-to-be-in-the-past exams are HARD.

Well hard for me anyway which is, in the end what matters. To me. Yes. Even as I write this I look at my ever decreasing time left til my exams and wonder if I should lock myself in a soundproof box with only my mechanics books and a bottle of vodka. It could be the birth of another drunken master, only with less on the master part and more on the drunken part.

Okay the vodka is a bad idea, forget I mentioned it.

But back to the topic at hand, some isolation could be seriously good for me. When I want to study I can study around noise, girls and even Koreans but I can't, no matter how desperate I am, study around a computer which has the capability to play dota. There should be a DotA/WoW quitline because I think that this problem right now is quite a bit worse than smoking or drinking or doing drugs through glass elephants. Our generation is having our minds depleted, sucked, immobilized, frozen, shaken, maybe even annihilated through the onslaught of gaming and information which grows daily like an unseen plague. Even as we speak or type, millions of kids are playing Grand Theft Auto and smashing people's cars and shooting mafia bosses in that virtual reality. Is this really the sort of experience people should be letting their children go through?

I have no idea as I don't like Grand Theft Auto.

I don't get what others see in that game. All that comes across is senseless violence and degenerated graphics with the occasional virtual prostitute and lots of animated blood and broken glass. I find it absent of class, enjoyment and skill unlike DotA which is the epitome of strategy, skill and experience.

Enough of that. Time to study.

How long has it been... like 3 hours? Did y'all miss me?

This is getting serious.

What started off as procrastination is now turning into a phenomena that is encroaching the depths of my mind. Okay, maybe that's going a bit far but how long has it been, like 3 to 4 hours since my last blog post? I initially started this blog so that my grammar and writing skills don't disintegrate after long hours staring at a computer screen and analysing shear force diagrams(of which still make no sense to me) but unfortunately this seems to have created more problems rather than solutions.

So here I am, writing a blog post at 2:36am because I REALLY REALLY suck at studying.

I think I have a disorder. I name it the "OMG I HAVE AN EXAM TOMORROW and let's play some dota guys" disorder. I'm sure there's other names and other instances for this problem but this was the most specific name I could think up of. Other variations of this disorder include: "F*** IM SO SCREWED FOR EXAMS let's check my facebook" and the infamous "SHIT SHIT IM SO DEAD FOR MY EXAM IN 4 HOURS come to think of it I'm really hungry let's get a big meal". Symptoms may vary between person to person but the general gist is the same.

We as humans love to procrastinate.

Well, most humans anyway. Those that don't tend to be quite outstanding as they don't spend 99.5% of their time on Restaurant City or Mafia Wars and instead go running or play sports. I believe we should all take a note out of these people's books and start exercising as a form of stress relief. You get a fresh supply of oxygen and spend your excess energy while you don't destroy your eyes staring at a dull screen which also has a tendency to freeze and cause more grief. It makes you think, or it makes me think anyway that if the person who invented the concept of the computer really knew what kind of parasitic contraption he had just conjured. My studies show that using a 95% confidence interval, I can approximate my time spent in front of a screen to be most of my time. Maybe that was not very helpful. I'll give a brief example. I wake up, go on the computer. Eat breakfast, watch some TV. Eat Lunch, go on the computer. Eat dinner, play some DotA. Get the picture?

The day my self control kicks in is the day I become successful, or so I hope.