Mashed Potatoes » games

One Life Ago: Other Stuff

jiannmeng — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:41:52 +0000

[Part of the series of posts: One Life Ago]

There’s been quite a few other happening in the three weeks after SPM. For my own chronicling purposes, I’ll be writing about the slightly more mundane things here.

Just before SPM I got my driving license! Unfortunately SPM arrived and so did any hope of me driving. Well, after SPM my father let me drive his Golf GTI around, as long as he was sitting in the front seat. I’ll be frank, I was quite nervous at first because it’d been so long since I drove in the test, and a Golf is quite different from a Kancil. Like the indicator signals are on the left instead of the right, and the accelerator and brake pedals are about ten times more sensitive. I pity anyone who rode with me (that’s everyone in my family :/) that time, for they surely had a bumpy ride all over the place.

In those three weeks I drove around the neighbourhood. It’s liberating 8D. I finally got to drive myself, and that freedom is just exciting. Sadly now that I’m heading to the UK I can’t drive for two years until my ‘P’ license expires. Sigh.

My father was nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. He didn’t win, the guy from Sapura Holdings (which is about 20 times bigger than every other company nominated) won, but at least I can tell everyone that my dad was one of five nominees for being awarded an award for being good at selling stuff. Datin Frieda, chairwoman of Cempaka Schools, was there for the woman Entrepreneur award and she won (the only other nominee owned a small textile company I think). Good for her :D

Time to go! It's a nice tuxedo.

My dad + his friends.

One funny story, only for those Cempakans who know what I’m talking about. Cempaka had at least two tables at the extremely formal dinner at the hotel, but everytime Datin Freida showed up on stage or on video, the adults at the tables would do the Tepuk Cempaka. It’s great to see the enthusiasm at such a formal occasion :) (Clap-clap clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap).

My family is soon moving to a new house! Currently I live in Duta Nusantara, a nice cosy gated community. We’ll soon be moving to a bungalow about 5 minutes away in Damansara Heights. It’s so much bigger than my current house…

Funnily, it turns out that Datin Frieda owns the neighbouring house. I guess you never really escape from her.

I have a laptop now! 2.8 Ghz Intel Duo Core, 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM 15-inch Macbook Pro. It’s made of awesome and win.

Another story coming up: when my dad went to Bangsar Shopping Centre, he found out that a Apple store (Mac Studio) was opening there that day, so he booked the mine and my sister’s laptops there before the store actually opened. When we returned there at 2pm, the outside of the store was filled with people waiting in line for free iStuff. Then later the opening ceremony started for some reason, there was a lion dance before Christmas, since Chinese New Year is obviously nearby (2 months is near right?).

Now imagine the narrow corridors of BSC, with the really loud Chinese gongs they use for lion dances, and then remember all the people waiting for the store to open. Not fun, but we already booked the laptops so we had to wait. But the lion dance went on and on with no end in sight (much like this blogpost actually…) and after about half hour, one of the employees actually let us in to pick up laptops. This means that we were literally the first customers into the store, and best of all about a hundred people watched us go in, buy some computers, and leave before the opening ceremony finished. Probably the closest I have ever felt to being a celebrity.

(Boring technical stuff ahead)

Somehow they made a silly mistake and gave me OSX Leopard instead of Snow Leopard. Those idiots >:( So we had to go back and they actually gave me the upgrade CD, with no licensing limits on it. Hah! If anyone wants a free upgrade to Snow Leopard when I come back from the UK, tell me and I might be able to help :D

Also, my dad bought Windows 7, which after wrestling with video drivers for a while, finally managed to play TF2. I think my life is complete.

Little tidbits

jiannmeng — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:23:00 +0000

Every single time I eat a Hacks lozenge, I tell myself, “Don’t bite, just leave it in your mouth to dissolve. It tastes better this way”. And every single time, after a few minutes, I bite it into many small pieces and eat it.

-.-;;

Zerg for Starcraft 2 was announced today. HAPPY TIMES.

What :

I’m playing on the Wii – Super Paper Mario
I’m watching on Youtube right now : Happy Tree Friends
Book I’m reading : Thief of Time (Terry Prachett)
Major homework I’ve yet to complete : book report (1k-1.5k words)

Also, the emo-ness of several people have gone up, based on their blogs.

Strange Things I Noticed

jiannmeng — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:40:00 +0000

The best time to meet the people in your neighbourhood is during a blackout. I am not the only person in KL with a DS and Mario Kart. Also, when Tenaga Nasional says power will be restored in 3 hours, it usually takes longer. Ours came back in 2.

Both KDU and Cempaka are celebrating their 25th year this year! KDU college first opened in 1983, and if I’m not mistaken has I think 2 ~~schools~~ institutions of learning in Malaysia and one in China. Cempaka opened their first school in 1983 also, and now has 4. (I think)

Not having Powerpoint sucks when you’re supposed to do a presentation via .ppt. Why are people so insistent about using Powerpoint anyways when its not really that good of a visual tool in learning? Oh, and OpenOffice, while free, is still pretty sucky.

Studying history in Malay makes even the Punic Wars feel like studying… um- Sejarah. Sigh.

I have about 10 minutes to complete my Moral homework before class starts tomorrow. Once again, I left the textbook in school.

To-do list items which have already been done

jiannmeng — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:47:00 +0000

Solve Rubik’s Cube. ~~Fast. As in, less than 1 minute fast.~~
Finish Super Mario Galaxy.
Get Zelda : Twilight Princess.
Finish Kumon -.-
Listen to Natalie Williams.
Go to school.
Play Starcraft.
Read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This list.

Edit 13/02/08 : Slightly changed due to annoying inquiries. ;D

Roffle

jiannmeng — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 08:50:00 +0000

New Year is here. I don’t feel any different.
Team Fortress 2 is perhaps one of the best games ever.
I have a headset, which I probably won’t use.
School starts in 32 hours.
As of this post I have 9 unread messages across various mail accounts.
Form 4 sounds like hell.
I’ve got a new calculator.
National Treasure 2 is exactly the same as NT1.
I have only 50GB left on my computer.
Sleepy.
My lamp looks like Pixar’s lamp.
Roffle means ROFL.
This is the 12th statement.
If you counted to check for correctness, you’d be right.
Good night.

!iiW

jiannmeng — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 10:18:00 +0000

Wow today was Christmas and I was quite forced to go to a really quite boring Christmas party (no offense to the host) and ate a small lunch because I had just eaten a large breakfast and while I was there I alternated between drinking Coke, playing Pokemon and staring into outer space but I then again I was used to this and got through it without much (if any) complaint although I guess my ego could have altered my memory and changed my perception of my patience but anyway I digress as I was saying right after the 3 hour wait my mum asked if we should go to BSC to ask about the Wii (which is kind of a long story but basically we’re looking for a ‘special’ type of Wii which can play ‘special’ games and it so happens that the game store in BSC might have one of the very few in Malaysia) and when we got there I had some orange juice and then we went to the shop and lo they had 2 sets left at an extremely inflated price (though now that I think of it it really wasn’t too bad) but with an extra set of controllers and 13 free games so my dad (bless him) bought it on the spot and we brought it home and set it up and so now I have something fun to do until school starts up next week but anyways this has been a rather great Christmas so yeah Merry Christmas to anyone who even bothers to read this and congratulations on reading so far into a paragraph which doesn’t even have a comma let alone a full stop and which probably violates a hundred grammatical rules but I’m finding it hard to sleep so why not be hyper?

GOW!

jiannmeng — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:17:00 +0000

Let me tell you a story. Not a particularly interesting one, nor a funny one, nor sad, nor thoughtful. In fact, I’d say it’s really boring, unless for some reason you like hearing a story about how one human who likes gaming has to sit for over a year drooling at the fantastic PC games coming out but not being able to play them, but finally managing to get a graphics card (NVidia Geforce 8500 GT, btw), and playing some of those games at last.

Well, skip the story if you like. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Alright, story over.

Anyways, I played Bioshock, and man was it good. For a while anyways. Then it started to get kinda repetitive. I mean, all you do is perform fetch quests. Over and over again. Imagine this :

Quest :
Go through the door in front of you.

Woo, easy! And then, about 10 metres from the door, poison gas enters, kills all the trees, and for some inexplicable reason, locks up the door until it is completely impenetrable. Thus you are supposed to revive the trees, which somehow is linked to opening the door, but to do so you need to collect 7 samples of Item A, B and X, which can only be found by through a suddenly exposed hole and killing about half an hours worth of enemies before managing to find everything. AND THEN THE FRIGGIN CURE TAKES ANOTHER 5 MINUTES TO WORK, leaving you to survive against a horde of enemies that basically turn up from nowhere (if the exit is blocked and the entrance is barred… never mind).

Rinse, repeat and dry clean.

But now I’ve got Gears of War, critically acclaimed and probably sucky in my eyes. We’ll see.