James & Georgie

Where huge apples are in abundance.

I’m staying in an 18th-storey apartment with my dad; the whole apartment is smaller than our kitchen in our house back in Sydney. The shower cubicle is barely larger than our bathmat, and the first few times I used it I bumped into pretty much every surface in the damn thing. Occasionally I still do.

For size comparison. No, my feet aren't abnormally big.

 I have taken plenty of photos, but I’m only uploading the ones that are even remotely interesting. My skills as a photographer are pretty far below par; even the shots I took after climbing The Peak look like I just took them from some dude’s balcony.

Ah, jeez.

If there’s one thing I can describe without photos, it’s the food. Where back in Australia a Big Mac would set you back a good $7 (if memory serves. It probably doesn’t; I avoid McDonalds back home because of the insanely crappy value for money) here it’d only cost you a measly $2. Everything edible is more or less set back by a similar proportion, and there are so many damn new things I have never even tried.

A leg of roast goose. Note my dead eyes, blinded by the tastiness.

Oh, and Pizza Hut is a pretty big freakin’ deal over here.

Cheesy pasta, and stuffed crust. They eat like kings.

Our two dishes took 25 minutes to arrive and was served by some dude who was dressed like an actual waiter, not some 15 year old kid who probably shat in your mushrooms.

Another thing we tried was ‘dar bien lo’; you pick a soup which arrives above a burner. You cook meats, veges and noodles in it, and eat the stuff and then drink your soup. I’ve had it many times at home, but in a restaurant is quite an interesting experience. While both my Dad and I failed to photograph this, we saw some tourists that were rather stumped by the whole procedure, and were cautiously trying to roast their meat with their chopsticks above the burners. We were properly getting into it by the time they realised what the soup was actually for.

A great thing about this city is the Octopus system; it’s a prepaid card you can buy and top up at virtually any convenience store, and then just swipe by a reader to pay at most stores, and all modes of public transport. It even works through your wallet!

Other places I went to was the Promenade where many Chinese actors had left cement handprints (Jackie Chan’s looked far more enthusiastic than anyone else’s), Sai Kung fishing village (fishing no longer allowed), and the famous Ap Liu electronics market, which I will soon return to to buy a new mobile phone and take some happy-snappies.

Yesterday my dad and I were at a space museum where, among other things, they had a rotating gyroscope ride…

To infinity...and other places.

Most of the other rides were pretty bad; this one worked well probably due to its sheer simplicity. The ‘land the laser dot on the three photoreceptors’ ride was unbearable, and don’t even get me started on the Mars Rover thing.

Bastard.

You basically manipulated a crude pneumatic robot arm to pick up rocks. It was rather straightforward, except moving the robot left/right was very erratic, which nearly drove my dad insane. Sometimes it’d respond and most of the time it wouldn’t, causing him no end of frustration and grief.

Does he look like a bitch?

Yesterday James came with me to get my hair cut. <3 He paid for it too. It was great that he took the time out to come. =)

We saw this movie yesterday. It was great. (:

We’ve actually not seen many movies together. It seems like such a typical thing for a couple to do, but for us it’s not. Some time ago, my boss actually asked me if I’d seen any movies recently and I said no. The first movie James and I saw together was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That was only last year, too. And I think it was the first movie I’d seen in four years. I can barely remember – I just haven’t seen gone to see a movie too many times.

Last year we saw Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs with Lilian. That was pretty awesome. :3

When I talked to James the other day on the phone, I thought our conversation would be a bit bland. Admittedly, our MSN conversations are; there is never enough to talk about, or we’re just bust with our own thing.

I like spending time with James. He even said that I’m a lot more interesting in person.

I know, it’s hard for anyone to embrace my inner geek – hours of sitting on the computer and just hacking at code or returning comments or doing anything website-related. I’ll admit I’m addicted, but when it comes to spending time with James, eeeee. <3

I kind of miss our three-hour-long phone calls, and five-minute-goodbyes online (they're more like one minute now, often shorter and more abrupt), but nothing beats a hug IRL. (:

Going back to my inner geek, I want to clean up this site a little… (And I registered glassfields.net.)

So, over the last six months I was working (for free) at a small engineering company around two hours from my house. We were taking part in an international robotics competition to make a robot that could autonomously travel through a maze and tag with a laser some stationary red bins and walking people in red overalls. The objective was to have three robots that were capable of this; and this is how it all went down.

Up until the last two months, everything was so relaxed. They eventually figured I wasn’t too bad at maths, so I was in charge of almost every mathematical task in the robots’ programming. When that was done, I helped make cables, and do some rudimentary machining tasks.

The guy running that place was retarded. Some of his ideas included:
-redesigning the chassis of the robot literally seven times over (the last amendment being a week before the contest date). At the end it was still…a rectangular box.
-coating the rubber tyres in Teflon to ‘reduce friction’. Hello, that’s how wheels work? And besides, I don’t think tyres can stand 400 degree C heat. The worst part was he made one of us call up a Teflon company, and when he was told it was a stupid idea the guy laughs and goes ‘Well, maybe we should’ve researched it a bit more”
-tried to make me sweep the floor because he had nothing for me to actually do (but I couldn’t leave early). I swept around one square metre before leaving

etc.

Finally, the day of the contest crawled around. It was a Saturday, too. The dad of the guy who ran the place turned up to help out, and we were using cable-ties to secure some plastic sheeting to posts we had driven into the ground; this would serve as a barrier. One of the cable ties his dad put in were upside down, and I had to state it five times and pull it out in front of him before he was convinced.
Like father, like son. Eh?

The government people (it was a govt run competition) turned up on the dot, and we were still scrambling to set up the maze, and some people were trying to…fix the robot. It didn’t move. At all. It had to be driven with some hastily written code controlled with a big fat Cat-5 cable running to a laptop with a guy walking behind it. Not impressive.
The reason why this was, was because we had never tested this robot because we simply ran out of time. Ironic, considering how laidback he was the first few months. Pathetic.
So our evaluation started four and a half hours late, and I got home at a quarter past eight.
Yay.

I’m just being an idiot here…

WELL HELLO. I know this is absolutely nothing fancy, and you’re thinking “what the hell…” So you remember how I mentioned that Fire The Arrow (.com) was moving to James.Georgie.nu? Well, that’s where we are, isn’t it? :)

Obviously this is just a test post. I’ve removed the snazzy layout and chosen to stick with this classic WordPress one (just for now!) until I can come up with something simple, but that WORKS. Because we all know the two-column thing is awesome, but James didn’t like the narrow widths, so maybe I’ll have to set the width of the sections to auto – yeah, like you know what I’m talking about. :P

But I think the main reason I’m doing this is to test Twitter too – I had to change application settings so at the moment I’m thinking… yeah dude… yeah.

And yes, I’ll be selling Fire The Arrow.

Keep watch on georgie.nu/domains

James (and I) have decided that this poor little project won’t be on this domain anymore. :(

Of course, we don’t really update much here, and it seems terrible to have a domain for a website that isn’t regularly updated. SOSOOSOSO?

We’re going to be moving this little bugger to james.georgie.nu. As James says, we’ll give it a “gritty reboot”. Hopefully I can do this by next week – give the site a new layout and other snazzy stuff. :3

But, it will be goodbye to Fire The Arrow.

(Hey, it cuts down on my domains…)