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?

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

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.)

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.

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

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…)

I don’t know what else to say. O_o

I’ve been stressed lately, since university started. Sucks. And I haven’t seen James in a while. :(

Someone remind me to pay my university fees soon. -_- Sadly I won't be seeing James this semester and he'll be at his internship until 5:00pm every weekday. And we'll probably be a bit busy on weekends. I hope he can take a day off every once in a while.

Like yesterday, he took a day off. We went to the aquarium.

It’s quite a depressing atmosphere; a lot of work gets done, for sure. Many things are printed, people mull over screens and type a lot, but not much progress is made. The remote control car is still, alas, remote controlled. The one intern who bosses everyone else around whilst doing the minimum amount of work himself, still does what he does unchecked. I can not wait until this is over; by the way. Did I mention this is all unpaid? Gah. I’m never taking this train line again when this is over. EVER. Hahaha

I like it when I’m alone. It’s nice, and quiet. You don’t have to think about what other people want without seeming like a callous asshole, and you have time to reflect on your own wants and needs. What I don’t really like is when people ignore me when I actually have something to tell them. I had to overhaul a small part of the company’s website, and when I was done I told the company’s manager (it’s a veeeeery small company). Turns out he didn’t even pay attention to me/believed me when I told him; he asked someone else how the website was going soon after I left. I hate that, more so because of the way he’s rather nice to me when I am there.

Every day I have to leave an hour earlier or so, in order to take the last bus from my station home. I turned up at the station near the company a few minutes late; I was wet from the rain so I sat next to a man staring into a bottle in a brown paper bag.
“They got you stuck in work, mate?” It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. I started talking about the internship and the things I didn’t like about it, and he would complain about his failing career and the fact that nobody would hire him even if he promised to stop drinking. He was smelly, swore a lot and had wild, crazy eyes, but he also said some things that didn’t really suit his appearance like ‘Hahah, look at me, talking to a foreigner. You’ve been here since the gold rush, and they still call yous foreigners. Pretty fucked up, eh.’ and ‘That psychic chick in Minority Report; she could’ve been Shakespeare. Yeah, Shakespeare.’
We talked about life in general, and everything before he shuffled off the station when my train arrived, unlit cigarette in hand.
I sat on the train with my iPod in my ears turned off, thinking ‘That was the first proper conversation I have had with anybody down here.’ It was. It really was the most fulfilling face-to-face contact I have had with anyone in that part of the…world. In four minutes it felt like I’d known that dreamy alcoholic more than the people I’ve been working with for nearly four weeks. It took me twenty minutes of sitting there thinking that over, until I realized the iPod was still off. I didn’t take it out, or turn it on until I was on the bus an hour and a half later. I really just didn’t feel like moving; I guess I was a bit upset about the…isolation, if that’s the right word.

Well, that’s all.
I believe I can see the future, ‘cos I repeat the same routine… D=