What a lil Brat(d)?

I was unfortunately quite busy on Sunday doing some studying and could not make it in front of the TV for the 2009 81st Annual Oscars! So after doing much searching for the last couple of days, I was finally able to stream it on Need Movies. It was a really awesome show, probably the best one I've ever seen, so it's worth watching.


The reasons I'm posting about this is to:

• Let people know that there's a link that hasn't been taken down yet (at the moment I've posted this).
  

and


• Show what a possible brat Brad Pitt was at the awards ceremony when Kate Winslet was announced to be best actress and not Angelina Jolie.
  

Everyone stands up for a standing ovation for Kate Winslet, including Angelina Jolie, but Brad Pitt does not (See Part 12 of the link I gave out).

1. Angelina tells him to stand up too.
2. About ten seconds later, he finally does.
3. Kate Winslet walks right by him since he's got the aisle seat at the front.

Some theories:

• He doesn't like Kate Winslet because she forgot Jolie's name during her Golden Globe acceptance speech
• He had something on his leg/his leg was asleep and couldn't stand up right away.
• He's upset that Angelina Jolie didn't win and supports her by not standing up.
  
• He thinks Kate Winslet didn't deserve the Oscars/performance wasn't that good.

You can decide.

___________

On another note, I almost forgot, my favourite dresses:
Marisa Tomei's Versace Pleated dress (If you look carefully, the pleats are done so elaborately and intricately) and Heidi Klum's Roland Mouret fiery red origami dress. She wore a dress of the same colour last year which I liked a lot better, but this year's nice dresses were quite limited. Nothing memorable like Halle Berry's dress the year she won best actress or Gwenyth Paltrow's RL pink dress when she won.

White was apparently the colour this year, surprisingly a lot of people came with silvery white, beige white, barly any color that looks like white. Needless to say, the show itself was a lot better than fashion this year. I blame it on skinny jeans, Ugg(lies), TNA, hoods with the fur, and lululemon pants. Ugg(h)!

I don't know how

I didn't pee on my bed last night....hahahahaha

Story: I woke up in the middle of the night I had to go pee but I was too tired to climb down my loft bed so I held it and fell back asleep. Throughout the night I kept dreaming about the fact that I can't stop having to go pee even after I just went to the washroom.....I woke up in the morning and realized it's because I really had to go.

I just wanted to share this disgusting story. =D

Going Batty

Over the summer, while Adam was in Seattle, I stayed away from Waterloo to the best of my abilities. Another housemate of ours, Trisha, had a workterm at OpenText and was never home during the day. The third housemate, Joe, was the only one who was consistently in the big, three story house alone. Occupying the smallest room of the house that was meant for Elvin, who was away on a workterm in Toronto, Joe began to see bats everywhere.

It was quite funny, mind you. I remember coming home one day and Joe coming to my room to tell me that there's a bat in the house and that I should keep my room door closed as much as I can. It was in his room in the middle of the night and he ran out of his room. After some investigations, which included an extensive search throughout the house, doing some googling, and having someone from animal control come over, we could not find the bat and Trisha concluded that it might be living in the Chimney and came out from the fireplace on the first floor (our main entrance is on the second floor and we live on the 3rd, the house is insanely big, as seen in the picture below).

From then on, the first floor was out of bounds for Joe. He was pretty scared. When I walk downstairs to do the laundry, he would immediately close the door behind me and I'd be left in the dark yelling at him to open the door (we didn't fix our lightbulbs down there yet and he stopped doing laundry in Waterloo). When I drive out of the remote control-less garage that can be accessed from the first floor and Joe happens to be outside, he would refuse to close the garage door from me so I would have to get out of the door, turn off the garage door, walk upstairs to the main entrances and walk back downstairs to my car.

Unfortunately, avoiding the first floor was not the end of misery for him. One night, while i was sleeping, I heard him storm out of his room and slam the door of the bathroom. At first i thought he had an emergency, but he told me the next day that the bat reappeared in his room. Another day, Trisha came home and found him sleeping in her bed and when she asked him what's going on, he replied, meekly, "I know you think I'm crazy, but there's really a bat in my room." The thing was, neither Trish nor I have seen this said bat. We were even told that the bat didn't just stay in Joe's room, but also "chased [him] around the living room, flapping at [him] while he had a laundry basket over his head."

When September started and Adam and Elvin moved back, Adam fixed all the lightbulbs in the house and moved in all the furniture and the house became cozy. No bat was heard of and when the subject came up, we all thought Joe really was a little...well...batty.

But then, this morning happened. At around 7am, I heard a lot of pounding, running around and talking next to our room. It sounded like Justin (who took over Trisha's room cuz she's always at her bf's house) and Elvin were taking the house apart. Adam and I got up to see what's going on Elvin tells us that he was woken up by a "bat" brushing his face. After running out of his room with his covers and without his shirt nor his glasses, he see the "bat" banging against the window. Why did I have to quote bat? Well it's because he couldn't actually see the bat without his glasses. After Elvin went to wake Justin to catch the bat together, the bat was nowhere to be seen. After all three guys tore his room apart, no bat was found.

Now, I am not saying Elvin is making this up, especially because we were told by the property manager that there are bats living around the area. But I'm actually a little freaked out because the whole thing sounds so weird.

First of all, where did this bat come from and why was it not around for the last 5 months? And secondly, why does it always appear in the same room and can only be seen by those who live in that exact room?

Here are several theories:

1. There is no bat: It was some flying creature and Elvin thought it was a bat because of Joe's craziness. But even if that is the case, there is a flying creature and we need to be a little worried.
2. There is no bat: The room is cursed and everyone who occupies this room sees bats randomly in the house.
   
3. There is a bat living in Elvin's room: The bat has been hibernating in Elvin's room over Fall and Winter and finally came out of hiding because the weather warmed up. But why was it not found when Joe moved out and Elvin moved in? Also everyone has been searching through every crevice of the room! Plus, bats usually live in colonies.
   
4. My hole theory: There is a hole in Elvin's room connected to the outside of the house. Bats can squeeze through a hole as small as 1cm and we just haven't located this hole.

Elvin has escaped back to Markham for the rest of this week and since reading week is next week, he won't be back for quite a while. Our plan is to tear his room apart to figure out where this thing comes from when he comes back. But if this bat does exist, then it might just show up randomly in the house in the next week or so and although I know Ontario brown bats are harmless because:

• There are no vampire bats in Ontario and also that vampire bats don't suck on human blood, and
  
• Ontario brown bats are helpful to the ecosystem and they are not blind nor do they get tangled in your hair,

it is still extremely nerve-wrecking to see one hanging around the house in the middle of the night.
Let's hope it's theory #2 for the sake of everyone's sanity except for Elvin's :P

Poor Elvin! =(

"What have you been up to?"

When people ask you, "how are you doing?" or "what have you been up to?" many of us generally assume that the people asking don't actually want to know the answer: it's just something you're supposed to say when talking to people. Well that's true to some extent, but if you really think about it, it's called a "conversation starter" for a reason. The only time the question doesn't render a good answer is when the person who is asking already has something to say but felt the need to be polite. In that case, i'd rather them get to the point then ask me what's up, because, frankly, I hate telling people that nothing is going on my life and that I'm sitting in my room talking to you because I have nothing better to do.

But you know what? As much as I don't do it, I think it's always necessary to give a good answer to "What have you been up to?" and "What's new with you?" even if you know the people asking don't really care about the answer. Why? It's because you sound lame when you say "oh not much" or "my life sucks, i don't do anything" (which are my typical answers).

The truth is, we all know that it's always a lie when people say nothing is going on in their lives. We all know that there is always something going on in everyone's lives but we answer with "not much" because a)we think what what we do is quite uninteresting for others, b)we're don't want to talk about/too lazy to explain what we've been doing and we'd rather talk about something else, or c)we don't want to talk to the person who is asking. For the most part, I admit that I don't give good answers because of a combination of a) and b). And I would be quite right about a) if you don't finish reading the rest of this entry.

So henceforth, here is where I explain what I have been up to for the last year and a half. Now when people ask me what I've been up to and I don't want to talk about school or my sad life, I can provide them with this link. This is so that they will know that although I might be nerding it up, at least I'm not a lame person who sits at home and play pet society....

Currently I am working on two major projects for school:

1. Documenting the libraries that are being used for developing applications for tabletop computers (e.g., Microsoft Surface) that's developed by one of the Sys. Design Engineering labs.
2. Re-writing my paper on "The marriage of form and meaning: Chinese four-character idioms" for submitting to the publication Cognitive Semiotics.

I also do other stuff, like:

• Updating documentation and tutorials for nSpace2
• Other projects and assignments/papers for my classes (Genres of Technical Communication and Cognitive Science).
• Lots and lots of reading.
• Lots and lots of procrastinating.
  

In previous terms I took the graduate classes Semiotics, 18thC literature, Knowledge and Public Life, Cognitive Rhetoric, Writing about the Self Online, and Foundations in Rhetorical Studies, which resulted in many research papers and presentations (sometimes exams).

I'll be done in April '09 with any luck.

So that is what I do while I'm in Waterloo and that's why I have nothing to say when people ask me what I have been up to. Makes sense, doesn't it? ;)

My (not so) New Vice

Say hi to Harrobutt

This is Harrobutt's home:

If you don't know where these screenshots came from, don't worry, it just means you're not a loser.

For the first time in my life, I am actually addicted to a game. No, it's not WoW or...you know what, I don't really know what people get addicted to since I'm not a gamer...but the point is, I've been addicted to this facebook app. called Pet Society.

The concept of the game is quite simple:

1. You create a pet by choosing its colour, ears, eyes, nose, etc. I created a lil piggy by the name of Harrobutt
   
2. You visit friends and race with other pets in order to get money
3. Once you have money, you can buy furniture to decorate your house and dress up your pet.

What's addictive about it?

• Every Sunday, the game comes out with new furniture, some are available "only this week".
• Every Thursday, new items appear in mystery boxes that you can't buy in the stores. However, there's no guarantee in what comes out of the mystery boxes so it's a surprise every time. The point is to get all the new pretty items in the mystery boxes (we have a workaround to ensure we can get them).
• Forums: There's a Playfish forum that allows players to trade their items. Rare items that are no longer offered in stores, such as Christmas and Hallowe'en decorations are worth a lot! So getting rare items is one of the points of the game.

So for a while, since mid-December, I've been playing on it on a pretty regular basis (at least once a day). But recently, Adam has found a little "trick" to help me get any item I want. Needless to say, the game is no longer as addictive as it used to be and I don't play it as much as I used to. Only on Thursdays and Sundays when the new items come out, do I go and get the items to redecorate my house.

Lame? Yeah, I know. I'm also somewhat addicted to Rockband, but since Adam decided bringing it to Waterloo is not a good idea, all I have is my lil piggy Harrobutt!

The images above are the six rooms I decorated. Oh, I forgot to mention that one can "level up" by earning experience points and you slowly go from one room to six rooms.

My desk

Since I've been tagged, I'll update.
I've been lazy, not so much busy. Eventually I'll get back to this :D



I tag Elvin, Eddie, and Jenny.