Zhanga: August 2006
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Saturday, August 26, 2006 (1 comment)
I realized I forgot something very important. Ping pong paddles! Between everyone in our block, we have one paddle. I think we might have one ball too, but at least those are easier to get. What am I going to do...
This double seems bigger than our triple last year. The empty area in the middle is at least three times wider, and maybe one and a half times longer, than it was last year. We have a nice view of the quad, there's air conditioning, and there are actually girls on this floor. A lot of them, actually. Unfortunately it is difficult to communicate with fobs.
Ok, my mom drove most of the way here, and started driving back at 3 PM. My dad calls me at 8:30 telling me she's not picking up her cell, so I kept calling her for half an hour and listening to it ring. Then I figured it's time to call highway patrol in a couple of states to see what's going on. After finding nothing, I called me mom for maybe the 15th time and she goes, oops I didn't hear my phone ring. Ahhh!!!
9:24PM
Sunday, August 20, 2006 (0 comments)
You know what? I hate English. The rule about what goes inside double quotation marks and what goes outside is really arbitrary. For example:
I said, "Go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich."
That makes sense. Put the period in the quotes since, well, it's a sentence in quotes. But what about this?
If you don't keep your balance in the cafeteria you may inadverdently "pull a Brasuell."
For something like this, why should the period be inside? Ok, sure, maybe it still makes sense to you. But change it to a question. Why the sudden difference?
If you don't keep your balance in the cafeteria, will you inadverdently "pull a Brasuell"?
Perhaps you can come up with a rationale for that, too. But to me, it's retardedly frustrating.
Ok, near the top of this program code here, I've defined the variable "biggest_idiot_ever" to represent the string "Bush."
People like me (read: nerds) are used to quotes surrounding string literals. So, does the string include the period or not? I really hate it when this happens. This is why technical manuals often don't seem to follow the rules of English. Because the rules are stupid. Well, and because they are written in China.
Maybe one last example, one that I've run into over and over:
To login to this webpage, use the username "george" and the password "chimp."
Ok, one more:
Please open a command prompt and type "ipconfig /all."
Open a command prompt and type "ipconfig /all," then read me the output.
Sorry, did I just rant about something completely worthless? Sorry. I just find myself using up far too many brain cells trying to reword sentences to not end with string literals so I can be grammatically as well as technically correct. Why should this conflict even exist?
10:50AM
Friday, August 18, 2006 (1 comment)
Whoever wrote the plot of 24 needs to be shot in the kneecaps. Last time, the president was being assassinated in the last 30 seconds of the season. This time, the invincible Jack Bauer is captured by some Chinese dudes from right under the noses of SWAT teams in the last 30 seconds of the season. What happened? Did the new patch break his god mode hack? (ha... ha... =)
Today is a week until I go back to Duke. A week and three hours before I realize I forgot to bring something important, like a pillow, a toothbrush, or maybe my clothes. A month and a half before I'm back again for fall break. Maybe I can work WAC? Does Mrs. Martin still want me? Is it on Saturday, Oct 7?
I've seen some good videos on the web lately, but this one tops them all. I wish I had that kind of exhaust nozzle velocity.
5:54PM
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 (1 comment)
I was with Yujing today and we saw a Do Not Enter sign lying on an intersection:
Me: Dude, I really want to steal that sign.
Yujing: You know, it would be perfect for...
Me: A girl's shirt.
Yujing: Or the back of a girl's pants.
I think that makes the list. I'll add it later when I'm bored.
When I was at school on Monday, I sat in the back corner of Williams's class with Eva. He recognized Eva after about 20 minutes and by association he decided that I didn't belong there either. But he called me Matt... wtf?
Anyways, Roger Ho was front and center. If he is the origin (0,0) and the positive Y-axis points to the front of the class, then the only empty seats in the room were (-2,-1), (-2,0), (-1,0), (0,-1), (1,0). Basically the five seats around him.
9:55PM
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 (0 comments)
I hope that Waffle House doesn't mind when I show up with a huge jar of diarrhea and accidentally spill it all over the counter. Whores.
If you bought a Dell laptop with a battery, or if you got a Dell laptop battery between April 2004 and July 2006, go to www.dellbatteryprogram.com to check if they'll replace your battery for free. There's an issue with these batteries being prone to explosions. I saw some pictures, and it's not just some wimpy little explosion. The entire laptop got taken out and there were marks in a ten-foot radius around the laptop on the table.
I suggest going to the site if you like your balls.
10:37AM
Monday, August 14, 2006 (2 comments)
I am currently dying. Stupid POS Waffle House gave me diarrhea. I ate a lot of watermelon before I started diarrheaing, so now I have a lot of hashbrown + chili + other toppings + loads of watermelon. All in soup form.
When I'm back for winter break my sister will be better than me at ping pong =(
7:22PM
Sunday, August 13, 2006 (0 comments)
Based on a true story...
[20:36] icydog1: ok, so the lamest thing ever happened
today
[20:36] icydog1: I was eating watermelon seeds, listening
to britney spears, and reading slashdot
[20:36] eixenelyam: ...
[20:36] icydog1: and I bent over... and my pants ripped
[20:36] icydog1: no, my boxers ripped
[20:36] eixenelyam: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
[20:37] icydog1: they had pink hearts and purple flowers
all over them
[20:37] eixenelyam: ROFL
[20:37] icydog1: they were my favorite ones! I was so
pissed!
I guess I should go on a diet now. =(
She wrote all of the above, by the way. I didn't actually say any of that. Sadly, upon reading it, I realize that it is (almost?) completely believable.
But yeah, I bent over to plug a microphone into my computer, and my boxers went riiiiiiippp. I have a 4 inch hole in my boxers right where my anus is. I guess God is telling me I need a new $2 pack of Walmart boxers.
9:16PM
Saturday, August 12, 2006 (4 comments)
I went to this store "The Pink" a few days ago. It is the worst store ever. Look at the quality of their employees! This one is undressing a mannequin and apparently is about to do some naughty things to it:
If she were my employee she'd be fired, especially since that was right in front of the store where people passing by could see.
If I went to Walton on Monday, found a random Asian freshman, and went to all his classes in his place... would that be funny or just dumb? I wouldn't even have to sit through 7 hours of classes... I'd just sleep through them and rack up detentions for the poor kid. Better yet, I should find an Asian girl without an Anglicized name so the teachers wouldn't know. Or just pretend to be a girl? Too hard to pull off though.
Actually, no, it's more trouble than it's worth. Even factoring in sleeping through every class, getting up that early is too painful. But who doesn't want to have Inlow again...
Hey, Science Bowl -- want to visit Dutter sometime next week? I think it would be nice if we all showed up together. Let's do it again around winter break just so we can play Science Bowl against Fischler squared, Philip, and whoever has the misfortune of the fourth seat. I want Fischler's mom to scream and bitch at me some more. It gives me great satisfaction to hear her being funny.
12:50AM
Wednesday, August 9, 2006 (2 comments)
Does anybody know Dutter's birthday? Or is the concept of "birthday" limited to mere mortals like you and me?
By the way, to whoever told me 24 is a Republican show... I see it. It basically supports all of Bush's stupid ideas and paints them in a glamorous light. For example, torture is necessary and is the only way to get information out of terrorists. One of the main themes of the show is that US law is a hindrance, an obstacle to justice. In order to get things done, law enforcement has to not follow laws and do things in the dark.
Anyways, as long as you remember it's just a TV show, it's still a very good TV show. Just don't let it get to your head if you watch it a lot. I think my record so far is 29 episodes (~45 mins each without commercials) in maybe a little over 50 hours. It could have been a better ratio but my batteries didn't quite survive the 15 hour plane ride to China.
10:06AM
Saturday, August 5, 2006 (3 comments)
I'm back after not long in China. I stayed at my dad's place in Hangzhou the whole time, and it was really boring. There is nothing to do there, unless you include shopping for clothes at the nearby mall. At night there is one of those open-air markets where they sell random fake stuff and try to eat white people alive with ridiculous prices, but there wasn't really anything I wanted. I was looking at some switchblades, but not only did they suck and cost 4x as much as what I paid last year, my grandpa also banned me from buying any because apparently they can be used as weapons (??no way!!)
Cuz every time we touch, I feel the static
and every time we kiss I reach for the sky
Sorry.
Oh yeah, there was this enormous place with three stories of computer stuff. Why don't we have those here in the US? I guess Fry's is the closest I've seen, but even there you can't get 10 foot ethernet cables for 5 yuan (~60 cents). It'd probably be $4-10 back home. Seriously, why do mundane stuff like wires cost so much in the States? It all comes from China anyways!
So about the Internet situation. My dad has an ownage wireless dialup card, but either he'd be using it or my sister would be lame. So I just randomly connected to hotspots. For the first two or three days, I could get a signal on my bed but only if I kept the laptop facing a certain direction and kept the area between the laptop and the window clear. Turning the laptop just 15 degrees would take out the connection. My grandpa and his belly were pretty effective at absorbing radio waves, I also found out. This was crappy but acceptable for however long (short) it lasted. Then all of a sudden, the hotspot disappeared completely.
A few days later, somebody nearer put up a wireless router, and I could get online again and could even turn my laptop a bit without dropping. But two or three days later, all of a sudden I could connect to the router but not to the Internet. I logged into the router's interface (the good old admin/admin combination never fails (well, it does sometimes)) and reset the DSL connection a couple of times, but their ISP had cut them off. Oh well. After that I only got on for a little while at a time because being on a windowsill leeching weak signals is really annoying and really hot.
So basically: (1) I use somebody's wireless for a couple of days, then it vanishes into thin air forever, then (2) I use somebody else's wireless for a couple of days, and the access point doesn't go away until later but its connection to the Internet becomes disabled by the ISP. I have no idea how hard the government is on Internet regulations so I'm just speculating, but maybe it happened because I kept clicking banned links (Wikipedia + bunch of random sites) and getting blocked before remembering to tunnel it through my server first. I probably did this at least a few dozen times, and that might have been enough for the ISPs to kill those accounts.
It's pretty sad that I was online at all in China, especially since I was there for such a short time. I am never staying in that place for more than two days at a time again. In fact, the whole city sucks. There's a famous (?) lake, it's really hot, and there you have it -- a summary of Hangzhou in seven words and a question mark.
By the way, I got a new ping pong paddle. Whoever gets to play against the virgin rubber should feel special. That sounds so wrong, and I didn't even mean for that to happen.
By the way (I'm Charles minus the TLA-loving), the morning of my flight, I had set my alarm for 7 AM. Some faggot called me twice at about 6:35, and stupid me thought it was my wake-up alarm so I opened and closed the phone to shut off the alarm (so I have no idea who it was). Stupid faggot made me eat $3 in roaming fees for answering. This is probably more than all my "die 10 cents die bitch" text messages combined have ever eaten. If you're currently thinking, (Urkel) "Did I do thaaaaaaaat?" then I suggest not confessing or (Indian guy) "somebody gonna get a-hurt real bad."
By the way (last one), I was at a 新华 bookstore and I saw something that I just could not resist. A first-person shooter where you're some Chinese dude in Shanghai in 1937! This game is seriously the best game ever made. There is no mention of Japan or Japanese anywhere in the game, at all. It only says 鬼子 (as in demon). It's also really, really funny but I don't know if the game makers were trying to be funny. There are these samurai... and they are hilarious. At one point they create some kind of tornado around themselves and spin at you. They often jump 80 feet through the air with their swords like it's some kind of kung-fu movie. Incredible. It cost me 10 yuan, but I would have paid a lot more for this amazing work of genius.
11:33PM
Older posts can be viewed through the links to the left, under the main menu.
979 hits since September 1, 2006.
