Signs of Old Age

I went up to Genting Highlands for a night the day before yesterday. It was a casual trip among a few friends who wanted to make use of our holidays, so I tagged along. We left KL late afternoon, so it wasn’t until evening that we reached there. Then we spent almost another hour waiting to check-in to our rooms because we were 60+ away from the queue count.

The first thing that we did after checking in was actually searching for a place for dinner. When I came across this somewhere in the indoor theme park:

Who in the right mind would put something as horrifying as that smack in the middle of the theme park? That thing has been there for as long as I can remember, but I don’t remember it being that scary. I don’t know if the red paint on its face is supposed to be makeup or an act of sabotage (which is unlikely as it could’ve been taken care of easily), but it’s horrifying. I’m psychologically scarred for life.

There isn’t really much to do in Genting if you don’t take into account the casino and the theme park. Of all things, we watched Ocean’s Thirteen in Genting Highlands. We didn’t had anything better to do so oh well. I’ve watched the two previous movies in the series and I’d say the third isn’t that bad either. After the movie everyone was in the mood for the casino. Again, I tagged along for the lack of better things to do. All I did there was looking at money flow like water. Huge amounts of money. Waited for my friends to finish their thing and we went to Coffee Bean after that. After the customary supper, we went back to our rooms and instead of sleeping, we were mashing buttons on the PS2 which Howard was kind enough to bring. That lasted until about 4, only then were we able to settle down and go to bed. Though sleeping wasn’t such a lovely affair, especially when four people have to share a queen-size bed.

Waking up the next day with a sore neck, we had a quick breakfast in McDonalds. After that we split up into two groups – the Addicted Gamblers and the Inexperienced Themepark-goers. Guess which group I belonged to.

Our first ride of the day – the Corkscrew rollercoaster, notably the most “exciting” rollercoaster in Genting. That gave me a headache.

Our second ride was the spinning suspended chairs thingy, no idea what it is called but it made me all woozy.

We waited for the Space Shot to open, and that made my heart popped out. It is without a doubt the most exhilarating ride in Genting. I am afraid of heights to begin with, which only made it frightening instead. I’ve been on it a couple of times, but it’s not something you could easily prepare yourself for.

We went on another smaller rollercoaster, which gave me a swell on my shin because the seat was too small (read: I’m too big for it).

The last and most devastating “ride” was the ride home. Self-explanatory.

Genting made me feel old.

Rampaging Squirrel

Squirrels are generally cute and harmless critters.

Generally.

Because there was one (and possibly more to come) exception.

BERLIN (Reuters) – An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday.

With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off.

The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.

“After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man’s garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh,” the spokesman said. “Then he killed it with his crutch.”

The spokesman said experts thought the attack may have been linked to the mating season or because the squirrel was ill.

Source

Strange things happen.
Mother cat fostering puppies – check.
Mother dog fostering kittens – check.
Commando squirrel? – check!

How Howstuffworks Works

I was doing my routine browsing on sites which I subscribe to through feeds when I saw an interesting topic from Howstuffworks (Yes, I subscribe to it. And yes, I know it’s boring). Topics from Howstuffworks typically goes like How Gas Turbines Work? and How Car Crushers Work? but this one was different. It went:

Peek under the hood for the ultimate image gallery all about engines. This special collection includes original HowStuffWorks animations on engines.

And I thought, wow, that sounded interesting (I know, I know). I promptly went to the site and was greeted by a nice-looking engine.

Very normal. Very interesting. That is until I wanted to click Next. To my horror, There were TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY SEVEN slides. There were no other indexes besides the page count, and neither were the pages ordered chronologically. I had no way of telling what to expect from the 2547 pages. I wanted to know how long reading all of them will take, so I did some calculations.

_{Just kidding.}

Assuming I’d take 15 seconds for every slide (and that’s a very conservative estimation considering I didn’t take into account of the time needed to load the page) – I’d take 10.6215 hours to finish reading each and every one of them. Ten hours. I couldn’t play my favourite game for that long continuously. Neither can I work on my computer for that amount of time. Even a geek as geeky as me would find it difficult to stay on the computer for ten hours in a stretch. That basically meant that it was impossible to finish reading all the slides in a day, even if I were to start reading early in the morning.

So, I skipped to slide 2000 and went “aaahh!” and closed the window.

And carried on surfing elsewhere.

Caged Bird

I’m as free a bird. A caged bird that is.

Had the last of my exams for this semester. Only had 2 exams to sit for this time, a seemingly light task to those not knowing how much more work we had to deliver beforehand. Though when compared to the assignments we had before, these exams are in fact pretty light. Light does not mean easy. Because it wasn’t. Not for the subject beyond the narrow mind that I have, at least. Writing answers for my Project Management exam paper was like trying to regurgitate my lunch – except I didn’t had any.

Today’s Mobile Web and Multimedia paper was acceptable. It was not particularly difficult, but it still had the challenge factor. Generally, not too bad.

After that, I when out for lunch with a couple of friends for a rather fancy lunch. I guessed they wanted to “celebrate” the end of our exams. But I was more than happy to tag along. There would be food. Which is pretty much all that is needed to convince me to follow.

- Fast Forward -

Now that things are settled down – exams are done and assignments are more or less done. It’s more or less done because it isn’t really done as in done done. It’s done, for now. I have another mega-assignment which is still in the process while we (okay… I ) speak. It started about… March? And ends in October. Yes that sounds like a long time but it isn’t really that long because everything else runs concurrently. Classes are as usual and no special breaks are given. Unlike some colleges I know, they have an entire semester off specially for them to work on the project.

Admittedly, we have quite a thorough system for monitoring this project across the project time span. Frequent meetings with our supervisors are mandatory, and advisors will monitor our work along with our supervisor. We have access to quite a few good digital libraries, ACM most notably. ACM subscription doesn’t come cheap, and the account is locked to my college’s IP so it’s only accessible there. A major inconvenience if you ask me, because I have the tendency to only be able to work at home. Good things don’t come easily so I’ll have to make do with it.

My holidays have pretty much officially started. But it doesn’t feel like one at all.

Lizard’s Tail

Warning: Gross Alert

I’m sure most of you, if not all have heard of how lizards can detach their tails when caught in order to save themselves. But how many of you have actually seen it in action? I did… and I can assure you that the lizard’s self-preservation mechanism does in fact really work. And it works very well.

Here’s the case. I was about to sleep when I found a lizard in my room. Not that I hate lizards or anything, but I’d prefer not to sleep with lizards in my bedroom. It was hiding among some boxes in my room, so I slowly approached it and saw its tail jutting out. I knew I could get a good hold on the tail, and was pretty sure I could drag it out after that. Well, I did get a good hold on its tail. I held it for a while, thinking “GOTCHA!” – then I heard a tiny snap.

Only the tail was left wriggling in my hands =.=”

I’d show you the video of the tail wriggling if it wasn’t for the gross factor that would potentially devoid me of my readers for good. So I’ll stick to the picture for now.

The lizard really did let his tail snap off to save himself. And it worked brilliantly. So brilliantly that I had to sleep with it being in my bedroom. Oh well, it deserves credit for that anyway. Haha.