… for your scholarship =)
I was just notified about it by my dad, who said a a letter from Waterloo came in during my exams.
So, my tuition next term is effectively freeee~~~ 
Michael Phelps
Aug 17, 2008 – 7:07 pm
This is what happens when you’re the last person to leave an empty house with nothing much to do on a Sunday: I went youtubing Michael Phelps.
I’ve actually seen and heard about him on TV quite a lot before, including his appearances in the Athens Olympics as well as most of his competitions this year in Beijing. To me, he was just another amazing swimmer (much like Ian Thorpe)… it wasn’t until after I youtubed him did I realize how adorable he can be. *squee*
By the way, if you haven’t heard of the name Michael Phelps by now (which is quite hard unless you live in a little isolated hole) he has made history this year by winning eight whoopin’ gold medals in all of the eight events he participated in, and managed to break a record every single time (7 world record, 1 olympic record). Monster!
Anyhow, I got bored and found a few cute videos of him 
He appears to be quite a nice and down-to-earth guy for someone who’s practically at the top of the aquatic world. His laugh and his responses to the reporter’s questions were very very adorable indeed. (“What is your shaving technique?” BAHAHA 
)
.
And more eye candy, courtesy of Google image search. 
heh
The last photo is my favourite of the batch, where he’s got the international flags as backdrop. I definitely prefer that hairstyle more than the one he is sporting now, but maybe he had to cut it short to swim faster in the Olympics? *shruggs*
Exhausting
Aug 15, 2008 – 12:01 pm
I… am… so… exhausted…..
I “slept” in the SE lounge around 4AM, but the couches were so cold, so I couldn’t really sleep for long.
Wrote my longest exam of the term this morning.
My wrist go a nice workout.
When I opened the exam paper, I knew immediately that I would be short on time, so I blasted through that thing.
Barely finished.
No time to double check.
It’s not over though.
One more exam to go though…. 
Two more
Aug 13, 2008 – 10:51 pm
Four down, two more exams to go. Three more days and it’s goodbye to 4A!!!! This puts me a whooopin’ one term away from graduation. 
Scary thought indeed.
因這幾天考試，而沒追的幾集《家好月圓》，
今天終於有時間坐下來看看。
發覺自己每看《家》時，心情很容易就會大起大落。
因為，有很多不同的低能GAG位，激氣位，矛盾位，感動位，。。。真的蠻好看！！
昨晚，在圖書館溫書中途跟Chris和Jacky偷懶看奧運！
中國男女子柔軟體操首次齊齊奪金丫～ *O* 恭喜恭喜！
現在期待八人男子划船項目！！
加拿大，是時候到妳表現了～
唉～ 又奧運，又《家好月圓》，
今期考試很難集中。。。 
Swimming World Records
Aug 12, 2008 – 10:48 pm
Every day, a world record is broken in an olympic swimming event!! How can 5 people ALL break the world record in the SAME race?! LOL And not by a small amount too. In the 400m medley, they smashed the existing world record by something on the order of 4 seconds or something!!
It’s the pooooool, I tell you. It the pooool.
Gah. Back to studying design patterns. Reading through this stuff, I realize that most of us naturally do a lot of this stuff when coding. We just need to learn to attach all these “technical vocab” to the concept now. 
Inferno Heroes
Aug 11, 2008 – 4:07 pm
A firefighter mourning over a lost comrade
First Hong Kong, then Toronto. 
Fire broke out in Cornwall Court, a 15-storey building located in arguably the most populated area in Hong Kong: central Mong Kok. Even without incidents, Nathan Road (one of the busiest roads in Hong Kong) is pretty jammed on a normal day. I can’t imagine what traffic is like with the entire area closed off like that. O__O This is actually reminiscent of the Garley Building fire [video] in 1996, which happened just down the street from Cornwall Court, also on Nathan Road.
The fire was discovered around 9am on Sunday, and was quickly raised to a “five-alarm fire” (the most severe rating for a fire disaster) by noon, with over 200 firefighters on site to help with the rescue effort. A little over 2 hours into the rescue, two firefighters were found lying unconscious on the upper floors. Fellow mates carried them to the rooftops of the adjacent building to try to revive them. Both of them were eventually lowered to the ground and rushed to the local hospital, but were pronounced dead a few hours later.
There were reports that, when these firefighters entered the fire scene to rescue trapped civilians, they had given their oxygen masks to victims so they could breathe. :( When they finally reached the top level, they had already inhaled too much smoke and ultimately fell unconscious.
Trying to revive a fallen firefighter on the building rooftop
In Toronto, a Canadian firefighter also died Sunday battling fires resulting from a massive explosion at a propane depot in Northern Toronto, which resulted in complete closures of sections of Hwy 401, Canada’s busiest highway.
Fire from explosion lit up the Toronto sky
A series of explosion erupted around 3am Sunday moring, which sent fireballs flying into the sky. Tons of people were forced to flee their homes in their pajamas, with many homes left unlivable after the explosion shattered windows and caused ceiling of houses to collapse. Fortunately, there were not many injuries or deaths.
Men’s Eight
Aug 11, 2008 – 12:34 pm
Olympics are such a distraction during exam period But I couldn’t help myself.
So Canadians are gold medal favourites in the men’s 8 rowing event. CBC currently hosts blogs for some of their Beijing-bound olympic athletes, and Adam Kreek is one of the 8 (+1 coxswain) on this rowing team. I thought this entry of him describing his team mates was very cute. I am impressed at how smart this team is: Harvard grads, law school grads, mechanical engineers, Oxford alumni in mathematical finance… just to name a few.
I decided to YouTube them and found this video of them impersonating their coach HAHAH. Such a cute team!! Can’t wait to watch the finals.
And another cute video of their “secret training”:
GDP => Medal Count?
Aug 11, 2008 – 9:10 am
In light of the Olympics and the medal count competition, I thought this articles was kind of funny :P
From the Wall Street Journal:
Want to Predict Olympics Champs? Look at GDP
August 8, 2008
Back in early 2000, Daniel Johnson, a professor at Colorado College, found himself with extra funding leftover from a separate project and with the help of an undergrad decided to use the resources to see whether economic variables could predict the medal winnings of each country in the upcoming summer Olympics.
…
His results and subsequent predictions weren’t too well-publicized — it was, after all, an exploratory project. But once the Games concluded and countries’ medal count showed a 95-96% correlation to his predictions (“We were so accurate we thought we’d made a mistake,” he says), people started to pay attention. Calls poured in, including calls from two nations “who shall remain nameless” asking him for advice to gear up for the next Games.
“It would be harmful for me to offer advice,” the self-proclaimed un-athletic professor jokes. “I don’t know, get more income per capita?”
(Full article at Wall Street Journal)
Eason and Show
Aug 06, 2008 – 9:52 pm
I don’t remember how I ended up clicking onto this video, but oh… my… gawd…. It was SOO freakin’ hilarious. It’s been a while since I’ve last watched Taiwanese talk shows, and I’ve seriously forgotten how funny they are.
This is just a snippet, links to the full show are below:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnwjSCnSS_k
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ia89U95dII
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tge0vN4q5FE
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqI450WpT4Q
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCH2t9pjfP0
Honestly, 笑到趴响到 …. omg… Eason and 小豬 are soooo adorable. Seriosuly, SOO SO SOO funny. Watching this completely made my day.
This is actually kind of bad…. to discover this 娛樂百分百 show during exam period….. lol
Woot. Clean Hard Drive
Aug 05, 2008 – 11:45 am
After reading Sunny’s entry the other day, I decided to go and clean out my hard drive too. And I managed to go from 3GB of free space to almost 12GB!! And this was without using XSlimmer (because I’m too cheap to pay for it)!
I haven’t seen so much free space in so long. This makes me happy because I’ve been recycling that 3GB for the longest time.
Oh the things I do to avoid studying. First exam in… 45 minutes.
Taxes
Aug 04, 2008 – 6:27 pm
I really should take a course on taxation. As I’ve learned from my finance courses, the existence of taxes make such a huuuge difference in your “pocketable” money, particularly in ridiculously high-taxed countries like Canada (and especially so in Ontario).
There’s so much money to be saved from accounting for taxes….
While on the topic of taxes with a friend, I decided to search up various tax rates, and…
DID YOU KNOW: There is no capital gains tax in Hong Kong?! There is NO tax disadvantage whatsoever to investing in stocks or real estate for example. I wonder if this helped fuel the culture of 炒樓 and 炒股票 over there. 所為全民皆股，連對投資三唔識七嘅公公婆婆都學人買股票。。。
放榜
Aug 04, 2008 – 1:54 pm
今日香港中學放榜；it’s all over 港聞頭條。
自己慶幸不需要經歷啲咁 stressful 嘅 experience.
現在亦暫時未有表弟妹要 experience。
聽收音機聽到學生周圍搵學校那個徬惶的情景。
香港學生壓力真大，讀書真辛苦。
Dark Knight, Finally
Aug 02, 2008 – 8:31 pm
“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” - Joker
So I finally caught this movie on Thursday night with Jacky, and luckily, it didn’t disappoint. Though, I was less blown away than I had wanted to be due to my high expectations. Still a very very good movie though! Absolutely loved the subtle but recurring themes of human nature, and ‘light vs. dark’. Walking out of the movie, I was surprised that my favourite character of the movie was actually Joker. I understand he’s the villian, but Heath Ledger did an absolutely fantastic and convincing job as the mad criminal.
After watching this, it made me go back to rewatch Batman Begins today, which was equally good
Speaking of movies, the teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released on the Warner Brothers website a few days ago. It’s a teaser only, but we get a glimpse of the young Voldermort. Personally, I’m not too excited about this movie, since the last one seriously disappointed. Not to mention, the 6th book was my least favourite book in the series. The movie is scheduled for release in November when I’m in Seattle…. so we’ll see…
This is relatively old news, but what in the world would drive someone to stab and decapitate a random stranger?!? It’s scary how sudden these things happen, especially since it’s not uncommon to ride the greyhound…
爛 GAG
Jul 30, 2008 – 12:55 pm
想講一講。。。
It bugs me when people incorrectly translate slang.
「爛GAG」 does not mean ‘dirty joke’; it just means ‘lame joke’, which are very different things.
近排全世界都睇《家好月圓》，
而劇裡嘅「荷媽」常常講「爛GAG」。
某些英文網站錯誤地將它翻譯為「dirty joke」，
根本就不是那一回事。。。
所以記得不要譯錯喇～
嗯，講完。
溏心風暴之家好月圓
Jul 29, 2008 – 7:15 pm
Sequels usually fail to live up to the expectations set by a very successful predecessor. But after watching the first three episodes of《溏心風暴之家好月圓》, I am actually quite excited about this series!!
I still remember the ridiculous 《溏心》craze during summer last year. It was pretty much all everyone in Hong Kong talked about. Every night, my floormates would faithfully gather around the TV in the common room, and tune into TVB Jade Channel to catch 《溏心》. When I went out to eat with my aunt and uncle, they would always make sure they get home in time to catch it. If they didn’t, they would make sure the restaurant they’d selected had TV’s installed (which is apparently not uncommon), so that they can catch it while eating. Yeaaah… that was how badly people followed it. Streets of HK are usually packed with people in the evening, but when this was aired, this might be a slight exaggeration, but I swear it’d be unusually calm by 9:30, because everyone was curled up in front of their TV’s at home.
I quickly looked up some stats, which says that the peak viewer rating for the series had slightly more than 3 million people tuning in. To put this into perspective, the population of Hong Kong is slightly less than 7 million people. Soo… yeaahh…
很久沒有「追」劇集了，
通常都係整套劇出晒街才開始看第一集，
因為不喜歡天天等它一集一集的出。
但今次等唔切，唯有日日追。
Charing is an undergraduate student studying 
