Sometimes i wonder...

If it is worth working fast... wanting to get things done... having short lunches, not taking tea breaks...

Thinking to myself that i should finish things faster, just in case there will be more just around the corner...

then comes Monday meeting... board blank.. with manager wondering why I haven't got much to do....


sometimes.. maybe.. just maybe it's better to do things slowly.....

Games

As many of you who knows me will know gaming is a very big hobby of mine. I guess my fascination with games begin when I was young, my grandpa used to have a Nintendo sitting in the corner on the top floor of our apartment. The Nintendo sits on a little wooden table, and we used to sit on little stools watching my grandpa play Mario. When we were a little bit older we started joining him in playing games.

Then my dad invested in a SEGA. I remember countless nights sitting on my parents bed, watching my dad playing driving game (which he never manage to finish) while munching on cheeseball. Or many weekends spent on the very SEGA watching my cousin William and Emily playing co-op Sonic, racing to the finish line.

I guess the first game I ever played by myself was princess maker II, I don't know how many hours I spent on in, trying to get all sort of different endings. Then a long came my first RPG game on the computer "pal", and I was forever hooked. For the first time, I experienced gaming like never before, not only was the game about 'completing' or 'killing that monster', it had the most captivating story that went a long with it. Since then, there were many years of playing 'incomplete' games, which were the unfortunate result of buying 'jumbo' game discs, where the seller try to copy as many games into the disc as possible and due to many problems (possibly due to the incapability of our computer), the games either doesn't play at all or would suddenly freeze at certain point in the game and that was that.

And then.. came along PlayStation. I am not sure how I manage to convince my mum to get me one, no doubt my dad had a say in it too. In the first few months of getting the ps, it didin't gain much popularity in our house, because my poor mum who knows nothing about games made the purchase for us, and no doubt the shop keeper took advantage of her lack of knowledge and recommended a bunch of very old or poor selling games. Things of course changed after dad and I went back to Taiwan and bought a handful of games. That was the first time I was introduced to Final Fantasy. I still remember when the store manager recommended it to me, he said it was very popular. I didn't think much of it at the time except noting that the game was 4 cds long, and the drawing on the front cover was very good, A LOT better than anything I have seen so far.


Then that summer I think my life changed, who knew anyone could get hooked on a RPG game when it's in a language that he/she didn't understand... but I did. I had pages of print outs of translations, guides, and many many hours of running trying to figure out where I was suppose to go. That was definately a turning point, because for the first time, I start to anticipate the moment dad would go upstairs to sleep freeing up the TV, because only then can i start playing. For the first time I start sleeping late from time to time because of gaming (usually because I couldn't find a save point), and probably it is around that time ppl in the family start saying things like "omg you are playing games again?!?!" for the first time I was labelled as 'gaming geek' in the family. LOL luckily due to long game release time between each game title that I am interested in, I manage to keep big rpgs in summer holidays only which definately kept my grades at bay. FF8 in summer 1998/99, ff9 in 99/01, chrono cross in 00/01 so on and then on my ps2 which I spent my entire year's savings on, Kingdom heart, ffx, ffx-2, ffxii and KH2.


So you can imagine my shock, after having to defend playing games for 10 years now, to see my entire family (aunties/mum/cousins) all started playing game that I play on facebook. Not only do they play, they are playing a lot harder than
I am.

Life has a funny way of turning things around...

Either that or facebook games has a way of reaching out into the public...

Or perhaps I prefer to think that the era of gaming has finally reached the general public, and we, previous being branded as gaming geeks were just the trendsetters, the pioneers of entertainment of tomorrow. or maybe not :P

Religion

Religion is such a funny thing. My grandma (dad's mum) had been a Buddhist all her life, whilst she was not devoted one, she certainly never missed giving offerings on special occasions such as chinese new year to Buddha. Until few years ago, she walked past a Christian church and was offered to learn about God.. for free that she was converted. Now she is a Christian, everyone Sunday a volunteer comes to her home that reads bible to her. While she doesn't pray before her meals nor prays everynight, she believes there's a place in heaven for her.

My other grandma had been an atheist all her life, but she was taught by Russian nuns in her primary school days that she had always been more lenient toward Christianity. My mum has been Buddhist for most of her life but whenever mum mentions it, grandma had always shown certain dislike towards it. Few weeks ago whilst in hospital, Buddhist monk was visiting patients offering to pray for patients. Now as she lie onher bed with a small mp3 that plays monk's chants hanging from the side of the bed, and Buddhist beads on her wrists.

Religion... is a funny thing. Perhaps what we choose to believe depends on our family background, and what is presented to us at the right time. Perhaps certain religion resonates more strongly with certain individuals so no matter what religion they started with, they'll eventually ends up with their destined religion.... Who knows.

Inspired

At the end of last year, we had this dairyfarmer came to us with this product he developed himself, asking for advice and suggestions. This was a guy who had no background in science or technology. He started with a great idea. He took one step at a time, solved problems as he goes. During our one hour meeting, I was inspired, by his enthusiasm, by his confidence and optimism. They say NZ businesses are largely entrepreneurs, I guess it's ppl like him, who have great ideas, have big dreams, and not afraid to face on any challenges that comes his way.

I wish him best of luck with his product! May it be successfully developed and launch in the near future.

Presentation day

Today is the first day of presentation for th 4thyear individual projects, I went and showed my support. There are some really interesting projects, ranging from developing products with reduced salt and no MSG, detecting milk damage, water treatment options investigation, and gluten free bread. Particularly, one of them was on detecting campylobacter on real time pcr. I know that girl quite well, she has repeated told me that food techi have vertially no background on campylobacter and PCR, so she had real trouble preparing her presentation for an audience who just didnt' have a clue.

Which come to a point, because I did, I knew what she was talkign about, admittedly not as good as Miss Hui-who-majors-in-biotech. But the point is... so what if they have no idea, in the food industry, unless if you end up doing some micro quality stuff, you'll probabily never run into basic bio methods such as PCR or what not. At days like this, I can't help but thinking if the choice I made 4 years ago was the right one.

Yesterday I had one of the most enjoyable lecture on ice cream. It was NOTHING like the version laurie gave us last year. Things that I had wondered about during his lecture and the field trip were now explained. They even went into details on the difference between premium ice cream and normal ice cream. And the lectuerer HAD a lot of experiences with ice cream and he could tell us a lot of standard practices based on his experience. It was really brilliant.

We had entire 4 weeks worth of lectures on colloids (sry this is gonna be a bit technical). The only thing that I've learn in Auckland was laurie's *cough* wonderful tables of different emulsifiers, and a chemmat lectuere mentioning things on laplace pressure. But what I got this year, was soooo much more indepth, and I can go on and on and on about this, but I will not bore you with the details.

My course coordinator half jokingly said to me on our 2nd meeting "didn't you wish you were here" I replied him "things would've been a lot different" and indeed it would've. I would not have many of the friends that i treasure, woudl've met Danny at all... so how can I say that things would've been better right?

All I am hoping is that I will be equipped with more food techi info that AU students lacks, and more general bio info that Massey students lacks, that makes me an unique, all-rounded food technologist that employers will want to hire!!! HIRE ME PLZ!!!!

Quality paper reflection

I just handed in my last quality assignment on Friday. Feel great, that's 1/4 of my course done, officially. The last assignment was a reflection assignment on what i've learnt etc (don't ask me how the heck the lecturer is gonna mark that).

I choose to do the Quality paper because my course coordinator said "looking at what you've done, you never done anythign on quality systems, so I think it'll be quite a good paper to do". Granted I have vowed not to get into QA or QC stuff just having worked as a QC technician for almost 2 years part time allow to me to discvoer that, that is not where my passion lies. But it did gave me I guess curiousity to what Is quality, and how it is maintained.

The quality paper was certainly intersting, for starters is part extramural which means NO LECTURES! and since I am an internal student, I get the privilege to have a meeting with the lectuerer weekly to discuss my progress. All I can say is. thank goodness for those meetings, or else I'll never have the self-displine to do a bit of study every week. But most importantly, it is really not close to ANYTHING i've done before. For once it wasn't about soaking up all the information, it wasn't about regurgitating, it was all about critical thinking, and what I think is right. I seriously have major headaches when I have to do quality assignments, just on the basis of how hard I had to think. And at the end of the course, while I can't say still that quality is somehting I like, I really feel like I've learnt a heck of a lot. This just to showed.. 2 years experience at AQ taught me nothing about quality systm. just as well as i was just a technician.

New tool for investigations

Watching the news, I've noticed a interesting new trend. Police are starting to use internet diaries and networks such as blogs, facebook and bebos etc as a tool to investigate into the lifes of the suspect/victims. Last week, the bebo were on the news as tools to find out the final moments of Augustine, and just today Xue's blog was on the news to find quotes related to this artist that she liked.

I wonder... if any thing i documented will be used against me in the future.... it makes you wonder right? Say one day if i died tragically (or else i wont' end up in teh news) i wonder if ppl will dig out random stuff that i've written, and flash it on news.... I guess we now enter an age where public blogs are really public, people and authorities are now realizing that this is a great source of information directly from the person of interest.

I guess it is time that I start be really careful what I write, the possiblity of the internet is endless.. who knows who'll end up reading it.