Awaiting last final and GTA 4

Well i have my last final tomorrow which is religions of the east. Similar to the midterm, the exam is going to be composed of only short answer questions, except there'll probably be more since it's a 2 hour exam rather than 1. I've got some studying done so far, but still a long way from being ready. I'm not that worried about it though since it's being held at 2 tomorrow so i got plenty of time still. And when i mean short answers, some of them can be simple one word answers such as dates and names. The only real threat is the spelling because there are so many terms and most of them derive from Sanskrit.

It was a real bummer that much of the material got rushed as we approached the end of the course. One of the main reasons for taking the course was because i wanted to know more about Chinese and Japanese religions such as Chinese Buddhism and Zen Buddhism. Ah well, I guess i'll have to read the text book during the summer.

Speaking of studying, it has been quite hard to concentrate. With the recent purchase of a PS3 and the great weather outside, i was already in summer vacation mode. The release of GTA 4 isn't helping either. Though i preordered already, it's a pain to hold off until tomorrow to get it. In retrospect, getting the game would of probably been a better idea since I ended up wasting much of my time surfing the web for gameplay videos....lol yea that's kind of pathetic I know.

It's also not good for me to relax as if summer vacation's here either, since there'll be no vacation for me. I applied for 5 courses during the summer since i'm behind in credits, and want to leave UTSC by next spring. Though i'm sure i won't be hardcore studying during the summer anyway, I should at least go into the term with a better mentality lol. Here's my awesome timetable.

Abnormal psychology isn't on here since it's weboption only. I get to enjoy the lectures in the comfort of my own home. Hopefully i can watch it on a weekly basis rather than saving and watching them all the day before exams.

Snack Recommendation of the Week

Before i get back to studying, i'd like to recommend those who love nuts (the food), Planter's Cracked Black Pepper Cashews. It's a relatively new product which i picked up at the Good Food Festival i blogged about earlier. As the name implies, these cashews are different than your regular salted ones because they're covered with cracked black pepper. They're damn addictive and the pepper gives it a real nice kick to it. Excuse the picture since my phone camera isn't the best.

And it's a given that these things with make you thirsty. So my second recommendation would be So Good's Strawberry Flavoured Soy Beverage. Its Pepto Bismol pink color can throw off some consumers, but it's quite good. I admit, not everyone will enjoy it, especially those who don't like soy beverages in the first place. If i were to describe it's flavour, i'd say it taste kind of like a strawberry smoothe. You get a real strong (artificial) strawberry flavor at initial tasting, which ends off with a slight soy aftertaste. NEVER try the chocolate version of So Good though. It tastes nothing like chocolate...it's just plain bad. There are many other good brands for chocolate soy beverage.

Anyway, this has been a long post. Enjoy your week folks, and to those who still have exams, I wish you all good luck.

Pong

Good Food Fest

Photos courtesy from Phil's pro camera handling
More of his pics @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcheng/sets/

Free Caesars: The spice on the edge of the cups taste good, but smells like ass

Pemeal Bacon sandwhiches anyone?

These things were pretty dang good. Deserves the $2 charge

A food fest is not complete without a pedophile dressed as a giant peanut

Workshop on how to serve/taste cheese: Might sound 'cheesy' but it was enjoyable. Had some good cheese samples (free) and good tips on pairing alcohol with this wonderful diary product

Food fest and PS3

Aside from the lack of sleep and cramming before the exams on the 24th and 25th, this week has been quite joyful. The Memory and Cog (PSYB57) and health/aging (HLTB01) exams were quite fair, and think I scored decent marks on them...at least decent in my standards lol. Now all that remains is my east religions exam on May 1st, and I will be able to get a good break until May 5th when summer session starts :\ .

Having finished 3/4 exams, I was looking forward to a bright and carefree weekend. Right after the exam on the 25th, and still suffering from a lack of sleep, I ended up playing Smash @ ryans in my half dead state. I got to say, it was good to see some old faces. It was off to church later @ night for me while the rest of them ended up watching Harold and Kumar i believe.

Still on a high from finishing the hardest of the 4 exams, I ended up getting a PS3 saturday morning from futureshop. I got an extra dualshock controller, and the system came with GT5. GT5 is alright considering it's only a demo, and it will occupy me (and studying that well) until I get GTA4 in a couple of days. Later in the day I went to the Good Food Festival with Pat, Phil, Rebekah and Simon. Basically you pay $12 for admission and you get to have all sorts of free samples. Some you have to pay but they are relatively reasonable.
Check it out here: http://www.goodfoodfestival.net/

Having ate during most of satuday, it was a good idea to excercise and work off all those free samples today. After church phil, pat, rebekah, nancy and i ended up on a joyous bike ride through east scarborough. At least I think we were east, because i had no idea where da hell we went. Nevertheless , it was a good 2 solid hours of riding.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. Now to have some quality time with my PS3 and anime. I'll post the pictures from the foodfest in the next post. Good luck to all those who still have exams....which includes me

Child Leaps Over Car

Jacked from the guys @ http://www.japanprobe.com

It actually took me a couple of views to see the spring board there. My original reaction was a 'WTF', since launching over that car by hops alone is pretty insane. Having realized the spring board, much of the 'wow' factor was lost, but i have to say that it is still quite the feat. The kid is pretty small, and one would require pretty good flexibility and coordination to pull that off. I think i'm capable of pulling the stunt off, but then again, i could also end up owning the windows and shattering my face on top of the roof.

Starbucks: Double Shots

Upon my study sessions at Chapters this weekend, I stumbled upon a Starbucks' drink worthy of a short post. Feeling the heat from outdoors, I wanted something cold with a bit of kick to awake my senses. That was when I found the Starbucks' Double Shot. It's basically expressio in a can, but this one's from Starbucks! Retaining the rich flavour you've come to know from Starbucks brewed coffee, the Double Shot is excellent for those who wastes no time in consuming caffeine. With such a great balance of expresso, cream and sugar, chugging it would almost seem like a waste. It makes you want to nurse it slowly so you can enjoy the rich flavour. Coming at under $3, Starbucks' Double Shot is a refreshing drink that will appeal to most coffee drinkers, and it is definitely worth a try.

Weekend Roundup

It seems as if spring has been skipped over as we launch from winter straight into summer. With the sun shinning, and temperatures averaging mid 20's, it was hard to stay put at home and study. Nevertheless, i managed to squeeze in a bit of reading over the weekend.. though i'm still miles away from being ready for my exams on the 24th and 25th.


Friday: HARVEY'S and CHAPTERS/STARBUCKS

Started off the day with a heavy lunch @ Harvey's. For those who don't know yet, they have a promo where you can get a free ANGUS burger (not known as the Black Angus burger anymore) w/ the purchase of ANY menu item, which means you can technically order a 50 cent gravy and get one. I myself ordered a drink and poutine, which wasn't a great idea because i ended up bloated for the rest of the day. I felt so physically bad that i had to walk and jog around my neighbourhood later on in the day to relieve the stress in my gut. The offer ends on the 27th, so google a copy of the coupon now and use it while you still can. HOWEVER, many chains have started to refuse accepting these coupons for various reasons/excuses. I went to the one on Morningside, so perhaps you folks can try your luck there.

Afterwards, I ended up @ Chapters for a bit of reading. Though I ended up dozing off most of the time. I blame it on the heavy intake of calories lol.
And finally, I wrapped up the day @ church for some fellowship.

Saturday: More Chapters, Smash Bros, UFC

After drumming @ a worship session and lunch, I ended up back @ Chapters to attempt further study. Managing a good 2 hours of reading, I attended a short workshop @ church, and afterwards got some Smash Brothers in with the 2 other Musketeers and Singh Jr.

For those who play the new Smash game, in my opinion R.O.B. is the best character there is. All i do is chuck his stupid spinning top @ people which is pretty damn fun. And of course for those who don't play..you have no idea what the hell i'm talking about...so let's move on.

To cap the day, it was off to 'BAR10Ders' to watch UFC 83, or at least the last half of it. Got caught up in Smash i forgot what time it was and had Mr. Law wait a good 40 min. To be honest the matches weren't spectacular. I was expecting the main match b/w Serra and GSP to be more of a stand up fight. However they took it to the ground the whole fight, with GSP displaying his superior ground game and dominating Serra. I wanted GSP to TKO Serra in stand up striking to make up for his loss to him last time. Instead, he ended up with the TKO win with knee strikes on the ground, which isn't bad.

Sunday: Design studio

After church and japanese all you can eat buffet @ Yang's, i headed over to the design studio to meet with my mom. We had to choose what materials/decor we wanted for the rooms in our new house. I originally thought this would be pretty fun, like how you would decorate you own homes in 'The Sims'. But as we know, video games never reflect real life, and doing this stuff is a real hassle...at least for me. There are just too many options and colors, and because we only get to see samples of it, it is quite challenging to visualize how they will all come together in the actual house.

There is also the issue with what ones are standard items and which ones are upgrades. Obviously the model rooms they have at the studio use mostly upgrades and hence they all look marvelous. It can be quite hard to acquire the same theme as the models using the standard parts and materials. Unless you're willing to get ripped off purchasing the upgraded parts from them, it'll be hard to achieve the same level of design. The lack of sleep and heat eventually got to me, and i just wanted to get the hell out of there. So I quickly picked w/e i thought looked nice and left. Hopefully it'll look nice in the actual house.

Japanese Rice Festival cont'd

Woops, here are some more...

Enjoy

Japanese Rice Festival cont'd

It appears Blogger only lets me upload 5 pics in one post, so here are the rest:

Japanese Rice Festival

I don't usually open forwarded emails, however this one was tagged with the topic as Japan, which to me means 'view immediately'. Here's what the email enfolds and I quote:

'Every year, farmers in the rural town Inakadate, Japan creates rice field art by using red rice in in with their regular rice in special patterns. A few others fields in rural Japan also follow the trend of this beautiful rice field art. Check out different stages of the rice field art from start to harvesting with 16 more pics after the jump.'

Just for laffs...

For those feeling stress and the blues under exam pressure...here's something to relieve your pain.




Some may actually feel more pain having watched this...

BTW: I can't believe i managed to get this to play in my blog as an embedded video. Didn't know it was this simple...

1 exam down, 3 more to go

As the title implies, i just finished my first exam, which was for C54 or cognition and representation. I woke up @ 6am today to finish my 'studying' , and got to school around 12 to grab a slice of pizza and do some last minute cramming. The exam itself was quite fair with 45 m.c. questions and 20 marks worth of short answers. Dr. Kennedy threw in a 5 mark bonus question for good measure. Though one thing that isn't all that fair was the fact the exam is worth 65% of the course mark, making it the most heavily weighted exam i ever wrote. (I believe i wrote a 60% intro psych one back in first year.) However, since Dr. Kennedy is one of the friendliest and most enthusiastic profs i ever had, i'll let that go. Best of luck to him in Berlin for further research. As for performance wise on my part, i think i did alright on it....perhaps scrapping by with a 70 on it...hopefully.

Now that that's over, i can take a short break. Though since i have exams on 24 and 25, and without even reading anything yet, i should perhaps get back to it tmrw.

Pong

Spring anime line up

With the coming of spring is a new line up of anime titles. So far i have my eyes on a couple of titles, which are:
- Kamen no maid guy
- Hazura na kiss
- vampire knight
- macross frontier
- soul eater
- Toshokan Senso
- Golgo 13
-Code Geass R2

I plan to watch the Nodame Cantabile series which i've missed from last spring. It recieved some good reviews and it's not that long (about 13 episodes). But the main reason for watching would be because it is produced and directed by the same team who did the Honey and Clover series, which is one of my favorite animes.

Stuff i'm currently watching:
- Bleach (anime and manga)
- One Piece
- D Gray Man
- Naruto (manga only)

Well, back to studying i go...

Studying day

Objectives of the day:

-Read at least 3 chapters of C54: Cognition and Represetation

-Retain what i've read for later use

Currently listening to:

YUI: I Loved Yesterday

Kumi-X Presents Namie Amruo - amura.mix

Ridge Racer 4 soundtrack

Blogging once again

Well it's been a good two years since i last blogged. I would use my old blog site - laihonpong.blogspot.com- however, i forgot my login information, and hence I have to start this new one.

'So why am i blogging once again?'

Well I know my last one wasn't that successful since I only blogged 3 or 4 times in that one, but I plan to keep this one alive. I started that one when entering university, and it was one of those 'spur of the moment' things. Now entering 4th year soon, i'm at a crossroads in my life where i'm uncertain about what i'll end up doing, and my 'devil-may-care' attitude is not exactly helping. I guess this blog will be somewhat of a diary for myself, so whatever that i am in the future can look back at this crucial period of my life and see what kind of nonsense i'm thinking. This will also be a good medium in which i can do some free writing of sorts. I'm tired of writing pure objective and scientific bullcrap with no real meaning or personal connections at all. I get the feeling that i shouldn't even be in the field of psychology and life science at all, and should be doing something with less restrictions on creativity. However, this is a rambling for another post later.

'What's in this blog?'
As i said, most of the posts will be ramblings about the life of pong. I plan to put some 'reviews' of foods, anime or music later on, but this is still up in the air as i have yet to plan any of this.

It's funny (edit : actually it's more sad than it is funny) i should start this when i have yet to study for a 60% final on tuesday. It's 2 am so this will do for now, and i'll update the blog whenever i'm taking a 'study break'. Feel free to leave comments and such...

PONG