Speckled Green

Well, I haven’t posted since November 2011. What should I talk about in this post? Oh, I know. A generalised glossing over of what’s happened in the last 34 days or so!

So, let me see… I remember it was fun… and there was food. And friends. And fun. Oh, and at least 2 movies. And popcorn. And Skyrim. Lots of Skyrim.

Ok, well, first their was a friend’s belated birthday ‘party’, where several of us met up at Castle Towers to watch Puss in Boots (3D!), and then a rather enjoyable dinner at an Indian restaurant afterwards. Besides all the laughs, the conversations, and meeting new people, or eating a lot of food as I seemed to do, it was great to be with friends again!! Even if I had been with them just a few days before… You can never be with friends too often, right? Darn, this widescreen is messing up with my ability to judge how long this post is… Time for a blog redesign, I say! I just wish someone would do the visual designing for me, I’m awful at creating designs (I just find something I like on the internet, and make my own version of it). Read more »

Well, it’s been a while. Almost a month since I wrote my last blog post, and in that time, some stuff has actually happened. Yes, I know. Shocking. Life happening. Read more »

Speeches were given, songs were sung, dances done, slide shows hung (hey, I was trying to make it rhyme). My graduation has occurred, and joining over 60,000 people across the state who over the last couple of days have done just like me, completed around 13 years of schooling (some more, some less), and have felt emotional, cried, laughed with joy, experienced relief, or something else. Read more »

Well, those two days were sure eventful. At Sean’s house on Thursday, Ben & Sean were busy working out the coding behind the ATM and getting it to work. I have just read an email from Sean saying that he’s finished putting it together, and now I just have to come up with an acceptable GUI design for them to conform to. Ahh… time to let my imagination roam free. Except I have to remind myself that it has to be doable. So, that will cause several ideas to be immediately ruined.

It was an enjoyable day, with Ben and his MacBook and a school laptop, Sean with his desktop plugged into the TV, and me borrowing my mum’s laptop. Ben certainly had the most resources =]  And when it came to deciding what we would have for lunch (Sean’s mum gave us a choice), since we were running short of dice, Ben even wrote up a script to randomly choose what we would eat for lunch!!

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So, here I am at Sean’s house, using my mum’s laptop, and we’re working on our SDD project. Sean and Ben are busy coding, while I’m trying to workout a splash and layout for the GUI to our silly ATM project. More later.

Wasn’t actually much of a picnic when you think about it. But it was an enormous success and tremendous fun!! Especially for the Yr 7 kids! It was a fun day…

Grouped up with groups 10 & 11, group 12 had a fun time cycling through all the activities we Yr 11s had organised. When it was my turn to run an activity, I was with Thai, and our group had decided Capture The Flag would be an awesome game to play. As we got to the Bicentennial park, however, Thai and I, who were chosen to first run the activity, discovered just how small the area we were using was (and that it was sloped downhill towards the lake). Along with that, we discovered that we needed to create new rules for the CTF game, else it was gonna get boring quickly. So, we decided to add a modified version of Stuck In The Mud to it! And boy did the kids enjoy it =]

Anyhows, as they were enthusiastically playing the game (while the leaders with them periodically joined in), I spent some time looking around. It’s wonderful to see so many people running around being happy in a park… Although it looks odd when they’re all wearing the same uniform, and are all around the same age and size… but that’s a school for ya =P

During recess, Niro pulled out some cupcakes/scone-like-things he had made and offered it to the group of yr 11s that were sitting around and chatting. For some strange reason, Erin called out that it was Niro’s birthday, and we all starting singing Happy Birthday to Niro. Of course, it wasn’t actually his birthday, but we didn’t care =] Some of the people who didn’t know though that it actually was his birthday, which just added to our fun. We all thanked him for his birthday cupcakes though! Once again at lunch we continued it when Yeli brought out a cake she had brought for her peer support group, we all broke into singing happy birthday for Niro again. It was fun!

As I’m writing this post after I have come back from youth group, I feel a bit too tired and way too lazy to type any more about my week and day, especially after having a bandage attached to my arm to protect a rather annoying graze on my elbow from getting an infection after I ran into some stairs in the dark whilst playing outdoor night games (We were playing CTF in the dark!! I just can’t be free of CTF today, can’t I?)

So, I’ll be finishing this now. The rest can be a story I can tell some other day.

Wow, I didn’t think I would be, but the horror movie that a lot of people laughed through has really spooked me. Took till nearly 2 hours after it finished before I felt that I had been spooked. For the type of movie it was (horror??), it’s wasn’t the best, but it was still better than many of the first reviews said. The version being shown in cinemas around the world now is actually the 3rd version of the movie, interestingly.

Anyhows, today was a good day. After graduation, I went with my friends to Castle Towers, where shopping, browsing, general wandering, talking, eating, arguing and eventually watching a movie before going home was the activities of the day. I shan’t bother going into greater description of the day. I don’t look forward to the formal. Well, I do look forward to it, I’m sure it’ll be great. I just feel really nervous about it, I always feel nervous about social events like that.

Thanks to my friends for a great school year, btw!!

It’s been almost a month since I last posted something on my blog, and in that month, I’ve done my school certificate, badly went through my piano exam, had a get-together at Ben’s place, and played plenty of games.

Not much that’s happened really.

My piano exam was last Tuesday (17th November). Didn’t do as well as I should’ve. Didn’t practise enough though, so that is my own fault. Not pleased with my result, but I’m happy I passed and that it’s done, finally.

Thursday saw the Band ‘Christmas’ Concert, with performances from all the bands in the school, plus a few other groups. It also, sadly, saw the farewell of our Band Conductor/Master for the last 11 years. Bye Mark!! We’ll miss you (well, some of us will at any rate)!

After my piano exam, I haven’t really been bothered doing work much. Playing games a lot, reading books, playing what-ever-I-feel-Like on the piano…… Friday arvo, I went over to Ben’s place to have a celebration of sorts. Also there was Don, Lok and Simon. Mostly all we did was play Halo 3. Once again, Ben and I dominated, unless they forced us to play solo while they teamed up. Then it was much harder. But Ben and I still got nice scores (even if neither of us won). For hours we played, stopping only for food, drink, monopoly, and for all the others except Lok and I (who didn’t feel tired at all) sleep. On that thought, I didn’t really feel tired till I had been awake for 36 hours straight………. Finally went to bed at 9:41 pm, which means I had been awake for over 40 hours. Tiring.

But, besides playing games all night/morning long, my brother has finally got a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the Xbox 360, and so I’ve been playing through that (I really suck at it… maybe I’ll be better when I learn the levels), and watching my brother playing online multi-player games. Definitely looks, feels and sounds awesome, and is a step up from CoD4.

But now I gotta go to Church, so I’ll just end this post here and now. Besides, I don’t really have much more to say, except that having only 5 hours of sleep before being awake for over 36 hours makes me feel really tired (unless I get distracted, or have caffeine!!)

P.S. This post is the 256th post by me, Ant! BTW, 256 is 2^8

Yes, I’m alive. I just haven’t felt like writing. Haven’t felt like doing much except mindlessly reading stuff from my school books, and playing on the Xbox about once every 4 days. In these holidays, my attention span seems to have shrunk from 10+ minutes, to about 30 seconds. On that thought. My ability sleep in has gone from ‘not really sleeping in’ to ‘kinda sleeping in’ (from 6:50 am to 8:30 am). I think I feel better waking up at 6 am than 8:30 am.

Probably the only thing that’s worth a real mention here in this post is the small outing some of us people of the ‘Back-stoop’ & others had on the 1st Tuesday of the hols. We met up in Parra for lunch (after Anthony and Michael Lee had a ‘study’ session, which included hardcore study of Tap Tap Revolution), before wandering towards the Cinemas to buy our tickets for our movie (Mao’s Last Dancer, very good movie, you should all go watch it if you haven’t already). As usual, the guys out-numbered the girls, but that didn’t stop us guys following the girls like a gaggle of geese around the shops, till we realised that they were shopping for formal dresses and such, and then strangely we felt like going off on our own. Read more »

If I haven’t already mentioned it, I found this plug-in for WordPress which adds a ‘Like’ button. Thought it’d be pretty cool, so I added it. Now, just to add some custom CSS for it…

Recently been taking some of those “How Well Do You Know” someone quizzes on Facebook, and I’ve come to this conclusion after 4 quizzes: I don’t know my own friends. With my highest score being around 50%, that’s not that good really… After making my own quiz (25 questions long… I would’ve made it longer, but I wasn’t allowed to…) and seeing some of the results of my own quiz, I realise that many of my friends are like me, they only know (or guessed) one half of me correct. I guess we could all do with a bit of learning about each other.

That’s not to say that many of you could’ve easily answer many of those questions in my quiz if you had happened to read some of my blog posts where I blabbed on about this and that, unwittingly telling you (and the world) much about my life and myself. But I guess we can overlook that.

Having a quick glance at my blog, I’m thinking that I should go and find some plugins to jazz up my blog. Maybe some fancy AJAX stuff like what Facebook uses…

But now, about life. Not that much has happened. Went to the Sydney Opera House for the Pulse concert again this year, only this time I went as part of the School band rather than as part of the Occasional Orchestra (the orchestra formed for the Pulse concert each year). We were going to play ‘Spain’ (a latin song), but due to some mix up, the program said we were going to play Hopetown Holiday, so, that’s what we played. All the better for us, we felt. Instead of a small 2 minute song, we played a longer, 5 minute song (or was it 6 minutes?). Still, any time there is worth it. I mean, how often do you get to perform in the Sydney Opera House? Unless you become a good actor/singer/musician, not that often.

We were the only group there to not have the PULSE t-shirt. This year’s colour was purple. Last year it was that almost ugly teal. The year before it was red. I wonder what next year’s will be…

Maths common test coming up this Friday. Need to study, and finish assignments. So, TTFN, Ta-Ta-For-Now! (you just gotta love Tigger’s sayings)