I've signed up for an online TEFL (teaching english as a foreign language) course in preparation for heading to Japan. I haven't gotten that far through it, but its been pretty basic so far. I'm really only interested in the later modules which include stuff abotu how to prepare classes, but i have to do the rest of this stuff in order to get a certification. yawn..

This past weekend was pretty trashy.. i went to a farewell in Wahroonga.. where i had a beer or five.. and backed it up with an all day wine and cheese session.. which i spent the end part struggling to find my balance .. and yet still recording 0.00 BAC on my friends breathalyzer. =p

Since last post i saw Prince Caspian and Dont Mess with the Zohan. they were both pretty awful. i wouldnt particularly recommend either. The former tried to be LOTR and fell horribly short by having a terrible adhoc screenplay padded with awful acting and unlikeable characters. The latter just seemed like it was a movie length SNL skit.. kinda funny.. but a bit much to hold on for the full 90mins.

i dont really have anything else interesting to post.. suprisingly nothing to write about frisbee. =p

Labels: drinking, movies

why do you build me up?
hrm.. posts are becoming more scarce lately. but thing interesting is happening really.

last week i went out to our disaster recovery site, which was pretty cool. its in the middle of nowhere, as these things tend to be.. so its rather desolate. it was mildly interesting to experience what it would be like to work out of the city. i dont think its for me.. too quiet.. feels like im some post-apocalyptic movie.

i also caught the Transformers movie.. (may contain spoilers) and i was only mildly disappointed. i mean it was bad.. but not much more so than i expected. it suffers from tons of cheesy dialogue and cliches, as well as its share of plot holes, but the CG is totally awesome.

The story is not like the original cartoons, i.e. no energon cubes or space bridge. After watching it i found out that the whole All-Spark concept is from Beast Wars, and so it was not totally made up out of no where. but if u never watched beast wars then u will probly be thinking "wtf? is this?". however it isnt all that bad if u can get over the unfeasibility of it all =p

what i was most annoyed by was the dialogue.. it was terrible.. almost Phantom Menace bad.. almost. just awful. so many ppl rated this as like 10/10 or 5/5 and im like it was ok.. but surely this must knock it down at least one star.

Labels: frisbee, movies

everything i own in a box to the left.
this is a very late and thus will probably be the usual, long but half-assed post =p

so the big news is that my dad is retiring! he isnt 58 till nov, but because of annual leave and long service leave he can actually stop working somewhere about july and still get full benefits of being 60. i wont go into the intricate details cos its boring. but he is on the old system of superannuation which basically means he gets paid a % of his salary every year instead of what he's "saved" into super. his net salary each year will be more than me even when he is retired =p

this all wouldnt be much of a big deal really, since he is gov and doesnt work much anyway =p but it does mean my parents are selling the house. they plan to move into a small apartment in the city. i dunno why, but thats the plan. so im out on the street. but maybe onto the streets or japan or something. for a while ive been saying that if i moved out, i would move overseas. so heres my chance. am i gonna do something? or just wuss out like usual?

i also saw two movies, the first was Spiderman3 at iMax. it was ok depsite being predictable and a bit of a cheese-fest. i mean it was so clichéd that i was waiting for someone do yell "c'mon you can do it peter. you just have to believe in yourself". but then again i didnt really expect much from this other than sandman fighting spidey. in fact if the movie was just half an hour of that fight i probly wouldve enjoyed it a bit more =p ive also come tot he conclusion that iMax is just too big to watch movies on. we were in the last row and i still felt like i needed to take a few steps backwards to see everything without turning my head and going "what happend in that far corner of the screen which i wasnt looking at?"

i also went to see Tales From Earthsea, which is the new Ghibli movie. it was pretty much what i expected. it was better than Howls Moving Castle, but not by much. the story didnt make any sense, it was like all over the place. there were like some good concepts but they just didnt put it together than well. It wasnt all that bad.. but its certainly no Spirited Away.

.. later that day i went to Rosies bday thing at Putt Putt. we played 2 rounds of Extreme Putt Putt, which was basically starting from crazy spots instead of the regular tee. this was often off the plants and furniture or involved bouncing off object which were on another course =p i think we gave up scoring half way, but im pretty sure i was winning.

i havent had much frisbee lately except for training. but i did pick up a game in div4 and played shoeless =p i wasnt intending to play so i didnt have gear, i only picked up to make up numbers. No shoes frisbee isnt too bad, as long as you dont need to change directions. i did score on my first point on the field though =p

work has been deadly. well relatively...
it went down something like this:

[6 weeks ago]
boss: hey can u help these guys out? theyre project is behind
ian: ok, ive probly got a bit of spare time between my other projects.
project manager: we are 9 months into a 12 mth project and we've accomplished about 10% of the work.
ian: *roll eyes*

[3 weeks ago]
boss: worker1 and worker2 have been reassigned, so its just you and the PM now to do 10 months of 4 ppls work in 2 months.
ian: *roll eyes* oh well. at least im not in charge of this train wreck.

[last week]
boss: the PM has quit. so now you're in charge of this totally doomed project.
ian: *roll eyes*

in other news: lately ive had this bizarre fixation with the song Maria by Blondie. i think if my life were made into a bad 80s coming of age movie, then this would be the song in the credits. possibly with me (played by Kevin Bacon) walking home some quiet suburban street under a clear night sky.

Labels: movies, rba

go away, give me a chance to miss you
hrm.. it used to seem like a long time between posts when i missed a day or two.. but its been like 10 days now and i dont really feel like i have anything much to say. certainly nothing that profound.

anyways.. last week in frisbee i did a 'greatest' =) which is like when you jump out of bounds and catch the disc, then throw it again before you land. i almsot did it twice in one night.. but no one on my team was paying attention to catch the disc again =p

i snuck in an extra frisbee session this week by going to hills training, which included the vertical leap gizmo. its basically this big pole with a disc attached to the top to test how high you can grab a disc out of the air.

this week frisbee was "rained out" which means not enough ppl turned up cos they were scared of the rain. we still had pick up games in the pouring rain which is always fun. there was some guy there who wanted to fight me for some reason.. and im like "dood, what are you? like in high school?" .. and most of the guys were like "yeh" =p some of them were up to 10 years younger than me (gah i feel old now)

on the way to frisbee i accidently left my handbrake on for about half the trip.. is that bad? it sounded terrible and im like "wtf? why is there no power" =p

in the world of java wev development, ive been playing with some new things lately like Spring Web Flow and a lot of different methods for building UI like pagination. sadly none seem to be that great. web based UI is always so buggy its so frustrating. and on top of that, most of the business user requirement ambiguity lies in the UI, which means lots of last minute changes there (gah). oh how id love to be in one of those places where a designer builds the UI and the coders do the backend.

yesterday was anzac day public holiday so some of us went around to hemas to discuss investing.. which was mostly the ever popular real estate vs stocks debate. i think stocks won in the end.. but it will probably continue at a later date =p we also went to see the movie Sunshine at Towers. it got a bunch of really good reviews from all over the place, which is pretty rare for a sci fi nowadays. but i have to say i was a bit disappointed with it in the end. whilst it looked cool and there were some interesting concepts in it, it kidna tailed off at the end. actually the first half of the movie was really interesting... but some exec probly said "this is boring" and made them put some stupid hollywood crap into the end to make it more "exciting" =p

on the tues nite before the holiday we headed to shelles to watch some Black Books and to consume large amounts of wine, cheese and leftover easter eggs. mm. it was a bit of a pig out session, but its been a while for me, so i wasnt too fussed as i scoffed down caramello eggs =p

Labels: driving, frisbee, java, movies

but if you love me, where have you been?
well .. ive been busy.. (no seriously). bah humbug, even with 2 weeks between posts i still update more than almost anyone else i know who blogs =p

despite being busy.. i dont think ive even done anything interesting in that time. i've mostly been trying to accumulate driving hours and working on this website which ive been doing on the side (i can show you cos its secure). and also xmas shopping ^^;

a couple of weeks ago i went to jen's house to watch Brick on her projector screen. and i just realised that thats where id seen that girl from Heroes before =p the one with persuasion "skill". anyhoo the movie was pretty enjoyable.. it was pretty clever (which i like) but then at the end they tried to shove the ending in your face. like throughout the movie there was subtle hints linking the story together, then the movie finishes with the protagonist jsut doing like a monologue of the explanation. it was a bit condescending.. like the director was saying "look, you're probly not smart enough to figure it out, so ill just tell u what happened".

i also caught The Departed which is a remake of the HK movie Infernal Affairs. it was ok.. i dont think its the 80th best movie of all time as imdb says. or maybe im jsut not impressed by "drama" anymore. i dont really enjoy movies nowadays unless they are original, clever and well made. and this movie was only one of those 3.

:: 17.25 driving hours remaining

Labels: movies

not a gay cowboy
so reckless layouts have finally caught up to me. im more injured than ever before after getting cleats to the hip .. and finishing the game with ambulance-worthy knee to the back. gah! normally i bounce right back up from such collisions, but my old bones dont spring back like they did when i was young =p

after waiting a million years at the hospital.. the doc says i should be fine with a lil bit of rest and a lot of bits of Nurofen. she says i can take nurofen 3 times a day along with panadol 4 times a day.. mm druggy. moni was nice enough to give me a ride home at 1am.. cos my parents accidentally left our home phone off the hook and my brother was too busy playing Zelda to answer his phone.

anyhoo im at home today.. not doing much get taking drugs and grimacing every now and then. also playing some guitar hero, which i suck at. you would think that spending all my days typing at a keyboard would make my fingers just a lil bit nimble, but theyre all just unco =p

.. earlier this week i went to see the new Bond movie with the work peeps. I was skeptical at first, but the trailer looked good and it started out ok. then they reached the texas-holdem scene.. or should i say river of endless scenes. once they reached the casino (which you can imagine happens quite early in a movie called Casino Royale) the movie spiralled into a hole of cheesy acting and long winded "drama" if you can call it that =p theyre were some limited action scenes not very subtled squeezed in, but frankly all the best bits happen at the start of the movie. the best scene involved some jackie-chan-like parkour scenes at a construction factory.. but even that wasnt the best ive seen =p it gets 6/10 from me only because ill probly watch it again and think it "wasnt that bad" as i tend to do with bond movies.

on a related note.. heres my list of fav bond movies =)

1. Goldeneye


2. Live and Let Die


3. Goldfinger


4. Moonraker


5. From Russia with Love

notably absent are bond movies with roger moore or timothy dalton =p

Labels: frisbee, injuries, movies