Bao is blogging for Alan again

Hey all, how is everyone doing? Bao here (Alan’s roommate). If you haven't noticed already, I wrote 2 of the 3 most recent blog entries, and now here's another blog entry. Alan's on the way to class now, which I'm supposed to be in, but due to some confusion and hints that Jason gave me (by kidding about not going to class), I suddenly had the urge to not go to class, so that's why I'm here. Like, I woke up, to go to class, but then Jason came in and kidded about not going, and then I just decided not to go.

So… I’m here, all alone, for the next hour or so. I should probably go see the math undergrad office, to make sure I’m graduating this term… I probably should’ve done that early in January, but I kept putting it off. And today, is no different.

So… I’m here, as Bao, writing on Alan’s blog… not sure if I should write about me, or write about Alan, or whatever else. Anyway, Alan’s okay. He’s in good condition, he’s fine, nothing’s wrong with him, although he slipped on the ice a few weeks ago. Didn’t break anything or anything like that. I haven’t slipped on the ice yet, I’m glad.

Alan got a new laptop, a couple weeks ago, maybe a month, it’s been a while. It’s a dell, not an MDG, so it’s gotta be better than the MDG, and it is. The videocard and all that is snazzy enough to handle World of Warcraft, which is what he still is doing, for many hours during the day. Might not be the average of 8 hours a day anymore, but it’s still at least 5 or 6, on average, per day. It’s like, it’s been out for 30+31+31+10, so 100 days, and he’s played at least… 27 days? Maybe 30, so it’s close.

So that’s what Duy, Jason, and Alan have been doing. Me? No, not me. I’m not a fan of MMORPGs… the going around, collecting stuff, clicking on enemies… not my thing. So I decided against buying it, or playing it… although I did play the beta. I wasn’t a fan of MMORPGs prior to WoW, and Raymond kept bugging me to join him in MMORPGs, so if I was going to try any, it would make sense to try the best of the best. So I did download the beta, and got Duy and Jason hooked onto it. Damn.

I wasn’t sure if Alan got hooked onto it, since he only tried it out for a few hours at the end of the open beta. I thought it was more of a peer pressure thing that he got involved into world of warcraft, but now he seems to be enjoying it a lot, and playing with the others a lot… A LOT… so I guess he actually does like it.

So no, I’m not playing world of warcraft. I’m spending the rest of the time talking on msn, watching stuff, etc… which is sometimes conflicting with WoW, when I try to download anime, bit torrent eats the bandwidth so the others complain. So sometimes I leave my computer on at night, downloading from 1:00 am until noon, but sometimes that doesn’t even work because the others will still be playing until 4:00 am. It’s happened a lot of times where I’ve seen Alan still awake at 4:00 am, playing WoW… or at 1:30, when we have an 8:30 class.

So the others are playing world of warcraft, 7/7, paying a monthly fee of about $15 Canadian, I think. We considered getting xbox live, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet, and I’m not sure if we’ll play a lot of online games. Anyway, while they’re paying $15 per month, I’ve found me a much more expensive hobby.

I play poker. I play poker in real life, I play poker online. Well, offline, I vary, sometimes I’m up $10-40, sometimes I’m down $10-40, or more. I have good days and bad days, but altogether I’m definitely getting better. Online, it also varies… a few weeks ago I easily made $100, then the next week it was so confusing because I kept losing money, so I lost $60 pretty easily. So I’m going back to the easy, low-cash games and steadily rising again.

So what else is new… my marks are okay, Alan’s marks I think are okay too. Recently, there was a super smash brothers melee tournament, which a bunch of us participated in. Duy got first, I did okay, Alan did okay… argh, I keep wanting to talk in Alan’s point of view, like I did several blog posts ago. Anyway… that was fun. I should say, read Duy’s blog, or my blog, or Jason’s blog, or Ambrose’s blog, for more details… well, Jason’s blog doesn’t have that many details.

Well, we did have a Betrayers of Kamigawa (Magic) draft a few weeks ago, and that was also fun. So… that’s what we’ve been doing. Magic, SSBM, WoW for most of the house, Poker for me. I’m almost graduating, but I don’t really have good plans for the future yet, better work on those. I’m only taking 3 courses right now, since I only need 2 to graduate, so I have lots of free time… instead of sleeping or playing some poker, maybe I should make stuff… like, movies and videos… or pictures, or whatever. Or practice programming or animation or anything like that…

Food… we still don’t cook! Man, we should really cook. We hear about how Ambrose cooks, and Andy cooks, and Lachlan cooks, and how they don’t like to spend money eating out, or they just don’t like eating out in general… hmmm… now that I think about it, I should put this blog update in my post. But it’s okay, share the wealth, right? Force you guys to read this absurdly long post, hahahaha… Maybe I’ll post a shortened version on my livejournal though, since I haven’t blogged in that for a while either. Anyway, so yeah, all these people are cooking, saving money, eating food that’s actually healthy, tastes better, and … not too hard to make? And cooking is a good universal skill… even though pastas are easy to make, it’ll still be a good start, to make pastas and meats again, instead of eating out, or cooking microwave dinners.

Continuing about food… we love chicken wings, or at least, I do. We could go crazy and have chicken wings 4 days a week… Morty’s, Molly Bloom’s, the place at WCRI, and then Morty’s on Thursday again… but we’re not that crazy. Although we’ve been to Morty’s twice during the past 2 weeks (on the Monday) and Molly Bloom’s on one of the Tuesdays… hehe. Chicken wings are soo good! First, it’s chicken, which is great, and then there’s sauce and batter. They’re easy to pick up, easy to eat and finish. You feel so accomplished when you eat all the meat around a bone, or clearing a chicken wing till there’s absolutely no meat yet.

So they taste good, they’re relatively cheap, and the atmosphere is pretty good. At Morty’s it might be loud, but at the table when we’re sharing chicken wings (not so much at Morty’s but more at Molly Bloom’s), it’s like a nice family dinner. We don’t have many “family” dinners, since most places it’s pretty expensive to have a family dinner, where we eat together and share stuff. I’m not talking like, Mikey’s, sitting at a table and eating, but a more together dinner… like at Chinese restaurants where we order meals for 4, or yes, Wings.

So wings are great, and we eat a lot of wings. Maybe I’m craving some now… anyway, it’s 2:46, so I can still write more, for another 40 minutes. Technically, I still write when Alan is back, but I rather post by then… I don’t really like it when people see me during the process of doing something, and I like it when he comes back, he checks his blog, and he’s like, “ummm damn, that is beastage.” Because it’s so long. However, typing on this notebook keyboard isn’t to the best of my liking.

Since September, Bao (ARGH!) I mean… me… I… I had TV installed because I wanted to watch TV. Mainly, SpikeTV just started its 7pm, 8pm, weekday CSI Las Vegas thing, where they show backtoback episodes of CSI every day. Plus a new episode of CSI Miami on Monday, CSI New York on Wednesday (which I STILL HAVE NOT SEEN) and CSI Las Vegas on Thursday, I have plenty of CSI. And since then I started watching Conan and Leno, and that’s been pretty good. I got a TV Tuner, so instead of wasting my time downstairs watching TV, I can watch TV and talk on msn or do homework at the same time. So it’s nice.

But since then, Alan and Jason and Duy don’t watch TV a lot, so basically I’m spending a lot of money just for me to watch TV. I thought Alan would enjoy watching CSI with me every day, but he hasn’t done it, so I dunno. He’s watched a few times, but not enough to make TV a worthwhile investment. Anyway, Alan approached me the other day and he said we would cancel tv, and I agreed, since it was costing way too much relative to how I was using it.

Anyway, just a couple days ago, Jason watched his first episode of CSI (any of them, in this case, Monday night Miami), and now he’s hooked. That same day I already had borrowed some DVDs from home, and we watched another 2 episodes. For the past 2 days, we’ve seen 1 or 2 episodes of CSI on those days too. So now he’s hooked, yay! So we’ll be watching a lot more CSI together. It gets Alan away from the auction house too (in WoW).

So let’s see… we covered videogames, and food, and tv, and school… as for movies, can’t say we’ve done a lot lately. Lately, the “in” thing at home is obtaining movies from other people who can get them, so while I’ve seen The Incredibles in theatres, we were able to obtain it on DVD shortly after it came out. So I’ve shown it to Alan and… Lachlan, and they enjoyed it. Jason wasn’t here at the time, so it was too bad. He should see it one day.

On the same note, I recently watched Ong-Bak, on DVD. I’m not sure if it was the same as in the theatres, with the subtitles and non-English language, but… I didn’t like it too much. This post is already pretty long, so I won’t post a review of it yet, but I didn’t like it so much. It felt a bit… contrived, that’s the word that Wen might use to describe something, hehe. Like, the big thing was that all the stunts are real, with no wires or stunt doubles… it looked like the movie was based on individual scenes, where the dude would purposely show off and show everyone “I can do this stunt without wires”.

For example, at one point he’s running through an alley way, being chased, and all along the way there will be people holding boxes or something, and there will be these obscure obstacles, like a small loop he has to “jump through without wires”, and these two vertical panes of glass with a thin vertical gap in the middle which he has to “flip through without wires”, and this frying pan and table which he has to “jump and roll over without wires”… it’s so… weird.

And every now and then he would jump and hit or kick his opponent, and then they’ll do it again in slow motion in the same angle, to emphasize that he did it “without wires”. So I felt the story wasn’t so good, the acting wasn’t great, the cast wasn’t too memorable (it wasn’t hoorrrrrible), and…. Yeah, everything felt like it was set so he can show the audience “wow, I’m cool, I don’t need to use special effects to do this stunt.” That’s what I felt.

I also saw a movie called Godsend, it wasn’t so good, and the ending wasn’t happy at all… I think it was supposed to be a happy ending, but it just left things open ended. I also saw Mean Girls, which was okay. I like Lindsay Lohan, Freaky Friday was better though.

Did we tell you about Bo-De’s? Lachlan introduced it to us, it’s a place around Weber and Parkside, where they sell discounted food in bulk. Best example, is what we bought, is a bunch of no-name fudgeo cookies, 10 pounds, 10 bucks. It’s really good, they’re good cookies, it’s a good deal, and we still have some cookies left over since middle of February. There are also chocolates, candies, and other cookies there. I recommend you drive there and buy some cookies. I would do it again soon.

These days, we usually still purchase drinks from the convenience store. They no longer have the “two 2-litre coke products for $3.00” deal, so ice tea is more expensive now, but we still manage to buy some there. I like my ice tea diluted with water, so it’s less sweet, a bit less flavourful, but still much more flavourful than water. So it’s like drinking healthier ice tea, with still enough flavour and effect. Also, on my desk at all times is a 100g Toblerone, right now dark chocolate, since it’s so good. The Dark Chocolate kind is so rich, so that 1 piece is enough to fill a craving or whatever. Such a toblerone would last me a month, so I don’t have to buy a lot to feed my chocolate craving.

I feel like some iced tea now. BRB. Or Be Right Back. Or as Alan would say, “Bee Arr Bee”.

Anyway, did I tell you about my current obsession? Well, I did on my blog, but there was no opportunity for me to do it here. Anyway, when Alan gets back, he’s probably expecting a funny entry, but it’s not so funny, it’s just long and… descriptive. It’s 3:12 now, time has passed by, and I’m not even done writing yet, but I can end it soon. Anyway, you all have been reading so far, so here’s my obsessive song, download it, get obsessed to it too.

http://www.baomon.com/board/dragostea-din-tei.mp3

Let’s see… not much time left… 10 minutes…. Umm… I bought Need for Speed Underground at the end of last term, it’s fun, but lately I haven’t played it much. It’s a bit boring, yet still fun, and I haven’t unlocked everything yet. Anyway, I just wanted to get that out of the way.

We covered most of everything… except… Anime! ANIME! Recently I had a VSA anime-a-thon, Alan attended, Jason wasn’t there that weekend though, but it was fun. Ask Alan about the anime about Bread, it’s very enjoyable. As for me, I’m so hooked on Gankutsuou, which is a retelling of the count of Monte Cristo. It’s very captivating, if you can enjoy the weird… stylish… art animation. I recommend it.

Alright, I should wrap this up now, but the biggest event lately, was reading week, or for us, the reading moment. As it was last year, David and a few others visited us during reading week, to spend time in Waterloo. David really enjoyed it last time, this time was also okay I think. So that was fun, ate out, good food, good time had by all. After that, when we went home for the rest of the few days, I had a semi-party, had all of Duy’s friends come over. That was fun; the regular smash-a-thon, some Futurama in there, Settlers of Catan, Pool, and pizza. So, it was a good reading week.

Anyway, it’s 3:17 now, class ends around 3:20, and it takes 7 minutes to walk back. Hmm… I still have a few minutes, but I’m sure you all want to stop reading now and just post lots of comments to Alan and I. Come on, I gave you 5 Microsoft word pages of stuff to read, the least you can do is… comment… about the song… hehe…

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading. Let me know if you want to do this more often, or if you don’t want me to do this again, haha.

So, tell all your friends that Alan updated. Well, maybe not. If you like my update, spread the word to all those you like and love. If you hated my update, spread the word to all those you hate. (taken from www.nedroid.com , check it out, it’s one of Duy’s friends, he draws crazy pictures and comics).

Umm… 3:19… that sounds like time to go. Anyway… how to end this… maybe I should go downstairs and