You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. - Atlas Shrugged

New template

So it turns out that using the old classic blogger template you can have AJAX and XML in your template, which lets you do those cool drop downs that I have in the side. Quite neat. I like this new template cause its minimalistic, and its quite sleek. What do you think about it?

Avatar

So I just finished watching Avatar, and I must say that it is probably the best movie I've watched of the year so far. Sure there are still 2 days left in the year, but Avatar was a great movie. James Cameron spent close to 20 years writing and producing the movie, which goes to show that maybe instead of having shitty movies come out every year, you have freaking amazing movies every 20 years. Some movies are ones that have a really deep meaning and they are just very intellectual, and usually I really enjoy watching those, as opposed to action movies where it's just a car chases and shooting and things exploding. But Avatar in 3d was like reading a sci-fi book, and you are just so drawn into the movie. James Cameron makes great use of the 3D effects, its not like things spinning around everywhere and popping out at you, its small subtle yet effective 3D effects. I don't want to spoil the movie, so I won't say much about the plot, other than that the movie takes place on Pandora, one of Saturn's many moons, 61 I think. The movie really makes you wonder about extraterrestrial life, especially of the humanoid form. There isn't really much I can say about the movie other than that if there is one movie you should watch this Christmas break, it would be Avatar.

Another idea that Avatar brought up was the fact that many scientists don't believe in extraterrestrial life, just based on the fact that if there are other life forms out there, they would be trying to look for us as well. We assume that all aliens have advanced technology, and they would be the ones finding us rather than us finding them. But maybe the aliens are content in their planet, and their way of living, that they have no need to look for others in the universe. Avatar causes you to look at the human race from a different perspective, and think the rashness of human actions and what non-humans would think of us.

So the point of this blog post: Go watch Avatar now!

Goodies

So for christmas i kinda went out and used my mom's credit card to buy myself a new camera. Yeah i sound like a total rebel don't I? But my mom let me, so i'm less cool now. It was only because my credit still hasn't come in the mail, so it would be kinda weird to go to the store with hundred dolla bills. So i bought myself a Canon Rebel T1i, aka 500D. I've been wanting a DSLR for a really long time now, and I've just never put myself to spend so much money. I guess thats the Asian part of me, always wanting to be cheap and not spend money. But i guess splurging once a year is okay right? (But i also got a new macbook pro in the summer.....) I've only had the camera for like 2 days now, and i'm already in love with it. I'm still noob, but once i get better shots, i'll be posting photos on my blog more often, and turn this into a photoblog of sorts, since a picture is worth a thousand words right? The camera can also do HD videos, which i will be posting onto my youtube account, where right now you can see a low-light video of Joel drumming away before another intense round of Call of Duty.

All hobbies end up being so expensive for me, with a new camera comes new lenses, and more photography equipment. Ontop of that, skiing already cost me quite a bit this season for new skis. Seems like i'm helping this so called recession, wooo go me!

"Beer is like vitamin water, theres stuff in it but it does nothing"

For the past 4 months, my life was school. School was life, and life was school. I haven't blogged in forever, and whenever I try to write now, it feels that the creative and writing part of me died after highschool. Maybe I should've pursued a English major like Ms. Nannery, my highschool AP english teacher, told me to. Since grade 9 she said I was a good writer, and that if I wanted to, I could easily become a great writer. But I'm ASIAN!

It's not in my blood to become a person who sits at the coffee store with a laptop and notebook, brainstorming plot ideas and character traits. Sure it would be pretty awesomely cool to write a book and have people buy it, but to me that same idea falls within the group of winning the lottery, or gaining superpowers. I once tried to write a book, and even though I planned on it being a short lil novella, I can tell you that book writing is not easy. And then now with university, being an engineer requires you to give up some part of your life, and it definitely changes you. Maybe I put it upon myself, taking 8 courses in 1 term/semester, but the satisfaction of finishing 8 finals, and getting a decent mark (standards have been lowered), is worth it. I'm a person who strives for intellect, I simply cannot live ignorance.

Reflecting back on the finished school term, 2nd year has been rough. I don't think I have ever really been challenged in school until this year. If I had to compare the effort I spent, it would probably be like all the years of school before it combined. People often say that the 1st year is the hardest, because its the transition from highschool to university, where teachers expect different things and adopt various attitudes towards your learning. Sure there will be profs who don't give a shit about the students, and is fine with a 55% class average. But most of the times you will find that the profs there do indeed care. The transition, for me, was nonexistent. Everything was the same, except that there were more group projects, and harder assignments. Most people balk at being assigned impossibly hard things to do, but what is the point of going to school if everything is easy? Do you want to go to a math class and just have the prof teach you everything you already know? Or would you rather be assigned questions on topics you didn't know existed, and spend hours learning it? Sure it may seem that I am being sarcastic here, and maybe a little part of it is. But right now when I look back at the assignments I thought were impossible, it gives me satisfaction knowing that I worked hard and solved it. My entire 2nd year was like, spending days at school working on math assignments with friends, staying up late researching into how to build circuits, arguing over stupid ideas.

School is a love-hate relationship. You hate the amount of time that you could spend doing other useless things, but you love the knowledge. Being on this christmas break, for the 1st week I didn't know what to do with my time. There were no finals that I had to cram for, no last minute projects to franticly finish. And now theres only 1 week left of the break, and I think I miss school. Next term I'll be doing co-op, and it will be joyous to not have classes to take, but I think i want to take classes. Earning money and researching will be fun, but I think i want to take a random night class, just so I will have something to do. Life isn't meant to be easy, nor do I want it to be right now.

This is probably the longest post I've written in awhile (or ever) and I think this was the sole reason I started this personal blog away from our highschool fun blog. Writing for personal reflection, and just for the heck of writing. Maybe with all this writing i'll take up poetry again, it's been awhile.