YES!

Due to popular demand (hehe), yes I am still posting. Been having a break from uni, but don't let that fool you. I've got an assignment that is due this break. My todo list is getting bigger and bigger...

YES! for the fact that I've finally finished marking assignment 1 for HCI. Hopefully I didn't make any mistakes..ugh..

Had an awesome time at HomeCell. We had a "cooking" night, we brought food and things to cook. I bought stuff to make tacos - mind you this is the first time I've ever made tacos. Well maybe it's the seconds time counting the time I made them during the Food tech subject in high school.

Anyway it turned out pretty good, chicken tacos it was. After eating we spent a couple of hours playing Singstar (Playstation 2 game). Pretty fun, I'm starting to get into this karaoke thing now. Now the problem is there's only 30 songs in the game. Gets boring once you play it a few times.

Oh well, hopefully I'll be able to get the other Singstar games later so we can have more songs.

If people are wondering my iPod nano is just fine. Heard about how people managed to crack their screens and stuff - pretty scary. Mine's still good though =)

Good news and bad news

The good news is that I finally got my iPod Nano. My very first MP3 player, very happy with it so far.

The bad news is that today was the last lesson for Latin Dance. We all received a certificate, but I guess now if I don't practise I'm going to forget it. Well it was fun while it lasted, hopefully I'll be able to make it next week at the "graduation party".

Combined

Our bible study group was combined (UNSW and UTS) it was awesome. We all went into our cozy little study room in the library. Had an awesome time talking about prayer, and at the end we spent some time praying for each other and the univeristies as well.

My nano came today!! but no one was home to take the package...grrrr...ok God I'll be patient...

Heard about the new Nintendo Revolution controller? It's soo cool, I want to get one now. Well it's not released yet. So I'll get it next year when it comes out.

Got a job interview tomorrow, downside is I gotta get up early, and also the fact that I won't be home for the nano delivery (again). The good thing is that I have a good feeling about this interview. Just gotta trust God and do my best I guess, and He'll do the rest.

I know a few people that are not feeling too well, so I'll be praying that you all get better soon.

Take care ya'll, God bless.

iPod Nano

Yes that's right, the brand new iPod Nano is coming into my hands soon hehe =P The wait has been worth it, it's exactly what I've been waiting for (shuffle with a screen). Not only is it what I want, but it's beyond my expectations.

For more info check out: http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/ (I know you'll want one)

Today was the second last dance class for this semester. Today we were taught to do the jive, I still can't do it properly ... probably because I was late for class... so I had no idea what was going on.

Spoons

We played a game called "spoons" at the UniCell meeting today. For those that don't know how to play it's quite simple. You need a deck of playing cards and some spoons equal to the number of people playing minus one, i.e. if you have 5 people playing then you'll need 4 spoons.

Before you start the game you need to sort out the cards so that you pick out 4 of a kind for a particular card, e.g. all four kings. You need to do this for each person that is playing. So if there are 5 people playing you need to pick out 5 of these 4 of a kind, it doesn't matter which one you pick. So if there are 5 people you should have 20 cards.

Place the spoons in the middle of the table or the centre of the circle. The dealer then deals the cards to each player and each player should have 4 cards. The aim of the game is to get the same four cards, it can be any value. To do this each player must pick a card he/she doesn't want and pass it to the left. Keep doing this until someone gets 4 of a kind. When that happens, the person that got the 4 of a kind picks up a spoon. Now all the other players must also try to get a spoon and the one that did not get a spoon loses. Usually there's some form of punishment, but I'll leave that up to you.

So yea, that was quite fun. We talked about how playing spoons is similar to how we manage our time. We need to be careful what we keep and what we throw away. So in a way we need to be careful of how we prioritise different things in our lives.

Cafe-cell

We were homeless for Wednesday night home cell. So instead we had Cafe-cell...hehe. Basically we had our meeting at a Gloria Jeans (similar to Starbucks). It was good, we ended up spending most of the time reading magazines, but it was all good.

Here's a joke:
Q: What does a mathematician do when he gets constipated?
A: He works it out with a pencil.

I've got a quiz tomorrow for computer architecture. Soo...better get back to studying -_-''

A God day

A good day indeed. Had our first university cell group meeting. It was awesome, had an awesome word from Proverbs 6:6-8 (which I shared). There were 4 of us at the bible study, more should be coming next week.

Got some "significant" progress happening with my thesis project (according to my supervisor anyway) so I'm pretty happy with that. Now I need to keep this going.

Unreal!

WOW! is all I can say, there are no words to describe God's goodness. To think that I have come as far as I have now. Ten years ago I would never have dreamed to come this far. When I was in school growing up, I was just an ordinary kid, I didn't do that well at school, just barely passing.

Ten years later... I'm attending one of the top universities in Australia (UNSW). Now not only am I a student, I am also employed as a casual tutor and lab demonstrator in one of my favourite subjects (Human Computer Interaction).

Then I started to think, how much I'm actually doing these days. I'm doing my thesis, working as an IT Service Desk Analyst, doing casual tutoring and very soon I will be leading a cell (bible study) group at uni. I would never have imagined to be where I am right now.

God is awesome, He is truly the way, the truth and the life. Keep persevering, only God can turn the 'unreal' to something 'real'.

God bless you all =)

First time

The first time I had ever heard of a "food date". Well I had "lunch" (which was mainly coffee and she brought some breakfast bars for us to eat) with my friend, and so it was our so called "food date". I thought it was pretty funny =P

The first time I've been to karaoke. Can you believe it? I'm like almost 22 and I've never been to karaoke! Well it's about time and it was lots of fun too. I can't wait for the next time we go. I so want to get the singstar game (Playstation) but then I gotta think about how much time I'll have to play it...

Well you've probably noticed there's no tagboard, well..that's because the one I was using broke...this is the second time now, so I'm reluctant to putting another one up, unless people really want it, hook me up with some reliable tagboards, and it HAS to be FREE.

Not this time

Me and my friend was planning on taking the ballroom class today. I called up this morning to see if there was any room, and yes there was, 2 spots left...so yay...but then when I asked if there would be enough girls (my friend being a guy) the guy told me that there was already a 50/50 split, i.e. 19 guys and 19 girls. The class size is capped at 40, and so if we were to join it would be 21 guys and 19 girls, meaning 2 guys would miss out...so we decided not to take it this time. It's strange to see so many guys joining the dance class, in the latin dance class it was like 7 guys to about 12-14 girls. So that was good, for the guys haha... oh well I guess I'll have to do ballroom another time...

Man I'm starting to realise how little work I'm doing on my thesis. I haven't met up with my supervisor for weeks, he's not gonna be happy :\ ok time to get into gear and get some work done ...

Me dance???

Well you probably don't believe but yes I've started taking dance classes. Today was the first class (Latin dance) and we learnt how to do the salsa and samba. It was pretty good, I had heaps of fun, the lesson seemed really short...I feel like dancing some more haha

UNSW Cell coming soon...

That's right we will be opening a new (cell) group in the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. So whether you're a Christian or a non-Christian we would love for you to join us. More details to come ..

Happy 6th Anniversary for Hope Church.

Training at church

Sometimes people ask, why do you have to go to church? Isn't it enough to be a Christian and as long as you don't do the wrong thing?

Well there are many reasons, but one of them is training.

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.

Isaiah 2:3

When we train for anything, whether it be sports, a skill for a job, there would always be someone there to teach us. It could be a coach, mentor, teacher, etc. If we wanted to get better we wouldn't be able to do it without meeting our teacher. So it's the same as Christians, we need to continually meet our teacher, Jesus Christ, because He is the one that knows all about us. After all God is the one that created us.

This is just one of the many reasons there are for going to church. Just because it seems like a lot of work, don't be discouraged. I hope you all will be able to enjoy going to church as much as I do, maybe even more =)

God bless

Foreigner

Well I just realised I haven't posted for over a week! yikes...sorry peoples, I've been pretty slack with my blog lately. Well just a quick run down on what's happened the past week.

- Went to SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineering) convention at Darling Harbour, Sydney. The highlight of that was probably the magician. Good thinking for the people trying to sell the cameras, because he did manage to get quite a few people to go to his stall.

- Found out that I'm going to be tutoring at Uni. Which is gonna be pretty cool I think. It should be fun being the teacher for a change =P

- We're hosting a Japanese student (on exchange). Despite the fact that I'm giving up my room for him, it's been pretty cool. I can practise my Japanese on him =P We took him out to the city, saw the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge and then went to Darling Harbour and we took a look at the Sydney Aquarium (which I've been to .... I'm not sure how many times, I've lost count).

Today we supposedly had choir practice but it was cancelled because our teacher wasn't feeling well. Just tonight we went to Double Bay for ice cream...yumm. The place is called French Riviera, it's famous for the huge ice cream towers. We had the biggest one, called "Maxi" and I'm guessing it would be at least 20 scoops of ice cream, stacked up in a bowl. Had 7 people eating it, and so yea we managed to finish it. Afterwards we were soo cold though, especially since it's winter here.

Until another day...

Jaa mata (means cya later in Japanese)

Funeral

I went to a ceremony tonight...it was a Buddhist ceremony...with lots and lots of incense the room was filled with soo much smoke...oh man our eyes were hurting. It was interesting to experience it though. When someone has died, do you think it makes any difference what happens to them in the way we do things here. Well during the ceremony it seemed like they were trying to "please" the buddha by praying and bowing to him and offering gifts, so that the deceased would go to heaven. I don't know about you, but it doesn't make sense to me. Where you go surely depends on the person. There is nothing we can do that will affect it. It's like begging God so they can go to heaven.

The only way we can go to heaven is clear: "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish BUT have everlasting life" - John 3:16

In other words we need to accept and believe that Jesus died for our sins so that we can be made clean again. In heaven there can be no sin. There is no way we or anyone can clean us of our sins, but God gave us a second chance through His son Jesus Christ. I pray that people would make the right decision before it's too late.

God bless

Sickness go away and don't come back another day

I've said it before and I'll say it again...I hate being sick =(

Please pray for me so I will get better really soon...like tomorrow because I need to work..

Luna Park

Today I was actually planning on staying home to do some uni work (I am soo behind). Instead my sister (older) asked me if I wanted to go to Luna Park. For those who have no idea what is Luna Park, it is an amusement park. So since my sister offered to pay for the ticket, I thought I may as well go, after all what have I got to lose...

So I ended up going, a friend of mine wanted to go as well, so she came and brought her little brother along. We got to the park at about 2pm and so we had 4 hours to go on as many rides as we can (since the park closes at 6pm). Even though we had 4 hours, I knew it was never going to be enough. I don't think we even covered half of the things that were there, and some of the rides were also closed, so that was a shame.

Some of the things we rode on were Wild Mouse (a rollercoaster type ride), Flying saucer (similar to a gravitron where they spin you really fast, but it also spins vertically), Dodgem cars (always a favourite), Spider (another one of those spinning rides, which was surprisingly fun). The only regret I had that day was going on the Ranger ride (which is like a pirate ship ride, where it spins you upside down). After that ride, I started getting sick and feeling light headed. Not long after that I went on another ride that spun you around and around, which did not help at all. I felt so sick I vomitted afterwards (in the toilet of course).

Apart from getting sick, it was a really fun day. I got to meet my friend's little brother, which was cool.

Fantastic 4

A fantastic day capped off with a fantastic night of watching Fantastic 4. The movie lived up to my expectations more or less. The characters were well done, the visual effects were stunning. Although I would've liked to see a little bit more action, I think this movie sets the platform for a great sequel, which would be nice to see.

The story revolves around a group of scientists (and friends and family) trying to conduct an experiment which could result in saving many lives. Of course things did not go as planned. I won't say anymore in case I accidentally reveal anything.

My rating: 7.5/10

What a week...

What an awesome week it has been, mostly because of the Hillsong conference night rallies. The first night I went we were a little late, so we only managed to get into the overflow, which meant we had to watch the proceedings on a big screen rather than live. The next night was better, we managed to get in and see it all live. We saw Cece Winans lead us in a time of worship - it was really good, except it would have been better if we knew her songs.

On Wednesday night Seven Hills homecell (bible study group) had Chocolacicous Night. We played games, ate chocolate, trivia, ate more chocolate, more games and more chocolate. It was great, and I even got myself a CD, which was really cool.

On Thursday night it was Hillsong again, and this time there was a few more of my friends there. It was soo amazing, praising and worshipping God with Michael W Smith leading us. Sometimes I tend to be more conservative when praising and worshipping God. That night was totally the opposite, I was jumping up and down, singing my heart out until I started to lose my voice. Nevertheless with some water I was back at it. Maybe it was just the atmosphere that made me be able to do that, but that's what I want to do. To be able to praise and worship God without having to think about what others might think. That is the start of true worship.

On Friday I would've liked to go to Hillsong again, but work mates had a dinner to say goodbye to our former manager. Even though I don't know him that much, it was nice to socialize with the group. I kinda regret not having tried at least 1 cocktail (since they were half-price), oh well maybe next time.

To cap it off I got to work today which was great, because I've spent quite a bit this week, on CD's, books, food, petrol, etc. So at least I'll be getting some extra money next time I get paid. You know what, the sowing principle does work, I actually gave up one of my shifts next week for a friend who forgot to put in his availabilities and I ended up getting the saturday shift as well. Also just recently another one offered me their shift for next week (on a different day). So in giving up one day's work, I got back 150% as much (1 and a 1/2 days).

How awesome is God!!! Praise God, forever and ever!!

Current Mood: jubilant

Tim Tam

For those that are thinking - what the heck are Tim Tams??

Tim Tam is an australian snack (made by Arnotts). It is basically a chocolate biscuit, filled with chocolate center and covered in more delicious chocolate =D

Here's some more info on Tim Tams and a picture:
Wikipedia: Tim Tam

Current Mood: hungry