If a picture speaks a thousand words, then I have about 13000 words to say.

The past week was the Singapore Fireworks Festival, and apparently my family find joy in the art of pyrotechnics. Also, it would be a good time to get back to some photography with the DSLR.

On thursday, we had a view from, er, somewhere, but we had a blardy barge as the foreground =__=

[Please click on the images to get the original intended-res, as this downsized res makes the images look ugly and stuffs yeah.]

And so we returned on Saturday to get a better view for the photography shots. This time, we were on the Sheares Bridge, which has one of the best view for photography as the background was the entire city landscape. We reached there even before the Sun set, and we had an entire one and a half hour to rot away on the bridge. And even though we were damn early, it was already blardily crowded =__= However, the irony was that as the VIPs were sitted somewhere near the Fullerton Hotel, the view from the Sheares Bridge was actually the side view of the fireworks, so the intended visuals weren’t perfect. But well, it was still beautiful!

Panoramas of the City!

Yesterday, I sacrificed my sleep the same way I do likewise to attend school every weekday — Pointless you might call it. Well, it isn’t as bad as school, considering that I woke up at 10am and it was for a much better purpose.

Eh, ‘kay… That isn’t my point here.

Anyways, me and 4 other friends went through the irritatingly long MRT train ride again to Suntec, to take part in the Quake 4 5vs5 tournament at the WCG Intel Booth. Considering that last year the prizes were processors, cameras and motherboards for the similar competition, we assumed that the prizes were gonna be as good. And boy, we were wrong, damn wrong. (And I won’t touch on it)

Eh, let’s just skip all these insignificant crap…

…And so the Quake 4 5vs5 compy commenced. Well, it was supposedly a Team Deathmatch with a team of 5 on another team of 5, but apparently, Intel doods don’t know how to do server settings, and it ended up as a Free For All game, with the top 5 highest scorers winning.

I started off the game pretty badly, struggling at the bottom of the 10. Somehow, somehow, I don’t know how, but I managed to work my up to mid-table, fluctuating in and out of the top 5. At that point, dxdt (XJ) had a 9 point lead over me at the top with 18 frags, while I was miserably with my 9 frags. =___= Interestingly enough, this “somehow” magic worked again, and somehow this 9 frags lead was reduced to 2 frags with me at a somehow 2nd position. Somehow, really.

And for the rest of the game, me and dxdt made it a personal battle at the top of game, making the frags difference from us and the rest significantly large. But well, I don’t stand much chance against such a sick l33t gamer, so eventually, he extended his lead to 6 points T___T And the commentator was blardy irritating;

Commentator: “Ohh and HELiX got dxdt good! dxdt is definitely looking for his revenge right now!”

Meh. Made me worry for no reason, ‘cos dxdt was on the other side of the map =___=

But at the end of the 15 mins game, amazingly, exactly all 5 of us were in the top 5! w00ts!

Team BP lol

Well, after the competition it was mostly rotting away gaming and stuffs, and onstage events included CosCon and DotA Asian Championships. And I got bored enough to join the Quake 4 FFA (yesss, not 5vs5) tourny again =___=

To start off with, I used the nick “lol” instead of “HELiX”, in high hopes that the commentator won’t recognise me as a 2nd-time competitor =___= And apparently, he didn’t. lol.

And without dxdt to compete with me, needless to say, I had helluva fun. I started the game with my frags doubled that of the 2nd fellow. And then I decided to play around. Using the melee weapon, Gauntlet, I went around to humiliate 2 people. Wowee! And the commentator was referring to me as, “Laughing out loud”. Not catchy enough for me, so I decided to change my nick mid-game to “lawl”. And the commentator was like, “And Laughing out loud has changed his name to lawl! Sorry, I didn’t know it was meant to be read like that! Lawl has such a big lead in the game that he could even relax and take time to change his name!” Indeed, LOL! And the game ended with me having 7 Excellents, 3 Impressives and 2 Humiliations =P

World Cyber Games 2006 commenced today!

And of course, being the gamer that I am, everything along the lines of homework and school were ignored. Then again… what’s new?

So, me and my friends decided to go there together and after an irritatingly long ride on the MRT (yess, this is what happens when you’re spoilt by private transport), we reached (duh? =__=). Well, obviously it was much smaller-scale that last year’s WCG Grand Finals, but well, it was still quite fun! But unfortunately, all the lucky draws were missing… =(

And by the time we decided to join the 5v5 Quake 4 tournament organised by Intel, the registration slots were full for the day =___= So we decided to sign up in advance for the 5v5 Quake 4 tournament on Saturday, and we’re also planning to do the same for the 6v6 Counter Strike tournament. Maybe it’s just me, but somehow I’ve got this feeling that the prizes gonna suck compared to the previous year. Bleh.

And also, we caught the Warcraft III: Frozen Throne tournament on the big projector screen onstage! Well, I don’t think it’s right for me to irrelevantly flame DotA now, so I’m just gonna say that the Warcraft III (not DotA pls) players are downright sick. The top Singapore players click their mouse and use hotkeys something like 120 times a min, or in WC3 terms, 120 apm (actions per min). And the last I heard, the world top players have something like 200 apm. That’s 200 button presses on your keyboard and mouse in a minute throughout the game =___= And their reflexes were so damn sick that their mouse cursor simply flies flawlessly around the screen, and you can’t really see it. As I said, sick people.

Gonna have to train my Quake 4 for this saturday! Weeeeeee….! =)

Insignificantly, today was National Day.

Significantly, today was a public holiday.

…

Being insignificant as it is, I spent my day not at the National Stadium or watching the live broadcast on TV, but rather, out with my friends at the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club. Yupp.

Supposedly, it was meant for us to do fishing, but the Youth Room with the computers meant that we were going to spend the day (and night) behind the keyboard in what we call a LAN party. And so we did.

Fishing was pointlessly insignificant, with the fishes apparently having a day off due to the National Day holiday, and the weather either having us baked alive or threatening a downpour. So… I’ll skip that part.

LAN gaming took up most of our time in fact, and it started off with an hour or two at Team Fortress Classic, with my team barely winning XJ’s by 5-4. Then we moved on to more TFC after lunch, with the final score 5-5. Following that was, well, Counter Strike, and my team got pwned by XJ, so I shall not elaborate further on that. And nevertheless, we turned to Ricochet after that, and once again, XJ being one of the world’s top 16 players in that game, we got pwned badly.

Following all that hours of sheer gaming fun which I couldn’t put down in words well, we had dinner, where XJ made us feel uber guilty. Well, we ordered dishes that included Curry Fish Head, Thai Crispu Chicken, Soft-Shell Crab and it totalled up to about $10 per pax, but XJ decided to be a nice rich guy and paid for all 5 of us that stayed on. =___=

And after dinner, of course, it was back to more gaming and it was Half Life: Deathmatch Classic this time. In that game, XJ was apparently used an alien model for his character, and since his frags and score was disgustingly high, we labelled him as an alien, and then all of 4 us humans decided to 4 vs 1 him. Imbar as it may sound, but with XJ’s sick 1337 gaming skillz, 4v1 was a damn fair game. And unbelievably, we ended our almost-10-hour-long gaming marathon with a game called, er, Think Tanks =___=

Hmm, ohh and there’s WCG tomorrow! Hopefully there’s something for me to win there… =)

Blah. Here goes something.

Well, this afternoon, I talked to Mr Loh about the annual Primary School Science Quiz (which our school organises) for this year, and seems like he isn’t so supportive after all. Apparently, he claims that we have a lot of events already for this year and blah blah blah . On top of that, he added that from now ’till september or something, robotics are having an intensive training schedule blah blah blah and a hell lots of excuses that are either too illogical or doesnt relate to me in any sense. So, there’s a good chance that our annual tradition of the science niche programme gets screwed in my last year of possibly organising it. Bleh. (Altho I’m trying to get Rong’en to save it. Eh.)

And tomorrow I’m gonna look like the Indonesian flag in my red house tee + school long pants uber awfully 1337 combo. Bleh. And following the harsh day of watching people either marching for the forced national pride or cheering shouting their heads off, I have 4 3 possible appointments to go for, which includes 103′s detention astro celebration lunch-or-movie-or-both-hopefully, movie with friends or bowling with other friends. Oh wait, there’s home sweet home too.

And on wed and thurs, there’s… LAN party, fishing and WCG! w00ts. And a.maths homework.

Umm. Nothing to blog about.

So… I’m just gonna crap ’bout certain geek stuffs like what I bought today.

Uh, let’s start off with some news.

So, Apple has their iPod, iMac, iTunes, iWork, iLife, iSight, and lately, rumour has it of an iPhone. What iPhone you ask? There are so many pictures (fake or real, I have no idea) of these so called iPhone, iCall, iChat, iTalk, iHavenoidea things that it would seem like Apple has a whole department that does nothing but leak fake products to us.