First Day Back At School
Sheesh. Nothing has changed. Not much anyway. The new marsh is … well … not as charismatic as Marshall Sweeney. I guess we just gotta get to know him better. He kept saying “Keep Quiet! How many times do we have to tell you!”. The thing is it is the first day back, assembly hadn’t even started, and no one had already told us to keep quiet. It’s alright to tell us to shut up, but he kept adding “how many times…”.
The school switched over to IBMs!! They finally saw the light! Woohoo! 26 P-166 MMXs! At least I can see where some of our fees are going. Hmmm – maybe after I finish School (ie, the end of this year) I can sorta hire the room for a day or two, get a few people along, install some games and have a massive lan gaming day. Probably won’t happen. The school won’t want games on the machines, will they, even though we’d delete them afterwards. Besides, the lan runs on NT and NT doesn’t support some games :(.
The car park development was halted over the holidays. Too hot for the workers to work or something. Some union thing. Since the computing department moved to the maths department, the maths department moved to a row of prefab classrooms stuck on top of the underground carparks. At least they have air-conditioning. The thing is that they are all so close together.
Our 4-unit class easily makes the most noise. We have a habit of breaking into “clapping frenzies” – especially when someone enters the room. What happens is someone starts clapping and soon the class (only 14 of us though) starts full-on yelling, cheering and clapping (much to the confusion of the guy who walks in, and when we stop, the moment the person opens his mouth to say something, we start clapping again). Click here to listen to a relatively small frenzy. Today? 4 clapping sprees, and many laughing epidemics prompted the room across the corridor to stare at us. A whole host of bewildered (and annoyed?) faces looking at us pissing ourselves with laughter.
One person noticed my new glasses. Only one. Incredible. Well I guess they do look similar. So how did I lose my old ones? Well for the hols I was up at the Gold Coast with a few friends. One of the theme parks we went to was Wet ‘n’ Wild – the water park full of slides n all that. Anyway, I normally take my glasses off for rides (even though I’m pretty much lost without em). However they got this new ride called Calypso Beach. What it is is this sort of circular moat of water. The water has a current powerful enough to drag a tube (which you plunk your butt into) around and around. Some sort of relaxation ride. So I think, “tame”, right? I would like to see where I’m going for once, so I decide that I’ll wear my glasses. Anyway my friend, Kevin, decides to have a race. There’s this bridge and we race over one lap. He beats me, but I want a rematch. He agrees but this time its over two laps. Calypso is damn crowded, so we have to weave our way through all the people in tubes. I lead, but Kev catches up with me. Now there’s this little offshoot which runs off into an artificial beach. See the diagram. The yellow bit’s the beach, the blue arrow is the current direction and the back lines are walls. When he catches up with me, I give him a shove into the beach junction, and he gets stuck. So he gets out of the tube and tries to push it back into the main river, but there are so many people trying to get into the beach that he gives up. He was wearing sunnies, and that, combined with the look of frustration on his face reminded me of one of those bad guys in Bond movies where they get outsmarted by Bond again (no – I’m not comparing myself to Bond, but it was a brilliant tactical move :). Its this face staring at me amongst a sea of laughing faces. Hahaha. Once he makes it out of the beach area, I’m miles ahead. He jumps out of the tube again (which was not allowed for the race) and starts moving towards me. Looked like he was going to try to tip my tube over in revenge. So I sort of panic, and try to jump out of the tube. Crap did I look like an unco. I flipped straight over, face first into the water. My first worry was that everyone’d be looking at me (“Hey look at that dumb Asian kid” :), but that wasn’t the case. The second worry was that I felt my glasses come off while under the water. They floated straight off my face and bang. The current took them. Wet ‘n’ Wild wasn’t much of a help, they said, “maybe tomorrow, our cleaner should pick them up and we’ll call you”. But they never did (yes, we gave them the phone number). So 5,000 people have trampled over my glasses in the meantime. Sooner or later the lenses will crack, someone will step on them, cut their foot, sue the crap out of WnW and I won’t get a cent :P.
5:30pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
