Where have I been… part II

PREVIOUSLY ON ‘WHERE HAVE I BEEN’

Touchdown in Brunei…good to be home….wait…what’s this? a black van appeared out nowhere at the airport parking…three masked men rushed out..put a bag over my head and took me to an unknown location…WTF?!

***

Hello there! Haven’t heard from you for awhile

*wakes up* wtf?… WTF! Where am I?! Who are you?!

I’m just an interviewer

An interviewer? What kind of interviewer are you huh? Kidnapped me…

Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine…

and tied me to this freakin chair! And put me in this dark room?! WTF!

Don’t worry…we just want a chat with you. So how’s everything?

Fine fine..just finished my exams and..by the way, I passed, well, not that you care…

Congratulations..

..and I’m back home and..oh yeah, and I’m now tied to a chair being forced to do an interviewer with you..whoever you are, so yeah, everything is FINE~

So now that you have nothing to do, I guess you’re returning to blogging right?

I don’t know and why should you care?

So you’re busy with other things then?

Not really..aside from being tied up!

..but you’re doing things other than blogging right? I mean..If I remember correctly, you started the blog because you were in a long holiday..

Yeah, school ended and I was waiting for to get to Uni  and..

And you were bored out of your mind and so you created the blog..

Yeah exactly..

..Trylobyte’s Corner on wordpress

..boredom leads to creativity, that’s what I like to say..I think I’ve wrote that somewhere in my blog or maybe it was in the old blog..

You are referring to the old MSN space page right?

Yeah..this one…’Boredom leads to creativity’ one of those stupid random quotes I like to say..wait how the hell do you know that? How the hell do you know a lot of things about my blog?

Because I’ve followed your blog for a long time, you could say I’m the biggest fan of your blog

Biggest fan? Hahaha..you? A fan?

What? You don’t appreciate your readers?

I do but a fan? A fan of this blog? THAT IS JUST SAD

You don’t believe that there is someone who is fan of your blog?

nop…People search, they stumble upon posts I’ve made, they read it, they enjoyed it..well, i hope they did..and then they leave AND THAT is how things go with this place…no fans

I’m sorry to hear your pessimistic view

Well good for you, so~ mr.’Fanboy’..why don’t you untie me and let me go

I can’t do that

why not?

because I have few things to ask you…you know…catching up on things…

***

Click more to see the rest of this odd interview as Trylobyte touches on various topics such as Twitter, Facebook, TV and other random stuff. AND find out the shocking end of the interview that you just have to read it yourself to believe!!!

Happy Holidays :-)

Sorry for the lack of update lately. I’ve been busy with assignments/essays and I thought ‘maybe I should start writing some posts again when my term holiday starts‘ yet when holiday started, blogging was the last thing on my mind hehe. Just want to say that I don’t think I’ll make any post till the New Year because I’ll be in London doing…well…things besides blogging that is.

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone (everybody celebrates Christmas…the commercialized version of it at least) and enjoy your holiday!

One year Odyssey…

I just realized that few days ago (November 15) marks the first year anniversary of this blog! Holy F***! It has been one year? A year ago I was bored and sitting in front of my computer while starting this blog. Now…I’m still bored and sitting in front of my computer writing this post…some shit never change

Anyway, thank you to all those who viewed this blog (all 126,214 of them) and those who left comments, I appreciate it, it kept me ‘blogger sane’ because then I know somebody actually read what I wrote (especially during the early months of blogging).

When I started this blog, it wasn’t my intention to make it a big thing or anything….wasn’t really all that into the so called blogging community….but I have softened a little bit…..I like to thank those who, to my surprise, actually bothered to link this blog - my family, my friends, some people that I’m not that close with but actually come here once in a while, some I’ve exchanged comments online with and some that I don’t even know…..ok, maybe the last one got bored and removed the link to my page but yeah I remember his URL pops up once in a while in my referrers stats :-P

The story so far…

I was planning to write an overview on the posts I made since last year but I remember that I pretty much wrote about it in my previous post. So I’m just gonna copy and paste it here:

Some of my earlier post were more personal like the one I wrote about my story idea or the recurring dreams. Even the post about Battlefield and WWE were also personal. I think I should do those personal posts more often rather than being preoccupied by movies. My friend even called my site a movie blog. WTF

I also remember how at the beginning, I said to myself that I’m not going to talk about politics. Blah! I guess I failed in keeping up with that promise. Another promise that I sort of broke was the one that I stated in my About page.

…post about things that interest me…..anything that’s part of the Pop culture that I find necessary to post about (no I’m not going to talk about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, you can find that somewhere else)

On second thought, I did not break that promise because I did not talk about them. I just posted their pictures

Recently, I made few posts on my country Brunei. I just thought that I needed to write something related to Brunei or maybe it’s just another way to balance out all those movie related post.

I’ve also noticed how I began to write more episodic posts (eg Part 1, part 2). Several reasons; either the original idea of the post was too long or I was just lazy to finish the post and hold it off for later. Examples of this can be found here, here and here.

Oh and one more thing, I realized that I have only reviewed one book. Man, I haven’t read any novels for a long time. I’ll try posting a review of books that I have read. (fiction or non fiction).

I wrote that back in March and I have little to add to it except for few things I did since March like:

• I made several pranks on this blog like my april fools joke and rick rolling people
• Made some education related post like this one about the Arts and another about studying
• ‘Live blogging’: for both the opening and closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics
• And of course, my journey to UK and the random things goin there

In a way, I think I’ve pretty much made a wide range of posts (from a serious one to a really totally random post).

So what’s coming up?

This is what I’m planning and hopefully get done.

• Finish my ‘Trylobyte Odyssey Portal’ page that I was planning to finish by November 15 lol (more on this later)
• Restructure my ‘Top Post’ page. It’s outdated now.
• Publish this post that I’ve been thinking about in the past few days
• Hopefully adding more links in my links bar/blogroll.

If you’re interested in some random statistic facts about my blog then click ‘More’ at the bottom of this post. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Coldplay’s ‘Lovers in Japan’. No reason….just felt like putting up a video at the end of this post hehe

Look who is back with a really random post

I haven’t been blogging for few days (ok make that for a month!!) but here I am now! I’m back! I’m not going to write a long account in paragraphs of what has been going on so far, instead, I’m just going to dump few random things in this post that would hopefully give you some idea. So here we go…

Random Quotes

“Konichiwa”
- Some white dude greeting me with a smile while I was walking down the streets. Oh what the hell, I said Konichiwa back to him lol.

“The only good thing about London is getting out of it”
- Some elderly Taxi Driver at Canterbury who also turned out to be one of the owners of the Taxi service itself.

“Get the fucking the books. Or even better just photocopy it. Just pretend that you didn’t hear that from me” 
-A lecturer who looked like Moby (there’s another one who looked like Bill Gates)

“Cheers mate”
- I’m probably the only one who says “thank you” instead of cheers around here.

“Sorry housemates, I was really drunk last night. I will clean this in the morning”
- A note posted on the door of one of the bathrooms (good thing there’s three bathrooms). Btw, he never cleaned it LOL the cleaner did.

Friend:         Basar jua susu atu
Me:              Kan tekluar bah
Friend:         Sini susu2 saja bah Baie
- A conversation we had in malay while passing a voluptuous woman. We said it out loud and nobody understands it. Of course we didn’t stare coz that would be obvious.

“Urang Brunai kah tu?”
- a phrase we always say whenever we see:
a) dark skinned person b) a girl wearing ‘tudong be-design2′  c) Mua urang brunai lah

Random dude:               Are you Malaysian?
Us:                              No, we’re Bruneians
Random dude:              oooo……*short nod*
*Silence* Random dude stare somewhere else
Us:                              Are you Malaysian?
Random dude:              No, I’m Bruneian
Us:                              OOooooOOO [*thinking* mcm nada bah urang ani]
- Us meeting one Bruneian (there’s a whole bunch of them in Canterbury)

“Iatah bah”
- me randomly saying a Malay Bruneian word when talking to an Italian girl

“bah apa karang malam? Crash? Crash rumah urang”
- The phrase we always say when we’re bored (almost every night in the first few weeks). Usual target? The UBDians

“Salnviger?” (Salt & Vinegar?), “minus?” (Mayonnaise?)
- Barely audible staff at the local Kebab shop (really funny cool guys though) 

“GOLIMAR!! KILLA KILAR KILLAR!”
- nuff said

Random Lessons we learned

- Shopping is fun…..until you multiply the amount by three. 20 pounds kau blanja? Duit brunei brapa tu? Hehe

- Making lots of friends is nice….until they nominate you for Society president and you don’t know shit!

- Taking a hot shower is great….until you step outside and remember that it’s below 10 degrees. Baik tah ku mcm urang putih inda mandi

- Asian night sounds fun….until you find out that it should’ve been called “South Asian” night.

- Going to a halal restaurant is a relief…..until you find out they also serve Bacon burger….ok that’s fine, the chicken is halal….until you find out that they cook in the same kitchen and stuff…tapi iya ckp halal kalau d tanya so…..di halal uleh ya, iya tanggung dusa

- Walking around campus at night can be boring…..until you meet some drunk ass white dude making a fool of themselves…just the right entertainment we need.

- Staring at hot girls is ok….until you almost accidentally hit a pole Sapa kan tegantuk tiang tu ah?! *coughsiSafcough*

- Buying stuff and cooking together is a good idea….until you find out only two know how to cook and the rest were hopeless

- It’s really easy to make fun of vegetarians…until you find out that she also has a black belt in karate

- Going to the library is a good idea….until you find out how big the library is and you don’t know where to start

- Baju lawa2….harganya LAGI TAH lawa2 Haha

*Updated* Across Eurasia

***UPDATE 12/8/08***

As I mentioned few weeks ago, I’m moving to UK…the city of Canterbury to be exact (somewhere at the southeast of England). Before that I had to endure a long tiring flight Brunei to UK with a short stopover at Dubai.

NOTE: Recalling from memory. And times are in Brunei time (+8 GMT)

7pm (22/9/08) – Take off. Little did I know that it’s going to be one long boring flight.

8pm – The first of many meals. I think it was Cheese Omelette. Eating Cheese Omelette while listening to the whole album of Coldplay’s Viva La Veda (really good btw…some really good tracks)

10pm – got bored and started to try out the airline’s Sky Show with their selection of inflight movies. I chose to watch Kung Fu Panda despite having seen it many times. I think it’s one of the best animation to come out in recent years (aside from Wall E but that’s more of a sci fi epic while this one’s just plain fun) and they’re making a sequel which would definitely not be as good as the first one but I would still watch it

11pm – Fell asleep while watching Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of Crystal Skull.

4am – Arrived at Dubai and I think it was around midnight at Dubai. Sadly, I only stayed there for half an hour at the airport. Random info: I saw Azerbaijan airlines for the first time too.

5am – Fell asleep again.

7am – Woke up for awhile…listen to songs…fell asleep again

11am – Woke up and decides to spend the last two hours watching Indiana Jones 4 again and this time managed to finish it. I enjoyed the movie more actually and I thought it was a perfect ending to the series. NO Shia Labeouf/Mutt Williams movie please.

2pm/7am UK time - Arrived at London. Managed to avoid some dogs at the custom. Those were big dogs!

NOTE: Recalling from memory. And times are now in UK time (GMT)

10pm/11pm (23/9/08) – Arrived at Brunei Hall. We quickly decided not to stay and just go straight to Canterbury and get it over with.

12pm/1pm – Went around London (small section of of it). Tried the ‘tube’. It rained (creating this dull gloomy windy environment)

2pm/3pm – Hired a van (but he arrived with a bus!) to take us to Canterbury. Long winding journey out of London.

5pm/6pm – Arrived at Canterbury. Got lost for awhile which was also a good opportunity to see the city.

7pm – An international Student Dinner night. I went there and mingle around.

People:               So how’s your flight?
Me:                      Boring, it was a long one about 16-17 hours
People:            Shit! Really
Me:                      Yeah.. yeah *drinks*
People:               What time did you arrive?
Me:                      umm..this morning
People:            SHIT REALLY!
Me:                      Yeah!
People:               Don’t you feel Jetlagged
Me:                      Jetlagged? kinda…but I’m not really that exhausted
People:               So you arrived here at canterbury at what time?
Me:                      An hour ago
People:               Really?! Wow you don’t look tired?
Me:                  I don’t? Guess I’m a good actor then
*laugh*
Padahal mata ngantuk mendangar urang belgium ani ceta2. Pasal Politik lagi!!

10pm – Went to sleep. Fuck it.

Sinetron

In recent years, there’s a rise in popularity of satellite TV here in Brunei. Mostly (if not completely) due to the way it enables us to watch our favourite Indonesian channels. Nowadays, it’s normal for us Bruneians to have access to three different ’TV modes’ in a single household: the local Bruneian channel, the Malaysian Astro cable channel (eg.HBO, Cartoon Network, etc) and the satellite TV (receiving Indonesian channels). It’s usually a tug o war in my house between me wanting to watch cable channels and my mom with her Indonesian channels.

There are some good shows in the Indonesian channels and there are some bad ones. Then there are the “so-bad-it’s-good” ones . What’s interesting is that the shows that fit into this “so-bad-it’s-good” belong to the Sinetron genre, the type of shows that my mom loves to watch. What’s a Sinetron? It’s a short form of “Sinema Elektronik” (Electronic Cinema) and it’s basically an Indonesian version of Soap Opera. The main reason for why they fit into the “so-bad-it’s-good” category is that all of them share the same cliche that always makes me laugh whenever it shows up on screen. Here are the list of cliches of a Sinetron that I could remember:

The hero (usually a heroine) is soooooo good…like really really good, caring, noble…I mean all of the good qualities of human being magnified 1000x. She is soooo innocent to the point that she is very stupidly naive and get fooled by the bad guy every single second!!! This goes on till the very end of the series when the bad guy finally get his/her ass kicked by bad karma.

The moral of the story:When facing oppression, don’t stand up for yourself. Instead, just be patient and take all beating from the bad guy because one day she will get what she deserves. Maybe tomorow or in ten years but it will come eventually

Extra points: The good girl wears a head scarf and sweet looking. For maximum impact, reveal that she teaches children Quran reading as her part time job.

The bad guy (usually an evil bitch) is sooooo F***ing evil that she will do anything to get what she wants and make the good heroine suffer badly. There is one sinetron where the evil bitch got what she wanted (she gets to marry the heroine’s boyfriend) and yet she still continues to make the heroine’s life miserable by framing her for murder so she gets sent to jail. I mean she already got what she wanted! How f***ing evil can she be (and this is after the heroine admitted defeat and wish the evil bitch & her ex boyfriend good luck in their marriage). But don’t worry, the evil bitch got sent to the prison by the end of the series if I remember correctly.

The moral of the story:Being evil also equals to being smart. Try to be creative when you want to do some evil things to someone eg. frame someone for murder, ask a ‘bomoh‘ or a witch doctor for help to do the dirty job or claim that you were raped by the hero (usually a good looking guy who works at the mosque). And be a good liar too.

Extra points: The evil bitch is hot and sexy. And she must have bulging eyes! When she talks, her eyes keeps bulging (accompanied by dramatic music) to show how evil she is Hahaha. For maximum impact, have TWO evil bitches: the evil step mom and the evil hot/sexy bimbo daughter

A love triangle.The good guy and the bad guy out for the same girl or vice versa.

Random martial arts scene. Hero must know how to do martial arts moves. It’s also an opportunity for the director to try to do some exciting kinetic Matrix style fights. Even better, have a good looking pious man do martial arts with superpowers!

Evil shape shifting snakes. Usually locked in a battle with a badass pious man.

Big beautiful houses. One of the main highlight of an Indonesian tv series or movies is the way they showcase the big modern designed houses in Indonesia.

Comic relief characters: homosexuals, cross dressers, midgets. Any other characters who isn’t a good looking teenager are usually the ones that provides the comic relief. Besides, good looking teenage characters are busy with angst ridden love plot anyway….no time for humour. (BTW, a lot of teenage Indonesian stories now. What happened to those old Kadir & Doyok comedies or Sundel Bolong type of horror. Although I heard from many that Ayat2 Cinta is really good)

The title of the show is the name of the heroine. Sort of a trend these days…let me list down the names that I could remember: (Na)Dia, Suci, Intan, Candy, Mawar, Soleha and there’s a new one coming out during Ramadhan called Syarifah I think…forgot which channel.

We hear the voices inside the character’s head. Extra point: We hear the evil bitch’s plan (I know, the villain could be a guy but most of the time it’s a girl) through a voice over. Meanwhile, she smiles evilly and play with her eyes BUT nobody around her notice that she’s making evil facial expression!!! HAHA :-P

Longer than it should be. The series tend to drag and just frustrate the viewers. Probably because the producers or TV station stretched it out due to the success of the first few episodes.

***

That’s all I can come up with. Have any more ideas?

An Idiot…

Last night there was this idiot dribbling a basketball at the bowling alley and distracting other bowlers. Felt like throwing the F***ing bowling ball to his face!

Sorry for the Twitter like post hehe I was just trying to finish up another post about Batman 3 but I got writer’s block.

Oh Let it Louie, She’s Under Cover..

Here’s a random ‘game’ that my friend and I came up with during a MSN messenger session. It started with him giving me a link to the theme song of the game Metal Gear Solid over at YouTube. I replied with a link to the Battlefield 1942 theme song and so we went back and forth giving links to musical scores we like, be it from a game or a movie. But eventually we started trading YouTube links to songs that we consider to be ‘guilty pleasure’ songs (he started by ‘rickrolling’ me with that Never Gonna Give You Up song). Note that we don’t neccessarily considered these songs to be bad but they are something we enjoyed, laughed and remember fondly.

It’s kinda funny listening (and watch the music videos!!) to songs like Modern Talking’s ‘Brother Louie’ or Mc Hammer’s ‘Can’t Touch This’ again. We continually went “hey, remember this song?” or “OMG, this song used to…” back and forth. This went on for about an hour and some of these songs are now stuck in my head thanks to it.

Click More to see some of the songs that we ‘rediscovered’ during our little game over MSN. Enjoy the trip back in time

A person of good character

Me filling out an online form to apply for a Visa:

In times of either peace or war have you‚ ever been involved in‚ or suspected of involvement in‚ war crimes‚ crimes against humanity or genocide?

*Types* No

Have you ever been involved in‚ supported‚ or encouraged terrorist activities in any country? Have you‚ ever been a member of‚ or given support to an organisation that has been concerned in terrorism?

*Types* No

Have you ever‚ by any means or medium‚ expressed views that justify or glorify terrorist violence or that may encourage others to terrorist acts or other serious criminal acts?

*Types* No

Have you engaged in any other activities that might indicate that you may not be considered a person of good character?

*thinking* well….I have lied to people before; I cheated on a school test when I was 5 on a subject I just didn’t bother to study; I stole someones toy/pencil when I was a kid; I’m mostly lazy on most stuff….so does that make me not “a person of good character” *thinking*

*Types* No

I know it’s formality and stuff but seriously, would a guy who commit mass genocide be truthfull :mrgreen:

PS: Btw, this is my first time publishing a post from my laptop Yeah! Just bought a HP laptop! But I’m still not used to the whole ‘mouse control with your fingers’ thing and Windows Vista I’ve always been technologically slow Hehe

Greatest discovery today, Total BS tomorrow

I was watching the show called “The Universe” on the History Channel and they mentioned how Albert Einstein’s “greatest blunder” turned out to be correct. In 1917, he proposed a concept called a Cosmological Constant which is this force that pushes the universe outwards to balance out the force that would make the universe collapse (or something like that I think) thus keeping the universe static/stable. Anyway, his theory was discredited after a discovery by Hubble that proves the universe wasn’t static but expanding. Even Einstein abandoned it and called it his greatest blunder. But little did he know that very same blunder turned out to be one of the possible explanation for the greatest mystery in the universe: the nature of the so called Dark Energy that is not only expanding the Universe but accelerating the process. So Einstein’s blunder wasn’t such a blunder after all.

Let’s put physics aside now because that’s not what I want to talk about. See, while I was watching this documentary and they point out about the Einstein’s blunder story that I mentioned above, I can’t help but think, “you know what, these bunch of scientists with beards, glasses; these guys from Harvard talking about stuff like axion, neutrinos, dark matter and dark energy; all the really cool stuff that Michio Kaku talks about….I bet 50-100 years from now, all of this would be bullshit“

Hundreds of years ago, if I said that the sun is the center of the universe then I would get arrested. Go back in time and say that the continent is floating above molten rocks and I would  be called crazy. So next time when you’re reading something from your textbook or seeing something from a documentary, just imagine yourself 50 years from now and laughing at all the scientific theories back in the early 2000s.

“Haha!! OMG Jurassic Park?! The movie with Jeff Goldblum being chased by a prehistoric giant lizard?! Pfft~ We all know that giant birds ruled the world 65 million years ago, not giant lizards”

You might interested in my other post about my crazy random theory on the Universe Here.