paintball and cranium

A friend organized a paintball game last Saturday at Red Dynasty. This would be my first time.

It was pretty fun. And I love how it was drizzling, adds on to the mood.

But getting shot at isn’t fun, lol

Someone shot me from the side. First shot slid off my chest but left a bruise. The next 2 shots hit my side and hell they hurt. I thought we would be provided with vests but they didn’t. I regret wearing just a thin T-shirt.

I was so sure I was in a safe place before I felt the pain. Yea, they should call this painball.

We had 12 so we were split into 3 teams of 4, each team gets to play twice. Each round didn’t last very long. The objective is to bring 2 pieces of items back to base while dodging the other team’s bullets and preventing them from doing the same.

I think my bullets got stuck a few times. Like out of 10 shots, I could only see 2 coming out.

There was one occasion I saw a bullet flying towards me and I managed to duck in time.

If there ever was going to be a next time, I’m definitely going to wear thicker clothing.

After that all of us went to this friend’s home for a early Christmas party.

We played Cranium, good party game. Some of the activities involved having to sculpt something out of dough to get your friends to guess what it is. I did most of the sculpting and drawing for my team.

Cranium

Some of the things I sculpted, and managed to get my team to guess correctly was: rocking horse, solar system.

There was once I had to sculpt out “holy cow”, so I made a weird looking animal, and held a halo over it, hahaha. My team couldn’t guess but a rival team member got it.

For sketching, some of the cards require you to sketch blindly. I got a card that says “seasick”, so I quickly drew a boat and a simple face with wavy lines coming out of it’s mouth. My teammates got this pretty quickly.

seasick

The only hard category was the one which require you to act out characters and hum out songs. As this game was initially designed for the US market, a lot of the characters and songs have never been heard of by many of us.

Later that night, I opened a small bottle of Otard cognac that someone brought. Drank like half of the bottle without mixing. I wanted to get drunk as quickly as possible. I did end up comfortably drunk and it was all good.

PlayStation 3 – Lightning Edition

Next on my shopping list is a PS3. I decided I will get one when they announced a slim version, but thanks to past experiences, I decided to wait till a special edition comes out. And I didn’t have to wait long until they announced a Lightning edition, which is the FF13 edition.

PS3 Lightning edition

Bought it from Gamescore. Thank god they offered to bundle a HDMI cable with it. I didn’t have one and it didn’t occur to me to get one. If not I would have to spend a torturous night staring at a PS3 slim but not being able to play it.

Before I started playing the game, I went exploring the PS3’s home interface. God it’s beautiful.

Those sparkly things kept me staring for a while.

iPhone, 2 weeks later.

So did iPhone really change my life? Perhaps I overexaggerated because everything’s still the same.

However, a lot of things have become a lot more convenient for me. Here’s a few stories.

The other day I was shopping for manga at Kinokuniya. I decided to get I”s manga after eyeing it for a long time. But the thing about Japanese manga is that they don’t indicate if this is the last book in the series so I don’t know if this is the full set. I went online on my phone and googled for info, found a wiki page which indicated how many books there are in the complete set.

I"s 完全版

Next I wanted to know what was the issue of Macross Chronicle that had a very nice Sheryl Nome poster in it. I went to check out my anime club’s forum. I had earlier posted the issue number there but forgot what number it was. Sadly, it was sold out.

I have this little app that shows the estimated bus arrival times for bus stops in Singapore. I’ve bookmarked the 2 stops that I take to work and from work to home. I use this to determine if I have the luxury to walk slowly or not.

Having twitterific and facebook apps help me catch up on what my friends are up to while killing time.

I also now have a proper email reader, with push email by google. And I can also type in Japanese and email my friends in Japan now. Though Google’s sync seems to have problems with Japanese text. I have a silly workaround for that for the moment.

The calendar app also syncs with my google calendar.

There’s a nice and free pdf reader called Aji Reader. So my phone is also a “book” now. I can read while on the bus but right now I’m trying to break this frustrating sudoku puzzle at extreme difficulty.

Downloaded Japanese and english dictionary apps. Now I can look up words during my Japanese classes.

One of the default applications, a map, proves to be useful should I go to Japan again.

So far there aren’t any phones out there that meet my requirements. A fast, smooth and responsive UI, ability to type Japanese, check emails and surf the net.

IMAG0072

To prove that I’m not an Apple fanboy, the next best phone I would recommend to friends would be the HTC Hero. 2 of my colleagues own this phone and it’s pretty smooth and good. I didn’t choose this because it didn’t support Japanese input, the screen size is smaller than iPhone’s and when I try to type really fast on it, it couldn’t catch up.

so I got my iPhone

And I queued for over 6 hours for it.

I should’ve checked how long the queue was. And should’ve given up when it’s going slow.

But I stayed all the way just because I’m stubborn and optimistic. I thought I could go home by 3am.

I ended up leaving the place at 6am. I started queuing at 11.30pm. I didn’t expect such a huge crowd because the phone has been on sale in Singapore for at least a year?

The first part of the long queue ends when you arrive at the customer service counter (bottleneck #1) and you submit your details for a ticket number. A sales person immediately called for my number once I got the ticket. I thought my ordeal was finally going to be over when she directed me to another long queue which is for payment (bottleneck #2).

Then somewhere along the queue, there were 2 M1 girls helping customers apply the screen protector to the newly bought phones. So I too bought screen protector when making my payment and joined the queue.

And there weren’t seperate queues for those who pre-ordered and those who didn’t. I’m assuming there were people who didn’t pre-order in the same queue.

iPhone 3GS

smartphones

The long wait is finally over.

My telco is finally selling M1 tomorrow, a midnight launch party. I think I’ll go grab mine and hurry back home because I have work the next day.

Now for some silly thoughts of mine.

  1. I somehow believe using a smartphone will change my life. Which is why I’ve been desperate to get one. But several things happened which has delayed me until now.
  2. Women who use smartphones (iPhone, HTC android phones) appear smart to me. Guys, just guys.
  3. I’m going to set the UI to Japanese (if it’s possible). So most of my curious friends will have a hard time using it and then give up.