Your “What if?” Moment

I think that every one of us has at least one “What if” moment.

I think that somewhere down the line, everyone has a moment where they wish they could’ve seen the outcome of an event, of a scenario, happen in a different way.

This moment I’m talking about should not be confused with regret because the concepts are really two different things. With regret, you wish you could have changed something. What I’m talking about is simple speculation – it’s a simple “What if?” question. I think everyone has a huge “What if?” question that they think about every single day.Did you buy the right house?
Did you marry the right woman?
Did you choose the right career path?

It’s not like you regret buying that house, or marrying that woman, or working in that industry. Hell, you may even love it. Still, there’s that moment that plants a “What if?” inside your head for what seems like an eternity.

I know that I have a real big “What if?” moment.

It happened months ago. Someone told me something, and I basically did absolutely nothing. I could’ve, and perhaps I should’ve. It caught me off guard, and I was defenseless. Rather than rising up and standing my ground, my instant reaction was to stand firm and do nothing. Maybe in the back of my mind, I do take comfort in the fact that you can sometimes do the most by not doing anything at all. Maybe.

No matter what I do, I always wonder “What if?” Maybe things would’ve been much worse, instead of much better. Maybe destiny would’ve taken its course and the end result would have literally been exactly the same.

But it’s not like I regret doing what I did – which was nothing.

Why September will be Awesome

Last night, I finally realized why September will be awesome.

 If there’s anything that the Smallville producers/writers know how to do, aside from casting incredibly sexy women in their TV show (Kristin Kreuk, Erica Durace, Sarah Carter, etc.), it’s how to write an awesome season finale.

 The show has really been stagnating for a while, but this season, I must say that I really got back into the series. While many of the season 6 finale moments were predictable, they still delivered nonetheless – i.e. Clark telling Lana about his “powers.” Seeing Chloe’s “meteor power” was pretty cool, but it begs the question as to whether or not she’s actually dead or alive. The Lex/Lana confrontation was pretty sweet, and I really enjoyed the b**** slap heard around the world. I’m basically hedging all my bets that Lana just jumped into the mail truck that was near the bomb explosion, faking her death right infront of Lionel Luther in an effort to get away, and take down Lex in the process. Are they really gonna kill off the second hottest piece of *** on the show? Probably not. Oh yeah, seeing the Martian Manhunter is always pretty sweet, and Phantom Clark is pretty damn badass, thoguh I’m really against the clothes that he happened to wear. I wanted to see him wear something along the lines of what Batista wore. And why wasn’t Martian Manhunter there all those times that Clark was about to die? At least they kinda addressed that.

 The Office was by and large not the funniest episode in the show’s history. Still, that didn’t prevent the season finale from being a great episode.

 They really focused more on storyline for that episode, and I’m not necessarily complaining. They had a lot to cram in this episode – three job interviews (Michael, Karen, Jim), and the fallout of Pam’s hgue spiel at the end of the Beach episode. There were still some awesome moments, like Michael taking back Jan after she got her boob job, and selling his house for 80% of what he paid. Why would ANYONE do that?! lol. I love how whenever Dwight gets a chance to become regional manager, he all of a sudden gets drunk with power. Shrute bucks? But more important than ANYTHING ELSE was the fact that Jim and Pam are now going on a date! My goodness gracious, it’s finally happening people.

 One thing I couldn’t help but think of was the fact that Pam came across as an absolute b**** for some reason. I don’t know why either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the Jim/Pam connection, but I can’t help but feel that Karen got royally screwed. Karen is a naturally beautiful, fun sweetheart, who’s smart, competent, and would be the dream girl for most normal guys (kinda remidns me of Gem now that I think about it). She didn’t coerce Jim into going out with her, but rather, she was honest with him from day 1. Pam had Jim in a series of mind games and relationship conflicts for God knows how long, and literally had him dangling on the end of a string. Pam stayed in another relaitonship when she knew Jim liked her, she flatout rejected him, and she openly got jealous in front of Jim, Karen, and all of their co-workers. Pathetic, really. I feel bad for Karen.

 Break time’s over!

2nd Day

“Well I’m almost home so I’m gonna get off. The phone… I’m gonna get off the phone.” – NN [on the phone w/ Manori]

I’m on my break at work – in the library.

Much like yesterday, today’s been quite unproductive. It’s not my fault or there fault – I need website software to work on the website, and without the software, there isn’t much stuff that I can really do.

For now, I basically have to create my own work. I found myself a mini assignment to start working on. I figured I’d redesign the newsletter that they send out to students everyday. To do the redesign, I had to get someone to order Photoshop for me, so hopefully she can have that done by the end of the night (she needs to order a business license or something like that), cause then I can start actually doing stuff for the newsletter. It’ll also be nice to see the new versions of Photoshop since I’ve been using Version 7.0 for like the last 5 years… it’s really outdated.

I think that I’m going to update every second work day. See, I get a full hour to kill, and even more time when I take into account those “15 minute breaks”… so realistically, that’s a lot of time to either blog, or play DS. Since I have a seemingly long list of DS games that I need to conquer before Phantom Hourglass comes out, I do need a serious amount of DS play time without cutting into my Wii time. On top of all of that, I still have a considerable amount of work to do for the UBCMA website, which apparently needs to be relaunched within a week. How that’s going to happen is well beyond me since I’m not even near finished, but after a while you start to get used to those insane deadlines. Afterall, I am a commerce student.

It’s not my fault – it’s my first day!

First day at a new job is always quite an adventure. Every first day has a lot of similarities, but obviously, lots of new things that you can’t quite anticipate. Today seemed to fit that template just fine.

I arrived at school @ 8:00 AM. I hung out downstairs and listened to a podcast while killing time, since I didn’t want to show up ridiculously early. When I did show up, at 8:30 AM, there was no one there. After some nervous waiting, I was greeted by my co-op coordinator who showed me around, but had no idea of what I was supposed to do. I looked around, found a computer, and just sorta chilled there for a while.

At around 9:30 AM, I finally met my boss. She’d been running late b/c of traffic. Anyways, I was basically told “Alright… so… uhm… yeah… just uhm… familiarize yourself with the website and uhm… yeah we’ll go from there.” I looked around the website and checked a few things but honestly, I did that within ten minutes… so from like 9:45 AM – noon, I was just re-reading lots of pamphlets that I randomly found, and thoroughly scanned the Career Centre website inside and out. I literally had no idea what I was doing.

I was basically going to go talk to my boss when I basically got dragged into a baby shower out of no where. I… don’t even really know how that happened. So uhm… I mingled with a few people, which was painful only because I had nothing to talk about since it was only my first day. The food was pretty damn good though so it made the experience worthwhile.

I returned to my table at around2:00 PM. I decided that I would check the websites of other schools’ career centres and compare notes across the board. Eventually, it became 3:00 PM, so I decided that I would go to the kitchen and pig out on the food that was left behind from the baby shower… which was awesome. I came back at 3:30 PM, and continued my random site clicking ’till around 4:30 PM. I was about to call it a day (since that’s when I get off), but only then was I called into a meeting. The meeting was all of 10 minutes or so, but at least there was I able to give some insight and show that I wasn’t a complete idiot.

So all in all… an extremely unproductive day. I really gotta figure out how I’m going to start getting assignments and projects and whatnot during my time in the car tomorrow. A lot of what I’m supposed to do involves the new website for them, but I cannot work on that until we have the new website content software… so until I have that, I’m pretty much screwed in terms of what I can and cannot do. I guess I’m gonna have to find my own work

Time to get creative.

Bye Bye Spring 2007

Another year, another semester.

When I think about it, I really had an awesome semester at school. As far as I’m concerned this was my first “real” semester at UBC. I was here in Fall, but I wasn’t really here. I skipped over 60% of my classes, I was barely ever on campus, and I wasn’t taking any marketing courses – in fact, only one commerce course! It wasn’t that “UBC experience” that I’ve been looking forward to for so long. This semester seemed like a night and day difference.

My Consumer Behaviour course was awesome, mostly because I had the best prof I think I’ve ever had for any course teaching that (she’s also incredibly easy on the eyes…). Market research was a challenge to say the very least, but for some reason, I didn’t push myself nearly as hard as I should have. Very challenging professor, but that’s definitely not a bad thing. Government and Business was a joke, and simultaneously the biggest missed opportunity. I could’ve gotten an A+ in that course had I studied for the final… I still have no idea what I was thinking.

My marketing analysis course (the one I made the video for) was probably the most value-added course I’ve taken thus far in my academic pursuits. It’s a course that forces you to work with random people, and with high levels of ambiguity. Apparently those are two things that students hate. Most students prefer to work by themselves, and most students apparently love to work in situations where there is a clearly defined answer. I’ve always found myself in the former situation, which is why this class was the type of thing that I had always been looking for. Learned so much in that course, and not just about marketing either, but about life, and about dealing with difficult decision making. That course alone gave me that “UBC Experience.”

Picture says it all

The following occurred on May 1st between 11:54 AM – 11:55 AM.

‘Nuff said.

“I’ve never done anything harder!”

I heard a lot of people say that after my Marketing Research final. After saying “That’s what she said” about a dozen times, I finally joined in the collective group cry session that took place just outside of Angus. I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw 80% of those classmates again in fall… in the exact same course.

I don’t think I’ve had a final that hard before. There were basically 3 parts. One part – statistical analysis. Two parts – written. The analysis destroyed me, and was worth a little less than 50% of the final. That question crippled me, and everyone else I know. There were parts that you could have done well on, but the other parts… it was as if it was a completely different course or something. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but the material that he tested us on was really thrown out of left field. Horrendous.

The first part in the written section was a real breeze. The second question was like right up my ally tho – “You are a market research consultant hired by Nintendo. Design a research proposal that will help Nintendo reposition itself so that it can effectively target baby boomers.” I’ve answered that question on my friggin’ blog, doing it on an exam is a walk in the park.

Still though, I’m actually scared that I may have failed the course because of this. To make matters worse, we got our [optional] project back, and well… my mark drastically went down because of that stupid project.

F***.

On the plus side, I did manage to see the Hulk, Superman, and Batman on top of the bridge in Stanley Park on my way to UBC the other day. I know, that’s pretty random, but a bunch of guys just happened to be in their costumes during rush hour, waving to the passing cars. Things like that are awesome.

Bad Decisions

Sometimes, I tend to make the wrong choices.

Something tells me that watching Blades of Glory, Old School, and The 40 Year Old Virgin, is probably not the best way to prepare for my toughest final exam.

Ah well, time to start watching Zoolander.

… I’ll do a proper update tomorrow

Pure Talent

If you have 2 minutes and 9 seconds, watch this clip. It’s a guy beatboxing/playing the flute of the Super Mario Bros. theme song.

Hello, I’m a Mac

I have no idea when my parents anniversary is. I know, that sounds horrible, and that’s probably because it is. I know it’s in April. I know it’s in late April. I even know that I have it written down somewhere. Off the top of my head though, I have absolutely no idea what the actual date is.

Every year, my brother and I are faced with mission impossible. Getting a good gift for my parents is next to impossible. Over the years, we’ve given them clothes, perfume, cologne, and just about everything else you could imagine that falls under the category of a conventional gift. All of those usually go unused for the longest time, even though they are appreciative of the gesture. Last year we did good – we got them a digital camera, right before their trip to Italy. They actually used the present!! That’s also because our old camera had broken down, and this was the only way they could preserve those precious memories from their trip

My dad’s needed a new computer for the longest time. The one he’s been using all these days is somewhere between 6-7 years old. It takes a solid 10 minutes to boot up. It’s disgusting. Oddly enough though, the computer isn’t really all that slow since I reformat it semi-annually, and the hard drive was relatively untouched since my dad just used the computer to read the Sri Lankan news and check his e-mail. For a while now, my mom’s been wanting to learn how to use the computer, but I never really had a chance to properly teach her. My brother and I finally decided that we wouldn’t get them anything for their birthdays or Christmas or anything else, and just get them a new computer.

We originally wanted to get them a mac mini, a wireless keyboard, and new LCD monitor. Well, we got the flat panel, we got the keyboard… but no Mac Mini. Apple’s phasing that product line out so that they can make way for some new SKU’s, at least according to the fellas at Future Shop, which left us effectively screwed. We then saw that the iMac was on sale so we figured we’d just pick one of those up.

FYI, this computer is pretty damn awesome. Not even looking at OSX, but the hardware itself is really amazing. The design is beautiful. The screen is unbelievably gorgeous, and it’s actually brighter than the CRT that I’m using right now (though to be fair, my CRT has been in use almost everyday for the last 7 years…). While the included keyboard and mouse combo look nice, I find them quite annoying, which is why I got my parents a wireless Microsoft keyboard + mouse. It’s black, but it’s still badass.