01 June 2008
Married! +Engagement Party
07/06/08 00:03 Filed in: Life
Yvonne (晓岚) and I are married!
The two people (probably an overestimation) reading this will probably know anyway, but yep, we’re married.
Before we got married though, we had an engagement party. My Mum organised it, and it was great. If you are more of a visual learner, perhaps you should skip my textual description and just look at the engagement party photos.
The party was held at the family’s beach house, which is at Mt. Manganui. The house is very nice, and well suited for such an event. It was quite a way from Hamilton though, which meant that a few people couldn’t come. A lot of the guests came down from Auckland though, and they said that for them it didn’t matter, as travel time from Auckland to Hamilton was about the same as from Auckland to The Mount.
My Mum, Yvonne and myself went to the beach house a few days before the party, to give us plenty of time to prepare. We didn’t do very much the first day, just went to the hotpools and then watched a movie. We watched “Man of the Year”, which was pretty good. The next day we put up the decorations and went shopping. Some of my family arrived, and they helped. I hung up the red and yellow crepe paper around the lounge walls. Then I just wandered about trying to look busy until about 8, when Yvonne and I went to see my friends. They had rented an apartment nearby and were having drinks. The apartment they rented was very nice. They had one of those video intercom units, allowing people to talk to them from the front desk. Stephen’s girlfriend was paranoid that they were going to spy on them, so she hung a piece of paper over the whole phone. I thought that was pretty funny. It said in their agreement that they weren’t allowed to smoke outside on the balcony, which my friends found appalling. The only other option involved a 2 minute wak through the complex to get outside. Instead of embarking on such an arduous journey everytime they wanted a cigarrette, they would simple “hide” below the safety barrier on the balcony. I though this was hilarious because though they hid themselves, they could do nothing about the smoke itself. Also I kept forgetting to talk quitely, and even that I was supposed to hide when I accompanied them outside. I wasn’t allowed out after doing this a few times.
On the day of the party there was more organising, which won’t be talked about. The party started at about 8. A whole bunch of people came, and they all had fun (or they lied). I spent a lot of my time wandering around, making sure all the guests felt comfortable. A few people were brave enough to come all that way even though they only knew one person there, and I had to make sure people were being nice to them. Everything went really well though, and I’m certain no-one felt ignored. My Dad came, which was great as I hadn’t seen him in a long time. His head was shaved, which was unexpected. He says it is because he gets too hot, and it was the most effective way to cool himself down. No arguing with that! When I opened the door, I was a) surprised and happy to see him b) surprised that he had no hair. This surprise changed to shock when I heard him say “Oi Oi Oi*”! I laughed, and he looked confused. I had to explain what I thought he said, which made him a little more confused. Turns out he was just laughing. Maybe the two beers I had drunk by then affected me more than I thought.
Jeffrey got pretty drunk, which was interesting because I had never seen him drink before. None of my friends got really drunk and obnoxious, which was great. Nor did any of my relatives, but I wouldn’t expect them to do that.
喜：比如： 喜出望外
Xǐ: example: xǐ chū wàng wài
After the speeches, everyone was allowed to continue drinking/socialising.
Some time later, maybe 12, most of my relatives left. My friends stayed for awhile, but they were tired from the previous night’s drinking. Also, they were dumb enough to think that climbing the mountain after such a night was a good idea. Stephen and Craig stayed, which was good. We continued unitl Craigs’ cask of wine (only the best) was gone.
Then they went home and the party officially ended.
Then, some time later, we got married!
(more on that in another post)
*This is a typical thing for skinheads to say, right before they punch your face.
Been a Long Time...
It sure has been a long time since I posted here.
I’ve been busy... Though I can’t say this semester has been horrible, I can’t say it has been very enjoyable, either. Being reminded that I had a COMP paper remaining, after coming back from our wonderful trip to China was not fun. That paper is very very hard, and makes me stressed. Even after completing an assignment, I am not sure what we were meant to do. My assignments tend to pass the required tests, however, regardless of their creators lack of understanding. I have one more assignment left for this paper, and I hear from the lecturer that it is “not going to be easy”. I think he was implying that the previous 5 assignments have been easy. I assure you, they were not. I shudder to think what hideous task he has waiting for us. He really makes work for himself, when he gives me such difficult work. He must know that I will be emailing him every half hour with (what would be to him, I guess) inane and obvious questions. Questions like:
So the binary "whatchamacallits" for each index could be:
000
010
100
110
001
011
101
111
Right?
This would let "us" know which of the variables were true for each index, and allow "us" to do our thing?
Is this at all correct?
Am I getting closer?
Mike
Actually, that is less desperate than normal. He answers them promptly, and I usually find the comments helpful.
Though I don’t like the paper, I don’t mind being forced to complete it (it is a compulsory for my major), as it makes other, non AI related programming seem like actual fun. For example, this weekend I created The Chinese Idiom Database, partly because I wanted to learn how to use MySQL & PHP, and partly because the other idiom databases I could find were ... somewhat lacking. One of them appeared initially promising, returning a good number of idioms for my search “orange”, but it fell over when I selected an idiom to view. The idiom’s information was presented in some encoding that my browser doesn’t understand:
This may, or may not be their fault. Whatever, I can’t use their database. There were one or two others, but either the layout or the search method were seriously flawed.
Mainly I wanted to make my own.
You can find it by clicking on the “Idiom DB / 成语资料库” link in the sidebar.
I’d say I enjoyed about 15% of the creation process. The rest was extremely frustrating. Prior to creating the database and associated pages, I knew NOTHING about MySQL or PHP. This meant that any error I got didn’t make sense to me, and help (in the form of Google) would more often than not confuse the crap out of me. I found two great tutorials, and combined with the excellent W3Schools site, I managed to throw together what you’ll see, if you’d only CHECK IT OUT!
The tutorials are: a MySQL tutoral, a short tutorial on how to create a login/registration area, and W3Schools.
The thing that I like the most about The Idiom Database is that you can create an account and add idioms yourself! I hope that people do, as I know there are a lot of Chinese Idioms out there, and I know I can’t add them all myself. Users can also edit idioms they have entered, or if they have special permissions, can edit any entry. If you think you deserve special permissions, please send me an email! The reason I had to make it so people can only edit their own entries is because I don’t want one bastard to come along and screw it all up by changing all the entries to something rude or nonsensical. If people start entering stupid things, Ill change their account permissions so that any idiom entered by them goes into a moderation queue, waiting for me to OK the entry before it gets displayed with other idioms in search results.
Well, that is all for now, I have to go out. When I get back I’ll let you know about other things that have been going on!
