Almost Over...

Tomorrow's the start of a new week, and it's been an enjoyable 4-day break :) On Friday my wife and I were invited to stay over at a villa at Pacific Harbour (by the parents of one of our friends). It was a totally relaxing stay... all I did was eat, sleep and swim. The weather was bright and sunny, and the pool water was cold - a great combination! After swimming I'd take a nap in the lounge chair and then it would be time for lunch. And on Saturday morning we went for a walk around the suburbs. There're a lot of empty lots just waiting to be purchased and have villas or houses built there, and a quite a few little streets just sitting empty, without any houses whatsoever there. Some villas were halfway built; apparently their owners ran out of money to complete the construction. A great place to get away on the weekends if you had your own place there (and the cash to build or buy it!).

I couldn't leave without a visit to my favourite place in Pac Harbour, ParadICE (which sells fruity drink combos and ice creams), so before we left, we paid a visit there. The frozen yoghurt was good, as always, but I bought a black pearl tea (sour lychee flavour) which wasn't that good at all. It was full of ice (which it shouldn't be) and the flavour... was actually mango! Their black pearl teas must have been a new addition and maybe they're still getting used to making it, but I think I'd rather stick to the ones I can buy at Easyway in Australia.

Fiji Wins!

Fiji won in Adelaide tonight and victory was sweet. Coming back after the loss to Samoa in HK last week, the boys made up for it and gave them a good hiding, 21-7. YESSSSS! Fiji had an especially tough journey to the finals. First they had to dispatch a tough Tongan team, almost going down 22-21, had an easy victory over Canada (33-7), but were overcome by a resurgent England team 20-12 (who incidently, were beaten by Tonga 12-5!!) Well, that was all just during the pool matches!

Even tougher was the quarters & semis - Fiji had a draw with South Africa 17-all at full time and scored in sudden death to win 22-17. Then we had another showdown with NZ and again scores were tied 17-all almost at full-time, but Ryder saved the day by scoring just before the final whistle to nail it, 24-17. Then, Samoa. We were expecting a cracker of a match and weren't disappointed. There were some freakin' tough tackles done on the Samoan players; just as well Naevo didn't get sent off for that bruising judo throw on his unfortunate Samoan victim! In the end, we got what we came for... the Cup.

Now it's just left for the England & Scotland legs, and then the Sevens circuit for 2006/07 is finished. All the best boys and bring back the title of Sevens champs for the year again!

Long Weekend

Well, tomorrow's the last day of a 3-day work week, and I'm sorta wondering what we'll be doing on the long weekend. This past Monday was a holiday, as it was Prophet Mohammed's b'day, and Friday & the coming Monday are part of the Easter weekend.

Already it looks like quite an eventful week, as far as natural disasters are concerned. On Monday an earthquake of around 8 on the Richter scale hit the sea off the Solomon Islands and a tsunami warning was quickly issued. Unfortunately, the Solomons got hit pretty bad and there's been a number of people killed. However, here in Fiji, people just didn't seem to take the warning seriously. Police were out on the beaches trying to get people off the shores and safe onto high grounds but apparently this had the opposite effect, as people instead flocked to the beaches in the hopes of seeing a giant wave come up. According to the papers, a few even brough along binoculars!!! WTF...

Anyways, it seems there are a lot of idiots out there who have already forgotten the tragedy of the South East Asian tsunami and the wave of death it brought. A beach-goer here was even quoted as saying "It doesn't look like there'll be a tsunami considering the beautiful weather we have today". I truly fear for his kids if that's the kind of common sense he's dishing out. I mean, does he really think a tsunami cares what kind of weather it is out there before coming in to shore?

Oh, and just today we had a tropical cyclone alert for the Northern parts of the Fiji group, meaning that Vanua Levu (our big northern island) and the Lau group (little islands in the east) are going to get affected. Looks like the poor North is up for trouble once again after just getting flooded recently after heavy rains. Just hope there aren't any mariners who've ignored warnings and decided to go fishing or something.

Maybe I'll just catch up on my sleep this weekend. Or play some games. Or hopefully, catch some rays at the beach!

Fiji 7s

Well, yesterday was a pretty disappointing day for me. The reason is, Fiji didn't get to win the Hong Kong 7s, despite overcoming some tough hurdles to reach there. We beat an inspired Scotland team after brushing them off in the pool games (played them again in the quarters as it was a six-pool tournament), then defeated our arch-nemesis, New Zealand, pretty nicely. But it looks like our main competition won't be NZ, or even England. It will be Samoa. These guys almost demolished us in the finals, scoring 27 points to Fiji's 0 in the first half. While Fiji came back bravely in the 2nd half to make 22 points, it wasn't enough in the final seconds as we lost the ball and Samoa ended the play to make it 27-22.

The thing I noticed was, at the kickoff they targetted the ball toward the middle of the field, toward the shorter Fijian guys, instead of at Naevo, who definitely would have got the ball for Fiji. They've defeated us twice now in the IRB 2006/2007 7s circuit, and we've beaten them once. With them just behind us by six points (along with NZ), the competition is sure to become tougher and the pressure will rise to keep the lead up.

One thing is for sure, Serevi still has some of his old magic left. He side-stepped a number of NZ players to score the final nail in the coffin for NZ, and made it 21-12.

All the best for Adelaide boys. If you meet up with Samoa, make sure you thrash them!

300

Man, I saw this movie on the weekend and let me tell you, it's a freakin' good bloody movie (no pun intended). The action, the storytelling, the cinematography all added up to one hell of an action flick. I mean, if you loved Gladiator and Troy (like I did), you'll definitely enjoy 300 as well.

It's based on the graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller, and since Sin City was based on another of his works, I was expecting a great flick and I wasn't disappointed. Awesome, awesome, awesome!! Go and watch if you're into action flicks, or just good movies in general.

Well, I'm looking forward to more good movies this year. Can't wait for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Spiderman 3 to come out!

Cats & Dogs

... that's what it's raining here in Fiji at the moment. Torrential downpour here in Suva right now, and a tropical depression around 400km NW of Nadi that's likely to develop into a cyclone. The West isn't getting spared either, with the bad weather actually hitting them first. Well, we can expect more floods to hit various spots in the country. Just hope people are taking appropriate precautions and watching their kids.

On another note, some sad news to tell. There's this old gentleman that brings morning tea and lunches to different offices around Suva to sell, and his wit and humour always started our day off well. Yesterday however, we heard some news over the radio that his house had caught fire and everyone inside had perished, his wife, daughter and a relatives' son he was looking after, and today it was confirmed in the papers. It was really sad and horrible news. I'm sure most of the office people around Suva knew (or knew of) him because of his food deliveries or personal connections, and it was really sad to hear about the death of such a hardworking and likeable man and his family. Even at 69 years of age, he was as spritely as a young man. Apparently they had been working early in the morning to prepare food for the day when a gas tank exploded and their wooden house caught fire, and spread too fast for them to evacuate. So if you knew the guy, please say a short prayer for him and his family.

Have a safe weekend all.

Wikipedia

Apart from games, I love reading. In fact, if I weren't spending time playing games, I'd be reading. If I'm in the mood, nothing beats lying down in bed with a good book (well, there's a couple of other things, but they're not open for discussion). Especially if it's a cold, rainy day out and you're nice and warm in bed and feeling lazy!

I'm mainly into the sci-fi/fantasy genre, and I rate Richard E. Feist, Isaac Asimov, Tolkien, and Anne McCaffrey among my favourite authors. But I also enjoy books by Agatha Christie and Michael Crichton, among others. So, I'm not really limited in my range of reading, it's just that I prefer sticking to reading something I know I'll enjoy.

But what if you're not in the mood for gaming, and there's nothing around to read? Well, if I'm online I normally go to Wikipedia and do a search on whatever tickles my fancy at that point in time. Anything from WW2 to army ants goes. I can even check what a certain movie is about if I don't mind reading the spoilers, or find out what a particular tv series is about or what episodes have been aired.

In short, I use Wikipedia to find out info on almost anything of interest that I think of. Sure, it's not perfect and probably will never will be, but I don't mind. It sure beats trawling the net searching for info on something when it'll likely be in Wikipedia.

Games

Friends of mine know that I just luurve playing PC games. I think the very first one was back at my friend Ron's place, where he had the Warcraft 2 demo loaded on his PC. Without a manual or any idea what the game was about, we managed to figure out how to go about gathering resources (wood & gold), using them to buy foot soldiers, and going forth to slay savage orcs. And what did I do when I finally got the full version of the game? I used cheats to maximise my gold... what I didn't realise was that the computer opponent would also get his gold maximised, and I kept wondering how come he was able to pump out units as fast as I could! LoL.

Well, that was my first taste of an RTS (real-time strategy) game. I was introduced to the FPS (first-person shooter) genre when Kim gave me a copy of Unreal Tournament. Jeez, I was so bad at it when I started off. I couldn't shoot straight and kept getting my ass kicked by the computer in the single player tourney, and that was only in round two! Then I finally got my sights straightened and became enough of a good player to regularly win Quake 2 deathmatches at our work LAN. No, we never played Q3 coz our work PCs had this tiny chip called the 'Intel integrated graphics chip' that was very Q2-friendly but absolutely crap at full-screen games. Yeah, we played our Q2 matches at res' less than 640x480. It was a hassle, but well worth it if it meant not getting caught by the bosses! These days we don't play though, as after a while gaming fell out of favour.

Right now? I've just finished Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It's a pretty good game filled choc-a-bloc with action and a fantastic range of heroes to choose from. There's also Company of Heroes, which uses the Warhammer 40,000 game engine to create an RTS feel to the war in France after the assault on Normandy. The graphics in this game are absolutely incredible! Even when zoomed up close, units never lose their detail.

Hmm... maybe I oughta start reviewing games in detail from now :)

Guh... sooo full from dinner

Phew... had such a large dinner tonight. Between 3 people (myself, my wife Har, and one of her friends from uni), we had about 6 dishes at this Chinese restaurant and in the end, we couldn't finish it all. Had to split the takeaway between her friend and us, and I'll have our share for lunch tomorrow :)

Anyways, there's something else I wanted to mention. Here in Fiji, we just have one telco company, Telecom Fiji, and like all monopolies, they really charge high when they want to. For example, international calls cost around $1 a minute to most countries, so in just half an hour you can spend up to almost $30 or more talking to someone overseas. Thank goodness for VoIP then. My good friend Kim mentioned this site, www.iconnecthere.com, which offer some good VoIP packages, one of which he subscribes to. Well, my wife and I took up one of them which costs US$15/month, and includes 400 free mins to call US/Canada, and 400 free mins to the rest of the world. Har was really excited coz she's got lots of friends & family overseas, but now that our first month of subscription is almost up, she's now realised that she can't finish the 400 mins... LOL.

That's it for tonight... gotta have my bath now. Goodnight!

It's ALIVEEE!!

So... here's me, finally getting a chance to publish my brilliant ideas on how to solve the world's biggest problems. Or, letting people finally see the crazed, insane maniac lurking inside my head :)

Whatever the case, hopefully I'll be posting here regularly on what's the latest in my life or thoughts that I've... thought up. Yeah.

So expect new stuff soon! :)