New Design

Oh hai :D Noticed that my blog is not so dark anymore?

Was in a colourful mood, and my hands were itchy, so I decided to revamp my blog. I found this awesome background image for tiling online, and it just wouldn't look as nice with a black outer wrapper so decided to use a sort of cream colour, I just know it by the web color code #ffff99.

Instead of a whole outer wrapper like last time, I did the header wrapper, main wrapper and sidebar wrapper individually. Adjusted the width and padding etc. Eh see, we can put what we learnt in Web Page Design last time in Foundation to good use XD. All those very basic html.

Had to change the font colours from the html itself also, using web colour codes haha. It was sort of fun, though I had to figure out which parts I had to change and what codes I had to add to make it look the way I wanted it to. I went nuts when the 1st time I saved, the stupid thing had an error saving, and when I went back to the page all the work I did was GONE. Good thing I remembered what I did.

Honestly this is the most satisfied I have been with my blog layout. So what do you think? Like it?

Festival of the Mind V

There are quite little things that I can say that I am really proud of about my uni, UTAR. Some things that I am really proud of is our big picturesque campus in Kampar, and an event that they have in UTAR every few months, Malaysia Festival of the Mind. This is already the fifth Festival of the Mind, and it is the 1st time it is held in the Kampar Campus.

This year it is officiated by our Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education, Y.A.B Tan Sri Dato' Haji Muhyiddin Bin Mohd. Yassin. When I went to uni on the first day of the event, which was Friday, I saw so many police cars around. Didn't really bother.

When I was still at home, I suddenly received an sms from Yi Lyn asking if I was in Kampar, because she is here with her parents for the Festival of the Mind. I was like OMG yay! since I hadn't seen her for quite awhile, let alone hung out with her much since we graduated in form 5. So I went to meet up with her in uni. I would have already been in uni by the time she smsed me if I could wake up for my 8am class that day =P My next class was at 1pm, so I went early at 10 something, and went around Block A visiting the booths with her and her parents. Friday night Yi Lyn and I went to yum cha at La Foresta in New Town, catching up. Played with my camera a bit, but we didn't use the flash because we didn't want to attract so much attention to ourselves =p

Ong Yi Lyn :D

With Grand Kampar Hotel as our backdrop, they were all staying there.

Our wedges and sausages, too bad the wedges came out blur, sausages look juicy though, with the sauce somemore hehe

Shadows

When we're leaving

Yi Lyn wore our troop tee :D Aih, Scouts

There was like a number of talks going on during the whole three days of the event. I was planning to attend a talk on Saturday, titled "Self Hypnosis- Release the Power of Your Mind with the Click of Your Fingers!" by Mr. Terry Winchester. I got to shake hands with him on Friday because Yi Lyn's dad was talking to him. I googled him and I found out that he is an internationally renowned hypnotherapist from South Africa. He is the founder of The Winchester Foundation, which is an organisation dedicated to the spiritual awakening of humanity through the power of the mind. Yi Lyn's dad told me that Mr Winchester can actually like "talk" to bees and snakes. In his website I read that he is a holistic beekeeper in South Africa also, and that he has like a telepathic rapport with the bees. He can like "talk" the bees out of an inaccessible place so that they won't get exterminated. Find out more here *click*

Picture credits to this site *click*

On Saturday when I went for the talk, outside of the venue it was totally packed, so many people wanted to go for his talk, but the tickets were out. Luckily I could get the tickets hehe. They let some of the people without tickets in, but they had to sit on the floor. I took down a whole lot of notes, because I have to write a short report on it for one of my classes. I would share the whole thing here but it would be extremely long. In a nutshell, what he was talking about was how the subconscious mind is so powerful that you can achieve something just by visualising it. Your thoughts create your reality. It is all in the mind. It is like "The Secret".

Before the session ended he did a relaxation exercise with us, asking us to close our eyes, with the background music of waves playing, we had to let his voice guide us the whole time, asking us to visualise our future as we want it. I really felt relaxed and refreshed after that. There was a smile on my face even while I was cycling home in the sun =P The other people from my class that also attended the talk, asked me whether I was relaxed or not, and I said yes, and Madame (nickname) in particular sounded like she was scoffing. I guess she didn't follow him. Too bad Madame, you would have benefited from his teachings, then maybe not all of us will dislike you. Okay enough, don't attract negative energy.

Honestly I am a new age person. I am open to new concepts and not so close minded like so many Malaysians. So many things they judge based on what they see in movies and stories that is like so outdated, all their prior knowledge that leads to the abstraction of knowledge. (Oops, info from what I study for my Cognition midterm leaking out) Like associating Wicca with black magic. Hmph.

The Mist

Have you ever felt so disturbed by movies sometimes that it makes you think about life? Well I have, most of the time actually, the last one being The Machinist. Today I watched another movie that had that effect on me, The Mist, which is an adaptation from a Stephen King novella of the same name, The Mist.

The Mist is set in the small town of Bridgton, Maine, and the storyline is about how members of that town seek refuge in a local supermarket after a violent thunderstorm cuts off their power, and while there, a mysterious mist comes and blankets the whole town. The mist came along with some pretty gruesome creatures: some scary tentacled creature, huge poisonous dragonflies, huge scary spiders that spit acid-like silk and pterodactyl-like creatures. My fear of spiders have been amplified. I can never look at an insect the same again, and that's bad seeing how my room here in Kampar has like tons of insects sometimes that I have never seen before back in PJ.

The main character is a pretty hot guy named David Drayton, with his son by his side. His wife gets trapped at home when the mist comes, and at the end of the movie when he goes back home to get his wife, he find her dead, hanging in the webs of the huge scary spiders.

As I said I do get emotionally involved sometimes while watching movies, and in this movie that happened when Mrs. Carmody was talking. The wikipedia page for the actress Marcia Gay Harden that played Mrs. Carmody, described her as a "religious zealot" in The Mist. I seriously felt disgusted and annoyed at her while watching the movie, I was practically cursing at the screen. Especially that part where she accused one of the soldiers, Jessup of being the cause of all this, and made her followers so agitated that the butcher actually stabbed him in the stomach a few times before they threw him out to the creatures as sacrifice. So when one of the good guys shot her twice in the stomach and head (boom! headshot) when she tried to stop them from leaving the store holding a knife and asked her followers to kill them, I was like almost clapping.

FYI I don't get so agitated in the cinema. That would be embarrassing. At most I will silently curse, only the person sitting next to me will hear me.

The most disturbing part was the ending when David's car runs out of gas when they were trying to escape the mist. While his son was sleeping, the 4 adults in the car decides that its better for them to commit suicide shooting themselves than to suffer when the creatures get to them. They then discovered that there were only 4 bullets, for 5 of them. So David shoots his son and the other 3 adults, and then goes out of the car to let the creatures get to him.

An unexpected ending happens. Instead of some creature coming and gobbling him up, a whole lot of army tanks and trucks with survivors come, and he is rescued. To think that he just killed the others, especially his son, thinking that they couldn't be saved, when help was actually just minutes away. He was so overcome with grief that he sank to the ground, crying out with pain. That was really sad, I felt his pain.

The tag line of this movie is: Fear changes everything. Basically its about how we humans when in fear, we will do anything, even if it is as inhumane as killing one of our own. There was a scene in the movie that emphasized this.

I want to get the book, and see how it is compared to the movie. I like Stephen King books, the last books from him that I read, IT and Needful Things, are dark and scary also. Sort of disturbing yet they sort of teach you lessons. Like in IT, I learnt that you should not trust scary looking monsters in disguise as clowns that come from the sewers HAHA Okay just kidding, there are real lessons. Needful Things teaches me to not be so attached to materialistic things. I just realised that I actually have the first editions of both IT and Needful Things, when I read the wikipedia entry for both. They were both hand me downs from my aunt and her friend. Awesome.

IT first edition cover according to Wiki. Exact same one I have.

Needful Things first edition cover. Also exact same one I have hehe.

Both IT and Needful Things were made into movies, plan to get it and watch it and see. Should be both disturbing and nice lol.

Philosophical much?

I always thought that philosophy is something very interesting but lately I have been more interested in it. There has been this silence in my head lately (not that I have had voices in my head before, please, I'm not schizophrenic or anything), and its been letting me focus more on my work and letting me sort out my life.

I read about Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger in some of my other books, just brief mentions, but their names were imprinted in my brain, and so when I went back to KL last weekend, I went to Borders with my uncle, aunt and cousin, and I was browsing when I saw a book on Nietzsche quotes. So, I sat down and started reading it. Man it was interesting. I wanted that book, but in the end I didn't get it. I wasn't paying after all, so maybe next time. I still dream about that book, thats what happens when I want something. I like to own books.

Its not like I don't deal with philosophy on a daily basis. Being a psychology student, I study about people like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and the likes that are partly philosophers no? Since Psychology originated from the study of both philosophy and physiology. So I have been reading some of my last semester textbooks in more detail for my assignments and I found out that Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger are some of the many contributors to the Existential approach.

The existential approach basically seeks a balance between recognizing the limits and tragic dimensions of human existence on one hand and the possibilities and opportunities of human life on the other hand. Their view of human nature is that we as a person are constantly changing, evolving, becoming. We are discovering and making sense of our existence.



I like Nietzsche's views because they somewhat affirm my own views and values. According to this website that I read, Nietzsche was vehemently opposed to religion in his life, mainly Christianity. He felt that life should be affirmed and lived fully instead of being denied and oppressed. He also felt that we should question all values and then eventually come into our own values. If like sheep, we comply passively to "herd morality", we will be nothing but mediocrities, just a moderate person. But if we break free from that and give control to our will to power, we will release our potentiality for creativity and originality. Though I know I have to read his book to see the bigger picture of his philosophy.




Makes you think doesn't it? Thats what I believe anyway, that we should always question. Nietzsche's works influenced a lot of important people, like all philosophers do, though some used it for no good, picking parts that seemed to support their agenda. One of them is Hitler unfortunately.

Next time I go Borders, I will leave with a book from Nietzsche (hopefully soon).

Transformers 2

Transformers : Revenge of the fallen. I sort of have a love hate relationship with it now. I like the movie, but please, don't make me watch it again.

You know why I say so? Because I watched it 4 times already. Yes yes I know I'm crazy lol. 4 times is seriously damn a lot. 1st time was last thursday when it just came out, went to Jusco Ipoh with my classmates to watch, 4th row from the screen... 2nd time was with my aunt, uncle and white rabbit cousin in Tropicana City Mall on Sunday, 5th row from the screen... 3rd time was with straight Ryan (not gay, straight) in 1u, Monday afternoon, thank goodness it was 2nd row from the back! 4th time was with my form 5 classmates, my Keruing girls, on Monday night, 5th row from the screen...

I can remember what happens at which part already, and I can even spot some incongruent parts in the movie. The part where Sam was coming down the stairs after his astronomy lecture dropping papers, the people passing by beside him came down the stairs and after he picked them up, the same people were still coming down the same part of the stairs.

Theres also the part where the 5 Decepticons were diving into the sea to revive Megatron, they said that there were 6 of them when they came up, when they got down there they had to kill "the small robot" for parts, so there should still be 5 of them, Megatron and the remaining 4 Decepticons no? I found out that theres more that I didn't notice lol. Its always the little details that escape detection.

Overall it was still okay. Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf is still hot as ever. Major Lennox too =D Alex says that Megan Fox will turn him straight, I say Megan Fox will turn me lesbian LOL Okay okay kidding, how can I turn lesbian seriously. People who know me will know how true this is hahaha.

I shall go watch Transformers the 1st one again when I am free. I kind of forgot the movie already oopsie.

Lata Kinjang

Lata Kinjang is one heck of a long waterfall near Chenderiang. From KL, you have to come in at the Tapah Exit of the highway to get there (like going to Kampar). Lata Kinjang can be seen from the North-South Highway, last time when I was a kid, I would always see it on the way to Penang, but I didn't know back then that that was Lata Kinjang lol.




So, my classmate Joshua (aka Mojo Jojo aka Jojo) invited me to go along with him and my other classmate Wei Jie (aka Jie Jie, pronounced GG hahaha) to Lata Kinjang to explore the 2nd and 3rd tier on Saturday morning. Woohoo I was so excited, its been awhile since I've been to a waterfall, makes me think of Usaha Camp last time in Templars Park. Jie Jie and I were both scouts last time, but he's from Johor.

Jie Jie

=P

We left for Lata Kinjang at 7.25am, nice and early lol. We left Kampar going towards Tapah. Passed lots of palm plantations and such. The road is fairly straight forward, just that when we reach Chenderiang town we have to turn into one of the shophouse roads, and go straight till we reach the Kampung Orang Asli, which is where the Lata Kinjang's carpark is. Parking is rm 1 for cars and 50 cents for motors.

Jie Jie and Jojo

That black cat was there from when we went in till we came out. We shall call it surveillance camera. The eyes are piercing green.

The guide that takes you up to the 2nd and 3rd tier was still sleeping so we went up to the 1st tier first ourselves. There were these little kittehs (LOLspeak) and 2 of them followed us. More specifically they followed Jojo. We couldn't do anything about it so we just let them amble up with us. Some of us almost tripped on them and kicked them by accident because they would stand near to your feet and sometimes you just don't notice and start walking.

One of our cute guardian kittehs =D

And so they follow

At one point we reached this rock platform and we stood there, and we could look downstream and look upstream. Man the view is awesome. Very nice. The kittehs followed us up there even, not afraid of water I guess haha.

Downstream

Upstream. Nice view!

Guardian Kitteh 2. Not scared of water eh?

The top

We went up to the very end of the 1st tier which was the end of the suspension bridge, and then we walked back down and tried to go up to the 2nd tier ourselves through this road halfway down. It was only a mud and tree roots path, a little steep. We went up a little, and ran into this tangle of huge beige millipedes. Damn they looked scary. We then decided that it was a little dangerous for us to go up without a guide so we went back down to see if the guide is up.

The suspension bridge

From the suspension bridge

Trail to 2nd tier

Scary milipedes

When we got down, we saw the guide, but after finding out his charges for the 3 of us, which is rm60, we decided to come another day with more people. If we came with 10 people he said he would charge us rm 70, which is more worth it. 40 people rm 120 I think, but then taking care of 40 people in a jungle would be a nightmare.

Scary toilet

We then looked at the chickens around there, big colourful cocks. I also took some pictures of some flowers there.





We then left for Chenderiang, and had brunch there. We ate at this roadside fried noodle stall that Jojo said seemed nice, and I had fried mihun, that cost only about rm 1.30 and was quite delicious, it had a very nice aroma. We then went on our way back to Kampar, but before we went home, we stopped at the Old Town market to drink soya bean. Jie Jie was sleeping in the car while Jojo and I went.





Nice nice, I can wait to get to the 2nd and 3rd tier man. It would be awesome.