Greetings from Japan!

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

The view of Kobe Bay from my hotel windowHoo boy. Talk about your crazy epic prep and packing frenzy. The last thing on my todo list was to write a blog on what’s goin’ on, and I finally got to it. XD

I’m writing this post on a plane, currently flying out of Hong Kong and headed for Kansai, Japan.

Earlier this year, a fellow ECU student and myself were very lucky to receive scholarships to attend a study seminar in Kobe. The seminar will be focused on ‘multicultural symbiosis’, and will run for 2 weeks. It will consist of a lot of pretty interesting activities, including hanging out with a host family and going to make soba noodles out in the countryside.

Since I was very fortunate to receive a similar scholarship back in 2006, I’m extremely honored to be chosen again for another one and plan to do the very best to represent my university, and Australia as a whole. :)

Now… the last time I went to Japan, I tried to blog about the stuff I did everyday, but found out that there simply isn’t enough time to do that. ^_^;

So this time, I plan to leverage the latest social media tech to the extreme, and post updates as a go along. This will probably consist of Twitter updates and Foursquare checkins as often as possible (But hopefully not up to spam levels haha).

I learnt from my past trip to Japan that using global roaming on one’s iPhone is a VERY BAD THING TO DO, and this time, I’ve tried renting out a 3G SIM card from DoCoMo, which I’ll report back on here on how well it goes.

Anyway, the plane’s about to land. I’ll be posting this the next chance I get.

See ya round!

Volunteering at Supanova Day 3

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Again, same deelio with the photos. I’m SERIOUSLY considering buying a DSLR camera with good low-light sensitivity for next time. ^_^;

Whew… sorry for the late post. I was pretty much straight home and into bed last night. Words could not describe the level of knackery I was feeling. :P

Anyway, quick rehash of how it all went down:

Rocked up at 7:30 again. It was a few degrees warmer this time, but still darn near freezing point. XD This time I brought gloves, but my feet froze haha. Going to go back and work on my Perth winter wardrobe… XD
A few volunteers weren’t able to make it this time, so the tasks got re-allocated a bit. Thankfully my posting didn’t change; back into the seminar room for more crowd control! XD

I’ll see if I can do another re-cap of the new guests this time as well:

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Day 1 of Volunteering at Supanova

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Sorry for the bad photography. I only had my iPhone on me at the time. Can’t wait for iPhone 4. XD
NB: WTF! WordPress flipped my pics! I’ll have to fix that later tho, sorry!

Whew! Well, day 1 of volunteering at Supanova is over! Boy am I knackered! ^_^; The Supanova Opening Ceremony

It’s been a pretty interesting day, and although there were a few hiccups here and there, generally it was all good. :)
Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve decided to document how the whole experience goes so there’s more information about it available online to other potential volunteers. :)

So I thought I’d go about this in 2 phases. I’d document down everything that happened, and then write my overall feelings on the matter.

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Supanova this weekend!

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

The Supanova Logo!Sorry for the complete lack of updates. Busy busy work makes for hard blogging. XD

So, Supanova, the pop culture expo is on this weekend!I last went to Supanova in 2008, and had a pretty awesome time.

This time, I’ve decided to take things further, and I’ve volunteered to help run the event! :D

I’ve heard a few varied things about volunteering at this event so far though… The majority of people I’ve talked to said it’s great fun and definitely worthwhile. A few others have told me that there are sometimes some hinks in the schedule, where you might end up not having anything to do on your shift. ^_^; But then again, considering the scale of the event, and the number of volunteers, this is understandable.

Either way, I thought to myself that rather than listen to the opinions of other people, I should go out there and experience it for myself. :D

In any case, since the internets came up dry on people posting their own thoughts on how it truly is to be a volunteer at Supanova, I thought I’d have a go at reporting back here on how it goes.

I’ve been a volunteer for RFLAN for 3 years now, and I volunteered at this years WAICON as well, so I’d like to think of myself as having a pretty good range of experience at Perth events… so with that in mind, I want to try and contrast this event against the others…

In any case, there’s an awesome guest list and plenty of fun activities, so it looks like a totally fun weekend all round!

Hope to see you there! :)

P.S: OMFG! Apple shop opening in Perth this weekend! XD

Bought my iPad today!

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

My iPad and 3G microSIM card. Also a lens flare in the BG. XDI thought I’d just fire off a little post on what happened today. XD

I went and bought an iPad 3G 64GB. :D

While I’m extremely happy to have an iPad now, what I had to go through to actually get one as of today miffed me a little bit.

I originally ordered my iPad from the Apple website, however I was told I wouldn’t receive it until June 7 (Still more than a week away!). When I jumped online today, I found that most electronic consumer shops in Perth were fully stocked to the brim with iPads, ready to purchase right then and there. So I immediately jumped up, ran over to my nearest JB Hi Fi and bought my iPad from there. I then returned to my desk and instantly canceled my June 7 pre-ordered one.

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