The Walking Dead Ep 6-7

Alright folks I'm back. I haven't updated cuz I've been lazy and busy at the same time. The makers of TWD thought it would be cool to have 13 episodes this season and to have a "mid season" finale. We have to wait another 3 months before the rest of the episodes come out, woopie-do.

S2E6 - Secrets

From the last episode, Glenn finds the barn full of walkers and his girlfriend Maggie tells him to stfu because her dad wants to keep them there. Apparently these people are "sick" according to the farmer man--damn ignorants. Rick spends more resources trying to find Sophia. Meanwhile, Shane goes to teach everyone on site how to shoot guns, including the little boy, Carl. Andrea shoots well at practice, so Shane makes her shoot moving targets and she can't hit a thing. Dale confronts Hershel about the barn and he tells him to mind their own business and be ready to leave their property. Glenn (& Maggie) goes to fetch more supplies for Lori because shes preggo. They almost die to a walker. Shane & Andrea go into town to search for Sophia and then confront a bunch of walkers. In distress, Andrea manages to learn how to shoot moving targets. Now that she has the abortion pills, Lori takes like ten of them, then throws them up. Dale confronts Shane about Otis' death and threatens him. It backfires. Rick finds the pills and Lori spills the beans--the pregnancy and her affair with Shane.

Thoughts - I think it's pretty stupid how they don't conserve ammunition and wastes all their rounds on "practice." Shane nails Andrea in this episode, about time. Lori finally spills the beans about her relationship with Shane and Rick is okay with that. Is Rick okay? The dude fucked your wife and you're going to pretend nothing happened?

Good parenting includes teaching your 8 year old to shoot a gun

S2E7 - Pretty Much Dead Already

Glenn tells the group there's walkers in the barn. Everyone freaks out and Shane wants to deal with it by killing all the walkers. Dale goes to hide the guns because he knows Shane will go clear the barn with or without Hershel's permission. Rick asks Hershel for his permission to stay on the farm instead of getting evicted because Lori is pregnant. Shane learns that Lori is pregnant and he is certain that the kid is his. Hershel brings Rick to help round up some walkers back to the farm with a leash. Otis used to do this but now hes dead, so someone else has to do the job. Shane tracks down Dale and gets the guns back through intimidation. Shane gives everyone a gun and prepares for the shoot down. Shane sees Rick herding walkers back to the farm and rages out. He screams that walkers aren't people and he shoots them down. He breaks down the locks on the barn to let the walkers out. The crew massacres the walkers in front of the distraught Hershel family. In the end, Sophia emerges from the barn. And thus we kill off Sophia.

Thoughts - slow start, but the episode ends in a bang. I just don't know what to make of Shane. He's a villain, the type you love to hate. He didnt have to go and knock down the doors of the barn, they were safe. But yet he did and massacred the crowd. At least they finally found Sophia, who was in the barn this whole time.

Whatchu gonn do old man?

This is easy, its like herding cow

Egg planted.

The A Team

Sophia's Dead

The Walking Dead Ep 5

S2E5 - "Chupacabra"
The script writers really need to come up with a better name for the episode titles. The crew still haven't found Sophia, the lost little girl in the woods. They send out a search party once again. Daryl takes a horse to scout further out. Rick and Shane have another morality conversation in the woods in which Shane says its a waste of time while Rick doesn't want to give up hope. Daryl's horse flips him over a cliff and he gets punctured by his own arrow. Poor guy has a will to survive and a natural instinct to do what is necessary to achieve it. However, with his wounds, he fails multiple times to get back up the hill. After he fails, he is knocked out and starts hallucinating. He sees his brother, whose name escapes me, and starts talking to him about how he's pathetic. Merle (thats his name) kicks Daryl and tells him to get up. He wakes up just in time before a walker takes a bite out of him. He pulls out the arrow from his body, shoots the walker, and eats a live squirrel. Talk about being a badass. He eventually gets over the cliff and walks back to the farm. Unfortunately, the way he walked looked like a walker, and the blonde bonehead shoots him with a sniper rifle, despite Dale telling her not to shoot. Luckily she missed and Daryl didn't die.

Never ride a horse in a zombie apoc.

Wake yoself up son

Lets shoot that incoming thing that looks like a walker

Why do they make them so pretty and dumb?

The Walking Dead Ep 2-4

S2E2 - "Bloodletting"
Honestly, nothing happens in this episode. Rick brings Carl to a farm where they can find help. The other crew continues to search for the lost little girl but find nothing. The vet tells Rick that he needs to operate on Carl in order to save his life. They need medical supplies. Shane and the guy who shot Carl volunteer to go to the local high school to grab supplies. Shane and Otis get trapped inside.

S2E3 - "Save the Last One"
The caravan crew and the farmers finally come together. They still haven't found Sophia. Lori and Rick contemplate on whether or not to perform the surgery on Carl, since the world sucks. Nothing really happens and in the end Shane comes back from the trip with the medical supplies--alone. The vet saves Carl's life. In the end, it is revealed to us that Shane killed Otis in order to escape from the horde of zombies when they were being pursued. However, he lies about it being an accident, that Otis sacrificed himself.

Thoughts - Shane had two options when he was being chased by the horde. One was to die together with Otis. The other was to turn on the guy and save himself. He chose the latter. However, he could've done it better by shooting the man in the head, instead of shooting him in the foot and causing his death to be much more painful (eaten alive sucks). And you have to wonder... if they had that much time to fight against each other before the zombies caught them, are you sure they couldn't have gotten away together?

S2E4 - "Cherokee Rose"
The crew finds a walker inside one of the water wells. Since they didn't want to contaminate the water by shooting it in the head, they decide to drag it up and then smash it. But honestly, if it already been down there for that long of a time, it probably already made the water bad. The geniuses decide to get the walker out of the well by using Glenn as bait. They almost get him killed because they couldn't support the rope. They successfully tie a noose to the walkers head and drag it out of the well. Ironically, the walker ripped in half and the lower half (guts and all) fall back into the well. Lori asks Glenn to get her a pregnancy test from the local pharmacy. Glenn goes with Maggie and when Maggie saw him digging through the condoms, she initiates sex. Back home, Lori cries when she finds out she's pregnant.

Thoughts - 3 things really happened: the ugly walker in the well, Glenn getting laid, and Lori is revealed to be pregnant. Glenn getting laid was awful. It downright made Asians look bad. He was the typical virgin nerd who didn't know what he was doing and got lucky. Lori is pregnant with Shane's kid and only Glenn knows.

Who woulda thought a single rope wouldn't hold him?

"Good thing we didn't do something stupid like shoot it - TDog"

Disburbing things about humanity

Recently, a 2 year old toddler was ran over by a truck, twice. 18 people walked by the 2 year old in a pool of blood, yet none of them did anything to help her. She died yesterday, after several days of suffering in critical condition in the hospital. The link I provided above contains the video of the clip of which the child was ran over by two different trucks. Do not watch if you are squeamish, it truly is sickening. What is more scarier than the lack of compassion from the drivers is the fact that bystanders pretended they didn't see the child at all. Among them, a mother and child walked by, and did not care. Others strolled along and it was not until the 19th person that went to get help for the kid. What has humanity come to? Are we so cold hearted that we are willing to let others die right in front of us?

The Walking Dead--Returns! S2E1 - What Lies Ahead

Spoiler Alert*

It's been a long freaking year. I've waited my whole life for this, television's zombie series, season 2! Everyone's gotten so excited about the show, my friends and I (who are huge fan of zombie genre) literally camped out the stream/download websites refreshing the page every minute on Sunday night waiting for the show to come out.

Season 1 Pilot was phenomenal. It felt like something that came out of a Romero movie. Season 1 left something to be desired, simply because it was way too short. For a six episode season, it made the viewers hungry for more. The build up and hype about the show is unprecedented for AMC. Last season the season finale ended with about 5 million viewers on the air date. Season 2 premier was up in the 7 million mark.

S2E1 - What Lies Ahead

Summary

For a 1.5 hour premier, it wasn't action packed. At the start of the episode, we get a mini recap of season 1. The crew is now an 11 member crew, 2 cars and a motorcycle. The gang is heading to a new destination but they get stuck on the highway because their car breaks down. Since the cars were abandoned, the crew scavenges the by standing cars for food and equipment. They find a ton of useful stuff until a "herd" of migrating walkers show up. Caught by surprise, they hide under cars. Since there were too many walkers around to use firearms, they had no choice but to hide. Somehow, the little girl Carol gets revealed and she runs for it. Rick goes after her and fights off the walkers chasing them. However, Carol is lost in the woods and can't be found. People panic and argue about the situation. The rest of the episode is about the crew walking around the woods and didn't find the lost girl. Towards the end, they encounter a deer. Carl walks extremely close to the deer and gets shot--by an unknown gunman. The credits roll.

Thoughts

The opening scene was both suspenseful and exciting. There were some excellent scenes. Daryl managed to save T-Dog, the idiot that cuffed his brother to be left for dead. T-Dog somehow cut his arm and spilled blood everywhere when the herd came along. If it wasn't for Daryl, he would've been dead. There was another scene in which Rick and Daryl had to cut open a walker in order to confirm that Sophia wasn't devoured. That was bloody disgusting. But I really dislike the fact that people are touching the blood of the dead. Shouldn't they be more careful not to get that stuff splattered all over their face and eyes?

Hide the children!

How to live: cover yourself with a dead body

I hate ABC

ABC sucks. They canceled both V and No Ordinary Family. Both shows were running good storylines and they killed it. V was a very high end sci-fi show, I can understand why they cut it but still, leaving a plot hanging like this is just distasteful.

The fall lineup doesn't look too interesting. The only one I'm looking forward to watching is Terra Nova, which will be on Fox. Other ones I might watch are Ringer and Unforgettable. However, know how television shows can get cut for running after 1 season, I don't have my hopes up anymore.

two natural disasters within a week

Hello East Coast, mother nature said hi.

On August 23, a 5.9 earthquake originated from Virginia shook the eastern sea board. The effects of the quake were felt all the way from Canada. I was on the 9th floor of a building in downtown Manhattan when the quake struck. The entire building swayed for a few seconds but I didn't realize it was an earthquake until my coworkers started to talk about it. When I looked out the window, I saw people from other buildings flush out of their offices and into the streets. They were afraid that they wouldn't make it out if another quake occurred. But honestly, if buildings were to topple over, you can't run anywhere. I think I would simply stay put rather than getting crushed to death. It was a nice excuse for people to take a break from work, after all our lives are incredibly dull and a little excitement was needed.

To sum up the 5.9 quake:


The second great big disaster was hurricane Irene. It was predicted to have unprecedented collateral damage done to the eastern coast.

Mayor Bloomberg instructed the people in the orange and yellow areas to evacuate. I was in danger zone A and I wanted to leave. After reading up on some information on Hurricane Katrina, I planned to camp in Baruch since it was a designated evacuation zone in Manhattan. In the end my parents convinced me to stay put because they feared I would be stuck in Manhattan with no means of returning, for days perhaps. The entire MTA public transportation shut down due to flooding. I was so glad I stayed home, we didn't lose power or get flooded. None of the predictions came true, thankfully. By the time it reached New York City, the storm became a category 1 and was no big deal.

future goal

I want to move to Sweden one day. I have nothing against the US, but something tells me I'll enjoy life much more over there.

Got Fios?

Finally got Verizon Fios Fiber-optics internet. For being such a long loyal customer of Verizon, they offered us a 2 year contract for $70 a month for unlimited phone calls and internet service. The technician had to drill a hole in the wall and the landlord wouldn't let him drill through the bricks. Luckily for us, there was a wooden part of the window that he let be drilled. Fios internet is awesome, not gonna lie.

Remember this post? I went to Borders today and the discount on books are slashed to 70-90%. They kept slashing prices every 2 weeks or so until this point where they have almost sold everything. The store will remain open for one more week. I wanted to grab a ton of books off the shelves but the books left were mostly unwanted stuff that people didn't pick up.

How I learn stuff

For my minor capstone, I decided to take monetary policy. The class itself is very poorly structured. The professor is an employee of AIG and for the first 6 classes, he was absent for half of them. Teaching at Baruch is a second job for him and there isn’t much to say about it. The textbook we are assigned is written for and by the British. This is because the only book that is updated for the current situation is this one. The way he teaches the class is very different from the rest of the school. Instead of using PowerPoint slides like every other lazy professor, he writes on the board and dictates the information. This old school type of teaching and in my opinion far more effective than the current trend. What do students do when the professor hands them the notes in class (in the form of PP slides)? They slack off, fail to pay attention, and reread the slides when midterms come along. PP slides are meant to be an aid to the lecture, not the notes. This type of teaching is far less effective than writing on the board.


Here’s why: When you are writing your own notes, a certain mental capacity and willpower is needed in order to follow the lecture. From my own personal perspective, learning is best done this way. It is the precise reason why I did so well in HS, back when all they did was write on the board. You see, when the professor writes on the board, he isn’t supposed to write everything down for you. What he writes down is part of the formula and the meaning behind the symbols you must listen and jot down for yourself. The problem with most students is that they are mindless drones that imitate what the professor writes down without properly absorbing the information the professor supplements the lecture with. So you wrote down the formula, when you look back, you have no idea what they represent. For me, I don’t simply copy, I create my own notes, due to my understanding of what is told to me. It’s similar to learning how to do something on a job; your boss shows you how to do it once. You must pay attention during the demonstration and make sure you have a crystal clear understanding or else you’ll forget. This is also why I am not a fan of getting notes from someone else. If you don’t understand what the person is writing, how can you study from someone else’s notes?


It’s quite a phenomenon in the class because no one is falling asleep during his lecture. No one dares fall asleep because if you do, you’ll miss out. This is why old school lecturing is so powerful. It keeps students on their toes and forces them to focus. Otherwise in the other scenario, they cut or fall asleep knowing the information is and will be made available to them on Blackboard. It hurts the student because the lack of care. When notes are given to me, I don’t even bother looking at them until the day before the exam. That is not learning, it is cramming. If I ever become a professor, I would definitely do a good job at teaching because I know how to break info down and the best way to deliver it.

Hello, Goodbye

This is my very first evaluation of several companies, based on my personal opinion and what little research I've done on the subject matter.

I've started working last month in a small attorney's office near Wall Street. During my lunch breaks I would roam around and I discovered a great place to kill time: Borders, a book store. I spent whatever time I had left of my break there to look at book titles and read manga. It was a great place to be, and very similar to Barnes & Noble. However, on Tuesday, I saw this dreaded poster in front of the store.

20-40% off means 20% off 99% of the time.

I've only recently been going there and it's going to be closed soon. Just my luck, this was like a library for me during lunch breaks. I did a little research on the matter and found out that the company is filing for bankruptcy (Feb 16th). To be honest, I am not surprised. Here's why:

Most people simply don't buy new books from the bookstore anymore, it's not economical. The price of a book from the bookstore is outrageously high. First of all, any book at their original retail price at the bookstore can be beaten by a search on Amazon. At a competitive pricing viewpoint, Amazon wins hands down when it comes to buying books for a good price. Buying a book used is the same as buying it new, if you're a student like me. We are in it for the content, not so much for the condition of the book. Even when Borders was trying to get rid of their inventory by slashing retail prices by 20%, their prices were still substantially higher than sellers on Amazon.

Second, the trend nowadays is to go digital and to be eco-friendly. E-readers are becoming ever more popular. Everyday on the train, I would see at least two people reading from an Amazon Kindle. Brick-and-mortar bookstores have become absolute, just like how Blockbuster was driven to the ground by Netflix. I predict that over the next ten years, 70-90% of books will be read off of e-readers. I am fond of holding a book and reading by having the book in my hands. I haven't tried reading from an e-reader yet since I don't have one, but I feel that the upcoming generation will be more technology savvy and go for the e-readers. My other point is that Amazon emerges as a leader in this industry. The Kindle is the leader of the e-reader industry at the moment, much like how the i-Pad is the leader of the tablets in the market. Market share of the Kindle amounts to 40% of total e-readers, which is extremely impressive.

What does this mean?

Let's take a look at some stock historical graphs.

Barnes & Noble

Borders Group

Amazon

The Amazon Kindle came out in late 2007. At the same time, the stock prices of both bookstore companies fell continuously. Remember that the height of the mortgage bubble was in 2007 before the market took a jump off the cliff. Therefore we can not attribute the fall of the stock price of the book companies to the financial crisis. In the same year the Kindle came out, Amazon's stock almost doubled during the year. Amazon has been steadily climbing while the two bookstore companies continue to suffer, with one of them bankrupt.

Okay so Borders Group is down under, what does this mean for the other two?

Amazon - bullish. Amazon will continue to dominate their market share, as long as they continue to innovate. Their brand name is already built into the e-reader market. In addition to that, Amazon sells all kinds of products, not exclusively books. If I had money to invest at this point in time, I would definitely invest in AMZN.

Barnes & Noble - uncertain in the long run. From research, I've learned that B&N plans to purchase closing Borders' bookstores at attractive locations. This might temporarily add to their revenue, but in the long run, brick and mortar bookstores will not survive. Bookstores are more like libraries because people literally go in and take a book out to read it inside the store for hours. I don't know what the return policies are for them, but if books are returnable, I would imagine it can be abused quite easily. So my predictions are: B&N will survive, but only because they have their own e-reader (the NOOK). They will have to close down many more stores in the upcoming future, but they won't die out like Borders because B&N is the largest retail bookstore in the US, the other reason being they also sell their books online.

V-Day

Another year of V-Day. As I browsed the streets today for flower shops in Manhattan, I noticed a lot of different people. There were jolly men on the streets, with bright smiles on their faces and flowers in their hands, eager to give them away. There were happy women on the streets, holding huge flowers and showing it off to the other people on the streets as they swayed by. There were jealous women, those who held nothing and were bitter. There were sad men, looking at those who had something to celebrate. Valentine's Day really is extreme on both ends. The happy get happier, the sad feel more miserable.

A funny thing I noticed was that women also bought flowers at flower shops as well. I wonder if they buy it for themselves or for someone else. I saw these two girls on the train who held two roses (unpackaged) on the train. To say the very least, they were "undesirable." I really think a lot of them just buy it to show they are wanted or something lol.

Here's an interesting article (that I found on a friend's wordpress):



Mondays are really bad for relationships lol.

Living the Life

Happy Lunar New Years!

So apparently when you get out of your home at 9 AM and get home at 10 PM, you have a life. It feels like there arent enough hours in the day to do anything anymore. Working and going to school will take a toll on me, I never done it before, so let's see how this semester will go. So far, it's a bit rough because I used to have so much leisure time.

As far as living expenses go, it's quite high. I spend 2 out of 3 meals in Manhattan and food is outrageously expensive there. I'm going to start tracking how much I actually spend and how much I take home as a result of taxes and food costs.

No Pants Day

No Pants Day Subway Ride: NYC
Okay so there's an annual prank known as the No Pants Subway Ride every January in NYC. It is a largely organized event organized by ImprovEverywhere. People who volunteer to participate are given very detailed instructions at Union Square before they are set off to take their pantsless (is that even a word?) journey. I saw some of the videos that were uploaded and I don't know how those people kept a straight face. More importantly, how did they go without their trousers in such a cold environment is beyond my comprehension. However, I think I'll attend next year's no pants day. I'm going to be a spectator, not a participant. They're trying to get me to feel uncomfortable? We'll see who wins at that game =D