taiwan & 2010

the last time i was in taiwan, i thought i wouldn't go for a while again because school was starting up and i wouldn't have any real breaks anymore... but i found myself there again this last winter break haha =] i suppose it has been longer than usual, since i used to come back at least once a year (and sometimes twice ^^;;) and for longer periods of time. oh well... i'll take what i can get

surprisingly, i didn't do that much shopping for clothes this time; i only got a jacket and a shirt... i realized that a lot of the stuff i bought before from taiwan looks perfectly normal in taiwan, but when i bring it back to the u.s. it's like... wow... this is too weird/embarrassing/fobby to wear out haha.. so i forced myself not to buy anything too fobby this time lol

i saw my cousin katherine's baby, claire, for the first time in person on my trip. man, that is one good baby... she laughs all the time and rarely cries. almost makes me want to have kids... that is, until i was at dinner with my other cousin, paul, and his two kids. suffice it to say, those two are more than a handful. seeing katherine with a kid makes me feel really old :( i remember a long time ago when she lived in the house on the street behind mine and was doing color guard in high school, while i was in elementary school doing whatever retarded things i did at the time... sigh.. time really does fly.

i started missing taiwan the first week i was back here... where else can you get dimsum 24/7, electronics for cheap, 麻辣鍋 hotpot flavored lays, and good 牛肉麵 from a different restaurant each meal?? and i think my friends in taiwan outnumber my friends in the u.s.... *sigh* haha the only downside to being in taiwan is that i feel kinda fat == i have to buy medium shirts, and a normal sized bowl of noodles was definitely not enough for me... oh well.. i'm suffering from good-food withdrawal (and some kind of unknown stomach sickness) right now, so i will be skinny in no time once again bwahaha

you'd think that after three weeks back here in the states i'd be back on my normal schedule of sleeping at like 2-3am and getting up at 7, but apparently i'm still somewhat jetlagged. more often than not, i'm sleeping right after i get home from school (somewhere between 3-9pm depending on the day) and i wake up at like 4am. it's actually kind of nice.. i can get studying done in the morning and i save money by not going to out eat dinner.

i'm actually starting to do work on patients in the clinic now, which is kind of fun~ the 4th year in my team says she's proud of me because i am so calm when i am working on the patient =] she said the first time she was drilling teeth in a real patient she was freaking out, which i guess, is not a good thing to do. but i'm kind of scared of the fact that i'm not hesitant at all to pick up my handpiece and start drilling away... ^^;; what does scare me, however, is all the paperwork and protocol that needs to be followed when treating patients ugh, such a pain. also, in preparation for clinic, i ended up getting a haircut.. and it's pretty short... i can actually spike it now; in fact, if i don't spike it it just looks hideous... sigh.. i don't want another haircut for a long time ==

on another topic, last year i spent $12,106.31 (not including rent, which would be another $13,082 on top of that). naturally, food was the largest expense at 41%, followed by "other" at 17% (gifts for other people, things that aren't food or fun, or just things i don't know where else to put) i don't really know what to make of it though... i have no one really to compare to, since other people don't seem to keep track of their expenses like i do haha... one thing i think i could probably improve on in 2010, however, is my alcohol expenditure.. even though it was a measly 3% of my budget, that means i still spent $375 on it... so basically, i need to either drink less, or get more people to buy drinks for me :D

ok enough for now.. it's getting wayyy past my bedtime, so... until next time!

soccer guitar hero
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XjwoVqM_qE
soccer players play guitar hero by kicking soccer balls at panels on a wall in front of them. they're pretty skillful... reminds me of (detective) conan (not conan o'brien) :P

usb stick!
http://www.geekalerts.com/usb-computer-prankster/
i wanna get this and pass it around class telling people it has the newest lecture on it~ you know you want to too =]

ps: sorry no pics this time... and i'll try to update with shorter posts and more often, since i doubt most of you have the attention span to read my whole posts haha

fall quarter 09 update

school has gotten really busy this quarter with a lot more labwork to do. i never used to have to stay long nights in the lab or take labwork home to do, but now i'm finding myself in the lab at 9 or 10pm, and i actually bring waxing stuff home to do... at least i can watch house md while i do it =] so ridiculous... i started watching house this quarter from season 1... and i'm currently in the middle of season 5, almost caught up to the current season (6). totally loving how house is such a bastard sometimes, but at the same time i hate him for his insensitivity haha

yogurtland has been having this promotional thing with tokidoki. they have these cool cups with tokidoki designs and spoons to match. as a result, i have a small collection of yogurtland spoons now haha

i need to go back after the 24th to collect the other 2 spoon designs XD i entered the sweepstakes http://www.tokidoki.it/yogurtland hopefully i can win free yogurt for a year :D haha

since my last posting, i have learned how to give injections intraorally bwahhaha~ my hand was shaking for the first few i gave, but after getting used to it and getting over the anxiety, it really didn't seem like that big of a deal. i mean, after all, it'll be something that i'll do on an almost daily basis in the future when i start practicing. i think the best part of it was when i inadvertently injected some of the anesthetic into steph's bloodstream :D the epinephrine in the anesthetic made her have a rush for about 30 seconds... it was kind of cool, aside from the fact that if she had some kind of heart problem i could've killed her ^^;;

this quarter we also learned how to cast our own restorations in gold, which we had to buy ourselves (~$850 >< ). the whole process is actually pretty tedious; we have to make a wax pattern of the restoration, invest it in stone, melt out the wax, and then shoot molten gold into the investment mold. after we take it out, we have to reshape it, polish it, and then cement it onto our prep. each step takes a pretty long time, and it's easy to mess up and have to start over... luckily i only had to do that once =] i'll put pics up when i take some. update: here are some pics~ that's about... i dunno... $200 worth of gold?

on veteran's day, we went to redondo beach and gardena to eat good food :D at redondo we had live uni from quality seafood fresh fish market... which was not that great... we were constantly getting attacked by birds, the uni was too salty from all the seawater, and i think it gave me stomach problems... afterwards we went to sanuki no sato, probably my favorite udon place heheh =] it was just as good as always, but their chicken still sucks... dry and somewhat bland from being boiled too long i think... haha oh well... i have yet to find a better bowl of udon elsewhere.

this weekend was mildly frustrating... i left for the health fair in sylmar at around 7:30, and arrived to find absolutely nobody at the site... so me and dr. spolsky ended up sitting in the car waiting for some kind of information from the people running the fair, which finally came an hour later, telling us they had rescheduled the health fair to some time in january == i guess i'm not that pissed about it. it's just that, if i had known, i would have probably had 2 (or 3) more drinks the night before =] oh well ^^;;

music:
sakamoto ryuichi - merry christmas, mr. lawrence
the whole time i thought utada just came up with a randomly weird title for her song, but now i know that it was based on this song written by sakamoto ryuichi as the soundtrack to a movie by the same name. i love his instrumental music.. his melodies just flow, and while they're simple, they convey pretty deep feelings. i recommend his album titled 1996 =]

lady gaga - bad romance
did you know that her chinese name is 女神卡卡?? lol anyway, i wasn't really into her stuff until recently. she's quite amazing, in a weird kind of way. her live performances are highly entertaining (i recommend her 2009 mtv vma performance) and she is a really good singer live. i really don't know why she tries to make herself so ugly though; she actually looks pretty decent in the bad romance video when she uses a lot less makeup and shorter lashes. oh well, whatever floats her boat i guess.

ugh i am old now :(

夏の終わり

it's been a while since my last update... really, aside from school, i don't think i've been doing all that much.

sitting at home now, i realize how much better i like living on my own... i don't know if it's the fact that it's so hot and i can't just turn on the a/c 24/7 like i do at school, or if it's the fact that i feel guilty if i go out past say 10pm, or if it's because my dad keeps on telling me to fix his computers or clean my room... but i just feel so much more relaxed at my apartment in LA ^^;; maybe it's my friends in LA that make the difference... but they're disappearing one by one too :( kimoon has gone off to boston, which is good for him, since he was able to get into a master's program, and good for me because i think i'll be able to eat out less (and lose some weight) now that he's gone haha. but i guess that means no more random midnight outings to yogurtland or k-town... also, miki has left us for taiwan, so one of my mahjong-based sources of income has disappeared =[ but i guess that means i won't be forced to watch any more scary movies anytime soon bwahaha

speaking of movies, i've been watching a bunch of them lately... since last time i updated, i've seen inglourious basterds, district 9, couple's retreat, funny people, bruno, 500 days of summer, orphan, up, transformers 2, pelham 123. out of these, the one i regret watching the most would have to be bruno. it was nowhere near as funny as borat, nor was it really all that tasteful. following that would be orphan, since that just scared the sh*t out of me... i am never gonna adopt kids. ever..

i think my favorite of these would be district 9~ i went into it totally expecting it to be like a straight-up action flick, but it ended up being this pseudo-documentary, and it was pretty intense; it definitely made me think about the ugly side of human nature... while i guess i can understand being mean to the stupid aliens that cause trouble, wikus, the main guy in the movie, was quite a meanie to the alien who was trying to help him. i hope i am not that mean to anyone who's that nice to me... ^^;; i stayed pretty focused throughout the whole movie, which doesn't usually happen because i think i have adhd or something like that.

i also watched a bunch of movies at home: coraline, lemony snicket's a tale of unfortunate events, howl's moving castle, and ghost town. i liked all of these... maybe because the first three are for kids, and the last one is about a cranky dentist (kinda like my dad..... haha). i think i've probably seen more movies in the last few months than i have in the last couple years combined haha

school this quarter went pretty well, i think. i am still awaiting grades, but for the ones that have been released, i have passed them all =] we did some pretty cool stuff this quarter... one of the things i found kinda fun was pindexing. basically, we cut preparations for different types of indirect restorations (crowns, onlays, inlays, and the like) and then made a cast of it. then we mount it up and then cut it up into little removable sections. the whole process takes hours, and it's pretty meticulous, but it sure beats studying lol.. i still have to clean up the cast and apply the die spacer, but the tedious parts are done =]

i'm pretty sure that it's an asian thing not to use dishwashers as anything but a dish rack, so i think it's pretty understandable that i am not exactly very good at using one. seeing that the floor of my dishwasher was getting dusty from just being there without being used for about a year, i figured i'd run it with a little dishwashing machine detergent (i'd learned my lesson from last time, when i used the ultra concentrated dishwashing detergent instead of the special type for the machine...). after months of dust building up, the little cover to the cup that holds the detergent for the second round wouldn't close... and i didn't find out until after i had already put in all the detergent for both rinses, so i thought, what the heck, it's dishwashing machine soap, it should be ok...

*sigh* dishwashers hate me.

i went to try out this one place with mike in little tokyo called wakasaya. they serve donburi (stuff, mostly sushi, in rice bowls). their menu is quite attractive, everything looks so fresh and huge in their pictures, and the prices were acceptable. i guess it wasn't as good as it looked in the pictures; it was definitely not that big, and there was quite a bit of rice for the amount of fish they gave. in my opinion, akasaka is much more worth it, even though there's no way you could finish one of those bowls in one sitting haha..

anyway, what made wakasaya memorable is that in the middle of our meal a fight broke out between this one fat guy and one of the waiters. i didn't see it personally, but apparently the fat guy just started beating up the waiter out of the blue. i wasn't really sure what an appropriate course of action would be, so i just continued eating my bowl haha... (it was the same way at in-n-out when a fight broke out in front of me... some guy even got hit across the back with a chair o_O;; i just stood there waiting for my number to be called haha) i dunno, what would you do? haha..

the table of girls next to us just got up and left, and a bunch of other people just paid and left too. honestly, the thought had crossed my mind to just leave without paying, because i really don't think they'd do anything about it haha, but mike wanted to watch the fight so we stayed. in the end, the waiter was bleeding from the nose and the fat guy had his blood all over his arm. they took their fight outside, and after that i have no idea what happened...

me and mike, being the fatties that we are, decided a bowl of sushi was not enough, so we went to orochon to top it off. service was horrible... some chubby dirty looking white dude took our order, and when he gave us our food he totally messed up which one was spicy and which one wasn't, and his thumb was definitely swimming in the soup as he gave us our ramen... just another reason why shinsengumi is the best ramen place period. =] (and yes, it is better than daikokuya :P)

i only played mahjong once recently... my last time playing with miki for a while... it was pretty intense~ i had lost everything ($30) at one point, but i managed to make back enough to only lose $1.50 in the end XD
we just need to find a replacement for miki now...

and i think that just about sums up the highlights of my life over the last few months

cool stuff on the web:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrGYpYx8CQ a string quartet plays video game music; it's pretty well done, and the people acting out the games on the side are pretty entertaining to watch too.

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix make your own tune~ basically, click on the boxes to make it play a certain tone at a certain time. the tones are all chosen so that they won't really clash, and you can make a pretty cool repeating melody this way

http://armorgames.com/play/3527/gemcraft-chapter-0 Gemcraft!! i played the first one years ago...this new one is insanely long and very well done. it's basically a tower defense game, where you upgrade gems and place them in towers to attack the monsters. different gems have different attributes. i've been working on it for at least a month, still only like halfway done haha. and no, i don't know why i'm so obsessed with gem-based games (the other one being bejeweled...)

summer~

It's been a while since I last updated i guess... i can't believe it's june already. the cold weather isn't helping me think it's summer either. first year of dental school has ended... it went by so fast haha... another sign that i'm getting old :(

i had one really eventful weekend last month where i went to the dental school commencement ceremony, music of china class concert, and miki's art show =]

on saturday morning, the commencement was pretty cool~ they had it in Royce and it was packed, surprisingly. it was pretty crazy... there were people who flew in from all over the world like africa just to see it ^^ (those people even dressed in their traditional attire... crazy headdresses and stuff) according to vivian, the dean gave the same speech last year, with the same corny jokes hehe

leaving commencement took a while because everyone wanted to take a picture with everyone.... and then when we finally got to the parking lot, we found tickets on everyone's cars who parked in that lot... even though they told us that we could park there when we showed them our permit as we entered... ucla parking enforcement is evil ==

saturday night i went to watch the music of china concert... it was nice seeing people i haven't seen in a while.. but i have to admit, i think they don't sound as good anymore... must be because i'm not playing XD (just kidding ^^;;) or maybe it's because professor li recycles all the songs that we played before years ago, so it doesn't really sound all that interesting to me anymore...

sunday! i think i just bummed around the whole morning before going to miki's art show at night. she made some pretty cool stuff =] her glass chess set that she got like a gazillion cuts from... was like the centerpiece of the show almost haha. you could definitely tell she put a lot of work into it; though i don't think anyone will be using that chess set anytime soon... unless they want to get all cut up too haha... there was some other pretty cool stuff at the show too, and some really weird stuff as well... after checking out the whole show, we went to dennys where i proceeded to pig out and study for a while... since i hadn't done any of that all weekend haha

this last month at school.. the only kinda cool thing we did was the saliva lab for our cariology (study of dental caries aka cavities) class... we did things like measure the pH of our saliva, measure how much saliva we produce and how fast we produce it... so if you're wondering, the pic on the left is how much saliva i produced in 5 minutes. tmi? i know haha ask me if i care =P

i think i improved a lot recently on my teeth-drilling skills. i thought i was actually pretty decent before.... but then my dad showed me his preps from way back when he was in school and it just put me to shame lol... his looked like.... machine made.. his pulpal floors were so flat and he had no burn marks and ughh... just too perfect == but then again, he did make those preps after having gone through dental school in taiwan... so maybe i'm not that bad after all ^^. anyway, i took a few pointers from him and now my preps are actually not half bad =] i will put some pics of these up when i remember to take photos of them...

one thing i'm looking forward to is google wave~ it looks like it'd be really fun, and it definitely looks like another productivity killer to me lol.. i would be on it alll the time ^^;; for more info watch the video.. yea it's an hour+ long, but it's pretty interesting, watching the things it can do.

some of the dumb things i've done this quarter just made me think of how much a genius i was when i was little... so the dumbest thing by far i did this quarter has got to be when i was getting one of my cavity preps checked off... the instructor started working on it a little bit and then he told me to blow it out to clean it up... he was blocking the air/water syringe the way he was sitting and i was like wtf how am i supposed to blow it out?! and he says "go on, blow it!" and i was like o_O;; so i just started blowing air out of my mouth lol.. only then does he tell me to use the air/water syringe from the bench behind me ==

contrast that to my intelligence in like... first grade or something... we had a spelling test, and one of the words was fruit. i didn't know if u was before i or if i was before u..... but what i did know was that i was wearing fruit of the loom underwear lol so i just turned around and looked at the label of my underwear... and aced the test of course haha

yea i know, i'm weird =]

OH! almost forgot to rant about the current retard in charge of taiwan. sigh.... mr ma, being the suck-up to beijing that he is.. says that we should use simplified characters, like the ones they use in china. yet at the same time he also says "It is also our hope that the standard [traditional] characters can be listed as World Heritage by the United Nations one day". wtf? giving off mixed signals as usual... sigh... blah ok done.

april/may!

recently i haven't done much aside from school... i've been staying in ackerman a lot to study...

oh, pictures of the remodeled cooperage, by special request of superstraight


they're still not done with the rec room though. i'll take a pic of it when they finish.

aside from all the studying, this last week has been fun ^^

first off, i played mahjong again today, won $15 ^^;; not quite enough to cover dinner at boston cafe, but it was like 2 or 3 meals in one, since i have this huge box of fried rice sitting in my fridge now... the food there is so good<3

other than that, i didn't get much done today, since i woke up at like noon, after going to a club last night.. == i haven't been to a club in like 6 years, and i still don't dance haha... it was fun though, drinking and meeting up with friends and friends of friends ^^

yesterday, we had our poster presentations for our periodontics course... luckily we had dr alvarez grading us, otherwise i feel like we would've gotten like a 40/100 haha... at least our poster was pretty :P we decided to dress up for the presentations this time... since last time almost everyone else did, and my group looked pretty slobby wearing our scrubs ^^;;

after the poster presentations, we went to beverly hills to this place called paulette's for their macarons.... they're really pretty, but a little too sweet for my tastes.they have all kinds of flavors like... jasmine tea, pistachio, caramel, coffee, vanilla, raspberry, and like 10 others. it was sort of like eating... cake frosting with cookie dough haha... too sweet... and at 1.60 per macaron, it's also too expensive for me == haha

after that, we went to this restaurant/lounge place in the avenue of the stars building called CraftBar. they serve small tapas-style dishes i guess, but they have a restaurant too. this too was a little overpriced in my opinion, but, it was pretty good XD

the area the restaurant was located in is reallyyyy nice ^^ it kind of reminded me of roppongi, modern, classy, and somewhat artsy. i guess basically it's like a 有錢人的地方...u can check out more pics of friday's outings here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2495750&id=2500017&l=a05bde168d

sigh... it's only the 9th of the month, and i've spent $234.01 on food... i guess i'm gonna be dieting/eating cheap the rest of this month....

some cool stuff i found on the web:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkLlVzUBn4 wolf and pig! this guy made an animation out of still photos... he took like 1300 photos or something and made a stop motion animation all around his house or something. very cool ^^

http://charlesandmarie.com/lifestyle-gems/quintessentials/epicurean-delights/details/product/hot-cold-mug/?tstmp=1204749073 this cup is pretty cool too~ it changes color and text depending on its the temperature of its contents =D i wanna get it.. but i need to cut down on my spending ><

http://www.luisandclark.com/violin.php i wanna buy this too!!! but it'll have to wait till i start making money :( haha i haven't played in sooo longgg......

http://bubblecalendar.com/2009p-int.htm this too haha... a calendar with bubble wrap.... one bubble for each day that passes by~ who cares if the year is half over! haha i feel like i would unconsciously pop them all by accident if i got it though ^^;;;

anyway, なんとなく我現在心情很好~ though it might change after i find out how i did on my final... lol... if i didn't pass this time... then i really have to have no life

april's fool

this month is off to a great start~

not ==

it's just first week and there was not a night i slept before 2am... granted that's partially due to discovering the stupid bejeweled app on facebook, (btw, i don't seem to have any competition at all in bejeweled... can anyone beat my score? XD) i really did study though... as part of my "no-more-failing" initiative, i even did some studying on the weekend of first week~ hopefully all this nerdiness will pay off haha..

at least school is fun this quarter though.. the hours are longer, but they're mostly lab classes ^^ meaning i dont' have to study-study as much heheh, but still... with something like 8 classes and 3 labs, it's pretty intense~ i made my first impressions the other day~ they're pretty fun to do, but a little messy haha

oh, and thanks to gossip-girl splee, we found out that our bench instructor, who is extremely social and pretty funny, was sued for insurance fraud in '96 haha

"The Los Angeles dentist recently pled guilty to eight counts of health-care fraud, and was sentenced July 15 to three years probation and 10 months of electronically monitored home detention, according to the U.S. Attorney's office. He was also ordered to pay restitution and had his license revoked by the state Board of Dental Examiners."

i guess it's safe to say he won't be teaching our ethics course...

so those of you who know me know that i keep tabs of (almost) all my expenses in excel like so:
and i've noticed changes in my spending habits from 2007...

first of all, i've been spending a lot less on food... in the first quarter of 2007 i spent an average of $408.26 on food, but in 2009 i spent $304.67... also, you can see that i've been spending a lot less on entertainment and car/gas, but more on school... i guess what you can draw from this is that i now am more studious, have less fun, eat less, and walk more.

one thing that bothers me, though, is that my "other" category seems to have increased... i don't like that because i don't know what i spend it on, since it has everything from the 1.5tb hard drive i got to the listerine toothpaste i use... oh well.

speaking of expenses, this is quite funny, in a wow-that-kind-of-sucks-for-you kind of way http://consumerist.com/5198894/worst-april-fools-ever-online-brokerage-zecco-pretends-to-give-away-millions-panics-when-people-start-spending dumb customers, dumber company, even dumber april fool's joke..

after i found fmylife.com, i found other funny sites too: mymomisafob.com and mydadisafob.com, which chronicle stories of fob parents and the fobby things they do.... so funny :P

and finally, i decided to be a good son and get a haircut since my dad's been badgering me about my hair being too long... it's really short now compared to what it was before, but still, the first thing he said when he saw me was, "when are you going to get a haircut".... i saw him the day after i cut my hair.... i'm growing it out again -_-;;

spring break~

yay it's spring break XD

so... i guess i'm making it a tradition to get f**ed up after my last final each quarter..... sigh.. haha... so this time i went to lounge dna (at the back of a restaurant called fisherman's wharf) where my friend miji works as a bartender~ i feel like my tolerance for alcohol has decreased by a lot :( i only had 4 mixed drinks + 1 shot and i was gone lol.. thankfully this time i had my good friends miki and miji to take care of me while i was incapacitated (sorry for making a mess XD). i'm sure it wasn't that bad though... miji tells me that apparently 我那個晚上邊吐邊擦地板... lol... i'm so dumb ^^ they had their fun too though... somewhere out there are pictures of them + marker + me passed out.... i'm sure you can figure out what happened then haha...

last time this happened, i was alcohol free for at least a week.. this time, i came home the next night only to drink with my dad and aunt, then the following night with my dad and uncle and cousins, and then the following night with more relatives.... so bad.. haha.. whatevers

it's break time and i'm catching up on the whole quarter's worth of drama bwahhaha~ i finished メイちゃんの執事 [Mei-chan no Shitsuji] which is about this girl, from this poor family, whose parents die and then she finds out that she's actually the heiress to like the biggest corporation in japan or something, so she has to attend this super elite rich school where everyone has their own butlers and stuff... yea... it's really farcical haha but i don't care~ it's entertaining enough. ^^ one thing that annoys me about it is how ugly the evil girl is... she's supposed to be like the perfect, highest ranking girl in the school, but she's just... so... sinisterly ugly haha...

i still need to finish 神の雫 [Kami no Shizuku] and i kind of want to watch キイナ [Kiina] and ヴォイス [Voice]... i'm never gonna have time for them during school.. they're an hour each episode haha, i can only spare time for shows like big bang theory, so i will be busy watching drama these next few days XD

i have no idea what to eat when i'm at home... there's never any chips or other yummy junk food at home... :( except for this! bwahhaha i haven't had this is in so long~ if u havent' had it before, u must have some! they're called "mug noodle" u know, like cup noodles~ but in bite sized form haha
they have these little dog and panda shaped chikuwa (fish cake) things in them too XD... too bad they're only like.... 3 bites each :( but i guess that's what makes them so appealing~ it always leaves me wanting more ^^

i've been trying to learn how to use adobe flash cs4 to make presentations, kind of like the one our school gave us to study for the kidney, but it's kind of sad.. i couldn't even figure out how to get it to go past the title screen lol... everything's so complicated nowadays, especially with this action script crap... it's basically like c++...... bleh... so i kinda gave up on that haha.. i think i can do basic small flash animation type things though.. they don't seem too bad... but if anyone has any tips on flash, feel free to share them with me~ :P