Okay, so it has nearly been a whole month since I last posted.
The short update is that my contract at Transport finally finished last week, I have enough money to probably get me through to March, and I expect the possibility of contracts on the market about February - but nothing is definite. I have never been so stressed about money before, but I will probably scrape through as I always do somehow. I am becoming more distant from my family, not just my father's side, but my mother and sister and her kids. I am pretty firmly convinced that I should not have come back from Singapore; I should have taken one of those jobs at one third of what I get in Australia and ridden the crisis through there. And I am also firmly of the opinion that my life has turned out so far to be one big empty waste.
Does that cover it?
It's Xmas. The 'X' stands for 'Christ' for the ignorant, that's why 'Xian' = 'Christian'. It is the christian hijacking of the Northern European Winter Solstice festival. I hate this time of year; not just that I hate the weather and the crowds and the social compulsion to shop, but I hate the false, shallow, and hollow 'religion' of it all. It makes me puke.
A friend and I were talking about Battlestar Galactica the other day. I have had to watch the whole of the previous series in a couple of sittings 'cos another friend wants to watch the last series with me. Anyhow, we were comparing the Cylons and Colonists to things; I noted how the polytheist humans versus the monotheist mechanoids was comparable to the evil christians persecuting the natural faiths of this world. My friend compared the Cylons with Americans (as in citizens of the USA, not the rest of the Americas) and the humans with the rest of Earth being destroyed by everything American. (Maybe I should put that lower case, like I do with the accursed religion?)
It cast the show in a different light. Are Americans capable of such conceptualisation? Of seeing their own corruption and portraying it, even parodying it, in a TV series? But recently I have gone off almost everything American on TV. It started with the putridness of the 'United States of Earth' of Futurama and the 'United States of Space' of Star Trek, and then boiled over into a re-ignition of vile at the Simpsons and South Park, but then Family Guy and American Dad for exactly the same reasons.
I want to watch animation and science fiction so much, but I am so sick of how Americans cannot make anything that does not force feed their own social paradigms down everybody else's throats. But it now even extends to the National Geographic and Discovery channels and their constant presentation of Xian crap disguised as 'history'. It makes me puke so much.
Gods, I want to live in a world without Americans or Xians so much!
Monday, December 21
Tuesday, November 24
Clusters
I am staying home today.
I am having a migraine. I get these rolling pains across my head that are technically called 'cluster migraines' according to a doctor that I paid $90 to for a consultation. He also told me to avoid caffeine (inc chocolate), and that they can be caused by stress, or the release of stress, and to take nurofen or aspirin, but always to eat something before taking either, and to take zantac or something similar as well to prevent the nausea that nurofen gives me.
That was it. That in an hour long examination. Prick was a 'headache specialist' and he just wanted to grab as much stats as he could for his own studies. Didn't benefit me any. As if knowing the 'name' makes any bloody dif.
Anyhow, here I am. Slept for nearly twelve hours straight, and will spend as much of today as possible sleeping. Have got a dull throb behind one eye right now, but in ten minutes it could turn into a sharp stabbing pain in the forehead, or a line of sharp pain across the top of my head. If I go to work then I will have to spend the day doped on nurofen and will end up feeling, and behaving, as if stuck in neutral.
It is weirdly affecting my typing and my spelling is atrocious. Good thing I spell check this - there is a spelling error in almost every sentence.
Have read an interesting article on the Newsweek site about the proposed health care reforms in the US. Specifically about how they will be burden the young with the cost of looking after the old. Given the large number of financial burdens the working tax-payers in the US (and Australia) already have the future for them looks grim. Interesting point about the cost of the aged being twice the US military budget. It is even more so in Australia.
The options are:
1) Stop paying taxes, i.e. minimise income;
2) Leave;
3) Rebel; or
4) Suffer.
I believe that it must be obvious to even the stupid that this cannot be a long-term solution. The working generation is being dissuaded from having children by the expense of living themselves; they are being punished for succeeding, so they see no reason to try harder and earn more; all of this means that there will be fewer tax payers to bear the burden precisely as the older generation burgeons. As the aged cohort grows and the working cohort shrinks the cost ratios exaggerate and the system passes the bounds of stability. It fails.
The old don't care. As long as they get looked after they care not that their children will inherit a bankrupt state and will not be able to enjoy the same privileged retirement.
This is an old argument, its coming was foreseen long ago, good to see that it has now hit the main steam media and might open up some public debate.
It is, of course, just one more symptom of the collapse of Western society; indeed, of our civilisation.
I was only recently talking to someone about the cycle that all societies go through, whereby they all seem to collapse after about a thousand years or so. Egypt's Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms were each about a thousand years long, and separated by interregnums of sixty or ninety years, i.e. two or three generations. Chinese history seems to me to also have such collapses of centralised authority into anarchy or regionalised kingdoms or periods of warlords. India has gone through cycles as well, but complicated by a series of racial invasions. The Mayan collapse was mainly due to overstressed agriculture, as was the second collapse of Babylon. The first collapse of Rome, who can forget? And of course, the piece de resistance, Byzantium!
Why is Byzantium so important? Simply because it is such a total mirror image of what is happening today. The tale by Priscus (who accompanied Maximus to the court of Attila and wrote of their journey) of the Roman businessman who came to his tent one evening because he wanted to talk to someone from his old home, and maybe for the chance to talk Greek for a bit, is one of my favourite stories, short as it is. The businessman had been hounded by bureaucracy and heavy taxes and so had left the Empire and gone to live with the Huns. He had taken a Hunnic wife and he was running a successful business - without government interference or high taxation. It is the exact image of so many successful Australian and American men leaving for the Orient to start new lives. It so encapsulates where we are right now, namely one or two generations from collapse - for how long after that did Byzantium survive?
Or so I thought until a recent conversation where I was questioned as to the speed of the collapse once it is initiated. The questioner pointed out the moral degradation of modern Western society (which, I might point out, is unfortunately infecting Eastern cultures) and its impact upon society. His point was that if this was so, then will not the collapse happen sooner than I anticipate? I had to agree with his logic. I had always thought that it would be my children or grand-children that would see this fearful day, but perhaps I will live to see it.
It had been my intention to 'prepare' for the event. That is why I used to have a four hectare place in the country, where I was growing an orchid, had a vegie garden, was water sufficient, was going to get myself energy sufficient. Of course all of that was lost in my separation. And since in this country the woman always gets seventy percent, that being 'equality', I had little chance to rebuild soon. So I decided to try other options; such as trying to live to enjoy life, to explore, to see the world, experience other cultures. All of which lead me to realise that life is more fun in some other places, so why not try to emigrate and work and live there?
But the great 'GFC' (as if there haven't been dozens of others, perhaps it should be called 'GFC 14'?) put a hole in that.
I have to believe that I will pull through, achieve something worth while. Acknowledging that the next few months will be touch and go. After that, though, things should get better and I should be in a much better place than ever before.
I have to believe this, otherwise I would be tempted to blow my brains out, for after all, why choose to continue to live if you do not believe that your future life will be worthwhile?
Morbid, you think. But we all choose to believe that we will be luckier than we have any logical reason to believe. The natural psychology of man is an unjustifiable optimism. Indeed, we probably term a more realistic view to be pessimistic. The Gods will favour us. Well, I kind of don't trust deities anymore.
Which, in my mind, brings me back to the initial point; one more straw in the bundle, when will the camel's back break? Ironic, but fitting, that it may happen during Obama's first term. Sadly, unlikely, I think that the economy has some more resilience before it finally snaps.
I am having a migraine. I get these rolling pains across my head that are technically called 'cluster migraines' according to a doctor that I paid $90 to for a consultation. He also told me to avoid caffeine (inc chocolate), and that they can be caused by stress, or the release of stress, and to take nurofen or aspirin, but always to eat something before taking either, and to take zantac or something similar as well to prevent the nausea that nurofen gives me.
That was it. That in an hour long examination. Prick was a 'headache specialist' and he just wanted to grab as much stats as he could for his own studies. Didn't benefit me any. As if knowing the 'name' makes any bloody dif.
Anyhow, here I am. Slept for nearly twelve hours straight, and will spend as much of today as possible sleeping. Have got a dull throb behind one eye right now, but in ten minutes it could turn into a sharp stabbing pain in the forehead, or a line of sharp pain across the top of my head. If I go to work then I will have to spend the day doped on nurofen and will end up feeling, and behaving, as if stuck in neutral.
It is weirdly affecting my typing and my spelling is atrocious. Good thing I spell check this - there is a spelling error in almost every sentence.
Have read an interesting article on the Newsweek site about the proposed health care reforms in the US. Specifically about how they will be burden the young with the cost of looking after the old. Given the large number of financial burdens the working tax-payers in the US (and Australia) already have the future for them looks grim. Interesting point about the cost of the aged being twice the US military budget. It is even more so in Australia.
The options are:
1) Stop paying taxes, i.e. minimise income;
2) Leave;
3) Rebel; or
4) Suffer.
I believe that it must be obvious to even the stupid that this cannot be a long-term solution. The working generation is being dissuaded from having children by the expense of living themselves; they are being punished for succeeding, so they see no reason to try harder and earn more; all of this means that there will be fewer tax payers to bear the burden precisely as the older generation burgeons. As the aged cohort grows and the working cohort shrinks the cost ratios exaggerate and the system passes the bounds of stability. It fails.
The old don't care. As long as they get looked after they care not that their children will inherit a bankrupt state and will not be able to enjoy the same privileged retirement.
This is an old argument, its coming was foreseen long ago, good to see that it has now hit the main steam media and might open up some public debate.
It is, of course, just one more symptom of the collapse of Western society; indeed, of our civilisation.
I was only recently talking to someone about the cycle that all societies go through, whereby they all seem to collapse after about a thousand years or so. Egypt's Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms were each about a thousand years long, and separated by interregnums of sixty or ninety years, i.e. two or three generations. Chinese history seems to me to also have such collapses of centralised authority into anarchy or regionalised kingdoms or periods of warlords. India has gone through cycles as well, but complicated by a series of racial invasions. The Mayan collapse was mainly due to overstressed agriculture, as was the second collapse of Babylon. The first collapse of Rome, who can forget? And of course, the piece de resistance, Byzantium!
Why is Byzantium so important? Simply because it is such a total mirror image of what is happening today. The tale by Priscus (who accompanied Maximus to the court of Attila and wrote of their journey) of the Roman businessman who came to his tent one evening because he wanted to talk to someone from his old home, and maybe for the chance to talk Greek for a bit, is one of my favourite stories, short as it is. The businessman had been hounded by bureaucracy and heavy taxes and so had left the Empire and gone to live with the Huns. He had taken a Hunnic wife and he was running a successful business - without government interference or high taxation. It is the exact image of so many successful Australian and American men leaving for the Orient to start new lives. It so encapsulates where we are right now, namely one or two generations from collapse - for how long after that did Byzantium survive?
Or so I thought until a recent conversation where I was questioned as to the speed of the collapse once it is initiated. The questioner pointed out the moral degradation of modern Western society (which, I might point out, is unfortunately infecting Eastern cultures) and its impact upon society. His point was that if this was so, then will not the collapse happen sooner than I anticipate? I had to agree with his logic. I had always thought that it would be my children or grand-children that would see this fearful day, but perhaps I will live to see it.
It had been my intention to 'prepare' for the event. That is why I used to have a four hectare place in the country, where I was growing an orchid, had a vegie garden, was water sufficient, was going to get myself energy sufficient. Of course all of that was lost in my separation. And since in this country the woman always gets seventy percent, that being 'equality', I had little chance to rebuild soon. So I decided to try other options; such as trying to live to enjoy life, to explore, to see the world, experience other cultures. All of which lead me to realise that life is more fun in some other places, so why not try to emigrate and work and live there?
But the great 'GFC' (as if there haven't been dozens of others, perhaps it should be called 'GFC 14'?) put a hole in that.
I have to believe that I will pull through, achieve something worth while. Acknowledging that the next few months will be touch and go. After that, though, things should get better and I should be in a much better place than ever before.
I have to believe this, otherwise I would be tempted to blow my brains out, for after all, why choose to continue to live if you do not believe that your future life will be worthwhile?
Morbid, you think. But we all choose to believe that we will be luckier than we have any logical reason to believe. The natural psychology of man is an unjustifiable optimism. Indeed, we probably term a more realistic view to be pessimistic. The Gods will favour us. Well, I kind of don't trust deities anymore.
Which, in my mind, brings me back to the initial point; one more straw in the bundle, when will the camel's back break? Ironic, but fitting, that it may happen during Obama's first term. Sadly, unlikely, I think that the economy has some more resilience before it finally snaps.
Wednesday, November 4
Handlebars
Okay, the first point has to be the sheer joy at the way the US elections are panning out at present with the people obviously waking up to how useless Obama is. Shame it is not a presidential and we have to suffer three more years of the fool. Interesting to see a fair number of 'Conservatives', a new party, unfortunately the US, like Britain, has a non-democratic voting system - hence how William Blythe (Bill Clinton to most) got elected when 60% of the country voted against him; had the US used any sort of actual democratic voting system, Australian, French, or Russian, then George Bush senior would have been re-elected.
My contract got extended, again. This week and then two weeks to backfill someone. The Monday after that is when the Health contract starts if we win it, and it is looking very good at this point. On that subject, turns out the RFP (Request for Proposals) was worded incorrectly and the workload will be twice the initial estimate. We did ask them to clarify the "three month project for each of two years, 130 person days total" and they said it was for the two years, but now they are saying it was meant to be for each year. Which means that it will be a full time job for both of us, and a good thing that we arranged the option to bring in a third as well.
Looking good. Yesterday I was getting very despondent, today it looks like one contract will slide into another, and then that could well slide straight into the next. I may not suffer from this GFC thing after all, well that is except for the bit about wasting most of a year trying to fit into Singapore's economy.
So far, so good.
Hmm, I am playing East India Company at the moment. Kind of boring, I got to locking the rest of Europe into the North Sea, cut off from their colonies in Africa and India, and I should have been winning, but instead I was going broke. So this time I am trying a bit more of a balancing act with the marine corps and actually taking and developing colonies.
I pretty well have given up on AI Wars, it was not as good as Sins of a Solar Empire. Even on the low settings I start with one star, the two AIs start with fleets in every star in the damned galaxy. With the medium settings on top of that they start invading my system before I have even had time to locate my damned ships! That has got to be a load of crap.
So mostly I haven't actually been playing much at all. Certainly not in the evenings during the week, as I normally would. Been working a bit later, and that has an impact as well.
I did some card readings at the end of the weekend. Something about the immediate future will be tough, beware of untrustworthy people, the medium term future will be tough, beware of untrustworthy people, but the long term outcome will be complete and fulfilling in a spiritual way. It didn't specifically say that I would marry six (or at least three) gorgeous teenagers and finally discover what sex can really be. Also didn't seem to be encouraging about the becoming-incredibly-rich plan. Just that I would be successful in mastering contrary energies. Or whatever, I can't recall it perfectly.
I got a call yesterday from AIM(SA) that the project management intensive for next week was cancelled due to too many withdrawals. Then a call today that it was back on and a promise of an email, which never came. I am not being very impressed.
Did my tax. Finally! I know, but when I phoned to get my NOA number the voice menu said that the personal returns window had been extended by a week, so I didn't fret. I had to call because the online package would not give it to me, so I had to call a person to answer the same questions but the person gave me my damned NOA. I should get over five thousand back. That was the first step in my stress load reducing - worst case; that could pay my rent over the December / January period, getting me through to the magical February where everyone predicts that the market will pick up. Now, of course, things a looking even a bit better than that and so I am putting on hold any plans to do a hard reset.
The warmer weather has good points and bad points.
The major good point is, of course, that the girlies are looking better as they dress less, and with so many Asians here now the skin content is greatly increased from what it was a few years ago.
The main bad point that is annoying me is that it means more people out partying Friday and Saturday nights, making noise to way after midnight and keeping me awake. Grouch that I am, this bothers me. If I can't be having fun then why should anyone else be allowed to?
Oh yeah, 'Handlebars'; I am growing a moustache for November - the raise awareness, and hopefully money, for men's health. As you know more men in Australia die from prostrate cancer than women die from breast cancer, and yet breast cancer research gets forty times more funding; more men die from testicular cancer than women die from cervical cancer, and yet cervical cancer gets more funding; more men die from either gender related illness or from preventable illnesses of any sort than do women, and yet women have their own health department, as do children, youths, aboriginals, and ethnics, but not men, not white, adult men. We do the majority of the work, we pay the majority of the taxes, and yet we are paying for everyone else's benefit. I think better than growing a moustache would be to be allowed to kill a few feminists, but we have to start somewhere.
My contract got extended, again. This week and then two weeks to backfill someone. The Monday after that is when the Health contract starts if we win it, and it is looking very good at this point. On that subject, turns out the RFP (Request for Proposals) was worded incorrectly and the workload will be twice the initial estimate. We did ask them to clarify the "three month project for each of two years, 130 person days total" and they said it was for the two years, but now they are saying it was meant to be for each year. Which means that it will be a full time job for both of us, and a good thing that we arranged the option to bring in a third as well.
Looking good. Yesterday I was getting very despondent, today it looks like one contract will slide into another, and then that could well slide straight into the next. I may not suffer from this GFC thing after all, well that is except for the bit about wasting most of a year trying to fit into Singapore's economy.
So far, so good.
Hmm, I am playing East India Company at the moment. Kind of boring, I got to locking the rest of Europe into the North Sea, cut off from their colonies in Africa and India, and I should have been winning, but instead I was going broke. So this time I am trying a bit more of a balancing act with the marine corps and actually taking and developing colonies.
I pretty well have given up on AI Wars, it was not as good as Sins of a Solar Empire. Even on the low settings I start with one star, the two AIs start with fleets in every star in the damned galaxy. With the medium settings on top of that they start invading my system before I have even had time to locate my damned ships! That has got to be a load of crap.
So mostly I haven't actually been playing much at all. Certainly not in the evenings during the week, as I normally would. Been working a bit later, and that has an impact as well.
I did some card readings at the end of the weekend. Something about the immediate future will be tough, beware of untrustworthy people, the medium term future will be tough, beware of untrustworthy people, but the long term outcome will be complete and fulfilling in a spiritual way. It didn't specifically say that I would marry six (or at least three) gorgeous teenagers and finally discover what sex can really be. Also didn't seem to be encouraging about the becoming-incredibly-rich plan. Just that I would be successful in mastering contrary energies. Or whatever, I can't recall it perfectly.
I got a call yesterday from AIM(SA) that the project management intensive for next week was cancelled due to too many withdrawals. Then a call today that it was back on and a promise of an email, which never came. I am not being very impressed.
Did my tax. Finally! I know, but when I phoned to get my NOA number the voice menu said that the personal returns window had been extended by a week, so I didn't fret. I had to call because the online package would not give it to me, so I had to call a person to answer the same questions but the person gave me my damned NOA. I should get over five thousand back. That was the first step in my stress load reducing - worst case; that could pay my rent over the December / January period, getting me through to the magical February where everyone predicts that the market will pick up. Now, of course, things a looking even a bit better than that and so I am putting on hold any plans to do a hard reset.
The warmer weather has good points and bad points.
The major good point is, of course, that the girlies are looking better as they dress less, and with so many Asians here now the skin content is greatly increased from what it was a few years ago.
The main bad point that is annoying me is that it means more people out partying Friday and Saturday nights, making noise to way after midnight and keeping me awake. Grouch that I am, this bothers me. If I can't be having fun then why should anyone else be allowed to?
Oh yeah, 'Handlebars'; I am growing a moustache for November - the raise awareness, and hopefully money, for men's health. As you know more men in Australia die from prostrate cancer than women die from breast cancer, and yet breast cancer research gets forty times more funding; more men die from testicular cancer than women die from cervical cancer, and yet cervical cancer gets more funding; more men die from either gender related illness or from preventable illnesses of any sort than do women, and yet women have their own health department, as do children, youths, aboriginals, and ethnics, but not men, not white, adult men. We do the majority of the work, we pay the majority of the taxes, and yet we are paying for everyone else's benefit. I think better than growing a moustache would be to be allowed to kill a few feminists, but we have to start somewhere.
Saturday, October 24
Divisional
Separating my rants from my status updates...
My contract ends next week. To be specific it ends after a certain number of hours, which equates to a set budget; and I will work that out on Monday and report it to the management of the government department I am with at the moment.
I have been offered a short contract of a couple of weeks to cover someone being concentrated on a project. In the absence of anything else I will take it, though it will be a thirty percent rate cut. There is a government tender that is looking good, but it is always hard to tell, you don't even know how many other tenders there are, but if it comes off then it should equate to thirty to thirty five days of work over the next few months. And then there are a couple of possibilities looming for February.
The point of all of this is that life is looking quite precarious at the moment.
I am tempted to regret having left Singapore; I am of a mind to think that I should have taken one of those half dozen jobs offered to me at four or four and a half K a month. At least to keep me going until I got myself something more normal.
Ironic. The cards were telling me to wait one more month but I told myself that I had run out of time and money, and yet returning to Adelaide and setting up cost a packet. Maybe I should have stayed; at least I would have been happier. Maybe it is another one of those times when whatever I do is wrong, that somehow I rationalise myself into doing the worst thing possible.
I figure that one reason I had trouble getting taken seriously in SG is that it is so anal about pieces of paper. Here I can get a thousand a day 'cos everyone in this city knows that I can do what I do, but in Singers no-one would know me from jack. (Apart from the fact that most of the agencies I tried there have offices that know me here.) I have a comfortable income, I like it, I have no desire to take such a huge step down.
Once before I reasoned that the lack of an accounting masters was holding my career back, and so I started one. But I dropped out 'cos the delivery style ticked me off, the same as I dropped out of the business admin qual 'cos the stupid remarks written on my papers my wet post-grad students that had never had a real job pissed me off. But now I am pretty sure that the lack of those letters after my name was one of my problems with SG. So I am doing a diploma in project management (since most of my work is project contracts) and I am planning on starting another accounting masters in the new year. I am hoping that if I get in on the great contract that I know is going down then I will be able to work three or four days a week and study two days (and maybe another evening) and complete the degree in one year. If the plan works then I might do the same to finish of the MBA the year after. And CPA Australia has made a mutual recognition arrangement with CPA Singapore.
So that should all make a difference for the next time I try to make the great escape.
I keep planning on blogging about girls and shorts and pantyhose (it has to do with the oriental girls setting fashion trends here), but tonight's not the night either.
My contract ends next week. To be specific it ends after a certain number of hours, which equates to a set budget; and I will work that out on Monday and report it to the management of the government department I am with at the moment.
I have been offered a short contract of a couple of weeks to cover someone being concentrated on a project. In the absence of anything else I will take it, though it will be a thirty percent rate cut. There is a government tender that is looking good, but it is always hard to tell, you don't even know how many other tenders there are, but if it comes off then it should equate to thirty to thirty five days of work over the next few months. And then there are a couple of possibilities looming for February.
The point of all of this is that life is looking quite precarious at the moment.
I am tempted to regret having left Singapore; I am of a mind to think that I should have taken one of those half dozen jobs offered to me at four or four and a half K a month. At least to keep me going until I got myself something more normal.
Ironic. The cards were telling me to wait one more month but I told myself that I had run out of time and money, and yet returning to Adelaide and setting up cost a packet. Maybe I should have stayed; at least I would have been happier. Maybe it is another one of those times when whatever I do is wrong, that somehow I rationalise myself into doing the worst thing possible.
I figure that one reason I had trouble getting taken seriously in SG is that it is so anal about pieces of paper. Here I can get a thousand a day 'cos everyone in this city knows that I can do what I do, but in Singers no-one would know me from jack. (Apart from the fact that most of the agencies I tried there have offices that know me here.) I have a comfortable income, I like it, I have no desire to take such a huge step down.
Once before I reasoned that the lack of an accounting masters was holding my career back, and so I started one. But I dropped out 'cos the delivery style ticked me off, the same as I dropped out of the business admin qual 'cos the stupid remarks written on my papers my wet post-grad students that had never had a real job pissed me off. But now I am pretty sure that the lack of those letters after my name was one of my problems with SG. So I am doing a diploma in project management (since most of my work is project contracts) and I am planning on starting another accounting masters in the new year. I am hoping that if I get in on the great contract that I know is going down then I will be able to work three or four days a week and study two days (and maybe another evening) and complete the degree in one year. If the plan works then I might do the same to finish of the MBA the year after. And CPA Australia has made a mutual recognition arrangement with CPA Singapore.
So that should all make a difference for the next time I try to make the great escape.
I keep planning on blogging about girls and shorts and pantyhose (it has to do with the oriental girls setting fashion trends here), but tonight's not the night either.
Carboniferous
Sometimes people annoy me soooo much!
I mean, just how stupid are the majority of people?
Just how ignorant is the average person?
People wank on about how humans are the 'intelligent', dominant life form on this planet, when the truth is that most humans are not intelligent beings, they are emotional beings.
And stupid.
And ignorant.
The thing that has been annoying me the most recently is the ever continuing wank about global warming. If any person cares to actually check the records, which of course most don't - they just repeat the gossip like so many parrots, they would be aware that for the last ten years the planet has been getting COLDER!
And it has been doing that whilst carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere has increased ever so slightly; from less than one hundredth of a percent to less than one hundredth of a percent.
Yes, it is true that in the period when this myth took off the world was getting warmer, and CO2 was increasing, and this continued for a little over ten years. But it is also true that for the twenty years before that CO2 rose and temperature decreased. And for the fifty years before that CO2 rose and temperature went down. And for the fifty years before that the temperature rose whilst CO2 was essentially flat.
One hundred years ago the world was warmer than it is now.
One thousand years ago the world was warmer than it is now.
Two thousand years ago the world was warmer than it is now.
Between each of those peaks the temperature dropped.
That's nature's cycle; the temperature goes up, the temperature goes down.
It has nothing to do with CO2; the supposed and much quoted link between CO2 and temperature is due to the CO2 levels and the pollen profiles and methane levels in deep arctic ice cores showing both going up and down 'together' over the millennia. But what the Al Gores of the world neglect to tell you is that the CO2 increases always follow the temperature increase by twenty to fifty years.
It is so easy to research this one.
Yet next to no one does.
How stupid are people?
I mean, just how stupid are the majority of people?
Just how ignorant is the average person?
People wank on about how humans are the 'intelligent', dominant life form on this planet, when the truth is that most humans are not intelligent beings, they are emotional beings.
And stupid.
And ignorant.
The thing that has been annoying me the most recently is the ever continuing wank about global warming. If any person cares to actually check the records, which of course most don't - they just repeat the gossip like so many parrots, they would be aware that for the last ten years the planet has been getting COLDER!
And it has been doing that whilst carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere has increased ever so slightly; from less than one hundredth of a percent to less than one hundredth of a percent.
Yes, it is true that in the period when this myth took off the world was getting warmer, and CO2 was increasing, and this continued for a little over ten years. But it is also true that for the twenty years before that CO2 rose and temperature decreased. And for the fifty years before that CO2 rose and temperature went down. And for the fifty years before that the temperature rose whilst CO2 was essentially flat.
One hundred years ago the world was warmer than it is now.
One thousand years ago the world was warmer than it is now.
Two thousand years ago the world was warmer than it is now.
Between each of those peaks the temperature dropped.
That's nature's cycle; the temperature goes up, the temperature goes down.
It has nothing to do with CO2; the supposed and much quoted link between CO2 and temperature is due to the CO2 levels and the pollen profiles and methane levels in deep arctic ice cores showing both going up and down 'together' over the millennia. But what the Al Gores of the world neglect to tell you is that the CO2 increases always follow the temperature increase by twenty to fifty years.
It is so easy to research this one.
Yet next to no one does.
How stupid are people?
Sunday, October 11
Meaningless Award
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to some very dubious persons in the past; two ex-terrorists that became presidents, a woman who preached pro-life to poor people but pro-abortion to rich people, a musician that raised money to buy food that mostly didn't get delivered to the starving; and now a president that has not yet achieved anything.
It was bad enough that he was elected without having even spent four year in parliament, had written a book stating that he hated most Americans (the White ones), and has never had a real job in his life - he hasn't run a company or any type of organisation. What next? Award him a Grammy even though he hasn't released an album? An Oscar?
This award is now so cheapened that it is meaningless.
It was bad enough that he was elected without having even spent four year in parliament, had written a book stating that he hated most Americans (the White ones), and has never had a real job in his life - he hasn't run a company or any type of organisation. What next? Award him a Grammy even though he hasn't released an album? An Oscar?
This award is now so cheapened that it is meaningless.
Tuesday, October 6
Tick, Tock
Today I am forty seven.
Yahhh (in a flat, monotonal voice)
A busy weekend 'cos there are a number of birthdays in the family and a few of very close friends of the family. So yesterday it was lunch with my dad and his wife, and then straight to dinner for my nephew. And Sunday friends came around to give me my pressy early and then I went shopping for the present for yesterdays lunch. Saturday was mostly sleeping, of course. Aren't all Saturdays? Fortunately Australia has a long weekend just for this, but I took today off work as well.
So, 47 and feeling as if my life so far has been meaningless and empty.
I really don't know why I do this, why keep trying to make something of life when so many attempts have failed? Some forlorn dream of finding meaning, of finding love that actually lasts, that doesn't end in betrayal, of one day having children, or leaving something that will survive me. Why do we do this? Because if we don't then we have nothing?
I don't know, my brother seems quite happy just rolling along, enjoying the drugs and alcohol, not seeking anything deeper, not leaving children. I have friends that are okay with that, as long as they get some drugs, have some fun, get some sex, everything else is bearable.
But I really want more from life. If I had the good fortune to have been born into, or the sense when I was much younger to have moved to, a society where such plans were more the norm, then I would probably have been happy for most of my life. But chance, misfortune, laziness or plain stupidity, have dictated otherwise.
So, I am 47, I still dream to build a happy, fulfilling life, I am probably misguided in that, I acknowledge this.
Yahhh (in a flat, monotonal voice)
A busy weekend 'cos there are a number of birthdays in the family and a few of very close friends of the family. So yesterday it was lunch with my dad and his wife, and then straight to dinner for my nephew. And Sunday friends came around to give me my pressy early and then I went shopping for the present for yesterdays lunch. Saturday was mostly sleeping, of course. Aren't all Saturdays? Fortunately Australia has a long weekend just for this, but I took today off work as well.
So, 47 and feeling as if my life so far has been meaningless and empty.
I really don't know why I do this, why keep trying to make something of life when so many attempts have failed? Some forlorn dream of finding meaning, of finding love that actually lasts, that doesn't end in betrayal, of one day having children, or leaving something that will survive me. Why do we do this? Because if we don't then we have nothing?
I don't know, my brother seems quite happy just rolling along, enjoying the drugs and alcohol, not seeking anything deeper, not leaving children. I have friends that are okay with that, as long as they get some drugs, have some fun, get some sex, everything else is bearable.
But I really want more from life. If I had the good fortune to have been born into, or the sense when I was much younger to have moved to, a society where such plans were more the norm, then I would probably have been happy for most of my life. But chance, misfortune, laziness or plain stupidity, have dictated otherwise.
So, I am 47, I still dream to build a happy, fulfilling life, I am probably misguided in that, I acknowledge this.
Wednesday, September 30
What? Hey Look!
A FOUR post day!
Hahahahaha, no really, reading through my last dozen posts I realised that I have talked games for a while. So I should let you know that I am playing Stalker; Clear Sky again. And I have a friend over at present and he has been playing it as well. His own disc, when he gets the hang of it we will LAN.
I don't want to play the storyline this time, only using it when needed to unlock map sections, I will not be entering the tunnel over the bridge to Lamansk, I intend to get involved in the faction war. I want to join Freedom and wipe out Duty, and then join the Stalker faction and wipe out Freedom. Unfortunately I have discovered that every time I wipe out the Bandit base they just repopulate from the back of the warehouse, so I am expecting Duty and Freedom to do the same. Although, in contradistinction, I have learnt from previous plays that you can only wipe out the army base at the start of Cordon about four times before they stop repopulating it (by running up the road from off-map); so maybe that will happen with Duty?
Why do I clean out the army base? 'Cos it is a great source of good guns, which I sell for rubbles to upgrade my weapons and suit.
No, I won't force you to suffer a five-post day just for the fun of it :)
Hahahahaha, no really, reading through my last dozen posts I realised that I have talked games for a while. So I should let you know that I am playing Stalker; Clear Sky again. And I have a friend over at present and he has been playing it as well. His own disc, when he gets the hang of it we will LAN.
I don't want to play the storyline this time, only using it when needed to unlock map sections, I will not be entering the tunnel over the bridge to Lamansk, I intend to get involved in the faction war. I want to join Freedom and wipe out Duty, and then join the Stalker faction and wipe out Freedom. Unfortunately I have discovered that every time I wipe out the Bandit base they just repopulate from the back of the warehouse, so I am expecting Duty and Freedom to do the same. Although, in contradistinction, I have learnt from previous plays that you can only wipe out the army base at the start of Cordon about four times before they stop repopulating it (by running up the road from off-map); so maybe that will happen with Duty?
Why do I clean out the army base? 'Cos it is a great source of good guns, which I sell for rubbles to upgrade my weapons and suit.
No, I won't force you to suffer a five-post day just for the fun of it :)
Ah hah...
Okay, so that qualifies as a 'Rant'. And it was kind of disorganised to boot.
Also I updated the little blurb on me on the side, and now it kind of runs a bit too long I think, but what the hey. To be honest, one of the pics published of me, whilst really good, was not actually of me, rather it was of the South Australian DPP. He was making a lot of noise and getting a lot of media space, but he, himself, was keeping out of camera shot. Anyhow, I was business analyst for the Supreme and District Courts of South Australia at the time and a new judge was being sworn in and consequently we were both at the event. My seat was along the side, facing inwards, and just a tiny bit ahead of the DPP's, and on the other wall opposite were the cameras. So page three of the paper the next morning shows a big pic of the DPP, half the page, and in the background, me. And they used a pic taken when I was looking at the camera too! So cool. My mum cut that pic out and stuck it on her fridge for months. Why? You may ask, there was a perfectly good pic of me from the Australian's IT section from when I launched an encryption software company.
So, anyhow, that was a rant, and the blurb is now too long but so what? I had to qualify what I had said about the media, and I had to add a bit about coming back to Oz, even though it is my dream/hope to return to Singers on a permanent basis at some time.
Also I updated the little blurb on me on the side, and now it kind of runs a bit too long I think, but what the hey. To be honest, one of the pics published of me, whilst really good, was not actually of me, rather it was of the South Australian DPP. He was making a lot of noise and getting a lot of media space, but he, himself, was keeping out of camera shot. Anyhow, I was business analyst for the Supreme and District Courts of South Australia at the time and a new judge was being sworn in and consequently we were both at the event. My seat was along the side, facing inwards, and just a tiny bit ahead of the DPP's, and on the other wall opposite were the cameras. So page three of the paper the next morning shows a big pic of the DPP, half the page, and in the background, me. And they used a pic taken when I was looking at the camera too! So cool. My mum cut that pic out and stuck it on her fridge for months. Why? You may ask, there was a perfectly good pic of me from the Australian's IT section from when I launched an encryption software company.
So, anyhow, that was a rant, and the blurb is now too long but so what? I had to qualify what I had said about the media, and I had to add a bit about coming back to Oz, even though it is my dream/hope to return to Singers on a permanent basis at some time.
I Hate Women
I guess I should be more specific; I hate Feminist Anglo Bitches.
Our wonderful legal system here in Australia has come up with a new one; a woman is not responsible for her actions when she is drunk. If a man has sex with a drunken woman she can charge him with rape, even if she consented whilst drunk, even if both of them were drunk.
Is she responsible if she was driving? Or is she only not held responsible if she was drunken driving and the victim was a man?
If women are not equally responsible for their actions then why do we pretend to treat them equally at all? They want their cake, and our cake as well, AND they still want US to pay the bill. There are times that I wish I could simultaneously vomit on every woman on Earth.
It's kind of like how sluts think that they can hang out with drunken footballers and not be expected to provide sex. Once upon a time they would just be called stupid, now they scream and the law listens. Women are just not responsible; they do not take responsibility for their own actions. If you choose to jump off a cliff then you cannot blame anyone else for the consequences.
This has all gone so far, but believe me there is still room for it to keep going, but one day Western men will say "enough" and white bitches will get a dose of reality. If you choose to behave as a slut then don't be surprised that no-one respects you.
So, on top of the fact that more than half of Australian wives are unfaithful to their husbands after three years of marriage, and that one third of children born in marriages in Australia were not fathered by their mothers husband, and that when most Australian marriages end in separation after three years (I wonder why?) the bitch routinely gets seventy percent, and that in Adelaide a man can be charged with assault for looking at a woman (not saying anything, not touching, not even pulling any facial expressions, just looking), a man can now be charged with rape even if the bitch consented, and consented the whole way through, but regretted her actions the next day.
And people ask me why I have both given up on Australia and given up on Australian women.
Our wonderful legal system here in Australia has come up with a new one; a woman is not responsible for her actions when she is drunk. If a man has sex with a drunken woman she can charge him with rape, even if she consented whilst drunk, even if both of them were drunk.
Is she responsible if she was driving? Or is she only not held responsible if she was drunken driving and the victim was a man?
If women are not equally responsible for their actions then why do we pretend to treat them equally at all? They want their cake, and our cake as well, AND they still want US to pay the bill. There are times that I wish I could simultaneously vomit on every woman on Earth.
It's kind of like how sluts think that they can hang out with drunken footballers and not be expected to provide sex. Once upon a time they would just be called stupid, now they scream and the law listens. Women are just not responsible; they do not take responsibility for their own actions. If you choose to jump off a cliff then you cannot blame anyone else for the consequences.
This has all gone so far, but believe me there is still room for it to keep going, but one day Western men will say "enough" and white bitches will get a dose of reality. If you choose to behave as a slut then don't be surprised that no-one respects you.
So, on top of the fact that more than half of Australian wives are unfaithful to their husbands after three years of marriage, and that one third of children born in marriages in Australia were not fathered by their mothers husband, and that when most Australian marriages end in separation after three years (I wonder why?) the bitch routinely gets seventy percent, and that in Adelaide a man can be charged with assault for looking at a woman (not saying anything, not touching, not even pulling any facial expressions, just looking), a man can now be charged with rape even if the bitch consented, and consented the whole way through, but regretted her actions the next day.
And people ask me why I have both given up on Australia and given up on Australian women.
Monday, September 28
Cough, Cough
So, this guy at work was on leave for two weeks then comes back to work for one week and then calls in and we are told will be ill all week and has been diagnosed with whooping cough and will have been contagious for the week he was back at work.
On the good side I don't think I saw or heard him cough at all, a fact that makes me wonder if he's laying it straight.
On the other hand there was this woman that works closely with him that was coughing her head off for half the day - and not going home, not wearing a mask, not ...
How can people be so totally self-centred, so convinced that their own needs and wants are all that matters, and that their impacts upon others are totally unimportant in comparison?
In Asia she would have been asked to go home. If she had been coughing like that on the streets without a mask the cops would arrested her for her social irresponsibility. But in our Western society the rights of the individual outweigh the good of society. Well, maybe not, maybe I am overstating it a bit, but that's how it should be. At least in my head.
Anyhow, a couple of times today I have had a really scratchy cough...
Over the last couple of weeks I have really bulked up, for some reason I have felt totally starving and eaten twice as much for each meal. (Given the loss of appetite is a symptom of whooping cough I am counting myself pretty safe there.) My tum has bulged and tightened and breathing was getting hard. Frightening. So today I realised that this was going to take some serious will power, something that I have never felt the need before with food, and have made sure that I have kept to the three meals and kept them small and gone for a two hour walk this evening. It was meant to be a run, I have no problem walking; day long hikes, up mountains, down dale, but I know that just walking, even brisk and long, is not going to be enough, running is going to be necessary. But a ten km run straight off the bat is too much.
So, that's the plan. I should get around to joining a gym at some point as well. I have a really great gym set, but I just wasn't using it, so I gave it to my sister. But when I pay gym membership I go. Financial incentive, works for me.
I had this experience once; I was getting a little on the fat side, my suits were getting tight around the middle. So I joined a gym, worked out three or four times a week for half to three quarters of an hour. Lost the weight, my suits fitted in the middle - but they were tight around the shoulders!
Can't win sometimes, have to buy new suits either way.
Had a friend over for the weekend just gone. Hadn't heard from him for over a month, turns out his phone had died and he had lost all his numbers. Also turned out that he was working that day just south of the CBD, and he lives waayyy north. I, of course, am living in the CBD, so I told him he should visit on his way home, he stayed two nights. So I have lent him my spare swipe card and key so he can let himself in since he does night shifts mostly and has two shifts south and two shifts north. He can crash for the night between his two south-end shifts. He will get in after I have gone to bed and won't wake until I have gone to work, so I probably won't see him, but if they happen at the end of the week like they did last week then he will probably stay the weekend as well.
He kind of went crazy with my cable. My sister did the same thing last time she was here and discovered that I had cable. And then he maxed out my broadband download limit updating games. I guess it had to be done, but whilst Steam was updating and installing he wasn't able to play Defence Grid, which is on my Steam account, so I think he should have prioritised.
Meanwhile a new young blonde has started at work. She is spending time with all the people at the bottom of the ladder, getting things explained to her. It will probably be a while before she speaks with those of us at the top of the ladder, how sad. On the other hand, there is this brunette, brown-eyed, cute for an Anglo (but still an Anglo, remember) that has been interacting with me a lot lately. I wanted a good excuse to do some interacting with her, but she is now sitting herself on my desk and smiling. Someone told me she had a boyfriend, or a fiancé, and I have a thing against trespassing, in theory. We shall see, maybe she is just flirting, and you know that I don't really want anything more from an Anglo, after all, it would only lead to trouble, that's why I gave up on them. Well, probably on white women altogether. Anglo, Western Euro, Eastern Euro, all trouble, all crazy. But then, maybe there is just no such thing as a sane woman?
It's half past ten, I have done a two hour brisk walk (interspersed with runs), eaten half a meal, and my eyes are closing. So goodnight all.
Oh, yeah, late update. I was just reading through my last few posts and realise a few threads were still hanging. Most importantly, my contract got extended to the end of October. I feel good about one of the private tenders I am in on, and that would start in November. So things are not too dire yet. And yeah, running along the river park tonight kind of reminded me of Singapore, lots of Asians - but then Australia is full of them now - too cold for Singers, I know, but still, it almost had that feel to it. I felt homesick.
On the good side I don't think I saw or heard him cough at all, a fact that makes me wonder if he's laying it straight.
On the other hand there was this woman that works closely with him that was coughing her head off for half the day - and not going home, not wearing a mask, not ...
How can people be so totally self-centred, so convinced that their own needs and wants are all that matters, and that their impacts upon others are totally unimportant in comparison?
In Asia she would have been asked to go home. If she had been coughing like that on the streets without a mask the cops would arrested her for her social irresponsibility. But in our Western society the rights of the individual outweigh the good of society. Well, maybe not, maybe I am overstating it a bit, but that's how it should be. At least in my head.
Anyhow, a couple of times today I have had a really scratchy cough...
Over the last couple of weeks I have really bulked up, for some reason I have felt totally starving and eaten twice as much for each meal. (Given the loss of appetite is a symptom of whooping cough I am counting myself pretty safe there.) My tum has bulged and tightened and breathing was getting hard. Frightening. So today I realised that this was going to take some serious will power, something that I have never felt the need before with food, and have made sure that I have kept to the three meals and kept them small and gone for a two hour walk this evening. It was meant to be a run, I have no problem walking; day long hikes, up mountains, down dale, but I know that just walking, even brisk and long, is not going to be enough, running is going to be necessary. But a ten km run straight off the bat is too much.
So, that's the plan. I should get around to joining a gym at some point as well. I have a really great gym set, but I just wasn't using it, so I gave it to my sister. But when I pay gym membership I go. Financial incentive, works for me.
I had this experience once; I was getting a little on the fat side, my suits were getting tight around the middle. So I joined a gym, worked out three or four times a week for half to three quarters of an hour. Lost the weight, my suits fitted in the middle - but they were tight around the shoulders!
Can't win sometimes, have to buy new suits either way.
Had a friend over for the weekend just gone. Hadn't heard from him for over a month, turns out his phone had died and he had lost all his numbers. Also turned out that he was working that day just south of the CBD, and he lives waayyy north. I, of course, am living in the CBD, so I told him he should visit on his way home, he stayed two nights. So I have lent him my spare swipe card and key so he can let himself in since he does night shifts mostly and has two shifts south and two shifts north. He can crash for the night between his two south-end shifts. He will get in after I have gone to bed and won't wake until I have gone to work, so I probably won't see him, but if they happen at the end of the week like they did last week then he will probably stay the weekend as well.
He kind of went crazy with my cable. My sister did the same thing last time she was here and discovered that I had cable. And then he maxed out my broadband download limit updating games. I guess it had to be done, but whilst Steam was updating and installing he wasn't able to play Defence Grid, which is on my Steam account, so I think he should have prioritised.
Meanwhile a new young blonde has started at work. She is spending time with all the people at the bottom of the ladder, getting things explained to her. It will probably be a while before she speaks with those of us at the top of the ladder, how sad. On the other hand, there is this brunette, brown-eyed, cute for an Anglo (but still an Anglo, remember) that has been interacting with me a lot lately. I wanted a good excuse to do some interacting with her, but she is now sitting herself on my desk and smiling. Someone told me she had a boyfriend, or a fiancé, and I have a thing against trespassing, in theory. We shall see, maybe she is just flirting, and you know that I don't really want anything more from an Anglo, after all, it would only lead to trouble, that's why I gave up on them. Well, probably on white women altogether. Anglo, Western Euro, Eastern Euro, all trouble, all crazy. But then, maybe there is just no such thing as a sane woman?
It's half past ten, I have done a two hour brisk walk (interspersed with runs), eaten half a meal, and my eyes are closing. So goodnight all.
Oh, yeah, late update. I was just reading through my last few posts and realise a few threads were still hanging. Most importantly, my contract got extended to the end of October. I feel good about one of the private tenders I am in on, and that would start in November. So things are not too dire yet. And yeah, running along the river park tonight kind of reminded me of Singapore, lots of Asians - but then Australia is full of them now - too cold for Singers, I know, but still, it almost had that feel to it. I felt homesick.
Monday, September 21
Peanut Butter
No it is not an allusion to groundnuts instead of peanuts being in the shops in Singers. It was 'cos I am watching the peanut conspiracy episode of American Dad.
Several people I know in Singers are getting elevator upgrades in their HDB blocks. Contrary to what I inferred from what I had previously read the bulk of the expense is being passed to the residents. For the people I know these range up to tens of thousands for PRs and more than ten thousand for citizens. For some of my friends it is nowhere near so much, but still more than ten thousand for PRs and thousands for citizens.
Now, most of the people I know in SG are Chinese Malaysian and PRs, their life plan being to live and work in Singapore and then retire back to Malaysia in their old age. But now under this financial pressure I have seen some take citizenship. It raises interesting questions. I always had difficulty with the idea of living in a country for over twenty years without taking citizenship, but that is because of my personal viewpoints. For me, my Australian citizenship means little to me, I am quite open about my desire to leave permanently. And as, what Singapore classes as a strategically desired skill set, I have the option of taking PR after only two years of residency, and then citizenship after two years of PR.
But what happens after the lift upgrade? Do they revoke their Singaporean citizenship and retake their Malaysian citizenship? Do they keep both? I know that the Singaporean constitution does not allow for dual citizenship, but such laws can only apply within a nation, a country may not acknowledge another nations claims of membership, but once you cross the bridge do you become a Malaysian citizenship again? Does Malaysian acknowledge your MY citizenship and deny your SG citizenship? As Australians we used to have a similar conundrum with dual Australian/US or Australian/UK citizenship. Australia changed its laws, but Singapores rule is set in the constitution.
And so to the subject I was going to write about a few days ago but was too tired; the Japanese election. What I want to know is just how much will change, or will it be a mere cosmetic alteration? I was raised with a solid programming of all things Japanese are unmitigated evil, but I have grown beyond that on my own. For example; Australians often say quite bad things about Japanese environmental policy, after all they murder dolphins and whales, and you need to understand - to Europeans that is murder, before Christianity it had the same death penalty as murdering another person. Asians have difficulty understanding this. But look at the bigger picture; 78% of Japans tree cover still stands, less than 2% of Australias trees are still here; Australia pumps millions of tons of pollution into our rivers, Japan spent decades cleaning up bays that were polluted by early mercantilism. We declare some species endangered and protected, but then destroy the environment that is critical to its survival, whereas in Japan they have declared whole valleys and their river systems untouchable to protect the giant salamander (and it is GIANT, two and a half metres long!). So who really has the better record?
But criminal organisations are allowed to have shop fronts in Japan, they appear to be allowed to engage in slave trading without any interference from government. Boys in colleges set up rape clubs. I could go on and on and on. I want to know if any of this will change. Will the new Japanese government actually outlaw criminal organisations? Because until they do I just cannot accept them as a civilised nation. I know that it is a terrible slight for most of the population, but it is the choice of the government, they can change this.
In a way it is like the water issue in Australia.
The government claims that we have a water crisis and yet they still permit people to drain our rivers to farm cotton and rice in deserts. If such things are permitted then they cannot truly believe that we do really have a crisis.
Ask yourself what was going through the minds of the Christmas Islanders that cut down the last tree to move their big head statues. With the loss of their tree cover they suffered terrible erosion and a huge drop in their farming output and they starved so much that they turned to cannibalism and most of their population vanished. To me that is where Australia is with its 'water crisis'. If it is real then stop farming cotton in the desert. I can't stand such two-facedness (another new word).
My Oriental neighbours are holding a rodeo in their apartment apparently, for the last few days it happens every day from 6:30 or 7:00 pm and goes for an hour or two, but it is pissing me off too much and is bringing todays blogging session to an end.
Several people I know in Singers are getting elevator upgrades in their HDB blocks. Contrary to what I inferred from what I had previously read the bulk of the expense is being passed to the residents. For the people I know these range up to tens of thousands for PRs and more than ten thousand for citizens. For some of my friends it is nowhere near so much, but still more than ten thousand for PRs and thousands for citizens.
Now, most of the people I know in SG are Chinese Malaysian and PRs, their life plan being to live and work in Singapore and then retire back to Malaysia in their old age. But now under this financial pressure I have seen some take citizenship. It raises interesting questions. I always had difficulty with the idea of living in a country for over twenty years without taking citizenship, but that is because of my personal viewpoints. For me, my Australian citizenship means little to me, I am quite open about my desire to leave permanently. And as, what Singapore classes as a strategically desired skill set, I have the option of taking PR after only two years of residency, and then citizenship after two years of PR.
But what happens after the lift upgrade? Do they revoke their Singaporean citizenship and retake their Malaysian citizenship? Do they keep both? I know that the Singaporean constitution does not allow for dual citizenship, but such laws can only apply within a nation, a country may not acknowledge another nations claims of membership, but once you cross the bridge do you become a Malaysian citizenship again? Does Malaysian acknowledge your MY citizenship and deny your SG citizenship? As Australians we used to have a similar conundrum with dual Australian/US or Australian/UK citizenship. Australia changed its laws, but Singapores rule is set in the constitution.
And so to the subject I was going to write about a few days ago but was too tired; the Japanese election. What I want to know is just how much will change, or will it be a mere cosmetic alteration? I was raised with a solid programming of all things Japanese are unmitigated evil, but I have grown beyond that on my own. For example; Australians often say quite bad things about Japanese environmental policy, after all they murder dolphins and whales, and you need to understand - to Europeans that is murder, before Christianity it had the same death penalty as murdering another person. Asians have difficulty understanding this. But look at the bigger picture; 78% of Japans tree cover still stands, less than 2% of Australias trees are still here; Australia pumps millions of tons of pollution into our rivers, Japan spent decades cleaning up bays that were polluted by early mercantilism. We declare some species endangered and protected, but then destroy the environment that is critical to its survival, whereas in Japan they have declared whole valleys and their river systems untouchable to protect the giant salamander (and it is GIANT, two and a half metres long!). So who really has the better record?
But criminal organisations are allowed to have shop fronts in Japan, they appear to be allowed to engage in slave trading without any interference from government. Boys in colleges set up rape clubs. I could go on and on and on. I want to know if any of this will change. Will the new Japanese government actually outlaw criminal organisations? Because until they do I just cannot accept them as a civilised nation. I know that it is a terrible slight for most of the population, but it is the choice of the government, they can change this.
In a way it is like the water issue in Australia.
The government claims that we have a water crisis and yet they still permit people to drain our rivers to farm cotton and rice in deserts. If such things are permitted then they cannot truly believe that we do really have a crisis.
Ask yourself what was going through the minds of the Christmas Islanders that cut down the last tree to move their big head statues. With the loss of their tree cover they suffered terrible erosion and a huge drop in their farming output and they starved so much that they turned to cannibalism and most of their population vanished. To me that is where Australia is with its 'water crisis'. If it is real then stop farming cotton in the desert. I can't stand such two-facedness (another new word).
My Oriental neighbours are holding a rodeo in their apartment apparently, for the last few days it happens every day from 6:30 or 7:00 pm and goes for an hour or two, but it is pissing me off too much and is bringing todays blogging session to an end.
Wednesday, September 16
Overlay
Yes, two weeks without a post, then two in one evening. I wanted to let the last one stand alone, and not to complicate it by changing subject, as this one will probably do a few times.
My google analytics map overlay is quite interesting.
I can easily understand that most of the visitors to this blog come from Singapore, no surprise there. The next biggest source, at a little less than half the number of Singaporeans, is the US, and that is not really a surprise either simply because there are so many of them in the one country. Australia at number three and just a bit less than the US is also not a surprise. But the next, with only a bit fewer than Australia, is routinely Brazil - now that I, and I suspect you, would not have imagined. Well, it has been Brazil at number four for a few months now.
I am playing Rome Total War again, without the Total Realism mod and without using cheat codes. I was recently playing Evil Genius via Steam, yeah, I have the game discs somewhere but couldn't find them - turns out my nephew has them - and Steam was selling it for only US$10, so why not? Anyhow, I got bored with the constant overload of enemy super agents when I moved to the second island. I just wasn't getting the chance to build the base up. You would think that having moved islands you should be able to build the second evil lair in piece, the forces of justice (huh!) would/should imagine you out of the game. I tried hacking the save files to reduce my notoriety score, even to kill off the super agents, and I tried the unofficial patch so I could put gun turrets inside the base (have them covering the cells I have the super agents in so all five of them are pretty well out of consideration), but the non-stop avalanche of soldiers and veterans just got boring.
I have started reading a book about gamers, specifically how some US management consultants think the computer/console gaming generation will impact business culture. I find it fascinating. The bastards classified me as a baby boomer. My parents are baby boomers, so how can I be???? I have noticed that every time I read something they are extending the baby boom forward and cutting generation X back, those of us who were once one, are now called the other. Anyhow, I am gen X, it is not up for debate, I was gen X ten years before gen X existed. I am a gamer, this book assumes that people my age are the parents of gamers, but I am a gamer, my friends are gamers, one of my friends mothers is a gamer, so eat that. (As in, she is a little old grey haired lady.) My friends and I were into computers when they first came out, before the Microsoft/Intel combination changed the landscape. Blah, blah, blah, except to add that when my father (who was head of the school of mathematics at one of the unis here) had to baby sit me I was plonked in the unis mainframe console room and the post-grad students would log me in to play Star Trek. Space was a ten by ten grid, stars were asterisks, Klingons were 'K's and Romulans were 'R's and I was the 'E' - yeah, you couldn't play the good guys. Probably the entire multi-storey computer had less power than a wrist watch does now.
Anyhow, all that is waffle, this book was written to help generation history understand generation future, and finding myself amongst the latter I find that in a perverse way it has helped me to understand flat-scans in ways that I never thought before. How ironic.
But, yeah, all of these boomers and hippies and drugged out drop-outs that thought they were the future, and all they ended up becoming was the problem. Our grandparents and their parent built a great world, and our parents just coasted on a raft of bubbles, inventing things like welfare states and tax-funded pensions to ensure that everybody else paid for them, and it is left up to my generation to fix it all. I consider that my brother, who is only two years older than I am, to firmly be in that dead generation, that locust generation, that is the way his mind works. Whereas for me, by the time the rest of the world got into the X-Files I had been there, done that, and moved on. But now I find that I can talk with people twenty years younger than me much more easily than I can talk to people ten years older than me. I talk with my nephew and his friends and they get it, I talk with people at work supposedly in my age cohort and they don't get it, and I can't understand how their minds work.
There was going to be something else about something in the news recently, but I can't be bothered right now, and quite frankly, I can't remember what it was...
My google analytics map overlay is quite interesting.
I can easily understand that most of the visitors to this blog come from Singapore, no surprise there. The next biggest source, at a little less than half the number of Singaporeans, is the US, and that is not really a surprise either simply because there are so many of them in the one country. Australia at number three and just a bit less than the US is also not a surprise. But the next, with only a bit fewer than Australia, is routinely Brazil - now that I, and I suspect you, would not have imagined. Well, it has been Brazil at number four for a few months now.
I am playing Rome Total War again, without the Total Realism mod and without using cheat codes. I was recently playing Evil Genius via Steam, yeah, I have the game discs somewhere but couldn't find them - turns out my nephew has them - and Steam was selling it for only US$10, so why not? Anyhow, I got bored with the constant overload of enemy super agents when I moved to the second island. I just wasn't getting the chance to build the base up. You would think that having moved islands you should be able to build the second evil lair in piece, the forces of justice (huh!) would/should imagine you out of the game. I tried hacking the save files to reduce my notoriety score, even to kill off the super agents, and I tried the unofficial patch so I could put gun turrets inside the base (have them covering the cells I have the super agents in so all five of them are pretty well out of consideration), but the non-stop avalanche of soldiers and veterans just got boring.
I have started reading a book about gamers, specifically how some US management consultants think the computer/console gaming generation will impact business culture. I find it fascinating. The bastards classified me as a baby boomer. My parents are baby boomers, so how can I be???? I have noticed that every time I read something they are extending the baby boom forward and cutting generation X back, those of us who were once one, are now called the other. Anyhow, I am gen X, it is not up for debate, I was gen X ten years before gen X existed. I am a gamer, this book assumes that people my age are the parents of gamers, but I am a gamer, my friends are gamers, one of my friends mothers is a gamer, so eat that. (As in, she is a little old grey haired lady.) My friends and I were into computers when they first came out, before the Microsoft/Intel combination changed the landscape. Blah, blah, blah, except to add that when my father (who was head of the school of mathematics at one of the unis here) had to baby sit me I was plonked in the unis mainframe console room and the post-grad students would log me in to play Star Trek. Space was a ten by ten grid, stars were asterisks, Klingons were 'K's and Romulans were 'R's and I was the 'E' - yeah, you couldn't play the good guys. Probably the entire multi-storey computer had less power than a wrist watch does now.
Anyhow, all that is waffle, this book was written to help generation history understand generation future, and finding myself amongst the latter I find that in a perverse way it has helped me to understand flat-scans in ways that I never thought before. How ironic.
But, yeah, all of these boomers and hippies and drugged out drop-outs that thought they were the future, and all they ended up becoming was the problem. Our grandparents and their parent built a great world, and our parents just coasted on a raft of bubbles, inventing things like welfare states and tax-funded pensions to ensure that everybody else paid for them, and it is left up to my generation to fix it all. I consider that my brother, who is only two years older than I am, to firmly be in that dead generation, that locust generation, that is the way his mind works. Whereas for me, by the time the rest of the world got into the X-Files I had been there, done that, and moved on. But now I find that I can talk with people twenty years younger than me much more easily than I can talk to people ten years older than me. I talk with my nephew and his friends and they get it, I talk with people at work supposedly in my age cohort and they don't get it, and I can't understand how their minds work.
There was going to be something else about something in the news recently, but I can't be bothered right now, and quite frankly, I can't remember what it was...
The Red Queens Race
Yeah, notice how I dropped the non-possessive?
Lewis Carroll, hmmm, let's not go there.
Point is that I used to get somewhere between 30% and 50% more each year, but right now I am earning the same as I got last year. So a lot of running to stay in the same place. Comparatively, since the agencies wanted me to drop my rate by 25% to even 50% from one agency, you could say I have done well to hold my ground.
Trade is slow. I had coffee with one agencys manager for executive contracting for the public sector today, and she painted a very sombre picture. There seems to be just nothing on the ground from the agencies. Meanwhile I have four in the pipeline from my personal network, but nothing guaranteed for next month.
By "public sector" I meant civil service; we have public/private in Australia, rather than the government/public that they have in the US.
Apparently the public sector is looking attractive to a lot of permanents, since it weathers downturns better here. They tend not to lay off staff like commercials do, but I promise you that they are not doing too much hiring either. Anyhow, my forte is project work, and few have the budget for starting any project at this point.
Strangely I have heard from several sources now that February will see an upswing. In the government sector that makes sense; budgets will get approved end of the calendar year, everyone is on holidays through January, and will ramp up in February for their implementations a few months later. The logic doesn't quite work for the corporates, unlike governments they are usually not allowed to start spending money until they actually have it.
I had lunch yesterday with the government sector sales rep for one of the largest systems companies. I am talking Oracle, SAP, IBM, but won't tell you which one. She was being very hush, and although I know a few things that she should know as well, I will be hush as well. But she did talk about the scene as she saw it; to a degree I think she is looking at SA through rose coloured glasses, but she made some interesting points.
Adding all of this to the impressions I have picked up from the independent contractors recently, as well as the feedback through the grapevine, I get the impression that some big things are planned next year, but nothing is happening in what is left of this year.
With the contract I am on finishing in a few weeks I am left wondering how I will pay my rent for the November, December, January period. All things considered, I need at least $3,000 a month to get by, and right now I don't have the wherewithal for three months of no income. But apparently if I can weather that patch then everything is meant to look peachy.
All of this because I took such a chance on Singapore last year, and now I am left carrying the burden of that failed exercise. Normally I would have the reserves to get me through a few months of down time without any problem, but all those reserves and more got burnt up trying, unsuccessfully, to transplant my career to another country.
So right now I am feeling a little more concerned than I am used to.
Lewis Carroll, hmmm, let's not go there.
Point is that I used to get somewhere between 30% and 50% more each year, but right now I am earning the same as I got last year. So a lot of running to stay in the same place. Comparatively, since the agencies wanted me to drop my rate by 25% to even 50% from one agency, you could say I have done well to hold my ground.
Trade is slow. I had coffee with one agencys manager for executive contracting for the public sector today, and she painted a very sombre picture. There seems to be just nothing on the ground from the agencies. Meanwhile I have four in the pipeline from my personal network, but nothing guaranteed for next month.
By "public sector" I meant civil service; we have public/private in Australia, rather than the government/public that they have in the US.
Apparently the public sector is looking attractive to a lot of permanents, since it weathers downturns better here. They tend not to lay off staff like commercials do, but I promise you that they are not doing too much hiring either. Anyhow, my forte is project work, and few have the budget for starting any project at this point.
Strangely I have heard from several sources now that February will see an upswing. In the government sector that makes sense; budgets will get approved end of the calendar year, everyone is on holidays through January, and will ramp up in February for their implementations a few months later. The logic doesn't quite work for the corporates, unlike governments they are usually not allowed to start spending money until they actually have it.
I had lunch yesterday with the government sector sales rep for one of the largest systems companies. I am talking Oracle, SAP, IBM, but won't tell you which one. She was being very hush, and although I know a few things that she should know as well, I will be hush as well. But she did talk about the scene as she saw it; to a degree I think she is looking at SA through rose coloured glasses, but she made some interesting points.
Adding all of this to the impressions I have picked up from the independent contractors recently, as well as the feedback through the grapevine, I get the impression that some big things are planned next year, but nothing is happening in what is left of this year.
With the contract I am on finishing in a few weeks I am left wondering how I will pay my rent for the November, December, January period. All things considered, I need at least $3,000 a month to get by, and right now I don't have the wherewithal for three months of no income. But apparently if I can weather that patch then everything is meant to look peachy.
All of this because I took such a chance on Singapore last year, and now I am left carrying the burden of that failed exercise. Normally I would have the reserves to get me through a few months of down time without any problem, but all those reserves and more got burnt up trying, unsuccessfully, to transplant my career to another country.
So right now I am feeling a little more concerned than I am used to.
Monday, August 31
And Here I Sit
The trouble that I have in thinking up titles for these posts is equalled only by the mutability of what I was intending to write. I think maybe in a way the titles reflect the fact that what I was thinking of writing five minutes before the laptop boots is no longer in my mind and then the title box calls for my attention and I am completely somewhere else by then.
I am feeling amused. I am sitting on the floor of my apartment, having just watched some program on the Thai sex trade that my cable box recorded a few days ago, not that I was sitting on the floor to watch it, no, that happened on the couch, as I ate a 'chunky tomato' pizza (family size only $7.70, the Monday special, a different flavour on special each day) that really wasn't worthy of the name 'tomato', or maybe it was, there was probably one tomato cut into smallish 'chunks' on this family size pizza, which is funny, 'cos usually the 'killer mushroom' (Wednesday's special? I can't be bothered getting up to check the menu) is actually quite good and loaded with heaps of mushrooms (plural), and this is possibly the longest single sentence that I have ever written. I feel proud of that small achievement. But the thing that amuses me is that my knee is killing me. For some reason that I must admit I do not understand, the fact that I am in pain from this is somehow decidedly funny.
Why is it so?
As the TV scientist that expanded our childhood minds used to ask.
Probably because so many puerile little things have been pissing me off lately and now something serious grabs my attention. It is some sort of relativistic counter point.
I miss Singapore.
Here I am, in a flat that Singaporeans would call huge, that costs less than my tiny HDB cost, earning four times what I could get in Singers, but I am unhappy.
You know when some smart-arse tells you that money isn't everything and you laugh in their face? Hmm, well, I guess sometimes that strategy backfires.
Oh, yeah, just 'cos you will ask; the program was by some pommie guy that came to some sort of epiphany over the sex industry not being the image that had been programmed into his head, that he couldn't get over the fact that the girls were, in their own relativistic way, using the clientele, that most of those trafficked against their will were actually young children being used as beggars, that the foreigners were all messed up in their heads, and that he couldn't make sense out of it all. And no, I don't know how I hurt my knee, no idea, too much walking? Sleeping in a bad position? Maybe I am just getting old and crotchety? Yeah, I know, I am forty six, relatively healthy, not too much over-weight, blah, blah. And I don't know why I miss SG so much, I mean, sure, it makes sense that I don't like my own country and so therefore I wish I were somewhere else, and yeah, I really enjoyed my time there, and yes, I had a much greater sense of freedom there and there was a much deeper and richer culture, and it is so dead boring here, such a total culture void. But homesick seems a little illogical, excessive, reactionary.
Whatever. I am sad.
I am feeling amused. I am sitting on the floor of my apartment, having just watched some program on the Thai sex trade that my cable box recorded a few days ago, not that I was sitting on the floor to watch it, no, that happened on the couch, as I ate a 'chunky tomato' pizza (family size only $7.70, the Monday special, a different flavour on special each day) that really wasn't worthy of the name 'tomato', or maybe it was, there was probably one tomato cut into smallish 'chunks' on this family size pizza, which is funny, 'cos usually the 'killer mushroom' (Wednesday's special? I can't be bothered getting up to check the menu) is actually quite good and loaded with heaps of mushrooms (plural), and this is possibly the longest single sentence that I have ever written. I feel proud of that small achievement. But the thing that amuses me is that my knee is killing me. For some reason that I must admit I do not understand, the fact that I am in pain from this is somehow decidedly funny.
Why is it so?
As the TV scientist that expanded our childhood minds used to ask.
Probably because so many puerile little things have been pissing me off lately and now something serious grabs my attention. It is some sort of relativistic counter point.
I miss Singapore.
Here I am, in a flat that Singaporeans would call huge, that costs less than my tiny HDB cost, earning four times what I could get in Singers, but I am unhappy.
You know when some smart-arse tells you that money isn't everything and you laugh in their face? Hmm, well, I guess sometimes that strategy backfires.
Oh, yeah, just 'cos you will ask; the program was by some pommie guy that came to some sort of epiphany over the sex industry not being the image that had been programmed into his head, that he couldn't get over the fact that the girls were, in their own relativistic way, using the clientele, that most of those trafficked against their will were actually young children being used as beggars, that the foreigners were all messed up in their heads, and that he couldn't make sense out of it all. And no, I don't know how I hurt my knee, no idea, too much walking? Sleeping in a bad position? Maybe I am just getting old and crotchety? Yeah, I know, I am forty six, relatively healthy, not too much over-weight, blah, blah. And I don't know why I miss SG so much, I mean, sure, it makes sense that I don't like my own country and so therefore I wish I were somewhere else, and yeah, I really enjoyed my time there, and yes, I had a much greater sense of freedom there and there was a much deeper and richer culture, and it is so dead boring here, such a total culture void. But homesick seems a little illogical, excessive, reactionary.
Whatever. I am sad.
Monday, August 24
And I Shall Call This a New Post!
[Late editorial note: this one is deep and personal and maybe I should not have written it. It gets my temper up and my blood hot. Maybe you shouldn't read it.]
Working full time has sure cut back my blogging!
And the only reason I am writing this today is that the MSN page pissed me off.
My MSN is still set to SG and I don't intend changing that 'cos it gives me some general Singers news when I log out of Hotmail. And I like Singapore, I want to keep it in my consciousness. It is, after all, my intention to return, and to stay permanently. And, indeed, to get citizenship if possible. At this point anyhow. Maybe I will discover that I like Honkers more, or TW, or JP, even though the cost of living in Japan is a bit of a put-off.
Anyhow, this today as I log out of Hotmail:
Should there be stricter laws to persecute children who dump their elderly parents?
1) Definitely, current efforts aren't enough to weed out the unfilial ingrates
2) Perhaps, but I want to see more pastoral rather than punitive measures
3) No, they may be financially struggling to cope with the recession themselves
4) There's only so much the Government can do. Friends and relatives must play their part as well.
Firstly, these MSN polls piss me off mega 'cos there are always valid options missing - they are structuring your responses, and limiting the 'survey' to only what they want to report.
Secondly, this one in particular pisses me off.
Where is the "My parents deserve to be dumped" option??????
Okay, my sister and I have talked about this (notice how the oldest brother is not included in this discussion, he takes little part in the family and does not keep any family obligations) and we have both agreed that we will look after our mother. We both owe a lot to her, and so we will ensure that her twilight years are comfortable and happy. We will not put her in a home, she will live with family and she will be cared for and respected.
My father is a different story; I would turn off his life support machine as an energy saving measure.
He used to electrocute children for amusement; he would make us touch, in fact HOLD, electric fences (I grew up on a farm remember). He gave me a baby brown snake for a pet when I was nine - this thing would have killed me if it had bitten me! He did a similar thing with my younger half-brother, letting him, when he was far too young to know otherwise, play with blue-ringed octopuses. His justification for this was that he had to discover these things on his own. How? Seriously, how is he going to 'learn' anything when he is DEAD????? (He isn't, he didn't get bitten, he grew up to be a wonderful person.)
When I was seventeen my father smashed the front door to my girlfriend's house and tried to rape her. Following her screams I entered a room to find her naked, her face bruised and bleeding from him having beaten her up to start with.
(Of course he said he was not going to rape her, just 'teach her a lesson'. A lesson? For why? For being with me??? What business was it of yours?)
This man is a piece of shit.
I have no filial duty to care for him in his dotage.
So where, Mr MSN.SG, is the relevant option for me?
Changing the track a little bit. My sister, as part of her personal growth, wrote a book about her life. Part of this is how we are all pissed off at how the Australian media keeps idolising this guy, keeps repeating his lies without any verification, how they keep letting him say totally untrue things about his family and have denied us any right of reply. But the book is mostly about herself, it is just that her father does enter into it to a degree. She has verified everything she says in the book, as in she did not write anything into the final draft that did not have physical proof such as papers or corroborating testimony. She got permission from a lot of people to mention them, sometimes to quote them - interestingly my first girlfriend wants nothing to do with it.
But here is the interesting thing; she has not been able to get this book published in Australia. Just as we have never been able to get any Australian media to present our side of the story, so too no publisher will carry our message.
So much for Australia being a 'free country' where everyone is entitled to have their say.
Working full time has sure cut back my blogging!
And the only reason I am writing this today is that the MSN page pissed me off.
My MSN is still set to SG and I don't intend changing that 'cos it gives me some general Singers news when I log out of Hotmail. And I like Singapore, I want to keep it in my consciousness. It is, after all, my intention to return, and to stay permanently. And, indeed, to get citizenship if possible. At this point anyhow. Maybe I will discover that I like Honkers more, or TW, or JP, even though the cost of living in Japan is a bit of a put-off.
Anyhow, this today as I log out of Hotmail:
Should there be stricter laws to persecute children who dump their elderly parents?
1) Definitely, current efforts aren't enough to weed out the unfilial ingrates
2) Perhaps, but I want to see more pastoral rather than punitive measures
3) No, they may be financially struggling to cope with the recession themselves
4) There's only so much the Government can do. Friends and relatives must play their part as well.
Firstly, these MSN polls piss me off mega 'cos there are always valid options missing - they are structuring your responses, and limiting the 'survey' to only what they want to report.
Secondly, this one in particular pisses me off.
Where is the "My parents deserve to be dumped" option??????
Okay, my sister and I have talked about this (notice how the oldest brother is not included in this discussion, he takes little part in the family and does not keep any family obligations) and we have both agreed that we will look after our mother. We both owe a lot to her, and so we will ensure that her twilight years are comfortable and happy. We will not put her in a home, she will live with family and she will be cared for and respected.
My father is a different story; I would turn off his life support machine as an energy saving measure.
He used to electrocute children for amusement; he would make us touch, in fact HOLD, electric fences (I grew up on a farm remember). He gave me a baby brown snake for a pet when I was nine - this thing would have killed me if it had bitten me! He did a similar thing with my younger half-brother, letting him, when he was far too young to know otherwise, play with blue-ringed octopuses. His justification for this was that he had to discover these things on his own. How? Seriously, how is he going to 'learn' anything when he is DEAD????? (He isn't, he didn't get bitten, he grew up to be a wonderful person.)
When I was seventeen my father smashed the front door to my girlfriend's house and tried to rape her. Following her screams I entered a room to find her naked, her face bruised and bleeding from him having beaten her up to start with.
(Of course he said he was not going to rape her, just 'teach her a lesson'. A lesson? For why? For being with me??? What business was it of yours?)
This man is a piece of shit.
I have no filial duty to care for him in his dotage.
So where, Mr MSN.SG, is the relevant option for me?
Changing the track a little bit. My sister, as part of her personal growth, wrote a book about her life. Part of this is how we are all pissed off at how the Australian media keeps idolising this guy, keeps repeating his lies without any verification, how they keep letting him say totally untrue things about his family and have denied us any right of reply. But the book is mostly about herself, it is just that her father does enter into it to a degree. She has verified everything she says in the book, as in she did not write anything into the final draft that did not have physical proof such as papers or corroborating testimony. She got permission from a lot of people to mention them, sometimes to quote them - interestingly my first girlfriend wants nothing to do with it.
But here is the interesting thing; she has not been able to get this book published in Australia. Just as we have never been able to get any Australian media to present our side of the story, so too no publisher will carry our message.
So much for Australia being a 'free country' where everyone is entitled to have their say.
Thursday, August 13
Yah, well.
So it has been another ten days.
Get used to it, I'm working now.
Yeah, job is pretty easy, pay is good, work environment is good, location is great.
Just been trying to install (Australian) Telstra's 'Big Pond' broadband but came to a block with the issue of not having a password. The installation pack says it will have been emailed to me three days ago. It also says that if there are any problems to call a number. The number rings and rings and disconnects. I go to their website and drill into Big Pond and there is a 'call anytime' number; call anytime to get a message saying that their centre is not open at this hour. I try to use the email facility and go through four screens entering information to get to the end and click 'submit' and it returns a blank page.
The degree to which this organisation fucks me off can not be described.
Why am I using them?
'Cos they have the mobile/landline/broadband/cableTV combo, and in our tiny little market no-one else does.
I haven't been paid yet.
The agency used to have money in my account always on Wednesday. When it wasn't I waited until Thursday to be on the safe side. When it wasn't in by Thursday morning I sent an email enquiring. No answer so I called when I got into work. They said that there had been a problem and no contractor Australia-wide had been paid but that it had been run and would be in accounts in twelve to fourteen hours. From when it was run? Or from that conversation? Well that conversation was fourteen hours ago and it is still not in my bank account.
So I am going to my mother's tomorrow evening and I book a bus. Adelaide to Keith is $55 by four of the coachlines - the full Adelaide to Melbourne fare, but V-Line does it for $24, so I book with them. Tonight I get an email telling me that due to changes in the SA State Transport regulations they are no longer allowed to drop me off at Keith and asking me to phone them to arrange a refund. I phone, they say they will process that. Why not just process the thing and email me telling me that they allowed me to book an illegal journey so they have cancelled it and refunded me. Send me an email to phone them to ask the to do the thing that they said they would do in the email. And all of this far too late to book another coach.
Some days I just feel that things aren't going my way.
Get used to it, I'm working now.
Yeah, job is pretty easy, pay is good, work environment is good, location is great.
Just been trying to install (Australian) Telstra's 'Big Pond' broadband but came to a block with the issue of not having a password. The installation pack says it will have been emailed to me three days ago. It also says that if there are any problems to call a number. The number rings and rings and disconnects. I go to their website and drill into Big Pond and there is a 'call anytime' number; call anytime to get a message saying that their centre is not open at this hour. I try to use the email facility and go through four screens entering information to get to the end and click 'submit' and it returns a blank page.
The degree to which this organisation fucks me off can not be described.
Why am I using them?
'Cos they have the mobile/landline/broadband/cableTV combo, and in our tiny little market no-one else does.
I haven't been paid yet.
The agency used to have money in my account always on Wednesday. When it wasn't I waited until Thursday to be on the safe side. When it wasn't in by Thursday morning I sent an email enquiring. No answer so I called when I got into work. They said that there had been a problem and no contractor Australia-wide had been paid but that it had been run and would be in accounts in twelve to fourteen hours. From when it was run? Or from that conversation? Well that conversation was fourteen hours ago and it is still not in my bank account.
So I am going to my mother's tomorrow evening and I book a bus. Adelaide to Keith is $55 by four of the coachlines - the full Adelaide to Melbourne fare, but V-Line does it for $24, so I book with them. Tonight I get an email telling me that due to changes in the SA State Transport regulations they are no longer allowed to drop me off at Keith and asking me to phone them to arrange a refund. I phone, they say they will process that. Why not just process the thing and email me telling me that they allowed me to book an illegal journey so they have cancelled it and refunded me. Send me an email to phone them to ask the to do the thing that they said they would do in the email. And all of this far too late to book another coach.
Some days I just feel that things aren't going my way.
Monday, August 3
The Donkey and the Millstone
My first day working for nearly a year!
A short one, of course, less than six hours; wouldn't want to stress too much at the sudden change in lifestyle. No, really had to start late to cater for their management and 'cos they weren't going to have my logons ready. Still haven't got them all sorted, and won't for the entire first week.
But it looks like it will be an easy contract. So easy that it threatens to border on boredom. This task which their civil service managers estimated as too hard to finish in a six month contract will be very unlikely to hold me up for even six weeks. And one of those weeks is going to be without full access to the systems that I am being contracted to rationalise.
Where did White Australia go?
Take a look around any main city in Australia now; I have been looking at Adelaide for a few weeks now. The white Australians are few and far between. Welcome to Asian Australia. Seriously, I am seeing more Orientals on the streets than I am Aryans. I prefer to say "Oriental" because I am specifically talking about Chinese (most probably from Malaysia), Koreans, Vietnamese, and even quite a lot of Japanese, and am specifically not talking about Indians, Kazaks, Turks, etc. I consider them to be very different, and consider the term 'Asian' to be pretty useless in any cultural sense. It really just means 'all the stuff east of Europe', and for us Anglos really covers the French as well ;)
Also, I now notice that there are a lot of these inner city apartment complexes such as I now reside in. More than there were a couple of years ago, and a few more going up besides. And these seem, as mine certainly seems, to be occupied mostly by Orientals. I am guessing that a lot are foreign students; four are allowed to share one apartment (such as I have to myself) and if you did that then the rent for each would be quite okay, and you are in walking distance of two of the universities, as well as the nightclubs and best shops and Chinatown.
My money situation is tight. Fortunately the agency I am working through pays weekly, otherwise I would be totally empty at the end of this week after paying next months rent and my car registration. Mum usually pays it since she has the car, but the papers are coming to my apartment now, whereas previously they went to her post box whilst I was overseas. She says that she has just paid the car rego, but I got it in my mail today, and it expired last week. But she is in long term financial difficulty due to the drought. Although she and Noel are refurbishing their house; new fireplace, new floors. So maybe they aren't so badly off after all...
And now for Overlord II.
I have packed it away and won't bother playing it again until either CodeMidgets patch the damned thing or someone writes either a crack or a trainer to get passed some of the impossibly hard and tedious puzzles. I hit the forums and tried some of the suggestions there, but to no avail, therefore the game gets categorised as frustration rather than the pleasure that games are meant to be. Face it, we play to have fun, if a game starts delivering more angst than happiness then it is not worth wasting your time on. And this game was priced at $110, expensive even for Australia where most games are priced at $80, for that you get half a game that can be played.
Verdict: FAIL
A short one, of course, less than six hours; wouldn't want to stress too much at the sudden change in lifestyle. No, really had to start late to cater for their management and 'cos they weren't going to have my logons ready. Still haven't got them all sorted, and won't for the entire first week.
But it looks like it will be an easy contract. So easy that it threatens to border on boredom. This task which their civil service managers estimated as too hard to finish in a six month contract will be very unlikely to hold me up for even six weeks. And one of those weeks is going to be without full access to the systems that I am being contracted to rationalise.
Where did White Australia go?
Take a look around any main city in Australia now; I have been looking at Adelaide for a few weeks now. The white Australians are few and far between. Welcome to Asian Australia. Seriously, I am seeing more Orientals on the streets than I am Aryans. I prefer to say "Oriental" because I am specifically talking about Chinese (most probably from Malaysia), Koreans, Vietnamese, and even quite a lot of Japanese, and am specifically not talking about Indians, Kazaks, Turks, etc. I consider them to be very different, and consider the term 'Asian' to be pretty useless in any cultural sense. It really just means 'all the stuff east of Europe', and for us Anglos really covers the French as well ;)
Also, I now notice that there are a lot of these inner city apartment complexes such as I now reside in. More than there were a couple of years ago, and a few more going up besides. And these seem, as mine certainly seems, to be occupied mostly by Orientals. I am guessing that a lot are foreign students; four are allowed to share one apartment (such as I have to myself) and if you did that then the rent for each would be quite okay, and you are in walking distance of two of the universities, as well as the nightclubs and best shops and Chinatown.
My money situation is tight. Fortunately the agency I am working through pays weekly, otherwise I would be totally empty at the end of this week after paying next months rent and my car registration. Mum usually pays it since she has the car, but the papers are coming to my apartment now, whereas previously they went to her post box whilst I was overseas. She says that she has just paid the car rego, but I got it in my mail today, and it expired last week. But she is in long term financial difficulty due to the drought. Although she and Noel are refurbishing their house; new fireplace, new floors. So maybe they aren't so badly off after all...
And now for Overlord II.
I have packed it away and won't bother playing it again until either CodeMidgets patch the damned thing or someone writes either a crack or a trainer to get passed some of the impossibly hard and tedious puzzles. I hit the forums and tried some of the suggestions there, but to no avail, therefore the game gets categorised as frustration rather than the pleasure that games are meant to be. Face it, we play to have fun, if a game starts delivering more angst than happiness then it is not worth wasting your time on. And this game was priced at $110, expensive even for Australia where most games are priced at $80, for that you get half a game that can be played.
Verdict: FAIL
Thursday, July 30
To be or not to be...
Or have I used that title already?
I always have so many thoughts going through my head that I want to write. Commentary on this or that, opinions on everything, my views and beliefs, interpretations, etc., etc., etc. But when I get online I don't feel like it; maybe I don't feel that I have them quite sorted out, or my mood has changed, or when I write it down it somehow doesn't have the impact that it seemed to have in my head. Whatever the reasons are it just doesn't happen as often as I would like.
And so this ends up being a diary more than anything.
I have written about anti-perspirants before. I never needed them until I went to Singapore first time. Then when I lived there I had to use them every day and so got to test a few. Nivea was sold everywhere and at first was the only one I could get my hands on, but it was so useless; "24 hour protection" it says, as do they all, but two hours was all it was good for. I found Colgate Mennen Speedstick to be the best, often giving four to six hours worth of protection. Well I have tried Dove here, and it was even worse than Nivea!!! Hard to believe I know, but in a tee-shirt, in winter, with my arms bare and chilled, it still failed after one measly hour. But wait! It gets worse! The TV ad promises "no more white marks", but I have never had any other anti-perspirant leave more white residue on my tee-shirts than this stuff - it has got to be the most useless excuse for an anti-perspirant ever invented.
My new contract got delayed again. No real surprise, it is the civil service, finding their own arses with both hands is hard enough, trying to get a decision made is pushing it up hill. But my friend had hopes that he could get it started last Monday, then sometime this week, then next Monday. Now it is sometime next week, but my access won't be ready on Monday and they were worried about their budget limits - me costing so much more than most contract staff. But I have to start with meeting management and then talk to their staff and familiarise myself with the data maps that they have and undertake some discovery. So there is some work that has to happen at the start that is not reliant upon me having computer access. So I will go in late to meet management, then maybe leave early that first day.
They are being strict on five days of eight hours only. No six and a half day weeks and no fourteen hour days. And the initial project has been cut back to two months; something that most of their staff don't think can get done in six months! Still, at this point it is not sounding too difficult and I wouldn't be surprised if two months leaves me with lots of room to move.
I have bought Overlord II. I wanted to get Halo 3; it was the most interesting thing at Avcon, but so far it is only out on consoles (read kiddy toys, not yet available for grown-ups). So I got Overlord II which I saw Paul demonstrating (on console, projected onto a big screen) saying his Mum wanted it. It is fun, mostly, but it has some huge bugs and some outright impossible puzzles. It has that problem where after you have been playing for a while then when you try to walk forward you get a loud beeping and nothing happening. I had that recently in some other game, but here it has the added twist that boxes pop up with CHINESE writing!!!!!
Now I have heard of a lot of companies outsourcing stuff to India, but outsourcing their coding to China???? And how is it that such buggy programmes are released onto the public? Don't these wankers play test these things?
But aside from that; there is a bit that I just can't get; after you kill the spider queen and then you have to get the spider-riding green minions to run up the walls and activate a series of switches, then your platform rises and you have another similar puzzle. But in this second one I just cannot get from switch two to switch three in time, and quite frankly I don't think that it can be done. Not given the constraints put upon a player using a mouse to guide the minions; it is just not accurate enough. Or to be more precise; the little bastards just don't go where you tell them to go. Maybe it works with a console, and this game probably came out on console first and has just been ported to PC. But it sucks. The entire game quest progression is stalled because I can't get out of this with my spider riders to hit the next set of wall-mounted switches to get into the city that is holding everything I need to continue the game. Like most games it is linear that way. I can go other places, and do other stuff, but the central game story won't progress unless I can get through this little aggravating piece of shit.
Have to get birthday presents for both my father and my step-father. I have no idea what to get either of them, save that I don't want to get my father a book this year. I have gotten him books the last few presents and I don't think he reads any of them! Anyhow, my mum and her husband will be driving to Adelaide this Saturday, a drive of three and a half hours, then they will be driving through the city centre to a hardware mega-store, then back to my sister's and then back down south. They will probably drive right passed my new apartment, which address they do have, but they will not stop, they will not visit. I lived in a gorgeous house with a gorgeous view over the city and out to the sea at Blackwood for two years and they never visited. I lived for a year at Mt Barker and they never visited (even though they drive through Mt Barker on their travels to and from the city). I lived next door to my sister in Macclesfield for eight years and they would visit her and not me. Do you get the picture?
Favourite child syndrome. A common problem with their generation, and yet she has the gall to criticise my paternal grandmother for doing stuff just like that. Not that my mother hasn't been great, and I owe her heaps; she and Nanna put me through college and I wouldn't be earning the money I do now if it weren't for them (forget the concept of Australia providing a free education for its children, and this was twenty years ago). And my sister has had a hard life, and hard times with both of her parents, and I am okay with her finally being on the receiving end of some favouritism. But that doesn't reduce in anyway how much this sort of crap annoys me. So I am making a point of not being at home that day; will be visiting my father who was interstate for his birthday, and will leave my step-father's present at my sister's. Not that either of my siblings will be visiting my father, or likely giving him any present or even a phone call; but that is a reality of his own creation, so he can live with it. I didn't talk to him for twenty five years.
So this is it; back in a dull, boring, and fucking COLD little town (and I meant that thermally - I am freezing!), in a society that is emotionally crippled and sexually neurotic, culturally void, intellectually dead, but pays well.
I always have so many thoughts going through my head that I want to write. Commentary on this or that, opinions on everything, my views and beliefs, interpretations, etc., etc., etc. But when I get online I don't feel like it; maybe I don't feel that I have them quite sorted out, or my mood has changed, or when I write it down it somehow doesn't have the impact that it seemed to have in my head. Whatever the reasons are it just doesn't happen as often as I would like.
And so this ends up being a diary more than anything.
I have written about anti-perspirants before. I never needed them until I went to Singapore first time. Then when I lived there I had to use them every day and so got to test a few. Nivea was sold everywhere and at first was the only one I could get my hands on, but it was so useless; "24 hour protection" it says, as do they all, but two hours was all it was good for. I found Colgate Mennen Speedstick to be the best, often giving four to six hours worth of protection. Well I have tried Dove here, and it was even worse than Nivea!!! Hard to believe I know, but in a tee-shirt, in winter, with my arms bare and chilled, it still failed after one measly hour. But wait! It gets worse! The TV ad promises "no more white marks", but I have never had any other anti-perspirant leave more white residue on my tee-shirts than this stuff - it has got to be the most useless excuse for an anti-perspirant ever invented.
My new contract got delayed again. No real surprise, it is the civil service, finding their own arses with both hands is hard enough, trying to get a decision made is pushing it up hill. But my friend had hopes that he could get it started last Monday, then sometime this week, then next Monday. Now it is sometime next week, but my access won't be ready on Monday and they were worried about their budget limits - me costing so much more than most contract staff. But I have to start with meeting management and then talk to their staff and familiarise myself with the data maps that they have and undertake some discovery. So there is some work that has to happen at the start that is not reliant upon me having computer access. So I will go in late to meet management, then maybe leave early that first day.
They are being strict on five days of eight hours only. No six and a half day weeks and no fourteen hour days. And the initial project has been cut back to two months; something that most of their staff don't think can get done in six months! Still, at this point it is not sounding too difficult and I wouldn't be surprised if two months leaves me with lots of room to move.
I have bought Overlord II. I wanted to get Halo 3; it was the most interesting thing at Avcon, but so far it is only out on consoles (read kiddy toys, not yet available for grown-ups). So I got Overlord II which I saw Paul demonstrating (on console, projected onto a big screen) saying his Mum wanted it. It is fun, mostly, but it has some huge bugs and some outright impossible puzzles. It has that problem where after you have been playing for a while then when you try to walk forward you get a loud beeping and nothing happening. I had that recently in some other game, but here it has the added twist that boxes pop up with CHINESE writing!!!!!
Now I have heard of a lot of companies outsourcing stuff to India, but outsourcing their coding to China???? And how is it that such buggy programmes are released onto the public? Don't these wankers play test these things?
But aside from that; there is a bit that I just can't get; after you kill the spider queen and then you have to get the spider-riding green minions to run up the walls and activate a series of switches, then your platform rises and you have another similar puzzle. But in this second one I just cannot get from switch two to switch three in time, and quite frankly I don't think that it can be done. Not given the constraints put upon a player using a mouse to guide the minions; it is just not accurate enough. Or to be more precise; the little bastards just don't go where you tell them to go. Maybe it works with a console, and this game probably came out on console first and has just been ported to PC. But it sucks. The entire game quest progression is stalled because I can't get out of this with my spider riders to hit the next set of wall-mounted switches to get into the city that is holding everything I need to continue the game. Like most games it is linear that way. I can go other places, and do other stuff, but the central game story won't progress unless I can get through this little aggravating piece of shit.
Have to get birthday presents for both my father and my step-father. I have no idea what to get either of them, save that I don't want to get my father a book this year. I have gotten him books the last few presents and I don't think he reads any of them! Anyhow, my mum and her husband will be driving to Adelaide this Saturday, a drive of three and a half hours, then they will be driving through the city centre to a hardware mega-store, then back to my sister's and then back down south. They will probably drive right passed my new apartment, which address they do have, but they will not stop, they will not visit. I lived in a gorgeous house with a gorgeous view over the city and out to the sea at Blackwood for two years and they never visited. I lived for a year at Mt Barker and they never visited (even though they drive through Mt Barker on their travels to and from the city). I lived next door to my sister in Macclesfield for eight years and they would visit her and not me. Do you get the picture?
Favourite child syndrome. A common problem with their generation, and yet she has the gall to criticise my paternal grandmother for doing stuff just like that. Not that my mother hasn't been great, and I owe her heaps; she and Nanna put me through college and I wouldn't be earning the money I do now if it weren't for them (forget the concept of Australia providing a free education for its children, and this was twenty years ago). And my sister has had a hard life, and hard times with both of her parents, and I am okay with her finally being on the receiving end of some favouritism. But that doesn't reduce in anyway how much this sort of crap annoys me. So I am making a point of not being at home that day; will be visiting my father who was interstate for his birthday, and will leave my step-father's present at my sister's. Not that either of my siblings will be visiting my father, or likely giving him any present or even a phone call; but that is a reality of his own creation, so he can live with it. I didn't talk to him for twenty five years.
So this is it; back in a dull, boring, and fucking COLD little town (and I meant that thermally - I am freezing!), in a society that is emotionally crippled and sexually neurotic, culturally void, intellectually dead, but pays well.
Monday, July 27
Avcon
It was Avcon this weekend; Adelaide's Anime (and Manga) and Video (gaming) Convention. For the first time not held at Adelaide Uni, but at the Adelaide Convention Centre. A rather suitable place to hold a convention you might think.
Personally I am glad that it has finally moved out of the student union building; it is a sign of maturity. I have been saying for as long as it has been around that it shouldn't be there. I just don't like the 'kiddies' image it gives it.
Having said that, I didn't really enjoy myself. Not enough anime. There used to be six to eight anime screening rooms, now there were two, and one of those held other things as well. It was good that there was a lot more gaming. And the merchandising was handled, and placed, well. But a major reduction in anime and only two anime discussion rooms as well. So mostly it was a case of paying to get in to shop for me. Which doesn't make sense. But there just wasn't enough other stuff to justify the entry price in my view.
There did not seem to be as many people in costumes as previously. Lolitas and sailor schoolgirl uniforms excepted, 'cos there were enormous masses of those. And a jolly good thing too; can you name anything else so sweet, cute, and sexy? And any girl that enjoys dressing in lolita is not going to turn into a feminist bitch, is she? So bring it on!
Other than that nothing much has happened this week. I haven't started work yet, the promised contract is lagging, but I have an interview for another one on Tuesday. The Australian Labor Party can't seem to get to grips with labour, as in the unemployment problem; especially bad for them, on one hand they can't seem to successfully reduce unemployment, on the other they can't reduce the benefits that people get in this country for doing nothing. Tight spot to be in.
Don't know if Rudd has introduced his 60% tax rate yet, or if it will be brought in next financial year. I get my desktop computer back this week and then I will do my tax and find out. Imagine just how loyal you will feel to your country if it demands to take most of your money away. One thing you can always count on the Labor Party for; they will always punish the hard-working and the successful for being hard-working and successful. So, against this backdrop, how many will choose to vote with their feet? You know that I will as soon as I get the next chance.
So weird that Singapore turned out to pay less than half what I get in Australia. I think that I will make the move next time as a functioning business, and not as an individual looking for employment. But Singapore or Hong Kong? We shall see.
Personally I am glad that it has finally moved out of the student union building; it is a sign of maturity. I have been saying for as long as it has been around that it shouldn't be there. I just don't like the 'kiddies' image it gives it.
Having said that, I didn't really enjoy myself. Not enough anime. There used to be six to eight anime screening rooms, now there were two, and one of those held other things as well. It was good that there was a lot more gaming. And the merchandising was handled, and placed, well. But a major reduction in anime and only two anime discussion rooms as well. So mostly it was a case of paying to get in to shop for me. Which doesn't make sense. But there just wasn't enough other stuff to justify the entry price in my view.
There did not seem to be as many people in costumes as previously. Lolitas and sailor schoolgirl uniforms excepted, 'cos there were enormous masses of those. And a jolly good thing too; can you name anything else so sweet, cute, and sexy? And any girl that enjoys dressing in lolita is not going to turn into a feminist bitch, is she? So bring it on!
Other than that nothing much has happened this week. I haven't started work yet, the promised contract is lagging, but I have an interview for another one on Tuesday. The Australian Labor Party can't seem to get to grips with labour, as in the unemployment problem; especially bad for them, on one hand they can't seem to successfully reduce unemployment, on the other they can't reduce the benefits that people get in this country for doing nothing. Tight spot to be in.
Don't know if Rudd has introduced his 60% tax rate yet, or if it will be brought in next financial year. I get my desktop computer back this week and then I will do my tax and find out. Imagine just how loyal you will feel to your country if it demands to take most of your money away. One thing you can always count on the Labor Party for; they will always punish the hard-working and the successful for being hard-working and successful. So, against this backdrop, how many will choose to vote with their feet? You know that I will as soon as I get the next chance.
So weird that Singapore turned out to pay less than half what I get in Australia. I think that I will make the move next time as a functioning business, and not as an individual looking for employment. But Singapore or Hong Kong? We shall see.
Monday, July 20
Kind of Back Online
I know, nearly three weeks. I have been down at Mum's (no access), I have been at offline hotels (common here, not what I have usually found overseas), and now I have moved into an apartment that is not yet online but a friend has lent me a wireless dongle.
So, mostly I am just reassuring you that I am still here, just been a little out of touch.
Firstly, living space. I have a new apartment, two bedrooms, fair sized living room, large entrance hall (as it would be called in SG) that contains office desk and dining table, toilet and laundry, and bathroom with both shower and a bath, oh, and a balcony. Fully furnished (including cutlery and crockery etc). All for a bit less than my tight little 2 bedroom HDB, but what do you expect? Rent is expensive in Singers, on par with Sydney (well, same size cities), and little old Adelaide is cheap. I am in the CBD, ten minutes walk to the North Terrace / King William Street corner - which is to say 80% of my clients.
Secondly, the other main living requirement. This one is sort of funny, I am having real difficulty with it. I used to earn about twelve thousand a month, I went to Singapore as a major life-changing event, I was expecting to earn good money (everyone says "come to Asia; earn twice as much, pay half as much tax") - but the best I was offered was four and a half thousand a month. I come back here to find the agencies trying to talk me into settling for about half the rate I got a year ago (something about some 'global financial crisis'...). I hesitate, and a good thing too - my private network then starts turning up some very interesting offers that are all pitched at more than I ever earned before.
This is really puzzling me. One of these is set to start this week. I have yet to settle the rate, but the initial discussion was about 30% up from what I got a year ago. I am expecting this to come down though, how far I don't yet know, but I think that the project will get a set budget and I will have to fit that. But we shall see. I am actually in a perceived position of power. My weakness is that I really need to have cash inflow soon, but I can wait a month or two before I am totally desperate. On the other hand; I am good at what I do, probably the best in Australia (honestly, I am not kidding you on that), and there is a near zero chance of the client being able to get anyone else to do what I can do in the timeframes required.
To me this is just a bit of database work. My contact in the client agency wants it done in three months, I think it will only take six weeks, most people are estimating that it would take six months. But I am used to this sort of thing. Been here before, seen this before.
Emotionally my life is void. I am beginning to really question my reality on this. Perhaps I need a major overhaul; dump the concept of 'love' and just go for 'sex'? Perhaps my focus on romance up to this point in my life has been a mirage, one that I should stop chasing. I am dealing with this issue for now by avoiding it; I give myself a year to focus on work and money, then stand back and reassess. I know that I want to get out of Australia - the 'culture' is killing me slowly. But I kind of like the comfortable level of income that I earn here - as shown by the fact that I have just taken nearly a year off to live (incomeless) in SG, and two years before that I finished a break of over half a year (during which time I also went overseas). I can handle taking six month international breaks every other year. I don't want to lose that level of lifestyle.
I can stay in Australia and live with a very good income but spiritually die, or I can move permanently overseas and apparently live at half the material level but feel alive. Unfortunately, I want both.
I am giving myself a year to figure this out.
So, mostly I am just reassuring you that I am still here, just been a little out of touch.
Firstly, living space. I have a new apartment, two bedrooms, fair sized living room, large entrance hall (as it would be called in SG) that contains office desk and dining table, toilet and laundry, and bathroom with both shower and a bath, oh, and a balcony. Fully furnished (including cutlery and crockery etc). All for a bit less than my tight little 2 bedroom HDB, but what do you expect? Rent is expensive in Singers, on par with Sydney (well, same size cities), and little old Adelaide is cheap. I am in the CBD, ten minutes walk to the North Terrace / King William Street corner - which is to say 80% of my clients.
Secondly, the other main living requirement. This one is sort of funny, I am having real difficulty with it. I used to earn about twelve thousand a month, I went to Singapore as a major life-changing event, I was expecting to earn good money (everyone says "come to Asia; earn twice as much, pay half as much tax") - but the best I was offered was four and a half thousand a month. I come back here to find the agencies trying to talk me into settling for about half the rate I got a year ago (something about some 'global financial crisis'...). I hesitate, and a good thing too - my private network then starts turning up some very interesting offers that are all pitched at more than I ever earned before.
This is really puzzling me. One of these is set to start this week. I have yet to settle the rate, but the initial discussion was about 30% up from what I got a year ago. I am expecting this to come down though, how far I don't yet know, but I think that the project will get a set budget and I will have to fit that. But we shall see. I am actually in a perceived position of power. My weakness is that I really need to have cash inflow soon, but I can wait a month or two before I am totally desperate. On the other hand; I am good at what I do, probably the best in Australia (honestly, I am not kidding you on that), and there is a near zero chance of the client being able to get anyone else to do what I can do in the timeframes required.
To me this is just a bit of database work. My contact in the client agency wants it done in three months, I think it will only take six weeks, most people are estimating that it would take six months. But I am used to this sort of thing. Been here before, seen this before.
Emotionally my life is void. I am beginning to really question my reality on this. Perhaps I need a major overhaul; dump the concept of 'love' and just go for 'sex'? Perhaps my focus on romance up to this point in my life has been a mirage, one that I should stop chasing. I am dealing with this issue for now by avoiding it; I give myself a year to focus on work and money, then stand back and reassess. I know that I want to get out of Australia - the 'culture' is killing me slowly. But I kind of like the comfortable level of income that I earn here - as shown by the fact that I have just taken nearly a year off to live (incomeless) in SG, and two years before that I finished a break of over half a year (during which time I also went overseas). I can handle taking six month international breaks every other year. I don't want to lose that level of lifestyle.
I can stay in Australia and live with a very good income but spiritually die, or I can move permanently overseas and apparently live at half the material level but feel alive. Unfortunately, I want both.
I am giving myself a year to figure this out.
Wednesday, July 1
Back in Town
I am back in Adelaide after my week down at my mother's farm.
Naturally, having spent time on the farm, I am sore. Not from gardening (moving garden beds and laying new ones), and not from installing a new fireplace in the living room; no, my thumbs and forefingers still ache from the fencing on the first day - Noel prefers to use a hard steel wire for his ties and I had to bend hundreds of the damned things.
Also there were Uncle Warren and Auntie Faye. She is half aboriginal and one of the 'stolen generation'; "best thing they could have done for me" she said, she has been re-united with her mother's family and is grateful for being taken away from that life and given what she considers a much better one.
My sister and her friend drove down to stay the night and give me a lift back. And I have returned laddened with scones and biscuits. My mother stated more than once something to the effect of not having liked one of her children being overseas and too far away from her.
I contacted two agencies when I got back last week, and both responded very quickly, and both have been talking to me today and running short-lists past me. I have one other agency that I do have to contact later this week. This is so different from my reception in Singers.
I am staying at my sister's again tonight, but am hoping to move into a small apartment tomorrow; I am calling one back when it passes seven and an agent about another tomorrow morning. But that second one is unfurnished, so I have to make a couple of calls about furniture rental first. Boils down to one furnished one bedroom apartment just out of the CBD for $375 per week, or one two bedroom apartment in the CBD but unfurnished for $275. I have looked at one online furniture rental site and it quotes about $200 a week, but I phoned another guy and he said it was possible to get a package together for one hundred or less but to call after ten in the morning.
I think that the CBD apartment would be worth at least $400 a week to me including furniture, but it is limited to a two month rental only, whereas the other place could be extended unlimited. Still, you can get student apartments in the CBD for less than two hundred a week, often for only about one hundred; not as nice, true, but cheap.
Naturally, having spent time on the farm, I am sore. Not from gardening (moving garden beds and laying new ones), and not from installing a new fireplace in the living room; no, my thumbs and forefingers still ache from the fencing on the first day - Noel prefers to use a hard steel wire for his ties and I had to bend hundreds of the damned things.
Also there were Uncle Warren and Auntie Faye. She is half aboriginal and one of the 'stolen generation'; "best thing they could have done for me" she said, she has been re-united with her mother's family and is grateful for being taken away from that life and given what she considers a much better one.
My sister and her friend drove down to stay the night and give me a lift back. And I have returned laddened with scones and biscuits. My mother stated more than once something to the effect of not having liked one of her children being overseas and too far away from her.
I contacted two agencies when I got back last week, and both responded very quickly, and both have been talking to me today and running short-lists past me. I have one other agency that I do have to contact later this week. This is so different from my reception in Singers.
I am staying at my sister's again tonight, but am hoping to move into a small apartment tomorrow; I am calling one back when it passes seven and an agent about another tomorrow morning. But that second one is unfurnished, so I have to make a couple of calls about furniture rental first. Boils down to one furnished one bedroom apartment just out of the CBD for $375 per week, or one two bedroom apartment in the CBD but unfurnished for $275. I have looked at one online furniture rental site and it quotes about $200 a week, but I phoned another guy and he said it was possible to get a package together for one hundred or less but to call after ten in the morning.
I think that the CBD apartment would be worth at least $400 a week to me including furniture, but it is limited to a two month rental only, whereas the other place could be extended unlimited. Still, you can get student apartments in the CBD for less than two hundred a week, often for only about one hundred; not as nice, true, but cheap.
Tuesday, June 23
Road Rage
Well, this is Adelaide. Within one hour of being in the city I had heard a few people blasting their car horns at others. Within a few days I had been the victim of road rage; my sister was driving us back from shopping and changed lanes to pass someone turning across rush hour trafic, she indicated, and this moron also changed lanes two cars behind but felt that he had some sort of unique right to the road and drove up alongside use to scream abuse, then had to drop back because his lane was blocked by a bus, but then sped up to get along again and hurl more foul language.
Welcome to South Australia!
This is what it is like these days.
Adelaidians are bad drivers, bad parkers, bad pedestrians.
They are rude, obnoxious, arogant, inconsiderate, and selfish.
If anything, they are worse than when I left.
Four days and I have arrived at this realisation.
I am using my sisters laptop, which has an expired Microsoft Office, so I can't spell check this; I feel "arogant" is wrong, but 'arrogant' seems just as wrong. Tomorrow I will load a copy of my home and small office Office on it, it is multi-license so it will be legit; but with one copy on my laptop and one on Ivy's it will be the final instal I can do.
Di, Mum, and I went to the central market today and Mum had a ball. Seriously, she loved it. She said 'cos it was clean and varied, not like when she used to go there when I was a kid. I bought lots of cheeses, which are so much cheaper here than in SG, and so much wider choice. And I cooked dinner whilst Mum and Di watched a movie. My signature dish; large cup mushrooms, spoon of oil rolled around inside to help the mass of the body cook, then fill with bechumel sauce, then cheese, then bake. I used three cheeses, two below, one on each half, then moz on top 'cos it melts so well. Also steamed vegies and rolled in butter and a little salt and pepper, and marinated some tofu (disolve honey in hot water, then add herbs and gentle spices, then add soy sauce) and fried slowly to ensure crispness.
Sleeping on Di's lounge room floor (on a spare mattress, again, that feels wrong with both spellings) whilst Mum has the spare room.
Will visit Maggie and Shaiby on the way back to Mum's tomorrow morning. Then a week at Mum's. Di and Carmel will be going down there next week for a one-night stay and I will come back with them.
So why are Adelaide drivers so bad?
I would say because Adelaide police are not doing their job as they are too focussed on taking bribes to look the other way from sex-slave traders, supressing political dissent, selling stolen drugs, and murdering the occasional intellectual. This is my personal experience. I would also add raping young women; but to be honest I have only personally come across that in my circle of friends in Melbourne.
But this doesn't explain why Adelaidians are also bad pedestrians.
They do exactly the same sort of stuff on foot paths that they do on roads.
So it must be psychological, as in some sort of generalised social neurosis.
This was one of the things that I wanted to be leaving behind me for good, and it is sad to have to come back to it. I have been on the road in four other countries so far, and no matter how much honking there was, there wasn't anywhere near the same level of aggression.
I emailed some contacts in agencies and texted some contacts in my network yesterday morning. My phone then spent the rest of the day running hot with reply texts and incoming calls, bar one who responded by email.
How different is that from my experiences in SG?????
In SG I never got to see anyone except the receptionist.
Here I had the manager of accountancy and finance calling me from the largest agency in town and spending nearly an hour talking to me, and I had a near instant response from the manager of all contracting from one of the smaller agencies. They explained the scene, the changes since I was here last, what effect the financial crisis had on both permanent and contract placements, and the impact on rates. All wonderful information that no one in SG could be bothered talking to me about. One is going to compile a list of clients to target for me and start calling them; "Kai is back in town". Those were his words.
It will be fascinating to see what comes from this.
Although I suspect that I might have to drop back to the sixty to seventy dollars an hour range for the next year or so. But in another year I expect the market to be fully recovered and project work to be proceeding again and I will be able to utilise my personal network for consulting positions through my private company rather than though an agency. The benefit is a near doubling of the rate; but I have to keep the majority of it in the company and can not use it for personal expenses.
So, all in all, sad, but interesting.
Oh, yeah. Some post scripts.
The Tietzer's is still hurting; I am taking aspirin a few times a day to hold it in check, but it doesn't seem to be going away.
I did have some sort of weird cold in the end, lasted the weekend, lots of nose blowing, and lots of blood. I have never seen so much blood come out of my nose without some sort of impact event preceding. Now almost all gone.
And I spent another day with Little Kai.
So that tidies up any loose ends from the preceding few posts.
As I am going down to my mother's farm and it has no internet connection (or mobile phone coverage) I shall be out of touch. So there probably won't be another post for a week, a week and a half. Since no one reads this it is off no great concern. If you are reading this then I seriously ask if you do not have better things that you could be doing with your time?
Welcome to South Australia!
This is what it is like these days.
Adelaidians are bad drivers, bad parkers, bad pedestrians.
They are rude, obnoxious, arogant, inconsiderate, and selfish.
If anything, they are worse than when I left.
Four days and I have arrived at this realisation.
I am using my sisters laptop, which has an expired Microsoft Office, so I can't spell check this; I feel "arogant" is wrong, but 'arrogant' seems just as wrong. Tomorrow I will load a copy of my home and small office Office on it, it is multi-license so it will be legit; but with one copy on my laptop and one on Ivy's it will be the final instal I can do.
Di, Mum, and I went to the central market today and Mum had a ball. Seriously, she loved it. She said 'cos it was clean and varied, not like when she used to go there when I was a kid. I bought lots of cheeses, which are so much cheaper here than in SG, and so much wider choice. And I cooked dinner whilst Mum and Di watched a movie. My signature dish; large cup mushrooms, spoon of oil rolled around inside to help the mass of the body cook, then fill with bechumel sauce, then cheese, then bake. I used three cheeses, two below, one on each half, then moz on top 'cos it melts so well. Also steamed vegies and rolled in butter and a little salt and pepper, and marinated some tofu (disolve honey in hot water, then add herbs and gentle spices, then add soy sauce) and fried slowly to ensure crispness.
Sleeping on Di's lounge room floor (on a spare mattress, again, that feels wrong with both spellings) whilst Mum has the spare room.
Will visit Maggie and Shaiby on the way back to Mum's tomorrow morning. Then a week at Mum's. Di and Carmel will be going down there next week for a one-night stay and I will come back with them.
So why are Adelaide drivers so bad?
I would say because Adelaide police are not doing their job as they are too focussed on taking bribes to look the other way from sex-slave traders, supressing political dissent, selling stolen drugs, and murdering the occasional intellectual. This is my personal experience. I would also add raping young women; but to be honest I have only personally come across that in my circle of friends in Melbourne.
But this doesn't explain why Adelaidians are also bad pedestrians.
They do exactly the same sort of stuff on foot paths that they do on roads.
So it must be psychological, as in some sort of generalised social neurosis.
This was one of the things that I wanted to be leaving behind me for good, and it is sad to have to come back to it. I have been on the road in four other countries so far, and no matter how much honking there was, there wasn't anywhere near the same level of aggression.
I emailed some contacts in agencies and texted some contacts in my network yesterday morning. My phone then spent the rest of the day running hot with reply texts and incoming calls, bar one who responded by email.
How different is that from my experiences in SG?????
In SG I never got to see anyone except the receptionist.
Here I had the manager of accountancy and finance calling me from the largest agency in town and spending nearly an hour talking to me, and I had a near instant response from the manager of all contracting from one of the smaller agencies. They explained the scene, the changes since I was here last, what effect the financial crisis had on both permanent and contract placements, and the impact on rates. All wonderful information that no one in SG could be bothered talking to me about. One is going to compile a list of clients to target for me and start calling them; "Kai is back in town". Those were his words.
It will be fascinating to see what comes from this.
Although I suspect that I might have to drop back to the sixty to seventy dollars an hour range for the next year or so. But in another year I expect the market to be fully recovered and project work to be proceeding again and I will be able to utilise my personal network for consulting positions through my private company rather than though an agency. The benefit is a near doubling of the rate; but I have to keep the majority of it in the company and can not use it for personal expenses.
So, all in all, sad, but interesting.
Oh, yeah. Some post scripts.
The Tietzer's is still hurting; I am taking aspirin a few times a day to hold it in check, but it doesn't seem to be going away.
I did have some sort of weird cold in the end, lasted the weekend, lots of nose blowing, and lots of blood. I have never seen so much blood come out of my nose without some sort of impact event preceding. Now almost all gone.
And I spent another day with Little Kai.
So that tidies up any loose ends from the preceding few posts.
As I am going down to my mother's farm and it has no internet connection (or mobile phone coverage) I shall be out of touch. So there probably won't be another post for a week, a week and a half. Since no one reads this it is off no great concern. If you are reading this then I seriously ask if you do not have better things that you could be doing with your time?
Saturday, June 20
Here I Stand
Well, here I am; back in Australia. My first morning, it is cold, but not wet; I will have to down copious amounts of vitamin C to stave off catching a cold or flu.
I spent most of yesterday with little Kai, who looks adorable. And this weekend I shall write emails to all of my contacts letting them know that I am back, and I shall see what ensues. Tuesday I will go down to mum's for a week.
But for now I am going to sleep again.
I spent most of yesterday with little Kai, who looks adorable. And this weekend I shall write emails to all of my contacts letting them know that I am back, and I shall see what ensues. Tuesday I will go down to mum's for a week.
But for now I am going to sleep again.
Thursday, June 18
Pain and Pain
Today is my last day here. My flight leaves just before midnight. The flat is empty except for the mattress I am sitting on and my suitcase, packed, in the next room. I don't want to go so much that it hurts, but what can I do?
I also hurt from the Tietzer's; I ran out of aspirin and started using nurefen (spelling?) but it is nowhere near as good. I have just come back from getting more aspirin as well as some anti-inflammatory the chemist said was stronger - I have taken it but don't feel that it is as good as aspirin, so in an another hour or so I will take the aspirin anyhow. It is Bayer, not as good as dispirin in my experience, but they don't have the good stuff here. Also found a net caf to print out my flight and hotel bookings.
Nothing much else to say; I hurt, and I hurt.
I also hurt from the Tietzer's; I ran out of aspirin and started using nurefen (spelling?) but it is nowhere near as good. I have just come back from getting more aspirin as well as some anti-inflammatory the chemist said was stronger - I have taken it but don't feel that it is as good as aspirin, so in an another hour or so I will take the aspirin anyhow. It is Bayer, not as good as dispirin in my experience, but they don't have the good stuff here. Also found a net caf to print out my flight and hotel bookings.
Nothing much else to say; I hurt, and I hurt.
Monday, June 15
Differences
The plan for today was to visit the Air Force Museum.
This involved bussing to Kallang MRT, then train to Eunos, then 194 to the museum.
Thence to discover that it is not open on Mondays.
I should have realised that would happen; I recall that the army museum is not open on Mondays, so it kind of figures. So I caught the 190 to Toa Payoh; this is a train/bus interchange.
What a major difference to the previous disaster of a bus station! This one made sense, the bus points had two routes each, not three, and they had coloured arrows tiled on the floor, red and yellow, so you knew exactly where lines went. Also the lines folded back, so the ends were near the starts and easy to get to as there was nobody queued up. This bus terminal was a joy to transit through.
Then into the city to find something to eat. Since everybody blogs about dining out; I ate at the Asian Civ Museum restaurant, Chino something or other, their selection of vegetarian was small, i.e. one; greek salad focaccia, this was so-so, too much aubergine and capsicum - these need to be peeled before being served! The drink, a 'sunset' was nice, for desert the chocolate brownie; the brownie was a bit dull but okay when drowned in cream and choc sauce, the ice cream was beautiful though. All for $40; a bit steep, huh?
Then a walk around Canning Hill; love that park.
But all in all, a day wasted, when I have so few left here.
This involved bussing to Kallang MRT, then train to Eunos, then 194 to the museum.
Thence to discover that it is not open on Mondays.
I should have realised that would happen; I recall that the army museum is not open on Mondays, so it kind of figures. So I caught the 190 to Toa Payoh; this is a train/bus interchange.
What a major difference to the previous disaster of a bus station! This one made sense, the bus points had two routes each, not three, and they had coloured arrows tiled on the floor, red and yellow, so you knew exactly where lines went. Also the lines folded back, so the ends were near the starts and easy to get to as there was nobody queued up. This bus terminal was a joy to transit through.
Then into the city to find something to eat. Since everybody blogs about dining out; I ate at the Asian Civ Museum restaurant, Chino something or other, their selection of vegetarian was small, i.e. one; greek salad focaccia, this was so-so, too much aubergine and capsicum - these need to be peeled before being served! The drink, a 'sunset' was nice, for desert the chocolate brownie; the brownie was a bit dull but okay when drowned in cream and choc sauce, the ice cream was beautiful though. All for $40; a bit steep, huh?
Then a walk around Canning Hill; love that park.
But all in all, a day wasted, when I have so few left here.
Hostility
God, Blogger.com can piss me off sometimes!
It keeps claiming that my cookies are turned off and takes me to some other page when I log in (by "keeps..." I don't mean always, just enough to piss me off). I have discovered that if I hit my shortcut to my blog again then I am still signed in and can then hit 'new post'. Just a mindless nuisance. My cookies are NOT turned off, and once I checked this page it sent me to and followed the instructions only to discover that all of my settings were as it was requesting ANYHOW.
Singapore can be very user hostile at times.
By that I define it as the opposite of user friendly, just in case you needed to be told that. I went to the zoo yesterday; someone gave me a free ticket and a little brochure. The brochure said that I could take the metro to Ang Mo Kio and then a 138 bus; so I take the metro (MRT for those who need to be told) to Ang Mo Kio and then walk out to the bus stop and, you guessed it - there is no 138. So I walk around trying to figure this out, give up, go back into the train station, which is raised so I can see down from the platform, and what do I see? A 138! Driving into a bus depot ACROSS THE ROAD under a multi-storey carpark. They didn't think to say in the zoo brochure that "you can catch the 138 FROM ACROSS THE ROAD", no, they just said catch it from the station.
But I was in the station then, so the next on the brochures list was to take the train to Woodlands and from there catch a 926. Taking the train to Woodlands was easy enough; finding the bus interchange at Woodlands was a major military undertaking! First come out of train station and see sign "buses this way", follow, keep heading in the direction, end up outside with no buses. Go back, notice a sign saying buses that way THAT IS SIDEWAYS TO THE WAY YOU ARE WALKING FROM THE FIRST SIGN!!!!! Head in this new direction, end up at a precipice, can see buses below but don't wish to jump 40 metres down to get to them. Head back, notice SIGN SIDEWAYS TO THE DIRECTION YOU ARE TRAVELLING FROM THE SECOND SIGN saying buses down there.
(You see? It would all work if you were walking backwards from where you want to be to where you start from.)
So now we are at the buses and finding the 926 stand is not hard. Figuring out which of the three lines is for the 926 is not possible unless you have a Chinese brain though. Three lines go this way, then they break, and then three lines go back again - BUT THEY ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE FIRST THREE LINES!!!! So I just wait to the side, and wait and wait and wait and wait...
The sign says that the 926 only operates on Sundays and yesterday was a Sunday. HOWEVER it would also appear that the 926 does not, in fact, operate on Sundays either. I give up and head up to find a taxi. The taxi stand is a long walk and it is hidden to one side of the complex. There are no taxis. I sit down to wait. Then I notice a little button on a pillar saying "press to summon taxi", I press, a taxi arrives in less than two minutes. I could have been waiting for hours before seeing this little notice though.
When it is time to come back I go to the bus stop at the zoo and what is the first bus to come along? A 927!!! Notice that, it was NOT a 926. And back at Woodlands bus interchange the 926 queue and the 927 queue are not next to each other, they are not even in sight of each other.
So many little things that would be so easy to do properly.
But which Singapore insists on doing arse-end first.
We have a saying in English about 'Chinese puzzles'; something that you cannot solve unless you can think Chinese-style. Sometimes Singapore seems to be one big Chinese puzzle to me.
I guess now you know why so many white guys here get Chinese girlfriends.
Without one you are just lost.
It keeps claiming that my cookies are turned off and takes me to some other page when I log in (by "keeps..." I don't mean always, just enough to piss me off). I have discovered that if I hit my shortcut to my blog again then I am still signed in and can then hit 'new post'. Just a mindless nuisance. My cookies are NOT turned off, and once I checked this page it sent me to and followed the instructions only to discover that all of my settings were as it was requesting ANYHOW.
Singapore can be very user hostile at times.
By that I define it as the opposite of user friendly, just in case you needed to be told that. I went to the zoo yesterday; someone gave me a free ticket and a little brochure. The brochure said that I could take the metro to Ang Mo Kio and then a 138 bus; so I take the metro (MRT for those who need to be told) to Ang Mo Kio and then walk out to the bus stop and, you guessed it - there is no 138. So I walk around trying to figure this out, give up, go back into the train station, which is raised so I can see down from the platform, and what do I see? A 138! Driving into a bus depot ACROSS THE ROAD under a multi-storey carpark. They didn't think to say in the zoo brochure that "you can catch the 138 FROM ACROSS THE ROAD", no, they just said catch it from the station.
But I was in the station then, so the next on the brochures list was to take the train to Woodlands and from there catch a 926. Taking the train to Woodlands was easy enough; finding the bus interchange at Woodlands was a major military undertaking! First come out of train station and see sign "buses this way", follow, keep heading in the direction, end up outside with no buses. Go back, notice a sign saying buses that way THAT IS SIDEWAYS TO THE WAY YOU ARE WALKING FROM THE FIRST SIGN!!!!! Head in this new direction, end up at a precipice, can see buses below but don't wish to jump 40 metres down to get to them. Head back, notice SIGN SIDEWAYS TO THE DIRECTION YOU ARE TRAVELLING FROM THE SECOND SIGN saying buses down there.
(You see? It would all work if you were walking backwards from where you want to be to where you start from.)
So now we are at the buses and finding the 926 stand is not hard. Figuring out which of the three lines is for the 926 is not possible unless you have a Chinese brain though. Three lines go this way, then they break, and then three lines go back again - BUT THEY ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE FIRST THREE LINES!!!! So I just wait to the side, and wait and wait and wait and wait...
The sign says that the 926 only operates on Sundays and yesterday was a Sunday. HOWEVER it would also appear that the 926 does not, in fact, operate on Sundays either. I give up and head up to find a taxi. The taxi stand is a long walk and it is hidden to one side of the complex. There are no taxis. I sit down to wait. Then I notice a little button on a pillar saying "press to summon taxi", I press, a taxi arrives in less than two minutes. I could have been waiting for hours before seeing this little notice though.
When it is time to come back I go to the bus stop at the zoo and what is the first bus to come along? A 927!!! Notice that, it was NOT a 926. And back at Woodlands bus interchange the 926 queue and the 927 queue are not next to each other, they are not even in sight of each other.
So many little things that would be so easy to do properly.
But which Singapore insists on doing arse-end first.
We have a saying in English about 'Chinese puzzles'; something that you cannot solve unless you can think Chinese-style. Sometimes Singapore seems to be one big Chinese puzzle to me.
I guess now you know why so many white guys here get Chinese girlfriends.
Without one you are just lost.
Monday, June 8
Tsetse Attack!
No, not really, not tsetse flies; tietze.
Interestingly tsetses have existed mostly unchanged for over 30,000,000 years, but they are not the subject of this post. No, I forgot in my last post to mention that I have had a tietze attack. I suffer from Tietze's Syndrome, it is an inflammation of the cartilage where it joins to the ribs. It can strike either the front, where the ribs join in the centre of the chest, or the back, where they join to the spine, or the lower middle of the chest where the floating ribs end and lengths of cartilage then continue to the central join.
So this here cartilage join get inflamed and hurts. To be specific, they hurt when they move, such as getting up or down, or lying on them, or breathing if it is really bad. I have had a pain in my lower right chest for a couple of weeks but it didn't click since I haven't had an attack for over a year. But when it started to get bad it was obvious what it was, so up I got to have a mid-night snack then a couple of aspirin. Breakfast was followed by a couple of aspirin, and lunch was followed by a couple of aspirin. Aspirin, you see, is a very strong anti-inflammatory, brutal, but strong. And now it is mostly gone.
What causes it? Google it and you will get twenty different answers. It is a 'syndrome', which means no-one knows what causes it, just what the symptoms are. I tend to agree with the virus theory; I think it is like warts. Apparently the wart virus lives in all of us, but usually the body's defences keep it down, every now and then for unknown reasons you get a little outbreak of the virus on your skin and a wart appears. I find that milk thistle works really well, also I have had success with hypnosis - any hypnotic routine that includes a cleansing visualisation will clear up any warts that I might have. So I think that this tietze thing is a virus that once it is in you it can never be gotten rid of, only 'managed'. And I manage it by hitting it hard with aspirin whenever I become aware of an inflammation.
I had my first attack when I was in my mid thirties, but I have never had it so severe since because now I recognise it. So this one took a while for me to notice, but sometimes the inflammations go down on their own, so it is not until it hurts to an inconvenient degree, such as hurting when I lie on my side, that I know a) that it is tietze, and b) that I have to hit it with aspirin.
Remember to always eat before taking aspirin; otherwise it does bad things to your stomach lining.
Interestingly tsetses have existed mostly unchanged for over 30,000,000 years, but they are not the subject of this post. No, I forgot in my last post to mention that I have had a tietze attack. I suffer from Tietze's Syndrome, it is an inflammation of the cartilage where it joins to the ribs. It can strike either the front, where the ribs join in the centre of the chest, or the back, where they join to the spine, or the lower middle of the chest where the floating ribs end and lengths of cartilage then continue to the central join.
So this here cartilage join get inflamed and hurts. To be specific, they hurt when they move, such as getting up or down, or lying on them, or breathing if it is really bad. I have had a pain in my lower right chest for a couple of weeks but it didn't click since I haven't had an attack for over a year. But when it started to get bad it was obvious what it was, so up I got to have a mid-night snack then a couple of aspirin. Breakfast was followed by a couple of aspirin, and lunch was followed by a couple of aspirin. Aspirin, you see, is a very strong anti-inflammatory, brutal, but strong. And now it is mostly gone.
What causes it? Google it and you will get twenty different answers. It is a 'syndrome', which means no-one knows what causes it, just what the symptoms are. I tend to agree with the virus theory; I think it is like warts. Apparently the wart virus lives in all of us, but usually the body's defences keep it down, every now and then for unknown reasons you get a little outbreak of the virus on your skin and a wart appears. I find that milk thistle works really well, also I have had success with hypnosis - any hypnotic routine that includes a cleansing visualisation will clear up any warts that I might have. So I think that this tietze thing is a virus that once it is in you it can never be gotten rid of, only 'managed'. And I manage it by hitting it hard with aspirin whenever I become aware of an inflammation.
I had my first attack when I was in my mid thirties, but I have never had it so severe since because now I recognise it. So this one took a while for me to notice, but sometimes the inflammations go down on their own, so it is not until it hurts to an inconvenient degree, such as hurting when I lie on my side, that I know a) that it is tietze, and b) that I have to hit it with aspirin.
Remember to always eat before taking aspirin; otherwise it does bad things to your stomach lining.
Parcel Post
Heh heh, there should be some actual bearing of that title with something in this post if I remember to write it.
So, busy few days. My agent friend Ivy has found new tenants for this flat, so I get my bond back. I used the diplomatic clause to cut out at the six month point, which lets me give one month notice or pay that months rent in lieu. Chose latter, and was going to forfeit the bond for that. But now will get it back, also Ivy has sold my furniture so get a couple of hundred for that as well.
Have to sort out what accounts hold what money before I book flights and hotel back there. Everyone has offered to pick me up from the airport, but the city council provides a free shuttle mini-bus to the CBD and drops you off in front of your hotel. I will probably book a room in the Chiffley on South Tce as it's quite cheap. Stay a few days to sort stuff out, then mum wants me to visit her for a week. Might take Radar down as well, then we can both help Noel with any stuff on the farm and we can network my two computers and play into the night. Then back to the Chifley (one 'f' or two?) until I get a new contract and some cash in the bank.
I am planning then on taking a studio apartment in the city centre so I can walk to work and don't have to maintain a car. So my dog stays with my ex (cos he is happy with her and I don't want to keep disorienting him by taking him back) and my car stays with my mum. But for the price that a modest apartment in SG would set me back I can have a HUGE two level apartment with its own roof garden in Adelaide. So maybe I will...
Anyhow, I have managed to collect rather a lot of books in my short stay here; they fill a large storage box. So will need to send them, some software, some clothes, maybe a few oddments, back by courier. Have looked at SingPost, DHL, and FedEx; looked at a few others, but these three are the ones that survived the first elimination. FedEx seems to be cheaper and offer more options. I just want to send one box, maybe 25 kilos, by surface - it doesn't have to be express by air, the time is not important, it can take a week or a month, I don't care, but do you think anybody's website offers these options? No, it is all air express for hundreds of dollars. Still, since FedEx has passed the first hurdle I will go to one of their offices and ask. Best for DHL or SingPost seems to be over three hundred, best from FedEx seems to be less than two hundred.
I will be SO GLAD to be out of this HDB. Not that it is any worse than the non-HDB apartment that I was in before, but that was not a 'condo'. But it will be nice to be somewhere clean and quiet, and by that I mean the city, the suburb, the estate, the general environs. I am sure that there are plenty of such places in Singers, just that I haven't lived in one yet.
It will take a while to get used to working again I guess. I took seven months off work a few years ago and moved back into work afterwards quite easily, so maybe it will be okay (by a "few years ago" I mean the time between the two breaks was more than two but less than three). In fact, given how much I earn (in Australia that is, having established that I can not survive on what Singapore offers) I can easily take six months off every other year. So maybe I will just go back and do a couple of contracts then go live in Hong Kong for six months. Then back to Oz to work for a year or two before trying an extended holiday in Seoul. I could get used to such a life style for a while. There are parts of it that won't work for me; I really want to be out of Australia on a permanent basis since I think that Western culture and society is going down the gurgler, and I really want to be in some sort of permanent relationship that leads to children. But we have to settle for the best that we can, and maybe experiencing the world this way is the best that I can hope for?
So, busy few days. My agent friend Ivy has found new tenants for this flat, so I get my bond back. I used the diplomatic clause to cut out at the six month point, which lets me give one month notice or pay that months rent in lieu. Chose latter, and was going to forfeit the bond for that. But now will get it back, also Ivy has sold my furniture so get a couple of hundred for that as well.
Have to sort out what accounts hold what money before I book flights and hotel back there. Everyone has offered to pick me up from the airport, but the city council provides a free shuttle mini-bus to the CBD and drops you off in front of your hotel. I will probably book a room in the Chiffley on South Tce as it's quite cheap. Stay a few days to sort stuff out, then mum wants me to visit her for a week. Might take Radar down as well, then we can both help Noel with any stuff on the farm and we can network my two computers and play into the night. Then back to the Chifley (one 'f' or two?) until I get a new contract and some cash in the bank.
I am planning then on taking a studio apartment in the city centre so I can walk to work and don't have to maintain a car. So my dog stays with my ex (cos he is happy with her and I don't want to keep disorienting him by taking him back) and my car stays with my mum. But for the price that a modest apartment in SG would set me back I can have a HUGE two level apartment with its own roof garden in Adelaide. So maybe I will...
Anyhow, I have managed to collect rather a lot of books in my short stay here; they fill a large storage box. So will need to send them, some software, some clothes, maybe a few oddments, back by courier. Have looked at SingPost, DHL, and FedEx; looked at a few others, but these three are the ones that survived the first elimination. FedEx seems to be cheaper and offer more options. I just want to send one box, maybe 25 kilos, by surface - it doesn't have to be express by air, the time is not important, it can take a week or a month, I don't care, but do you think anybody's website offers these options? No, it is all air express for hundreds of dollars. Still, since FedEx has passed the first hurdle I will go to one of their offices and ask. Best for DHL or SingPost seems to be over three hundred, best from FedEx seems to be less than two hundred.
I will be SO GLAD to be out of this HDB. Not that it is any worse than the non-HDB apartment that I was in before, but that was not a 'condo'. But it will be nice to be somewhere clean and quiet, and by that I mean the city, the suburb, the estate, the general environs. I am sure that there are plenty of such places in Singers, just that I haven't lived in one yet.
It will take a while to get used to working again I guess. I took seven months off work a few years ago and moved back into work afterwards quite easily, so maybe it will be okay (by a "few years ago" I mean the time between the two breaks was more than two but less than three). In fact, given how much I earn (in Australia that is, having established that I can not survive on what Singapore offers) I can easily take six months off every other year. So maybe I will just go back and do a couple of contracts then go live in Hong Kong for six months. Then back to Oz to work for a year or two before trying an extended holiday in Seoul. I could get used to such a life style for a while. There are parts of it that won't work for me; I really want to be out of Australia on a permanent basis since I think that Western culture and society is going down the gurgler, and I really want to be in some sort of permanent relationship that leads to children. But we have to settle for the best that we can, and maybe experiencing the world this way is the best that I can hope for?
Thursday, June 4
Response Time Zero
You have probably figured out by now that my post titles are usually just words to fill the space. Why does each blog posting have to have a title?
Anyhow, to an issue that has been mentioned here a few times over the last couple of months. I have thought about this, and think that maybe they did not ride in on my socks and shoes from a park bench at East Coast Park. Maybe yes, maybe no. Just want to put this as an option, but am thinking now that is perhaps more likely that they simply are coming from the mob of [deleted] in the flat next door. They were most numerous at the foot of my bed, which is closest to the door, and more numerous in the cushions of my computer chair, which is closer to the front door than the bedroom. Anyhow, some interesting tips from web-searching; double-sided tape around the legs of beds (and other clothing holding furnitures) and move bed a bit away from wall so doesn't touch, and spray with "V-Safe" which can get from NTUC. Normally I would not shop somewhere owned by communists, but Baygon wasn't working to perfection. (Yes, "communists", well now you know how right-wing I am, don't you?)
I am in the process of dismantling this apartment. Yes, part of that was to spray everything yet again. But more also just to attempt the dual task of cleaning up and preparing for travel. So already about half of my manchester has been thrown. I am guessing that close to half of my clothes will be thrown out as well, and I have started to sort shirts accordingly. I have also thrown out some stuff that came with me from Oz, and am defining what I got here goes with me and what goes down the chute. Ivy is coming over tomorrow with her kids, principally to play Monopoly 'cos I have a chocolate monopoly game that my sis got me for xmas and needs to be used before I go back. But she will also be collecting my HP laptop and my printer (do you need to be told that it is a Canon? I only said "HP" to differentiate the two laptops; the Asus is going back to Oz with me). The landlady appears to be buying the furniture (such as it is) and the fridge, microwave, electric oven, kettles, etc., etc., etc., the money side of that transaction is irrelevant to me. And I will be sending some clothes and a heap of books and PC games back by courier.
The is some stuff going around in my head that I want to write, but for two things:
1) I am still trying to sort it out, and
2) my bum is sore from sitting on this (now cushionless) chair for too long.
I will see if I post again later today.
Anyhow, to an issue that has been mentioned here a few times over the last couple of months. I have thought about this, and think that maybe they did not ride in on my socks and shoes from a park bench at East Coast Park. Maybe yes, maybe no. Just want to put this as an option, but am thinking now that is perhaps more likely that they simply are coming from the mob of [deleted] in the flat next door. They were most numerous at the foot of my bed, which is closest to the door, and more numerous in the cushions of my computer chair, which is closer to the front door than the bedroom. Anyhow, some interesting tips from web-searching; double-sided tape around the legs of beds (and other clothing holding furnitures) and move bed a bit away from wall so doesn't touch, and spray with "V-Safe" which can get from NTUC. Normally I would not shop somewhere owned by communists, but Baygon wasn't working to perfection. (Yes, "communists", well now you know how right-wing I am, don't you?)
I am in the process of dismantling this apartment. Yes, part of that was to spray everything yet again. But more also just to attempt the dual task of cleaning up and preparing for travel. So already about half of my manchester has been thrown. I am guessing that close to half of my clothes will be thrown out as well, and I have started to sort shirts accordingly. I have also thrown out some stuff that came with me from Oz, and am defining what I got here goes with me and what goes down the chute. Ivy is coming over tomorrow with her kids, principally to play Monopoly 'cos I have a chocolate monopoly game that my sis got me for xmas and needs to be used before I go back. But she will also be collecting my HP laptop and my printer (do you need to be told that it is a Canon? I only said "HP" to differentiate the two laptops; the Asus is going back to Oz with me). The landlady appears to be buying the furniture (such as it is) and the fridge, microwave, electric oven, kettles, etc., etc., etc., the money side of that transaction is irrelevant to me. And I will be sending some clothes and a heap of books and PC games back by courier.
The is some stuff going around in my head that I want to write, but for two things:
1) I am still trying to sort it out, and
2) my bum is sore from sitting on this (now cushionless) chair for too long.
I will see if I post again later today.
Monday, June 1
Yyeeeehcckkk!
This got me so mad that I had to blog it straight away!
But having turned on my laptop (balanced precariously on a pillow on the bed in the guest room...) I had to first clear out my email, so now I have calmed down a bit.
When I sat down to post ads for this flat at a couple more sites I noticed that I was scratching the back of my right upper thigh a lot. So I stood up and checked it, new bites, lots of them! So I turned my pyjamas inside out but nothing there, and I have checked my bed and bedroom to pieces so I didn't feel like doing that again. This called for some lateral thinking!
It happened yesterday or the day before as well I thought. But I haven't been anywhere, and it is the back of my right leg both times, weird. Unless, maybe it is where I was sitting all day? So I look at the cushion on the seat by my laptop. Nothing. So I look at the cushion under that one (two cushions 'cos I've been sitting there all day sometimes), I turn it over... BUGS!
In one corner, a mass of them, and different from the last type of bug.
So where did these come from?
There is no way that you can convince me that I happened to sit somewhere that had bugs on the seat and they rode home on my shorts in the last couple of days. I haven't been anywhere for the last few days, I most definitely haven't been down to the beach. No, the only explanation that I can think of is the mass of [deleted due to SG's delicate racial harmony laws :)] next door above the $2 shop ("buy one, free one"). Especially as my computer desk was so close to the front door. So I cleaned out the entrance hall and sprayed around the doors, both the front and the one to the dentists (also in the entrance hall).
Lesson learned: do not live in an HDB! If you are going to migrate to Singers then make sure that you rent an apartment in a clean condo, in a clean street, in a clean suburb.
Anyhow, both cushions got sprayed then into a garbage bag and tied tightly then down the garbage shoot (egads! maybe that's where...). And now my laptop is balanced precariously on a pillow as I sit cross-legged on the guest bed.
I am definitely not sad to be leaving this.
But having turned on my laptop (balanced precariously on a pillow on the bed in the guest room...) I had to first clear out my email, so now I have calmed down a bit.
When I sat down to post ads for this flat at a couple more sites I noticed that I was scratching the back of my right upper thigh a lot. So I stood up and checked it, new bites, lots of them! So I turned my pyjamas inside out but nothing there, and I have checked my bed and bedroom to pieces so I didn't feel like doing that again. This called for some lateral thinking!
It happened yesterday or the day before as well I thought. But I haven't been anywhere, and it is the back of my right leg both times, weird. Unless, maybe it is where I was sitting all day? So I look at the cushion on the seat by my laptop. Nothing. So I look at the cushion under that one (two cushions 'cos I've been sitting there all day sometimes), I turn it over... BUGS!
In one corner, a mass of them, and different from the last type of bug.
So where did these come from?
There is no way that you can convince me that I happened to sit somewhere that had bugs on the seat and they rode home on my shorts in the last couple of days. I haven't been anywhere for the last few days, I most definitely haven't been down to the beach. No, the only explanation that I can think of is the mass of [deleted due to SG's delicate racial harmony laws :)] next door above the $2 shop ("buy one, free one"). Especially as my computer desk was so close to the front door. So I cleaned out the entrance hall and sprayed around the doors, both the front and the one to the dentists (also in the entrance hall).
Lesson learned: do not live in an HDB! If you are going to migrate to Singers then make sure that you rent an apartment in a clean condo, in a clean street, in a clean suburb.
Anyhow, both cushions got sprayed then into a garbage bag and tied tightly then down the garbage shoot (egads! maybe that's where...). And now my laptop is balanced precariously on a pillow as I sit cross-legged on the guest bed.
I am definitely not sad to be leaving this.
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