The Day After Yesterday

Hi, just keeping you in the loop.
Just posting to keep my blog alive.
Absolutely nothing has happened to comment on.
But I will still. After all, this is a commentary...

Did some ironing. Did four shirts before getting into the ones that I brought back last time I was in Oz. Decided they needed washing again, so saved from doing more ironing. Have noticed that the kitchen floor drain, which sits vertically like a semi-circle below the kitchen sink, is making a little puddle every time the kitchen sink is emptied.

It is getting hotter. It is 28 inside rather than the usual 26, and my air-con is set at 23 rather than the usual 25. Something that I will just have to get used to.

Have tried a new protein drink, EAS, got from GNC. I am a member so I get them 2-for-1, but chocolate whey protein was only available in the larger, 5 pound, containers, so two of them. Didn't want strawberry as I don't like artificial strawberry. The GNC brand vanilla is okay, and okay to mix with chocolate. But I wanted to try a different brand, it was slightly cheaper, but the taste is not as good as the GNC brand. Not that any whey protein drink tastes that great, and I will be mixing this with Milo to make it palatable. That is 'Australian formula' Milo, which does not quite taste like Australian Milo, but tastes a hell of a lot better than the foreign Milo - which tastes like Ovaltine. It's kind of like comparing Vegemite (which, you guessed it, I am missing soooo much!) with something like Promite or whatever.

I would like to try the soy protein drinks, but you don't get the member's 2-for-1 deal therefore they are, effectively, twice the price. But I just won a 'buy one item at half price' draw at the GNC store - I could, therefore, try the soy protein drink. Except that I now have ten pounds of EAS whey protein drink to get through...

Am trying a new sleeping pill; a tiny little red one. It seemed to work last night, but the bitch next door wasn't too bad. I think that I might have gotten to sleep before midnight, I was certainly awake before six (as was she). It will be a minor battle to re-establish my sleeping patterns after the week-long illness threw them totally out of whack.

Have discovered that I have close to sixty thousand in my AMP super. This means that I have earned a bit over $600k in the last eight years contracting, and most of that will have come in the second half - for the last few years my income was roughly doubling every year. Now this is not an amount that will make one jot of difference to my future retirement, and with technically about twenty years to go until said retirement is officially on the cards there is no way at that rate that any decent amount to retire on could be amassed. However; if I get a job here then I have reasonable cause to use the 'never returning to Australia' clause and get my hands on it directly. In that sense it could be a useful amount. It would be more useful right now, but that is not an option - unless I lied, which I am not of a mind to do, ever.

I have at least one other super account, the one via the Hays agency, and I should get that rolled into the AMP account to simplify my life one tiny little bit.

My Adult Friend Finder account runs out late this month. A gold account and I paid for standard members to be able to contact me free. So far this has been a big disappointment, I did it on the slight chance that I could nab a girl friend before arriving in SG. Naturally that did not happen. Nor have I nabbed a girlfriend with it in the six months of being here. I thought it was running out end of last month (they gave me a free extra month) and so wrote it off in my mind, but now that it is there for that little bit longer I am actually using it differently. I am using it to contact girls (no kidding...) for friendship rather than explicitly for any sexual/emotional relationship. Just nice, sane sounding people to communicate with.

Oh, and a hot Russian babe. But that's a different story...

One of the SG blogs that I often check out is Mr Miyagi (aka Benjamin Lee) a (how shall I put this) self-gender focused guy that seems to really dislike Xianity. (I really don't like saying 'gay' because the word has a meaning in the English language that I don't want 'queers' to hijack.) Normally I find his site okay and I don't mind the anti-Xian stuff that emerges sometimes because, as you know, I totally hate Xianity. But I read a letter by a young boy to the Straits Times the other weekend complaining about a play that Mr Lee has written that makes, according to the letter writer, a lot of negative comment on Chinese women that marry Europeans (I also hate the term 'Caucasian', which is used in the letter). I had never noticed this in the Miyagi site, but I am concerned if he might be another anti-White racist that Singers seems to have so many of. I have kind of gone off Babe Logic and Sheena's Little Fragments of Time because of the anti-men stances they sometimes take. After all, why read a blog by someone that doesn't like you?

Did not like F.E.A.R. 2, Red Alert 3, or Dawn of War 2.
Went back to playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and Dawn of War 1 SoulStorm.

Don't like either Stalker game once it goes linear. You know; when you start chasing Strelok and you can't go back into previous maps. I would like a free roaming type of Stalker. There is space on the strategic map for sixteen game maps, but they used less than half in each game. So, all sixteen regions and no over plot, just stalking, mercing, and the factions war.

I met this Duty party and noticed that one of them was carrying an MG; I think it is a PKM (with a 100 round belt in a clip-on), anyhow when you wipe out the army base at the start of the Cordon map you can't take the MG. So I thought, why not try here...
So I shot him in the head at point blank range and 'F'ed to pick it up.
Bingo! Worked, except that the rest of his party were shooting me...
So I reloaded (I had 'F5'ed just before this, of course), went off to do something with Freedom, then tried hunting out another Duty party with an PKM.
None anywhere!
Minutes before it was like every three man Duty team had one PKM, now suddenly none of them did. Just when I decided I wanted to single-handedly take on Duty. (I didn't join Freedom; well I quick saved, joined Freedom to find out what that was like, then quick loaded to go take on Duty by myself.)

I noticed that this time the bandits in the Garbage were hostile to me, whereas last time I played I could enter their base and trade. If you wipe out everyone in the base then the traders vanish, but then some more bandits mysteriously appear at the back of the shed in a few minutes and the base is back in operations again.
Also, I wiped out the Cordon army base a few times. It is a great source of rifles, and therefore a good way to build up some cash. But it only replenishes three or four times, after that it stays empty :(

As for the benefits of the last patch:
It made no difference to the sky going vomit when you enter the Red Forest map.
I did not experience bad physics like things falling through floors, but I didn't put anything on roofs anyhow, so I wouldn't have noticed.
It introduced corrupted quick saves, which I have read about, but not experienced myself before. (Not all quick saves, only a few went bad.)
It added invisible people; you can see the icon for an important character on the minimap, but not in front of you. Quick save, then quick load, and suddenly the character is standing in front of you, and there are a lot of other people standing around that were non-existent a minute before.
So, all in all, it made no improvements that I noticed, whilst it added a few new problems. A big fail. It's like these guys are amateurs, and don't do any testing. I had no problems with the first Stalker, but the second is the worst game programming I have ever experienced.
Despite that it is a great game.
Just wish they would hire a reasonable programmer.