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.