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.
Monday, August 31
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
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