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