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.

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?

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.

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.