Whatever

Probably won't be the last time that I use that for a title.

Nearly two and a half months without blogging. It roughly equates to the time I was at Santos, it was kind of soul-sapping. It wasn't a 'bad' place to work, just dull, the people insipid. Okay, the system setup is bad, their account string is cripplingly short, they have just expanded it, to something that is still cripplingly short, their OLAP setup is criminally bad, seriously, the implementation consultant (UXC) should never do that again, and won't, since they have withdrawn from that market.

The other contractors there have told me that they all feel that they get the cold shoulder from the employees as well, one woman transferred to permanent but it took a few months before people warmed to her. They just don't go to lunch together, and don't give the time of day to contractors. It is not a 'friendly' place. Also it is not nice for other reasons; they wank on about their focus on safety, but don't have mirrors on the ceiling at blind junctions in the corridor. Other than that, whilst the building is nice and open, very light and airy; the top floors get very hot and the aircon doesn't cut it. Their elevators have no fan and stay closed all day, so during summer they get very hot and stuffy; I could walk to work very early whilst the day was still quite cool, and then the five minute ride up in the elevator just standing still got me covered in perspiration!

All of this, of course, is on top of the fact that they pay shit.
This is the third time that I have interacted with them, the first time that I have taken a contract with them, and only because I knew that there was nothing else on the market at the beginning of this year. But now I have a week off and then on to something that pays a little more than half as much again.


We have recently voted here in little South Australia. I did my usual draw a little box at the bottom and tick it then write next to it "none of the above". In the lower house anyhow, in the upper house where there are far more options I did my usual start by putting the socialists last and then arrange the other fifty-odd choices in the order they least offended me. Putting people at the front that might provide the most entertainment should they get in.


Steam, ah Steam, it is a good thing to have an app that lets me buy a new computer in a new country and just go online and reinstall a big swag of games. It is a bad thing that I pay for a bunch of games but cannot play them for two weeks because Valve can't be bothered providing the servers required to handle the traffic they force the app to generate. I am seriously thinking about using cracked servers. And I don't particularly like the new look either.


I am coming up on my third monthly rent payment not being paid. I gave up asking for the fridge to be fixed, and being promised by the manager that it was happening soon, and stopped paying rent. I thought that this would get a quick resolution, but this week I will be not paying for the third month. I never saw that coming!


I have had another unauthorised transaction on my credit card. I suspect that it is the Adult Friend Finders company; I joined their site some years ago but did not renew. I think that they have dug through their records and hit old credit cards hoping that they don't get noticed, and in truth it wasn't for a while. Now I am having that battle with the National Australia Bank where they say that they are not involved in any agreements that I make with a merchant for automatic deductions and I have to take it up with the merchant. To which I responded that I don't really know who the merchant is!

I am in the process of moving all of my business to HSBC and will soon close the NAB accounts anyhow, but along the way I wanted to open a Citibank credit account 'cos they had a really good deal with a Singapore Airlines rewards programme, but now that I am actually doing it I can't find it on the Citibank Australia site and the only answer I get from them is that I can transfer my reward points at a rate of 1.5 to 1.0 to any airline programme. The old programme offered 1.5 points for every dollar spent, now they making this generic offer that is worth 0.66 whilst they have moved their main linkage to Qantas. I live in Adelaide, Qantas doesn't fly direct out of Adelaide, a Qantas program does not grab my attention. My friend has opened an account with Westpac because they have a SingAir offer and he is suggesting that I do the same. Certainly Citi is not offering anything that will get my business.

I have gone full vegan; my neice talked me into it over xmas. I am not finding it difficult in that I am not missing anything and I can cook dinner without much hassle (takeaway pizza and grating cheese over pasta are the two biggest loses) but I am noticing that it is MUCH harder to eat out. Well, eat out in Australia, I did comment previously on being vegetarian in Singapore that it would be so easy to go full vegan there, and indeed I did think about doing so. I find this an interesting comparison between our culinary cultures.


I have played through Stalker 3 again, this time choosing to stay and not depart with the military team, and thus enter the free form part of the game, but I am finding it kind of boring. I have the best guns, the best suit, the best artefacts, I have killed the best monsters; what else is there to do? I was pondering just killing all of the bandits. I would love to be able to shoot Sultan, but you are not allowed to draw guns in the bases, huh, what's with that? Also, whilst in the previous ones I tended towards Freedom, I find in this one that I cannot help but work with Duty; Freedom is just presented as bad guys too much, so maybe I will try and take out Freedom. But again, you can't shoot in the base, so how? It took several attempts to wipe out the Duty base in Stalker 2, I had to make sure that I had killed every duty member outside of the base before the base would stay dead. And I couldn't get the bandit base to stay dead at all.

Some of the forums commented that there were no bugs in Stalker 3. Dream on, maybe nowhere as bad as 2, but still more than any other commercially available game that I have ever seen. Yet despite this the Stalker series remains my favourite shooters, despite the huge log of often quite pathetic bugs, and bugs that often seriously impact upon game play, the story line, the setting, the realism, the weapons offered, and the repair/upgrade style all add up to more fun.

I tried playing Wolfenstein recently, I thought it was a copy of Escape from... that I had lying around, but it turned out to be a new game, next in the series, next generation graphics etc., etc. that someone had given me and just hadn't played for who-knows-how-long. But it had a boss level that was too crazy, I hate bosses in games like that, it is a stupid interruption of the storyline. Anyhow I searched and found a cheat to get through it, except that it doesn't work in older windows and I can't play it on my laptop at the moment for various reasons. So that went unfinished.


Anyhow, I should get some lunch, then go down to the bank and ask for the forms to deal with an unauthorised transaction since the link their online people sent me had nothing and their call centre just kept me hanging for twenty minutes. Whilst I let Steam update C&C4, which I have only recently bought and must be onlined to play (it stores your progress on a server, disconnect and you have to start the campaign again!) and yet Steam insists on spending half a day to 'update' before I am allowed to play.