Remember Me

So, the little "Remember Me" tick on this thing doesn't work, at least on XP.

On Vista I have so many damned things prompting me with stored passwords I wouldn't know if it was the Blogger site remembering, Vista, or the Asus.

I was offline over the weekend. I blew up my modem, well, I was setting up my desktop and moved the modem and the plug pulled out and when I stuck it back in there was a little blue flash and then the modem's lights went out. Turns out it only needed a reset, and there is a reset button recessed and hidden, not where the Telstra person said it was, but knowing it was somewhere I just kept searching, and it worked. But I need a new cable since that one has its little clicky bit broken off.

Why is it that most of the female project managers that I have had to work with are so forgettable? I am being polite; something more along the lines of "wouldn't want to work with again" would describe it more accurately. They just don't seem to make good leaders; don't have vision, can't form strategies, can't manage people. Sure, not all of the males have been that good; but 1) most were okay, and 2) few were as bad as most of the females have been.

Did I tell you about the time one was so bad that when our team was talking about who to ask to have replace her I suggested we use a teddy bear? Couldn't have been any worse. After the team stopped laughing and asked for a serious answer I pointed out the cute Chinese girl that was junior to everyone in the Finance area. All she had to do was be a channel for communications, take minutes, and do what I told her to do / say what I told her to say (to management) and she would have been fine. Seriously.

The number of times that I have been 'managed' by someone paid less than half what I get can't be counted. What do you expect when a project team is composed of subject experts brought in just for the project but the project manager is the person in-house that is not too busy with other stuff? It is not a bad thing, and most experts are so wrapped up in what they are doing that they don't notice, and really, the pm's job is mostly communication. Most of the time anyhow. People skills - that is what is important for a team leader. And everybody always says that women have people skills.

You know what I think that it is? The women that have all been good pms have been professionals, consultants, well paid. The women that have been bad pms have all been, shall we say, not so professional, internal, not that impressively paid. Maybe women panic when they feel out of their depth. (Hell, when they are out of their depth.)

Remember when I was at my last contract and I said that the largest consultancy in the state (one of the biggest in the country) had asked me to speak with them? Never heard anything more. I suspect that it was just a bit of bait to try and get me to wheedle them a deal from the inside. Chalk that up as a learning experience.

Here is something that hurts; when you take a new rental here you have to pay up six weeks rent as bond and two weeks rent in advance, then two weeks later you have to pay a months rent. So twelve weeks rent paid in two weeks. All this before you get your bond back from the previous rental. Ouch! Well done South Australia.

Odd thing; the SA Government body that takes bonds is very quick about taking your money, but rather slow about giving it back. Never thought that did you?

I was in the bank the other day, and the woman helping me felt the need to get quite personal, as in tell me her life story. Asian woman, went on about how she wants to be a good wife, loves her husband, wants to serve him. Later was saying something about being loving and subservient. The whole discussion (one sided) went on for longer than I really wanted, but I was intrigued by the thought processes that you will never see in an Anglo woman. Can you imagine an Australian woman (at least one younger than fifty) talking about being happy with her destiny to serve her husband? Kind of like the times Eastern European women have prefaced their expression of an opinion to me with "just being a woman, but...". It may be dead feminine, it may melt your heart and threaten to instantly enthral you, but it is definitely something that you will never hear from an Anglo bitch.

One thing about Rome Total War - Total Realism is that it does have a habit of corrupting the autosaves. Almost seems guaranteed to happen at some point in a campaign (they will last a few weekends remember). Must remember to save frequently, because it is only the autosave, which happens just after you press the next turn button but before it makes that turn. And the bitch only keeps the one autosave, so you can't go back to the previous one and only lose one turn (no big deal). No you have to go back to the last time that you remembered to save a few hours ago.

Doesn't seem to happen so much in the vanilla game, just the mega mod.

A friend was telling me that there is a baby boom amongst the foreign students. They come here, and away from their social structures they do a little more PDA, moves beyond just holding hands and kissing in public (but that next bit doesn't happen in public mind you). And they are having a higher pregnancy rate than they would at home or that native students do. Who is going to pay for this? Just as I don't believe that foreign students shouldn't get free bus passes like native students (I am not saying that they do, I wouldn't know, just that they shouldn't), I also don't believe that they should get free medical. Although emergency medical treatment is part of an international agreement, but this one shouldn't be, they should be sent home to deal with it there. But I have noticed how so many little dark-haired girls are holding tightly on to dark-haired boys around town. In a way that wouldn't be allowed back home.

My first thoughts were why the silly little things were wasting their time with a boy, he wouldn't be able to provide for them, he wouldn't have the experience or knowledge to make a good husband, he wouldn't have the maturity to be a good father. And if they went too far then they (the little girls that is) would be less desirable a catch to some man that would be a better husband. But there you go, just what you start thinking like when you get to be a grumpy old fart.