Kai Shan in SG

Now that I am into it

2011-10-07T22:25:00.001+10:30

You see how easy it is? Don't blog for five months, then blog thrice in one night.

This one is important; I am still at the same contract, the rate sucks, it is a tad more than half what I used to get two years ago, before the Depression brought the world to its knees, but in my week off work (oh, yeah, I took this week off) I have found a way to increase the rate by almost fifty percent. Just need to get it to happen now.

Google Sucks

2011-10-07T22:20:00.001+10:30

Okay, that's official, Google is even worse than Microsoft. In fact I strongly suspect that the CEO of Google is a genetic fusion of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

I was going to post a question on how to get the new system to function as well as the old, or how to get the old one to function at all, but a total lack of realistic help options combined with several forums that were mostly full of customers complaining that despite Google's promise of a reply within 24 hours they had not been contacted in over a month does seem to indicate that Google is just another evilness in a world of evil. So I will see if any independent forums have anything of use.

Seriously; to read those forums is to be convinced never to become a paying customer.

Like a Light Sabre

2011-10-07T22:02:00.002+10:30

Wow, I cannot believe that it has been so loooong!1st of May to 7th of October; five whole months!This time, (almost) needless to say, has been bad, well, in the sense that it started bad and I just didn't want to talk about it and then it got to be a habit not to blog anymore. In fact, to be more precise the bad time was really the bit before I stopped blogging.So no, just to be sure that I don't have any medical issues, I am going to ease into this slowly. And stop here for now...Okay, edit, the new 'blogger' interface sucks; it drops line breaks and paragraphs and it refuses to publish from the old interface.Nice one.

Here We Go Again

2011-05-01T12:30:00.005+09:30

Once more, dear friends...

I am once again falling into infatuation with a girlie band.
My friends are not surprised.

Last weekend I came across them when I refined a you tube search gradually down into 'Japanese girl rock band', I came up with about half a dozen that I quite liked, as in their music was good, we are not talking about their looks at this point. But one kind of grew on me during the week, and yesterday I checked out their fan sites, official websites, downloaded a few albums, ordered a few albums on eBay, and stripped off mp3s from the videos that I downloaded both then and last weekend. And then spent the rest of the evening watching and re-watching their clips and interviews, and then retired to bed to listen to the mp3s.

Good music, cute girls, spunky image. What more could I ask for?

Disappointment

2011-04-22T21:08:00.002+09:30

Specifically, Portal 2.

An extremely clunky and buggy serve that was.

A few maps / puzzles / rooms that were a tad too obtuse so I had to google a walkthrough. Amazing that within a couple of days of release there were good walkthroughs, GamesRadar being the one that I used. But such a clunky game that alt tabbing out to check the guide and alt tabbing back in usually meant it killed my computer. Not just crashed the game, locked the whole cpu. Had to reboot my machine about three times. And all of that for a game that was not appreciably any better, or even equal, to the first instalment. Graphics were not noticeably better either, so more of a Portal 1.2 rather than a Portal 2 if you ask me. Still have to try the multi-player, but we shall see.

Contract is going slowly, not my work, just that this is the most 'yes ministery' government department that I have ever contracted to. Seriously, you could fire half the staff and still get twice as much work done. I am testing a new application, I am meant to be user testing, not testing the system or design, I make a new journal, there is no save button, task cannot be completed. Did none of the programmers even look at the screen to see if it was complete before dumping it on the finance team to test? Not just one example, there have been dozens of similar events. The shoddiest programming that I have ever seen.

This is the Easter break; the harvest was brought in during Spring, yes? I am not too sure about how these things work in the Northern Hemisphere, but Winter is when things grow here, Summer is dead, maybe in Europe the crops are planted in Spring? Either way, lots of work in the fields during Spring, the full moon lets peasants work late, the full moon after the Spring Equinox is called the Harvest Moon, again, yes? I am not too sure about all this old Northern Hemisphere stuff. The Harvest Moon lets the peasants get the harvesting finished, and the next weekend is party time! And xians call it Easter.

Typical, steal a good old pagan festival and re-badge it with some daft xian mythology.

But here ANZAC day comes soon after, very soon, in fact this year they run together and we get a five-day weekend. Not good for shopping, this being Adelaide, they shut the shops at the slightest excuse. Five days of shut shops. Lovely.

Okay, not strictly true, they are letting them open for the Saturday, and half the Tuesday.

I have been play Fallout 3 a lot lately, a HUGE game that is. So big, and the story just kind of goes on and on and on, that one does tend to get quite bored with it all.

Shogun 2 out recently. I have played it through a few times, have completed four clans now. It did take my two or three tries before I worked out how the mechanics work for this one, how to plan ahead to make sure that I get enough regions before the time limit runs out. But a good game, quite enjoy that one.

Did get all of the Dawn of War 2's, well the three out so far. Kind of so-so on that one. I don't really like the lack of base management. I do like that I can play the Guard, took a few extensions before that came along though, didn't it. Am looking forward to playing the co-op campaign with friends.

Other than that, life still really sucks.

Work, game, sleep.
That's my life.

And working just to clear my cards for now. Since lovely, little old Adelaide is so the arse-hole of the civilised world it is so slow to recover from the recession. The BIG recession, the Great Recession, aka the GFC, but remember; the markets fell further than they did in the Great Depression, more people lost their jobs than during the Great Depression, it is taking longer for Adelaide to crawl out of it than the Great Depression. All of which adds up to my rates being half what they were before the Great Recession. So it will be quite a while before I clear those damned cards.

I so regret returning to this place.
I so regret having left Singapore.

I was so much happier there, this has been a very salutary lesson for me.
When I get back it will be with a lot more dedication.

A Long Dry Spell

2011-03-09T09:55:00.003+10:30

Yes, it has been a long time, and there is a very good reason for this; I have been through what is probably the worst three months of my life.

The basic problem was my decision, undoubtedly the stupidest decision that I have ever made in my life, to leave Singapore and return to Australia almost two years ago. What I came back to was a total mess, a nation wracked by the Great Recession (a.k.a. the 'GFC'), and in particular a state (that is to say; a city) brought to its knees and still incapable of getting off them. Unfortunately the expense of returning and setting up was so great that it precluded me just turning around and heading back to SG as soon as it became obvious that this had been a very big mistake.

So, this mostly centres around the lack of work that there is in Adelaide. I have had interviews over the last couple of months and been asked to start the next Monday with the job then not materialising. But in the last three days I have had three calls from agencies asking if I was interested in a position, and one interview. Does this finally mean that the drought is over? Because as soon as it is I start my countdown to returning to SG, and this time with no intention of ever returning to AU. (Family visits aside.)

Okay, update that, I just took a call from one of the agencies and I start on Monday - a six month contract with a probable three month extension.

Anyhow, the main point is that I did not want to blog whilst I was feeling near suicidal from the voidness that is my meaningless existence.

I Hate Life

2011-01-03T22:14:00.003+10:30

I have been going through a rough patch. Basically suicidally rough. Funny thing just now is another stuff up with Steam. Start with that, shall we?

My desktop has been dead for a month or two. Turns out that somehow the CMOS had reset its clock to zero, not sure I see how that stopped the box from running, but at least it is running again. My laptop has died as well; it was running like a dog, the fan and thermal bridge were not getting the heat away from the graphics chip. But then it started blue screening (still is) with an iastor.sys message. I have stuff on the damned thing, but I got off my finance assignment, which is the most important thing as it is due next week (managed to send to a flash drive on a rare two minute period before the blue screen). When I moved on to trying to install windows seven (which won't install from disc unless windows has already booted, which it won't, so w7 won't install) I decided to play something on the desktop whilst I waited. My steam password has been reset since the last time the box was running (and what a battle that was) and that password was on the laptop so I tried to reset the password when I started steam on the desktop. This requires you to answer a secret question and was where I seemed to have trouble last time, now I know; the steam secret question does not work. True; both times I got the answer right (after the reset I had to set a new question and answer), neither time did steam take it, end conclusion - steam doesn't work.

Oh, naturally Steam on the desktop has to reconnect via the net before it will run and naturally the Steam servers are drowning (due to Valves total lack of service provision for their customers).

Can I rehash something old? Coming back to Australia was probably the single stupidest thing that I have ever done in my life. I got all antsy because they wouldn't pay me anything near what I got here, but I come back here to find that Australia (most particularly Adelaide) has been totally killed by the GFC and not only is my rate usually about HALF what it was three years ago, but I can only get contracts for less than HALF my time; so I am on less than a quarter (annually) what I got before, and half what I would have gotten in Singapore. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

There is a very thin line of hope that I could grasp; it means returning to SG, but with some dedication this time, i.e. taking what I can get and casting off AU for good. If I can pull that off then I can clear the mountain of debt that returning to, and setting up in, Australia has cost me. This time I need to find a job in SG from here, before I go there.

I have talked about this with almost everyone that I know; their question usually boil down to where was I happier (isn't that sweet of them) but they all then acknowledge that I was much happier in SG than here. Even sweeping streets I would be happier there.

When Support Does Not Mean Help

2010-12-06T11:31:00.003+10:30

Why do the staff at Valve (i.e. Steam Support) have to be such useless shits?

Seriously, for two weeks or more I have been asking them to reset my password. Nothing more, just that. But will they? Noooooo, they insist on trying all of this useless shit that we all know is not going to achieve anything. Please send us a system info file (note that you have to 'save' not 'export', same output, but they are too useless to convert it). Please turn off all of these programs if they are running in the background. None of this achieves anything, and we all know that it won't. Only two things ever work with steam; reinstall or reset.

Just that, nothing else. Uninstall and reinstall the application, or reset your password.

But, as usual, it is my password that is the problem. And, as is often the case, I cannot reset it because their application (more probably at their end methinks) won't accept my answer to my secret question. So I have to ask them to reset the damned password. This is not the first time that I have had to do this, it is not the second, nor the third, nor the fourth, nor the fifth...
You see how useless the application is.

But will the stupid prick at the other end do what I ask?
Noooooo.
Fuckwit has to try all the shit that they always want to try to absolutely no avail.
Won't just reset my password as I asked for two weeks ago.

Dickwads.

Just Quickly

2010-12-03T07:37:00.002+10:30

I have not been blogging, principally because I have been depressed, principally because I have been 'between contracts' for too long. I have exams this week and next, indeed two tomorrow, so don't expect this to be too long.

Let me start by saying that I like Lee Hsien Loong's view on social welfare; the burgeoning welfare state is the biggest single challenge to the Anglo world but few have the inclination to recognise it for what it is. In my view the leadership of Singapore has been wise in avoiding this trap.

My younger brother is a father; his girlfriend has given birth to a daughter - at present she only has two states; crying or sleeping. She kind of looks Asian, I am guessing this comes from my brother's mother who has Asiany looking eyes, I have no idea where she gets that from, but the little girl looks more Asian than my friend's children - who have a Chinese mother. I wonder if it will stay that way as they all grow?

I am having a 'cultural' issue; I am getting pissed, totally pissed, at the ethnics at uni, specifically at the fact that their stupidity and ignorance wastes an hour of most lectures. On one hand there are really dumb questions; we have to use a financial calculator, for financial functions you enter a number, press the button for that variable, you enter all variables except one, then you press 'compute' and press the last variable button, a slide shows all of these buttons, it has numbers above the buttons for all except one, it has the answer below that button. How hard can it be? Apparently it is still quite difficult if you are Indian. But then there are the totally irrelevant questions; if we are talking about interest rates some Indian will have to ask the lecturer if they think bank interest rates are fair and then make some comment about them being mercenary. Then there are questions, lots of them, from Indians that have supposed to have done degrees (we are doing a post grad) and done them in English, that show a total lack of understanding of basic English such as how to write a list of numbers.

My younger brother was complaining about how this was wasting so much time in his lectures. There are about four hundred in his class, of which six or so are White, the rest are Indian and Chinese. He says that he understands the Chinese having troubles and can sympathise; English is not their first language and their accounting system is different from the European model, but the Indians are meant to have studied in English and they are meant to use the same accounting principles, yet they are wasting the lecture with stupid-level questions. My observation is that they also have a tendency to throw out seemingly random answers, perhaps hoping for some recognition for participation, although to be fair, randomness would entail a fifty percent chance of being right whereas they are almost always wrong.

The bottom line is that I am being significantly held back by having to share my lectures with foreigners and our universities should offer Australian-only classes so that we can study at a faster rate. The other major point is that catering to these ethnics is lowering the overall quality of education provision.

I am having trouble with Steam again. I can log in offline, but it will not let me log in online. I tried to reset my password, but it would not let me, it would not accept the answer to my secret question. I have asked Steam Support to reset the password, but rather than simply do as I ask they insist on a lengthy series of email exchanges and a system info output. Why? All they ever do is tell you to reinstall and reset the password; they have no other answers to anything.

I have a contract starting on Monday, it is in the same division of the same department as one of the long term contract offers I had a while ago. I am hoping that I will impress them enough to get this other one happening again. It was advertised in the government notice of vacancies and they did not like any of the applicants, it was advertised in the public press but they got no responses, it was taken to recruitment agencies and I am the candidate that they got offered (indeed I was the only candidate put forward by the largest agency in town) but they then said that they had to get approval to actually progress the position. What does that mean? You advertised it three times without permission to fill the job?

I had a health scare recently; I had a choking problem. My father said that he had the same problem and it was only resolved when he lost weight, and further that the only way he lost weight was through starvation and totally no bread and no potato. ARRGGGGHHHH my two most favourite foods! Anyhow, I have been pretty good with this, I have stopped eating so much bread and am only having flat bread to make 'roll-ups' for lunch, I have reduced the number of times I eat a day, and I have reduced the amount that I eat at each meal. Almost immediately I could swallow better and have had only a few minor issues there. I have not noticed being any thinner though and was whinging about how no amount of exercise and diet got me any skinnier (remember walking the entire length of East Coast Park (two to three hours) every day for six months and not losing any weight?) HOWEVER; my underwear is all suddenly too loose. This must mean something...

So Many Thoughts

2010-11-02T19:52:00.003+10:30

I haven't blogged for a while, mostly because I just haven't bothered 'netting, whenever I have turned my pc on I have played. But I have had quite a few things that I wanted to write about and so I thought that I should get them off my chest.

The Kommunists
Spider Wasps
More Kommunists, specifically perverting justice
The SGX attempt to buy the ASX, second bite of the cherry
Elders selling their share in Rural Bank for 27M
Bob Brown's comments on SG being an oppressive dictatorship
Councillors
Rare Earth
Tax Returns, or rather the effect tax has upon returns
Window Dressing

Let's see if I can get through them all.

Australia, like most Western nations, employs far too many public servants. One in three people that work in AU work for government; our income tax is one third of our pay, so effectively one third is taken out of two people's pay and given to the third who is told that he was paid three thirds but one third was withheld for tax. Our non-income taxes pay for all of government's non-salary expenses. These bureaucrats don't do anything; for example, Health SA employs 35,000 people but there are only 9,000 hospital beds. Do you think that there are three and a half people to every bed? No way! There is only one nurse for every ten beds, one doctors for every thirty, one ancilliary for every ten, the rest are all administrating! Most tax dollars in Australia are spent on welfare, but for every dollar actually given to a recipient, four are spent on salaries for bureaucrats to make sure that one dollar isn't being ripped off!

So when the South Australian Treasurer says he is going to get rid of a couple of thousand leaches I think it is a small start, SA could get rid of 90,000 of them! But four thousand of these bureaucrats take to the streets and march. They have fire engines leading the parade; we pay our taxes to have them on station ready for emergencies, not being used as political props.

Spider Wasps
Ichy subject, I know.
The other day a woman in the next office (with the door open) made some statement about Aboriginals bludging at white man's expense. I thought of popping my head in and saying that she could get into trouble for making comments like that. Then I thought; only if someone that didn't agree with her heard it.
Then it reminded me of spider wasps...

If you have ever watched Discovery Channel (or Animal Planet or any of a dozen doco channels you can get on cable) then you have seen a wasp hunting a spider. Maybe you saw the spider behave in fear and try to escape.

Funny thing is that apparently if you put the spider in a glass cage in a white laboratory, i.e. out of his environment, and release the wasp into the cage, then the spider will hunt, and kill, the wasp.

Freed of her programming she knows that she has the upper hand. It is only because she has been 'programmed' into submission that the parasitic wasp can have her way.

This is the world that we live in.
This is Socialism, Feminism, and Humanism.
Perfectly, to a 'T'.

More Kommunists.
And this time perverting justice.
In civilised nations you are innocent until proven guilty.
Not so in Australia.
Specifically whit regards to unions accusing employers of OHSW breaches. The legal onus is on the employer to prove his/her/its innocence.
That is sick.
But it is specifically the situation that the Labor premier of NSW wants to keep.

The SGX is trying to buy the ASX.
That is to say the Singapore stock exchange is trying to buy the Australian stock exchange. They initially called it a 'merger' to make it sound more pallatable, but I don't think it is still going to be swallowed.
Funny thing is though; they tried something like this before, well more the real merger thing, with the two exchanges connecting live and traders being able to access the other. It didn't work, well to be more precise, it didn't get used.
This time around it is really just one company taking over another.

Bob Brown, our resident 'Green', that should, of course, be 'Red', doesn't llike it. His speech on the subject accused Singapore of being a totallitarian and oppressive state and therefore the deal was no go for him.

I think he lives in la la land, but he has proven that often enough.

Elders is selling its share in Rural Bank. For a mere $27M. Well, that may be all it's worth. Two things get me about this; firstly my total amazement that Elders is still alive, and secondly their fascination with selling everything that makes money so that they can keep running the things that lose money!

Rare Earth.
What can I say?
Well, something it appears.
Okay, the name means minerals that are scattered, as in 'rarefied', not actually rare as such. And that they all come from China, and the evil Chinese have decided to ration them so that they don't run out. How dare they think like that.
What it makes me think though, is what did we do before China opened up and traded with the world? Did we not have any 'rare earths'? Did we get them from somewhere else, but they were more expensive so we have forgotten how? Did we not build high tech equipment until China gave us these magical ingredients?
All seem pretty stupid to me.

Tax Returns
Ah yes, I made a model (that's what I do, remember?) for currency trading. Highly compounding, daily trading, each week at a set level before ramping up a level for the next week, taking out tax and safety margin each month, with tax rates, return rates, risk levels, etc built in.
I ran it to find out the starting funds I would need, at a conservative leveraging level (half what is common in the market), with a conservative rate of return (less than half what is common in the market), with a conservative risk level and a very safe safety margin withdrawal rate, blah blah blah, in order to find out what starting funds I would need to get a given return for a year.

The next bit is where it gets exciting.
I then changed the tax rate to SG to see the effect, since as you know, I am partial to moving there (again). The result was astounding; the return increased tenfold!
I then put in SG's currency trading tax rate (as opposed to ordinary company tax rate), the return increased another fourfold!

The funniest thing is; that although the tax rate was going down, the amount of tax being paid was going up! At 20% tax versus Australia's 30% tax SG would actually receive five times more tax, this is because it allowed a much faster rate of compounding, therefore far more profit was made. And by halving the tax rate for currency trading SG would double the tax it received.

I did some further modelling to find out what tax level would actually maximise the amount of tax a country would receive; 9.05% is what I got, so Singapore's 10% is not far off the mark.

Window Dressing
This is a funny one, the US SEC went public with an accusation that some accounting firms, they named Lehman Bros, were temporarily selling assets to 'cook' the books and improve companies' credit ratings. What I got from this was that they named Lehman, of all the companies that you could kick, they kick one that is down, in fact truly dead! Why not shame one that is still trading?

And I am not going to bother about councillors.

Time to Blog

2010-10-12T18:51:00.003+10:30

I have been slack on blogging the last few months, a sign of the stress I have been under, but I should keep it up, after all - the main purpose of this was to document my journey to living permanently in Singapore and I am not there yet.

Okay, first up, I get a new contract, great rate and a long project. It stalls. It is still out there, but lagging a few months. I get another contract offer, it hangs for a couple of weeks whilst people are off sick, then it goes belly up. It is a month and a half now. Then I get a new contract, the rate sucks, it is a tad over half what I got before the GFC but anything to pay the rent right now. It gets delayed, first by two weeks, which I don't mind as I have exams, then by another weeks. Then on the day that I get the call delaying it I get another offering a short one to fill this week.

So I spent today at a radio station. Office to myself off in some quiet corner, only five minutes walk from home. And the rate is a little better.

Originally it was because they couldn't roll their financial reporting model over for their new year. They have a UK owner so their year is different. I look at it with the Financial Controller, "seems like ten, maybe fifteen minutes work" after all, wrapping a formula inside an IF statement to deal with there being no 'previous period' data at the start of the year would do it. I get to work, I uncover that once this problem is resolved there are others that will become visible, previously hidden by the lack of data flowing through the model. I have a good look at this, at least for fifteen to twenty minutes, I undo the previous work and I make one change to one formula in one cell on one sheet. Problem solved.

Fun

But then I ask the philosophical question; you have previous period data, it is from the previous year but it could be shown, so why not? They like the sound of this, so I do it. Then I correct a few formulae errors through the model, simplify things, cut out some redundancy. Take it a lot further in one day then they thought that they would get in a week. But a chat reveals that there is a lot more work that they would like if I am willing to stay the rest of the week. Who am I to say no?

But the repeated false starts of this were echoed at uni. I have received three different course schedules for next semester, each time the reception ask me not to enrol as it will change again. I get told that it is finalised and that the last one I received is right to go, but the next day I get another one. I ask reception to enrol me in the two evening courses, whatever they may be. It doesn't happen. I meet the IT guy at the desk on my last day there last semester, he promises to do this. It doesn't happen. So I am using the printed form method.

Paul and Cheng fly off to Singapore this week. They will spend a month there, one week will be in MY seeing Cheng's family. The last two weeks staying with Jaz, Cheng's sister in SG. I was thinking of flying over for their last weekend there but I suspect that I will be too busy and so will drop that idea.

Have only been half watching the post-election games; Gillard seems to be lying and conniving at every chance. But the main thing was that I have noticed several times that the text stories on Foxtel's news multichoice have been very strongly, indeed outright aggressively, worded pro-Labor, pro-Gillard and anti-liberal, anti-Abbott.
So much for fair, balanced reporting.

People try and engage me in political debates and I respond only partially. I always come back to "I really don't care anymore, the country is going down the gurgler and I have made the decision to leave". This even happened with my step-mother at the agricultural show when she was getting upset at most of the orchids being foreign and I made some comment about non-Australian not worrying me and she responded with "you're already half in Singapore though". So true. I admired the beauty of those that I like without any consideration for their botanical political correctness.

Oh, yeah, exams last week. I expect to come top in both my subjects. The economics exam was outright FUN! The management accounting was, true to form, all cost accounting but not as bad as it could have been and my decision to actually revise paid off. I won't know the actual results for a while, but I am confident enough to judge that I can take on a heavier load and undertake three subjects next semester.

Keyboards

2010-10-01T14:46:00.003+09:30

I surrender, I give in, I give up.
Microsoft wins.
I can no longer tolerate having to constantly change the fracken keyboard setting because Microsoft Vista cannot understand that just because I speak English English, as opposed to American English, that I do still us a US keyboard, and not what Microsoft seems to think is an English keyboard - which Microsoft is adamant has the '@' and '"' signs transposed, so my email addresses always turn out someone"somewhere.
So I have turned the language back to US English since that is the ONLY way to get Vista to keep the keyboard setting as 'US'. Seriously, if my language is set to English (UK, Australian, or Singaporean) the keyboard reading goes stupid. Thank you morons at Redmond. Now I will have to constantly be resetting the dictionary when I use Word.

ACCA v CPA

Google it, see what you get.
I get either English people considering their options 'cos they are moving to Australia, Asian students chatting amongst themselves with no idea of the facts, or USers not understanding how the world works outside their own small universe.

I have been pondering it for a few days and have come to some conclusions.

1) ACCA is a British organisation. Yeah, I know, they 'claim' to be the biggest international accounting association, but that is because they are the only one that accepts international membership per se. ACCA is not recognised anywhere but Britain, if you come to Australia then you will have to join either CPA Australia or ICA Australia. The latter has a relationship with ACCA but is less than half the size of CPA Australia.

2) ACCA offers no real benefits for me vis-a-vis working in the Orient. CPA Australia has a joint membership arrangement with CPA Singapore, and the legislatively mandated body in both Singapore and Hong Kong is called 'CPA'.

3) The total world membership of ACCA is less than the combined memberships of CPA Australia and ICA Australia, so they aren't that big after all.

All of which totals up to ACCA being an irrelevance.

With regards to the snob value. There is a tradition in Australia of CAs thinking that they are better than CPAs. It is based on their requirement for one or two extra subjects when studying, so it limits your choice of electives in your degree, but other than that, no diff. In my experience, having had to clean up after both for twenty years, I find them, in the main, equally incompetent.

ACCA also requires one more subject; the MPA I am doing qualifies for both CPA and CA, but not for ACCA - for that I need to do advanced management accounting. Now given that 'management accounting' in Australia is actually not management accounting, rather it is cost accounting, and given that I do work in that area, I am considering doing that extra subject anyhow. But having done that, I then see no reason to apply for ACCA membership. As I have said, it seems irrelevant, meaningless, of no benefit.

Some of the English lecturers speak highly of it, and say that it is big in Asia, but I cannot find any proof of that, and I strongly suspect their prejudices are due to it being and English body. All I can find is that membership will work for you in Britain, but in any other country you will still need to join the local body.

It is my birthday next week, the day is sandwiched between two exams so I will be spending my birthday studying said management accounting. Not that my birthdays mean anything to me, I gave up on that back in my mid twenties.

I have postponed starting my next contract until after this exam week. They did want me to start earlier, but were having trouble with line managers all going on leave (long weekend coming) and so I pointed out that I had exams and would not mind postponing the start - my consultant at the employment agency called back within ten minutes to say the offer had been accepted.

I just got three assignments back. A distinction for one, a high distinction (well, 100%) for the other economics one, but a strangely low mark for management accounting. Even though the lecturer could only point out one error when we went through it (I did find a second later on my own), still I only got a credit.
Now why is that?

I was checking SG blogs the other day, ones that I have had bookmarked for years and used to regularly check, and noticed that several have gone quite stale, as in the authors are no longer posting. Big names in the SG blogsphere too. I guess people grow, change, and move on.

One of my best friends and his Chinese Malaysian wife and their two children will be visiting SG later this month. I was pondering flying over for a weekend whilst they are there. I have enough points in my KrisFlier account for one leg of the trip. It would be a chance to catch up with friends (my SG friends that is). Funny thing; I have more friends in SG than in AU.

More Green

2010-09-07T12:52:00.003+09:30

What I forgot to put in the last post was what I thought the outcomes would be.

I feel that if Labour gets (sorry 'Labor') enough indies then they will deliver a short term government. Firstly with the two 'green' indies they only need two of the three country indies, therefore there is a high possibility of one of them going Conservative. And then it will only take one by-election to change government, because you can guarantee that if any borderline left or indie seat goes up for by-election it will go to the right strongly.

However, if the Conservatives get the three country indies, then they will only pick up any by-elections as well, and, the next full election they will get one or two of the three country indie seats and at least one of the green seats. So they will only get stronger and thus they will deliver a longer term government.

Still on politics, but SG not AU.
Senior Minister Goh has flagged the idea of approaching 50,000 of the 500,000 permanent residents in Singapore and strong-arming them into taking citizenship.

I think that this is a no-win situation, specifically a lose-lose-lose.

Firstly, half a million PRs is a lot, just as a general observation, for a country of four and a bit million citizens. I know that there are going on a million foreign workers and a few hundred thousand tourists at any one time, but these PRs are the business expertise that built Singapore's thriving economy. If he is planning on approaching some of them, then I am betting that it will be the better, or the longer term, one tenth. These people may have good reasons for not taking citizenship and by cajoling them Singapore will probably drive them away. And it makes a mockery of the term 'Permanent' Resident, you know, the kind that isn't permanent. So these PRs will probably leave, they lose, and Singapore loses them, and the SG government loses face over a failed policy.

Mind you, I would like to see the demographics. And I would also like to see the results of any interview based survey on why they didn't take citizenship.

Mind you, I could be reading this wrong, maybe they are the Malaysian Chinese PRs? I know two of those that took citizenship a few months ago (well, one's husband did, she kept her MY citizenship and SG PR-ship). In this case maybe a squabble between Chinese? But what I see in my Malaysian Chinese friends living PR in Singapore is that they don't like MY, but they have so much family there that they feel compelled to return. And also they like that they can work for good money in SG and buy a good house in MY to retire to. Dual citizenship would resolve that, but create its own problems. So in this case I see them all leaving SG, moving to Jahore Bahru, and commuting to SG to work. This will free up a lot of HBDs, forcing their price way down, and it will move a lot of grocery shopping over the bridge, forcing prices way down. Maybe both are good things, but will it achieve much else?

Post Election Greens

2010-09-07T09:37:00.002+09:30

Still no government.

We are meant to hear today from the three independents that have been holding the country to ransom. As in, they said that they would deliver their final decision today. So I wanted to write this before I find out what way they go, then I can see how well I went.

I think that they will back Socialism.

These are my reasons:

1. Costings.
The Conservatives' costings were savaged by the Civil Service. Despite lots of experienced commentators reminding people that the government bureaucrats are not very good with numbers the majority of journalists still believe that 'Treasury' are somehow sacrosanct. Despite Treasury using a fallible interest rate projection, despite Treasury applying current government policy to the Conservatives' budget to warp it. And despite the Socialists' 43 billion dollar broadband project not being included in their costings. The independents still made lots of comments about the Conservatives being fiscally irresponsible. Yet after adjusting for all of the smoke the Conservatives will deliver nearly a billion in surplus versus the Socialists delivering more than four billion in deficit annually. In short the independents are economically naive.

2. Politics.
The independents come from seats that the Conservatives will contest and may take from them, so any alliance would be fraught with danger. The Socialists will never get those seats and so they will welcome the independents and value them, their alliance would be far more secure.

3. Personalities.
The three independents are all renegades from the minor party in the Conservative Coalition. They have severe issues with the Nationals' leadership; they will never sit well together.

4. Politics 2.
The independents have all made quite a lot of leftist sounding policy statements; therefore it seems more likely for them to side with the left. An alliance of Agrarian Socialism, Environmental Socialism, and Union Socialism.

In the meantime, they have been holding the country to ransom, to ensure that both sides of politics would agree to a range of demands prior to their making a decision. That is to say; they laid out a list of demands, and demanded both sides to affirm these, then they would decide which side they would support.

One of the 'Environmental' Socialists, as opposed to the Agrarian Socialists, and I put 'Environmental' in single quotes because he is a member of the Greens and they are red not green in this country, demanded a hospital as the price for his support. The Conservatives offered him one billion dollars, the Socialists offered him one quarter of a billion, with ongoing funding - which is to say a billion dollars but with a schedule. He then went public with both offers and condemned the Conservative offer as irresponsible.

The Agrarian Socialists also published the Conservatives' offers and costings. Which the Conservatives had only given them on the understanding that the content of the negotiations remain confidential.

So complete under-handedness and untrustworthiness on the left.
What's new?

Post Election Blues

2010-08-23T10:20:00.004+09:30

We had an election on Saturday, by midnight on Saturday we had a projected result of Socialists 73, Conservatives 73, Independents 4. However 4 seats were still in doubt. They had all Sunday to keep counting, but it hasn't changed. What have they been doing? Concentrating on counting the safe seats?

One of the independents is a 'Green', which in this country means a 'Red'; there is nothing pro-environment about them, they are just a cover for the Socialist Alliance (Socialist Workers Party (full of students, not workers) and the Socialist Party of Australia). There is no CPA (Communist Party of Australia) anymore, they disbanded; but they were pure Maoist - they all moved into the left wing of the Labor Party, you can recognise the Maoists in the Labor Party because they learn to speak Mandarin, like our recent ex-Prime Minister.

Given that the other three independents are all ex-Nationals (the minor party in the conservative coalition) then we would normally expect them to make a pact with the Coalition. But remember that here in South Australia the National Party member joined with the Labor Party. Yes, at the next election her voters turned on her ferociously. Those three ex-Nationals have said that they will move as a bloc, whilst the 'Green' has said that he will support the left.

But right now no one has a majority, and one major party will have to get three of four independents to form government.

We probably have a week or two of negotiations before we get any outcome.

I did not say last post, but I am back on Spellforce 1. I realised what I had to do to get past that point and went back to it. You see I had been following a strategy suggested in a walk through, rather than my usual play style. He had said that if you build up the Orcs on the left and then go kill the boss monster the little monsters will pour out of the Rift in a flood to the west and destroy your Orc base and that there was nothing you could do about it. You would be left to build a Troll base in the east to take the map with. His suggestion was to run through the Rift, kill the boss on your own, the horde have nothing to destroy so you can then build both bases.

Well, my strategy, which worked, was to build the Orc base, use an Orc army to fight through the Rift and kill the boss, and then build the Troll base. The demon horde flooded out of the Rift to my Orc base alright, but apparently this walk through author is not too good on his defensive strategies because the horde never got through my tower line. Well, more of a tower field.

Turned out to be a pretty boring map really.

I am now two or three maps beyond that point.

I am still unemployed, by Thursday last week I was suspecting that I might spend this week not working. I have two assignments (both nearly finished) and a test this week, so will be busy. But I would like some positive cashflow.

I have been back in Australia for a six month contract, two months off over xmas new year, a three month contract, and then a four month contract, so a year. A year that I could have been in Singapore and working if only I had accepted that last offer. I regret that so much now. Hubris; it has definitely been my downfall.

Cuddly

2010-08-20T12:27:00.003+09:30

I have just rescued a baby brush-tailed possum, well, six months so maybe 'child' not 'baby'. Found her under a tree in the sparse parkland at the corner of Grenfell and East Terrace. Just at that moment, as I was bending down to pick her up, a man walked passed that is a member of Fauna Australia and he gave me a ride to a 'participating' vet. Although by law all vets have to take in native animals and pass them on to a carer organisation.

It had heaps of fleas mind you, I got four of them either off her or off my shirt. Curled up she just fills a double handful. Her main need for the next day is warmth, she was on the way to dying from exposure, but by tomorrow she will be able to take milk (special marsupial milk, not cow milk). (And also banana, rolled oats, stuff like that.) I have raised a few ring-tails in my time, but I have never held a brush-tail before. Fed wild ones a few times.

I am still unemployed. One contract, the better one, is in government and as usual for our wonderful Australian public service, they are not organised and need to delay for a few months. The other I just haven't heard back from the agency about. I have tried calling the consultant, but he hasn't answered yet.

We have to vote tomorrow. I must try not to forget. And I must remind Radar, 'cos he used to forget a lot. The polls are close, the last two that I have seen both said about fifty-fifty, but polls and 'town halls' in the marginal seats show a dissatisfaction with Labor. All the people in the world could vote Labor and I wouldn't care, so long as they live in safe left-wing seats. The way the Australian democracy works it is only a few thousand voters in the dozen marginal seats that matter, the other ten million voters are effectively marginalised.

Still, it is not as bad as the USA where Clinton got elected on forty percent of the vote.

I live in a close seat, the city of Adelaide, i.e. the CBD seat. It has swung a few times, currently red, was blue not long ago and may go blue again this time.

The Democrats, this is a laugh, have discovered that one of their South Australian candidates is a convicted paedophile. By law it is too late to remove him from the ticket. This late revelation should hurt them in the polls; they won't get any lower house seats anyhow, but I wonder if it will cost them an upper house seat or two. SA has always been their stronghold, they only need to lose a couple of seats to lose the balance of power in the Senate.

And just to close off; I regret having left Singapore, I should have taken one of the jobs offered to me there and stuck it out, risen the ranks, studied part time, and above all, not come back to Australia. I so regret this. I miss it so much. I miss my friends there, I miss the culture, it was just a totally better place to be. But if I was there I would still be expected to vote in this election tomorrow. How does that work? I would not reside in any lower house electorate, so how do they do that? I do know that one senator wanted Australia to have a seat for the diaspora, like Italy has two seats for them. I'm going to google how this works.

No, the electoral commission says that it is not compulsory to vote if you are living overseas. Further, if you have been overseas for less than three years and intend to return to Australia within six years then you may register to vote. That makes nine years, and yet if you have been living overseas for more than six years, or you intend to be doing so, then you are meant to be removed from the electoral roll and cannot vote. This would mean that if I moved back to Singapore, as I intend to do, and it is my intention to stay there, as it is, then I will lose the right to vote in Australian elections. I would not gain the right to vote in Singaporean elections until I obtained Singaporean citizenship (of course). This means that Australia disenfranchises its citizens.

Kind of similar to the health care situation if you live overseas. If you ever return to Australia you will be 'fined' every year for not having been paying for private medical coverage in Australia during that period that you were not in Australia. How stupid is that?

What the electoral commission doesn't elucidate upon is who are you voting for? If I am living overseas and still get to vote, then for what lower house seat am I voting? Quick google! According to the Southern Cross Group (advocacy for Australians abroad) you either stay registered where you were last registered or where you have near kin (as a lot are children that turn eighteen whilst living with their parents overseas, so have no previous enrolment in Australia).

There are about two thirds of a million Australians living overseas and old enough to vote; this would be enough for a few electorates on their own. Like Italy or Portugal, Australia could have two or three 'virtual' electorates. I don't see it happening though, principally because most Australians are hostile to anyone that leaves the country for anything more than 'a trip to Bali'. But as it stands it seems that less than two percent of Australian citizens living overseas are allowed to vote. Whilst the government states that ten percent of Australians overseas vote, that is mostly tourists only out of Australia for a short time.

Further more, whilst changes have been made in the last ten years, many long term OS residents have, under both the previous laws and the current laws, permanently lost the right to vote for the country of which they are a citizen. And that kind of sums up the way the Australian government and public service thinks about issues like this.

When Australia does so little for Australians living overseas, why should they do anything for Australia? The Senate enquiry in the Australian Diaspora looked at using Australian residents in other nations as 'ambasadors', but in reality these nearly one million Australians overseas are treated like shit by their own government (both bureaucrats and politicians), so why should they think nice thoughts about their nation?

Post and Non

2010-08-17T16:28:00.002+09:30

So, the mid semester exam turned out to be this and that.
Okay, firstly it was pretty easy, I took it slow and read everything twice, and took my time on the answers, and still left ten minutes passed half-way.
But it was interesting that after the lecturer told us it was in room 102 on the first floor, and wrote it on the whiteboard, and said again very slowly that it was not in our normal room but on a lower floor, and it was listed as 102 on the calendar, I was the only person to show up at 102; everyone else, including the guy that set up the room, showed up at our normal third floor room.

Obviously, on this occasion, the rhetorical question "is it just me? or..." has the rhetorical answer, "yes, it was just me".

I am unemployed. You knew that was coming from last post, but the contract promised to me has not come through and, I have been told, may not for a few months. Public sector. But I was asked about another one on Friday. Today is Tuesday and I haven't heard anything about that yet. But it is a previous client and I am reasonably confident. It won't pay as much as the other, and these are the people that last time paid me half my normal rate. I am trying to split the dif between that and what I was paid on the one just finished, that will do a bit better than cover my rent and will allow me to live a bit. Although in my case 'live' means dine out a couple of times, buy a game or two, and pay off my cards.

I am pretty sure that next weekend is the election, wait, let me just Google that, yep, next Saturday. The two major parties have yo-yoed a bit, which is a good sign in that it means the communists are not a shoe-in. Maybe even might lose, wouldn't that be nice. Methinks that Tweedledee is not quite as odorous as Tweedledum. Funny watching the Liberals try to compare themselves with "the desire for change that elected Obama". Funny that "Obama" passes the spell check but Tweedledee and Tweedledum don't.

I am playing Spellforce 2. Yeah, quick change of subject, but be honest, the last one wasn't exactly riveting, was it? This is crashing more often than Spellforce 1, and on its own as well, not when I make it think two things at once. It must only be the Spellforce Universe pack, because I don't remember either of them doing that before. Anyhow, I found out why I never played the two Spellforce 1 expansions - there is a monster that I can't get passed. We are the same level, but my hits do little to him whilst his severely hurt my character. Shame that. Good game kind of ruined. Neither of them crashes cleanly, they kill Windows on the way, but without causing a reboot, just lock it up, so I have to hard reset the machine. Which is very annoying.

Other than that, life in general sucks and I am starting to severely question why I bother.

Whoa!

2010-08-06T14:44:00.002+09:30

Sometime things happen so quickly.

Last week was the end of my contract, and I was asked to extend to the end of September.

Today I am told that due to some fundamental mismanagement the project has run out of money and can I please leave.

Or put another way:

Yesterday I was asked to start a job.

Today I was asked to leave a job.

Yeah, I got asked if I had 'capacity' to undertake some other work if it did not threaten the project that I was on. And now I find out that I won't be staying on that project, so I can focus just on the other one.

And now begins the game.

The contract comes to me, and I take it to the agency, not the other way around. So the agency is meant to only add a payroll handling fee on top, but of course they try to get as much gravy as they can.

So I start with the client, and I introduce them to the going rate for BAs (Business Analysts), currently in this town about $135 an hour. From that the BA will be getting about $80 an hour. The rest goes: as it is a government contract then the department of admin services takes a twenty or thirty percent cut depending on whether it is a financial or an IT contract, there is nine percent superannuation which in my opinion is dead money, there are work cover and payroll taxes, then there is the agency cut, and what is left over goes to the worker.

Of course, most contracts the employer goes to the agency who then goes to the contractor. In my case almost always the employer comes to me and I take the contract to the agency. This means that I get a better deal because the agency takes a much smaller cut, just a payroll handling fee in theory. Admin services still take their huge slice for doing nothing, but that is the Australian public sector for you.

Which means that I can give a little ground on that $135.
Conversely if I under value myself too much then other people just get paid more than me for not being any better. So I need to toughen up. After all, the reason contractors and consultants get paid a higher rate is because we don't get paid holidays, we don't get paid sick leave, we don't have secure jobs - I had spend most of this damned GFC living off my reserves! There was just no work around. And when I got some I had to take some hefty rate cuts to get anything to pay the rent.

Anyhow, the whole point to this was how quickly things can change on you.

One day being told that you have a job and being asked to extend it.
The next being told that you don't and being asked to leave.

Mid Terms 01

2010-07-31T17:00:00.010+09:30

"01" because there is a high probability of another post on this one.

Yeah, mid-terms are in two weeks.
Scary, I haven't done real serious study for so long and I want to get this right.
Only in one subject, the other does a couple of assignments instead, one of which I have just emailed to the lecturer.

If I do well at this, i.e. get distinctions or better for both subjects, then I will seriously consider taking on another subject. Not a day one - the two that I do are the evening ones - but an online one in another course. Currently doing the Masters of Professional Accounting (which always make me ask "is there a masters in amateur accounting?) and the other being the Masters of Applied Finance, the trading major, i.e. options, derivatives, rates arbitrage, etc.

The MAppFin has four core subject, and two other compulsory at masters level (since it has a nested diploma and certificate which also include the four core but not those other two) and four electives which can be taken from a shorter list of five each to get different majors. Those two compulsory subjects I could get status for from the MPA. So, with the MPA having eight subjects, and taking me four trimesters, then I could have four plus two equals six of the ten required for the MAppFin completed by the time that I finish the MPA, and thus need only two trimesters to finish it.

This in two years I could have two masters degrees.

The plan would then be to move back to Singapore and do the SMU MBA.

When I was looking at MBAs this one caught my eye due to its cosmopolitan nature. Australian MBAs make small talk about multiculturalism and globalisation and might offer one relevant subject as an elective, but the SMU MBA has things like 'communicating across cultures' as a required subject and a few like 'trading in ASEAN' as an elective. So more realistically a global (although specifically an Asian, and even more specifically an Oriental) education.

On to other things.
A contract has been signed, but the project still hasn't really begun and I have been on this contract for three months so far.
That is SAG for you.
(i.e. South Australian Government for anyone that strolls in from out of town.)

I was going to blog about this months ago, but here it is now because I have noticed the effect far more of late.

Used to be that Oriental girls here had long hair, there weren't many and they stayed within their cultural groups, but they kept that long hair thing from their culture. Then more Orientals were noticeable, and the girls started cutting their hair short and being more like Anglos. Now there are LOTS of Orientals in Adelaide, and a lot of them are short term (they are foreign students mostly now) and so do not take to the local culture. So their hair is longer, not as long as it was in the first wave though, and they are keeping the styles and fashions from whence they came.

The main point to this is that they tend to show a lot more skin than the local girls. i.e. mini-skirts and shorts. When winter started coming on they started wearing shorts with pantyhose underneath, so they could still 'show' more, but not be as cold (logical really). What I noticed was that after a few weeks the Anglo bitches started to copy this style. Maybe they noticed the lack of attention that they were getting. I found this very interesting.

Adelaide girls are probably the most boring in Australia, and Australian women are the most boring of all Anglo Bitches, and Anglo Bitches are the worst of all Western women, and Western women are the worst of all White women. You know the way this one goes, you have probably heard it from so many guys, especially middle-aged guys that are on better incomes and so have travelled and have some experience to make the judgement. Like me.

Interesting that they felt the need to change their appearance.
What do you think the chances are that they might realise that they have to change their behaviour as well?

Not going to waste too much time on the upcoming Australian federal election. The Socialists thought that appointing a woman as prime minister could save them, and it had some initial effect with female voters, but that has decreased a lot as women realised that this woman has nothing in common with the average woman and is not a champion for women.

Interesting though that my economics lecturer, who I would have pegged as a wet liberal, i.e. the typical type of Liberal Socialist that would have voted for her, pointed out in class that the Labor government was the most incompetent government that Australia had experienced for a long time. He illustrated this with such things as the 'alcopop' fiasco where they brought in a huge tax on low-alcohol drinks (vodka mixers etc) that kids were drinking, in an attempt to curb their use. As any economist would tell you, the result was that the kids moved on to something else, in this case hard spirits like Jack Daniels. Further he pointed out the mis-use of terms like 'super profit', which economically means a profit in excess of that which you would get from moving your investment into something else. In this case the government was using the term pejoratively against the mining industry which had come out of the GFC ahead of the rest of the country due to other nations getting out first (Australia typically lagged) and their demand for resources ensured that our resources industry made good profits. So the government automatically (as all Socialists do) decided to punish them for their success.

The lecturer didn't word it like that of course, but it is a standard rant of mine that our Socialist culture in Australia is always seeking to punish success and reward failure.

And yes, they spell it 'Labor', we don't in English usually of course, but that is how the party concerned spell their name.

Avcon was a bit of a fizzle for me this year.
I didn't enjoy last year that much either, it is kind of like it lost something in the move out of the Uni and into the Convention Centre. I don't mind the increase in focus on games (that is what the government sponsors are behind) but it has come at the expense of the anime/manga. For example, one of the theatres that would have been showing anime was used for a series of presentation on game design.

It's not that I don't want there to be a series of presentation on game design - after all, I attended a few myself - but I do not want there to be a decrease in the amount of anime being screened.

Also a lot, and I mean a LOT, of vendors have withdrawn. Less than half of the displays/booths/whatever were anime and manga oriented. There were a few game oriented, and there were a lot of government ones (TAFE, libraries, Trade and Development, etc.).

It's just not the same.

And just to finish off.

I left Metro 2033 unfinished somewhere half way through and moved on to a Spellforce that I had bought - it had 1 and the two expansions and 2 and its one expansion all on one disc. I started from the very start and am redoing Spellforce 1. Not using any cheats, but using a walkthrough for its map, i.e. where to find people, you know, when you have a mission to take this to that person but it doesn't tell you where they are and you can't remember which of the maps they were on. Playing as a necromancer, but currently in reasonably good armour, with a sword and shield, I am not using the magic so much. I was raising skeletons a lot, but I am getting to level 20, although my magic skills are still only at level 5 and so I am not finding the skeletons much use right now.

It was the first game to mix role play and strategy, and playing a necromancer is always way cool dude.

And it has a long story ahead for me. Weeks, if not months, of gaming.

Metro

2010-07-07T07:58:00.002+09:30

There was something that I forgot last night about Metro 2033, the installation process really pissed me off - I bought a disc and yet it installed via steam and took more than an hour, then it wouldn't play saying it was missing some PhysX thing and that I needed to reinstall.

You can imagine my screaming: if you need PhysX you fracken moron why didn't you install it dickweed???

Anyhow, I found a copy in my UT folder and copied it across, obviously the UT guys know how to package a programme...

It still splashes an error message about my Nvidia drivers needing updating (which my Nvidia control panel disagrees with) and that game play might be degraded.

What is degraded is that, like Stalker, I have to turn the graphics way down or else it is very jerky. Both my desktop and my laptop have high-end graphics cards (naturally) and can play any other game on its highest settings, but not the games out of Kiev...

Netscape

2010-07-06T21:39:00.002+09:30

I am a grumpy old man. I know that, I acknowledge it, I even take some pride and joy in it. And I know that as I am getting older, I am getting grumpier.

Being old and single kind of adds to it...

I have just returned from an evening lecture. These are meant to be phone-free zones, but routinely three or four people have their phones on and each goes off a few times, quite a few times in one girl's case (and yes, all of those that I clocked were girls). They have them on buzz, not on ring, but it still makes noise, especially in said girl's case as she lets it keep buzzing as she finishes writing whatever. Bear in mind that this is a small evening class of twelve or so students.

But one guy at the front had his laptop open and on and spent the entire, and I mean the entire, lecture surfing for cars.

I will be extremely interested to know how he scores in the subject.

Young girl goes out drinking alone, gets picked up by three guys, follows them willingly somewhere lonely, gets raped repeatedly, only actually realises that she was raped the next day. Yes, I know that rape is a bad thing, but one of the crimes committed here was stupidity. In cases like that I seriously question whether valuable police time and resources should be wasted, she should just be told that stupid girls that go out alone and get drunk then go somewhere with strange men are going to get raped. She should count herself lucky to be alive. Where is the personal responsibility thing? Sure, in a civilised country blah, blah, blah, but she went with several guys from a not civilised place so what did she think was going to happen? That they wanted to play tiddley winks? You can say that she was drunk; she wasn't able to think at all. I will say; good girls don't get drunk, good girls don't go out alone, good girls don't go off with several strange men. Why is it that good girls are so rare now and we seem to have so many stupid bitches and sluts? In a word; feminism. Call it the rant for the day, though I don't think just one makes for a very grumpy old man, I should do a few more.

Played Wolfenstein last week. It wasn't as good as Return to Castle... Sure, it has weapons upgrades, but it has too many stupid boss levels and too much search every-fracken-where for intel, gold, tomes. Did not really enjoy it so much at all.

Steam was offline last weekend (as in the one before the one just passed), apart from the obligatory rant about what right do the wankers at valve think they have to take my hard earned money and then not let me play the games that I have paid for. Yeah, it wasn't just that the steam servers were overloaded and you couldn't download anything that you had just bought (though that too) but that fracken steam wouldn't run anything without fracken connecting to the 'cloud', which, of course, is just what it couldn't fracken do. So I put in a Stalker disc, only realised a few hours in that it was Stalker 1 - after my friend made some comment about it and I said that I wasn't playing 1, I was playing 2, but sure enough there was no swamp, I was in 1. Mind you 2 was heaps buggier. Eventually I bored out, took a few days, but eventually the lack of challenge, the lack of purpose got to me. Naturally I was refusing to go to Pripet (Pripyat, I think they write it in Stalker 1) and follow the game mission, and in 1 there isn't really the faction war to get into.

So I ended up buying Metro 2033, which is what I am playing at the moment. Kind of a Stalker thing (lots of Stalker references), with something like the Wolfenstein engine by the look (no damage meter, get blurry around the peripheral vision and hide somewhere whilst you regenerate). But some really fracken hard bits here and there, and no save option before one. Anyhow, it kept refusing to read the game pad part of my Zboard gaming keyboard, specifically the run button, which I eventually noticed when I had a bit where I was hand-cuffed and had to run or die. And as each failed attempt got me to have to reload the whole map section it was not retaining the changes that I made each time to the key bindings so that it would fracken run. So I found that quite tedious. Also had some issues with people giving me instructions, and vital details not being shown in the objectives list - I was to go where and do what? In Stalker, at least by Stalker 3, you can check your message log if the details in the objectives list is a bit vague, and you can re-read the whole conversation. I am not too sure about the guns, find versus buy etc, I suspect that it will take a few plays to get the knack of that. But, all in all, I am enjoying it, I enjoy the darkness, the Russian-ness, in this way I enjoy the whole Stalker series. And it seems to have some depth, I don't know how far through I am yet, but Stalker 3 was definitely too short.

So that is my life right now; I wake up, I work, two nights I have lectures, otherwise I play games. I do need to get some discipline about studying; dedicate Saturday morning or Thursday evening. And I need to do a bit more housework. Also I need to buy some food.

Remember Me

2010-06-22T20:46:00.002+09:30

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.

Forgotten Blog

2010-06-17T18:15:00.004+09:30

Yeah, I kinda forgot that I had a blog for a few days. Too busy.
I have moved apartments. My old rental manager tried to cheat me out of another two weeks rent on the way out. I got the power and phone relocated, then to have Telstra drop me two days claiming that it is illegal to reconnect me so soon. And I got my power disconnected; as in I got it transferred to the new address, and then after the address was in my name it got cut because the previous tenants had moved out. I came home to a cold, dark house - had to go out for dinner, boo hoo, took a couple of calls but someone came around that night to reconnect it. I had to throw the main switch, apparently it is illegal for him to actually do the connection.

I had been reconciling two systems at work, well I was asked to check that one was in the other. I did a weeks worth of data out of one which checked to three days in the other (weekend thing) and asked my project manager if she wanted me to finish the next few days given that it wasn't going to add any value. She said it was okay. That was last week. This week it was "I asked you to reconcile the whole week, not just five days!" So I did the next few days. It did not add any value. What can I say?

My new flat is kind of nice. It has pros and cons. But I think that I will enjoy it more as I am closer to the 'busy' end of town. Lots of restaurants just steps away, the mall is just a few minutes, also closer to the river and gardens.

I had an Adult Friend Finder account three years ago, it was a one year pre-paid thing and then I closed it. They started billing my card every month about nine months ago, lasted for seven months. Unauthorised, in fact pure credit card fraud. Apparently it is legal in the US for US companies to commit fraud so long as it is not against US citizens. Anyhow, the bank closed that card, and it had only just been replaced. So now I am frantically changing all of my automated accounts, but not to the new card from this bank, remember, but to my new SingAir AmEx card so I get KrisFlier points. Both my new Westpac and my new HSBC cards are meant to have the zero or 1% on transferred balance offers, but I can't see that either of them has actually taken any of previous card's debt. I guess 'cos it was, coincidentally, just closed as they were opening the new accounts.

(The AFF account was meant to find me an Asian girlfriend in Singers before I moved there so that I could move straight into a relationship. I would have stayed with that sort of leverage to keep me there.)

As I come out of Hotmail I get the Singapore screen since I haven't updated MSN to the fact that I am (unfortunately) back in Oz, today there were lots of pics of Singers flooded by rainfall - it all made me so homesick!

Why am I doing this?

2010-06-07T19:34:00.002+09:30

I am moving house.

Fed up with my rental manager's total ineptness, replacing my fridge-that-was-okay-except-for-missing-door-shelves with a fridge-that-is-beaten-up-dented-scratched-has-cracked-plastic-shelves-a-much-smaller-freezer-and-is-as-noisy-as-hell-but-has-door-shelves and his entering my apartment without getting my permission to make this swap so I gave notice that I was going to give notice.

That was all mid last week, I enquired about five places, looked at three, and applied for two by Friday, and today, Monday, have been told that I was successful getting one - my preferred one too. All much quicker than I expected. So I gave written two weeks notice to the 'grand manager' after work and have just been online filling in disconnection, relocation, and new connection forms. I will still have to phone a couple tomorrow since not everyone will accept a cancel via the web.

I'm really buzzed.

The new place is in the old East End Market complex, an inside apartment so the balcony faces the quiet courtyard and trees and greenery.

My sister dropped off a few big plastic boxes (the wheeled kind) and I am going to start packing tonight (hence the title, I should be doing that now and not writing this). I will get a lot of packing done in the evenings, then finish Saturday morning, then move Sunday, then next weekend will clean the old place.

I am hoping that I can get the power on there in time, I use TruEnergy and they only take relocations by phone, and want four days, if I phone first thing Tuesday, then Wed, Thurs, Fri, will it by on for the weekend? Still, it is CBD so it should be easier. Phone won't be on until mid next week (Telstra...), broadband and cable TV follow it by a few days. And then Monday the week after I have everything cut here so that I have power and hot water for next weekend's clean up.

I had another little mishap with Australia Post; an eBay delivery was running late, so I emailed the merchant who swore that he had posted the item and gave me the registered post number, I phoned AusPost and lo and behold, it had been delivered a week ago, but they hadn't told me about it. Or perhaps more likely, the card had exactly the same info as for the last one (reference number '1', seriously) and naturally I thought that it was a second card for the first parcel. But then they moved it to the GPO, without me asking for it. True, I asked for the first one to be moved, but they never told me of this new event. Useless AusPost courier. He is an Indian of course (you know rings your buzzer saying 'please come down, please come down' [buzz buzz buzz endlessly] without saying who he is or why you should go down - something like 'Australia Post courier, please sign for a parcel' would work so much better). So is the new rental manager that is the reason why I am leaving this apartment. Do I foresee major 'cultural' difficulties ahead for Australia?

You do realise that over the last year Indians have become almost as much hated and despised as Muslims in Australia? They are more annoying, but have been committing less violent crime against Anglos (the nine year old girl being raped by one last week aside). But they have been blaming Australia for being racist for all of these attacks on Indians when we all found out that they were carried out by other Indians. Except for that guy that burnt himself trying to torch his car for insurance and then screamed that it was a racist attack against him. That wasn't 'another' Indian.

You know what all Australians are saying.
You don't like it here? Then fuck off back where you came from!

Seriously, when will Liberal Socialism gasp its last breath?
Still, if it did then I wouldn't be so keen on leaving here myself, would I?
All of this left wing humanist crap is a big part of why I want out.

That and the high taxes to pay for a plethora of useless public servants and welfare addicts, the government bureaucracies that strangle business ventures. And blah blah blah, I could go on for days.

But then you try to explain to a Singaporean how their one party Fascist state is like a breath of fresh air to us. They want to whinge about the lack of social services without accepting that providing them, and paying for the huge resultant civil service, will lead to crushing taxes. Which in turn will mean that families will not have the wherewithal to provide for their own family members and so will become even more dependent upon government handouts. By whatever deity you worship in whatever abode He/She/It resides in, your public transport system WORKS! Try finding one in Australia that does. (Admittedly, I live in Adelaide and it is worse than most AU cities in this regard, as in so many others.)

And seriously, do you want to live in Malaysia, where you know that you will suffer great persecution and oppression because of your religious beliefs, well Australia is a lot like that for those of us who follow traditional European beliefs rather than that false and foreign, indeed Asian, construct that most Whites profess to follow.

Speaking of which.

I just got a SingAir 'mail (KrisFlyer newsletter) which had a SingAir/AmEx card thing in it. (Well, a link thereto.) Two of the three cards were available to Singaporean residents only, and the third's best benefits were only available in SG. Kind of thought it was a funny thing for them to be sending out, but I guess maybe most of their members are Singaporeans. Maybe most Australians are members of QANTAS's club. Not in Adelaide of course, 'cos QANTAS doesn't service Adelaide. I have two best friends, that makes three of us, two of us have well paying jobs, both are KrisFlyer members, not QANTAS whatevers. I can only go on what I know; you know, it is a 'generation x' thing, we only trust anecdotal evidence.

Why do I use TruEnergy?
I made that choice years ago, but is it still valid? Maybe I should re-investigate.

Anyhow, big changes ahead.
Well, not really big, just moving home, but it seems big.

Birthdays

2010-06-05T20:57:00.002+09:30

Yes, there is one tomorrow, but rather than a 'present' I wired my sis a thousand. I know that she needs a hand at the moment and could use it, but somehow it doesn't feel 'right'. I have this thought that I should now buy some useless trifle and gift-wrap it. Odd. Emotional and not logical, I know. I get a tad annoyed at how my father always gives me a few hundred for my birthday, I think that I would appreciate a book (or something) more, even though it costs a lot less and even if I didn't actually enjoy it. But this is a particular situation.

Normally I would say it doesn't seem much, but at this point it is threatening my ability to pay my own rent. Financially I have been having a bad year. I could get really melancholic here...

At the moment my pet hate is cyclists.
The last few days I have been thinking of getting a t-short made up saying something like "When I drive a car I take revenge on the cyclists that make being a pedestrian so dangerous." Seriously, they are pissing me off. Riding on footpaths, blocking pedestrian crossing zones, shouting abuse at you as they cowardly ride off after they nearly run you over, thinking that no laws apply to them. Everything that cyclists like to whinge about car-drivers can be applied to themselves.

I am having a busy time right now. I lost patience with the new dick of a rental manager after the fridge fiasco and so have been looking for a new apartment, which will involve paying eight weeks rent before I get the previous bond returned. And I will soon be studying again and had to pay fees and buy text books. So kind of financial worries. At the point at which I am changing banks and starting new cards and have (still) to move my automatic deductions/charges to new accounts/cards. And Australia Post has been pissing me off all week not being able to give me something that they held at a post office ten minutes walk from me. Took nearly two weeks, eight interactions with them, and a total cost of about eighty dollars to me to resolve.

I have been playing Rome; Total War on this laptop, which runs Vista and the development console doesn't seem to work in vista, so the cheats available in xp are not. Given that the game seems to randomly hit hard with money lost to 'corruption', which you can't do anything about, like hiring constables or such, I resolved to use the money cheat to counteract it. But of course I can't get to it in vista, so I copied the save file onto a flash drive and tried to open it in a R:TW on my desktop (which runs xp), but that crashes the game. I had a similar problem with something else a while ago as I recall, cheats not working on vista. Seems to be not a gamer-friendly os.

Anyhow, I went out last night, Friday night, and walked down the road to the city centre. Initially planning to go to a text book shop in Renaissance Arcade (? I think, anyhow that same arcade that has the vegetarian place at the end near Pultney), but it wasn't open, wasn't open this morning either, sign (which I read at that point) said 9:30 to 4:30 Mon-Fri so obviously they don't want business. Ended up trying the new EB Games shop, not that it is 'new', rather that they have moved into a new store (not too far from Shin Tokyo). I am not kidding you, the only game I could find that vaguely caught my attention was Pharaoh! Marked to only thirty and then with a half price sticker on that. So old, but a fun game - I do not enjoy Children of the Nile, I bought it on Steam only because I forgot that it wasn't Pharaoh, forgot which was which. And every time that I would look through my steam list wanting to play a decent strategy game (an area steam is weak in) I would wish that it was pharaoh and end up playing a shooter. This says something for how weak on story line or original ideas games are lately.

I look at bioshock 2, but bioshock 1 was only a play-once game.
I looked at supreme commander 2, but nothing on the box indicated anything different from 1.
I was so desperate I even looked at civilisation what? 27 or something it is up to now? But I didn't like the first half dozen and couldn't see the latest being worth installing.

Remember when doom 2 was awe inspiring?
We could hookup the old co-ax and play TOGETHER!!!!

Oh, and then dune 2!

These two games defined us.
They gave us meaning.
Dare I say it? They made life worth living!

When fear 2 came out not too long ago my comments ran something like; the graphics are good enough to masturbate to but the story line is nothing much new and the weapons are no biggy, definitely it is not as frightening. Bearing in mind that fear 1 was the most frightening game that I have ever played. Seriously, when you saw that eight year old girl you just shit yourself! Started shooting at her whilst running backwards as fast as you could, knowing that you couldn't hurt her but hoping to slow her down enough until you fell out a window or something and so got away.

That was a fun game!

How many things?

2010-05-25T18:04:00.004+09:30

Raining again. Not that cold, in fact I got too hot wearing a coat to work, so tomorrow I'll just go with the suit jacket and a large umbrella. You start to think that winter is here, and then it gets warm, dry, and sunny for a couple of weeks, then it rains again. No real winters like there used to be when I was a child...

(Anyone that tries to post any comments about global warming will be burnt.)

Got a card from the Australia Post couriers, took half an hour off work, and since I am a contractor that meant forgoing thirty bucks, to find the post office closed when I got there. Just on five maybe. No five thirty or six like anyone running a business. I intend phoning tomorrow and telling them that they can deliver it to my work. I am not going to forgo any more pay because they can't provide a decent service.

One day when I was obviously quite bored I went to the Singapore Expats site and ended up trying their friends/dating sub-site. As I recall it turned out to be rather disappointing. I had thought that it would be full of SPGs trying to catch a good foreign guy, but not a scary of them. Anyhow I just got an email of 'likely matches' from them and one caught my eye; a cute Russian red-head with an interest in anime. Strangely none of the 'mails links worked, so I tried logging on, only to be refused, so I tried the 'resend password' button, only to be told that it didn't recognise my email address. You know, the one it had just sent a 'mail to...

Anyhow, I found a 'contact us' link that didn't require logging on (Steams old problem) and got a very rapid reply. A really stupid reply, but quite quickly provided. This guy wrote, in rather bad English, that I couldn't log on because my address city was not filled in. Just how I had been able to log on previously is a mystery. But a further mystery is how he expected me to log on to change the basic details so that I could then log on...

Also amusing was the bit "you details is not incorrect..." followed by instructions on how to click on my home city from the list of cities in China...
If this wasn't filled in then I am guessing that the list was deficient in the Australia area. (And why is 'deficient' i before e when it is after a c?)

Other than that I have sweet fanny adams to talk about.

Actually that's not true, I recall, just as I am closing, that I do have some politics to rant about.

Rudd, sweet little communist that he is, has decided that to try and balance his budget he is going to add a new tax on the resources industry.

Now you will all be aware that Australia is pretty much the end of the World, and is taking longer to get out of the GFC than most (and Adelaide is the arse end of Australia, which is why my hourly rate is still not up to where it was three years ago). The only sector to come out sooner was the one driven by foreign demand, the resources that we export to everyone else. So they have now got a forty percent tax on them, before they pay interest on their business loans, before they pay their shareholders, and before they pay their normal income tax.

This is justified by saying that the resources that they mine are the property of all Australians and that they should pay for them. A reasonable argument; which is why they pay royalties; royalties to the indigenous peoples and royalties to the state governments and royalties to the federal government.

How many companies will now look somewhere else for their next venture?
How many jobs will Australia forgo because of this?
How much future tax revenue on those projects will now not be received because these prats wanted to grab some more now?

I am

2010-05-15T18:44:00.003+09:30

I am blogging for no reason other than that I am alive, and blogging.
Rounding up reading things, facebooks, emails, chatting online with friends in Singapore, checking other blogs, so I felt that I should write something.

What to write though?

Hmm,

I left Santos and am back at Transport. That is good, not just 'cos I am being paid a bit more than half as much again, as the people have more character and I enjoy being there. Also it is on Leigh Street and has lots of good restaurants. "Lots" and "good" in the context of being Adelaide of course.

I am having the new contract pay into my HSBC account, and when it has something decent in it I will transfer my automatic deductions to it. It has a VISA card as well. Also applied for a VISA card from WestPac; it has an interest free period on the balance that I transfer from the NAB card and it has a loyalty/reward programme with SingAir. I wanted the Citi one, but they no longer have a relationship with SingAir here, they are with Qantas, and how useless is that? Hello, I am in Adelaide and Qantas don't fly internationally out of here, they only fly via other cities, so add on connection and at least half a day, plus at least a few hundred bucks expense, to your trip. So that is all good, moving at last. 'Cos the NAB were so useless when I was overseas.

I have enrolled in a masters, in accounting. Studying part time to start with, but I would love to work only three days a week and study full time. So I will have a certificate and a diploma and a degree in accounting. How overkill, but unfortunately the way that I have to go to do the things that I want to do.

I was not paying my rent since the manager was not fixing my fridge. This was my third month of not paying my rent, and finally someone called me to ask about that. I said "fix my fridge". It seems that it is finally being fixed, but I am holding back rent until it is done and I have seen it with my own eyes. Lesson learned; don't move in or pay anything until the bastards have got everything perfect, 'cos once you move in they will have no incentive to fix anything. Human nature sucks.

I was online chatting with my friend Javier in Singers last night saying that I have lots of Japanese music (J-pop rules!) but nothing Chinese and she sent me lots of links to clips on you tube. I spent hours watching S.H.E. and Sammi Cheung. Yeah, a few others, but that's where my attention got hooked, so lots of watching Landry shake her butt, and she tried to get me to watch a few that I said were like Chinese Barry Manilow :D So is cool, I got exposed to a new cultural experience, and I like that.

People keep asking me if I am going back to Singapore. Most seem to accept that it is inevitable. I find the psychology of that interesting; they are sad, but impotent, observers in the demise of their own culture and economy, their very social fabric is rending, but what can they do? I say maybe, maybe somewhere else; I can't be sure of how long it will take before I am ready to make the move again, but next time I will have to be independent of the local economy and the market vagaries. And I say that I would love to live in Hong Kong for three months and see what it is like, and maybe Taiwan, and definitely after I finish the degree I would love to get one of those teaching English jobs in Japan for a year and soak up that culture. I don't know which way it will go, I just think that in two or three years I will be at another cross-road making another decision. And right here, right now, I cannot give a firm commitment on what I will want in the future.

And here is the funny thing; I am happy with that, I am comfortable with that.
Like I am comfortable with consulting and working by contract and not having a fixed, guaranteed job.

I have been asked a few times recently what do I do. In circumstances that make answering with "I'm an accountant" seems meaningless, and "business consultant" or whatever seemed not to work either. For example, moving away from the few instances of people asking, the bank asked for my card application, and then asked for my position. Well, my 'position' is director of my own company, but then what follows from that doesn't work well with any of their drop-down lists. My company is just me, but I work in corporations and organisations that usually have a few thousand employees. But how do I describe my crust earning endeavours these days? Used to be easy, now it makes me pause and think; how best to describe it to this person, 'cos different people need different explanations.

So, all in all, I am generally feeling better about things than the last few months, the economy of little ol' Adelaide hasn't quite picked up yet, but it's getting there. And I am comfortable.

Whatever Again

2010-05-03T18:29:00.003+09:30

I guess this is more just to prove that my net connection is working. Since Steam is being such a pain. I went off and left it updating for most of the day so that I could play C&C4, for which you have to be online or you lose your progress, Steam was finally saying that the downloads were complete and that I could play. Why it needed to update so much when the damned thing is only a week or two old is both beyond me and unforgivable to start with. But lo! I click 'play' and Steam instead goes to 'updating steam' mode.

Fuck that!

Log into Steam Powered dot com and, as usual, I cannot log in under my real account name and have to use a shadow account that I created some time ago since every time I log an issue with Valve the site thereafter refuses to recognise my password. Petty little shit of a website that. Six fracking times I have had that password reset. The Valve staff say that the password has to be numeric only, which is crap 'cos the shadow account is an alpha-only rude phrase about Steam and my main account used to work with an alphanumeric until they started screwing with it.

Anyhow, whilst I am here, so the NAB pissed me around with their online help (online, but three or four days later...), they sent me a link and some directions to download a PDF form to lodge a complaint about FriendFinders unauthorised use of my credit card. So I phoned them, but after twenty minutes on hold dropped that idea and decided to go to an actual branch and speak to real people. More than an hour later and nearly fainting from hunger (tip, eat lunch first next time) the woman says that the transaction was in GBP! Britain? I have not transacted with anything UK ever that I can recall, certainly nothing recently, in fact I know that I haven't done anything since I got back from SG nearly a year ago. At first I thought it was something to do with Adult Friend Finder, 'cos I know that company is a credit card thief, but they are based in the USA (like most net crims) not the UK. Puzzling. It will be a race to see whether the NAB refunds the thefts, which they say will take six weeks, or I finalise moving everything to HSBC and shut the NAB card. Either way, they have lost a twenty-year customer.

They used to be a good bank, but they stopped providing service a few years ago. Started using Indian call centres, even the online is Indian and does nothing but spew lots of words but no help. I reckon it was when they tried being the 'National' and forgot the 'Australia' part, kind of like how Community Aid Abroad merged with Freedom From Hunger and the resulting body was called Community Aid Abroad, surprise, surprise, but the CAA people got promoted, the FFH people got side-tracked, the FFH programs (which actually helped people) got strangled, and the CAA method of programming became the norm. I think you lose your soul with something like that. Yeah, CAA was never a good organisation, they funnel money into socially invasive projects that force their liberal socialist paradigm onto the recipients whereas FFH used to dig wells and build shelters and actually do something useful for people. Hasn't changed with the name change to 'Oxfam Australia' either.

Mind you, if there is one thing that I have learned in life, it is that if you give someone charity then they depend on it. They give up on trying for themselves and start parasiting on society. It is a bad thing to give freeloaders a dime, better to tell them to get a job. Seriously, I know that twenty years ago I would never have thought that I would think this, but it is what I have seen. This country is going down the gurgler with all of this welfare state mentality and the requisite humungous civil service bureaucracy it engenders. Yes, I sound like a grumpy old man, and I am, I know, but it's for their own good.

Whatever

2010-05-03T12:17:00.003+09:30

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.

It Defies Explanation

2010-02-22T20:45:00.010+10:30

Someone wants to keep his job, so what is the last thing he would do?

Go on strike!

Would you like to explain that to the Lufthansa pilots? How does going on strike protect your jobs from being outsourced to an Asian airline? Surely it would simply speed it up. Sure! You can go on strike - we were going to replace you anyhow...

Obama never ceases to amaze me. The sheer arrogance when he stated that people just didn't understand his healthcare plan so he would have to explain it to them one more time! It just doesn't occur to someone so wrapped up in his own 'mission' to consider that perhaps the population is saying "No!"

This man has wracked up almost as much debt in his one year as Bush did in eight years! And yet he keeps blaming Bush for all his ills! He keeps claiming to have 'created' two million jobs, even though the USA has two million fewer jobs than a year ago! And now he is calling for 'bipartisanship', Democrats are blaming the Republicans for being obstructionist. The Democrats have the White House, the Upper House, the Lower House, how can anyone be obstructing the Democrats except other Democrats? Someone needs to explain to this university 'professor' about basic arithmetic.

I have been feeling very down lately, hence why the long gap in blogging. Mostly 'cos I've landed in a depressing job. The basic tasks are fun enough, I am working with Business Objects Planning and doing a lot of VBA programming, generally couldn't be happier. But as pointed out in an earlier post, I am getting exactly half the rate I have gotten for my contracts for the last nearly two years and I am reporting to someone that would have previously reported to me.

Last week two people asked me for my resumé to send on to different people in the same organisation and the rate will almost be what I am used to. So I guess I should start feeling better.

The main thing that was annoying me I reckon was that I was going to have to be working long hours just to make ends meet instead of the laid back, easy going style that usually provides me with more than I need. Life wasn't fun. But hopefully all over soon. That would officially be the end of the GFC.

We have an election coming up late next month in South Australia. We had a strange law in this state that didn't allow people here to blog about elections without signing off with their real name and post code. Then the Attorney General went off the deep end defending this law and in the process slandered some guy, and then in a quick back-track to divert attention from, or maybe to seem contrition for, his act of slander he suddenly revokes the law.

Can an Attorney General revoke a law unilaterally? I thought that it had to be revoked by another act of parliament.

But either way, now I can apparently tell you that I am seriously disappointed in both sides. Whilst I usually vote for someone interesting or fun or independent in the Upper House, compulsory voting has made our Lower House votes meaningless for most of us in Australia - the outcome of national elections is decided in just a few seats, usually be less than one percent, so in a country of ten million voters the outcome rests with just a few thousand voters. Not democratic. And I generally tend to live in what we call 'blue ribbon' seats, firmly conservative seats (this might confuse some yanks, their socialists are blue and their conservatives are red, other way around for everyone else on Earth). Therefore I draw a little box at the bottom, tick it, and write 'none of the above' next to it.

There has always been a few percent of votes that were informal for either reasons of error, or because the voter makes an otherwise legit vote but then writes a funny little poem next to it - and in this country any mark other than the approved vote informalises a ballot. But for the last couple of decades there has been a growing number of deliberate informals, and it scares the Australian Electoral Commission that people are not taking their system seriously. Last I heard five percent of votes, like mine, are deliberate statements against our political system.

A new email scam hit my inbox today; "someone I am attorney for with the same surname as you has died recently...". If I responded then I guess the next step would be to ask me for my bank details so they can send money to me. Came from a USA address, not Nigeria like the last few - they come out every year or so.

My damned niece! ARGGGHHH
I have been vegetarian for a long time, and I have been careful about the cheese that I bought - no animal rennet. But over xmas she got me feeling guilty about the entire dairy industry and so now I have to try and be full vegan. I never minded being vego, I got annoyed at the Australian - I suppose the entire Western - culture at times, and this was one reason I loved Singapore so much. But being full vegan is noticeably harder, especially eating out.

Road Rage

2010-02-01T18:51:00.002+10:30

I want to make this official, just so there is no confusion, I hate Adelaide.
And, what's more, I hate Adelaidians. They have serious problems. Yes, I know, I have lived most of my life here, but still.

A couple of days ago, Saturday to be precise, I went for a walk down to the market. As I, a pedestrian, crossed at the lights, whilst they had the little green man, I nearly got bowled over by a driver tearing around the corner who then had the audacity to scream abuse at me. At the same corner, Pultney and Angas, on the way back there were two bike/car incidents. The first saw someone blasting there horn at a bike mounted parking inspector who apparently made the unforgiveable mistake of being in the left lane and indicating a left turn and then turning to the left. Then a car wanting to turn right and indicating so was waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass (remember that we drive on the left here) and the motor bike behind blasted his horn and then pulled alongside the guy and screamed abuse at him.

And just now walking back home after the first day at my new contract the local old fart says hello and asks my name. I politely said "I'm Kai." He said "you're tired? Well go home and have a sleep!" I said "No, I'm sorry, you didn't hear me, I said my name is 'Kai'." And then he started berating me for being a "smart arse" and then reckoned that the only reason he didn't fight me was that he had to be somewhere. Stupid old fart could hardly stand as it was, he would have unbalanced if he had tried to swing one at me.

God, this city is just so rude and aggressive.

So, I have started my new contract. It is at Santos, I am going to be working on Business Objects Planning (data comes from Oracle Financials and I will be using a couple of the Oracle tools as well). I am working with a Chinese Filipino; I was talking about my experiences in Singapore and that I would like to visit Hong Kong and maybe Japan, that I nearly started learning Japanese but learnt some Russian instead, that I have a friend that was learning Japanese but is now learning Chinese because he has a Chinese wife, that I knew someone from Hong Kong that had a Malaysian Chinese wife, and he says that I know a lot of Chinese and asked if I was okay with Asians. But he was then distracted by someone requesting a report before I could say that I am a racist.

Isn't it weird? I have always thought of myself as a firm racist and yet I do have a lot of Oriental friends. But then they are all racists as well, seriously, you should here them sometimes. And one of my two best friends is an Australian Aboriginal, as is one of my aunts. So there you go. I would still describe myself as a racist though, it's just that good people are good regardless of what else they are.

On the gaming front; I have been playing Sword of the Stars lately, acquired via Steam. It is kind of a second-rate Master of Orion, maybe better than Sin of a Solar Empire in some ways, but with a few really annoying bugs that spoil it. Definitely Stardock really need to come up with a new version of MOO2 that plays on modern Windows - MOO3 was a total waste of time! Don't go there again, just redo MOO2 and all will be forgiven.

Add This Up

2010-01-23T10:49:00.007+10:30

Explain this to me:

Scott Brown wins a Senate seat in the US.
The Democrat party's majority goes from 60 out of 100 (technically 58 + 2 independents) down to 59.

So they don't have the 'super' majority to push through legislation without any discussion, but they do still have the majority.
And they have the majority in the House of Representatives.
But with Mr Brown's election Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, now says that the Democrats do not have the numbers to pass Obama's health reform bill.

Now as far as I can work this out it must mean that Ms Pelosi cannot count on the support at least one sixth of Democrat votes in the Senate. How many can she count on in the House?

Naturally the Democrats are holding the Republicans responsible for some 'great evil' (not letting them provide inefficient, ineffective, and expensive provision of basic health cover for all), but isn't the issue really that the Democrats are not united on this?

Isn't the issue that Democrats in the Upper and Lower Houses cannot agree on abortion?

(The Upper House Democrats voted to change the legislation to not fund abortions, whilst the Lower House Democrats are adamant that the bill must fund abortions.)

I went to a 'sceptics' gathering at a pub this week. One of my Eastern European friends called to ask if I was interested. Me (Anglo-Australian), the Latvian guy, and two guys of German derivation. Have I mentioned before that I generally have a two hour time limit with Germans? Seriously, the way their brains work just starts to grate after a while. Anyhow, this 'meet and greet' was just a get-together to have a drink and a chat listed on a public activities website in town. Organised by a small number of former members of the Sceptics Society.

'Former members'? Yeah, the reason being that most of them turned out not to be 'sceptics', i.e. people who question any statement or thought to challenge its inherent assumptions and force it to hold to the truth. No, they were just storm troopers of established orthodox 'scientific' theory. If it is published in the media as a 'generally accepted fact' then they defend it against all. If it is 'on the edge' then they denounce it.

A few centuries ago they would have been fanatical defenders of the Flat Earth theory. (Sorry, the Flat Earth Fact.)

But some of the others that attended were worth listening to. They had open minds and were willing to consider and discuss things until the absolute facts were known.

I had an interview for a contract on Thursday. It is not my first preference - I am still angling to get on that ERP project that I can't name. And it is exactly half of what I got on my last two contracts (and almost half of what I got for the two before that). But it would pay the rent. The irony is that is is equivalent to the half dozen offers that I turned down in Singapore. And how I wish now that I had taken one of them and then enrolled in SMU part-time to finish a masters. I would still be in SG, which is, in my view, immeasurably preferable to being in AU.

The only major issue I have with living in Singapore is getting hold of English language Manga. Seriously! Here I have a list of standing orders with Pulp Fiction, and the stores are full of English language books in alphabetical order. In SG the only place that has a lot of manga in English and in order is Kinokuniya. All of the manga-specialist stores are in Chinese and their small selection of English titles is not arranged alphabetically. Well, not English alphabetically, I have my suspicion that it is alphabetically in Chinese. So you have to search the whole lot to find what you are after. It would be alright if Kinokuniy took orders, but they don't.

Totally different with comics; I found a small comic stall on the third or fourth level of Funan, one of the IT centres. (Funan, Sim Lim Tower, Sim Lim Square, and 'The Verve' was opening whilst I was there - each have a dozen or more floors of IT stores. Sim Lim Square focuses on cameras and things, Sim Lim Tower on computers, Funan is more mixed.) Anyhow, this stall had American comics at their US price in Sing Dollars. So if the covers said US$2.95 then it cost SG$2.95 - they would cost AU$7.95 in Australia! I was so stoked to find him! If I was living and working in SG then I would definitely be taking up comics again. (Mostly Marvel, but also Dark Horse, Image, Top Cow. I don't read DC.)

Over January I have kind of gone half nocturnal due to the heat; some weeks it is upper thirties and touches forty for a couple of days, then some weeks it is upper twenties to lower thirties, but all in all it has been encouraging me to not go outside until evening. Kind of like Singapore in that respect. But if I start working again then I will have to start getting up at 6:30 again. That is probably the hardest part about working, the getting up in the morning bit.

The contract would be building budgeting and forecasting models and reports in Business Object Planning. Which I can do in my sleep. Apparently they have Oracle Financials and Hyperion but they didn't talk about the latter; it's probably not Hyperion Planning but one of the other applications in the suite.

In a way I enjoy the periods between contracts where I am not working, where my time is my own. Yeah, I know that I get far too slack, but time without stress is nice. If only I could find some way that I could get twice the average income and only have to do half the average work.

Second Worst?

2010-01-19T12:54:00.002+10:30

I can't resist. Seriously, I can't.

So I am watching Fox News this morning.
I know; it's Yankee crap, but most of the cable channels in Oz are Yankee, the local ones (Sky News, Sky Business, APAC) are dull - for local news I go to the interactive channel and browse the stories, all done in ten minutes!

So I am watching the AMERICAN news, and most of them are full of Haiti, a sad event, but I know about it now so why keep on? CNN and Fox were both covering the Massachusetts (God! I am glad I don't have to say that every day!) election, one decidedly red, the other decidedly blue. Everything in the US is so partisan! Anyhow the Democrats might lose Ted Kennedy's seat, something incomprehensible to them. The stories move on to something a little more interesting - Obama's first year!

Now I am not aware of him having done anything of note, certainly he has failed quite a few things, and definitely he is out to turn the US into a Socialist demagoguery and make most yanks poor, but get this - one commentator said that his first year was the worst since William Henry Harrison, who died in his first year from pneumonia. Hey what? What about Abe Lincoln? Didn't he start a civil war in his first year?

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

2010-01-15T11:03:00.003+10:30

Well, B'Lack Osama has done it again!

As you may recall there was a minor mishap in the corporate sector recently and it required the US government giving a lot of money to certain companies. A lot was given to banks, and they had to pay it back, and what's more, they are paying it back.

BUT...

They also have to pay back the money that was given to General Motors, Chevrolet, and American International Group!

Yes, that's right, Obama in his infinite wisdom realises that his demographics want to punish the banks, and a lot of auto-workers vote for him. So he is putting two and two together and he gets this.

Remember how he went to Chicago and told the farmers that they would not get any handouts from him? But then he made huge handouts to Detroit? And those auto companies do not, repeat, do not have to pay that money back! Instead the banks are going to be forced to pay it back.

They, of course, will pass it on to the consumers, and I hope that they restrict this pass-on to car loans!

Also in the news; with the series of extremely cold winters in Europe scientists there are finally having to admit publicly that the world is NOT getting warmer, it is getting colder! Now I know that all intelligent, educated, informed people already knew this, it was only the flat-earthers that insisted that the world was getting warmer and that man was responsible - despite the records clearly showing that the planet has been getting colder every year since 1996!

I know that I have harped on about this one before, but I do not suffer fools lightly, and this about-face is so laughable. Forced to acknowledge the truth by the truth being rammed down their faces in the form of three winters in a row, each progressively colder and more severe than any in a century. The general public was beginning to cotton on there...

Changing to something personal...

I just had a letter from GE Money telling me that I was in arrears. Also that I had to pay the arrears within eight days of the due date or get hit with a late payment fee. First problem? the letter reached me TEN days after the due date! Second problem? they deduct my payments from my bank account automatically, so how could 'I' be in arrears? Answer; without my requesting it, without my approving it, and indeed without my knowledge of it, they reduced the amount they were deducting to not include the account handling fee - which then accumulated into this 'arrear'!

Well done guys!

Fortunately a phone call sorted this out. To an Indian call centre of course. They waived the late fee naturally, they also waived the arrears (good call), and they asked me if they could adjust the deducted amount to include the account fee again. A puzzling occurrence to be sure.

On a different note;
'Kai Shan in SG' when I am in AU?
I have thought about this, but as far as I can determine it is still my intention to return to Singapore, and on a permanent basis. I just got the timing wrong and didn't do enough background research on the contracting industry there, and made a few bad decisions. I am now carrying a large debt from the exercise (a lot of that from the process of returning back to Oz and getting set up here again). But it was all a learning experience.

And my friends want to go there as well. One friend and I talk regularly about business we can start, new ideas and innovations, we work on new devices (we met at college studying electronics and programming), and all of these are now framed in setting these up in Singapore.

The Hare and the Rabbit

2009-12-21T20:39:00.002+10:30

Okay, so it has nearly been a whole month since I last posted.

The short update is that my contract at Transport finally finished last week, I have enough money to probably get me through to March, and I expect the possibility of contracts on the market about February - but nothing is definite. I have never been so stressed about money before, but I will probably scrape through as I always do somehow. I am becoming more distant from my family, not just my father's side, but my mother and sister and her kids. I am pretty firmly convinced that I should not have come back from Singapore; I should have taken one of those jobs at one third of what I get in Australia and ridden the crisis through there. And I am also firmly of the opinion that my life has turned out so far to be one big empty waste.

Does that cover it?

It's Xmas. The 'X' stands for 'Christ' for the ignorant, that's why 'Xian' = 'Christian'. It is the christian hijacking of the Northern European Winter Solstice festival. I hate this time of year; not just that I hate the weather and the crowds and the social compulsion to shop, but I hate the false, shallow, and hollow 'religion' of it all. It makes me puke.

A friend and I were talking about Battlestar Galactica the other day. I have had to watch the whole of the previous series in a couple of sittings 'cos another friend wants to watch the last series with me. Anyhow, we were comparing the Cylons and Colonists to things; I noted how the polytheist humans versus the monotheist mechanoids was comparable to the evil christians persecuting the natural faiths of this world. My friend compared the Cylons with Americans (as in citizens of the USA, not the rest of the Americas) and the humans with the rest of Earth being destroyed by everything American. (Maybe I should put that lower case, like I do with the accursed religion?)

It cast the show in a different light. Are Americans capable of such conceptualisation? Of seeing their own corruption and portraying it, even parodying it, in a TV series? But recently I have gone off almost everything American on TV. It started with the putridness of the 'United States of Earth' of Futurama and the 'United States of Space' of Star Trek, and then boiled over into a re-ignition of vile at the Simpsons and South Park, but then Family Guy and American Dad for exactly the same reasons.

I want to watch animation and science fiction so much, but I am so sick of how Americans cannot make anything that does not force feed their own social paradigms down everybody else's throats. But it now even extends to the National Geographic and Discovery channels and their constant presentation of Xian crap disguised as 'history'. It makes me puke so much.

Gods, I want to live in a world without Americans or Xians so much!

Clusters

2009-11-24T09:31:00.007+10:30

I am staying home today.

I am having a migraine. I get these rolling pains across my head that are technically called 'cluster migraines' according to a doctor that I paid $90 to for a consultation. He also told me to avoid caffeine (inc chocolate), and that they can be caused by stress, or the release of stress, and to take nurofen or aspirin, but always to eat something before taking either, and to take zantac or something similar as well to prevent the nausea that nurofen gives me.

That was it. That in an hour long examination. Prick was a 'headache specialist' and he just wanted to grab as much stats as he could for his own studies. Didn't benefit me any. As if knowing the 'name' makes any bloody dif.

Anyhow, here I am. Slept for nearly twelve hours straight, and will spend as much of today as possible sleeping. Have got a dull throb behind one eye right now, but in ten minutes it could turn into a sharp stabbing pain in the forehead, or a line of sharp pain across the top of my head. If I go to work then I will have to spend the day doped on nurofen and will end up feeling, and behaving, as if stuck in neutral.

It is weirdly affecting my typing and my spelling is atrocious. Good thing I spell check this - there is a spelling error in almost every sentence.

Have read an interesting article on the Newsweek site about the proposed health care reforms in the US. Specifically about how they will be burden the young with the cost of looking after the old. Given the large number of financial burdens the working tax-payers in the US (and Australia) already have the future for them looks grim. Interesting point about the cost of the aged being twice the US military budget. It is even more so in Australia.

The options are:
1) Stop paying taxes, i.e. minimise income;
2) Leave;
3) Rebel; or
4) Suffer.

I believe that it must be obvious to even the stupid that this cannot be a long-term solution. The working generation is being dissuaded from having children by the expense of living themselves; they are being punished for succeeding, so they see no reason to try harder and earn more; all of this means that there will be fewer tax payers to bear the burden precisely as the older generation burgeons. As the aged cohort grows and the working cohort shrinks the cost ratios exaggerate and the system passes the bounds of stability. It fails.

The old don't care. As long as they get looked after they care not that their children will inherit a bankrupt state and will not be able to enjoy the same privileged retirement.

This is an old argument, its coming was foreseen long ago, good to see that it has now hit the main steam media and might open up some public debate.

It is, of course, just one more symptom of the collapse of Western society; indeed, of our civilisation.

I was only recently talking to someone about the cycle that all societies go through, whereby they all seem to collapse after about a thousand years or so. Egypt's Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms were each about a thousand years long, and separated by interregnums of sixty or ninety years, i.e. two or three generations. Chinese history seems to me to also have such collapses of centralised authority into anarchy or regionalised kingdoms or periods of warlords. India has gone through cycles as well, but complicated by a series of racial invasions. The Mayan collapse was mainly due to overstressed agriculture, as was the second collapse of Babylon. The first collapse of Rome, who can forget? And of course, the piece de resistance, Byzantium!

Why is Byzantium so important? Simply because it is such a total mirror image of what is happening today. The tale by Priscus (who accompanied Maximus to the court of Attila and wrote of their journey) of the Roman businessman who came to his tent one evening because he wanted to talk to someone from his old home, and maybe for the chance to talk Greek for a bit, is one of my favourite stories, short as it is. The businessman had been hounded by bureaucracy and heavy taxes and so had left the Empire and gone to live with the Huns. He had taken a Hunnic wife and he was running a successful business - without government interference or high taxation. It is the exact image of so many successful Australian and American men leaving for the Orient to start new lives. It so encapsulates where we are right now, namely one or two generations from collapse - for how long after that did Byzantium survive?

Or so I thought until a recent conversation where I was questioned as to the speed of the collapse once it is initiated. The questioner pointed out the moral degradation of modern Western society (which, I might point out, is unfortunately infecting Eastern cultures) and its impact upon society. His point was that if this was so, then will not the collapse happen sooner than I anticipate? I had to agree with his logic. I had always thought that it would be my children or grand-children that would see this fearful day, but perhaps I will live to see it.

It had been my intention to 'prepare' for the event. That is why I used to have a four hectare place in the country, where I was growing an orchid, had a vegie garden, was water sufficient, was going to get myself energy sufficient. Of course all of that was lost in my separation. And since in this country the woman always gets seventy percent, that being 'equality', I had little chance to rebuild soon. So I decided to try other options; such as trying to live to enjoy life, to explore, to see the world, experience other cultures. All of which lead me to realise that life is more fun in some other places, so why not try to emigrate and work and live there?

But the great 'GFC' (as if there haven't been dozens of others, perhaps it should be called 'GFC 14'?) put a hole in that.

I have to believe that I will pull through, achieve something worth while. Acknowledging that the next few months will be touch and go. After that, though, things should get better and I should be in a much better place than ever before.

I have to believe this, otherwise I would be tempted to blow my brains out, for after all, why choose to continue to live if you do not believe that your future life will be worthwhile?

Morbid, you think. But we all choose to believe that we will be luckier than we have any logical reason to believe. The natural psychology of man is an unjustifiable optimism. Indeed, we probably term a more realistic view to be pessimistic. The Gods will favour us. Well, I kind of don't trust deities anymore.

Which, in my mind, brings me back to the initial point; one more straw in the bundle, when will the camel's back break? Ironic, but fitting, that it may happen during Obama's first term. Sadly, unlikely, I think that the economy has some more resilience before it finally snaps.

Handlebars

2009-11-04T19:30:00.004+10:30

Okay, the first point has to be the sheer joy at the way the US elections are panning out at present with the people obviously waking up to how useless Obama is. Shame it is not a presidential and we have to suffer three more years of the fool. Interesting to see a fair number of 'Conservatives', a new party, unfortunately the US, like Britain, has a non-democratic voting system - hence how William Blythe (Bill Clinton to most) got elected when 60% of the country voted against him; had the US used any sort of actual democratic voting system, Australian, French, or Russian, then George Bush senior would have been re-elected.

My contract got extended, again. This week and then two weeks to backfill someone. The Monday after that is when the Health contract starts if we win it, and it is looking very good at this point. On that subject, turns out the RFP (Request for Proposals) was worded incorrectly and the workload will be twice the initial estimate. We did ask them to clarify the "three month project for each of two years, 130 person days total" and they said it was for the two years, but now they are saying it was meant to be for each year. Which means that it will be a full time job for both of us, and a good thing that we arranged the option to bring in a third as well.

Looking good. Yesterday I was getting very despondent, today it looks like one contract will slide into another, and then that could well slide straight into the next. I may not suffer from this GFC thing after all, well that is except for the bit about wasting most of a year trying to fit into Singapore's economy.

So far, so good.

Hmm, I am playing East India Company at the moment. Kind of boring, I got to locking the rest of Europe into the North Sea, cut off from their colonies in Africa and India, and I should have been winning, but instead I was going broke. So this time I am trying a bit more of a balancing act with the marine corps and actually taking and developing colonies.

I pretty well have given up on AI Wars, it was not as good as Sins of a Solar Empire. Even on the low settings I start with one star, the two AIs start with fleets in every star in the damned galaxy. With the medium settings on top of that they start invading my system before I have even had time to locate my damned ships! That has got to be a load of crap.

So mostly I haven't actually been playing much at all. Certainly not in the evenings during the week, as I normally would. Been working a bit later, and that has an impact as well.

I did some card readings at the end of the weekend. Something about the immediate future will be tough, beware of untrustworthy people, the medium term future will be tough, beware of untrustworthy people, but the long term outcome will be complete and fulfilling in a spiritual way. It didn't specifically say that I would marry six (or at least three) gorgeous teenagers and finally discover what sex can really be. Also didn't seem to be encouraging about the becoming-incredibly-rich plan. Just that I would be successful in mastering contrary energies. Or whatever, I can't recall it perfectly.

I got a call yesterday from AIM(SA) that the project management intensive for next week was cancelled due to too many withdrawals. Then a call today that it was back on and a promise of an email, which never came. I am not being very impressed.

Did my tax. Finally! I know, but when I phoned to get my NOA number the voice menu said that the personal returns window had been extended by a week, so I didn't fret. I had to call because the online package would not give it to me, so I had to call a person to answer the same questions but the person gave me my damned NOA. I should get over five thousand back. That was the first step in my stress load reducing - worst case; that could pay my rent over the December / January period, getting me through to the magical February where everyone predicts that the market will pick up. Now, of course, things a looking even a bit better than that and so I am putting on hold any plans to do a hard reset.

The warmer weather has good points and bad points.
The major good point is, of course, that the girlies are looking better as they dress less, and with so many Asians here now the skin content is greatly increased from what it was a few years ago.
The main bad point that is annoying me is that it means more people out partying Friday and Saturday nights, making noise to way after midnight and keeping me awake. Grouch that I am, this bothers me. If I can't be having fun then why should anyone else be allowed to?

Oh yeah, 'Handlebars'; I am growing a moustache for November - the raise awareness, and hopefully money, for men's health. As you know more men in Australia die from prostrate cancer than women die from breast cancer, and yet breast cancer research gets forty times more funding; more men die from testicular cancer than women die from cervical cancer, and yet cervical cancer gets more funding; more men die from either gender related illness or from preventable illnesses of any sort than do women, and yet women have their own health department, as do children, youths, aboriginals, and ethnics, but not men, not white, adult men. We do the majority of the work, we pay the majority of the taxes, and yet we are paying for everyone else's benefit. I think better than growing a moustache would be to be allowed to kill a few feminists, but we have to start somewhere.

Divisional

2009-10-24T23:37:00.002+10:30

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

2009-10-24T23:14:00.003+10:30

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

2009-10-11T01:22:00.003+10:30

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

2009-10-06T18:34:00.002+10:30

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.

What? Hey Look!

2009-09-30T15:29:00.002+09:30

A FOUR post day!

Hahahahaha, no really, reading through my last dozen posts I realised that I have talked games for a while. So I should let you know that I am playing Stalker; Clear Sky again. And I have a friend over at present and he has been playing it as well. His own disc, when he gets the hang of it we will LAN.

I don't want to play the storyline this time, only using it when needed to unlock map sections, I will not be entering the tunnel over the bridge to Lamansk, I intend to get involved in the faction war. I want to join Freedom and wipe out Duty, and then join the Stalker faction and wipe out Freedom. Unfortunately I have discovered that every time I wipe out the Bandit base they just repopulate from the back of the warehouse, so I am expecting Duty and Freedom to do the same. Although, in contradistinction, I have learnt from previous plays that you can only wipe out the army base at the start of Cordon about four times before they stop repopulating it (by running up the road from off-map); so maybe that will happen with Duty?

Why do I clean out the army base? 'Cos it is a great source of good guns, which I sell for rubbles to upgrade my weapons and suit.

No, I won't force you to suffer a five-post day just for the fun of it :)

And What's More...

2009-09-30T15:26:00.001+09:30

And what's more, I just wanted to have a three post day!

Ah hah...

2009-09-30T15:17:00.003+09:30

Okay, so that qualifies as a 'Rant'. And it was kind of disorganised to boot.

Also I updated the little blurb on me on the side, and now it kind of runs a bit too long I think, but what the hey. To be honest, one of the pics published of me, whilst really good, was not actually of me, rather it was of the South Australian DPP. He was making a lot of noise and getting a lot of media space, but he, himself, was keeping out of camera shot. Anyhow, I was business analyst for the Supreme and District Courts of South Australia at the time and a new judge was being sworn in and consequently we were both at the event. My seat was along the side, facing inwards, and just a tiny bit ahead of the DPP's, and on the other wall opposite were the cameras. So page three of the paper the next morning shows a big pic of the DPP, half the page, and in the background, me. And they used a pic taken when I was looking at the camera too! So cool. My mum cut that pic out and stuck it on her fridge for months. Why? You may ask, there was a perfectly good pic of me from the Australian's IT section from when I launched an encryption software company.

So, anyhow, that was a rant, and the blurb is now too long but so what? I had to qualify what I had said about the media, and I had to add a bit about coming back to Oz, even though it is my dream/hope to return to Singers on a permanent basis at some time.

I Hate Women

2009-09-30T14:20:00.007+09:30

I guess I should be more specific; I hate Feminist Anglo Bitches.

Our wonderful legal system here in Australia has come up with a new one; a woman is not responsible for her actions when she is drunk. If a man has sex with a drunken woman she can charge him with rape, even if she consented whilst drunk, even if both of them were drunk.

Is she responsible if she was driving? Or is she only not held responsible if she was drunken driving and the victim was a man?

If women are not equally responsible for their actions then why do we pretend to treat them equally at all? They want their cake, and our cake as well, AND they still want US to pay the bill. There are times that I wish I could simultaneously vomit on every woman on Earth.

It's kind of like how sluts think that they can hang out with drunken footballers and not be expected to provide sex. Once upon a time they would just be called stupid, now they scream and the law listens. Women are just not responsible; they do not take responsibility for their own actions. If you choose to jump off a cliff then you cannot blame anyone else for the consequences.

This has all gone so far, but believe me there is still room for it to keep going, but one day Western men will say "enough" and white bitches will get a dose of reality. If you choose to behave as a slut then don't be surprised that no-one respects you.

So, on top of the fact that more than half of Australian wives are unfaithful to their husbands after three years of marriage, and that one third of children born in marriages in Australia were not fathered by their mothers husband, and that when most Australian marriages end in separation after three years (I wonder why?) the bitch routinely gets seventy percent, and that in Adelaide a man can be charged with assault for looking at a woman (not saying anything, not touching, not even pulling any facial expressions, just looking), a man can now be charged with rape even if the bitch consented, and consented the whole way through, but regretted her actions the next day.

And people ask me why I have both given up on Australia and given up on Australian women.

Cough, Cough

2009-09-28T21:26:00.004+09:30

So, this guy at work was on leave for two weeks then comes back to work for one week and then calls in and we are told will be ill all week and has been diagnosed with whooping cough and will have been contagious for the week he was back at work.

On the good side I don't think I saw or heard him cough at all, a fact that makes me wonder if he's laying it straight.

On the other hand there was this woman that works closely with him that was coughing her head off for half the day - and not going home, not wearing a mask, not ...

How can people be so totally self-centred, so convinced that their own needs and wants are all that matters, and that their impacts upon others are totally unimportant in comparison?

In Asia she would have been asked to go home. If she had been coughing like that on the streets without a mask the cops would arrested her for her social irresponsibility. But in our Western society the rights of the individual outweigh the good of society. Well, maybe not, maybe I am overstating it a bit, but that's how it should be. At least in my head.

Anyhow, a couple of times today I have had a really scratchy cough...

Over the last couple of weeks I have really bulked up, for some reason I have felt totally starving and eaten twice as much for each meal. (Given the loss of appetite is a symptom of whooping cough I am counting myself pretty safe there.) My tum has bulged and tightened and breathing was getting hard. Frightening. So today I realised that this was going to take some serious will power, something that I have never felt the need before with food, and have made sure that I have kept to the three meals and kept them small and gone for a two hour walk this evening. It was meant to be a run, I have no problem walking; day long hikes, up mountains, down dale, but I know that just walking, even brisk and long, is not going to be enough, running is going to be necessary. But a ten km run straight off the bat is too much.

So, that's the plan. I should get around to joining a gym at some point as well. I have a really great gym set, but I just wasn't using it, so I gave it to my sister. But when I pay gym membership I go. Financial incentive, works for me.

I had this experience once; I was getting a little on the fat side, my suits were getting tight around the middle. So I joined a gym, worked out three or four times a week for half to three quarters of an hour. Lost the weight, my suits fitted in the middle - but they were tight around the shoulders!

Can't win sometimes, have to buy new suits either way.

Had a friend over for the weekend just gone. Hadn't heard from him for over a month, turns out his phone had died and he had lost all his numbers. Also turned out that he was working that day just south of the CBD, and he lives waayyy north. I, of course, am living in the CBD, so I told him he should visit on his way home, he stayed two nights. So I have lent him my spare swipe card and key so he can let himself in since he does night shifts mostly and has two shifts south and two shifts north. He can crash for the night between his two south-end shifts. He will get in after I have gone to bed and won't wake until I have gone to work, so I probably won't see him, but if they happen at the end of the week like they did last week then he will probably stay the weekend as well.

He kind of went crazy with my cable. My sister did the same thing last time she was here and discovered that I had cable. And then he maxed out my broadband download limit updating games. I guess it had to be done, but whilst Steam was updating and installing he wasn't able to play Defence Grid, which is on my Steam account, so I think he should have prioritised.

Meanwhile a new young blonde has started at work. She is spending time with all the people at the bottom of the ladder, getting things explained to her. It will probably be a while before she speaks with those of us at the top of the ladder, how sad. On the other hand, there is this brunette, brown-eyed, cute for an Anglo (but still an Anglo, remember) that has been interacting with me a lot lately. I wanted a good excuse to do some interacting with her, but she is now sitting herself on my desk and smiling. Someone told me she had a boyfriend, or a fiancé, and I have a thing against trespassing, in theory. We shall see, maybe she is just flirting, and you know that I don't really want anything more from an Anglo, after all, it would only lead to trouble, that's why I gave up on them. Well, probably on white women altogether. Anglo, Western Euro, Eastern Euro, all trouble, all crazy. But then, maybe there is just no such thing as a sane woman?

It's half past ten, I have done a two hour brisk walk (interspersed with runs), eaten half a meal, and my eyes are closing. So goodnight all.

Oh, yeah, late update. I was just reading through my last few posts and realise a few threads were still hanging. Most importantly, my contract got extended to the end of October. I feel good about one of the private tenders I am in on, and that would start in November. So things are not too dire yet. And yeah, running along the river park tonight kind of reminded me of Singapore, lots of Asians - but then Australia is full of them now - too cold for Singers, I know, but still, it almost had that feel to it. I felt homesick.

Peanut Butter

2009-09-21T18:12:00.002+09:30

No it is not an allusion to groundnuts instead of peanuts being in the shops in Singers. It was 'cos I am watching the peanut conspiracy episode of American Dad.

Several people I know in Singers are getting elevator upgrades in their HDB blocks. Contrary to what I inferred from what I had previously read the bulk of the expense is being passed to the residents. For the people I know these range up to tens of thousands for PRs and more than ten thousand for citizens. For some of my friends it is nowhere near so much, but still more than ten thousand for PRs and thousands for citizens.

Now, most of the people I know in SG are Chinese Malaysian and PRs, their life plan being to live and work in Singapore and then retire back to Malaysia in their old age. But now under this financial pressure I have seen some take citizenship. It raises interesting questions. I always had difficulty with the idea of living in a country for over twenty years without taking citizenship, but that is because of my personal viewpoints. For me, my Australian citizenship means little to me, I am quite open about my desire to leave permanently. And as, what Singapore classes as a strategically desired skill set, I have the option of taking PR after only two years of residency, and then citizenship after two years of PR.

But what happens after the lift upgrade? Do they revoke their Singaporean citizenship and retake their Malaysian citizenship? Do they keep both? I know that the Singaporean constitution does not allow for dual citizenship, but such laws can only apply within a nation, a country may not acknowledge another nations claims of membership, but once you cross the bridge do you become a Malaysian citizenship again? Does Malaysian acknowledge your MY citizenship and deny your SG citizenship? As Australians we used to have a similar conundrum with dual Australian/US or Australian/UK citizenship. Australia changed its laws, but Singapores rule is set in the constitution.

And so to the subject I was going to write about a few days ago but was too tired; the Japanese election. What I want to know is just how much will change, or will it be a mere cosmetic alteration? I was raised with a solid programming of all things Japanese are unmitigated evil, but I have grown beyond that on my own. For example; Australians often say quite bad things about Japanese environmental policy, after all they murder dolphins and whales, and you need to understand - to Europeans that is murder, before Christianity it had the same death penalty as murdering another person. Asians have difficulty understanding this. But look at the bigger picture; 78% of Japans tree cover still stands, less than 2% of Australias trees are still here; Australia pumps millions of tons of pollution into our rivers, Japan spent decades cleaning up bays that were polluted by early mercantilism. We declare some species endangered and protected, but then destroy the environment that is critical to its survival, whereas in Japan they have declared whole valleys and their river systems untouchable to protect the giant salamander (and it is GIANT, two and a half metres long!). So who really has the better record?

But criminal organisations are allowed to have shop fronts in Japan, they appear to be allowed to engage in slave trading without any interference from government. Boys in colleges set up rape clubs. I could go on and on and on. I want to know if any of this will change. Will the new Japanese government actually outlaw criminal organisations? Because until they do I just cannot accept them as a civilised nation. I know that it is a terrible slight for most of the population, but it is the choice of the government, they can change this.

In a way it is like the water issue in Australia.
The government claims that we have a water crisis and yet they still permit people to drain our rivers to farm cotton and rice in deserts. If such things are permitted then they cannot truly believe that we do really have a crisis.

Ask yourself what was going through the minds of the Christmas Islanders that cut down the last tree to move their big head statues. With the loss of their tree cover they suffered terrible erosion and a huge drop in their farming output and they starved so much that they turned to cannibalism and most of their population vanished. To me that is where Australia is with its 'water crisis'. If it is real then stop farming cotton in the desert. I can't stand such two-facedness (another new word).

My Oriental neighbours are holding a rodeo in their apartment apparently, for the last few days it happens every day from 6:30 or 7:00 pm and goes for an hour or two, but it is pissing me off too much and is bringing todays blogging session to an end.

Overlay

2009-09-16T20:37:00.004+09:30

Yes, two weeks without a post, then two in one evening. I wanted to let the last one stand alone, and not to complicate it by changing subject, as this one will probably do a few times.

My google analytics map overlay is quite interesting.
I can easily understand that most of the visitors to this blog come from Singapore, no surprise there. The next biggest source, at a little less than half the number of Singaporeans, is the US, and that is not really a surprise either simply because there are so many of them in the one country. Australia at number three and just a bit less than the US is also not a surprise. But the next, with only a bit fewer than Australia, is routinely Brazil - now that I, and I suspect you, would not have imagined. Well, it has been Brazil at number four for a few months now.

I am playing Rome Total War again, without the Total Realism mod and without using cheat codes. I was recently playing Evil Genius via Steam, yeah, I have the game discs somewhere but couldn't find them - turns out my nephew has them - and Steam was selling it for only US$10, so why not? Anyhow, I got bored with the constant overload of enemy super agents when I moved to the second island. I just wasn't getting the chance to build the base up. You would think that having moved islands you should be able to build the second evil lair in piece, the forces of justice (huh!) would/should imagine you out of the game. I tried hacking the save files to reduce my notoriety score, even to kill off the super agents, and I tried the unofficial patch so I could put gun turrets inside the base (have them covering the cells I have the super agents in so all five of them are pretty well out of consideration), but the non-stop avalanche of soldiers and veterans just got boring.

I have started reading a book about gamers, specifically how some US management consultants think the computer/console gaming generation will impact business culture. I find it fascinating. The bastards classified me as a baby boomer. My parents are baby boomers, so how can I be???? I have noticed that every time I read something they are extending the baby boom forward and cutting generation X back, those of us who were once one, are now called the other. Anyhow, I am gen X, it is not up for debate, I was gen X ten years before gen X existed. I am a gamer, this book assumes that people my age are the parents of gamers, but I am a gamer, my friends are gamers, one of my friends mothers is a gamer, so eat that. (As in, she is a little old grey haired lady.) My friends and I were into computers when they first came out, before the Microsoft/Intel combination changed the landscape. Blah, blah, blah, except to add that when my father (who was head of the school of mathematics at one of the unis here) had to baby sit me I was plonked in the unis mainframe console room and the post-grad students would log me in to play Star Trek. Space was a ten by ten grid, stars were asterisks, Klingons were 'K's and Romulans were 'R's and I was the 'E' - yeah, you couldn't play the good guys. Probably the entire multi-storey computer had less power than a wrist watch does now.

Anyhow, all that is waffle, this book was written to help generation history understand generation future, and finding myself amongst the latter I find that in a perverse way it has helped me to understand flat-scans in ways that I never thought before. How ironic.

But, yeah, all of these boomers and hippies and drugged out drop-outs that thought they were the future, and all they ended up becoming was the problem. Our grandparents and their parent built a great world, and our parents just coasted on a raft of bubbles, inventing things like welfare states and tax-funded pensions to ensure that everybody else paid for them, and it is left up to my generation to fix it all. I consider that my brother, who is only two years older than I am, to firmly be in that dead generation, that locust generation, that is the way his mind works. Whereas for me, by the time the rest of the world got into the X-Files I had been there, done that, and moved on. But now I find that I can talk with people twenty years younger than me much more easily than I can talk to people ten years older than me. I talk with my nephew and his friends and they get it, I talk with people at work supposedly in my age cohort and they don't get it, and I can't understand how their minds work.

There was going to be something else about something in the news recently, but I can't be bothered right now, and quite frankly, I can't remember what it was...

The Red Queens Race

2009-09-16T20:04:00.001+09:30

Yeah, notice how I dropped the non-possessive?

Lewis Carroll, hmmm, let's not go there.

Point is that I used to get somewhere between 30% and 50% more each year, but right now I am earning the same as I got last year. So a lot of running to stay in the same place. Comparatively, since the agencies wanted me to drop my rate by 25% to even 50% from one agency, you could say I have done well to hold my ground.

Trade is slow. I had coffee with one agencys manager for executive contracting for the public sector today, and she painted a very sombre picture. There seems to be just nothing on the ground from the agencies. Meanwhile I have four in the pipeline from my personal network, but nothing guaranteed for next month.

By "public sector" I meant civil service; we have public/private in Australia, rather than the government/public that they have in the US.

Apparently the public sector is looking attractive to a lot of permanents, since it weathers downturns better here. They tend not to lay off staff like commercials do, but I promise you that they are not doing too much hiring either. Anyhow, my forte is project work, and few have the budget for starting any project at this point.

Strangely I have heard from several sources now that February will see an upswing. In the government sector that makes sense; budgets will get approved end of the calendar year, everyone is on holidays through January, and will ramp up in February for their implementations a few months later. The logic doesn't quite work for the corporates, unlike governments they are usually not allowed to start spending money until they actually have it.

I had lunch yesterday with the government sector sales rep for one of the largest systems companies. I am talking Oracle, SAP, IBM, but won't tell you which one. She was being very hush, and although I know a few things that she should know as well, I will be hush as well. But she did talk about the scene as she saw it; to a degree I think she is looking at SA through rose coloured glasses, but she made some interesting points.

Adding all of this to the impressions I have picked up from the independent contractors recently, as well as the feedback through the grapevine, I get the impression that some big things are planned next year, but nothing is happening in what is left of this year.

With the contract I am on finishing in a few weeks I am left wondering how I will pay my rent for the November, December, January period. All things considered, I need at least $3,000 a month to get by, and right now I don't have the wherewithal for three months of no income. But apparently if I can weather that patch then everything is meant to look peachy.

All of this because I took such a chance on Singapore last year, and now I am left carrying the burden of that failed exercise. Normally I would have the reserves to get me through a few months of down time without any problem, but all those reserves and more got burnt up trying, unsuccessfully, to transplant my career to another country.

So right now I am feeling a little more concerned than I am used to.

And Here I Sit

2009-08-31T21:58:00.003+09:30

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.

And I Shall Call This a New Post!

2009-08-24T10:01:00.005+09:30

[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.

Yah, well.

2009-08-13T21:30:00.003+09:30

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.

The Donkey and the Millstone

2009-08-03T17:42:00.002+09:30

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

To be or not to be...

2009-07-30T21:30:00.007+09:30

Or have I used that title already?

I always have so many thoughts going through my head that I want to write. Commentary on this or that, opinions on everything, my views and beliefs, interpretations, etc., etc., etc. But when I get online I don't feel like it; maybe I don't feel that I have them quite sorted out, or my mood has changed, or when I write it down it somehow doesn't have the impact that it seemed to have in my head. Whatever the reasons are it just doesn't happen as often as I would like.

And so this ends up being a diary more than anything.

I have written about anti-perspirants before. I never needed them until I went to Singapore first time. Then when I lived there I had to use them every day and so got to test a few. Nivea was sold everywhere and at first was the only one I could get my hands on, but it was so useless; "24 hour protection" it says, as do they all, but two hours was all it was good for. I found Colgate Mennen Speedstick to be the best, often giving four to six hours worth of protection. Well I have tried Dove here, and it was even worse than Nivea!!! Hard to believe I know, but in a tee-shirt, in winter, with my arms bare and chilled, it still failed after one measly hour. But wait! It gets worse! The TV ad promises "no more white marks", but I have never had any other anti-perspirant leave more white residue on my tee-shirts than this stuff - it has got to be the most useless excuse for an anti-perspirant ever invented.

My new contract got delayed again. No real surprise, it is the civil service, finding their own arses with both hands is hard enough, trying to get a decision made is pushing it up hill. But my friend had hopes that he could get it started last Monday, then sometime this week, then next Monday. Now it is sometime next week, but my access won't be ready on Monday and they were worried about their budget limits - me costing so much more than most contract staff. But I have to start with meeting management and then talk to their staff and familiarise myself with the data maps that they have and undertake some discovery. So there is some work that has to happen at the start that is not reliant upon me having computer access. So I will go in late to meet management, then maybe leave early that first day.

They are being strict on five days of eight hours only. No six and a half day weeks and no fourteen hour days. And the initial project has been cut back to two months; something that most of their staff don't think can get done in six months! Still, at this point it is not sounding too difficult and I wouldn't be surprised if two months leaves me with lots of room to move.

I have bought Overlord II. I wanted to get Halo 3; it was the most interesting thing at Avcon, but so far it is only out on consoles (read kiddy toys, not yet available for grown-ups). So I got Overlord II which I saw Paul demonstrating (on console, projected onto a big screen) saying his Mum wanted it. It is fun, mostly, but it has some huge bugs and some outright impossible puzzles. It has that problem where after you have been playing for a while then when you try to walk forward you get a loud beeping and nothing happening. I had that recently in some other game, but here it has the added twist that boxes pop up with CHINESE writing!!!!!

Now I have heard of a lot of companies outsourcing stuff to India, but outsourcing their coding to China???? And how is it that such buggy programmes are released onto the public? Don't these wankers play test these things?

But aside from that; there is a bit that I just can't get; after you kill the spider queen and then you have to get the spider-riding green minions to run up the walls and activate a series of switches, then your platform rises and you have another similar puzzle. But in this second one I just cannot get from switch two to switch three in time, and quite frankly I don't think that it can be done. Not given the constraints put upon a player using a mouse to guide the minions; it is just not accurate enough. Or to be more precise; the little bastards just don't go where you tell them to go. Maybe it works with a console, and this game probably came out on console first and has just been ported to PC. But it sucks. The entire game quest progression is stalled because I can't get out of this with my spider riders to hit the next set of wall-mounted switches to get into the city that is holding everything I need to continue the game. Like most games it is linear that way. I can go other places, and do other stuff, but the central game story won't progress unless I can get through this little aggravating piece of shit.

Have to get birthday presents for both my father and my step-father. I have no idea what to get either of them, save that I don't want to get my father a book this year. I have gotten him books the last few presents and I don't think he reads any of them! Anyhow, my mum and her husband will be driving to Adelaide this Saturday, a drive of three and a half hours, then they will be driving through the city centre to a hardware mega-store, then back to my sister's and then back down south. They will probably drive right passed my new apartment, which address they do have, but they will not stop, they will not visit. I lived in a gorgeous house with a gorgeous view over the city and out to the sea at Blackwood for two years and they never visited. I lived for a year at Mt Barker and they never visited (even though they drive through Mt Barker on their travels to and from the city). I lived next door to my sister in Macclesfield for eight years and they would visit her and not me. Do you get the picture?

Favourite child syndrome. A common problem with their generation, and yet she has the gall to criticise my paternal grandmother for doing stuff just like that. Not that my mother hasn't been great, and I owe her heaps; she and Nanna put me through college and I wouldn't be earning the money I do now if it weren't for them (forget the concept of Australia providing a free education for its children, and this was twenty years ago). And my sister has had a hard life, and hard times with both of her parents, and I am okay with her finally being on the receiving end of some favouritism. But that doesn't reduce in anyway how much this sort of crap annoys me. So I am making a point of not being at home that day; will be visiting my father who was interstate for his birthday, and will leave my step-father's present at my sister's. Not that either of my siblings will be visiting my father, or likely giving him any present or even a phone call; but that is a reality of his own creation, so he can live with it. I didn't talk to him for twenty five years.

So this is it; back in a dull, boring, and fucking COLD little town (and I meant that thermally - I am freezing!), in a society that is emotionally crippled and sexually neurotic, culturally void, intellectually dead, but pays well.

Avcon

2009-07-27T00:19:00.003+09:30

It was Avcon this weekend; Adelaide's Anime (and Manga) and Video (gaming) Convention. For the first time not held at Adelaide Uni, but at the Adelaide Convention Centre. A rather suitable place to hold a convention you might think.

Personally I am glad that it has finally moved out of the student union building; it is a sign of maturity. I have been saying for as long as it has been around that it shouldn't be there. I just don't like the 'kiddies' image it gives it.

Having said that, I didn't really enjoy myself. Not enough anime. There used to be six to eight anime screening rooms, now there were two, and one of those held other things as well. It was good that there was a lot more gaming. And the merchandising was handled, and placed, well. But a major reduction in anime and only two anime discussion rooms as well. So mostly it was a case of paying to get in to shop for me. Which doesn't make sense. But there just wasn't enough other stuff to justify the entry price in my view.

There did not seem to be as many people in costumes as previously. Lolitas and sailor schoolgirl uniforms excepted, 'cos there were enormous masses of those. And a jolly good thing too; can you name anything else so sweet, cute, and sexy? And any girl that enjoys dressing in lolita is not going to turn into a feminist bitch, is she? So bring it on!

Other than that nothing much has happened this week. I haven't started work yet, the promised contract is lagging, but I have an interview for another one on Tuesday. The Australian Labor Party can't seem to get to grips with labour, as in the unemployment problem; especially bad for them, on one hand they can't seem to successfully reduce unemployment, on the other they can't reduce the benefits that people get in this country for doing nothing. Tight spot to be in.

Don't know if Rudd has introduced his 60% tax rate yet, or if it will be brought in next financial year. I get my desktop computer back this week and then I will do my tax and find out. Imagine just how loyal you will feel to your country if it demands to take most of your money away. One thing you can always count on the Labor Party for; they will always punish the hard-working and the successful for being hard-working and successful. So, against this backdrop, how many will choose to vote with their feet? You know that I will as soon as I get the next chance.

So weird that Singapore turned out to pay less than half what I get in Australia. I think that I will make the move next time as a functioning business, and not as an individual looking for employment. But Singapore or Hong Kong? We shall see.

Kind of Back Online

2009-07-20T23:49:00.004+09:30

I know, nearly three weeks. I have been down at Mum's (no access), I have been at offline hotels (common here, not what I have usually found overseas), and now I have moved into an apartment that is not yet online but a friend has lent me a wireless dongle.

So, mostly I am just reassuring you that I am still here, just been a little out of touch.

Firstly, living space. I have a new apartment, two bedrooms, fair sized living room, large entrance hall (as it would be called in SG) that contains office desk and dining table, toilet and laundry, and bathroom with both shower and a bath, oh, and a balcony. Fully furnished (including cutlery and crockery etc). All for a bit less than my tight little 2 bedroom HDB, but what do you expect? Rent is expensive in Singers, on par with Sydney (well, same size cities), and little old Adelaide is cheap. I am in the CBD, ten minutes walk to the North Terrace / King William Street corner - which is to say 80% of my clients.

Secondly, the other main living requirement. This one is sort of funny, I am having real difficulty with it. I used to earn about twelve thousand a month, I went to Singapore as a major life-changing event, I was expecting to earn good money (everyone says "come to Asia; earn twice as much, pay half as much tax") - but the best I was offered was four and a half thousand a month. I come back here to find the agencies trying to talk me into settling for about half the rate I got a year ago (something about some 'global financial crisis'...). I hesitate, and a good thing too - my private network then starts turning up some very interesting offers that are all pitched at more than I ever earned before.

This is really puzzling me. One of these is set to start this week. I have yet to settle the rate, but the initial discussion was about 30% up from what I got a year ago. I am expecting this to come down though, how far I don't yet know, but I think that the project will get a set budget and I will have to fit that. But we shall see. I am actually in a perceived position of power. My weakness is that I really need to have cash inflow soon, but I can wait a month or two before I am totally desperate. On the other hand; I am good at what I do, probably the best in Australia (honestly, I am not kidding you on that), and there is a near zero chance of the client being able to get anyone else to do what I can do in the timeframes required.

To me this is just a bit of database work. My contact in the client agency wants it done in three months, I think it will only take six weeks, most people are estimating that it would take six months. But I am used to this sort of thing. Been here before, seen this before.

Emotionally my life is void. I am beginning to really question my reality on this. Perhaps I need a major overhaul; dump the concept of 'love' and just go for 'sex'? Perhaps my focus on romance up to this point in my life has been a mirage, one that I should stop chasing. I am dealing with this issue for now by avoiding it; I give myself a year to focus on work and money, then stand back and reassess. I know that I want to get out of Australia - the 'culture' is killing me slowly. But I kind of like the comfortable level of income that I earn here - as shown by the fact that I have just taken nearly a year off to live (incomeless) in SG, and two years before that I finished a break of over half a year (during which time I also went overseas). I can handle taking six month international breaks every other year. I don't want to lose that level of lifestyle.

I can stay in Australia and live with a very good income but spiritually die, or I can move permanently overseas and apparently live at half the material level but feel alive. Unfortunately, I want both.

I am giving myself a year to figure this out.

Back in Town

2009-07-01T18:45:00.003+09:30

I am back in Adelaide after my week down at my mother's farm.

Naturally, having spent time on the farm, I am sore. Not from gardening (moving garden beds and laying new ones), and not from installing a new fireplace in the living room; no, my thumbs and forefingers still ache from the fencing on the first day - Noel prefers to use a hard steel wire for his ties and I had to bend hundreds of the damned things.

Also there were Uncle Warren and Auntie Faye. She is half aboriginal and one of the 'stolen generation'; "best thing they could have done for me" she said, she has been re-united with her mother's family and is grateful for being taken away from that life and given what she considers a much better one.

My sister and her friend drove down to stay the night and give me a lift back. And I have returned laddened with scones and biscuits. My mother stated more than once something to the effect of not having liked one of her children being overseas and too far away from her.

I contacted two agencies when I got back last week, and both responded very quickly, and both have been talking to me today and running short-lists past me. I have one other agency that I do have to contact later this week. This is so different from my reception in Singers.

I am staying at my sister's again tonight, but am hoping to move into a small apartment tomorrow; I am calling one back when it passes seven and an agent about another tomorrow morning. But that second one is unfurnished, so I have to make a couple of calls about furniture rental first. Boils down to one furnished one bedroom apartment just out of the CBD for $375 per week, or one two bedroom apartment in the CBD but unfurnished for $275. I have looked at one online furniture rental site and it quotes about $200 a week, but I phoned another guy and he said it was possible to get a package together for one hundred or less but to call after ten in the morning.

I think that the CBD apartment would be worth at least $400 a week to me including furniture, but it is limited to a two month rental only, whereas the other place could be extended unlimited. Still, you can get student apartments in the CBD for less than two hundred a week, often for only about one hundred; not as nice, true, but cheap.

Road Rage

2009-06-23T22:41:00.003+09:30

Well, this is Adelaide. Within one hour of being in the city I had heard a few people blasting their car horns at others. Within a few days I had been the victim of road rage; my sister was driving us back from shopping and changed lanes to pass someone turning across rush hour trafic, she indicated, and this moron also changed lanes two cars behind but felt that he had some sort of unique right to the road and drove up alongside use to scream abuse, then had to drop back because his lane was blocked by a bus, but then sped up to get along again and hurl more foul language.

Welcome to South Australia!
This is what it is like these days.
Adelaidians are bad drivers, bad parkers, bad pedestrians.
They are rude, obnoxious, arogant, inconsiderate, and selfish.
If anything, they are worse than when I left.
Four days and I have arrived at this realisation.

I am using my sisters laptop, which has an expired Microsoft Office, so I can't spell check this; I feel "arogant" is wrong, but 'arrogant' seems just as wrong. Tomorrow I will load a copy of my home and small office Office on it, it is multi-license so it will be legit; but with one copy on my laptop and one on Ivy's it will be the final instal I can do.

Di, Mum, and I went to the central market today and Mum had a ball. Seriously, she loved it. She said 'cos it was clean and varied, not like when she used to go there when I was a kid. I bought lots of cheeses, which are so much cheaper here than in SG, and so much wider choice. And I cooked dinner whilst Mum and Di watched a movie. My signature dish; large cup mushrooms, spoon of oil rolled around inside to help the mass of the body cook, then fill with bechumel sauce, then cheese, then bake. I used three cheeses, two below, one on each half, then moz on top 'cos it melts so well. Also steamed vegies and rolled in butter and a little salt and pepper, and marinated some tofu (disolve honey in hot water, then add herbs and gentle spices, then add soy sauce) and fried slowly to ensure crispness.

Sleeping on Di's lounge room floor (on a spare mattress, again, that feels wrong with both spellings) whilst Mum has the spare room.

Will visit Maggie and Shaiby on the way back to Mum's tomorrow morning. Then a week at Mum's. Di and Carmel will be going down there next week for a one-night stay and I will come back with them.

So why are Adelaide drivers so bad?
I would say because Adelaide police are not doing their job as they are too focussed on taking bribes to look the other way from sex-slave traders, supressing political dissent, selling stolen drugs, and murdering the occasional intellectual. This is my personal experience. I would also add raping young women; but to be honest I have only personally come across that in my circle of friends in Melbourne.

But this doesn't explain why Adelaidians are also bad pedestrians.
They do exactly the same sort of stuff on foot paths that they do on roads.
So it must be psychological, as in some sort of generalised social neurosis.

This was one of the things that I wanted to be leaving behind me for good, and it is sad to have to come back to it. I have been on the road in four other countries so far, and no matter how much honking there was, there wasn't anywhere near the same level of aggression.

I emailed some contacts in agencies and texted some contacts in my network yesterday morning. My phone then spent the rest of the day running hot with reply texts and incoming calls, bar one who responded by email.

How different is that from my experiences in SG?????

In SG I never got to see anyone except the receptionist.
Here I had the manager of accountancy and finance calling me from the largest agency in town and spending nearly an hour talking to me, and I had a near instant response from the manager of all contracting from one of the smaller agencies. They explained the scene, the changes since I was here last, what effect the financial crisis had on both permanent and contract placements, and the impact on rates. All wonderful information that no one in SG could be bothered talking to me about. One is going to compile a list of clients to target for me and start calling them; "Kai is back in town". Those were his words.

It will be fascinating to see what comes from this.
Although I suspect that I might have to drop back to the sixty to seventy dollars an hour range for the next year or so. But in another year I expect the market to be fully recovered and project work to be proceeding again and I will be able to utilise my personal network for consulting positions through my private company rather than though an agency. The benefit is a near doubling of the rate; but I have to keep the majority of it in the company and can not use it for personal expenses.

So, all in all, sad, but interesting.

Oh, yeah. Some post scripts.
The Tietzer's is still hurting; I am taking aspirin a few times a day to hold it in check, but it doesn't seem to be going away.
I did have some sort of weird cold in the end, lasted the weekend, lots of nose blowing, and lots of blood. I have never seen so much blood come out of my nose without some sort of impact event preceding. Now almost all gone.
And I spent another day with Little Kai.
So that tidies up any loose ends from the preceding few posts.

As I am going down to my mother's farm and it has no internet connection (or mobile phone coverage) I shall be out of touch. So there probably won't be another post for a week, a week and a half. Since no one reads this it is off no great concern. If you are reading this then I seriously ask if you do not have better things that you could be doing with your time?

Here I Stand

2009-06-20T10:49:00.003+09:30

Well, here I am; back in Australia. My first morning, it is cold, but not wet; I will have to down copious amounts of vitamin C to stave off catching a cold or flu.

I spent most of yesterday with little Kai, who looks adorable. And this weekend I shall write emails to all of my contacts letting them know that I am back, and I shall see what ensues. Tuesday I will go down to mum's for a week.

But for now I am going to sleep again.

Pain and Pain

2009-06-18T13:38:00.002+09:30

Today is my last day here. My flight leaves just before midnight. The flat is empty except for the mattress I am sitting on and my suitcase, packed, in the next room. I don't want to go so much that it hurts, but what can I do?

I also hurt from the Tietzer's; I ran out of aspirin and started using nurefen (spelling?) but it is nowhere near as good. I have just come back from getting more aspirin as well as some anti-inflammatory the chemist said was stronger - I have taken it but don't feel that it is as good as aspirin, so in an another hour or so I will take the aspirin anyhow. It is Bayer, not as good as dispirin in my experience, but they don't have the good stuff here. Also found a net caf to print out my flight and hotel bookings.

Nothing much else to say; I hurt, and I hurt.

Differences

2009-06-15T21:09:00.004+09:30

The plan for today was to visit the Air Force Museum.

This involved bussing to Kallang MRT, then train to Eunos, then 194 to the museum.
Thence to discover that it is not open on Mondays.

I should have realised that would happen; I recall that the army museum is not open on Mondays, so it kind of figures. So I caught the 190 to Toa Payoh; this is a train/bus interchange.

What a major difference to the previous disaster of a bus station! This one made sense, the bus points had two routes each, not three, and they had coloured arrows tiled on the floor, red and yellow, so you knew exactly where lines went. Also the lines folded back, so the ends were near the starts and easy to get to as there was nobody queued up. This bus terminal was a joy to transit through.

Then into the city to find something to eat. Since everybody blogs about dining out; I ate at the Asian Civ Museum restaurant, Chino something or other, their selection of vegetarian was small, i.e. one; greek salad focaccia, this was so-so, too much aubergine and capsicum - these need to be peeled before being served! The drink, a 'sunset' was nice, for desert the chocolate brownie; the brownie was a bit dull but okay when drowned in cream and choc sauce, the ice cream was beautiful though. All for $40; a bit steep, huh?

Then a walk around Canning Hill; love that park.

But all in all, a day wasted, when I have so few left here.

Hostility

2009-06-15T12:54:00.006+09:30

God, Blogger.com can piss me off sometimes!
It keeps claiming that my cookies are turned off and takes me to some other page when I log in (by "keeps..." I don't mean always, just enough to piss me off). I have discovered that if I hit my shortcut to my blog again then I am still signed in and can then hit 'new post'. Just a mindless nuisance. My cookies are NOT turned off, and once I checked this page it sent me to and followed the instructions only to discover that all of my settings were as it was requesting ANYHOW.

Singapore can be very user hostile at times.
By that I define it as the opposite of user friendly, just in case you needed to be told that. I went to the zoo yesterday; someone gave me a free ticket and a little brochure. The brochure said that I could take the metro to Ang Mo Kio and then a 138 bus; so I take the metro (MRT for those who need to be told) to Ang Mo Kio and then walk out to the bus stop and, you guessed it - there is no 138. So I walk around trying to figure this out, give up, go back into the train station, which is raised so I can see down from the platform, and what do I see? A 138! Driving into a bus depot ACROSS THE ROAD under a multi-storey carpark. They didn't think to say in the zoo brochure that "you can catch the 138 FROM ACROSS THE ROAD", no, they just said catch it from the station.

But I was in the station then, so the next on the brochures list was to take the train to Woodlands and from there catch a 926. Taking the train to Woodlands was easy enough; finding the bus interchange at Woodlands was a major military undertaking! First come out of train station and see sign "buses this way", follow, keep heading in the direction, end up outside with no buses. Go back, notice a sign saying buses that way THAT IS SIDEWAYS TO THE WAY YOU ARE WALKING FROM THE FIRST SIGN!!!!! Head in this new direction, end up at a precipice, can see buses below but don't wish to jump 40 metres down to get to them. Head back, notice SIGN SIDEWAYS TO THE DIRECTION YOU ARE TRAVELLING FROM THE SECOND SIGN saying buses down there.

(You see? It would all work if you were walking backwards from where you want to be to where you start from.)

So now we are at the buses and finding the 926 stand is not hard. Figuring out which of the three lines is for the 926 is not possible unless you have a Chinese brain though. Three lines go this way, then they break, and then three lines go back again - BUT THEY ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE FIRST THREE LINES!!!! So I just wait to the side, and wait and wait and wait and wait...

The sign says that the 926 only operates on Sundays and yesterday was a Sunday. HOWEVER it would also appear that the 926 does not, in fact, operate on Sundays either. I give up and head up to find a taxi. The taxi stand is a long walk and it is hidden to one side of the complex. There are no taxis. I sit down to wait. Then I notice a little button on a pillar saying "press to summon taxi", I press, a taxi arrives in less than two minutes. I could have been waiting for hours before seeing this little notice though.

When it is time to come back I go to the bus stop at the zoo and what is the first bus to come along? A 927!!! Notice that, it was NOT a 926. And back at Woodlands bus interchange the 926 queue and the 927 queue are not next to each other, they are not even in sight of each other.

So many little things that would be so easy to do properly.
But which Singapore insists on doing arse-end first.

We have a saying in English about 'Chinese puzzles'; something that you cannot solve unless you can think Chinese-style. Sometimes Singapore seems to be one big Chinese puzzle to me.

I guess now you know why so many white guys here get Chinese girlfriends.
Without one you are just lost.

Tsetse Attack!

2009-06-08T22:21:00.002+09:30

No, not really, not tsetse flies; tietze.

Interestingly tsetses have existed mostly unchanged for over 30,000,000 years, but they are not the subject of this post. No, I forgot in my last post to mention that I have had a tietze attack. I suffer from Tietze's Syndrome, it is an inflammation of the cartilage where it joins to the ribs. It can strike either the front, where the ribs join in the centre of the chest, or the back, where they join to the spine, or the lower middle of the chest where the floating ribs end and lengths of cartilage then continue to the central join.

So this here cartilage join get inflamed and hurts. To be specific, they hurt when they move, such as getting up or down, or lying on them, or breathing if it is really bad. I have had a pain in my lower right chest for a couple of weeks but it didn't click since I haven't had an attack for over a year. But when it started to get bad it was obvious what it was, so up I got to have a mid-night snack then a couple of aspirin. Breakfast was followed by a couple of aspirin, and lunch was followed by a couple of aspirin. Aspirin, you see, is a very strong anti-inflammatory, brutal, but strong. And now it is mostly gone.

What causes it? Google it and you will get twenty different answers. It is a 'syndrome', which means no-one knows what causes it, just what the symptoms are. I tend to agree with the virus theory; I think it is like warts. Apparently the wart virus lives in all of us, but usually the body's defences keep it down, every now and then for unknown reasons you get a little outbreak of the virus on your skin and a wart appears. I find that milk thistle works really well, also I have had success with hypnosis - any hypnotic routine that includes a cleansing visualisation will clear up any warts that I might have. So I think that this tietze thing is a virus that once it is in you it can never be gotten rid of, only 'managed'. And I manage it by hitting it hard with aspirin whenever I become aware of an inflammation.

I had my first attack when I was in my mid thirties, but I have never had it so severe since because now I recognise it. So this one took a while for me to notice, but sometimes the inflammations go down on their own, so it is not until it hurts to an inconvenient degree, such as hurting when I lie on my side, that I know a) that it is tietze, and b) that I have to hit it with aspirin.

Remember to always eat before taking aspirin; otherwise it does bad things to your stomach lining.

Parcel Post

2009-06-08T11:47:00.004+09:30

Heh heh, there should be some actual bearing of that title with something in this post if I remember to write it.

So, busy few days. My agent friend Ivy has found new tenants for this flat, so I get my bond back. I used the diplomatic clause to cut out at the six month point, which lets me give one month notice or pay that months rent in lieu. Chose latter, and was going to forfeit the bond for that. But now will get it back, also Ivy has sold my furniture so get a couple of hundred for that as well.

Have to sort out what accounts hold what money before I book flights and hotel back there. Everyone has offered to pick me up from the airport, but the city council provides a free shuttle mini-bus to the CBD and drops you off in front of your hotel. I will probably book a room in the Chiffley on South Tce as it's quite cheap. Stay a few days to sort stuff out, then mum wants me to visit her for a week. Might take Radar down as well, then we can both help Noel with any stuff on the farm and we can network my two computers and play into the night. Then back to the Chifley (one 'f' or two?) until I get a new contract and some cash in the bank.

I am planning then on taking a studio apartment in the city centre so I can walk to work and don't have to maintain a car. So my dog stays with my ex (cos he is happy with her and I don't want to keep disorienting him by taking him back) and my car stays with my mum. But for the price that a modest apartment in SG would set me back I can have a HUGE two level apartment with its own roof garden in Adelaide. So maybe I will...

Anyhow, I have managed to collect rather a lot of books in my short stay here; they fill a large storage box. So will need to send them, some software, some clothes, maybe a few oddments, back by courier. Have looked at SingPost, DHL, and FedEx; looked at a few others, but these three are the ones that survived the first elimination. FedEx seems to be cheaper and offer more options. I just want to send one box, maybe 25 kilos, by surface - it doesn't have to be express by air, the time is not important, it can take a week or a month, I don't care, but do you think anybody's website offers these options? No, it is all air express for hundreds of dollars. Still, since FedEx has passed the first hurdle I will go to one of their offices and ask. Best for DHL or SingPost seems to be over three hundred, best from FedEx seems to be less than two hundred.

I will be SO GLAD to be out of this HDB. Not that it is any worse than the non-HDB apartment that I was in before, but that was not a 'condo'. But it will be nice to be somewhere clean and quiet, and by that I mean the city, the suburb, the estate, the general environs. I am sure that there are plenty of such places in Singers, just that I haven't lived in one yet.

It will take a while to get used to working again I guess. I took seven months off work a few years ago and moved back into work afterwards quite easily, so maybe it will be okay (by a "few years ago" I mean the time between the two breaks was more than two but less than three). In fact, given how much I earn (in Australia that is, having established that I can not survive on what Singapore offers) I can easily take six months off every other year. So maybe I will just go back and do a couple of contracts then go live in Hong Kong for six months. Then back to Oz to work for a year or two before trying an extended holiday in Seoul. I could get used to such a life style for a while. There are parts of it that won't work for me; I really want to be out of Australia on a permanent basis since I think that Western culture and society is going down the gurgler, and I really want to be in some sort of permanent relationship that leads to children. But we have to settle for the best that we can, and maybe experiencing the world this way is the best that I can hope for?

Response Time Zero

2009-06-04T16:20:00.002+09:30

You have probably figured out by now that my post titles are usually just words to fill the space. Why does each blog posting have to have a title?

Anyhow, to an issue that has been mentioned here a few times over the last couple of months. I have thought about this, and think that maybe they did not ride in on my socks and shoes from a park bench at East Coast Park. Maybe yes, maybe no. Just want to put this as an option, but am thinking now that is perhaps more likely that they simply are coming from the mob of [deleted] in the flat next door. They were most numerous at the foot of my bed, which is closest to the door, and more numerous in the cushions of my computer chair, which is closer to the front door than the bedroom. Anyhow, some interesting tips from web-searching; double-sided tape around the legs of beds (and other clothing holding furnitures) and move bed a bit away from wall so doesn't touch, and spray with "V-Safe" which can get from NTUC. Normally I would not shop somewhere owned by communists, but Baygon wasn't working to perfection. (Yes, "communists", well now you know how right-wing I am, don't you?)

I am in the process of dismantling this apartment. Yes, part of that was to spray everything yet again. But more also just to attempt the dual task of cleaning up and preparing for travel. So already about half of my manchester has been thrown. I am guessing that close to half of my clothes will be thrown out as well, and I have started to sort shirts accordingly. I have also thrown out some stuff that came with me from Oz, and am defining what I got here goes with me and what goes down the chute. Ivy is coming over tomorrow with her kids, principally to play Monopoly 'cos I have a chocolate monopoly game that my sis got me for xmas and needs to be used before I go back. But she will also be collecting my HP laptop and my printer (do you need to be told that it is a Canon? I only said "HP" to differentiate the two laptops; the Asus is going back to Oz with me). The landlady appears to be buying the furniture (such as it is) and the fridge, microwave, electric oven, kettles, etc., etc., etc., the money side of that transaction is irrelevant to me. And I will be sending some clothes and a heap of books and PC games back by courier.

The is some stuff going around in my head that I want to write, but for two things:
1) I am still trying to sort it out, and
2) my bum is sore from sitting on this (now cushionless) chair for too long.

I will see if I post again later today.

Yyeeeehcckkk!

2009-06-01T12:28:00.003+09:30

This got me so mad that I had to blog it straight away!
But having turned on my laptop (balanced precariously on a pillow on the bed in the guest room...) I had to first clear out my email, so now I have calmed down a bit.

When I sat down to post ads for this flat at a couple more sites I noticed that I was scratching the back of my right upper thigh a lot. So I stood up and checked it, new bites, lots of them! So I turned my pyjamas inside out but nothing there, and I have checked my bed and bedroom to pieces so I didn't feel like doing that again. This called for some lateral thinking!

It happened yesterday or the day before as well I thought. But I haven't been anywhere, and it is the back of my right leg both times, weird. Unless, maybe it is where I was sitting all day? So I look at the cushion on the seat by my laptop. Nothing. So I look at the cushion under that one (two cushions 'cos I've been sitting there all day sometimes), I turn it over... BUGS!

In one corner, a mass of them, and different from the last type of bug.

So where did these come from?
There is no way that you can convince me that I happened to sit somewhere that had bugs on the seat and they rode home on my shorts in the last couple of days. I haven't been anywhere for the last few days, I most definitely haven't been down to the beach. No, the only explanation that I can think of is the mass of [deleted due to SG's delicate racial harmony laws :)] next door above the $2 shop ("buy one, free one"). Especially as my computer desk was so close to the front door. So I cleaned out the entrance hall and sprayed around the doors, both the front and the one to the dentists (also in the entrance hall).

Lesson learned: do not live in an HDB! If you are going to migrate to Singers then make sure that you rent an apartment in a clean condo, in a clean street, in a clean suburb.

Anyhow, both cushions got sprayed then into a garbage bag and tied tightly then down the garbage shoot (egads! maybe that's where...). And now my laptop is balanced precariously on a pillow as I sit cross-legged on the guest bed.

I am definitely not sad to be leaving this.

Slow Train

2009-06-01T00:08:00.002+09:30

I had this feeling I hadn't blogged for a long time, and was kind of feeling "who cares?" and "why bother ever posting again" sort of stuff, but last post was only a few days ago after all. How weird.

On Friday Ivy showed me the easy way to Jahore Bahru. That is, without the improvised floatation device...

It was kind of interesting, but nothing to see except shops, and they all looked the same as in SG. As Ivy kept pointing out (she is Malaysian) it is less clean, but then, in my view Singers isn't that clean, certainly not finding it so living with the natives.

Have advertised my little flat on a couple of rental sites, and Ivy will place an ad in the paper. If we can get a tenant to take over before I leave then the land lady will not charge me the one month notice period. No hassle, but we'll try and see how we go. But now I will have to keep the place clean in case of viewers-at-short-notice. Two things; one, I hate having to keep a rented house clean for an extended period for the agent to show off, and two, keeping an HDB clean is near impossible - turn your back and all sorts of crap flies in under the door, dust, fluff, critters. Still, we'll see how we go.

And I am bored shitless.
Kind of compounds the effect of eating any curry. Mind you I have been staying off the local food recently, and my tummy is much happier for it.

Must be some strange time, but all my 'favourite' blogs have been boring for some time. Mr Wang is reciting poetry, Sheylara is kind of boring me - she is not a 'real' gamer girl, more of a console chick, and Xiaxue was only writing once every other week. Well, at least Wendy came back with a vengeance; her new look blog is quite sweet, you know, pink and girly sort of stuff, but isn't that what we expect from her? And why we like her. Well, Mr Wang doesn't, but people that write poetry that has no rhythm and no rhyme can't really criticise others. Each to their own I suppose. I don't mind it if it doesn't rhyme, so long as it has some sort of metric cycle, alliteration, something you know? Still, even that beats pictures of bicycles or marathon runners stopping for a drink.

I am looking forward to being able to LAN with friends. I am hoping that I will be working again not too long after I get back, and earning decent money again. I will try to be smarter and wiser with it this time. I am not looking forward to so much that will be there though. One way or another, I want out. I just want it to be with a comfortable income. The ability to lead a comfortable life, such as I am used to.

We shall see.

It's Done

2009-05-28T20:02:00.001+09:30

Today I got my PEP cancelled.

I have to the 27th of June to leave Singers.

Sex Education

2009-05-24T00:50:00.002+09:30

Good morning children.

Today we are going to talk about penises.
Daddy has a penis, mummy doesn't, she has a vagina.
Daddy loves mummy so much that when she takes her clothes off his penis gets big and hard. This is called an erection.

Then daddy puts his penis into mummy's vagina.
Daddy likes this, and ooooohhh mummy loves it too!
Daddy also puts his penis into mummy's mouth and anus.
And mummy and daddy both like that as well.
He would put it into her ear if it was big enough.
What would mummy think about that?
"Woo Hooo!! One bitch, five holes!" daddy would say.
Daddies are like that.

Analytics

2009-05-23T00:41:00.003+09:30

Okay, I am just popping in here 'cos I have just checked my google analytics.

Visitors up by a third, nearly all from Singers (no surprise I guess).
The SGers spent an average of just over five minutes on my blog site, which awes me - am I that interesting to read? Most of the non-SGers spent zero time, what does that mean? Click in, see that it is not written in Turkish, click out?

Here's the really wow thing; less than half of the Singers were new visitors. Can you believe that most of them return? (I ask because I can't.) And get this, 40% of them read beyond the first page, actually dug into the past posts.

This is so WOW!!!

If I can magnify this one thousand fold then I will be more popular than Xiaxue(!) and can earn my living blogging. I can dig that, at least you will know that I would blog EVERY DAY!!!! And not leave it blank for nearly TWO WEEKS!!! And that I usually write about three pages (in MS Word, font size 12 - that's where I spell check it since IE doesn't spell check, Firefox does, but I've gone off it for a while). Also I promise that I would live a much more interesting life than now, so you would have something better to read about, my life now is only good for wrapping chips in (sad face).

I can't turn into a pretty girl and cam-whore though.

Oh, Yeah...

2009-05-23T00:28:00.002+09:30

Got my VISA card going early last week (I think it was). Transferred from my SG HSBC account to pay off the requisite amounts, gave it a couple of working days, then called their financial hounds section. Which was okay, as they turned out to be Australian, so I got some communicating done - something that does not happen with their Indian call centre or Indian email centre, lots of talk but no service.

And got the washing machine going, service man came around the day after I called, writing an email was a waste of time, but I thought that it could get forwarded to the correct team more easily, doesn't work like that though, just came back three days later "please phone". The problem was the most basic of design faults, a fragile plastic tab juts down on the lid and contains a metallic strip that activates the door open / door closed switch. Naturally fragile bits of plastic get snapped off, any idiot could figure that out, but not the design engineers at LG. Took less than two minutes to fix, just opened the top up and wired the switch out, then warned me that it won't stop when the lid is opened now.

Spent the day at home 'cos the repairman was coming and, to be honest, I just don't feel like doing anything right now, so played Fear 2 all day long. How productive, hey?

Drown my Sorrows

2009-05-21T15:34:00.003+09:30

I can't believe that it is Thursday already!

Where has the week gone?
Okay I was aware of Tuesday, I went to the cluster of temples at Tampines, I looked at all of them, but only the Guan Gong temple kindled any attraction. The two old guys there, as there are usually lay people at temples and rarely any priests - religion is so 'self service' in Singapore! Anyhow, the two old guys couldn't speak any English, as usual!, but they were friendly and as helpful as they could be and for the first time I got to pray at a Chinese temple. When I came back, after looking at the other temples, there was a girl there that could speak English and showed me how to pray properly Chinese style, which was very educational and just what I wanted.

Never the less...
it is Thursday and I will be voiding my work pass on Friday next week (end of the month, being the last month I can stay without finding work) so Guan Gong has one week only(!) to deliver.

I am so fed up with being disappointed by deities that if this one lets me down then I will stop paying them any mind and become some sort of esoteric rationalist, believing in the existence of the non-physical but deeming it to be meaningless. In my experience so far Gods never deliver on what they promise. Nature spirits deliver on what you ask of them, but they totally don't understand the constraints that such requests come packaged in for humans and so I end up getting what I specifically asked for, but in a manner or with attendant consequences that far outweigh the benefits of the gift. So I won't ever be doing that again.

My washing machine is not working, it gives a 'door open' alarm when the door is closed and will not proceed. It does the 'get everything wet' bit, so now I have a stack of towels that smell and will need to be re-washed, and perhaps just thrown out. I also have a stack of washing that needs to be done and will have to visit a laundromat. Contacted LG (of course, LG, you could see that coming couldn't you? Well, my landlady bought cheap shit, what can I say) and they took two and a half days to tell me to ring this other number and have my receipt when they come (because it is new). I have passed all of this on to the landlady and am still waiting for a reply, so I am expecting total time out of action of at least two weeks. When it is such a small machine, and I have only the contents of one suitcase, so I do two or three loads every week, the laundromat will be a necessity.

Incidentally, I will have to tell her mid/late next week that I haven't found work and will be heading back to Australia. That gives her the one months notice, and I will use the first week or two of June to clean up and clean out, then fly back in the second week. My bond being forfeit as the break fee. (I was insistent on getting a diplomatic clause in the lease agreement, but it was fixed to only the six month point and incurs a one month break fee.)

I have only let a couple of people in my 'business network' know that I will be returning, and that only yesterday, but I already have one possible deal in the process of being lined up. See how different it is from Singers? And it will pay four times what I was offered in SG if I can get it via my private company and don't have to go through an agency (which sometimes have to do for government contracts).

I have learnt from this experience though.
Not just that SG doesn't take my line of work seriously and so only pays less than half what I can get anywhere else on Earth. And not just that coming here expecting to be able to transfer my career to another country and (business) culture was erroneous and that I should have gotten the job lined up before I came here, or came here to start a business (with all of its attendant components prepared to go in advance). No, I have also had to face a number of flaws imbedded within my character - but I am still unsure of what to do about them. For example being so lackadaisical about things, trusting too much that things would work out, expecting things to be similar to what I am used to back in Oz. I really wish that I had gotten out and done more 'stuff' instead of focussing on job hunting so much (now that I know the job hunting was a total waste of time).

In a way I will be going 'home' bitter and disappointed. When I get the wherewithal lined up for the next try it will probably be Hong Kong that beckons, although I am starting to thing about Japan. Maybe I should learn some Japanese and see if I like it (the way I loved learning some Russian), then try a week or two there as a quick holiday, then if all goes well an extended stay of a couple of months (definitely limited to two months this time!), meanwhile looking at what the job scene is like and then try for a job there whilst I am still in Australia!

Who knows? I might still go the route of retiring to the Australian outback and growing my own food and while away my twilight years playing Unreal Tournament.

What's Thailand like?

Time Whispers in my Mind

2009-05-17T19:11:00.003+09:30

I actually had almost a whole blog entry figured out in my head last night, and now I can't recall anything other than the fact that it existed. I can't even recall what I was thinking about. I had a cool title as well.

I have just applied for another three or four jobs. Fitted somewhere in the afternoon amongst playing Imperial Glory. I was playing Stalker Clear Sky but got bored as it gets to the Limansk bit. And before that had played a couple of races through to the end (or near end depending upon the boredom factor) in Dawn of War SoulStorm (I can't really stand DoW2).

My bank froze my VISA card 'cos I hadn't paid $60 (minimum monthly repayment). I logged on, paid off a hundred, then wrote an angry message via the website. I got three messages back from Indians that say lots but doing nothing; just like when I call them, get a call centre in India where people talk at you lots but don't do anything for you.

I went to a couple of temples recently, one on Friday and one on Saturday. I have been doing this during the day and during the week up to now, but the Saturday visit turned out to be more instructive - as usual there were no English speaking staff, and no priests, only lay staff (older volunteers doing manual stuff), but there were more people there. I didn't accost any of them because I would not like to be approached by a 'tourist' when I have gone to a temple to commune with a deity about something. But by observing I learnt more than I knew previously. To the point that I actually bought incense and prayed.

Both temples were meant to be to Guan Gong, one is, He is present in the first as a subsidiary deity. I have been using a list from a site by a committed Christian called Timothy at geocities/slowloris9, which whilst I have found to be inaccurate a couple of times, has provided me with more info than anything else that I have found on the web and has lead me to some wonderful temples.

However...

There only remain two weeks to my visa. If no job turns up in that time then it is back to Oz. And I feel that if this happens then I will give up on deities of all flavours and become a pure rationalist. I will still believe in reincarnation because the evidence has been overwhelming, but I will cease to believe that deities are of any value to mankind. So I have thus put the(se) Chinese Deity(ies) on notice.

Similarly, the cards are still telling me to wait it out until the very end. And I will, but if nothing happens by that point then I shall cease to have any faith in them as well.

Faith. That is what I am finding is challenged at the moment.

Bad Times

2009-05-14T03:08:00.002+09:30

I have had a bad few days. Mostly due to my bank (the National Australia Bank), and the end of my stay in Singapore. Coincidentally as my stay comes to an end, and I run out of money, this bank has chosen to freeze my funds. I was $300 dollars overdrawn on my transaction account (which they gave me a pre-approved overdraft facility of $50,000 one year ago, but apparently never turned on), I had $500 in my savings account, and my credit account, which has a limit of $22,000 was drawn to about $3,500. So I didn't really see the issue. But they obviously did, and have been busy dishonouring a couple of automatic payments that hit my VISA card and charging me a $30 fee for the privilege each time.

So I transferred the $500 positive to the account with $300 negative, then transferred another $500 from my HSBC account to make sure, then paid $100 off the VISA 'cos I think that this is all due to me forgetting a couple of monthly minimum payments (in the order of $50 or $60).

These guys have been told repeatedly that I am overseas and that mail sent to an Australian address is not going to do much good. They have both my email (which works overseas) and my Singapore phone number; they could have contacted me prior to taking such action. Arseholes.

They aren't in this to keep customers, that's for sure.

On another subject; I have a friend that was going to pop in for a night as he passed through Singers on the way to somewhere else, but he won't be. He is now serving time in gaol in Australia for daring to voice provable facts on his website. Ones that caused 'emotional hurt' to some people. Obviously people that can't deal with the truth.

It is strange that when such things are done against White people any complaint is thrown out, but when done by a White person it becomes criminal. That is so racist.

But it serves as another example that Australia is not a free country. It is a mental dictatorship. This is one reason why I wanted to get out.

The Ministry of Manpower website says that employer or authorised third parties can void employment passes online, but doesn't mention the employee being able to, so I expect that I will have to take my passport in as I was intending anyhow. It does say that a thirty day temporary visa is issued on the cancellation. I expect that for an Australian passport it would probably be the standard 'non-visa' allowing a ninety day stay. Which should be ample either way, since I should only need a week or two to dispose of all of my acquired assets. Mostly give them to Ivy I guess, would give some to Jazreel but she is not here, she is still in Jahor.

There is so much that I want to do in life.
But after so many attempts that have been crushed I come to a point where I am wondering if there is any point in still trying. For example I wish to establish a business manufacturing communications security devices. I have gotten half way through the proto-typing and am experienced in designing and writing the software side of the project. And, indeed, have designed encryption algorythms specifically for this project. I did a business plan a few years ago for this project and got an outside expert to write the marketing plan as that was my weakness in my first business attempt.

However, this one stalled in Australia because employing people in Australia is such a pain. Especially in South Australia, it is just not worth it. But Singapore is a totally different story, and so as soon as I had built up some capital I was going to redo and update the prototypes, register a private company, and start by employing some polytech graduates to work a small electronics lab. The final business would possibly have employed up to forty or fifty people.

But the whole Singapore concept is now sinking rapidly. If I return to Australia where I could reasonably expect to re-enter contracting for a year or so then move back into private consulting once my network was rebuilt, I could, in theory, build up enough capital in a few years to return to Singapore and launch a business. Rather than follow the plan I used this time of just coming here and expecting to find work (since finding work was so easy where I came from).

But if I did build up some cash in hand, then should I attempt to build a new life again? Why not just give up on it all? I could buy a property way out in the country, install solar power/heating and wind generators, grow a vegie garden, and retire to spend my twilight years playing computer games and going for country walks. I am just feeling tired from it all. Tired and so disappointed. When I get to that point will I still feel like fighting? Will I still be willing to take on the world again? Or will I just want to give up and get out of it all?

The New Coming

2009-05-10T11:49:00.003+09:30

Hmmm

Okay, it's hot, 28 where I am sitting and I am sweating. My aircons are set to 23 and it is 25 (which I find tolerably comfortable) in the bedrooms which is where the aircons blow. I am immediately outside of them though, and that one and a half metres makes a big difference.

I found another damnable bug this morning, as I lay in bed after awakening I saw it crawling on the ceiling. On the ceiling! I haven't been bitten (that I have noticed) by one for ages now, and had thought I had gotten rid of them. I have now once again cleaned out that bedroom and sprayed it again.

Maybe they are not from some walk along the beach? Maybe they are coming in from next door? Do you think that the crowd of individuals crammed in there may have lower hygiene standards? There were so many bicycles outside their door last night that they came half way over the front of my apartment on both sides of the walk-way. Maybe I need to spray surface poison around my doorway?

Have been inundated with emails from the yahoo group. But most are part of the thread that I am chatting in (one of three main participants). Mostly about what is the bigger threat to traditional Chinese religion in Singapore, one guy says Xianity and I say Buddhism. He says 'cos it is a big 'now' threat, I say Xianity has come and gone before in China's history, maybe this will as well, and it is an external threat. I feel that Buddhism is a greater threat because it is internal; it is insidiously creeping into Taoist temples and mythology, and this is exactly what Xianity did in Europe a thousand years ago. You may fight off the external threat to find that your own home has been occupied by your erstwhile 'guest'.

This discussion has gone so much more congenially than it would have in Australia. Even if I had been having it with another follower of our traditional (pre-Xian) religion it would have ended up heated. And it can be conducted openly here, whereas in Oz it would have been a secret thing, any posts to internet groups would be undertaken anonymously.

So there, in two examples of my life on this day, you have the two sides to Singers that I am wrestling with.

New Post

2009-05-09T23:10:00.003+09:30

Yeah, stupid title, but who cares? After all, who reads this anyhow?

Tomorrow is Mothers Day. That is Mothers Day as in the US one, the day honouring mothers, not Mothering Sunday as in the UK which is completely different and is a religious festival honouring the mother of the supposed christ and happens 12 days later. I have set my alarm and will be making an early phone call to my mum back in Oz.

I have joined a yahoo group on Taoism in Singapore. The address given to me by a lovely lady at the Taoist Cultural Centre. Naturally, I am already engaged in a hot discussion, namely about the similarities between what Xianity did to Europe and what Buddhism is doing to Taoism (well, Chinese religious beliefs, philosophy, and people in general).

And I am psyching myself up to the (most probable) inevitability of my returning to South Australia in two or three weeks. The chance of finding a decent job here in SG in two weeks when I haven't found one in three months being negligible.

Engaging in such a discussion in Australia would have a very different dynamic. Here in SG I feel free, liberated. Followers of our faith having been in forced hiding for over a thousand years; yes, technically the open practice of our religion is legal in Oz, but the reality is not so pretty. Here in SG I find many similarities between my natural faith and what I perceive to be the natural faith of what I had hoped would become my adopted country. Naturally I was therefore horrified by the incursions that Buddhism is making into Taoism. (I actually have difficulty with that term, and would prefer to use Shenism, but some readers might be at a loss on that one.) (Hello? Readers??? There are some???)

When I return (when? should?) such discussion in public venues would cease for me, to be restrained to friends and family, people that I know only after long association that I can trust.

Meanderings off to the Side

2009-05-06T15:13:00.004+09:30

So maybe some people are saying "Yaayyy!!! Thank God the Christians were defeated!" But personally, if I had the choice between constrained, but hetero, Xians or man-hating lesbian feminists then it would not be the latter that I would prefer.

Strange, you may think, because my people have been fighting a war of survival against the Xians for a thousand years. You may have noticed me use these sort of terms before, and make reference to the thousand year reign of terror that Xianity has put Europe (and Europeans) under, or refer to the tens of millions that Xianity has murdered in this millennia long nightmare. And that is just of my race, world-wide they have probably murdered more than a hundred million; easily making them the most evil religion on Earth, but not the most evil concept - Socialism has murdered at least three times more people in just the last one century, Moa's Red Terror (also called the 'Cultural Revolution') claimed nearly two hundred million.

I mention this, that is the stuff about my thousand year enemies, because I was collected something interesting from the Taoist Cultural Centre yesterday. Yes, I finally got to talk to someone about Chinese religion!!! Went to the temple complex on Bedok North Avenue 4 to see if I could see someone from the Taoist Federation, that didn't quite happen, but two girls from the cultural centre talked to me and showed me around and then a priest joined us and explained some things and then I spoke to an academic at the cultural centre and got a free copy of the Tao book - which is itself presenting me with problems.

Anyhow, I go this little plastic card holder with a 'Declaration of Religious Harmony' written on the back. This is so hard to come to terms with when I have this history of a millennia of oppression behind me. I just cannot 'calm down' when it comes to the Xian/Judean/Islamic construct, and for me that expands to include Baha'i, Druze, Sikh directly, and Buddhism indirectly. So, adjusting to Singapore's requirement for social harmony may be a little difficult for me, whereas in Australia I (and all other followers of our original European religion) may have been brutally oppressed, but at least I had grown comfortable with my anger.

Also can't help but notice that the IRO covers ten religions, but does not include any form of faith native to the Aryan/European/Caucasian people. Just this assumption by outsiders that all white people are Xian. Even at the Taoist Cultural Centre when I started to speak about the religious structure and history of our people I would get asked if I was not Xian, to which I would calmly reply no, I am not, and further it is not a natural religion of our people, but rather an outside construct (not mentioning though that it was forced upon our race by centuries of violence and murder).

So if I do stay in Singers then it shall force upon me a higher level of social maturity. Am I up to this?

Consequences

2009-05-01T13:37:00.004+09:30

Some blog that I read in the last couple of days set me to thinking. He was writing about the take-over of AWARE by a bunch of non-lesbian non-man hating and probably not-so-feminazi women. He didn't like the idea, and was defending the old regimes practice of using access to school counselling to deliver pro-lesbian propaganda to young girls; something along the lines that female homosexuality wouldn't get them pregnant so it was alright.

He then went on to state that he was going to cancel his credit card because the leader of this coup worked at that bank and he asked his readers to do the same, and to inform the bank of the why. Presumably the result of this is to render the woman unemployed.

So, if someone reading your blog that happens to a) disagree with your pro-lesbian feminazi stance and happened to b) work at one of your employer's larger clients took it upon himself or herself to suggest that their company should withdraw its support from your employer and when explaining the why to your employer stated that it was because you were trying to turn their daughters into lesbians, what would the consequences be?

Long shot maybe, but these things have a habit of coming back to bite you.

On a totally different note;
Today is the First of May; this is the month of decision. This is the final month my PEP will be valid without working, so if I don't find a job in the next three weeks it will be goodbye to Singapore.

Yes, I will have to leave Singers and its constant stream of job offers pitched at around one third of what I get in Australia. And no, I am not going to take one of them just to remain here until I find something decent.

Lesson learnt: don't go somewhere and then try to find work, keep working where you are whilst trying to get a job where you want to go.

Except that I tried that before; I came to Singers and visited the agencies whilst I was here but then never heard from them when I went back to Oz. Same as I haven't heard much from them this time 'round.

Yes, it's sad, but life must go on.

Raining on my Parade

2009-04-29T15:46:00.003+09:30

Marine Parade that is. Two days in a row that I have put off going to this place that I want to go 'cos the standard tropical 'afternoon' downpour has come in late morning or mid-day.

Okay, notes on two things; Firstly the AWARE thing, can't help but notice that as the dust settles and we finally get some more accurate information that it seems that the 'take over' was by somewhat more 'normal' women - as in not rabid man-hating lesbian feminists. That appears to be it, upset that AWARE was using their position and government funding to indoctrinate young girls at school that lesbianism was 'okay' and filling the heads of vulnerable women with anti-male propaganda, it appears that a bunch of 'normal' or 'real' women joined the organisation and took over. Yah! Good for them, says I. Let's have some more of that please. Secondly; the papers (online) are still full of 'Obama's first 100 days' but what has he done??? There are no specifics given, he has talked a lot but he has delivered nothing. This obviously sets the tone for his continued presidency.

Have applied for a few more jobs, but nothing has eventuated yet. Am getting seriously aware that end of May is the deadline for my work pass, so if I don't get something in the next few weeks then I will have to take my passport back to the Ministry of Manpower and get the PEP voided. Then, of course, back to Australia and at least twelve thousand a month until I have enough saved up to try Hong Kong.

Have found myself writing a fair bit lately. And writing comedy sketches I might add, crack me up some of them do. An interesting form of escapism or what?

Rant Time

2009-04-23T22:31:00.005+09:30

I keep forgetting that Singapore is NOT an advanced developed nation.

You know, a place where so many people do not wash regularly, will drop their trousers and take a crap in an elevator, spit in the 'coridor' in apartment buildings (okay, HDBs), and leave parisites crawling around seats in public parks, cannot be called advanced. It's kind of like half the population is civilised, and the other half really belong in a dirt village in some jungle.

But also reinforcing this rant is the fact that so many shops here do not take credit cards. This is really hard to deal with. Even in Eastern Europe barely out of the dark age of socialism takes credit cards. No, not Singapura, "will that be cash or NETS?".

I just went to the Asus Service Centre, an official Asus Service Centre, not somebody else servicing Asus laptops, and they wanted cash or nets. Can you believe this? They could not take a credit card.

This is only millimetres away from clam shells. That is how backwards this is. Close to a thousans dollars and they want cash. A corner store or deli I can understand asking for cash, a computer centre no.

This is my fault, I acknowledge this, I just keep forgetting that this is NOT an advanced nation, it is still dragging itself into the late twentieth century, it has a long way before it can be considered in the twenty first.

Ponder This

2009-04-22T23:38:00.001+09:30

It's a shop.

It sells fish.

It's called a fish shop.

...

How hard can it be?

Enlightenment

2009-04-19T21:00:00.002+09:30

I have learnt something.

If you put your fist into the screen of your $3,000 laptop it goes funny and doesn't work anymore.

Fortunately I have this $2,000 laptop as backup; but the screen resolution, cpu, and graphics aren't as good, so it isn't as good for games. Okay for working though.

Why?

Partly 'cos it was after 7, as in pm, and I hadn't eaten all day.
Partly 'cos too many things had gone wrong in both IE and Firefox and my patience had worn out.

Now I am going to have to spend a heap to get the fucker fixed.
Pooh!
Total Pooh!

Now I am going to go for a walk along the beach park, after 9 now.
Have eaten a bowl of cereal, am typing too fast for this piece of shit to keep up with, it keeps thinking that I have hit key combos and want some system crap opened.

Oh well.
It is all perhaps part of (oh, dear, just smashed $100 gaming mouse into wall) my getting so stressed, worried about what is, or rather what the fuck is NOT, happening to me (and my life).

Wanted to go to one or two temples tomorrow.
Discover something about Chinese culture, religion, philosophy.
Start building some networks.

Now will have to go to Funan to take laptop to Asus.

It is one of those days where I would kill if I could.
Preferably a god if I could get my hands around one's throat!

A Time to Forget

2009-04-18T20:13:00.002+09:30

This, in MSN.SG as I logged out of msgr:

FORGIVE AND FORGET
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
-- US President Barack Obama explaining why he granted immunity from prosecution to CIA officers accused of being involved in the torture of terror suspects under the former Bush administration.

So, Obama has finished his first 100 days, which yanks make such a big deal out of, meant to show what sort of president they got. He did nothing of note, made a lot of minor screw ups, started nothing new or good, but has now done this; in one pen stroke set forever free from prosecution (except by international tribunal) hundreds of torturers, criminals, murderers. Were they too inconvenient? Now we know what Obama is.

We also know what his wife is; far too plebeian when mixing with her betters, needs a social coach in her retinue, rather than a personal make-up artiste.

I haven't blogged for a while. Tough titty, I am not a professional blogger, so there is no requirement on me that I do this regularly. Now if some young SGirl that made her living from this were to go nine days without blogging you would have reason to stop reading her site, advertisers and sponsors would have reason to withdraw their contracts. But with me, there is only me, and only when I want it to be so.

Went out to lunch with Ivy and a friend of hers yesterday. I think that maybe I should be circumspect and not enter her name across the ether. She is single, so don't jump to any conclusions, it is just that Chinese names are probably more identifiable than Anglo ones. She and I went on to have a drink and a looonnggg chat together afterwards. Very pretty woman, very feminine, soft, quiet, seemed quite personable. At start of our time alone she told me that she would have to leave soon to collect her niece, but when I reminded her of this an hour later she shrugged it off saying that there was still some time. Sweet.

My Russian girl was never heard from again. Sound typical? Certainly sounds familiar to me. Oh well, my AFF account runs out in a week. It has never delivered anything but head games, so no guessing what I will do with it, hey?

Bitch next door is getting loud again. The problem with the inconsiderate is that their inconsideracy is ingrained and they have difficulty getting out of the habit of not considering others when they make trouble.

A Change in the Air

2009-04-08T12:44:00.002+09:30

For two nights my neighbour has been reasonably quiet.

She is somewhat noisy, but not excessively like she used to be, prior to midnight, but only far more gentle noise after midnight.

What happened?

Well the last noisy night I woke up an hour or so after her bedtime, which is 3, and moved my bed about a bit. That is, dragged it this way a bit, then that way a bit, then back again, then around again. Only for a few minutes, just to let her know what it felt like.

It was so unbelievably noisy!
I couldn't believe it. (Hence the unbelievableness of it...)
Maybe amplified by the stillness that generally prevails at that time of night.

The unstated threat was that if you keep me awake in my sleep time, then I shall retaliate and deny you your sleep.

I am guessing that she understood.

Romantic Moon

2009-04-08T00:50:00.004+09:30

I got out of bed to write about things that I love about Singapore, and whilst my computer has been booting my neighbour has been stomping around, slamming doors, and repeatedly opening and closing her bathroom sliding door. It is going on midnight, apparently the law for noisiness kicks in at 11. She is spoiling my mood.

I wanted to visit a Taoist society on Guilemard Road; they were closed, go upstairs to find a locked metal gate. So I hoped back on the next 197 to visit the Hong San See Temple - it is dedicated to Cai Shen, see my interest? It was all fenced off for repairs. I mean it is good that they are restoring things around here, but why is everything I have tried doing lately been a total waste of time?

So I went back towards Chinatown and lunch (it was about 6:30 by the time I ate). Then I chose to walk back to Marine Parade, took a few hours, got a little concerned I might be lost after crossing the river, got sore feet and am very tired, but the walk was good for me. There were so many people out running, like half the city was practising for a marathon. Cute girls trying to stay cute, buff guys trying to get buffer, serious runners carrying loaded backpacks. I stopped to sit and watch the moon. It was so romantic, nearly full, fully visible but shining through thin cloud like a beautiful woman naked under a see-through shift.

Then along East Coast Park. There were so many truly gorgeous girls out hand-in-hand with fat, rather unattractive guys who were obviously not that well off either. This is another thing that I love about Singers; that so many girls make their relationship decisions based upon what a man is like inside. They chose men for their character, their dependability, their trust-worthiness, their personality. Obviously I do not fall into this classification yet, but it is a goal to strive for. Beautiful, beautiful girls; as gorgeous as the moon shining through thin clouds.

People just out, living, enjoying life. I honestly believe that most Singaporeans are good people. I will miss them.

I just felt that there are so many things that I really love about Singapore. I will be so sad if I do have to go in the next couple of weeks.

Noisy Neighbours and Marble Dropping

2009-04-07T13:10:00.002+09:30

Okay, I have been doing some research and some thinking and I think I have solved one of the mysteries of HDB life; namely the neighbour dropping something like a ball late at night. It seems to be a wide-spread HDB phenomenon and is usually described as 'marbles'.

Some official comment blames water-hammer, but some independent commentators blame old aircons.

So after considering my situation I think it is the neighbours old aircon. It didn't happen for the month and a half before she moved in, and it doesn't explain the stamping and door slamming at 3am. But the 'ball dropping' would appear to be the old aircon 'relaxing' late at night, even though it is usually still turned on. With the cooling of the outside air at night the aircon has less work to do to get the same cooling effect, and as it makes adjustments accordingly the older ones can propagate pressure waves that flow back along the coolant pipes.

Apparently complaints about neighbours above dragging furniture across the floor can often be traced to the sound of lift doors travelling through the concrete. I don't know how that explains my neighbours dragging of furniture as it didn't happen before she moved in and it reduces in volume when I bash loudly on the wall.

And neither of these deals with her stamping loudly, continually opening and closing her (sliding) bathroom/toilet door, and slamming her bedroom doors. Nor does it explain the issue of the neighbour on the other side singing loudly at 2 or 3 in the morning.

But it does answer one question that was puzzling me, and that makes life a little easier.

Somewhere

2009-04-07T00:04:00.002+09:30

Not here, not there.

I must be in some kind of in-between point. Too old, yet not old enough.

I have just been perusing groups, as in discussion groups, on Adult Friend Finder; white guy / Asian girl, young girls for older men, so on. Firstly most of the women in most of the young femmes / old guys groups were near or post menopausal age, and weirdly those girls that were young, when I check their profiles, don't like my age. When I got into some girls for guys over 50 group there were some drop dead gorgeous babes - but they only wanted guys OLDER than me! So most young femmes younger than 40 think I am too old, but for some I am not old enough. There are sweet FA that think I am just right.

(Can you explain to me why there are so many Asian guys in the group called White guys Asian girls? Let alone why most women in a group called younger women for older guys are in fact older women themselves.)

(This dead dead dead hot babe in Dubai, total honey, 'Caucasian' not that there were any face shots to show her eyes. Married, huh? would you even let her outside she is so beautiful? let alone to play with other guys! Takes all kinds I guess.)

This young girl, American, dark eyes, winked me. Normally I ignore; write to me if you want my attention, but she was cute (very girly expression on her face), so I write back and say hello. Then I notice that she blogs, so I read a bit, she complains that no one likes her but some guy was saying 'what's your issue? I say hello and you ignore me yet you say no one is being friendly' - guess what? she (who winked me) never responded to my 'mail. Go figure.

So, I have mostly found AFF to be head games. But since the account runs out in a couple of weeks I thought I'd get more experimental with it.

Oh, my Russian girl has moved our comm to private email, and sent me a couple more pics (nothing explicit). Still, I am wondering if the sixth letter will be the "I have fallen in love with you!" and the next one asks for two thousand dollars so she can fly to be with me as I have come to expect from Russian contacts outside of good agencies. And even in good agencies most of the girls just want to be taken out to dinners that would cost them a months salary - I know; been there, done that.

I have been again seriously considering that I will now probably be heading back to Oz sooner or later. My bid to build a life in Singers seems to have failed the start point. I am so sad. Seriously! This makes me really unhappy.

On to the subject of blood-suckers.
But firstly a little side note; strange, maybe funny, or just stupid? that Singapore (as in the government) is so hot on mosquito control and yet the HDBs that house 85% of the population are built without insect screens on the windows. Again, go figure.

I may have mentioned a post or two ago that I had been bitten, or rather feasted upon, by something. Initially I thought mozzies, but then the bites got too itchy, with a sharpness to them that was more like flea bites. I thought that maybe when walking the beach at night I had rested at some bench where some flea-bitten feral moggie had lay and thus collected some. No, I sprayed the place out with mozzie spray, that usually kills fleas, but I kept getting bitten. So I pulled my bed apart, all of the sheets off, all of the cases off pillows, the covers off quilts, and shook each vigorously (notice 'vigour' versus 'vigorously'?). Result? Bugs!

As in bed bugs, or something like that. Much smaller than the kind you get in Western countries. Squished three of them. So then I put all the manchester in the washer and have sprayed room and mattress with surface spray.

So, my theory now is that this bench upon which I sat to gaze at the sea was slept upon by some itinerant who put his bag where I put my feet. This is how they move, they travel in back packs and bags put next to beds, then some stay in the bed and some return to the bag. So next person that uses this bed and puts his bag next to it will not only get fed upon during the night, but will also take some with him. Also, the reason that they are in the bed is because cheap hostels don't change the sheets, they just remake the bed.

So yeah, this guy had long enough before the police moved him on to make the beach park unsafe for the rest of us.

Kind of makes me think twice about going back. Brings home that Singapore is not that clean a place, sure, lots of places look clean, but East Coast Park is meant to be clean, instead it is infested with parasites care of the local hobos.

Yech

Now I am paranoid; keep thinking every twich is a bug crawling on me and every itch a new bite.

Got to see my noisy neighbour today. I was expecting a Chinese woman, since I was expecting it to be the owner of the chemist downstairs. Instead it was a Muslim woman, Malay. So my noisy neighbour on one side is a Malay Muslim and my noisy neighbours on the other side are Malay Muslims. So much is clear now.

I didn't speak to her. What was I going to say? "Excuse me, are you the bitch that keeps me awake until 3 every morning?" I wasn't exactly in the mood for it. Maybe sometime when I am totally ropable.

So you see, all in all, not a happy few days.

Why Does This Need a Title?

2009-04-05T10:42:00.005+09:30

Ho hum. I am going to get bored soon.

I have a mosquito (or something) that is feasting on my blood every night and leaving me with itchy spots. I have totally sprayed out the entire flat and there is a plug-in mozzie poisoner thing near the foot of my bed. What's going on? Apart from that there were no Baygon refills at the Giant store so I got Mortein - their refills fit each others plug-in devices.

I have just done another round-up of Singer blogs. Honestly, most of the ones by guys are so dull (as undoubtedly mine is as well). Most of them only post four or five lines every few days, and they are about bicycle riding, or marathon running. Yawn! Half of the female blogs in Singers seem to either be man-hating lesbians or man-hating feminists.

Did I tell you that every game I bought in the last six months has been crap?
F.E.A.R. 2, Dawn of War 2, Red Alert 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (bad code, but otherwise fun game); even UT3 is a letdown - it might boast better graphics, but the game play is essentially the same and where are all of my favourite mutators??? Also, why are the UT3 maps taking so long to come out? Only dribs and drabs. Everybody is going for improved graphics and totally ignoring gameplay (except Stalker 2, that was same graphics, just mega-buggy).

I don't know about you, but I keep getting girls trying to post testimonials to my Adult Friend Finder profile. They are just waffle with their yahoo or msngr address, these people don't know me. Why would I approve such crap? Why do they think that anybody would be their vehicle for free advertising? Seriously, these prostitutes need to be a bit more realistic. Also, I have had a rash of young girls (early twenties) winking me, and I have written back to a few and guess what? Nothing! Uhhh??? What's with this? Why comm me (communicate with me) if you are not going to talk? Imagine standing at a bar and a pretty young girl walks by and says "hello" and winks at you then keeps walking on. Maybe you follow her and smile and say "hi" and then she screams and calls the cops. I acknowledge that I truly do not understand bitches.

I was reading some Dilbert cartoons online and one was about no-work guy wearing noise cancelling headphones to a meeting. Noise cancelling headphones - that's what I need to deal with the bitch next door! I had been thinking about getting a mike and a speaker and programming in a counter-noise routine myself, but how much hassle would that be. So I did some looking; huh??? They are all something like $500!!!! So I try eBay, wooh hoo! Can get them for less than a hundred including postage, but good brands are less than two hundred. Most of them only cancel out between 75% and 85% of background noise, some claim 90%, Denon claims up to 99%, but then Denon is probably the best audio brand (IMHO), so I would expect them to be better than the others. Unfortunately most are in-ear or on-ear, I would so much rather over-ear. For me all in-ears are too big for wearing for more than an hour or so, they start to hurt. And same with on-ears; they start to get painful after an hour or two. Could I sleep with earphones on? It would probably force me onto my back, thence to choke on my own tongue as it fell down my throat. Honestly, one of the worst things about getting old is that I am snoring more. (That, and the having to get up in the middle of the night to pee. But that's only 'cos I have so much trouble getting to sleep, so getting back to sleep takes too much away.)

All of which highlights how miserable life is right now. I have two months of my rental contract here until the six month point for the diplomatic clause, plus a one month break fee; so five and a half thousand to pay if I want to pack up and go back to Oz. Still, if I can arrange a contract to be returning to then it won't be too much hassle, and at least I will have both an income and something more meaningful to do with my time. Then I can work for a year or a two, build up some reserves (more than I had for the try here), and go try Hongkers. 'Cos I am seriously considering that Singers was a bust. Wasted too much time in this place.

Of course, I could ask why do I exist at all?

The Day After Yesterday

2009-04-02T18:38:00.005+10:30

Hi, just keeping you in the loop.
Just posting to keep my blog alive.
Absolutely nothing has happened to comment on.
But I will still. After all, this is a commentary...

Did some ironing. Did four shirts before getting into the ones that I brought back last time I was in Oz. Decided they needed washing again, so saved from doing more ironing. Have noticed that the kitchen floor drain, which sits vertically like a semi-circle below the kitchen sink, is making a little puddle every time the kitchen sink is emptied.

It is getting hotter. It is 28 inside rather than the usual 26, and my air-con is set at 23 rather than the usual 25. Something that I will just have to get used to.

Have tried a new protein drink, EAS, got from GNC. I am a member so I get them 2-for-1, but chocolate whey protein was only available in the larger, 5 pound, containers, so two of them. Didn't want strawberry as I don't like artificial strawberry. The GNC brand vanilla is okay, and okay to mix with chocolate. But I wanted to try a different brand, it was slightly cheaper, but the taste is not as good as the GNC brand. Not that any whey protein drink tastes that great, and I will be mixing this with Milo to make it palatable. That is 'Australian formula' Milo, which does not quite taste like Australian Milo, but tastes a hell of a lot better than the foreign Milo - which tastes like Ovaltine. It's kind of like comparing Vegemite (which, you guessed it, I am missing soooo much!) with something like Promite or whatever.

I would like to try the soy protein drinks, but you don't get the member's 2-for-1 deal therefore they are, effectively, twice the price. But I just won a 'buy one item at half price' draw at the GNC store - I could, therefore, try the soy protein drink. Except that I now have ten pounds of EAS whey protein drink to get through...

Am trying a new sleeping pill; a tiny little red one. It seemed to work last night, but the bitch next door wasn't too bad. I think that I might have gotten to sleep before midnight, I was certainly awake before six (as was she). It will be a minor battle to re-establish my sleeping patterns after the week-long illness threw them totally out of whack.

Have discovered that I have close to sixty thousand in my AMP super. This means that I have earned a bit over $600k in the last eight years contracting, and most of that will have come in the second half - for the last few years my income was roughly doubling every year. Now this is not an amount that will make one jot of difference to my future retirement, and with technically about twenty years to go until said retirement is officially on the cards there is no way at that rate that any decent amount to retire on could be amassed. However; if I get a job here then I have reasonable cause to use the 'never returning to Australia' clause and get my hands on it directly. In that sense it could be a useful amount. It would be more useful right now, but that is not an option - unless I lied, which I am not of a mind to do, ever.

I have at least one other super account, the one via the Hays agency, and I should get that rolled into the AMP account to simplify my life one tiny little bit.

My Adult Friend Finder account runs out late this month. A gold account and I paid for standard members to be able to contact me free. So far this has been a big disappointment, I did it on the slight chance that I could nab a girl friend before arriving in SG. Naturally that did not happen. Nor have I nabbed a girlfriend with it in the six months of being here. I thought it was running out end of last month (they gave me a free extra month) and so wrote it off in my mind, but now that it is there for that little bit longer I am actually using it differently. I am using it to contact girls (no kidding...) for friendship rather than explicitly for any sexual/emotional relationship. Just nice, sane sounding people to communicate with.

Oh, and a hot Russian babe. But that's a different story...

One of the SG blogs that I often check out is Mr Miyagi (aka Benjamin Lee) a (how shall I put this) self-gender focused guy that seems to really dislike Xianity. (I really don't like saying 'gay' because the word has a meaning in the English language that I don't want 'queers' to hijack.) Normally I find his site okay and I don't mind the anti-Xian stuff that emerges sometimes because, as you know, I totally hate Xianity. But I read a letter by a young boy to the Straits Times the other weekend complaining about a play that Mr Lee has written that makes, according to the letter writer, a lot of negative comment on Chinese women that marry Europeans (I also hate the term 'Caucasian', which is used in the letter). I had never noticed this in the Miyagi site, but I am concerned if he might be another anti-White racist that Singers seems to have so many of. I have kind of gone off Babe Logic and Sheena's Little Fragments of Time because of the anti-men stances they sometimes take. After all, why read a blog by someone that doesn't like you?

Did not like F.E.A.R. 2, Red Alert 3, or Dawn of War 2.
Went back to playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and Dawn of War 1 SoulStorm.

Don't like either Stalker game once it goes linear. You know; when you start chasing Strelok and you can't go back into previous maps. I would like a free roaming type of Stalker. There is space on the strategic map for sixteen game maps, but they used less than half in each game. So, all sixteen regions and no over plot, just stalking, mercing, and the factions war.

I met this Duty party and noticed that one of them was carrying an MG; I think it is a PKM (with a 100 round belt in a clip-on), anyhow when you wipe out the army base at the start of the Cordon map you can't take the MG. So I thought, why not try here...
So I shot him in the head at point blank range and 'F'ed to pick it up.
Bingo! Worked, except that the rest of his party were shooting me...
So I reloaded (I had 'F5'ed just before this, of course), went off to do something with Freedom, then tried hunting out another Duty party with an PKM.
None anywhere!
Minutes before it was like every three man Duty team had one PKM, now suddenly none of them did. Just when I decided I wanted to single-handedly take on Duty. (I didn't join Freedom; well I quick saved, joined Freedom to find out what that was like, then quick loaded to go take on Duty by myself.)

I noticed that this time the bandits in the Garbage were hostile to me, whereas last time I played I could enter their base and trade. If you wipe out everyone in the base then the traders vanish, but then some more bandits mysteriously appear at the back of the shed in a few minutes and the base is back in operations again.
Also, I wiped out the Cordon army base a few times. It is a great source of rifles, and therefore a good way to build up some cash. But it only replenishes three or four times, after that it stays empty :(

As for the benefits of the last patch:
It made no difference to the sky going vomit when you enter the Red Forest map.
I did not experience bad physics like things falling through floors, but I didn't put anything on roofs anyhow, so I wouldn't have noticed.
It introduced corrupted quick saves, which I have read about, but not experienced myself before. (Not all quick saves, only a few went bad.)
It added invisible people; you can see the icon for an important character on the minimap, but not in front of you. Quick save, then quick load, and suddenly the character is standing in front of you, and there are a lot of other people standing around that were non-existent a minute before.
So, all in all, it made no improvements that I noticed, whilst it added a few new problems. A big fail. It's like these guys are amateurs, and don't do any testing. I had no problems with the first Stalker, but the second is the worst game programming I have ever experienced.
Despite that it is a great game.
Just wish they would hire a reasonable programmer.

Back in the Saddle

2009-04-01T13:03:00.003+10:30

Been up and about again for a couple of days.
Getting used to walking again. Had to go shopping of course - I had eaten the house out. Half way through my cold I ordered in pizzas, 2 for 1, large. That did me for breakfast and dinner for three days.

I had some very sad moments whilst so sick and feeling sorry for myself.
Like about how I turned down a $1,000 a day contract for a year to come here and chase a dream and now I have wasted six months of my life. Friends say "think about the experiences you have gained" etc., etc. But I don't think they really needed six months to live through, maybe an extended holiday would have covered that part.

At least some agencies are sending me jobs now and asking me to apply for them if I feel that they suit me. But they never mention the pay, and only tell me after I ask them that they are offering less than half what I got in Oz.

According to the MSN page when I drop out of msgr SG is launching some 'be nice' campaign. Or be considerate. Hah hah, what a joke. I have had six neighbours in my short time here and five of them were (two of those being neighbours now) are what I would have previously though impossibly inconsiderate - routinely noisy to two or three in the morning. And the way people here seem to believe that they have some need to take up most of both sides of a footpath and try and force everyone else of - or is it just because I am white?

So yeah, it is a very inconsiderate society. But also I don't think that I have experienced anywhere else where people are so unhappy with their own country. Well, not anywhere else 'advanced', I have experienced it from Eastern Europeans, all sad at how their countries are economic basket cases, but mostly they were happy with other aspects of their societies. But in SG so many people keeping moaning to me about how they hate Singapore. The last cab driver I had spent the whole trip whinging about SG, and how Australia is such a better country, wouldn't listen to me trying to get in some good things about SG and some counter-points about AU.

So many people seem to be upset by living in a pressure cooker.

I haven't worked here yet, so I can't comment too much about the work pressures. Sure most people work to after six, but they don't start till ten. Shops are open from ten to nine, so if you are running your own business then you have long hours; but that is true for independent businesses everywhere. Then again, I worked from eight to six thirty in Oz; same hours more or less, and running a shop has lots of down time, whereas a contractor gets no down time - trust me, your clients always have work to load onto you.

I suppose that I am now seeing yet another side to Singapore.

I am not too sure what purpose this serves in the grand cosmic scheme.

Bluurrrgggghhhh

2009-03-21T18:55:00.005+10:30

How can I have a cold in the tropics?????

:(

Feel so awful, and not in the sense of being full of awe.
Am full of mucus.
You want?
I give, free of charge.

('Mucus' is noun, 'mucous' is adjective. I thought 'mucusy' would be the adjective? Does not sound better? 'Mucus' is snot, 'mucous membrane' is home of snot. How meaningless. Why do this? "Oh, I have an idea! Let's spell the word differently when used adjectively!" Dumb person. English can be so stupid.)

Very blurgh day. But must blog sometime. Cannot have blog and not blog.
I know I am not professional blogger, professional blogger should blog every day or burn in hell (too harsh?), but still, if keep blog then should blog. Simple.

Suspect cold come from sleeping near naked in blow of aircon.
But so hot and sticky otherwise! How can not?
See how bad cold make me talk like local?

Did house work today.
Hate, hate, hate.
Did sweeping and then mopping of most of floors (2 bedrooms, entrance hall, dining hall, kitchen; not toilet, bathroom, utility room).
Move all things on floors to other places on floors, sweep, mop, do next bit whilst first bit dries, do third bit 'cos first still not dry, then move stuff around to mop second bit. Etc., etc., etc.

Hate so much.

But did not do ironing.
Have many shirts to iron, not yet ironed, did not iron.
Hate ironing EVEN MORE!!!!!

Taking 2 grams vitamin C every two hours, and took horseradish this morning.
Had afternoon nap, near naked, under aircon.
Wake up feel worse!
WHY??????

Feel so down, so sad.
Had huge battle with own soul last night, maybe this also cause?
Soul is tired, body therefore weak, cannot resist evil infection.

So sad, so sad, so sad.

Read blogs.
Read Xiaxue blog.
Read about Pumpkin eating own poo.
Write comment to; have had 4 dogs, have been there, dealt with that.
Now miss my doggie!!!!!

So sad, so sad, so sad.

Read UglyFatChick blog.
Why these people have lives?
I no have life!
Why my life so sad?

Come to Asia.
Earn twice as much, pay half as much tax.
Get squirty bum from the food! Do they tell you that? Nooooo.
Cannot find real food!
Bread not sold in proper loaves, only in half sized loaves (maybe 'cos Asians small, yes?). WHERE POTATOES??????
Go to food stalls. (I told you that one stall in court below is now vegetarian. Is good, but sometimes spicey. If guy is serving is expensive, if girl is serving is cheap.) Only potato dish is MOST SPICEY dish. Asian get revenge on Euro. Tummy go gurgly, bottom go squirty, not good idea to go for long walk along beach just now.

Downloading patch for Stalker; Clear Sky. 28% done; 2 hr 22 min to go. SingTel Broadband on Mobile bouncing between zero and ten. Wheeyy heyyy! So much for paying for 2,000 per sec! Is that like the ceiling? Can get up to 2,000? But usually get less than 1%???? Such good service from SingTel! Will keep customers with such service! Not! Will move to cable broadband as soon as land job!

Don't even know if need patch. Just doing 'cos there to do.
Will fix strange graphics anomalies? Think not!
Will fix strange physics anomalies? Think not!
But want to play. Enjoy game. Enjoy Russian-ness of it (one of the things I like about Half Life 2 is the settings in Russian zone, gives me a chance to practice my reading a bit, cannot get most of the speaking though).

Had thought other day.
Yes, can have thoughts sometimes. Only when moon is in right aspect to birth sign though.

Hey, look!
30% - 2 hr 51 min to go!

Maybe go back to idea of Russian girl?
(Maybe go to idea of Russian Girls! Plural.)
Saw girl on Alt.com, will be domestic and sex slave for man, any age, size, whatever, if he help her get out of little dead end Ukrainian village and get university education. Will be slave during time takes to graduate. Cool! I can do! Once get job, if get job pays what I get back in Oz then can do easy!
18, slender, redhead/strawberry blonde, nice curves.

Go look at badrussiangirls.com (got that right?).
Pretty teenage girls selling themselves. Some pretty ones say will be mistress.
I can do! Will put in flat, give live-in maid, pay money for 'support' - twenty times what would get in Russian or Ukraine (I know, been there remember).
Don't believe in using prostitutes, but having nothing against keeping concubines.
Is okay.

What you think?
Do I care what you think?
Do I care what anybody thinks?

Must get job.
Only flaw in plan!
Man with no job is empty, meaningless, flotsam in river of life.
That me. See? Floating aimlessly down river of life.
Get caught in netting at barrage at mouth of marina river.
Recycled back into landfill.
Singapore must grow, must build new land...

Steamed Fish

2009-03-16T13:33:00.004+10:30

So, have played DoW2 through to the end.
There is only one campaign, space marines. No Eldar, Ork, or Tyrannid campaigns.
Major minus!

I am not really sure if I think that much of it, I tend to think that I prefer SoulStorm. Sure the graphics are good, but the gameplay, whilst different, is not better. The much vaunted strategic focus I read so much about is a major disappointment; it is not really any improvement, and no big difference, to SoulStorm and Dark Crusade.

Sure, I like what I can do with some of the units; building the assault troop up in skill so that their drop onto an enemy unit scatters and stuns them, building all my other units up to terminators (the commander is in terminator armour with a teleport pack). (I seem not to be bothering with my scout squad or the dreadnought - the dreadnought dies too easily and can't be healed 'cos he's a machine so needs the scouts to fix him {there are no work units, the scouts have absorbed the repair machine function}.)

But there is no sense of 'empire building' anymore; all of the management side of the game is gone. Now it is just drop in and fight. Maybe that is more realistic for a marine company, but it is not what I want in a game.

Bought UT3 (Unreal Tournament III). Yes, I already have it in AU, but that disc is in AU and it was only US$11.99 on Steam.
Yes, I bought it via Steam. How did I do that? I have been whinging for so long about how I couldn't buy things from Steam since I came to SG.

Ivy wanted me to install Yahoo msgr, since it is easier to use video with than skype and she doesn't have Microsoft msgr (msngr?). Since I was going to have it on my laptop and auto starting every boot and letting me know if there was any mail in my yahoo account, it wasn't going to be an issue that I would have to be checking multiple webmail accounts anymore, they would do the checking themselves.

So I used my yahoo account to open a new PayPal account in SG.
Then I transferred US$12.00 from my AU paypal account to my SG paypal account.
Then I tried to buy UT3 from steam.
No go!
Not enough money in account.
So I transferred another US$10 and then successfully bought UT3 from steam.
Which left my SG paypal account with US$10.01????? Go figure.
$0.00 is okay, but $0.01 is not?

Haven't had time to play it yet since I was finishing DoW2. The ending of which was quite a letdown.

When I opened this blog I couldn't use Kai Shan 'cos some kid had started a KaiShan.BlogSpot account, made two or three entries, then left it for three years. But the name was still taken. So I used KaiShan-SG.

When installing DoW2 you have to start by installing steam (I had to uninstall steam, download the newest version, reinstall, then restore my steamapps remember 'cos my steam account wasn't connecting 'cos steam had gone AWOL as it so frequently does), then you have to install Games for Windows Live and then open a GFWL account (called a 'gametag', huh? why? is 'username' not adequate? do the people at microsoft have to invent new words for everything?), and only then do you get to actually install the game. From disc.
Anyhow, 'KaiShan' was unavailable!!!
How many people are there in the world using this?
Naturally the wonderful microsoft windows product offers some suggestions; InscrutableKai etc. You know the sort of stuff.
So I used KaiShanIV, as in 'Kai Shan the 4th'. Sounded regal at the time.
You shouldn't be able to see it 'cos I restricted the account to my contacts list.

So now I have yet another Kai Shan type name floating around.
My steam account wouldn't take KaiShan and had to have a numeric ending attached as well. I won't tell you that one 'cos I don't remember if steam let me lock it to my friends list.

Anyhow, in amongst all of this I got into my windows live profile details and decided to change my surname to Shan, since I had locked my account to my contacts list only, and they are (nearly) all gamers that know my moniker. (As do my family, since my skype account is another KaiShan### account.)

Now my hotmail mails are being tagged "Kai Shan sent this on..."

That was not intended.
It should not have been a problem, but amongst all of this I also got in contact with Replay, the distributors of DoW2 in SG. Initially I was just visiting their website to see if the 'win a life-sized space marine statue' competition was still alive before I actually posted the form in. But since I was there, and since it seemed to be an easy to use site, and since they turned out to be the local distributors for another game that I have been playing and enjoying (Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI) I decided to mail their support team and let them know about the process I used to resolve my DoW2 installation problems. Their support page had a flier on DoW2 steam connection issues, so I figured that they had been hassled by buyers already. This lead to a friendly exchange of half a dozen emails before I noticed that I was being called "Mr Kai Shan".

Scroll down last email.
Sure enough: "Kai Shan sent this on..."

I have had 30 unique visitor this month!!!
This where I used to scream ("AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"), go see previous posts on the subject.
Oh, the day I noticed that I had received my first two or three visitors. I seem to remember writing in large caps asking them all to go away.
And now that number has increased tenfold.
My private little space is being invaded.

Most from SG, some from US, Canada, UK, and then a smattering of countries with one.
I am betting that most are still just floating in after that spat on Mr Wang Says So.
Get ready, 'cos here I say something controversial again.

Was reading the Straits Times this weekend (got it to look for a job, found one possible). Noticed an article on an upcoming election in SG, there was a map with some electorates highlighted for discussion.

Strange map.

Maybe not complete, but I did not like what I saw.

There appeared to be electorates of rather inappropriate shapes.

You know, the sort that come under the term 'gerrymander'.

If you are not familiar with this term; it derives from some american, can't remember whether it was at state or county level - if you are that interested try wiki, but beware of that it is full of left-wing propaganda, anyhow, from some american called 'Gerry' or his surname started with 'Gerry' and he had drawn up his electorates to maximise his parties votes, and one was shaped like a salamander; namely a long thin body, with four corridors coming off that connected to four townships. The point is that electorates are meant to be as close to circular or square as you can get them, a bit of rectangularity is okay, but a bent shape with a bit that arches off on one side like a tennis racquet is not okay. That is drawing an electoral boundary so as to ensure that the benefits are maximised for one particular political party.

I do not like to see such things in Singapore.
They shatter my illusions.

The ones that particularly got my attention were, in order; Jurong GRC, Marine Parade GRC, and Jalan Besar GRC

On the positive side I seemed to read into this article (remember my innocence of SG politics) that SG has multi-member electorates! What a wonderful idea! And I don't just say that because I have been arguing for so many years that AU should do that. Well, okay, I probably do say that just because it is something that I have been saying for years that AU should do. I think that all electorates should have four or five members (all should be the same). This would give minor parties much better chances to get members into parliament. It would also mean (in the AU context) that whatever electorate you lived in you would (if you voted for one of the major parties) have a member representing you. And further it would mean that senior members such as ministers would not be leaving their constituents unattended by their being focussed on ministerial duties as there would be other electorate members to attend to constituent enquiries.

Also I couldn't help but notice that all of the opposition parties named, listed, and with their logos presented all appeared to be some form of socialist party. Given my views on the PAP being inspired by the BUF I think that this means that there is no representation of true right-wing politics in SG; lots of left-wing and the ruling party is third way - which, one could argue, as the synthesis of left and right transcends both.

Still, as my own personal politics are definitively third way (synthetic in the Hegelian manner) I don't find this latter to bother me too much. However, when these odd-shaped electorates are added to the banners flying everywhere advertising individual politician at public expense I do get a little concerned.

It is my own personal illusion, I know, but I want Singapore to be better than this.

Unmitigated Evil

2009-03-08T03:25:00.002+10:30

My immediate steam issues have been resolved. By me, not with any help or even input from valve. It is late, as in one in the morning, but I want to close this thread off.

The necessary action turned out to be to reinstall steam.
This required copying the steamapps folder to somewhere safe, then uninstalling steam, then going to steampowered and downloading the current copy of steam.msi, then reinstalling it, then loading the Dawn of War 2 disc, then letting it do its steam thing, then its windows live thing, then copying back the steamapps, then through steam reinstalling all of my existing games, then letting DoW2 do the actual install of the game.

A total of SIX HOURS to install a freaking game from a disc!!!!

Along the way both my main gaming account in steam and my backup account used to get support when my main account gets frozen, got frozen, as in steampowered doesn't recognise the passwords and does not acknowledge that there is an account with my email address. So I created another account and lo and behold it defaults to showing me my own issues list because all three accounts share the same email address. You know, the one that ten minutes before it was refusing to acknowledge as existing.

Anyhow, solved.

So far I am finding the games, Fear 2 and DoW2, so so. They are no quantum leap over their first incarnations. Graphics is a lot better in both, you could probably masturbate to the graphics of the female lieutenant in Fear2 they are so good. But playability is not noticeably better. Fear2 is not terrifying as Fear 1.1 was. I haven't played as much of DoW2 yet, strategically it seems to be an improvement, but I wonder if it will be much better than Dark Crusade and SoulStorm, there are a few tactical tweaks that are nice, AI intuitive taking cover is a lot better than Company of Fools (sorry, Heroes). You can carry an extra weapon in F2, and they have improved the guns a bit. I like the ability to level up squads in DoW2 and to be able to add equipment to them, but these are things that have been in other games for some time now.

They were both about $60 in SG, whereas they would have been about $80 in AU.

Anyhow, main issue solved for now. Probably re-occur in a month or two since valve refuses to provide sufficient servers for steam yet requires your install of steam to log onto the internet to validate itself regularly and frequently - even if all you want to do is play single player offline.

Will Star Dock succeed in their concept to counter steam?

Remember Star Dock?
They did Master of Orion.
It came out in 1, 2, & 3. And then Sin of a Solar Empire; kind of a MoO 4, but not as good.
MoO 2 was their pinnacle, 3 was total crap (like Dune; God Emperor, Dune 2 was good, Dune 2000 was the expected graphic improvement, but no game play change, God Emperor was crap).

I to bed now.

Steam is Still Evil

2009-03-06T21:52:00.004+10:30

The problems of the previous entry are continuing. Namely steam is not connecting to its server and so I can't play half of my games. Add to this that I bought Dawn of War 2 this arvo and it turns out to be chained to steam as well, it won't even start the install process until it makes a connection to a steam server.

Naturally there has been no response from valve yet; it is only one day, they need several weeks to get their heads out of their arses and reply to anything. So I searched the forums; lots of people have the same issues and most are complaining that valve does not bother responding, let alone fixing the problem. I read through four threads on similar sorts of issues, all were full of these three things; lots of people complaining that steam wasn't working and that valve was not responding, lots of people offering solutions, lots of people saying that they had tried those solutions and they did not fix the problem. Yes, it is true that some people were saying thanks and the prob was fixed for them, but more were in the negative. And yes, I did try all the solutions offered, none worked for me.

Nowhere on either the Fear 2 or Dawn of War 2 boxes did it state that the game would be locked to making an online connection to a steam server. In other words I was sold two games uninformed of the high risk that they would not play. And, as it turns out, neither of them will play, and this problem apparently exists for many people and has been in existence since early 2007 and is still unresolved.

Now for the bits that would be funny if they weren't so infuriating.

Steampowered.com wouldn't let me log on, it said that my password and username did not match what was in their database, this after being logged on this morning. Every time that I log a problem with steam it locks out my password.

I logged on with a second account that I keep just for when it does this. It used to be that you could not report that your password was buggered and needed resetting without logging on - that is how stupid the staff at valve are. I opened my issues list and it seems that valve have connected my two logons, I could access the list for my other logon.

I searched and read the forums then tried to post. Strangely being logged on to steampowered does not mean that you are logged into the forums which run in steampowered. I could not logon, it would not accept either of my logons. I tried to make a new logon just to get into the forums to comment on needing a second logon to get into steampowered because steam had locked out my main logon. It would not let me open a new account.

More FEAR

2009-03-05T16:32:00.002+10:30

Good news and bad news; terrible, terrible news.

F.E.A.R. 2 is out

This is good news. Fear was the most frightening game that I have ever experienced. It was simply awesome. The first expansion lacked a bit, and the second lacked more, but they were still better than most games.

Fear 2 promises to be the years best shooter simply by its existence.

But there is bad.
The people who own it, Monolith, have sold their souls to the most pure evil.
That evil has a name; it is Steam.

My copy cannot be installed without locking it to steam. This would be okay if steam worked, unfortunately steam is far, far more trouble than it is ever worth.

Yes, the idea was good, and it was good that I can come to SG and buy a new computer and log onto my steam account and have half a dozen games download and install and be able to play without the discs. But so often steam refuses to work, it randomly requires me to log onto the internet, and then it will just lock up.

I can still visit steampowered.com, but steam will not connect to my steam account.

So today I cannot play my Fear 2 (as I spent most of yesterday playing it), because today steam, as it is so often want to, will not work.

(This is all on top of my usual rant about steam and how they will not let me buy anything in SG because my VISA and PayPal accounts are registered in AU - they are so totally 20th century and cannot deal with the concept of a global economy or people moving outside of their little boxes.)

Why, oh why, Lith did you have to marry Satan incarnate?

A New Week, A New Month

2009-03-02T15:10:00.004+10:30

This week I start cold calling. Nothing from applying for jobs advertised, so I start calling on the agencies again and getting in their faces, and also approaching consultancies, to start with. My finances can handle another three months, as in this month, March, and then two more.

Remember my tale about the Chinese temple in Chinatown that broke my heart because it had been subsumed totally by Buddhism? Well, since then I took a walk around the nearby area between Changi Rd and East Coast Rd, Telok Kurau Rd and the Siglap Canal. There were three temples in the area that I visited, one had insignia - a Chinese character, and people's portraits, but no other iconography, the other two were both totally Buddhist. So absolutely no luck there.

I have tried out my Thoth deck, Aleister Crowley's deck, but found the pictures too 'busy' and hard to respond to. Also the booklet that came with them was next to useless. I did see a book at Kinokuniya on the Thoth deck, I might buy it, or I might not - I can't say that I am that impressed with the deck. I was told when I was a young student of the arts that it was a very powerful deck, that many were scared to use it because of what happened to Crowley, but that the cards had been designed before he went bad, but still to be wary of them as they were so powerful. This is not my experience now that I have tried them; confusing and convoluted, but so far not powerful.

I also tried out the manga deck my sister got me for xmas. They are a little odd in some ways, the artist has reversed the genders; i.e. everywhere there is a man in the Rider Waite deck he has used a woman and vice versa, so the Hanged Man becomes the Hanged Woman, the Kings become Queens and the Queens become Kings. Why? Because of this reversal I did not want to risk using a standard Rider Waite interpretation and relied upon the booklet that came with the deck for explanations, unfortunately it contained no interpretations for reversed cards, so I ensured that I shuffled the deck without reversing any. I did not use the standard Celtic cross layout that I almost always rely on, but the booklet had a nice little six card layout it said was good for relationships. So naturally I did one on Jazreel :)

Come on, what else would you expect of me?

Anyhow, same as always; [Relationship as Now] got the Two of Cups, [Relationship as Future] got the Ten of Cups, the usual sort of stuff, and yes, the Tower was in there as well. It was also in my Thoth deck reading, but I couldn't make sense out of most of that one.

Hard to believe, but it appears that my comments posted on Mr Wang Says So are still drawing attention. I got another comment posted here; not supportive this time, rather along the lines of "I read something bad about Singapore, therefore Singapore is bad, therefore everywhere else is better" sort of reasoning. There are poor people suffering in SG therefore it cannot be a better place than AU; I am sorry to have to burst a few illusions, but there are poor and homeless in Australia, and far more than I have seen here in SG. My statement stands; in my view SG is a better place for me to live in.

What I can't understand is the difficulty some people seem to have with the bits "in my view" and "for me"; it is as though because their view is different (and I stress the apparent lack of experiencing AU that these people exhibit) then it seems to follow logically for them that my view is flawed.

Wish I could remember the name of that guy that was on the Channel 10 "X-Files in Australia" type documentary back in the early days of the X Files. His partner (business and research) had been murdered, yet he was still demonstrating his technology on national television. One year later and he was murdered, shot through the head, it got four or five lines in one column on something like page fifteen of the Murdoch press, but I am guessing that they went onto thin ice to publish that much. These examples of government sanctioned murders would open up the discussion a bit. It is not easy to get names of people gaoled or certified because of their political activity because the mainstream media never carries such info, so you have to rely on underground sources and your circle of acquaintances; and, of course, in any discussion these will be challenged by people that will only believe something published in the state controlled media. How can you argue with such a mindset?

I will only believe that my God does not exist if you can show me my God saying that He does not exist.

It is, after all, a religious debate. Which is to say that it is defined by emotions and 'faith' and not by intelligence, logic, or facts. Just as 'religious' people need to believe in a better place, one that is found after death for the faithful, so these individuals need to believe in a better place; they just transfer this myth to the physical world by saying it is some other country where all social ills have been solved. They then contrast this with wherever they are residing to highlight everything that they do not like about their own country.

In a way I felt that Singapore was the ideal country. Now that I am living here some of the gloss has worn off; but I still think that, for me, it is a better place, for me, to be living. If some Singaporeans have difficulty with this and insist upon insisting that their country is some sort of Hell on Earth then that is their problem. One that will not be solved by emigrating to Australia or America, trust me. You will find some things better, some things worse, and some things just different. Also you will find many of the locals complaining about all of these Asians that the government is letting in, and why are they doing that? they don't add anything to the country or the economy, they just lower our standard of living blah, blah, blah. Oh, and don't forget the 'they are corrupting our women' sort of thing. You know, exactly the same stuff that a lot of 'angry Ah Phets' say about Ang Mohs.

Same stuff, everywhere in the world that you go; Germans complaining about non-Germans living in Germany, Scots complaining about non-Scots living in Scotland, Thais complaining about farangs in Thailand, Australians bemoaning the end of the White Australia policy. Same stuff, everywhere. Small surprise, therefore, that there are Singaporeans that say the same stuff, that have exactly the same feelings and make exactly the same comments that racists and xenophobes everywhere do. That they are so definitely a minority is shown simply by the constant election results in Singapore, but that they are so vocal a minority is a bit different; such comments would get you before the Federal Court in Australia. I know this; I have a friend that has a website that is operating under a Federal Court order, prohibiting him from saying some of the things he used to say and limiting the things that he says in the future. I seriously believe that some of the things said at me on the Mr Wang Says So site would have been grounds for lodging a complaint in Oz.

Perhaps I should investigate the Racial Harmony laws in SG?
Maybe they offer Whites some protection from vilification? Unlike Australia, where the Racial Vilification Act and other, state level, anti-racist laws do not provide any real protection for Whites, only for non-Whites. That being the definition of racial equality in Australia; just as the definition of gender equality is that the wife gets 70% of the assets in any divorce - mine did too, and I counted myself lucky that I got what I got. And that was with no children, otherwise I would have been lucky to get 10%.

And now the new Socialist government is considering allowing 'mistresses' to sue for 'divorce'; they are considering a law that would allow a woman that had been in a relationship with a man for two years or more, but not living with him, to be able to sue him for a share of his assets. End result? Australian men will be terrified of starting any sort of sexual relationship with a woman; they will go for casual sex only. When they want children and marriage they will leave the country to marry somewhere safer. So add 'matrimonial' refugees to the list of political refugees, economic refugees, social refugees.

Now a mass of SGers will complain about that statement; for your info I saw some programme on SBS once that stated in the voice-over at the end that over 300 Australians had been granted political refugee status by the US. But then again, I have friends that are 'economic refugees' from the US and are doing quite well in Australia. So that one goes both ways. But then again again I don't know but have read a fair bit about SGers emigrating to Oz to escape the work focus and to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle in Australia. I don't know about that one; most business professionals that I know, myself included, regularly worked 50 hour weeks in AU, even though the law is that the standard week is 38 hours (40 hours per week, or 5 days of 8 hours, with a rostered day off every 4 weeks). By law any work over 38 hours is overtime and must be paid accordingly, the Federal Court does not recognise that 'salaried' employees are not entitled to overtime as many employers try to argue. But most people work those hours unpaid out of desperation to keep their jobs. So my personal experience of Australia is not quite the easy going place that so many SG blog flamers would have me believe. I would routinely work 8am to 6:30pm on some contracts. Eating at my desk whilst I crunched data.

A Flame A Day...

2009-02-21T15:40:00.003+10:30

I have been so totally flamed!!!!

Mr Wang Says So posted a letter from a Mr Gopal about official discrimination against non-citizens in Singapore. Honestly I have to say, doesn't that happen everywhere? Is not a governments and a nations duty to care first for its own citizens?

Anyhow, I dared to enter the fray [big smiley face here].

Of the 15 comments posted since that 6 were counters to mine; of which 2 were points of discussion by Mr Wang, one of which I disagreed with in my second post, 4 were total flames, and 1 was Mr Wang asking for the tone to be kept civil; which took up 73% of the line space. And about four would have been entered before mine went visible, so really it is 50% of the comments and 85% of line space.

And what did I say that annoyed the citizenry so much?
That foreigners pay taxes that are used (in part) to provide benefits to citizens.

Anonymous said; "And what do you really know, Aussie? You're just another opportunistic FTrash from down-under who has not been here long enough to understand our society ills and now muscling in to get at our well-paying jobs."

FILTHs didn't actually insult me, he just went off the deep end by extrapolation.

Old-Timer said; "Face it, Aussie - you're a swell-headed moron." and also took great umbrage at my statement that I feel politically freer in Singapore than I do in Australia, questioning whether I was a real Australian or not. He made a statement about "Unless you're some world renown scientist who has cloned Dolly the sheep in your resume, ..." which I find humourous in an ironic way because I did work with that team for a time. I did their project costing model.

So, your well-paying jobs? Truth be told, my impression of the remuneration outlined in most job adverts makes me wonder at how the average Singaporean survives.

But when added to the way some SGers seem to insist on walking into me on the footpath, refusing to pass in a polite manner, I begin to feel that SG is perhaps too xenophobic, too hostile to foreigners for comfort. Should I count this as a mark against remaining and take my (as yet unused in SG) skills somewhere else?

I am still convinced that I should give SG another six weeks, to the end of March, before I start getting too concerned and making arrangements for possibly returning to Oz.

However I must commend Mr Wang for running with so open a forum.
Yes, I was insulted extensively, and mostly inaccurately, but I acknowledge that Singaporeans for the most part probably have little exposure to an Australian sense of humour and won't understand that some things are said in a light-hearted manner. As for the rest, they are entitled to their views, and, like Voltaire, I may not agree with them, but...

My Day in Soho

2009-02-19T15:20:00.003+10:30

I was just reading some articles on the AsiaOne website when I noticed that most of these linked articles and forum posts were dated 2007, whereas is was todays 2009 front page for AsiaOne. Nice to know that their news is so current.

One article was about NUS slipping from 19th to 33rd best uni in the UK Times opinion, again two years old, but interesting. My view is formed by this little fact:
to become a CPA Singapore member or accredited by the ACRA (Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority) you have to have either a recognised foreign degree plus a bridging course to familiarise you with Singaporean laws, or a degree from either SMU (Singapore Management University) or NTU (Nanyang Technological University). Notice the lack of any mention of NUS (National University of Singapore)?

In my humble opinion if NUS is delivering degrees in accounting that do not qualify the graduate as an accountant, then the university is sub-standard. I would imagine that this lackadaisical approach extends to other faculties as well, for me tarnishing the uni as a whole, for why would such unacceptable output be accepted in one faculty if it is not university-wide policy? For a university to accept such a position for itself, to accept such a level of performance, for me indicates that it is not a serious place of learning. Not somewhere to send your kids if you want them to be able to be employable on graduation. Perhaps this uni specialises in the arts and humanities? I suspect that it is the uni that Singaporeans enter if they cannot get into one of the 'real' unis.

Going back to a post the weekend before CNY (Chinese New Year) where I stated that I had lunch at the beach with three women and seven girls, alter that to five women and four girls. I may have over-counted the girls, but the real surprise is that two of the 'girls' were adult. You know how everyone says that Chinese women always look ten years younger than they are? Well one girl that I could have sworn was 12 is, in fact (I am told), 22. And further, she is a graduate from Curtin Uni in Australia, hence her excellent English (not that she was studying English, rather that she lived in an English-speaking country and so had lots of practice). And further further, that she was there because one of the women was trying to set her up with me. One of the women that the other women were trying to set up with me.

Nobody tells me these things. Not until two or three weeks later. How am I meant to know? There was me thinking "God, she is so beautiful, I wonder how long before she becomes legal, 'cos I have no desire to go to gaol...".

It is getting noticeably warmer at night; I have left the aircon on all night for a couple of nights running now. I guess that 'winter' is over. There have been a couple of 'mild' thunderstorms through, but it is still clear and sunny most days. I had thought that the monsoons were returning, but they receded again.

In the meantime, my fickleness astounds me. And why am I just getting to know this part of my being? I can be so focussed on something, so dedicated to some past time, and then a few weeks later not be doing it at all. I need things to come in bite-sized chunks; I really want to carry on with my education, but I will need to have it delivered in one or two weeks long intensives. There is no way I can imagine myself seeing out three or four years of part time study. I would just get bored. And it no longer has any required immediate impact upon my career. Yes, I am sure that it will help my career, but I can get work easily enough without it. (Well, back in Oz, so far not here in SG...)

Which brings me to the next point, probably the last for today as I am getting bored with this, I have applied for more than twenty jobs this week, one or two 'sorry' emails back, nothing else. Come to Asia, earn twice as much, pay half as much tax. Well I do understand that if I do get work that I will be paying about one third the tax that I would pay in Australia, but the job adverts that mention salary ranges are all offering less than half what I am used to getting. Maybe I still need to figure out how I am meant to be targeting myself in this market?

Exhilaration and Soreness

2009-02-13T13:48:00.005+10:30

An odd mix; but temporally disparate.

I went for my walk along the beach yesterday morning, I chose to head 'down' the beach, that is south and westwards for me, towards the city and away from the airport. Down near the end, where the path heads inland to the bottom of Fort Road a loud aeroplane noise caught my attention, as it does when it sounds only a few hundred metres up. Mainly, I guess, because it was only a few hundred metres up.

An F16, grey and unladened, was zooming in, landing gear lowering, on its way to Changi Airforce Base (yes, there are two airports at Changi, the commercial one, and the defence force one a little north and inland). A few minutes later a second came in, the wingman I guess. Five minutes later another pair came in, separated by a minute or two. What a total buzz!!

BUT THEN...

Another few minutes and I hear another, different...

AN F5 COMING IN!!!!

My favourite plane; the Northrop (now Northrop Grumman) F5!

I keep heading inland, getting as close as I can to the flight path they had taken, finding some shade under a tree that would not restrict my view. Would there be another? Was the F5 being flown by an instructor that had been directing the pilots in the F16s, or was he flying as an 'aggressor' - in which case there should be a wingman along soon.

A little further apart than the F16s had flown, but yes, another F5 came in.
I was so close!
Open wing mounts and no other ordinance either, whistling as the landing gear was lowered, but not when it was down.
What a dream come true!

This is definitely one thing that I love about Singapore.
It is such a small island nation that the air force has to fly over us all the time. In Australia they have huge empty spaces larger than Belgium to train in, so you hardly ever see them.

Had lunch with Ivy. Spent a long time listening to her friend tell me about her recently departed cat. Got given an email address of a girl that works there. Ivy is the only person I have met in Singapore that can make a lemon, lime, and bitters - the drink that is so fundamental to Australian culture. I just can't find them anywhere else in SG, everyone else tries to sell me a bitter lemon, which is positively the vilest drink imaginable.

Went walking around Chinatown after that and saw the temple. It was so saddening; all of the Shenist mythology is being contaminated with Buddhism; even Guan Ti (Guan Gong) God of War (and Commerce) is represented via Buddhist tales. This is so like the way Christianity subsumed the Gods of Europe and reduced them to minor roles in the Xian pantheon. I am so saddened at how the Chinese faith is being transformed by this alien culture.

The traditional Chinese beliefs are natural and realistic; whereas Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are artificial and recent creations. I firmly believe them to be false and shallow. I was so saddened to see this.

Then I walked down to the waterside, then along the river to the new barrage that turns the city river into another reservoir, across the river and along another one a little way to Fort Road. This was going to be the tricky bit; getting this far was okay, and once I was at the start of the East Coast Park walkway I would be okay, but the line connecting the two was unknown to me and didn't make sense on the map. Not helped by the fact that the maps in the Mighty Minds map book don't overlap, so you can't be quite sure that you've connected them correctly.

But down Fort Road just a little way and hey! I could see the pedestrian bridge that connects sections 'A' and 'B' of the ECP (and by that I don't mean the roadway). Easier than I thought! And so I walked all the way from Chinatown back to me apartment halfway along the East Coast. After walking around Chinatown for so long it totalled five and a half hours and I was totally knackered by the time I got home.

A fulsome day; filled by a breadth of experiences.

Moonshine

2009-02-10T19:10:00.002+10:30

Singapore is rapidly losing its shine for me.

Oh, yeah, you can probably ignore the last post; it was probably just caused by a sugar down, after pigging out on ice cream for two days. Well, I bought two brands of chocolate sundae and had to compare them.

I want to pay my broadband bill. When I bought it I was promised that I could pay the whole year in advance. The shop I bought it at won't accept payment for my SingTel bill, no, you have to go to a 711 or a SingPost office. I go there. They will both only accept cash or NETS, neither will take credit card. I go online, surely you can pay your SingTel bill online as you can with every other telecom in the world, yes? No! No, there is no bill ID that you can enter and just pay, in fact even finding any sort of online payment method takes a while if you follow the links given to you on the bill itself as they only go to places that tell you about paying bills, not to anywhere that either tells you where to pay or lets you pay. No, in Singapore you have to register online first, and then they will post out a verification code. Get that? Post a code to you!

Sometimes this place is so 19th century!

But beyond that; why does SingTel make it so hard for me to do business with them?
Maybe it is just that it is not easy doing business with Chinese people? They think so totally differently. Most Whites that I have met here seem to shrug it off and accept that you cannot get a Chinese person to understand what you, as a European, think is a very basic concept. I wonder if I learn Chinese will I begin to understand it? As I began to understand so much about Russians (and Ukrainians) when I started learning Russian. (God! Russian is such a beautiful language!)

Was job hunting online this morning, I had spent three hours of searching and had something like 27 IE pages open. Then I tried searching on the Robert Walters SG site -- it crashed every instance of IE open. Hours of work lost.

Sure, you can say that I should have copied the links to a Word.doc. Or, I can say, well now I know not to use Robert Walters. Seems the easiest solution to me.

And yeah, I don't know how to get an em dash to work in HTML. It is so easy to do in Word. Have you ever noticed how much of our written language we have (essentially) lost since the invention of the typewriter? At its most basic you probably think that there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, don't you? After all, most people are satisfied with that answer. The truth is that there are lots of letters and grammatical signs that were once common but have now fallen into disuse because they are not on the keyboard. I used to know the ATSI codes for most of them, 'cos you could hold down the ALT key and then type the four digit ATSI code in to get a real apostrophe or smart quotes (open and close, single and double) or i dash, en dash, or em dash. Word handles the smart quotes automatically now, and can even sort out i dash and en dash correctly most of the time (but not em dash), and even turns three periods (full stops in English) into an ellipse. But still, so many letters are lost to us.

Today has been a waste.
Time spent job hunting was wasted. Time spent trying to pay my SingTel bill was wasted. Time spent trying to get an ID card (as distinct from my employment pass) was wasted. I don't think that anything has been successfully accomplished today.

Except maybe for my early morning walk along the beach.
I did successfully walk along the beach.