Archives, eh
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# Links for 2005-11-30
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# Some self-involved meandering
My HECS is paid off. I am no longer faced with the possibility of men in gray suits turning up on my doorstep with tyre irons to break my legs and make me work for the guvmint. For furriners and the like, HECS is a federal government scheme wherein they pay for one’s university education and then you pay them back some token percentage of the total cost. It used to be totally free, but that was crazy, and in the mid-eighties sanity prevailed and the token repayment was instituted.
I’d probably still be in Bundaberg if not for HECS, bumming around town and cursing my shitty life, because fundamentally, I am a lazy lazy man. I have difficulty imagining that I would have worked hard in order to afford my education. You never know though, there’s a lot to be said for the path of least resistance, which is what made me work hard to earn my university entrance grade in the first place. That sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps, but not meeting parental expectation is often more effort than the work to get the grade.
So here I am, with a degree in IT that I only took after realising that an Arts degree in history is pointless if you don’t want to be a teacher or a post-graduate student. Oh sure, I did some comp-sci courses at the same time, but it’s not like I took them at all seriously. Until I was faced with the fact that IT was the thing that bored me the least
I am sure I am a disappointment to my parents. By traditional measures I am not the success that my maternal cousins and some of my paternal cousins are. Doctors and engineers and post-grad students who go back for more, oh my! Mum is also not getting a biological grandchild until she nags my sister. They might surprise me one day and reveal that they too think traditional measures are bizarrely weird. Hope so, because I don’t plan to assimilate any time soon.
Navel gazing aside though, I have paid off my HECS. I got used to having no money when I was at university – materalism was burned out of me long ago – so I never felt overly constrained by not having any spending money. With HECS paid and $company forced to pay something approximating market rate, the last month has been odd. Suddenly I have all this money that isn’t spoken for the day after payday. We can actually afford to send tWM to the school she has been going to all year :- ) I can replace the car, the fridge and the lino in the house. And you know what? Nothing has actually changed! I will be paying for tWMs education and a new car and new lino and then a new fridge, so all my money will still be spoken for the day after payday. A wise man once said, You’ll always be poor, you’ll just have shinier stuff to distract you from it.
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# It has come to this
So, now that Australia basically sucks at sport – our rugby team is even being compared unfavourably to dairy cultures – I guess it is to be expected that we would preserve forever a small patch of grass that a kick was taken from in a dodgy ceremony deciding the result of the most boring sport ever.
It has come to this, that we rejoice in the fact that we barely qualified for a competition in a sport that as a nation we couldn’t give a tin shit about.
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# Damn Windies couldn't score twenty more runs?
Australia clean swept the series against the West Indies, winning the last game by seven wickets. But Matthew Hayden, chasing centuries in five consecutive Tests, falls short today, ran out of runs to get before the game was won. He got 87. Of course. If he didn’t make it, he was always going to score 87 or 99.
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# Links for 2005-11-29
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# Links for 2005-11-28
- The Cthulhu Circus ✴
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# This is turning into some sort weekly update thing
The sun sets while a thunderstorm rolls in turning the sky gold. That’s in Bundaberg, the town I grew up in, sometimes also known as Hell. A friend who has been living in the US for the last seven years has come home, with his yankee wife, and the pictures are hers. They are buying acreage just outside Bundaberg in Childers and becoming self-sufficent. Straw house and the like – I am pretty sure there are no wolves in Childers, of any size or morality system.
You know what’s funny? Mr Howard told us last week that Michelle Leslie had better not sell her story because it would offend the Indonesians and jeopardise the chances of Australians facing drug charges in Indonesia in the future. I dunno. If I was part of a justice system, what I might find offensive is the implication that I am corrupt and make judgements based on petty annoyances with some girl – who months ago whined and bitched about being punished for having illegal drugs – rather than the facts at hand. Maybe it’s just me.
Oh, and I don’t even want to discuss the rugby. Either edition.
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# Links for 2005-11-22
- Dean Gray presents American Edit
I hope it really is them, because that would make it even cooler ✴
- Dean Gray presents American Edit
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# South of the border.
They flew me down to Melbourne again, last week. I tried my hardest to get out of it; I even forgot to turn my alarm on so instead of waking at 5.30 and having plenty of time I woke at 6.10 and was out the door at 6.13. I was forced to catch a taxi, and then realised as we hit the M5 that I would have been better off taking the train. Sure, I would have had to wait, and the train station is right down the wrong end of the terminal, but at least there’s no merging traffic on a train line.
Ostensibly I was in Melbourne for client meetings on Thursday and Friday – staying overnight that is – but I decided to turn it into a junket. I felt it was time I had a junket. I’m getting old, you see, so it can’t be quiet evenings with the wife every night anymore. Pre was there, and Spirit-Wolf and Sephy and Tany and Tany’s young man, Anthony. If Tany reads this, she should note that "Lovecraft nurse" is now my job title on the company intranet.
Tany very kindly allowed me to stay at her apartment that night. I thanked her for this. I wanted to make sure this was known before I start, and I meant it. I was truly grateful, and not just because I would otherwise have had to stay in the hotel with the suit sent to herd me. But wow, trams ae noisy. And traffic. Espicially when it is just outside the second floor window. How do people stand living in the city?
The best part of the trip was while catching the plane back. I had expended so much effort to seem normal and unthreatening. I had a small bag for my laptop charger so that I could quickly empty my bag of computer and other items that make X-Ray operators suspicious. I made sure they knew I had a safety razor, as if they even give a shit. I made sure the pipebomb-looking aerosol can was not in my bag. I made an extra special point of making sure my earphones were not sticking out of the inside of my shirt, as they normally do. I still got picked randomly for a test with the magic wand. They told me they were testing for gun powder residue and other explosives. It actually hurt to refrain from asking "Do pop rocks count?"
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# Links for 2005-11-21
