Infinite State Automaton

Choices, choices.

2010-05-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

I'm at a crossroads in life.

It's been a long time since I've had to make such a difficult choice. It's also been a long time since I updated this blog. So, I will go through some recent history.

The most pertinent event is my contract at DASI running out at the end of February this year. Since then, I've been unemployed for getting close to three months now. I did do some minor work for a friend's badgemaking business, but nothing to live on.

I've been trying to decide if I should look for work in Sydney, or keep living in Adelaide. I do not have a partner or any financial obligations, and my only immediate relative living in Adelaide is my brother (there's more family in Sydney, actually).

The only thing really tying me to Adelaide at the moment is my friendship group, and lately, they have shown what valuable friends they are to me. I feel terrible not having any kind of real job. Not being able to do things because I don't have enough money is very painful and shameful. But for my career, the best place to be is Sydney...my choice is, essentially, do I move to get better job prospects or stay in Adelaide to be with my friends?

I haven't had proper friends like this for a very long time. What I want is to somehow have a good job and also keep my friendship group together. These things, they should not be mutually exclusive, right? But as time has gone on, the friendship group has started to splinter slightly. First, one moved to Canberra. Then, one of the couple's split up and the girl left our group. Then one of the guys is moving to Sweden for six months. Out of the original core group, there's just one couple, and myself. Sometimes I really do feel like a third wheel.

It's been a long time since I broke out of those endless circles I was spinning in. This is the first time that I need to choose. It's good. I really moved a long in my life.

It's my 30th birthday in a few weeks. I wanted to do something to honor my friends, to thank them for the loyalty and kindness that they have shown for me. I don't know if I will be in Adelaide to do that anymore.

I am not sad or bothered, just troubled. I don't know what my motivation to stay or go is. If I am honest with myself, I am looking for some kind of sign I guess. I want some reassurance from somewhere or something that I am making/have made the right decision. But really, I learned long ago that there isn't 'one true path' for everybody. Every decision is an opportunity to learn new things or better oneself in some way.

My friends have new jobs and new things to do. I have seen a great deal of them during our mutual 'holidays'. But this time is coming to an end. I have become addicted to spending time with people. It's not a bad thing, really. For somebody like me who spent so much time on computers, to want and crave other people around is a really great turn around. The fact that this blog hasn't been updated so frequently is another indication that my life changed dramatically these last two years.

I should move to Sydney, if I can find work there. What is stopping me is fear of the pain of losing my friends in Adelaide. Really, I will not be losing my friends. I will still keep in touch with them. But I got comfortable here. I enjoyed spending time with them, playing dodgeball, playing volleyball, watching movies. It seemed these timeless days could never end. One day, they must. Perhaps me leaving will be the event that precipitates it, or, perhaps James leaving to Sweden, or Cat's new job...what will happen after?

I can't wait for fate to hand me the last card left after everybody has already made their choice. Going to Sydney is the hard decision. In truth, if I could move to the USA, I would have done that instead, because that is where I want to go. Sydney is a stop in between goals. My reluctance is because it's not perfect, and I'm looking for an excuse, and that excuse is "It's not exactly right". I'm scared of finding happiness somewhere that doesn't line up with where I want to be, and being trapped there.

So, rationally, I already know what to do. I have learned a lot about living lately. It's the same situation as always. I love the convenience of the city, and the lifestyle of the countryside. How can I have two opposed things at the same time?

Tales of the unexpected.

2009-12-21T18:15:00.001-08:00

It is unexpected because I had lost my old blog password, and now it is found again. It's even more unexpected because I had not lost my password - I had lost my E-MAIL ADDRESS and had been trying to log in from the wrong one for...almost a year.

This fills me with unbridled joy. Unfortunately I am work, so this update will be short -

I am 30 in six months D: (So ancient)

Hello to Kimmyjo, Jenny, Bellwether, Tenebrea and Sami :) Also a howdy to Anna if she happens to come this way.

It is Christmas so I won't write much now, but look forward to the near future.

Warcraftfu:
10 man ICC is done. I got a handsomecat new shield.
I currently live on Nagrand in Relic. Ah, let me get the webcrawlers to do their stuff. Ahem:

Alliance Nagrand Australia Guild Warcraft Recruiting Tank DPS Heals

We're trying to step up to 25 man content. If you came here late 2009/early 2010, please pop on over to http://relicofnagrand.guildomatic.com/ and say howdy.

That's all for now, because I am at work and probably shouldn't be blogging...

Cold sand is cold.

2008-08-26T04:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight I played beach volleyball. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. Our team was annihilated, as to be expected, although we stayed around and practiced afterwards so the next game will probably be less horrific. The sand was cold. So cold. It was like walking on ice and it was the only negative part of the experience. By the fourth game, my feet were numb and it wasn't so bad.

I have been neglecting this blog lately and I am sorry for it. There is a lot that I should write about and do, and I will try to make time to do it soon.

Today is my brother's birthday, so I will be calling him next.

I have been very sporty lately. Tennis, more tennis, dodgeball, walking with the work group on Wednesday's, and now volleyball. What the hell? My original plan was going to the gym twice a week.

Getting in to a group sport has been very easy. Playing in a social group - even though it surely isn't as good for me as the gym would be - is much preferable. For one thing, when there are friends, I actually do it.

My preferred option is to spend the night in and play Warcraft but that hasn't happened for a while now >.>;;

I have attended three lectures for masters, now. They are not particularly interesting however the course matter is. One of the first things we were asked to do was look up a disaster due to a system failure, eg the Challenger shuttle. This got me in to the Wikipedia trap and before I knew it a whole day was wasted just idly clicking. Somehow I always wind up on a page about tornadoes.

I am dead in the mafia game already. I was given a role where the best option appeared to be a heroic sacrifice to put together my group, however it seems my move was in vain. I won't know for another couple of days but I think my faction is going to be exploded quite soon. Oh well, you can't win them all.

New intarwebs are go~

2008-07-28T02:28:00.001-07:00

It was pointed out to me previously that I mispelled 'victorious' in the title of the preceding post, but I couldn't see where the edit button was to fix it. Oh dear >.>

I've got my new internet set up with minimum fuss and faster than expected. Now to make up for lost time~

(>'o')> Go, my little Kirby modem~ Suck down all the Internet! MWahahaahaaha~

Maybe I overdid it...

2008-07-24T03:22:00.000-07:00

Sunday: Dodgeball. Monday: Tennis. Wednesday: Denist, then more tennis.

The new racket (or raquet?) is coming along well, really starting to feel quite good. Last night we managed to scrape another victory. It was bitterly cold.

I'm having a problem with my Internet.

I was originally with Optus for my phone, mobile and Internet. I did not pay the phone bill for a long time, so they suspended my phone service. This is fine. This also meant my Internet was unavailable. Annoying, but fair. However when I tried to access my e-mail from work, I couldn't get in. Curious. I called Optus and learned that they had (allegedly) destroyed my Internet account.

My Internet, however, was paid for up until the end of July. It's true that because I didn't pay the phone bill I couldn't use my DSL, but the related services (eg e-mail) should not have been interrupted, let alone destroyed. I asked Optus to undo this, and when they refused, ask them to explain why. They could not give me a satisfactory reason and so I switched my phone to Telstra. They then insisted it was impossible to have an Internet connection through any other phone provider than themselves. To me this sounded like "We really don't want your business" so I have changed ISP's too. I'll be changing my mobile later also.

Surprisingly I got to keep my old home phone number, but my e-mail address is probably gone for good.

I won't have reliable Internet access for anywhere between 10-20 days. Probably I'll use this time to clean my room or learn a new language or something.

Recently I've discovered the joys of Skype. I've been chatting with a lovely young Chinese girl and spending more time talking to normal people than I have been playing games.

Right now I am at work late. I should be working, but I am procrastinating. I'm demonstrating the latest version of SRET to the client tomorrow and I was asked to draw a diagram to show which features are implemented.

Man I sure am hungry :/

House Montague, Victorius

2008-07-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

Finally we finished off the last of House Capulet, and those nasty Citizens and Watchmen too. You can see it all over at my Bacon and Ice Cream Cheesecake blog, although outside the context of the game it probably won't make much sense.

Since I was in charge of the house, the mafia in game 6 were under the impression I was somehow responsible for our victory and subsequently made sure I was the first to die in the next game. Oh well~ You can't win 'em all.

Paradox, and math = Science!
- I've never heard it explained that way, and you've captured in your second paragraph the essence of what I feel, but lacked the intellect to say. If you don't mind, I'll be using the spirit of what you've said there for my next inevitable confrontation with those dastardly nay-sayers.

Goals:

Food - has been so-so, but improved of late. Tins of soup, bleh :/ I can't stand it much more. I think I'm gonna have to make lunches in the morning or something.

Health - Pretty damn good. Dodgeball is a lot of fun and it keeps me fit and agile. Next dentist appointment is about two weeks away, and then we have the 'So, your wisdom teeth' conversation I've been dreading. After last week tennis finished up for two weeks, so we aren't playing THIS week or NE...oh. Did I forget a week? I'd better check. Anyway, Catherine's team needed a fill in this week so I got to play Monday instead of fencing. 6-0 loss, tiebreaker loss, 6-2 loss = Annihilated!

I am really happy with the improvement in my tennis game. I make a lot less stupid errors and it really feels like I have some control over the ball. I still do make stupid errors, just not so many. Catherine hasn't had to punch me for a few weeks now, so. That's good, right?

I also filled in for two other teams at dodgeball. The first team I played for was largely outclassed so we were kind of curb stomped into the ground. The last game I played with the rest of the team was astonishingly a success, kind of an upset actually. We walked out 45-18. The last time we played this team was the grand final last year, when we were crushed. So this was an unexpected, but pleasant, turn around.

Money - I finish paying off my car this week. It's amazing how a car that was labelled as $11,000 in the car yard somehow wound up costing me nearly $18,000. That compound interest is a killer. Well, I learned this lesson the hard and painful way.

Special - I have to do a photoshoot of me putting together a tin foil hat for the next mafia blog, www.baseunderacat.blogspot.com - I'll put the results up here, but I don't think I'll be sharing that blog publically. Right now it is predominately a giant wall of rant, so...

Right.

The cheesecake is made of ice cream. It has bacon on top of it, similar to this one.

So I want to say, "I ate the delicious (bacon and ice cream) cheesecake".

Defenders of Dessert - this is the secret super hero action group that Kimmy and I have formed. Our super powers are the ability to put common foods together to create unique and powerful new desserts, capable of protecting the earth while bringing joy and hope to everyone. And, now that I think about it, probably a diabetic fit.

In hindsight, the main appeal of bacon is when it is served hot, so a bacon and ice cream cheesecake is not for the faint hearted. Oh no. That crispy, juicy and steaming hot bacon, served on a smooth bed of rum and raisin ice cream, wrapped in hand pressed pie crumbs, is a battle! Each perfect morsel is a blend of fire, ice, earth - and just a hint of something mystic.

If you've tried fried ice cream and loved it, then you'll know - bacon and ice cream cheesecake is your final destination.

Until next time~

--Sky

What light through yonder window breaks

2008-07-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy with most of my spare time playing the Mafia game over at MegaTokyo.com. I have a sister blog up at http://www.llamalavalarvae.blogspot.com/ that is currently hidden to all but the authors; I'll link to it here with my role in the game and make it publically available when the game ends, somewere around Wednesday next week.

I've really missed being in an online community, I've met a lot of fun people that I'm hoping to introduce to my original group. Having a large group to play around in has given me some perspective in the previous very small community.

I haven't been playing much Warcraft lately but I will be getting back in to it when the Mafia game is done. I'm really unsatisfied with the guild I am currently playing in. When I started playing in it at the start of April there was two Karazhan runs going, we were making attempts against Gruul, and there was even a Serpentshrine Cavern run. So I'm at a loss to explain why, only three months later, they can barely scrape together enough to run a single Karazhan run, and some weekends can't even do that.

I've got a number of places that I can go to but I would prefer to go somewhere that I have friends. Ideally I want to be playing in Serpentshrine Cavern as I have been buying the SSC/Black Temple smithing recipes and at great personal cost overgeared myself from Karazhan and ZA.

End of Warcraft babble.

The other thing that has been taking up a lot of my time is that I have several different social groups and all of them want to do things on the weekend. I enjoy going out and spending time with other people however these things do overlap occasionally. If I am lucky, sometimes it's the social groups that overlap - last night I had my Golden Key friends, some of my Sarah's Group friends, and some of my dodgeball friends all in the same place.

I even met a couple of new people and helped connect them with some others. It was a fairly quiet night, although I unexpected ran in to Caroline, my ex-girlfriend from about two years back. We broke up on very good terms because in between two jobs and University, I wasn't able to dedicate enough time to a relationship. We realised this and just moved on with minimal fuss. So when we ran in to each other by surprise yesterday, we just talked and reintroduced ourselves with no problem, which was a relief for both of us, I am sure.

I am down to the last $600 of my car. This thing has been the biggest financial millstone around my neck since I started Donut King, and is 50% of the reason I was trapped there for so long. Paying it off at the end of this month will be immensely satisfying.

The last big expense I am looking at is the dentist. I went for my second-to-last set of fillings last week and they casually mentioned 'Oh yeah, we are going to have to take your wisdom teeth out'. Shit :/ I remember when Rachel had hers done she was pretty much useless for a whole week.

Work is going reasonably well, but I have been somewhat lazy. They took the SRET system to the INCOSE conference in Amsterdam and showed it to the Viatech guys to see if they wanted to buy the IP. I haven't been told what the result was, however my boss was happy with the demo and subsequently my contract will PROBABLY be extended in August, yay! They are also looking at paying for me to do Masters because I can't do some of the things they want me to do, namely, write documentation.

Oh I can write documentation, but it's not done to a certain standard, and I don't know the buzzwords and acronyms that real engineers use. It's really quite annoying, I have scientists on one side saying "Computer scientists are not real scientists" and engineers on the other saying "Software engineers are not real engineers". We're lambasted by everybody as not being 'real' because I don't get my hands dirty screwing around with a soldering iron or a tit pipette. I'm even told that when I've finished at DASI and get myself a real job, I'll be set for life. Huh? I thought what I was doing at the moment was a 'real' job?

What is real anyway? Do I have to always be pursuing goals other people set for me? My preferred goal is to sleep another half hour~

Lern2English

2008-06-02T00:51:00.000-07:00

“English essentials: The wouldn’t-be-without-it guide to writing well,” Mem Fox & Lyn Wilkinson.
“Middle School English,” Maureen Stewart.

By necessity I’ve sat down with these two books and started re-learning English grammar.

Today I have learned about verbs, adverbs, common nouns, abstract nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, articles and where apostrophes are supposed to go. There is at least one reader of my blog who will be maddeningly satisfied to know I will finally spell Australians correctly from now on. Still not sold on photos, though; however I’m only half way through the first book.

Chris enthusiastically consumed the delicious bacon and ice cream cheese cake!

Chris – proper noun!
Enthusiastically – Adverb!
Consumed – verb!
The – The definite article!
Delicious – adjective!
Bacon – noun!
And – conjunction!
Ice cream – noun!
Cheese cake – noun!

Is there anything wrong with this sentence and what I have broken it up to? Please tell me. No, really, please tell me. A six million dollar contract is riding on my ability to know proper English grammar.

I met Mem Fox at the Millicent Public Library when I was a young child, where she read the delightful Possum Magic, arguably the definitive childrens book.

(Edit edit: Actually, I didn't have an apostrophe for childrens. Then I read another chapter, and it said zomg put an apostrophe there. So I did! Then I read another chapter and it said "Lol nub, in this circumstance, no apostrophe!" So, right now there is no apostrophe, but maybe in a chapter that will change again T_T)

Why is Possum Magic such an excellent book? Well, it's all about a baby possum travelling all over Australia eating delicious foods to turn herself back from being invisible. Yes, long before Harry Potter was cool, Hush the baby possum was munching down on Vegemite sandwiches, lamingtons, pavlova and even more.

For me to then come across another book written by Mem Fox all these years later, then, was a pleasant surprise.

Badger badger = new Badger()

2008-05-26T23:55:00.000-07:00

Part of the requirements specification toolkit that I am building has a nifty little tool called 'BADGER'. The original version of it exists in another program called Tiger Pro, which you can find over here.

BADGER is an acronym that stands for 'Built-in Agent using Deterministic Grammar for the Engineering of Requirements'. TIGER itself stands for 'Tool to Ingest and Elucidate Requirements'. The theme at my company is to try to name projects after animals; so we are hoping to swap out SRET (Slim Requirements Engineering Toolkit) to something more appropriate.

One exec suggested 'LION' which fits in well with the Kenya theme of my office, but we're struggling to come up with an appropriate justification for the letters. I'm still hoping for CITA (pronounced "Cheetah") which stands of Chris Is Totally Awesome, but again, no luck in actually putting a proper meaning behind it.

Today the Badger tool is about done. You can put words in it and by some arcane magic, the words are assembled in to a requirement and plugged in to the specification. The second part of Badger is for the program to take all the words and using the rules for English grammar, automatically assemble the words in to the correct grammatical sense.

Since this requires my program to do lexical, syntactical and finally semantic analysis of the English language, and I didn't learn about nouns/adjectives/verbs etc at school, this is proving difficult.

These last few weeks have been surprisingly busy. My evenings have been action packed with various sporting things, and I am starting to really miss having evenings at home to unwind. On the other hand, the sense of achievement and actually getting things done despite (or perhaps because of) being so busy is quite refreshing.

I've recently gotten in to the MegaTokyo Mafia game, and some of the players have been scoping out my blog so I can't really talk about the current game here (since if I talk about too much it can be used as evidence to get me killed in the game). I normally avoid the MegaTokyo forums like the plague, but this is a fun little game that I can check every hour or so and see if my character is about to be killed off.

Busy, busy little bee

2008-05-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Monday - panic for Tuesday night
Tuesday - give lecture on requirements specification and SRET to the QAA. Only three people showed up, and one of them was another presenter.
Wednesday - tennis. 6-3, 6-2, 6-1 -> defeat!
Thursday - Golden Key New Members welcome. Used my awesome powers of charisma to form a big knot of people to talk to. Met these people:
David - ex flight lieutenant, currently retired, working in aeronautical engineering.
Terry - not actually a Golden Key member, not sure of his relationship to the current chapter president, Stacey, not sure what he is doing, but he sure is handy to have around.
Erin - studying marketting, working at HJ's. Did not get a good chance to talk to her due to the really annoying chair designs and ever expanding circle of people.
Sonya - Very interesting young lady; working two jobs and has a part time gig on the local radio. Studying something to do with publicity and the media. Has a pet golden labrador puppy.
Amanda - very active, sporting girl, plays tennis, volleyball, netball, AFL football, rugby, cricket, and anything she can do. Studying physiotherapy. Surprisingly talkative, I mistook her for the quiet shy type that wanted to hide in the corner of the room, once she got in the group she took over it.
Steph - studying to be a primary school teacher. Didn't find out much else.
Mysterious Girl X - was friends with Steff and Amanda but I never found out her name, what she did, or their history.
Julia and Shelly - I got their names but that was it. By the time they joined, the circle was so big, I couldn't even talk to them.
Pere - South African guy studying nursing, looking for accomodation. Anybody live near the Royal Adelaide Hospital and looking for a tenant?
Aysia - Another South African guy, but I didn't catch his study.

So the goal here was not to assemble all the cute girls into one circle around me, but to get the people talking with each other so they were enjoying themselves. So periodically I would walk around and spot people who seemed uninvolved or being wallflowers or looking for something to do, grab them, introduce them to some other person in the same situation. So I met a few other people this way too, but unfortunately I could not remember everybodies name.

Only two current executive people could make it, which was an odd thing, there was a lot more at the induction ceremony. Where did they go? So I did feel some sympathy for Stacey when so many came to the meeting - she had only had 11 RSVP, but then around fifty showed up so they had to move to another room. The main purpose of the informal meeting was to get people talking with each other and to ask questions about the Society to the executive, unfortunately with only two there they were quickly overwhelmed. I did have some previous experience as president so that is why I got the people into a big group; they then naturally split out and started talking amongst themselves and stayed rather than drifting off quietly in ones or twos. The second purpose was for Stacy to talk about what she needed in the new executive, and to tkae registrations of interest - it looked like almost everybody signed up, which is really positive. The AGM is on the 25th.

Stacy asked me what I wanted to do. I explained that this was her show now, I was keen to help out but - the main value for her as president was to lead and make decisions on her own. Similarly, I would not stand in the way of any new member who wanted a role on the exec; I had been on the exec before, it would be more valuable to a new person for that individual and also our chapter. So I said, find out who is interested in what, and if there are any gaps that need to be filled, I will go there.

Friday night - maybe playing warcraft at work with da ladz.

Saturday - hopefully nothing all day.
I need to buy: New set of shelves from Ikea, plus one more tray that I somehow missed.
Ironing board!!!!! I went to iron my shirt for the talk on Tuesday. Up until now I always made a habit of buying shirts that didn't really need to be ironed. But I wore a really nice shirt for the talk (because I thought I would be in front of around three hundred industry specialists, not three guys who rocked up in a tshirt and track pants...I should have known. This is computer science. These people...never see the sun...) and holy cow, it needed to be ironed. So I tried to iron it on the table. I don't know. I think it came out MORE wrinkled. And it smelt kind of funny. At least it felt nice to put on.
Oh one more thing - I need to buy a new front right tyre. I went to go to work the other day and I couldn't help but notice one of my tyres had exploded overnight. It is inexplicably worn down and crappy looking, while the others all look clean and happy. So I don't know, perhaps it was on low pressure and I had been driving it around and killed it dead, then during the night the changing temperature caused it to...hell, I don't know. Chemistry is scary. Anyway, the result is I need to buy a new tyre. Fortunately I had a spare so it's not a real tragedgy, just a small annoyance.

Sunday - dodgeball, then practicing dodgeball. Cat said to me that my throwing is all over the place - we know I can't throw or catch very well, so I said that I was interested in practicing. Well she took me up on it and now we will be practicing with James after the game. James had a hair cut - he used to have a tremendous affro, but without the hair he has transformed from a laid back hippie guy into some kind of assault marine of death. It's like, the hair was just holding him back, kind of the opposite of Sampson. He's faster, meaner, more angry, and he throws real damn hard, accurate, and he's jumping all over the place like a frog on a hot plate. He went from the laziest guy on the whole damn team to some kind of sport playing octopus. Now he's making me look bad, so I'd better learn how to at least throw straight.

Monday - I'm going fencing.

My mother always wanted a girl

2008-05-12T01:57:00.000-07:00

I said the following three things all on Mothers day:

1 - "I need a linen cupboard"
2 - "I had a great time shopping with you, mum"
3 - "I need to get some pom-poms for my cheerleading outfit"

I am still a boy, right?

Context.

Ok, so. Towels and sheets and those kind of things take up a lot of room in the cupboard. I don't have room for any more clothes. I need to get another Ikea frame (I'll grab it this weekend - I am on a budget, remember? ^_^) and then I should be able to finally hide everything out of sight. I would also like to get a block of pine to put across the top of one of the frames, kind of like a roof, so that I can stash all my warhammer junk there, and a block of wood on the other frame to put my shoes on. Then all I need to do is continue to throw rubbish out faster than it enters my room and my base should at least appear clean.

Sheets and stuff - up until now I only had one sheet and one quilt cover. THis meant that changing my sheet was a big deal, as I had to put it up in the morning, hope it didn't rain, then change it in the evening. Cleaning my cupboard out and suddenly I've discovered, actually I have three sheets and two quilt covers and oodles of pillow slips. I've also reclaimed a lot of old favourite clothes that I forgot about, like my Golden Key t-shirt, my Games Workshop bomber jacket, and those comfy black track pants that everybody hates because they have holes in the groin area. Indoor pants only, I'm afraid.

Oh, I went to Golden Key induction ceremony the other day. Well...I am not sure what Debbie was complaining about. They had a very slick operation going on. I was very nervous because as I walked in, the very first people I encountered were the two people who I was most afraid to meet, the president who replaced me and her partner. I didn't know what to do. My heart was beating so fast I just casually said "Howdy" and walked past in to meet the new president and see what I could do to help.

I don't know what I was expecting. I had been told that these people had been saying nasty things about me behind my back. I didn't expect to be pointed out during the induction ceremony and personally thanked by Lucy for being president previously. I didn't expect them to be so welcome and friendly, and thankful for me being there to help - even though they really didn't need my help. It made me feel silly and just a little bit ashamed that I hadn't gone back earlier.

When we talked about it, I said that, I wasn't sure if I would be welcomed back. Those two had kept my grandmothers tapestry instead of auctioning it off. They'd always hoped I'd rejoin them.

So, I think that's what I'll do.

Mothers day - the day started with waffles covered in maple syrup and cream. It's hard to top that kind of day off. Actually, the whole day was really fun. I went shopping with Shane and my mum to buy a photo frame, and on the way we managed to fit in a sword fight, punching statues of women in the stomach, wearing power ranger masks, warning young children to "Don't be like us" before irresponsible behaviour in the shop, looking with our fingers, blaming each other, discoveries for science, helping our mother choose pantyhose, discussing the benefits of wearing flourescent pink underwear, and repeatedly beating my brother over the head with a roll of cellophane. THAT makes for an awesome day. To top it off we went to Fresh Choices and I ate my body weight in roast beef ^_^

Cheerleading - well, Sunday afternoon was dodgeball. There was a New Challenger! Actually, all this time I have been filling in for Lance, who had a back injury and couldn't play. Suddenly he was healthy and wanted to play. Awkward, since the team was full. So I made Cat's life easier and said I would hop out and cheerlead. Afterwards, she had a private conversation with me and explained that for a variety of reasons, they still want me to play, but I will be sharing time with Lance. So I am playing this week and next week, then alternating from then on.

During the game, I ran up and down the sidelines grooving my thing and occasionally calling out helpful tips ("Boom! Headshot!", "Cat - 50% German! 50% Japanese! 100% Awesome!") when some of the players commented that I danced like a girl. Uh...

So.

Actually, this is true.

This is because a few years back, when Rachel was on her 'Fix up Chris' routine so that I would be an acceptable boyfriend that she could be seen in public with, I enrolled in a hip hop dancing class. I didn't know anything about music, I didn't know anything about dancing, shh.

Anyway, I enrolled in two different classes; one was an on-stage performance thing (that had a set routine that we were learning) and the other was more freestyle; the on-stage one turned out to be a group of around a hundred people with one instructor. I dropped out of it because I wasn't learning anything, but the other one I stayed in for a few months until the instructor moved interstate.

I had said to her that I was concerned that the moves I was learning were kind of, well...I don't have breasts or sexy girly hips so some of the moves that I learned kind of didn't, ah, look right. She said it was fine, having some kind of rhythm was important, and besides, you never know when it can come in handy to know how to pole dance. So. Yes, I dance like a girl.

Get me some leotards and pom poms and I'll be the best damn cheerleader Epic's ever gonna have.

Things to do...

2008-05-06T04:59:00.000-07:00

1) Get one of the BIG shelves from Ikea.
2) Oh my God, so much washing. It has been stashed at the bottom of the cupboard for over a year. I had no idea I had so much linen. It's like one of those clown cars at the circus, where clowns just continue to pour out. I started pulling on an old town, and before I knew it, an unending steam of clothing vomited out all over me, my floor, my bed, and halfway up the bookshelf. 'Shelters of Stone' is the only thing visible.
3) Finish typing transcripts for Xuan-Linh. I have two more to go, and it requires about four hours to knock off one.
4) Work: Finish the program flow diagram for SRET/CITA.
5) Work: Hack up a parser for Encase by Friday.
6) Golden Key: I'm helping set up and pack up on Wednesday night. A good chance to meet the new executive and see what state it's in.
7) I'm giving a talk on writing requirements specification documents to the Adelaide University IT professors and a number of executive big wigs next Wednesday, rather ironic on account of not having drafted an accepted requirements specification document before.

I am starting to get the feeling I had back in 2005, when I first managed to shake out of the funk and make some progress. Things are happening. They are getting done. It's kind of exciting.

A world fit for heroes

2008-05-02T03:17:00.000-07:00

"Dunn - variants Dunne, O'Dunn, Dun. Meaning 'brown complexioned one'. This sept originated in county Leix and formed one of the principle families of Leinster, their chiefs being Lords of Iregan. The sept gets special mention in the 16th Century as being hostile and dangerous to the English cause. It is in that part of the country, that the Dunnes are now to be found in their greatest numbers. Nearly all who spelt their name Dunn are from Ulster. In the gallery of famous Irishmen is found Gillananoaomh O'Duinn (1102-1160), who was a great historian and poet and James O'Dunne, an active Jacobite (1700-1758), who was Bishop of Osorry."

--www.namehistories.com

Add Austin Dunn, my grandfather, to that list.

I know too little about this man. I remember walks in the small garden of their backyard, learning of the plants, the caterpillars, the birds and flowers. I remember barbecues and dinners and lunches. I remember going to the small Catholic church at St Kierans that, even now, still feels like home to me. I remember the many lessons and things that he taught me, and also the smiles, the glasses of sand, and the many mornings together.

I remember eating grapefruit and muesli without sugar. I remember the quiet room full of books, the many readers digests, the soft, gentle reverence in that house.

I remember walks on the beach, I remember walks in the park, I remember discovering and sharing the secret of the ant lions with him. I remember the beautiful view down Seebreeze street, I remember the annoying no-right-turn corner.

I remember using the lawn clippers to cut the wrong trees and getting in to trouble, and I remember how few times I visited.

The steep hill. Manly Vale. The wide, beautiful beach, with stranded blue bottles, shells, and stories. A thousand times a thousand footsteps, with him, my brothers, my family and cousins. I remember the mall, ice cream, easter, mornings.

My grandfather flew a Lancaster in the battle of Britain. He performed many rescue missions too. But he never spoke of this time to me, only to tell me what the strange machine that was pictured on his wall. Now it is too late to ask him, because last night he passed away.

The first person in my family to die that I remember was Auntie Moira. I was too young to appreciate the significance. I was sad, of course, I cried. Fifteen years have passed. I have been very, very fortunate to have my family members live for so long.

I should be sad. I should be crying. But, no tears will come. Partly, it's annoying to be a Christian because I believe - as he believed - that he's in a better place, and happier, and waiting for his wife to join him. (As an aside, saying to a grieving grandmother "I am sure you will see him again soon" may possibly not be comforting)

I didn't make the most of my opportunities to speak with him, so I am selfishly sad that he is gone before I could ask him more.

My grandparents story is an amazing romance. They met at a dance when their eyes happened to meet, and had been together ever since. I went home to Sydney only two years ago to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

I am sorry I didn't finish my degree fast enough for you to be glad to hear about it, Granddad Dunn. But I am very glad to share the ant-lions with you. I know you were very happy to see and play with such tiny creatures with me.

ah well, now I am crying.

Rest easy old friend. You had a life full of accomplishments and success. You finished well. I admire you.

We interrupt your regular program...

2008-04-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

I talked about the situation in the comments from the preceding post in private.

The situation is resolved.

Thank you for the people who did write comments to support.

I am not saying everything is 100% sweet, it will take time for people who have damaged trust to recover and so on, however, the situation is stable.

I never put a limit on people who posted here and I don't delete posts, even things I was later embarassed to write. Please continue to write if you have something to say, add, or enquire about, however - I don't want anything that rocks the boat right now, please. I will break my rule about non-deletions if I see confrontational words - even from me.

It's late so I am going to bed. I don't know if I will add to this, but for tonight, I am happy.

Take care and be well,

Sky

EDIT: Ah, is my pride really so big I won't make some changes to what I wrote? I know it makes me seem a liar to delete posts and leave THIS post unchanged, but I think it's better this way. There's no reason to leave words that only hurt laying about where others can trip over them.

Shelf get!

2008-04-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

I bought my first piece of furniture, some Antonius shelving things. It's not very classy at all. In fact they look ugly and skeletal, but luckily they nestle perfectly in my wardrobe so the only time they can be seen is when I open the doors. I bought one five draw kit and I have space for another three (or five if I decide to stack them) and at $50 a pop for five drawers, I actually feel it's a really good deal. Next is to actually gut the contents of my cupboards out and put them in the drawers, and yes, I am using 'Write my blog' as a means of procrastinating to avoid doing it.

This week was a very up and down week. Food has been so-so. Well really it has been good but I won't be 'mission accomplished' until I can go a whole week without buying fast food once. An unexpected problem is that healthy food is not very filling. Every afternoon I am terribly hungry. I have to prepare a proper lunch and health snacks for the afternoon so that I can go the whole day without giving in to an urge for chocolate. I compromised and bought health bars and munched on them whenever I got hungry.

Annie and I went bowling with her e-club last night. We had a really good time! Actually I am terrible at bowling, and only scored 74 >.> The second game I think was even worse, my arm was so tired AND I had some alcohol in me. I dropped the ball three times. Once I fell in to the bowling aisle, the second time the ball went backwards, and the third time my finger got stuck in it, so the ball just dropped straight down and rolled forwards. I couldn't bear to watch so went to sit down, but then everyone was yelling to look - I had thrown it so slowly, it had come to rest in the gutter a few metres from where I had thrown it. So, ah, I sneaked down the wax surface in my funky clown shoes and threw it again ^_~

I was the only person on the team who didn't get a strike. Bowling is just not my game it seems. Ah, but it was a lot of fun ^_^

The book I read was 'The Prince', by Niccolò Machiavelli. I did not know it but I actually have quoted or paraphrased from this book many times before, the work is that common. I am surprised that I had not come across it before. My first encounter with this is from the Command and Conquer: Red Alert instruction manual - "There is no avoiding war. It can only be delayed to the advantage of others." A friend of mine gave me some advice from this book so of course I applied what I had learned recently from it to the whole situation. From this I had some better understanding of the motives of my friends and the reasons for their behaviour.

The question Anonymous asked below, what's the common factor - I am not entirely certain. If I knew, I would say. I am not sure there is one factor.

This word 'maturity' is thrown about a lot these days. I have many people, both online friends and in real life, saying 'person x behaves in an immature way' or 'this person just likes to cause drama/get attention' etc or whatever. You know, 'act your age' etc etc.

I think people have different ideas of maturity. My idea of maturity is a person who takes responsibility, acts with honor and integrity, helps other people, and defends those who cannot. Other people might say things like reliable, gets results, has 'class', has great knowledge, is unemotional, or many other words.

The thing is, none of these people are psychologists. At best we are some kind of person who has read a self-help book or manual, or maybe watched some good inspirational videos. But maturity is an intangible concept. It's not something you have, like a car, or even something like a relationship (which is intangible but still _definable_). Maturity...like many other things...is in the eye of the beholder.

People judge you not by who you are or who you think you are but by what you do, the results you get. Actions speak louder than words.

I will always admit to an error, and I will never hide from punishment. Discipline won't kill a person, but it can save them from death! The person who does not learn does not change state. They never break out of their circle until they can change.

I don't know what the common factor is (except, of course, for me). Often what has hamstrung me, though, is fear - fear of hurting others, fear of failure, fear of financial disaster, fear of heartbreak. Because I am too afraid to take action, the result is - take no action. But, you know, if actions speak louder than words, and people judge you by your actions, and I take no action...

EDIT: I have removed some text from this entry. Some of it really only pertained to the people involved in the situation, and since it is now resolved, leaving it here is kind of awkward. For this reason also, I removed one of my comments, and with the permission of one of the contributors, one of their comments also. So! Let's move on from here and try not to look back. The place we didn't go to yet is always more interesting than where we just left.

Escape Vector

2008-04-22T04:55:00.000-07:00

So, recovery.

I lost sight of my goal and so I was wandering randomly. Because of this, I did not follow the steps that I had laid out for myself to follow to reach the result. My motivation was gone. I didn't see any reason to try anymore.

I read a really interesting book and had a few very interesting conversations. Then anonymous said below,

"everything is a riddle

the answer to getting out of a circle is to start moving in straight lines..find a starting point and an ending point."

Actually I was going to write something like this, so it's really a great cooincidence that this person would say such a thing.

Well, what do I want? There are some different spheres to move in.

Friendships: I am not talking very much with the two people who I hope to be my close friends. I want to recover these friendships.

Relationships: I have a lot of work to do. I can't write about it here. My new motivation is from here. I said it before; now I am sure of it - I am not good boyfriend material. "If she is worth it, she will wait for you." I shouldn't keep her waiting for so long. We don't live forever, after all. This leads me to...

Finances and food: I have been unable to save any money. Up until now I had only been looking at the big things and not understanding that the little things added up. After tracking it for a while, I learned I was wasting between $150-$200 a week on food. Every morning at work I am buying food from the shops, then for lunch, then for dinner. Often I also buy dinner for my brother.

Breaking out of this habit will be very hard but I have to do it to escape.
The first thing I did was take a bowl and spoon to work. Then I bought some breakfast cereal and milk, and I will eat this very cheap food for breakfast from now. I don't have breakfast at home, I am not hungry when I first wake up so I don't want to eat. I also use the bowl to eat soup and noodles at work for lunch, instead of buying the expensive canteen lunch.

This is only half of the problem. The other half is to get in to the habit of planning meals and cooking them at night. I have a good friend who has promised to help me do this since I have been unsuccessful so far on my own to learn it.

Food and finances are the foundation that I need to build on. I am currently semi-tidy; I threw out my old bed and got a new one, there is no junk on the floor (still some on my desk though) and no glasses or food or yuk in here. When I was cleaning up I threw out a lot of old things that I did not look at for ten years, but had just been keeping "Just in case I wanted to look again."

So I looked at them one more time then got rid of them. Things from ten years ago...well, some was painful. I had written many promises and lofty goals and dreams that I did not meet. But carrying around all this junk in my life was just weighing me down and holding me back from going to a better place.

And well, some of it was just junk. Now that I have graduated, there is no reason to keep my old assignments around to copy from >.>;;

It seems I am in the same position I was at the start of the year. Wanting to improve my finances, my health, my fitness, my career. Actually, really I am. I made some small progress in all of these areas, but I am not satisfied.

So, the start point is 'here'. First is, fix up eating and spending. Next is fix up cleaning and shopping and being tidy in all areas.

The end point is, move to USA 2009 and take up the job I always wanted to do.

I am not going to do Masters at UniSA. In June they will re-evaluate my contract. I will ask to be put on as academic staff (rather than professional staff). The difference is, I will be expected to produce research papers for the company. I have two very good and experienced researchers who wish to support me in this. The proviso is, I have to finish the SRET kit prototype before my contract runs out. They want some proof that I will finish what I have begun before they will invest in me.

I think that's a very fair thing. When I look back, I can see many times where I have said "I will do xxx" and then did not actually achieve it. So I can respect that people might be dubious of my ability or intentions.

So my short term goals are:
Recover my friendships, if those people want to be my friend still
Sort out my home life: cooking, cleaning, shopping
Get down and dirty with my job and finish with style, not sliding in to the end like my final assignment

So, now you know my hopes. Later if these things work out, I can say more about my dream. But after having so many failures, I feel too embarassed to say about something in great detail.

Infinite State Automaton

2008-04-15T03:41:00.000-07:00

The hardest subject that I attempted and passed was Limits of Computation. It was the mathematics and theory behind a thinking machine.

Computers are finite state machines. A computer exists in a certain state, and continues to cycle between different states as changes to the system are made by/in response to the user.

This is a very simple state diagram.

This machine has only four states that it exists in, and a number of state change paths that it can follow or cycle over. A system must remain in a planned state - a controlled state - and it must not have unplanned exits. A state diagram always starts at So, and goes to Sx, where Sx is a single state denoted by two circles. In the diagram, it is S3.

If this system ever entered S2, it would go in to an infinite loop and never terminate correctly. This happens when your computer 'hangs'. If the computer tries to go to a state that doesn't exist, it doesn't know what to do. Programmers try to catch these errors and make your programs handle it in dignified manner. When they get it right, programs can continue to operate after an error - the error message pops up, "Hi, this thing broke! T_T I am sorry. Please don't be mad!" and you hit ok and move on. When an unhandled exception occurs, you get the blue screen of death.

It's called a finite state automaton because there are limits to the number of states the machine can go to. It can only make decisions and change states within the predefined bounds of the programmer. It's not a thinking machine. It can only make decisions and change states. A computer is a very powerful tool but it can never make any new thing on it's own.

Humans have states too. In addition to states, we have status - additional features tacked on top of whatever state we are in that is carried around with us until we enter a state where that status effect is removed. IE - you were working all day and got sleepy. When you go to sleep - the sleep state - the effect of the sleep state is to remove fatigue. You don't have a state 'tired'. You have a state 'working', 'sleeping', 'playing', etc etc. You can only be in one state at a time, but a person can change between them very, very quickly. If you pick up many status effects - such as fatique, illness, sadness, hunger - and you don't remove them properly, they can start to stack up.

Eventually the person can't cope with all these things going on and has an unhandled exception - they crash and burn. In an extreme case, they have a nervous breakdown. They just can't handle everything all at once anymore so they drop everything.

A person is an infinite state automaton. Our brain is a thinking machine. The limits on our computational ability are not finite. A human has unlimited potential. We can do and be many, many different things. However, the machine needs direction. Unguided and without a goal, the brain can wander in to many strange places, or begin to follow a pattern, and cycle over and over.

You have surely seen it. Some person who keeps making the same mistakes over and over. Not small things like forgetting their credit card number, or to pay their bills. Problems on a grander scale - not knowing how to budget, always getting into the same doomed relationships, having some kind of addiction to something - this is a cycle that a person may not realise they are in. They think they are in control of the situation, and any time they want to, they can leave it. Since they are in control, they don't worry about what it is doing to their lives. They think they can stop at any time, so if they are enjoying themselves now, why stop? It's not until they realise that they are hurting other people that they think it's time to change. And then they suddenly discover that they are in a cycle that maybe they need help to break out of.

People change state often. Most of the time it is a controlled change, even if they have to react to an unplanned situation. This is because we ARE learning machines, and when we make mistakes we usually remember the result. If one way doesn't work, try a different way next time! People exposed to a completely new situation often freeze up and don't react well. It takes initiative and applied learning to handle a new, unexpected situation. A persons instinct is to react to the environment until they are comfortable and understand it - then they make changes to that environment to suit their needs, and the needs of others.

That is the reason that 'practise makes perfect'. You become, over time, attuned to a situation, familiar with it, and you know what to do. The danger is that one can become too familiar, and wary of breaking out of the cycle. It is comfortable. I am happy. Why should I change? You see, we are learning machines. Learning is what we do. Time is always moving forwards. It's the final end state that all humans have to go to. We don't know what is after the Big Server Crash. All these 1's and 0's that make up our world, we don't know what it counts for. It's better to have a life full of many different states rather than only fill it with the same thing over and over.

I have spoken on this blog and in other places about being caught in a repeating circle, of circles within circles. This year has already been a great triumph in breaking out of these repeated circles. The new cycle I am in is to overcome a problem, then consolidate my position, recover, and plan the next step. I try not to make uncontrolled changes. Uncontrolled changes leads to a crash. I already crashed once late last year and nearly failed because of it.

Now I am in recovery state. Next is to check out the current situation, and look at what I want to do. There are many chances in the near future, and I need to properly plan out my path. I want to cross as many states as I can, without getting bogged down in bad cycles, and ensuring I still reach my goals.

Humans can do anything, but not everything is good for you.

A booty witch and red

2008-04-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

I have several different things to write about, but all of them are unrelated. So I am going to go with the fun thing first and roll on to the less-fun things in subsequent blog posts.

On Sunday I played with a young Vietnamese girl who enjoyed singing and drawing pictures. So I tried to teach her a bit of the Australian National Anthem – now, she was five years old and I am not sure of her reading ability, but at the very least she could mimic what I was saying (except r’s were a bit of trouble) and at least pretend she was following my finger pointing to the words. She did a very good job! “A booty witch and red” is the result from “A beauty rich and rare.” In hindsight picking the sentence with the most r’s in it for a child who had the most trouble with r’s was probably cruel and evil, but it didn’t occur to me until after a few tries. ‘For we are young and free’ came out much better.

I also played hide and seek (badly) and also enjoyed some fine Vietnamese cuisine, and got some more insight in to Asian culture. I have another cute picture on my fridge from a child – one is a small alpaca, the other is a house with…ah…somebody? I am not sure. It is not me. I am usually very popular with very, very small children (because, you know, they aren’t old enough to know better) on account of my inherent immaturity.

Well, maturity is a word that is thrown around a lot in some of my circles of friends lately. Adults enjoy saying to others “That behaviour is immature” or “you are acting like a child”. But that is the topic of another blog post.

I also played dodgeball. It was my first time playing it since Scouts. Back in Scouts, I made a game where everybody would throw balls at me – footballs, basketballs, tennis balls – and I had to dodge and evade. The rules were, keep throwing until I fall over and die. This was the indoor version of Fuji. Scouts was a strange situation. I was feared, hated and liked at the same time. For some reason I had a reputation of being a dangerous adversary and powerful ally at Scouts, while these same people at school would bully me. A uniform did very strange things to people’s minds. The Fuji game worked like this – whenever we were camping, everybody would try to hunt me down and attack me. But you see, they would split up in to small groups to find me, so I would encounter them in these little groups and counter-attack. Nothing major, just jump out, push them over, then go run and hide somewhere else. Eventually other people joined my group - so then we had Fuji, Muji, Guji, Suji...It was a lot of fun, up until the Scout masters had an issue with people running around in the Australian hinterlands in total darkness. So the indoor version developed. Everybody loved to play it, even me, because dodge ball is a lot of fun.

So! I played dodgeball. The only part of me that doesn’t hurt today is my left arm. We won, by a big amount. I think it was 40 to 16 or something. It started very badly because it was my first game and my instinct from softball was try to catch everything that came anywhere near me. The rules of dodgeball are: If you catch somebody, they are out, and one of your team mates can come back in. If you are hit (or even if you try to catch and stuff it up), you are out. Keep going until one team is all out or nine minutes is up. So when a ball came past and I dived to catch it and missed it, I was out. This happened a few times until somebody came over and said that it was a better strategy to miss a catch than to be hit. So I pretended that it was my plan from the beginning, not that I had been unconciously trying for everything...

I am not very strong so I don’t throw very well, and after the first match my arm was tired and I didn’t have much attack power. The teams were mixed, three boys and three girls a side. I was able to make some semi-decent catches, but I only took out two opponents from throwing at them. My main contribution was to fossik up loose balls and pass them to the more experienced players.

Also, the team name was Epic. No really. It was “Epic”. The irony was that the team colour was grey. Nobody appreciated it except me.

Urrrrrrg

2008-04-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

I meant to write something here earlier, and really, there is a lot that I could and should put up. But I feel sick today. Symptoms are - dizzy, feeling nausea, lethargy.

Anh; I read your comments that you made a few days ago, and I appreciated what you had to say. You are always welcome to write here, even if you disagree with what I say. From conflict, comes learning ^_^

I found out the reason I was unable to save money and have taken steps to rectify it.

Gym: There was a new situation in my life that meant that some of the things I planned did not occur. I intend to pick this up again next week.

Food: This was pretty good with some fails. Last night I cooked dinner again (maybe that is why I feel sick now >.>) but the major win was that I went shopping and bought food for two weeks rather than my usual 5 minutes notice thing. It's lucky because my younger brother will be staying for a few days and I know all my food will disappear.

I did not make much progress in work this week. I have been worrying about some other things and had some trouble concentrating. Also I am being continually distracted at work by a co-worker who is very passionate about a game and continues to bug me about it.

I don't feel so good so I think Ill leave it here for now.

oh right

I have been talking with the new president of the Golden Key chapter here. The old president is the one who gave me such trouble and said things to the group like "We don't want Chris as a president, he has an unglamorous job and it reflects poorly on us". This is off the back of one of the old executive seeking me out to complain about the old leadership. She said that after I left, most of the structure I had established was immediately changed.

The Chapter I had built was based around small groups that focused on tasks that were interesting to them; an individual from each group would then meet with other group leads and once every three or four weeks we would meet up and have an executive meeting. This encouraged largely autonomous group participation and meant people with varied schedules could still engage in the running of the Chapter - nobody was left behind. I recognised that people had different schedules and that a single mother who was studying had different time needs than a student in their teens with little responsibility.

This structure worked well; the main feature was that LOTS of people could join in and there was room for them to pursue their own goals - one person was interested in art, so organised students in her field to meet up with local artists, for example.

However after I left the new president had her own agenda and cancelled all of this thing. She molded it into only benefitting the people in her career choice, and her partner. My friend said to me that I made the Chapter into a friendly, group oriented architecture, where the focus was on mutual support. She said that she was touched that I made the time to seek out people who couldn't be involved as much and supported others who were trying new things.

But the person who replaced me made it in to a business like thing. If you could not meet the schedule of this person, well too bad! You could not participate in the group. My friend said many people had left the executive because they could not meet the demands of this president. This person said that she felt decieved; the purpose of the society had become subverted. Golden Key's premise is simple - those who are fortunate and successful have a duty to care for those who do not have the same advantages that we do. Specifically, not every body has access to the same level of education. We recognise that a person who could not attend classes because they have other responsibilities such as families or work should not be abandoned.

However the chapter had become a self service thing. Instead of using pooled abilities to help others, it was now using others support to promote the leadership group. My friend felt guilty approaching new members to recruit them because she felt they would be used by the leadership and discarded once they were used up. The same people were the ones to always 'win' the free trips to the conferences - the chapter had essentially become a fundraiser to pay for the President and her partner to fly overseas.

That is what I was told. Is it true? I desperately hope not. But, I already saw the start of this when I left. So reluctantly, I have to believe at least some of it.

As I am a graduate, I can't fulfill an executive role. But...in 2006 I was five votes away of being the leader for the entire Asia-Pacific region. The society has great potential for helping others. I am interested in rejoining - the president asked me to help out at some events, so.

It can't hurt to go along and find out for myself the situation, right?

Graduation!

2008-03-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

In a little over half an hour, I am heading to the Festival Theater with my friends and family to pick up my degree in Computers and Information Science.

In the end it took ten years and thirty six days from first enrolment to the final parchment being awarded.

I was thinking as I had my hair cut today, a lot of my precious things are kept in boxes or hidden away - they are too valuable to take out and put on display in this junk house. I am saving them for that special place, my home, and to share with the woman that would be the one I decided would be my wife.

I didn't find a place to call home yet.

The wind of change

2008-03-25T16:44:00.001-07:00

Can you feel the wind? It is pushing the leaves and debris around, the little things that don't matter from here and there. The big things that are important remain the same and weather a storm. Things that are fickle and worthless are torn away.

The wind is blowing very strongly now. I don't know what will remain when the tempest dies down. I will soon see who are the fair weather friends, and who remains after.

I have been holding on to something very painful since October. Finally I let it go. Sometime soon I will write about everything here, but for now, while the wind is blowing, I can't say. I had to let it go. It was ruining my life.

For my friends who will weather the storm, I thank you for your patience.

Helper Cat and Paladin Azrael

2008-03-02T04:49:00.001-08:00

What an interesting week.

First of all - shout out to my mother.

Hi mum! I love you!

^_~

---

'Helper Cat' is the name that Anna gave me. That is because it was my nature to help other people, always offering to volunteer my time and things to assist others. It is obligation free help. This is because of my time with the Lions Youth of the Year quest, from the question "What does it mean to be a volunteer?"

Although this was a very simple question, it stayed with me from that day - so well that I can't remember the other important question. Always, this has been my way. I have been raised to volunteer and to assist others, even to some personal cost. It is not some plan to convince others I am a nice person, omg, trust me! Although when I was younger, at first that was my way.

This person who felt guilty for not being sincere about his good actions was Azrael; that is the name I called myself on the internet back at that time. I had many misgivings with the church; I felt personally responsible for the misdeeds done in its name against my friends. I had been told that there was only two faiths in the world - you were a Christian of some variety, or you were evil and out to destroy all that was good and right. Encountering non-Christians who were good people was a big conondrum for me. Smite Evil does not work on good people. Very confusing for me.

However some time from then, I discovered a better me, one who was sincere in his actions, in my genuine desire to help other people for a greater good. I am happy to be this person. So from that time, I left the name Azrael behind. I did not need it anymore.

Last night I was told by my friend, "You eat like a cat." The meaning is, I am very particular with my cutlery, and always have to have neat hands. I think this is a result of my time as a baker; I despised having flour or any sticky thing on my skin. I would wash my hands many, many times in the morning (with industrial strength detergent. Don't do that.) while I was at work. From then, although my living habitat is always kind of messy (I prefer the term 'uniquely organised') my personal hygene has been very high. I dislike the feeling of oily skin or sweat in my clothes.

Cats are very important animals to me. Before Wallace the Great Devourer, there was Kitty, my friend and companion. Kitty was always aloof and unfriendly and did not like to hug. Nevertheless, she was very curious and would always like to be around people and watch, just not participate. Wallace is a dreadnought of a cat. He likes to be the centre of attention. His favourite game is to pretend that he wants you to pat his belly. Really he doesn't, he just wants you to put your hand near him so that he can bite it. His other favourite game is to steal all of the food from the neighbours houses, or to live in the gutter, or to sleep on the road, or vomit up horrors on the verandah. One time was a (still living) half meter tape worm. This was marginally less horrific than digging maggots out of Pony's skull (against all odds, operation SUCCESS), which to this day ranks as The Most Ghastly Thing I've Had To Do.

I think Wallace is in some degree feral. However, I liked his personality and some of it has rubbed off on to me. He is a very mellow person. When I visit home, he always remembers me, and we spend an hour or so catching up. I am then covered in cat hair and drool for the rest of my time at home, but I don't mind. There is some kind of special friendship we have that transcends normal limits.

Sometimes the best way to help is by not helping. You have to stand back and let the other people make their own mistakes, because if you get in the way, when it all falls apart they will blame you for their failure and not learn from the situation. It is hard for me to do this because I am a caring person and it goes against my nature to stand idle and let somebody else be hurt. In this kind of situation, the best thing is not to say 'I told you so' but to silently stay nearby for when they are ready to talk to you.

I am a good person. Every day that goes by, I am a slightly better person. Inside me is a shining white light and although I sometimes have dirty hands, it is nothing that I cannot wash off in time. I hate to have grime on my skin. During this time, I cannot touch anything that is valuable to me, because that valuable thing will then have the grime on it too, and it must be cleansed. It's easier to wait, and just wash my own hands. In the Bible, washing hands is also a way to say 'I am finished with a situation.' But in this case, I am not walking away. I am the good healer that knows that an infected injury must be cleansed before it can heal; and to cleanse, one must have clean hands.

To Kill a Mockingbird

2008-02-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

This week has been very hard for me. I learned many painful things.

This week has been very good for me. I learned many important things.

Growing is hard to do. The comfortable clothes you have and the world around you does not change to match the different you. Instead, you have to adjust to the world as you yourself change. In the process of adjusting, you also grow - and so the process of growing and adjusting is one of constant change. To not grow, means to stop changing, means to no longer fit in to the world, and so you will be left behind; die.

That is the rule of life.

Goals:
Food - this has been terrible. I know the reason for me to fail here and I will be working on it this week.

Saving - I managed to meet my goal for four weeks, but then my car had a problem which used up EXACTLY the total amount I had saved so far >.>;; Cars are expensive. But, I learned that I can use public transport to go from work to home faster than driving in the afternoon. Car fuel is very expensive. I run through $60 a week. Public transport will cost me $40 a week. It is only a small saving, but like all things in life, it is the little things that add up to make a big thing.
I will try it out not this week, but the week after, and see how much of a difference it makes.

I am not sure if this is a 'win' or a 'loss'. I did manage to save money. If I didn't have saved money, then my car could not be fixed. From the long term plan, this step was failed, but in the short term, it was success. I think this is the meaning of the saying "To win the battle but lose the war." Fortunately I have many, many more battles ahead of me, so I can still try to change my fate.

Exercise - I did not go to the gym for over a week now, so you would think 'Oh Sky, you failed here.' Actually I exercised a lot harder this week than I did before! I have fenced for two Monday nights in a row. Fencing is...unlike gym, which leaves me broken and utterly unable to move, fencing is an endurance thing. It uses completely different muscles, too. It is the junction of three things - your intellect, your strength, and your precision.

The following Wednesday I also went sailing again. This time I did not fall in to the ocean, win! The wind was stronger so the waves were bigger, but the direction was more favourable and so we did not have to tack as often. My fellow Lion from Kenya, Boyan, came out this week. Due to car trouble (and having to borrow my brothers car) ID I did not get to go sailing at the most recent time, but hopefully next week will be better.

I saw how dangerous sailing could be last time. There were thirty boats all trying to do a 180 degree turn about a buoy in the river channel, only a hundred metres wide. I did not see a single boat collide with another, but the sounds told an amazing story. Even though we moved so slow, the sharp crack of sails changing in the wind, the yells of boatsmen warning to each other, the crash-sh of wash being forced out...all of it combined in to a very tense situation.

I count sailing as exercise because the next day my body hurts like I have been exercising. I am not sure exactly what I have done that counts as exercise while I am on the boat, but it hurts, so, as long as the body thinks I am fit, it's all good.

Saturday afternoon was laser skirmish. This is done outdoors. We wore hats that detected when a laser had been fired at it, and the hats had a wire that connected them to the gun - if you were hit, the gun was disabled from firing for three seconds (but you could still be hit, so run and hide!). The guns were quite large and surprisingly heavy. The children had a small uzi style thing that they could fire one handed, that had a red laser pointer targetter. The women and Sky had a heavier four kilogram thing that needed two hands to fire and a scope. It was designed to be used as a sniper rifle. To make it more fun, this gun would announce loudly when you were out of ammunition.

The last gun was a fat five kilogram monster that was some kind of heavy machine gun. It was a 'spray and pray' approach. All of the men except for myself took this one, so of course I was the butt of many jokes about taking a womens gun. Well, I am not very strong! But actually I had seen the terrain that we would be fighting on, and it was a heavy slope with lots of objects to hide behind. I knew that most of us were unfit and would want to play the sniper game. So, having a sniper rifle seemed like the smartest thing to do. I am glad that I chose it because my arms did suffer a lot from carrying it around, but not as badly as the men who then had big bruises on their arms the next day at work!

This game was a lot of fun. The only problem for me is that I like instant gratification, if I can't see that I scored a hit on somebody I keep on shooting at them - if they don't react (and many of the children completely ignored that they had just been liquidated and continued to fire at me even though their gun had stopped working) I would keep plugging away until they gave up or I ran out of ammo. I could not tell if I had scored a hit or was missing my target unless I was close enough to hear their gun make the 'omg I was hit!' sound, which was about, fifty metres.

I did not know how to use a scope. This was a surprise! Previously I have used only open sight weapons, so you would get up real close and personal with it to get the best shot. But this scope would not work unless you moved your head slightly back from it. Perhaps my head was in the wrong position, and many of my attacks missed the target - I don't know.

This Tuesday coming, Michael is taking me with him to the Army Reserve training. I was also approached on Friday to consider doing Masters after I graduate. They didn't ask for a yes/no, just to say "Would you consider it?" I said I would consider it but I would like to know more details first. I said about my original plan to move to USA for my dream job, but I was keenly aware that where I am now is very good and 85% my dream job already.

I need to work out what I want again, and what is important to me.

Relationships - this was a really big surprise.

Kind of I was still on a downward spiral to self destruct. I was looking for something to hang on to so that I didn't have to start all over again. There was a girl that I had been very cruel to only a few months ago who, out of desperation, I turned to. What I found surprised me and was a big wake up call for me.

She said that she had forgiven me for the way I had treated her. Instead of allowing it to hurt her, she said that it had inspired her to prove me that I was wrong about her, and she had moved on in her life to successful things. She also thanked me, because in the midst of saying painful things to her, I had also said some things that were deeply inspiring to her.

She taught me that forgiveness is something that a person has from inside of them. They don't need to say it to another person, "I forgive you for xxx". If you have to tell the person you forgive them to feel better about it yourself, then you didn't really forgive them, did you?

There has always been some sexual tension between the two of us, but we have not done anything about it because she is married. After this conversation, the tension vanished. I did not realise that I had been behaving badly until I stopped doing it. I literally could not see. Afterwards, we went out to the Fringe Festival together and had a great time. We changed our frustration with each other for wanting to do something we shouldn't do, into a...I am not really sure. Whatever it was, it was a good thing. Instead of feeling some obligation to hold her things while she was trying on different clothes, instead of feeling obliged to do/say something, I was able to move honestly and freely. I felt good and confident about myself and was able to relax, and she did too. We talked about it and wondered the reasons for it. I don't know.

But whatever the situation, we somehow built a surprisingly good friendship out of an embarassing and awkward situation. Somehow we gave each other exactly what we needed, not what we wanted.

From this, I realised that what I had said earlier in my blog about women was disrespectful and wrong. I wanted to delete it, but as an adult I must accept responsibility for the things that I have done and said. Later I will write more in my blog about it, but for now, this apology can do.

--Edit:
I forgot the last bit of exercise that I did which was, for lazy Sky, quite epic. After I took my car to the mechanic, I walked to work - I knew I would be late, but I didn't realise HOW late - an hour and a half. On Friday, I left work at 4:20 and ran to the mechanic. I got there at 4:50. I ran in thirty minutes what it had taken me ninety minutes to walk. I don't know the distance or how it compares to actual effort (as I didn't run ALL of the way) but I haven't run this distance for a long time. It's a small but definite show that the gym and exercise is improving my fitness. I am really happy :D

Primary Mission Accomplished

2008-02-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

On February 14 at 10 am I recieved the e-mail to tell me that my final submission was a Credit, which was enough to push my failed mark up to a pass.

The result is that I will be graduating in March 2008.

It only took me ten years >.>;;

The difference between boys and girls

2008-02-10T18:59:00.001-08:00

As I was growing up, I learned that girls were never treated with much respect by boys, and the world seemed to accept and encourage it. For some reason, they were treated as less-than-people. Their good ideas and advice were ignored, and they were made fun of and degraded. Even something like a simple reminder was written off as nagging. If a woman has a problem, it is never as important as the problem a man might have, because a man is always using logic whereas a woman is always emotional. For some reason, emotion is not a valid reason to have a problem. Something like feelings are only temporary. Tomorrow, you will have forgotten you are upset, silly girl! That is why we don’t take what you have to say seriously. Why should we do anything about what you have to say today? Tomorrow you will want a different thing. That is the argument I always hear.

I didn’t understand why women accepted this treatment. The boys that they liked so much didn’t even see them as equals. But still, girls would allow themselves to be talked over and ignored and relegated only to be pretty things to show off to others. I had hoped that as we got older and people matured, girls would raise their standards and not allow themselves to be treated this way. I didn’t want to accept that world, so I tried to live in a way where I could feel satisfied. I always felt I treated women with the same respect and consideration as I do any other person. To me, there is no difference. I believe women are just as capable as men to do any important thing, and some things they can do better. Any adult having this conversation would come to the same agreement. So, why do these same adults not respect a woman’s ability? I don’t understand it.

More, I don’t understand why girls don’t stand together to change it. Men don’t respect women, but they like having them around because they are useful to do things for them. If a girl complains to a man, he will just ignore it because…it’s not important to him. She can’t complain to him about his behaviour being the reason she is upset. He won’t hear it. In this situation, the girl’s only choice is to eventually leave. In a group situation, the boys will all point and degrade the woman who is leaving and make up stories to say that she is attention seeking or a drama queen, all the while belittling her and saying to all the other girls who can see ‘if you are upset and complain this is how you will be treated’. So long as a woman can be singled out and targeted individually like this, it’s impossible for her to win. Even if a man stands up for her, the others will say he has feelings for her and is ignored, because – well – feelings aren’t grounded in logic, so, he shouldn’t be listened to either.

In that kind of situation, only women can stand up for each other. A man can’t do it, even if he wants to. His only choice is to leave the group if he can’t support the way the women are treated in it. If he is not part of the solution, then he is part of the problem.

But I wonder what would happen if all the women stood together and left at once? Suddenly, the men are the ones who have a problem. I wonder what the world would be like if it was run by women.

I’d like to think that humanity had gotten past this basic immaturity but it seems we still have a long way to go.

Sky_Pirate

2008-02-06T03:52:00.000-08:00

Today I went sailing on Stan's friend's ship, the Naiad. I'm told it's a Norse word for 'Water Nymph'. The vessel is ten feet long and had a crew of myself (ballast), Michael (assistant director from work, also ballast), Stan (from work - jig controller-guy), Sarah (mysterious girl who did things with ropes), Liz (the captain for the day), Liz' husband (the usual captain who was watching over Liz to make sure nothing exploded), and their daughter, whose name I never caught, who did something else, maybe navigation, I'm not sure.

The wind was strong and the skies overcast, but the day was good. The water temperature was also quiet pleasing, as I discovered about half an hour in to the race when I partially fell in to it.

It started off very well. As we pulled away from the vessels permanent dock in the marina, a pod of three dolphins came up and started playing. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera - I was worried about it getting wet (a good fear as it turned out) and didn't have it on me.

My job on the boat was essentially to counterbalance the boat whenever it tacked. We were sailing in to the wind for the first part of the race. I was surprised by how much speed the boat was able to pick up even when sailing in to the wind. To do it, the captain had to zig-zag the boat every two or three minutes. At this point, I had to hop from one side of the boat, over the cabin, and down to the other side, whilst avoiding the bottom of the sail from smashing my skull into little mush pieces. As you can tell be the fact I am writing here without some impairment, I managed to escape without having splinters of skull liquifying my precious brain meats.

However, this did happen - one time I was too slow to get across and the boat had tipped up to somewhere between 65-70 degree angle. I was mid-clamber across and didn't have any hand holds, so instead I just fell. I managed to grab one of the wooden railings on the cabin as I dropped and so I only thigh deep in to the water. I needed help to get pulled back on board because my clothes were suddenly waterlogged and too heavy for me to get back on after having gone to the gym the night before >.>;; Luckily Michael-ballast-assistant was in easy reach of me and we proceeded on without further trouble. I scraped my left shin considerably on the toe rail. After about five minutes of pathetic whimpering the pain went away. Historically I don't tend to bruise at all, so I won't have anything to show off, but later Stan took a photo of the cuts. Then we all traded horror stories of injuries. I think the worst was Stan's son Stefan, who had fallen and dislocated his knee as well as taking off huge amounts of skin, ow.

Aside from this minor thing, the day was actually a lot of fun. I'd recommend it to anybody. Afterwards, we all had dinner at the yacht house. I don't know if I will do it every Wednesday night, but I will definately try it again.

Yesterday, Ben and I had a great conversation on our tea break. It started out with me complaining about the task Shraga had given me, but then Ben gave me a startling revelation: The reason I am doing this research is because nobody has done it before. The AFP couldn't tell me anything, not because it was secret, but because the information simply didn't exist. This was encouraging!

Ben: "Nobody has done anything like this before. So, if you get it wrong, nobody will know."

I can't argue with that logic.

From there, we talked about the future of the human race. What will humanity look like in ten billion years time? We agreed that the first race would be to find a way to make humanity independant of this rock we call Earth. I reckon we can make it. But first we have to resolve the problem of people currently having to eat mud cookies. I had this same conversation with three different people in the last week - Bosco at the Vietnamese New Year, Sarah over the weekend, and now Ben.

So, here's a question for you - if you could live forever, in your preferred state (so for me anywhere from 22-now seems good), would you do it? Some people say to me, no, they would get bored. Others say that without some kind of time limit, the value of life would be diminished. Others say that they want to experience the whole range of human feelings, including growing old and death. Others say, they want to know what comes next.

Me? Hell no. I'm going to live forever. I could live for eternity and still not experienced everything I wanted to.

What about you?

It's time to conquer earth

2008-01-31T03:37:00.000-08:00

Ah, Power Rangers. I can remember when they were still cool, which was, if I recall correctly, for the first five minutes of the first episode. This kind of cheesy thing is burned in to the brains of my brothers and I. "Alpha, Rita's escaped!" and other such lines are the trigger point for all kinds of madness and hilarity.

Santa, a powerful demonic force?

Santa <--> Satan. Discuss.

He knows if you've been bad or good.
He breaks into peoples houses and bribes them with objects of material value to teach them that it's OK to be just good enough to get what you want.
He teaches children that if they are good they DESERVE a reward...
Both are fans of wearing red.
Both seem to have an excessively long life span.
One lives in the North Pole. The other is destined to an eternity of burning torment. (After centuries of living in the arctic, a million degree bath might not be so bad...)
Way too friendly with children and the sitting-on-the-lap thing.
Nobody should be that happy all the time.
Somehow, Santa suits always look better on women.

"Alpha, Santa's escaped..."
There was those creatures called 'putties' that, if you hit right in the chest plate, would explode. This kind of thing is hilarious.
So when Shane said, "You have to hit Santa in the sack to make him explode", he obviously meant the sack full of toys, and not some other sack that he might have had. Right? Right?

So. Santa. Powerful demonic force.

There's a reason small children fear him.

On an unrelated note, I knew this day would come. Gym.

Last night for the first time I had my first case of feeling totally inadequate.
Here I was heaving and puffing to lift two three kilogram blocks up and down and up and down and up and down...three sets of twelve.
Next to me some guy was casually hoisting...well, it looked like about 160 kilograms. I don't know. I didn't want to look too closely, because that would mean he would look back, and see me straining to lift these two tiny blocks, while he was...well...you get the picture.

Actually he did say hello to me, and not unkindly said, "you have to start somewhere." So I guess he could tell I was feeling embarassed about it.

Last night I didn't finish rowing for the first time. Normally I row first. That leaves my arms trashed. So I decided to do the weights first. What do you know! That leaves my arms even MORE trashed. After 1200 metres I developed some kind of painful thing in my side, like a stitch. I pushed on but it got so bad, I just curled over and died at the 1420 metre mark.

I read that 'The harder you train, the more recovery time you need, the less often you have to train'. I didn't know. I don't plan on becoming some big meathead, but in between fencing, gym, and tennis, I might finally get rid of this bowling ball on my stomach. Ugh. There's a photo of me at the Morialta falls walk up on Dasi where it looks like I have a kitchen board up my shirt. Seriously. My stomach looks square. It just aint natural.

Warcraft:

The guild on Surumar packed up and desintegrated over the Christmas break. Ian said it was because they couldn't get 25 mans happening, and some of the members started to run with other guilds that could. So when they didn't even have enough members to run Karazhan anymore (which was on farm status) they realised the group was in negative growth and pulled the plug. From the original guild, only six decided to stay together.

I heard an interesting thing on WoW Radio (yes I am a nerd). They said 'People always say guilds break up because of something in the game. For some it is changing from 5 man content to 10 man content, or 10 man to 25, or some change in the game or even over a ninja'd piece of loot. But the truth is, good guilds progress through these difficult times because they enjoy playing with each other. Guilds that are only sticking together for progress are the ones that will break, because if the guild is not moving forward, the members feel that their time is being wasted and they grow frustrated. It becomes a powder keg and the first small thing that goes wrong - a bad pull that causes a wipe - becomes the spark that allows people to be assholes to each other without feeling bad about it.' Well, I don't know if that is true, but I saw Ian was upset so my feeling is that it wasn't really a break up in the way he said. So if I do decide to play with them, I will need to be cautious about not getting too involved.

The new guild is "Terra Australis" on the Oceanic server Nagrand.

Today I bought the ret PVP shoulders. I thought that gladiator gear was a big waste for me, and these shoulders really are only a tiny upgrade. But there simply isn't any non-heroic shoulders available except for the T3 shoulders from Laj in Botanica. Then I noticed that they had two gem slots and no resilience - all the item value was put in to +stats and +spell damage. Mal has over 500 defence now (any more than 490 is a waste) so I decided to grab the epic shoulders for the increased stats, spell damage, and extra 400 armor. I think if I juggle around some gems and lose some defence, I can probably sneak in another 500 or so hit points and break 300 spell damage. I'll be pretty happy if I can make 12500 hit points unbuffed.

The only small sadface is that I just burned up all my holy dust to get nice exalted shoulder enchants for my heals, retribution and protection sets, and now I will need to do it again...

I have been getting a number of requests from people that I have been pugging with to join their guilds. The main reason that I don't want to do it is that I want to reconcile with Relic and I will feel like I am just using people if I jump ship as soon as a spot in Relic is available. When I said this, most of the people have said that is fine, they just needed a tank so they could do extra content. Well, I enjoy playing with others (because solo is so boring) and I enjoy learning more about the instances. I enjoy using line-of-sight pulls and using the environment to make the Paladin more effective.

Goals;

Eating has been so-so. I have a problem with my brother not eating the food I make. He only eats the meat. It's not my responsibility to look after him but I feel bad about it. I bought fast food twice because I didn't plan ahead far enough, once yesterday before gym (Rocking up to do my exercise while chowing down on some french fries, kind of is the wrong image to project) and another on the weekend, but that was OK because it was a party.

Saving: Well I don't know what is going on here. I spent too much this week already, but I am at a loss to say where. I am going to have to keep track of what I am spending on so I can fix it. I don't have anything to show for $x00 missing. It used to be that I would spend so much money on fast food. Well, that's not the case anymore. So where is it going? I haven't bought anything except new headphones today. The only thing I splurged out on so far was the Baneblade, and that was last year. Somehow I am letting money slip through my fingers and I need to find it and stop it or I will never save up anything.

Work: This week hasn't been so productive. Also, today I don't know. Shraga has assigned me a really strange task. He wants me to do research on a topic, but the nature of the topic is that you need security clearance to do it. So I have been given contact details for some fairly important people to talk to about it, but Shraga already said "They won't be able to tell you anything." How do I call this really important and busy person without any information on the project and no authority to ask about it? I will look like an idiot. So I didn't do it yet. Next week the expert in security gets back from her trip so I will approach her about what to do.

Faith and Duty

2008-01-28T20:09:00.000-08:00

People make decisions about a situation based on the information they have available. If they have the wrong information, or even the right information presented in the wrong way, they can make a bad decision. That same person would have made an entirely different decision if they had known different information.

My ex-girlfriend showed me this. She would never tell a lie. Instead, she would say an incomplete truth.
“Did you get home before 10?” her father would ask. “Yes,” she would say. The father obviously meant 10 pm at night for her curfew. In fact she got in at 11 pm or later, but since her father had not explicitly asked ’10 pm’, her answer was technically correct – as she had gotten in before 10 am the following day.
While technically truthful, it was a lie. Her parents sometimes caught her out in a lie, and she would explain the reason that it was still the truth. This taught me to explicitly state all of my questions to her so that she was unable to lie to me. Her parents didn’t do this, and instead just stopped trusting her.

The other thing she would often do would be to dodge a question. Two of her favourite ways were to ask “Why do you want to know?” or by changing the conversation, “Why would you think otherwise?” If the person could not provide a reason for it, the question was implicitly considered to be true, even though it was a lie. The last was the famous “Look, a UFO!” where she would simply disregard the question and talk about something else. In her head, she was being completely honest and open, but everybody around her thought of her as fickle and untrustworthy.

Because of this and many fights I had with her, I became very good at spotting this kind of behaviour. Most of the time it’s best just to remain silent and let the person think that their lie has been accepted. If you catch a person lying and say it, the other person will avoid you because they are ashamed that you have exposed them, while all the time acting outraged and offended that you could say such a thing. Instead, quietly decide if this person is a good person for you to have in their life and wonder for the reason for their deception. Liars will often accuse those who exposed them as the liar. They can’t help it. It’s easier to blame somebody else than to accept responsibility for their behaviour. It’s too hard for them to turn around and walk back through that shameful path. Instead, they lie more and more to protect themselves and to try to convince others that they are trustworthy. This is the meaning of the saying, “What a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive.” Watch out for people who act irrationally and can’t speak honestly to your face. Those people need help and forgiveness.

Why do people lie?

The lie itself is usually not nearly as important as the reason for lying. People don’t always lie for a selfish reason. But a person who never lies does not have to remember the lies that they have told and never has to worry about being exposed for it.

Some times a person will lie to protect another from information that is harmful to them. Sometimes a person will lie to protect themselves – the truth is dangerous or embarrassing to them. But another case is when somebody lies to deliberately mislead a different party. All lies are shameful, because we as humans know it is wrong to deceive, but the lie that is made to deliberately give somebody the wrong impression is the most dangerous, destructive lie of all.

A lie can be made to protect information. Some information is secret. Some information is private. What is the reason for the lie to be told to protect the information? Secret information must be protected because it can be dangerous to others, for example, the plans of the army. Private information is protected because it can be dangerous to the individual if released, for example, your address or credit card details.

A lie can also be made from withholding critical details of the information. A person may be pressured and unable to say “I can’t reveal that information”, or, posed a yes/no question where “I can’t answer” also gives away the true situation. “Did you steal xxx?” Instead, that person will lie to protect their privacy or the privacy of others. Private information is private. It can be embarrassing for everybody to know. This is the meaning of the saying “Airing your dirty laundry”.

When you decide to lie, what is the reason? Either you can’t trust that person with the true information, or you want that person to do something that you can’t honestly ask them to do, or because you can’t honestly respond without being harmed or harming another. But be sure that when you lie and are discovered, the person that you have deceived may be very, very angry with you. Not that you lied to them, but what is the reason for the lie? Discovering that you are not as respected by somebody as much as you thought you were can be a very painful experience for everyone.

People make decisions based on information. Information that is not necessary for them to know to make their decisions is not considered. Information that would help them make their decisions that is withheld is called “pulling the wool over their eyes”. It means that a person or group are being manipulated by an individual or other group who are feeding them some information that does not accurately represent the larger body of information.

Is that a lie? By the strictest definition, no. But by withholding information, you are giving an incomplete truth. By giving an incomplete truth, you deceive others. When you deceive others, you are not respecting them. When people are disrespected, the result is that they do not trust you. There is a saying – “When you curse, two pits are made.” This means that not only do you harm the other person, but you also harm yourself. When you lie or treat the other person with disrespect, the result is that they trust you less.

Trust is linked to respect. Another word for respect is love. Depending on the context, they are interchangeable. These are two very important things that define the basic foundation of society. A child trusts and loves its parents. The parents trust and love each other. The parents trust and respect their neighbours, who in turn have their own respect and trust of one another. These groups band together in times of need because they trust each other to look after one another. This is the meaning of Aesop’s Fable, that one stick is broken easily, but ten sticks bound together can’t be broken. Even in the Bible, God said (re: the Tower of Babel), “When they are united like this, who can stop them?” (Well, God can and did >.>). The Japanese character for ‘people’ is made from two people supporting each other.

Consider the effect on a family when the parents stop trusting one another or feel that the other has stopped respecting them. Consider the effect on a group when people gossip secretly to each other and make snide comments behind others backs. Consider the effect on friends when one decides not to trust or respect the other.

That is the reason that lying is a sin.

Together to Victory

2008-01-26T00:18:00.000-08:00

WARNING: This post is all about Warhammer.

Today I fought a 15,000 vs 15,000 point Warhammer Apocalypse battle. There were three players per side - my Dark Angel Space Marines, my brothers Blood Angel Space Marines, Jason's mix of *cough* Tyranid, Ork and Space Marine super heavies, versus Williams Tau, Lawries Guard, and Lance's Ork and Eldar allies.

Normally Shane and I aren't allowed to play on the same team because, to be an arrogant tool, we're crazy good. We have a lot of experience working together against random enemies. Our most enjoyable times are "Everybody puts everything that they have on the table, versus everything that we are able to field."

Also, we have a lot of tanks. Sooo many tanks. Normally you can only field three tanks at a time in Warhammer. However, in Apocalypse, you can field anything you want.

So for this reason we fielded my brand new Baneblade, seven vindicators, a predator annihilator, a predator destructor, three whirlwinds, and three land raiders, a vanquisher tank hunter, and nine dreadnoughts. Our ally Jason had forgotten to bring any infantry (...) so our already tank heavy army was suddenly bolstered with a super heavy thunderhawk, on Orkified Baneblade (Skullhammer?), TWO Stomba Mekka-gargents, some kind of Tyranid bio-tank, and some kind of battle fortress of a type I'd never seen before.

And before those of you who come here from the Warhammer 40k link accuse me of fielding an unbalanced army; I fielded a whopping seventy tactical marines and related officers. Shane took twenty tacticals, forty assault marines, death company, and fifteen terminators stuffed in to the land raiders.

Our enemy had also stacked on the tanks. There were two enemy baneblade super heavy tanks, three Leman Russ types, a hellhound, a hydra flak tank, two Valkyrie fighter bombers, and four chimera APC's in the guard forces. The Tau had two Hammerhead tank destroyers, two skyray missile gunships, some devilfish, and a few bunches of a new kind of flyer called a pirahna that I hadn't encountered before. William had also taken four of the highly annoying remora stealth fighter flyer drones. The ork and eldar vehicles were quite light, with only a falcon, a wraithlord, some warwalkers, and some ork buggies and a battle waggon.

The battle went very badly. We deployed second and the enemy went first. My forces took massive casualties; I have won almost all of our group tournaments so naturally I was targetted first for elimination. Of course I anticipated this so kept most of my best units a short distance back from the front lines so that they couldn't take such heavy damage, however this meant the bulk of my forces - my tactical marines - were almost entirely wiped out. Firepower that was supposed to have been levelled at my largely resistant tanks exploded my infantry rather easily. The ones who I had deployed in cover survived to some extent, but honestly from the first turn the casualties were too high for my infantry to play any effective battle from that point on.

However, because they focused on me, they left my brother - and Jason's super heavies - largely unscathed. Shane lost four assault marines in the first turn. Jason didn't lose anything. I lost almost four full squads of tacticals, over half of my infantry in the first turn!

This was the first battle for any of the Baneblades that were playing today, and every one of us wanted to be the one who was first to destroy a Baneblade...and none of us wanted to lose theirs first. I had taken the tank hunter Aphrael to keep my Baneblade protected - Aphrael is effectively a tank sniper and I had counted on my opponents wanting to attack the more threatening Baneblade and leave Aphrael unscathed. Unfortunately this didn't work and Aphrael was exploded in turn two without achieving anything. Very sad.

Aside from turn one, all of our firepower was surprisingly ineffective. Usually you would expect massive megadeaths in Apocalypse, but all day everything was bouncing off of the targets armor, or failing to hit at all. My Annihilator smoked a Leman Russ, but was unable to destroy anything else despite having a clean line of sight the whole game. My Baneblade managed to get a couple of good shots off at the core of the Eldar army, trashing the wraithlord and a number of very strong units - at the time it seemed inconsequential, but in the long run it won us the game.

Everyone tried so hard to blow up everybody elses super heavies. The Ork Stompas were damaged so heavily, they were both immobilised and all of their weapons were destroyed except their lowest machine guns. My Baneblade took extensive damage - it's main cannon was knocked out and the vehicle was immobilised. We managed to knock a few structure points off of the enemy Baneblades, but we weren't able to kill any.

So, the trophy for the first Baneblade kill remains up in the air.

We took a lot of damage, a lot of casualties. If the game went on for a few more turns, I would probably have been wiped out - however Jason had largely remained unscathed. The Eldar and Ork army was almost entirely destroyed (as was mine), while the Tau were annoyingly almost untouched throughout the game. Not for want of trying! William's units are extremely tricky to trap and destroy due to their fire and forget/shoot'n'scoot nature. I had fielded artillery pieces (the whirlwinds) to deal with this, but by the time enemy came within range the whirlwinds had been disrupted by the enemy basilisk and were ineffective. One of the surviving whirlwinds later claimed the objective in that part of the battlefield, though.

In the end, out of six objectives, I held two, Shane held one, Jason held one. William held one, and Laurie held one. We had four, they had two. Despite the massive mauling our forces had taken, we were victorious.

It felt like a hollow victory, to be honest. When I looked at the battlefield, the enemy force still looked very strong, while most of our units were heavily damaged and destroyed.

I made some silly errors.
A) I had taken the Masters of the Chapter detachment, not realising that the officers had to remain in the same unit. I prefer to distribute my officers throughout the entire army so that their abilities are more utilised by all, instead of concentrated in one position. In the game, this highly expensive and dangerous unit didn't accomplish anything. Even so, had I been able to split them up, the level of firepower directed at my forces probably would have been too much for even them to survive.
B) I used the dreadnoughts in place of the officers to provide fire support and assault resistance throughout the ranks. This was a mistake - dreadnoughts, although highly durable in assault, aren't very effective in it if on their own. I would have been better off to have deployed the Dreadnoughts in two or three groups and allowing them to operate on their own.
C) I forgot to use my orbital bombardment!!!
D) I didn't coordinate my timed bombardments with my allies effectively, and this meant that on the last turn I accidentally friendly-fired Jason's carnifex detachment. Fortunately they were able to shrug off most of the damage, but it was still very embarassing.
E) I didn't write my army list until after midnight, which meant going to bed at 3 am, and subsequently getting up at 6 left me unable to brain.

There's one thing I am trying to figure out. Every Apocalypse game has done the same thing so far:

Turn 1: My army takes HORRENDOUS MASSIVE CASUALTIES. I do barely anything in return.
Turn 2: My army takes some damage. I make some kind of good response.
Turn 3: I take a small amount of damage. My opponent gets smashed to little pieces.

It's completely different from a normal game of Warhammer, where the balance of power is largely even until near the end of the game, where the result of careful strategy and planning finally is revealed, and it can often come down literally to the last throw of the dice. This kind of tremendous turn around just does not happen in normal games. It's only in the Apocalypse level, which is simply a normal Warhammer game that is 3-5 times bigger than normal.

I take great pride in my Space Marines and I go to great lengths to protect them. I don't throw their lives away, nor do I leave them isolated and undefended. So if I can find out the reason for my army suddenly becoming so strong, even when it had taken such a massive beating, maybe I can work out what I can do to avoid the massive beating in the first place.

So I am going to nap now...

X_X

2008-01-25T01:33:00.000-08:00

Today's gym
Ah

.
....
...
.So.
Gym intructor, "OK bud, you know how to use the machine, now it s time sofr htso.

Sorry. My brain is blocking out the bad memory.

I remember...
Red? Suffering? Yes.

Then I was driving home. I had to avoid hitting a small dog.

So, weights. Ow. Oh my God, how weak and useless are my arms.

33.25 kilograms. THAT'S ALL. And when it was the single arms only 5 kg. I didn't even make it to ten lifts.

Ican't move. Im totally, totally trashed.

On the upside I ddi lift 80kg with my legs. That's kind of good.

Also I ran 10 kmph for 10 minutes. Thats good too I think.

@_@

Well I have to build the baneblade tonight or I can't use her tomorrow.

My hands are shaking so much. I don't wantto ruin such a beautiful model. But I need those guns on the field...

The Golden Rule

2008-01-23T06:52:00.000-08:00

Today was a good karma day, if you believe in that kind of thing. I absolutely do, but not in the 'every good you do will be repaid three fold' kind of thing. I enjoy doing helpful things for other people. It's kind of a left over from my time as a boy scout, and these days a lot of people automatically look for some deeper selfish motivation behind any good act. It's unfortunate, but it's very difficult for people to accept an obligation free gift these days.

Today I helped an old friend get a job. Today I helped a person who used to be my lecturer find a person she needed. Today I saved my business from losing money, an embarassing situation, and wasted time.

For some reason, people at work have the impression that I work long hard hours and am an efficient person. This is not really the case. In fact I even took Monday off >.>;; But I have been overhearing comments and people are saying encouraging things to me. It's good for my confidence, so I will try not to discourage these rumours, and also try not to let it go to my head. Even with two promotions in the future, at the moment I am still the lowest ranked person, and if I don't get my degree...well...that's bad.

So far January has been kind of bad for me. Stress, not sleeping well, some problems with friends, all added up to make a not very fun time. I stuck to my guns so far quite well. Today I recieved my first full time pay check again (I have been on half pay since holidays started) and I will be catching up on my savings. The other area (food) had been pretty good. I only bought fast food twice this whole year, when previously, I was buying it just about every day.

Well it's 1:30 am, I should sleep. If I want to bitch about not getting enough sleep, I can't expect any sympathy when it's my own fault :)

Last throw of the dice

2008-01-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

I'm exhausted.

I submitted the assignment. It looks good. There were some parts that didn't work. I never did find out why I couldn't touch or read from the matrix stack, the foundation of all OpenGL functions. But I had many successes, too. Textures. Lighting. Animation. Colours, materials, controls...all of it was there in some way or another.

Like the camera from the other assignment, the matrixes were crucial to this one. The relationship wasn't quite so dependant, but not having the operations I needed to do meant that I was forced to hand calculate a lot of the math and write up the code. I wasted a lot of time. Whereas all the other students could go:
gl.glMultMatrix(some matrix)
To do everything, I had to keep track of every camera movement and backtrack them. It added considerable overhead because not only did I have to track what was going on, I had to notify each part of the system each time a change was made, and in changing a part of the system I had to notify the rest of the system that such a change was made. It went around in a big circle. It's terrible, terrible programming.

But it works. Dammit, it works.

But is it good enough?

I didn't do everything I wanted to.

Somehow, even though I budgetted so much time for this, I still ran out in the end. I wonder why? It's not that I didn't stick to my schedule. Somehow, the time I had at the start seemed to go past without me really achieving anything. In this last week I almost doubled my work output. If I could somehow reach in to the future and pull out these quality hours, then I would have this problem again.

I wanted to finish well. Not like this. Not just barely sliding in to the finish line, and maybe not even making it.

Now, I am done. I am worn out, exhausted, burned. I have put off a lot of things to get my work done, and now it is done, I don't know what to do. I need to reorder my life.

But not today. Today, I need to relax and unwind. Tomorrow, I will start again.

I'll see you then.

Left Behind

2008-01-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

I didn't want to write on my blog again until after my assignment was done. But I had a bit of a bad dream last night and I want to get it out. It was about feelings of being abandoned, of being left behind, because I took on responsibilities that the other people didn't. Because I was burdened, I was weighed down, and could not go so fast. So the other people would always move forward without me.

Without going in to big details, there was a human virus that was transmitted by radio frequency. Anybody who heard it would go insane. So, there was a nuclear war. Around me and the group, people were going crazy while driving their machines or aircraft. Thousands of people died around me. A plane dropped out of the sky next to our group and just exploded. From the wreckage I found an infant whose parents had died.

Because I was carrying the baby that they told me to leave, they left me behind. I didn't have any mothers milk. I didn't have any small, soft food to feed it with. I didn't even have food of my own that I could chew up into soft mush to give. So the result was an obvious, terrible end.

I didn't like to wake up with that horrible sense of death and failure, but I did.

Today my lecturer finally sent me an e-mail to respond to my problem.

Make it so

2008-01-16T03:12:00.000-08:00

I got back late from the gym and have to jump right in to my assignment so just a short one this time.

Rowing: 2k in 9:58.
Jumping Weight Machine 40kg 1 x 12 set, 1 x 25 set
Arm sideways weight thing 30 kg 2 x 12 set
Arm forwards weight thing 30 kg 2 x 12 set
Arm lifting weight thing 30 kg 2 x 12 set
Arm pushing weight thing 30 kg 2 x 12 set
Stretches 30 seconds each
Suspicious stretch 30 seconds
Sit ups 8 >.>;;
Running: 10kmph for 2:30 at level 5. I would have gone for longer but the gym suddenly closed.

Today was very strange. I didn't finish appreciatebly faster on the rowing, but I wasn't anywhere near as destroyed as I was last time. I was able to do all of the weight brackets, although the last two on the final set were brutal. Everything seemed so much easier than the last time.

It's only my third try, so I don't expect any actual improvement. But it was very strange. Also, whereas last time I did the exercises I was in a lot of pain, this time the muscles went numb instead. Because of this, I was able to do a lot more continuous excercises.

Driving home was suddenly difficult. Somehow, even though I could lift all these weights, trying to turn the steering wheel was really hard. I didn't have any upper arm strength. Then when I got home to peg my washing up, wow, I never realised the clothes line was so high...

Today Ben, the resident photographer and also my tea officer managed to chalk up another mark under the "Sky may be homosexual" column by suddenly asking the group, "Hey, let's have a tea party." Ah, so we did. Unfortunately there was no china cups or pink fluffy anything, just four men sitting at a table discussing various machines for war (it is a Defence faculty after all) while drinking tea.

For the record, I had Earl Grey.

Girl germs

2008-01-15T04:34:00.000-08:00

I've had a bad evening on my assignment. I am baffled by a small bug; when I resize the screen the shapes are supposed to scale (increase in size/decrease in size to match), and sometimes they do. But most of the time, they stretch and warp. If the shape is rectangular, my spheres look like squashed tennis balls.

It may not be my fault. I downloaded a couple of other programs that were supposed to be flawless and ran the same test; it's the same effect. It's possible my video card can't handle this version of OpenGl I am supposed to be using. But I don't know for sure.

So I skipped this step (I have also skipped the transform step) and moved on to the user interface. I ripped the code from my work and spent the last half hour plugging it in to the new code, then when it dinged 11 pm I went to play Warcraft. Every second Tuesday night, World of Warcraft is turned off so the servers can get maintainence and some down time. Somehow, it always catches me by surprise. Ah well. So I am ranting on my blog for 20 minutes, then going back to coding. All the extra time I put in justifies going to the gym tomorrow after all. Damn :)

At the moment I can still get 90% of the marks so it is not a tragedy, I will just move on to a different step each night. I am currently on 60%, and every feature I get working from now on adds +5%. I managed to work out what they were asking in the transforms section, but I was unable to get it to work. I don't know why. I still didn't hear back from my lecturer on it, maybe he's not back from holidays. Maybe I just won't hear from him. Provided I don't run in to more than three OH NOES situations, I should still pass.

My decision was not to get in to a relationship until after I had finished studying. That did not change. It's only one more week, right? Some young lady has been checking her calendar or something. I didn't say anything to her since July last year, so this was out of the blue. Awkward phone conversation!
Girl: "Hi, how are you?"
Sky: "Oh, good thanks!"
Girl: "I haven't seen you in ages. Are you busy in the evening next week?"
Sky: "Ha no, I don't have any plans, I usually just play warcraft or something."
Girl: "Oh, you must not have a girlfriend."
Sky: "Yeah, that's right, because I-"
Girl: "Ok so lets meet up for dinner on *rattles off time, day, location* See you then bye" *click*
Sky: "..."

I'm not interested in this girl at all, and I will maintain that I am not good boyfriend material right now. Hey girls! I am not tidy or clean! I have repressed issues! I play with small model tanks and hang around with nerds! I watch cartoons for girls! I have poor dress sense! I don't know how to dance! Seriously, avoid. You don't want this.

Well, sometime soon from now, maybe. I know this girl is looking for a relationship because she has said it to me before. I've gone to great pains not to flirt with women (since I am not on the market so to speak) since I made this decision. Sometimes I fail. But I never flirted with this girl so I am confused as to why she is interested in me.

Somehow I want to get more experience spending time with/understanding women in a relationship sense but I don't know how to go about it. It's not like I can go up to some girl and say "Hey, I'm not interested in a relationship with you but I want some practice. Can I buy you dinner? How about a car?" *pulls out toy car from pocket* Ha, yeah. Oh, but when I was dating Rachel, she got me to read those Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus books. Kind of helpful, but sometimes I wonder if it did more damage than good.

Really, I don't know what to do. There are some other reasons I am not interested in dating right now, but the not being good boyfriend material is the easiest one to explain without hurting feelings.

Work is going well. Today I found out the result of the demonstration.
I don't understand the make-up of the research facility very well. I thought that Stephen had absolute authority over everything, but apparently we are actually funded by the government (or atleast the project I am working on is Government funded). The man who came to watch the project is from the driving committee that decide which projects get money, and which ones do not.

From June 2007, the project I was working on had been marked to be scrapped. After seeing my demonstration, it's being federally funded again.

Yesssss...

I am being paid the maximum amount that I can get for my qualifications. Today I found out that as soon as I graduate, I will be promoted to reflect my qualifications, and then a second promotion immediately after that because the Director was really, really happy with the demonstration.

I don't care if it will be any significant pay difference but I am just elated to get a double promotion. After five years of Games Workshop, after four years of Donut King, I NEVER got a promotion. There was nothing, IS nothing for me to show for those nine years of net work. And now, nine months in to this job, I got two promotions. I made over a million donuts for no difference. I wrote maybe a couple thousand lines of code and made more impact on this world than I ever did before.

Very sobering.

Well if they say the terrible spaghetti hack that I used, the game is over. But if it's stupid, and it works...ah...is it still stupid? >.>;;

Insects: Since deciding on their extermination, I have been keeping a closer eye on their behaviour. There are two different types. A long type that DOES look like a cockroach, and a short fat type that looks like...umm...I don't know. I'll take a photo of them (thanks mum!). I've watched where they like to live, and I've also noticed odd little black dots that look like eggs. When I go shopping on Thursday, I'll grab some roach traps and pop them down in the frequented areas. I plan to spend most of next week scouring the house and cleaning it up. So, if I start to see little roach eggs/poop in some places after I've cleaned it, it will let me know of any bases that I missed.

Ah well I should get back to coding. Bye bye!

Oh, it's on now.

2008-01-14T01:04:00.000-08:00

Those little bastards.

They ate my onions. My ONIONS.

I'm putting the bugs on notice. After my assignment is done, a campaign of insect extermination will begin on a scale not seen since Starship Troopers.

The enemy are desperate and running out of hiding places. I need to scour the entire house and remove any sign of untidiness, seal away all food, clean every surface so not even a speck of resources remain for them to survive upon. Being a little cleaner is not enough; it has only shown me this vile menace exists in greater numbers than I had first imagined.

Make no mistake. This is genocide. I will burn their habitat and destroy their supplies. I will give them no place to survive or hide. I will scour them all from the face of the earth, and I will do it without pity or regret. I do not need to know their name or race. Any that stay in my abode from this Monday, will face a harsh vengeance.

Assignment: I am about 80% done and have picked up 65% of the marks so far.
Fooding: Still good for now. Have cooked dinner every night. Made some work towards lunches, too.
Gym: I really should go to the gym again Wednesday. I want to see how my assignment progress goes tonight and tomorrow first. Although the situation is looking good, I don't want to ruin it by being overzealous.
Warhammer: Notice went out today of the next Apocalypse scale game for two weeks from now, on a Saturday. It's 5000 points. It will be the first time for my new Baneblade to go to war. She won't be going alone; I'll be fielding a Leman Russ Vanquisher (aka 'Sniper tank') to help defend her against enemy armor. I may field some other Space Marine tanks with them, but lots of infantry with good officers is my usual style.
Warcraft: I saved up enough honor and marks to buy the epic shield. It's really tempting to buy it, but if I save up a little more I can get that crazy mace. If I can get a group of four more players, I can get another great shield from half an hours work, so, it's probably better to skip the shield and save for the mace still.

Ok, back to work.

A strange dream

2008-01-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes my dreams solve problems for me, but most of the time they are just random trips through the warp. This dream was a weird conglemeration of Donut King, Tanking, alcohol, my trip to China, and wanting to fly again.

I am driving a Donut King tank. The dream is from the outside perspective, so even though 'I' am driving the tank; my view is as if I am watching a movie. My brother Warren is also in the tank. Through careful application of rum, we are able to make the tank fly. At that point we believed us both to be hallucinating, but later events show that it really happened. We fly the tank from Ireland to an odd island named 'Blue 5'. Then we fly it back again. We land in the middle of some medieval Pagan festival. The tank and Warren promptly vanish. I follow a dark haired girl who is showing me around the village. She shows me the two tanuki that my Auntie Dianne had given me years ago. What are they doing here? I had given them to an English girl named Jesse ten years ago, who had needed the luck more than I did. I fall over. I wake up in the Sydney airport with the people who went to China with me, minus a few faces that I didn't like, and a few new random people to replace them.

My passport is stamped with so many places that I haven't been in RL, most of them signed by the Director of the facility at work, and some by my brother Warren. Blue 5, of course. Ireland. Polynesia. China, again. America, again. Some other places I can't remember.

I go outside of the airport and, oh wait, I am actually in China already. I have forgotten my phrase book so I wander the streets of Wuhan looking for a phrase book shop...never mind that I don't have money to pay for it. As I am walking down the street, I encounter a small group of Chinese girls who are in strange foam animal costumes selling some...thing? Of course I am self conscious (they are cute!) and I realise I am wearing trashy clothes, haven't shaved or combed my hair etc. I say so, the girl says "It's ok, we sell pants, you need pants right?" Of course I need pants! Pants are required at all times, especially when out doors. I know how to say "how much does it cost?" and "I don't understand!" and many other things in Chinese, but not "I don't have any money" so I am lured in to the store.

Aside - you can really piss of Chinese people by greeting them in Japanese, and presumably vice-versa. It's really dangerous for a foreigner to think "Oh that person is Chinese" by looks alone. Always try to listen to them speak first to know for sure.

The store is filled with animals. It's clear that the store doesn't sell pants, it sells clothes made from animal fur (not skins). They have a video of a baby koala (so cute!) growing up and then they - seriously - carefully give the koala a hair cut and use the hair to make the clothes. The Chinese girl is arguing with her manager, but I can't understand what it is about. They ignore me as I wander about the store, and find some children teasing the snakes.
The signs are written in several languages including English.
"Warning - venomous." Over each snake are the species name. "Tiger Snake. Taipan. Cobra." Each of these are, truly, venemous and nasty, angry creatures. So it is with some distress that I am watching children putting their hands in and gleefully being bitten. One of them is walking around with some form of sea snake draping out of his pockets.
A mother of the children happens to walk past and scolds them angrily for misbehaving, blissfully unaware of the mortal danger her children are in. She places her hand on the top of one of the glass cages and the taipan bites her on the hand. I help remove the snake from her limb (it got jammed somehow), then tell them to get to a hospital, and then I wake up.

Anna and I talked briefly about PVP gear in Warcraft last night. She is playing battlegrounds! Awhile back, Kim, Anna and I had some plan to play in the Arena but due to one reason or another *coughexamscough* it never happened. It's really a big cooincidence, but I had just started talking about it yesterday, too. Part of the problem for my character is that there is no PVP reward items for tanks. WoW PVP is focused around doing as much damage as you possibly can in the shortest amount of time while limiting the damage you take. My Paladin can take ridiculous amounts of melee damage, but barely any spell damage and has one of the lowest damage outputs of all characters. If I want to play seriously in a team, I need to change him around a bit. Unfortunately respeccing costs in-game gold. After I finally buy the netherwing mount, respeccing more than once a week becomes viable, but until then I am sticking with protection spec. I enjoy tanking and people always need a tank. I am enjoying being the battlefield medic, too. Even my limited healing ability has turned the tide, and some of my attacks actually work better when I am in 'heals mode'.

Ian from work talked to me more about his guild on Friday. He asked me to transfer my main character over to their server, but I declined, explaining I planned to rejoin my old guild on Area 52 eventually. I said I would roll a new character on Suramar and asked what their guild needed. "Heals and DPS" he said. After some more discussion, I decided on a Shaman. I said I wouldn't start playing until after my assignment was done. More than damage and heals, they need people. They want to run 25-mans. They have finished Karazhan and made some runs in to Zulaman, but he said Zulaman is far too hard without the equipment from Gruul/Serpentshrine Cavern/Magtheridon's Lair to make any appreciatable progress. They did down the first boss so there is some argument that they could farm it for gear, but they don't want to waste the whole guilds time just so one person can get one item once a week.

Well, I should do my assignment. I'll write more later. Bye!

OK, back.

Simple spheres is the result of my assignment. No, it's not finished yet, I still need to add more shapes and the user interface. However, that is showing that my light sources, materials, and polygons are working. I still didn't get the transforms working yet.

I have been taking my camera to work. During the Morialta bush walk, I borrowed my brothers camera. I managed to spot a kangaroo on the way and took some photos. Apologies for the size.

Kangaroo 1
Kangaroo 2
Kangaroo 3
Kangaroo 4
Kangaroo 5
Kangaroo 6
Kangaroo 7

Last Thursday was spectacularly hot, and I spotted a family of magpies taking a break under the shade of a table.

Magpie Family from left to right, mother, baby, and father.

Shot 2

Magpies 3

I also came across this teenaged plover. It's an older version of this little fellow. He was so hot he was trying to hide under some columns, and eventually he gave up and went into this tree.

The photos aren't of very good quality because I am not a very good photographer. I hope with practice, and Ben's advice (for he is a very good photographer) it might improve.

Next time I will photoshop pictures down to a more manageable size.

Some people have said they can't see the kangaroo in those pictures. He is right in the middle of all of them. If people still can't see it, I'll circle him.

u_u;;

2008-01-11T21:03:00.000-08:00

Ah I went to the gym again today.

Oh boy. Ouch.

The first time I only did half a work out. This time I did the full work out, but only half of it. What?

The full set is:
15 minute run
2k metre boat row
2 x 12 30kg weight lift
2 x 12 40kg jumping thing
2 x 12 30kg weight sideways thing
Some stretches
Sit ups omg hate
Very-suspicious-looking-stretch x as many as you can do.

The first time I did all of those things, only half as long as I was supposed to because the trainer was trying to teach me as much about the equipment so that I could go on my own.

So! Today I went on my own.
I did: 2k metre boat row; 10 minutes 23 seconds.
After that, I was trashed. Completely. I was panting and sweating and making sad pathetic 'somebody save me' sounds with 500 metres to go. I made it to the end, then I sort of collapsed on to the ground and just stayed there for a bit.

Then I got up and tried the weights. Last time, I could do it. This time...I don't know, maybe my muscles were tired or something. It was really hard. REALLY hard. I made it to the end and then had a minutes rest. Then I did the second set and ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. That was the end. My hands and legs were shaking. When I tried to move around, I was staggering and had some trouble walking.

I remembered the advice from the instructor. "If you get wiped out, just go to the cardiac machines." I guess he knew I would go all out and destroy myself and be unable to do anything more complicated than walk. So I went over to the strange power armor walking machine and played on that for ten minutes. After then I was having some trouble even just walking in that so I decided to call it quits for the day. I had only been in there for 25 minutes but man. I really went all out.

My first gym goal is to survive to the end!

Food: Still going well so far. This morning I went to make breakfast, though, and vermin had destroyed all the breakfast cereal. That's a real shame. We've had a big problem with ....well...I don't know what they are. I want to say cockroaches but I don't think that is what they are. They are little thin things about half a centimetre to two centimetres long with strange markings on their back. They are cockroach shaped but they die far too easily to be true cockroaches. They climb real well, even up the outside of glasses and so on, and they get in to any unsealed container. If you leave food out - like a plate of meat - to defrost, if you don't seal it airtight in plastic when you come back to it there will be these little buggers all over it.

Saving: I am still on 50% pay due to the holidays so I won't make my target (again u_u). I should be able to stay above the emergency threshold but no extra bonus unfortunately.

WoW: I am not playing it much due to the study, but I ran an instance with Kimi, Jeff, and some pugs today. It was good fun and it went real quick. It was nicely timed, too - I had been headbutting my wall on a roadblock in the assignment and having something to distract that was fun and with my friends really helped. I am not sure if I am going to collect the Season 1 Gladiator gear. None of it is really useful for Protection spec, even in pvp (like it is supposed to). Instead, it looks like their is gear for Shockadin, Retribution, and Holy.

We aren't running arena yet but the reality is I will probably have to respec Mal to play arena. I would like to have a play with him in Protection mode but if we want to play seriously I know what has to happen. However, I did blunder across the best healing mace in the game - better even than the Hand of Eternity - in the S1 arena gear, and so I'm saving up for that. It's so good, it's even better than my current tanking weapon. I need another 10k honor.

Assignment: I am maybe stuck. I have all weekend to try and figure it out and if I don't get it, I will ask the lecturer. Rather, if I can't figure it out, I will go on to something else (since I can skip this part and come back to it) then ask the lecturer on Monday. The way the assignment is structured is that you code the infrastructure first, then the OpenGL drawing, and then the User Interface. Do that for 75% mark. Then the remaining 25% is a number of things that you can choose to do, each worth 5% - make 5 of them work and you get 100% for the assignment. 4 of those are trivial. I can use the Interface I built at work for the assignment, and I've got the OpenGl working. I just need to sort out the infrastructure.

"For the Group object, add code to the draw() method to:
i. Apply the transformation in the transform field of Group to the model
transformation."

As I understand it, this means that I should be taking the Group Transformation and applying it to the objects within the group; however the Group Transformation is specified as the identity matrix:
1000
0100
0010
0001

And transformations have to be specified as an x, y and z translation/rotation/scale. I know you can use a matrix against a vector to modify all the points within the object, but I'm not sure why I have to do it this way. The Group object ALSO includes the x,y,z paramaters that must be plugged in to the matrix. But OpenGL comes with it's own glTranslate/glRotate/glScale commands that can use the provided xyz to do the same thing.

I don't know why the assignment needs me to do it this way. If I can understand WHY there is a difference, then I can figure out what I am supposed to be doing with it...

Myspace? I'd rather eat...MySteaks...

2008-01-09T01:56:00.000-08:00

I went to the gym. My arms and hands are burning so. Short post.

Tuesday night was fail. I took a half hour nap and woke up five and a half hours later. Crap.

http://www.myspace.com/sky_paladin

^^ I now have MySpace. It looks bare and ugly because I didn't do anything with it. Maybe this weekend but probably not anything major.

So, gym. Well. I barely broke out a sweat. I still have some energy left. But damn, I worked hard. I have that dull, burning ache in almost all of my body, and the strenght is gone. Tomorrow will be fail. It's good. I finally went to a gym. Major, major victory.

Right now steaks are cooking for dinner. They are still a little bit frozen. The normal chops thawed out overnight. My guess is the higher quality meat of the steak has more density and therefore needs longer to thaw. But I put them on the hot plate anyway.

Goals...

Well so far I didn't do a great job. I would rate myself about 65% satisfaction. But I still have a good feeling because, even though I didn't accomplish everything, I still accomplished SOME things. I can't expect 100% right off the start. It means, this is working. I am doing things.

Next is. Continue to cook food for dinner, not buy take out. Gym again Saturday. Cleaning Saturday. Two hours study tonight. Three hours tomorrow. Three hours Friday. 12 hours on the weekend.

Once I learned and got good at the basic things, the foundation of a good, healthy lifestyle, I can make some plans for building on it.

Ah, whoops. Looks like my steaks are extra, extra well done.

The first day of the rest of your life

2008-01-07T01:55:00.000-08:00

First things first. I've joined up the local Zest gym. It's kind of pricey, but it's in a good location and the people seem friendly and not scary (much). I have two weeks to decide if I like it and want to stay, so over this time I'll try to check out another gym or two just to compare it.

My original plan was to look for gyms on Saturday. I was kind of antsy because I didn't get to do any study Friday evening, and with my brother over I didn't get much sleep. So I decided to swap my Saturday and Sunday plans around. It was a great idea, up until I went to the gyms on Sunday afternoon to find they closed at noon...oops.

The place was absolutely packed. I found out that Monday is the worst time to go, so I am coming back Tuesday evening, and have a gym instructor on Wednesday who will teach me how to use all of the different machines and sign up for different circuits and so on. It has a swimming pool, too, but I forgot to check for a saunta. There's also a massage parlour right next door. Very handy!

Food: This is going so-so. I had one fail on Sunday when I realised I forgot to buy food for lunches too. So we bought take out that day so late in the afternoon I didn't have dinner. On Friday night, when I came home, there was pizza already there! So that meant I pushed my Friday night dinner to Saturday. I still have to cook dinner for tonight (it's 8:30 pm). I kind of ruined my sleep schedule over the weekend so I am trying to push my staying-awake-ness up til around midnight to fix it.

Study: This is going well. I actually found myself yesterday not wanting to stop (I have a deadline at 11pm) which is a good sign! I'm interested in doing it and after this blog post is dinner, then study. I am not making the three hour study today, and I probably can't manage it with the gym at all, so I won't be doing too much of that just yet. I failed to do two six hour blocks on the weekend and only managed one block.

Cleaning: This is doing poor. The basic housekeeping is good (dishes, laundry) but other important things like sweeping and mopping still have to happen more regularly. That is, they actually have to happen. Also, I really need to think about ironing my shirts.

Saving: Epic fail. I don't want to talk about it.

Goals for this week:
Go to the gym tomorrow to play with some machines.
Go to the gym on Wednesday to talk to the gym instructor and find out what I should be doing.
Three hours study Thursday and Friday, and five hours split between Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Six hours Saturday and Sunday.
Have absolutely zero take out food bought this week.
Sweep and mop the house at least once this week - make it Saturday.

Well, I think that's about it. I'll write up more after the gym on Wednesday, assuming I don't have a heart attack and die on the spot first. It was kind of reassuring that the guy who was interviewing me plays Dawn of War...

WTB non-exploding TV, PST...

2008-01-03T00:28:00.000-08:00

So far so good. I've had too many good starts that ended with a tragic nose dive, though, so I won't be gloating til my assignment is done.

Shopping: Tick.
Haircut: Tick.
Washing: Tick.
Cleaning House: Ti.....mmm...well...I did SOME. More work to do.
6 hours of study: Fail. The haircut and shopping took a lot longer than I planned it to. However, I made up for it somewhat today when I was supposed to be working >.>;;

Shopping went well. I did something I never did before - I took an inventory of what I already had, so that I didn't wind up buying things I didn't need which subsequently went off and had to be thrown out. Surprisingly, I actually had a lot of vegetables. Taking Warren's advice, I bought wholemeal bread. Um. I ate a piece and now I am kind of addicted to it. I just eat it straight from the packet. Bread, hand, mouth, gone. Probably I should put some jam or something on it first but, uh...well...

Today was my first day back at work. It was dead! There are about four staff total, which quickly went down to three when Gerry locked himself out of his own office. Nobody was available to let him back in, so he went back home. A cunning strategy. I'll have to remember it for myself next time. I also took my new camera to work on the off-chance more baby birds were around, but nothing remotely cute showed up today.

The DOORS server was offline, which meant I wasn't able to work on the tools task at all except for moving bits of paper around and putting different colored post-it-notes on other pieces of paper. The rest of the facility are under the impression I designed this system and then started programming. In actual fact I didn't know any of the capabilities of the programming language, so hacked up something first and then retro-designed it around what it could do. It passed the inspection last December by some miracle, but it needs a lot of work to save it from being an endless blackhole of spaghetti code.

The Director has made some indication that they are prepared to send me to the US to get some training in the DOORS program. I expect I will have to pay a big chunk towards it so I am starting to save now.

After I hit 'publish' on this I am going to cook dinner. It's a low quality bachelor meal, just lamb chops, some pasta and boiled vegetables, but it's a hell of a lot better than the usual crap I eat. My eventual goal here is to get in to the habit of cooking dinner, and then I can start to play around with the fun recipes people have been sharing with me.

It's really an active, interesting time for me. I hope I can keep this up. I seem to have a lot more free time than I remembered having, and am feeling more capable and independant. It's only been a few days.

Another thing that I want to share - I am watching an interesting anime series called 'Ghost Hound'. (This is where Anna rolls her eyes, sighs, and says something about watching tv shows for little girls.) Prior to meeting Anna, I was actually part of two clubs - one was AJAS, literally an anime watching club, and the other was JClub, which was supposed to be about Japanese and Australian students doing fun things together but gradually became an offshoot of AJAS. At this point I left it. After my assignment is done, I'll have to invest more effort into looking further than just anime.

Ghost Hound is an interesting one because, on top of the usual supernatural storyline, there is another, normal-human story. The rural village has a brewery and the main character, Tarou, is the only child of the couple that own it. His older sister was supposed to inherit the brewery but died in suspicious circumstances (that are linked to the supernatural storyline). There is a great deal of pressure on Tarou to inherit the family brewery. It's clear even at this early stage that he doesn't want to do it, but feels some great loyalty to his family and will abandon his own (unspecified) dreams to meet his obligation to his family.

At this point in the series, Tarou's Aunt has taken over the brewery, having left her own job to take up the family business. Even people unrelated to the family make comments - a reporter who observed Tarou and his aunt automatically assumed and stated Tarou would be taking over the business when he was old enough, and everybody (even the aunt) agreed.

Shortly afterwards, the aunt and Tarou were talking about yeast and from this conversation, the aunt told Tarou he was never going to be the master brewer (in a polite way).

I'll be very interested to see the next stage of this story.

I'm well aware that tv is not a good way to learn about another culture; but right now I can't devote enough time to do it the right way.

So. I reached my time limit. It's time to make dinner. See you next time.

--EDIT
The television made this sound: *CRACK* then the picture went all funny.
Then the ominous smell of smoke, closely followed by actual smoke.
So Shane turned the TV off. Somehow he broke my TV with just the power of his mind. Very impressive. I'd be angry, except he gave me that TV for my birthday. What he hath given, he can also taketh away...

La-la-la-la-lasagne!

2008-01-01T00:08:00.000-08:00

So, this is 2008. So far it's just been unbearably hot. My little unit doesn't have air conditioning. The closest thing we have is when Shane leaves the fridge open too long. He just stands there, staring into the empty vastness of it all, his soulless eyes black and devoid of hope. We have some milk in there that expired a week ago. I haven't had the heart to throw it out, because while it's been there, it looks like the fridge actually has something in it.

It's time for a big shopping spree. I actually went shopping a few weeks -

SUDDEN NEWS FLASH

- Shane tells me that he bought new milk. IT IS ACTUALLY IN DATE!

...
Anyway.

Some person said to me my goal of finishing my assignment isn't steps to a goal. It's better if I say "I will invest x hours per day" towards the assignment. Because, right now, the assignment is my excuse to not do anything - for example, not going out at New Years. Well, I never thought about it that way, but they were right!

I have six weekend days, today, and one holiday tomorrow. I also have 12 week days left.

I think a good amount of time to spend is six hours per weekend/holiday, and three hours per week night. That's a total of seventy two hours to work on an assignment that is supposed to take fourty hours, and I already did all the book readings and started on the programming. I will re-evaluate this time allotment Monday 7 to see if I am sticking to the time allotments, and if I will actually finish in time. The reason for this time division is to force me to have a definite time block that I will be working on my assignment - I can then add in time around that block for other things. Such as shopping, tidying the house, getting a haircut, etc, etc, as well as having some fun time and meeting and talking with friends.

Gym - the 'objective met' part of this was to find some gyms. I found six. The next step is to actually visit some of them and pick one or go to some of the free trials they have. I am going to put down for Saturday from 12-5 as 'visit at least three gyms'. One of them is at the aquatics centre, so I'll make sure to go there and have a swim afterwards.

Also, I really need a haircut. I am going to do some shopping tomorrow so I will see about getting a quick trim then.

For today, I am going to work another two hours on the assignment, then stop for dinner, wash my clothes, then sit down and chill out for the rest of the evening.

Well, it's 2008. Welcome to the New Year everybody.

In the desert you can remember your name

2007-12-31T01:09:00.000-08:00

Once more, to battle. I have been granted a deferred assessment.

What does it mean?

It means that, even though I failed one of my subjects this semester, I am allowed to redo one assignment. It means that I get one more chance to graduate this semester. Normally I seem to leave all of my assignments to the last minute. This time, I already started. This assignment is due January 20. I am going to make it.

Well, I completed the 'find a gym' step from below. My next objective is to complete my assignment so that University is DONE and I can put it behind me forever.

I had some problem with this assignment because I reached a hurdle I could not clear. I cleared that hurdle half an hour ago, and I am so excited and hyperactive I can't focus. So I am writing here to burn off my energy so that I will calm down and start working again. It is kind of a boring way to spend New Years Eve.

This world is a wonderful place. Even a desert is not devoid of a heartbeat. You can hear it if you know how. The quiet, unending heat, when the wind has paused for a moment - allow the knowledge of that place, the timelessness of it all, to wash over you and your place in the vast infinity of the ultraverse. At the same time you are both insignificant and the center of everything.

There is something amazingly refreshing about letting go of something that you had been holding on to. It doesn't matter any more.

Every sunrise the desert changes. The dunes have moved, the sand has shifted, footprints are erased and replaced anew. Cast something off there, and the world will bury it and forget it for a time. Also sins, regrets...for four billion years the deserts have been quietly harbouring what the rest of the world cannot.

I have great love for this world. I want to protect it.

Sticks and Stones

2007-12-17T01:31:00.001-08:00

Some person said something like this to me, not so long ago.

"You are always trying to do everything. You are full of energy and enthusiasm, and you know that if you put your mind to anything, you can do it! But, you try to do EVERYTHING all at once. It's impossible. A person can't run in two directions at once. It's the same with these things. If you put your plans in an order you can achieve them one after the other. A person who is always running to do everything becomes too tired to enjoy the reward when they finish."

Another person said,

"Because you are always saying you are going to do something, and never do it. You get excited about it, and even make some plans to do it, but for one reason or another you never finish what you began."

Another person very dear to me said, long ago,

"Because you are incompetent and unreliable."

Some person said to me,

"Because you are so used to not succeeding, you started to give up without even really trying. You are used to getting no reward for your effort. How long would any person stay in a situation where all their work was meaningless to others? And you stayed there for almost four years out of 'loyalty'. Why would people who are your 'friends' treat you like that? Because you taught them to do it. You didn't think you deserved any better."

I said, in July,

"so often I have had to hide from people I care for because I could not bear to see the disappointment in their eyes when I told them I had failed them."

One last thing.

"The part where you fail is because you're too scared to even plan because you think if you plan you commit - and if you commit your time, it means you can't do other things. But you don't realise that by not planning, you're actually doing none of the fun things. Nobody can do everything. You have to choose what you want."

I want to do many, many things, but I don't do any of them.

The advice some other person gave to me was, "Just write down what you want to do. Pick the easiest thing to start. You don't even have to intend to do it. Just make some plan about it. Once you have a plan, it's something that you can build off of. Even if it just to drop it later and do something else...but for God's sake, pick SOMETHING. Every day you don't do anything, is a day that you didn't take a step towards your dream."

So, I know what I want.

Really, I know what I have to do, too. Really my excuse of 'oh I am lazy' is a lie also. It's because I was scared of what it meant of moving forward.

My goal for this week is to look for gyms. I won't necessarily pick one. But I can definately call up some gyms and find out their prices and locations. That's something, right? It's a simple, simple easy goal. If I can do even just one simple thing, it's still a real, real thing, and I can build off of it for something better.

I want to write a lot more but I don't want to be a person who says "I will do this" and then not do it. That is who I am now. So instead of saying "I will do this" I will say "This is what I am doing" and then "This is what I did." I am starting with one thing at a time.

"I am going to find a gym to go to."

Really I am not overweight but I want to have better stamina, strength and endurance. I don't have any goal at the gym. I didn't even find one yet. I'm going to look for some gyms, and find one. That's all.

A lot of the things those people said to me were hurtful but they were also true. Words are...words are all I seem to do. I want to live in the real world with other people, now.

Final Battle Between Good and Evil

2007-11-21T04:36:00.000-08:00

Now is a good time to play catch up, and also to respond to Sarah, below.

The last cast of the die has been made. Some time soon I will find out if I have finally graduated from University, or if I am doomed to once more spend six months of my life redoing subjects that I already should have passed. I'm desperately hoping for the former. My last exam was last night.

The last weekend was kind of rough for me. I quit my Warcraft guild. You could compare it to leaving, say, a sports club - that is the same kind of emotional attachment I had to it, except there were some people there that were good friends of mine. Leaving the guild makes it much harder to play with them, as I already saw tonight. Running around areas solo where normally I would have good companions leaves a bitter, hollow feeling in my heart. Already there have been numerous offers from people to have me join their guild (since my character class is kind of useful) but I think I'm going to stick to playing solo for a week or two.

The prototype for the tools task is due Friday. After this is done, magically all my time comes back to me, and I can start doing this -> having a life. One of the first things I need to do is go to a dentist. For some reason, this last month my gums have suddenly started receding. I brush my teeth every day (twice most of the time). My breathe is fine, my teeth are white, but something is really wrong.

Stan tried to pursuade me to go sailing with him some Wednesday nights. Actually, I admit it looks kind of fun, but he chose some poor footage - a 17 foot yacht in four metre swell, where the crew were being thrown around all over the railings - to demonstrate it. Coming in to the office limping and complaining about all his bruises didn't help. This is 'fun'. Later he showed me some footage of a pod of dolphins that came to play with them though. That was kind of neat! There was even a little baby dolphin, maybe fifty centimetres long. So cute!

Stan also tried to cure me of ever wanting to fly again, demonstrating some military aircraft accidents.
Don't fly in:
An Osprey.
A Caribou.
Any kind of aircraft being crash tested against a reinforced steel wall.

I think that's about it. Yep. Other than keeping my head down and focusing on my exams, I didn't really get up to much lately. Oh, I did a big clean up of the house and my room on the weekend. It sure is nice being able to see the floor.

Knowledge should never be wasted.

2007-11-16T15:10:00.000-08:00

There was some problems with the report so I nuked it. I intend to put a revised version up at a later date.

"Where's the content?" Sarah asked. If only she knew how prophetic those words would be.

Chicks dig me.

2007-11-07T23:55:00.000-08:00

So, what is this thing up above my text? Well there's nothing there now because it was causing people on dialup to go in to road rage and kill people. I can't have that on my soul. If people are dying because of me, I want to be personally doing it.

But you can visit here instead.

It's a fun little personality thing that Dani or Kimmy found (I can't remember who, please feel free to correct me). I'm looking forward to seeing The Golden Compass; and if you know me you know I enjoy reading and I enjoy both fantasy and science fiction.

One of the main reasons I wanted to make computer games was to create a universe in of my own understanding, to design people and characters to portray and live out things that were important to me. It's kind of selfish, really, maybe you can empathise - have you ever been reading a book, and 'felt' like you were the main character(s) and wanted them to do things differently?

Anyway, lately I've been a bit too self-centred in my online group and I'm trying to be more thoughtful of others. It's difficult because I don't get any feedback unless I make a big mistake. But that's normal in real life too, right? Friends don't come up to you and say, "Great job, person xxx! You're really acting like a normal person lately!" The people just stop contacting you or inviting you to places or avoiding you.

(See, that's my problem! Always having to 'act' normal, or 'act' mature.)

I like to be around people, but I also know lately I have been a bit of a grouch and snappy and spiteful to people. I'm not entirely sure of the reason. I'd like to blame it on not so much sleep or relaxation time, but then if the situation is the same after my exams are done I have no excuse. I have some other ideas, so, I will try to 'act like normal' for a little longer.

Anyway, I work in a two story building that is in a big U shape. I work at almost the very bottom of the U. On Monday, I heard plaintive chirps coming from directly above me. After some investigation, I discovered a baby bird had somehow fallen through the corrugated iron roof and been caught in the insulation partition in between the roof and the interior ceiling tiles.

The roof in my office doesn't have these tiles, so it's impossible to break through the ceiling to the bird. But the outside corridor did. I lifted up one of the tiles (think Jurassic Park, when Dr Grant and the children are escaping from the raptors through the ceiling right before the Tyranasaurus appears) but couldn't see the baby, I could only hear it. I slipped the roof tile back so there was a few inches of light piercing up through the loft, then put a cardboard box on top of the ladder.

A few minutes later, the 'cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep!' became very loud. I walked out, and lo! The baby had leaped to freedom.

We deduced that the baby had come from the roof, so we organised for some of the security services guys to take it up to the ceiling where the babies parents were surely going nuts. Well, a bird did attack, but later we discovered it was unrelated to the baby. So we contacted animal welfare who came out and picked it up.

Seems the baby is a plover, a bird that lives near lakes and other bodies of water, and feeds off of grubs and worms it can find from the land. The babies are supposed to be able to fend for themselves after a few hours of hatching. The University has an animal barn thing where some animals are kept and initially the bird was going to be kept there, but later it was decided that it would be better to look after it until it was big enough to survive safely and then be released.

The next day, there was another baby! This one started at one side of the U and walked all the way around down to my office. We could hear it chirping softly for half an hour or so as it made its way around. It must have been a marathon for the newly hatched chick. I don't know why my office is popular for birds, maybe they know I am helpless against baby animals.

This one also fell for the 'leave a big gap in the ceiling' trap, only it missed the box and fell about two and a half metres to the ground. Amazingly, it got right up and demanded attention, with no apparent damage. I had Rusty's camera for this one; so I'll post an image of it later. It really was tiny, both birds were essentially small balls of fluff with two legs and a beak sticking out.

I took it over to the welfare office. The official result for the two birds is they are being kept in an incubator until they are big enough to fly (so they aren't auto-meat for the first cat that sees them) and they are getting the best grubs and worms that the officers have on hand. Some of the girls in the office were really sad to see the birds go away (they already named them 'Cedisc' and 'Dasi', after the two research groups where I work) and I have to admit I was :( :( :(. They really were too cute for words.

Anyway, I should be studying for my exam on Saturday...

The smallest light shines brightest in the darkest hour

2007-10-30T00:46:00.000-07:00

Before, I said I didn't post because I had been too lazy. Well, from that moment on, I've been working as hard as I ever have in my life. I love it. What I am doing, at work and at uni, are things, real things, that are letting me flex my mental muscle. I'm building things. I'm learning stuff. I'm becoming the person I wanted to be. I'm really happy.

Some important dates:
Monday 5 November: My final assignment, ever, is due.
Saturday 10 November: Exam for Data Modelling and Database Design.
Tuesday 20 November: Exam for Computer Graphics.

Then I'm done.

---
Of course it's not all been fun and games. I ran out of time for my assignment because I am fail at vector maths, but the lecturer was kind enough to grant me an extension. I've had some problems with some of the people in my online community, and although it is not yet resolved the pressure has been removed so I can relax for now. I had a difficult situation with a woman who had some problem accepting no and ate up more of my time than I was willing to give her. I met up with my old boss Monika, expecting a fight but instead having a great night, and an easy peace to get the things from her that she still owed me.

---

Meanwhile, in the war torn future of the 41st Millenium, Rusty and I are playing our first battle of Warhammer 40,000: Apocalypse. 6,300 points each, my valiant Dark Angels are holding their ground against the Blood Angel assault. Photos will be up later. At the moment it is the start of turn 3 with the battle looking decisively in my control. But at the end of turn 1 it looked like Rusty was going to win. The game is not yet done.

---

I don't have any great one liners or some 'wisdom' to share from this one. I've just been working hard, and the end draws near. Soon, soon, I can do all those things that I wanted to do that, that I wrote about before when I first knew that this time could come. Good friends that I didn't see enough of are waiting. Lessons that I still want to learn, are in books that I own but haven't the time to open yet.

Just a few more days.

Take care and be well.

Let's do the Time Warp again!

2007-09-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

My habit of writing epic posts means that I tend not to write very often, and then dump the whole thing down in one massive post. It's not very effective because I forget stuff, and people quickly get bored from reading a massive slab of text.

So! Things that have happened since the last blog that I want to write about, and will update over the next week or so (in different posts so that I actually write it):

Meeting Anh, going shopping!
Briony's Barossa Fire of DOOM
Sarah's Pirate Party (Arr!)
Obligatory Warcraft commentary and guild drama
Spending too much on those damn warhammer things again
Getting back in to fencing (ouch)
Successful home brain surgery on a lamb
The Windriver Conference.

Also, I've started writing a short murder mystery entitled Inspector Dev over at the Relic Warcraft guild page. Almost all of it is reliant on some kind of knowledge of Warcraft, so don't expect it to make any kind of sense if you've never played it.

Work is going well. I was asked to sign a non disclosure agreement so I can't talk about one of the two projects that I am on. This Friday I get to demonstrate my code again to the customer. Today, we put William's code and my code in to the same program for the first time. Surprisingly, it still works, although there's no strong links between the two packages just yet.

Ah well I promised to keep this short. Next time I'll write about something on that list, or some other thing that I happen to think of.

Sorry for the big delay. I'd like to say something impressive like "Oh, I was too busy" but the truth is I just stayed up too late playing games or watching TV. Although I did go to a pirate party. That was really cool.

And hiccups. I had hiccups. But they're gone now.

The goggles do nothing

2007-08-29T03:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I reached a new low point in my life. A land of horror that I thought I would never come across.

Too sick. To play. Computer games.

A lot has happened!

So, where to begin.

Ah, not a good place to begin, but a fun story I wanted to share. One day (about five minutes ago) I was sitting on Rusty's bed drinking cola. Cola has special and mysterious effects on me ever since I got over the cola addiction from 1995-2003. Suck some of that down and POW I'm a different man. We're talking almost Pop-Eye here. It's cured headaches, lethargy, and temporarily staved off the evil hiccups for now, too. Well, after I disturbed Rusty's online friend (Rusty went away to buy dinner. His lady friend left the keyboard. So of course I wrote some messages to her. The usual stuff like "hay there is a spider in your room! Oh noes its hiding! No wait it's getting more of its friends OH MY GOD THEY'RE IN YOUR BED" and then a few more of the more surreal things like "If you set fire to your bed, make sure to keep your escape route clear. Also, it's OK to get one last nap while the mattress is burning for old times sake." But then Rusty came back. Sigh) I said, "So, I am going to pour this cola on your bed. Then you will have to sleep in my bed tonight. How will this story end?" to which Rusty replied "This story has no beginning." Well, conversations like this - between brothers - are much more for the benefit of some unfortunate person who happens to over hear, but there was nobody around so I decided to share it all with you.

Ok. So what DID happen?

Well, it started with hiccups on Friday evening at 5 pm! We had all gone down to the local bar to have drinks with Lyn E, who was having her eight 22nd birthday. I was still recovering from the flu, so I only had something light - just a glass of coke - and the moment the sacred liquid touched my lips, POW. Hiccups.

I stayed pretty late with Lyn E, Frances, and Tony and they tried to invite me to their dancing classes. It's a pretty good idea and I would like to do it, just as soon as I get myself organised and have time for it. I spoke a lot before about wanting to get better at house work and cooking and I have made no progress - my excuse so far is omg blah sick, but an adult would do it so I should too. Well I am a little hard on myself, I did some washing and cleaning that normally I wouldn't do, but it's nowhere near where I want it to be yet.

The flu was leaving me fatigued and with no appetite. I didn't want to eat. I could just manage to drink water, and some various fruit drinks. I managed a smoothie, but that was about it. So I spent most of that time going to bed very early, so tired, and then I woke up Saturday and still had hiccups.

I can't really remember much of the weekend. I think I spent nearly all of it in bed sulking, kind of like what I did the weekend before it. I must have done some work though. I also had a lot of fun playing WoW with Ves. We got to do some crazy battles in Nagrand, and also finally Mana Tombs! We finally got the pants we wanted from Shaffer, but tragedy! Mal already had better ones than those. Then we went to fight at Nagrand, got so many tokens and tragedy! Mal already had better belt and pants :/ So annoying! I should learn to look up where all the good item improvements are for him and make a plan to get them.

Well, Sunday evening I visited Rusty for his birthday. We were going to go tank shopping (because we both need a heck of a lot more tanks for Warhammer Apocalypse. I used to have the biggest armor section in the state, but moving house so many times and people buying pieces means suddenly my armor section is not up to the task of fighting against multiple opponents anymore. Most of the time it was Rusty and Sky versus everybody else (And we would win!). We have different battle strategies that complement each other surprisingly well. He likes to run up and hit things. I like to run up and shoot things. In the world of 40k, these kinds of strategies are very effective when used togther.) but he was in hospital so instead I brought him KFC and a whole truckload of lollies. I also got him some super rare forgeworld Terminator shoulder pads. Hmm, we should get some of the pictures of these things up on line so you guys can finally see what the zoik I am rabbiting on about.

Anyway, the nurses were giggling so much about my hiccups that they told me to go down to emergency and get them looked at. Emergency? For hiccups? Well...since the ward was boring, Rusty and I went down and spent a few hours in Triage. We met Ben, an old friend of mine from a supermarket, and his girlfriend who had bad migraines. After a few hours my hiccups went away, so we packed up. As I was starting to walk home, my hiccups came back, only, this time really badly. They started to chain together 5-10 at a time, and I couldn't breathe. My arms started to go numb and my chest was hurting. I couldn't talk properly to the service station attendant. So I turned around and went back to hospital for another few hours in Triage, but again the hiccups went away after a few hours. So I went home again, and omg, possum! It was sitting in the side of the road drinking water from a puddle. It looked up and saw me and said, "OMG, human!" and jumped in to the tree. Now, it thought it was hiding real well. Actually it was hiding at about my chest height, so I thought, "I wish I had a camera so I could take a picture for Nozomi." Then I remembered! I had a mobile phone camera. So I carefully took a video of the possum. After the film ran out, she decided I wasn't paying enough attention to her, so she ran off. Well, she sure was cute! But....then my hiccups came back O_o

So Monday was a bad day.
I was hiccuping and coughing all morning and annoying my workmates. I felt so embarassed. Eventually I got to the doctors at 2pm and the doctor said, "Well, I have no idea. Try this medicine, sometime it helps." It was Largactil. He also said I would be trashed all Monday night and Tuesday because of it, so, that was the end of work that day. I don't really remember much of Tuesday at all.

Today my hiccups were gone when I woke up so I got dressed and went to work super early! I had been planning to go to the hospital so there would be no triage delay, so I got to work at 7:20 am! It's only an hour and 40 minutes early, hmm! My boss is sure to be impressed.

But then the hiccups came back at about 9:30 am. Ahhh...so I had to go to the hospital after all. Well the triage at Modbury said 7 hours but I got looked at in four. They took some blood, gave me an injection, and gave me an xray. The nurses were very cute! They tried to scare me into losing the hiccups, but unfortunately it didn't work. Eventually a kind elderly women told me that she had a sure fire hiccup cure. Well, by now I would try anything! So she held my nose and a cup of water and I drank it while using my hands to block up my ears. Success! Unfortunately they came back as soon as I left the hospital, and I couldn't get it to work again for me later...

So that gets me to now. I'm glad Rusty is out of hospital, I missed him. I'm sick of being a big sulk, always being 'uuuu I have flu or hiccups' and just want to get better and be more cheerful. There's lots of fun things I want to do and being in bed sick is really boring.

Medical emergency!

2007-08-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

On my way back from the hospital after visiting Rusty and getting my hiccups looked at (72 hour hiccups is just silly) I was attacked! I managed to get the attacker on video though. I'll write more when I'm not at work.
But you have to download it :/

He aint heavy, sir.

2007-08-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

I must precede all of this before I forget with this: For some reason I can't log in to facebook. I can't even access the parts to search to find other people or even verify my account still exists. I've had no response from the facebook unit at this point except for an automated 'zounds! Check the help section!' which I did, and the help section said 'e-mail us about it!'. So. I'll try again later today.

I have been sick the last few days. In all likelihood I picked it up from one of the many thousands of children (there was supposed to be close to twenty thousand) that came past the UniSA booth where I was demonstrating the virtual reality equipment, but I choose to blame William because he exhibited the same symptoms as I did. This kind of logic causes a problem for me very shortly as you will see.

I spent most of the weekend sulking and useless in bed. Shane was terrific, checking to make sure I was still alive, occasionally bringing me panadol and coke or other little things, and even cooking me dinner Sunday night. He shuffled me out of bed a few times to drag his zombie brother around for various things, like going to the airport to farewell Julia, doing some shopping, doing some laundry, etc and so on. He's a good kid.

Monday I was still feeling pretty crap. I am terribly hungry all of the time but have no appetite. If I sit down and concentrate I can eat but it takes a long time and I am really only eating about a third of what I normally eat. Now, I eat too much normally, so maybe this is a good thing! I haven't had a custard tart in...well...ages! But it means I have no energy so when I drove home Monday night I was fatigued and decided to take a nap in my car. I didn't get home til 8pm and when I did, Shane was sick with the same thing I had. It looks like I had passed the bug on to him.

Well, for a guy like me being sick isn't really a problem. Of course I whine and complain because I am a child and want sympathy. Shane doesn't whine or complain. The only time Shane ever complained, ever, without someone first asking 'How do you feel?' was the time when he muttered, "oh, my hip hurts." A little later the doctors discovered he had septic arthritis and every step must have been blinding agony for him. For a kid that grew up in a world of pain, whose playmates and friends and then best mates and girlfriends who have almost all died now from cystic fibrosis, or juvenile cancer, luikemia, or some other terrible juvenile disease, to complain because your leg hurts? How could you even say it, in a place where every room was filled with a families own private tragedies, where simply walking from the entrance of the Womens and Children's Hospital to your brothers room showed you countless glimpses into other peoples lives tinged with sorrow and anger. 'My leg hurts'...."My leg is amputated because of gangrene." "I am paralysed from waist down because I have a brain tumor." "I am mentally disabled." "I am going to die in six months." When your world is already filled with so much pain, a little more is nothing to cry about.

Children in long term medical care are different. They see the world with different eyes. They understand things differently. Something like 'the value of life' has a different meaning.

At 11:40pm Monday night, Shane came in to my room. If I had of been fully awake, I would have picked up the laser gun Dani sent me and shot him repeatedly - I often sneak in to his room at night and do it anyway - to ask me to call an ambulance for him. So I did! Meanwhile, he stood there bent over double trying to breathe. It sounded probably how bagpipes would come out if you tried to play them underwater. Afterwards, Shane said I could go back to sleep, and he staggered off back to his room. Still barely conscious, I mumbled to him to close the door. After a moment I realised, "Oh, I just called an ambulance for him, perhaps I should at least pretend to care some," but by then he had closed the door. So I got up and flagged down the ambulance and then he was gone.

Well, he has been in intensive care since Monday night and is still there now, Wednesday morning. He was really sick. I don't understand the medical terminology so well, but mum who is a nurse said that the carbon dioxide levels in his blood were very high (which is bad).

Mum stayed at my house last night. We drank champagne. I had a very small amount since anything slightly acidic is like drinking nails right now, and she cooked me dinner. All morning she has been doing housework. How could I have been so slack? I never noticed it properly at home, I think. But now I am noting what she is doing, and how she is doing it, and......just by being organised, she is getting so much done in such a short time it's amazing. I always thought...something like this would take a whole day, so, I wouldn't do it very often. But mum has cleaned the kitchen, cleaned my room, done a load of washing, cleaned up a chunk of the loungeroom, called dad, called Shane, organised my bills, and all of that in the three hours this morning. Next up we are going to get my car rego and buy new pillows for my bed. I made an appointment for a haircut this evening, too. I wonder if I'll make it? And right now she is organising Shane's bathroom bag kit thing, shaving gear, underarm deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, so many things...I wouldn't have thought of it.

She also cooked an excellent meal with four ingredients (and chicken! I've never cooked chicken before) in fifteen minutes that looked superb. Mum made all of it look so simple, so easy. Of course I know it isn't. But so many things, so little time...she did all of it.

So I watched and tried to learn.

Why didn't I do it as a kid? I don't understand. I learned all the things Dad showed me. I can cut down a tree. I can mow the lawn. I can use almost any tool. I can do simple plumbing, I know how to make things out of wood and steel. I know first aid. I am skilled with rope, knots, tents, bushcraft...and I'm REALLY good with lighting fires. But I'm terrible at cleaning and cooking. Mum tried to show me when I was a kid. I can remember it. Is my mind really that different now? Why didn't I learn it? Ironing, washing, vacuuming, wiping, dusting, sewing, mopping...all these things are just as important as knowing how to use a hammer or how to remove a wasp hive from your door frame (don't use a hammer). How could I have lived so long and not know how to do it all? Basic, sustained housekeeping? It really is unacceptable. I made some small changes because of Anna's good suggestions, but it's not enough.

Well, there is a fierce determination behind my mothers operation. I can see it is not an easy thing in what she does. She's really organised. Super organised. It's how she can do so many things all at once. And she's been doing it for a long, long time. She said a lot of other things last night about the differences between the gender when they are 'looking after' someone, and also some of her experiences as a midwife. I can't expect to be perfect overnight. But I saw how much she did in such a short time and how much of an improvement she made.

I guess I'm ashamed about it, really. For so long I laughed and made some joke about it, but it's not really funny at all, is it?

The Fairest of them All

2007-08-17T03:30:00.000-07:00

Today was staff photos.

Despite my best efforts (to the point that I actually made an appointment. An APPOINTMENT. Usually I just stroll in and these people make time for me. This used to be because my awake hours where I could do things was generally the down time for everybody else. But now there's huge competition for those precious few hours after work is done and the shops closing) I still didn't get a hair cut.

This is rather tragic as my hair has become long and dangerous. Small birds have been known to attempt to set up a nest, only to be devoured by the teeming horde of spiders already living there.

This was compounded by the weird angle that the photos had to be taken on. I had to sort of stand side on and look at the camera. Some people, ah, looked really quite...scary. On the other hand, I just look like I was out in the sun for too long. And I have a slightly creepy grin.

So, it's down to three choices:

Camera- Person-Had-The-Shakes-Sky

Actually -I-have-a-splitting-headache-could-you-please-hurry-this-up-before-I-destroy-everything-Sky

Or

I -am-not-filling-my-pants-with-urine-honest-Sky.

Choices, choices.

I'm kind of thinking of the not-peeing-my-pants-Sky, but I also kind of like the faint hint of Doom in the my-world-is-pain-Sky.

If you want to photoshop in a better picture - you know, I always wanted a MacGuyver hair style, or a Magnum PI moustache - I'll see if I can get it posted up on the staff notice board instead.

Hmm. Drinking this MacDonalds coke has made my headache go away. I wonder what it can mean.

Tonight I am at my friend Drew's house. We occasionally get together and play Unreal Tournament. Drew has a friend whose real name eludes me, but goes through the game as "Jedillama", whom I most often encounter with the text message, "Sky_Paladin was gunned down without pity or regret by Jedillama" or "Jedillama is on a killing spree." That guy is invincible. The only time I can take him down is if I am wrapped in a tank.

Also, tonight I am having my first martini.

Drew should know better. One pair of shoes in the floor Sky picture belong to him.

Right now they are using their fel Linux loving powers to do some kind of penguin voodoo magic "which isn't working terribly well for some reason." Oh ho ho. It is because my virtuous Windows machine is fighting the good fight for justice, freedom, and...ah....well...I would like some more coke.

Ok. Time to go. Bye!

Groundhog Day

2007-08-15T02:28:00.000-07:00

I'm looking at the things that seem to be happening in my life - the things that involve other people, friendships, relationships...it seems like a lot of the stuff that happened ten years ago is starting to come around again. Situations that I have been in before. Things that I have done before. Choices that I made the 'safe' choice and did nothing and now they are happening again.

Some of it is good. Old friends I haven't seen for a long time are suddenly appearing out of the wood work all at once. None of it is bad, except...now I am wondering if I made the right decisions the first time.

I think doing something for the sake of stubborness is the worst kind of foolishness. For example - for a long time I did not drink alcohol. I didn't have any real reason not to, except just this general feeling it would be a bad idea. I tried to justify it first by backing it up with religion, then by always wanting to be the responsible person, but the truth was I was afraid that if I got drunk I would do something stupid and lose the new friends that I had. But that was a good reason. Even though later I did try some alcohol and I did some very silly things, that isn't the point. The reason wasn't, "I am not going to drink alcohol because I have never tried it before." Some other Christians say that drinking alchohol is bad, and so they never touch it; and that if they ever did it it would somehow ruin all the times in their life before it and that it would make them bad. I think it's ok to say 'No I don't want to do this because I am afraid of it' but 'no I don't want to do this because if I do, it will invalidate my decisions not to previously' is a poor reason.

I didn't know it, but my mother was very proud of me for not drinking alcohol at all. This was not the reason I didn't drink; it was the fear that I would lose control. I was afraid of what I might do to myself or other people.

I am looking at the events slowly building up around me and - although different faces, different names - things seem eerily familiar. Will I make the same decisions I made in the past? Well, I am older now, and my feelings and motives are different.

Dana would say, "This is your opportunity to fix the mistakes you made in your past." That I could somehow undo the things that I regret by achieving my goals in these new circumstances. However these things that are happening were not mistakes. They were situations where my life could have taken a different turn, followed a slightly different path. Choices. Choices where, there was no 'the right thing' or better or worse. Choices like...what is my favourite colour?

Choices, choices.

In Groundhog Day, the man had to get the best ending of the day to break out of the endless cycle. Now, I am not comparing myself to that, and I certainly do not have infinite time. I already made my choice, and I am seeing how the pieces line up against it. The last time, I didn't stick to my decision and my world crumbled.

Was it a warning, an opportunity for lessons to be learned? Or is this just a cooincidence, and I am reading too much in to it? That by thinking like this, I am seeing extra links that do not actually exist.

Am I a fool for ignoring the signs, or a fool for seeking signs?

Science will find a way

2007-08-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

Every night before I go to bed, I have a number of things that I do. One of these things is make sure that there are no monsters under my bed. My plan as a child was always to have so much garbage under there, that it was impossible for any monster to fit. When I was in China, a street merchant sold me a tai-chi sword for the princely sum of 20 yuan. It converted out to about four American dollars. This epic weapon travelled wrapped up in a newspaper with me for one month across all of China, from the beautiful majestic cliffs of the Three Gorges river, through the perilous mountain tops and bamboo forests, on the tightly packed train for three days. Where I went, it went, where I slept, it rested, always by my side, together to victory.

On my return to Australia, a terrible thing happened. The air crew wouldn't allow me to take the sword on to the plane. It had to go on as stowage. I wept as the sword was taken away because I feared for its safety, and my fears were founded. When I next saw it, the haft of the weapon had been severed from the blade - cut clean so that it couldn't be used to strike someone.

And so it was for years, merely a costume prop for various exhibitions, sometimes held together by as little as masking tape or even super glue.

Until one day, deep in the bowels in the Womens and Children's Hospital, an ancient dwarf weaponsmith took the fractured parts of this courageous sword, and mended them together once more. As I lifted the completed weapon to test its cut against the rays of light that streamed in through the dust covered windowsill, the smith said to me, "The spirit of the sword lives strong, but the body is broken. Never more can it strike mortal flesh or a solid thing." I knew then on this day that the weapon had been transformed from a common thing, a mere trinket, in to a legendary force of destruction; a demon killing sword, the bane of evil.

To this day, the sword rests by my bed, ever vigilant to smite the darkest creatures that dare try to take place under my bed. That is, if there was room for them...

After I make sure my base is safe, I check my e-mails, visit the various web sites, and then drink half a glass of rum to help me sleep. Well, no, not really. Rum doesn't help me sleep. It helps me find the floor, yes, and what a comfortable floor it is, but sleep isn't necessarily what I do there. In fact it's a good day if I don't drown on my own saliva. If you find Sky passed out on the ground, please be kind and roll him on his side. Thank you.

Well it's almost one am and I am getting up at 7:30 am. Why? Well, that's a good question. I don't know why. So, I'll set my alarm to 8. That's a much better idea.

Tomorrow my dad is getting out of hospital after having had surgery on his spine. I don't know the exact details, mum who is a nurse and knows important medical words like 'morphine;' could probably clarify. Actually, that reminds me.

Mum said something like, "Actually I worked on a career to be an IT professional." HOW DID YOU WIND UP AS A MIDWIFE? Can I look forward to it? Oh, here is an awkward story to share with you all. It starts well: My mother graduated from Nursing, and then went back and did another year (right?) to become a Midwife. So we went to attend the midwife graduation ceremony. As you probably know, different faculties have different colored robes and stuff. An odd thing, only women had become midwifes this year. This minor detail isn't important right now.

After the ceremony, we took lots of pictures of mum in her flash Graduate Midwife robes. Maybe she has some online? You can put them up here if you like. Well, I had to return the robes and hat and colors to the University office. It seemed like a good idea to wear it, after all, since everyone else was walking around in their Graduate gear and it would be fun to see what I would look like when I, too, am a graduate one day.

So imagine the looks of horror on the faces of the people who knew what the colours for the midwife graduate robes were when they saw a boy walking around in the same colours. Yes. So, I, ah, took the robes off. Mmmm. Awkward? Yes. Awkward is a very good word.

Fortunately my younger brother Matthew was present and I was able to make him wear/carry them and he was blissfully unaware of what I had done to him.

So, please give details for dads situation...?

Well, as far as I understand it, he's doing well but the next couple of weeks will be frustrating because he has very limited mobility. For a person who always seems to be working on a project and is very active, I think it will be very frustrating for him. Although I can easily spend all day reading a book or playing a game or...ah...just laying in bed sleeping, I guess...I don't think that is the kind of thing dad can do. I think this will be the hardest thing for him, actually relaxing and being patient enough to let the treatment work. I hope it will be ok.

Dani pointed out correctly that I had left 'Baker' in my profile when I am, in fact, not a baker! I still don't have a proper job description. On my pay form it says 'Software Developer: Professional.' Apparently they had to hire me as a professional (and not academic staff) because otherwise I would have to submit academic papers. They don't want me to write papers because I'm not a qualified professional. I think you can see where this is going. I thought it would be easy to say, 'Well, I am a computer scientist' but the rest of the faculty say 'No, you are an engineer'.

SO...

On Friday I demonstrated my program to the DSTO.

I have been afraid for the last four, five years, that I wasn't good enough. I found programming hard. Nothing worked like I wanted it to. I had found myself wondering, "Is this the right career for me?" Whenever I was in a conversation about computers with just about anyone, I felt entirely out of my area. I have been really quite scared of this jump from being a student to being a person who writes programs that are, well, paid for instead of being marked. I was afraid I would make a mistake, that they would discover how little I really knew about it, and they would get rid of me. I expected a long path of repeated failure while I slowly learned more about it until some day in my mid 30's I'd land a job good enough to get me through life.

So I didn't expect people to look at my program on Friday and go "OH MY GOD! THAT IS INCREDIBLE! YOU DID ALL OF THIS IN TWO WEEKS?". To say it was a good response is an understatement. All day long I had been wringing my hands nervously and unable to sit still because I was frightened about what would happen. What if the program crashed? What if the user didn't like it? What if the program somehow dialled into a foreign country and started downloading confidential data to them? All manner of things could have gone wrong. I was really nervous about it. Well, I worked hard on the program. I stayed late quite a few nights of the week to make sure it got done properly, and I was still putting polish on it half an hour before we sent it out. The system I wrote...ah...here is the thing about computer programming. There are bugs. A bug is a logical error, when a human says to a computer, "OK, please put a sign up on the wall to say "No trespassing" and the computer does this, but the sign is upside down. The job is done but it's not done right. You find bugs by deliberately trying to break your program, making it 'bulletproof'. You test it again and again and again to make sure it does the right thing.

My program isn't bulletproof. I pulled it entirely apart Wednesday night and wrote it again from scratch, using the algorithms I had written, and reassembling it all day Thursday, and adding 50% extra functionality Friday morning. It's not tested. It's not tested. I know my program logic. I know there are errors in it. Big errors. Really big errors. Things like...if you press the buttons in a certain sequence, the computer says "Yup! I'm going to eat all of your memory now" and the only way out is to wait for the blue screen to come up and go 'zomg u broke me'.

Well, anyway.

I know what I wrote isn't particularly special or amazing. My algorithms that I wrote in a few hours are not scientific breakthroughs. But the people who saw the program reacted like it was. It was a really good feeling for me. As I was driving home I was thinking about the events of the day and realising, "I know how to do this." Yeah. I know how to do it.

So, I am a computer scientist now.

In other big news, Taren learned how to make arcanite bars and Malachiel bought his first piece of pvp gear, the Grand Marshall's Scaled Gauntlets. He can't actually wear them for another two levels, but I reached 100 Alterac Valley tokens so I had to spend them on something (because it doesn't go over 100 and otherwise it is a waste).

I ate a whole 250g of Roses chocolates today.

Slaughter the World

2007-08-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Lately, no matter how late I stay up, I seem to wake up at 6 am every day, no matter that I don't actually need to get up til 7 am, and I am 99% refreshed. My body says "up and at 'em, Sky! Go forth and do great things this day!" despite the more rational, calm and collected mind saying, "Seriously, you used to be able to power nap laying face down over a chair, one hour in bed shouldn't be that hard for you." I decided not to fight it this morning and got up.

Similarily with this story, I recently started playing Kingdom Hearts 2. Every three or four weeks I'll pick up the control pad and burn through a stage or two. At this point, Sora, Donald and Mulan are getting pwned by a big group of heartless outside the Emperor's palace while Riku is threatening to kill said Emperor. One thing I did the last time I played was the 'Part of Their World' song with Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Since nobody was in the house, I could play this level without embarassment (although I have to say Ariel is kind of hot. Maybe it's the red hair?).

These stories match because if I hadn't of got up early, I probably wouldn't have had time to watch the LFG movie teaser, and I wouldn't have realised which song was being parodied without having seen the Little Mermaid, and the additional, dark humour that goes along with this particular character singing this particular song.

This Friday it's D-Day for me. I have to/get to show off one of the projects to the people who are paying for it. Because I started coding without a clear idea of what I was supposed to do (because my instructions have never been more specific than vague boxes that connect on a whiteboard) I wasn't able to code from the big picture aspect. Last night I had a really good idea of what had to be done, and one of those things was rip apart the old code and rebuild it all in a more logical pattern. Before I had something like fifteen classes, now it is seven. Reducing the overall program complexity increases my ability to find and fix bugs, and also increases the ability for me to add extra features.

Hopefully after this demonstration on Friday I can get to talk to the clients myself so I can find out exactly what they want from the User Interface. Since I am designing it, it makes sense that I am the one that asks the all important questions, "So, do you want this button red or blue..." however behind the interface is a lot of secret things that I am not allowed to know about. I have to program in a way so that later, someone can take the code I wrote, and modify it to match what they really want it to do. It's annoying to write something knowing that it's not doing exactly what they want, but I can't be told what it's really supposed to do.

My alarm went off in that paragraph. Yes, I really did get up too early, didn't I? I think next time I will take the opportunity to read some lecture notes, but what I really want is to sleep all the way through. It's only an extra hour, right? So I don't know why I can go to sleep at 10 pm or 1 am and still wake up at 6. At least I am not waking up every day at 3:30 am every morning like I had expected to. I'm not complaining, it's just an observation. Comparing six hours of solid sleep to my previous non-pattern of sleeping in two/three hour blocks with the occasional ten minute power nap to keep the batteries full? There's no comparison. I'm much happier this way.

Shout out to Anh, a friend of mine from the China trip, who I recently got back in contact with a few days ago and told me she read this blog! I look forward to catching up with you again soon!

This weekend I am demonstrating the Universities Augmented Reality system (ARAGE) at the Science Alive! fair. I used to be programming using the AR and virtual reality suite back in 2006. Wait, what year is it now? It's 2007 or 8? Let me check. Ok, yes, it's 2007. (Seems I DID get up too early). So 2006 was correct. Anyway, kids get to play the hospital quake game. This is a game that children with burns are given to play in hospital when they are having their bandages changed. It's apparently extremely painful, but if they are playing this game, for some reason their mind blocks out the pain because they are 'somewhere else'. So on Saturday (or Sunday? Hmm, I'd better check...) for a part of the day I will be fielding questions on the technology, helping small children do their part to rid the world of invading alien robots with generous application of shotgun, and being jealous of the Aviation Faculty who have a flight simulator (complete with an actual pilot seat and flight controls) who will be setting up right next to me. Last year I managed to accidentally steal one of their lap tops when I mistook it for our faculties and packed it up with ours at the end of the night, but I had to give it back. This year I'm hoping to make off with the pilot seat. My desk chair that my family gave me for my birthday is really good, but it doesn't have a throttle control or a radar. Come on, family, please try harder. How can I rule the world if I can't detect people sneaking up on me?

Well, it's go time. Have a great day everyone!

They are coming

2007-08-01T06:33:00.001-07:00

I wrote a letter to Anna today, and part of it I had so much fun writing that I thought I should include here also.

"Well, there were supposed to be red backs here, but I never saw any. We
did get a lot of huntsman spiders though, mostly medium sized and a few
large ones, and also snakes. We encountered a lot of spiders. Here's a
thing...spiders like to hide under bark. Bark lives on trees. There
were lots of trees in Hatherleigh. So spiders....everywhere. The
knowledge that they were all completely harmless did a lot to relax you.
However this illusion was instantly shattered the moment when one day
one of the big ones decided it was going to have a piece of Warren for
lunch, which it did. One of the things we would regularly do would be
find a tree that looked like it could be a threat to the house and/or
old and could fall and hurt someone, and cut it down. Then we would cut
it up into 30cm or so sections and stack it up neatly, clear up the
branches, and burn all the excess tinder. The log stack would stay
there for a few months until it had dried out enough that it could be
burned, whereupon it would be carted down to our woodshed and later, I
would bring it up to the house so that we could have a fire during the
bitterly cold winter months.
Of course you will say "Omg Sky....-1, -2 degrees is cold? You are
weak." Yes. Yes I am weak. Anyway, one day Warren and I were picking
up these logs when suddenly I heard Warren yelling and then screaming
and screaming. I immediately thought, oh, he has found a snake again.
A while ago, we were taking the logs away when, oh surprise, it's a
tiger snake. Tiger snakes = angry + aggressive to humans + poisonous =
very dangerous. Roger destroyed it with generous application of rake to
head. Mum is frightened of snakes, to the point where even a picture of
a snake is enough to reduce her to a quivering wreck. Anyway, this time
it was a spider, only it wasn't on a log, it was on Warren's hand,
biting him every three or four seconds. You know, just sitting
there...hmm, this hand is delicious *bite*.....oh, still good! I'll try
some more *bite*. Warren was just kind of standing there screaming
every time it bit him, his hand outstretched and his whole body shaking.
So Dad and I just kind of stood there for a few seconds while it bit him
a few more times, until Dad eventually stepped forward and flicked it
off with his fingers. It scurried off back to the log pile and tried to
hide, but it's evil red eyes could clearly be seen through its dark
miasma of pure hate (with a hint of contentedness. People hands are
tasty). So, this was a new thing. We had always been told huntsman
spiders wouldn't bite someone. I had seen people playing with them,
videos of people training them as pets. Now I had seen with my own eyes
one happily taking nips of my brother. This story takes a far more
interesting turn much later when Dad is cutting up a tree and disturbs a
huntsmans nest, and a few baby spiders - no more than two centimetres
across - surge towards him. Then the whole bark falls away and SEVERAL
MILLION SPIDERS, in a thick sea of eight legged wrath, charges towards
us, and we all remembered "Oh that's right, these guys will bite when
they are angry. Retreat!!"

So, Warren is lucky. The spider is not poisonous. It's no worse than a
bee sting, except, he has eight of them on his hand and it swells up.
Some ice and disinfectant and he's all good. So then Roger says to me,
"OK, please take the rest of the wood to the shed."

So I returned to the wood pile. There are eight pieces of wood left.
It should be an easy job except, I can't see the spider anymore.

Where did he go?

Obviously, he is hiding somewhere, waiting to attack.
He knows I know he is there. He's hiding. Watching. Waiting for his
moment. He is black, black as the night, and the dry she-oak logs,
darkened by the soft rain, conceal him as well as thick fog might. It's
quiet. Totally quiet. Even the birds, sensing this show down, this
final battle between good and evil the centre stage of even their world
right now, silent. The wind dies down. The plaintive cries of baby
lambs, warped over the landscape from distant farms, add an unnatural,
haunting atmosphere. Overhead, vultures circle. They know only one can
walk away from this.

But then I hear it.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap ta-
There.

The spider is so big he makes a noise when he moves. I can't see him,
but I can tell from the sound...there.
He's on top of the log my hand is just about to touch. I can see his
little muscles, straining in anticipation, his thick, cat like fangs
whirling, saliva dribbling like molten wax, his eight hungry eyes all
focused on my left hand as he mentally goes through exactly how he will
cook it up.

So he doesn't see my right hand bring the log I had just put away down
over his filthy body, splattering him into a billion juicy pieces.

The world explodes into sound. The birds are jubilant, the wind picks
up and howls a crescendo of triumph to match my victorious shout of
relief, but then suddenly -
IT WAS A DIFFERENT SPIDER.

There, sitting on the log I just just picked up, is ANOTHER spider. In
an instant I realise my mistake - the spider I have just crushed is
dark, dark grey, an innocent victim, just standing there, but rushing
towards me now is the true evil, the ancient enemy that -

There's no time. As I let go of the log, he jumps, I step back, his
eight legs spread wide, eyes full of revenge for his mate I have cut
down in revenge for his brother...and misses, falling on the ground. I
am wearing boots. Stomp. The end.

I pick up the logs and take them to the shed.

I loved Hatherleigh so much."

A few minutes ago I called Dani on her phone and disturbed her and her charges. I gave Devlan some good ideas. I wonder how many kilograms of chocolate cake an eight year old can eat.

Tonight Rusty and I are enjoying some good old times with the old Transformers game while I wait for my washing to finish. We're running through the old levels with the most powerful characters with an emphasis on super aggressive behaviour, with the best melee minicons on. This is the stupid way to play it - it's almost impossible to get anywhere. But it's a whole new playing experience. It's a sad thing that this game that is so old could be better than the new Transformers game, but there it is.

In response to Mum:

The thing with China? Oh, it was a positive experience. At the time I whined and complained because it interfered with my plans to be with Dana asap. But really, the one semester it held me back is largely eclipsed by the years I managed to hold myself back through failing so many subjects.

So don't worry about it. My whining was largely because I was immature and selfish. It was a good thing, and a really great experience. I wish that I had used that time more effectively than I had.

I worked hard today. It's been like it all week. Tomorrow is wine tasting. I'm looking forward to it. It's "Mission Accomplished" if I don't get photographed nude, covering myself with only a poorly shaved monkey stolen from the zoo, and see the picture drawn into the moon with a high powered lazer.

I can't possibly fail.

Again at number three Tree street

2007-07-31T03:20:00.000-07:00

Today and yesterday were good days for me. I worked hard, fenced well, overcame many programming difficulties, washed clothes and ate good food. So, I'm weary now. My brain is alive but I can feel my body going 'bleh omg let me sleep'. But I'm not done yet.

So, posters. Yeah, I remember now. The whole idea of the posters and war material around is to appeal to the people who think that by playing these war games they can somehow participate or take in some of the spirit, the courage of those fighting men and women who lived and fought and died before them.

I wonder what a real soldier would think, if they came in to that room, and saw the people of many ages - children, teens and adults, boys and girls too - moving plastic figures around a table and rolling dice. Would they be outraged, that the depiction of their friends and loved ones who died in such a circumstance be so boldly sold out for money, or encouraged, that at such great expense they were able to secure even this future. I wonder. I felt embarassed.

I had wanted to join the army when I was younger. Initially it was my mothers idea to give me some kind of future because - I had the impression - she beleived computers were not a real career and that my dreams of getting involved in them somehow were fantasy at best. Later I tried again because I wanted to do it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I was unsuccessful. My younger brother Warren is in the army and has fought in Iraq and the Solomon Islands. I didn't want to hurt or kill anybody. I just liked the feeling of belonging, the feeling of being in a uniform that I had from scouts. I wanted it again.

When I watch the way different gamers play their games of warhammer...some drive their troops forward and sacrifice them as meat shields to allow their more powerful forces to get in to position with less casualties. Of course these are just plastic models and it's nothing to care about if you have to let all of your troops die to save one man to win the game, right? Someone made a comment that in one game, his army was on top of (wait for it) a giant sea turtle for transport. At some point the turtle came under attack, so the player ordered his turtle to dive underwater to protect it from harm. This meant the entire army on the turtle were lost at sea and drowned. The player made this decision fully knowing the consequences because the sea turtle was more expensive than the men and he didn't want to risk losing it. I commented, "What a terrible thing, to know that you and your friends are all going to die because you weren't valuable enough to the commander." They laughed and agreed, but nobody thought anything else of it. But it stayed with me. Maybe because of the report I listened to on Friday.

At work, my co-workers are big on meetings. I have one every Wednesday morning to say what I have done that week ("Oh, I chatted in mirc and browsed wow insider..."). The last Friday of every month, students about to put out a thesis or professors and so on who are giving a talk at a conference get a chance to practice in front of the whole SEEC group. This week was a rehash of an old one that Ahmy had put together after September 11 which dealt with Systems Engineering in counter terrorism. One of the things he commented on that the Western Society is having problems with is that terrorists deliberately exploit Western values to gain additional notoriety/cause casualties and protect themselves. He cited the example of the seige in Beslan where several hundred school children were killed. From the terrorist perspective, that was a major win, because for three days they had 24/7 media coverage. It was an incident deliberately calculated to capitalise on the Western situation - freedom of speech, freedom of media - to damage. The fact that people died were an incidental happy consequence of the terrorists goals, and the fact that most of them were children was largely irrelevant to them.

I talked about this with Ahmy afterwards. He explained to me his perspectives on lots of different cultures. One thing he pointed out that was a flaw in Western society is the punishment for failure. If someone has a new idea for a project direction, and the project fails, that person is usually demoted, dismissed, or at the very least ridiculed. The company is unlikely to go in that direction in future. You can see this in the games industry where you will see a company make game after game after game that is relatively the same with little change except to update to the new computer hardware. In Australia, it's known as 'tall poppy' syndrome. The person who excels is the one who is pulled down or mocked. I've heard Anna talk about 'the nail that sticks out is the one that gets hit'...the person who wants to be different. I think this kind of sentiment is probably the same the whole world over, but it is probably more pronounced in certain places. What I have read on bullying in Japan, for example, far transcends anything most Australian school students would ever experience or witness.

Values...

In the Bible it says that originally we all talked the same language and lived in the same area, until Nimrod pursuaded the people to build the tower of Babel. God saw this and said "When they are all working together, who can stop them?" and scattered the people all over the world and broke up our languages. I always thought this was a bad idea, but recently, I haven't been sure. I think people who have the most hate are really afraid, afraid of others, because they don't understand these different people or things or were afraid they would be harmed somehow, so they attacked first. Trust is a hard thing to come by, but once won, more valuable than gold.

When I was in China I felt so terribly guilty about the conditions the people were living in because they were wonderful, decent people who were just in a bad situation. When I saw twelve people packed into a dormitory that was the same size as my single room I was ashamed. They never said anything about it or complained. And, after my initial shock subsided, I started to see something. They had adapted to their situation. The way they used their space, their three dimensional packing sense, their...ease of moving past each other, practically flowing over one another, whereas here people would uneasily stop, be offended, demand extra space or be rude to each other...

I think people are amazing creatures. Sure there are many terrible dark things about our races, and the things we have done to each other and this world. But I also have seen the brighter side, the spirit of a volunteer, the kindness in someones eyes, and the quiet hope of parents watching their children. I've seen people put aside their own goals and ambitions to help another.

When I see things like this I think, we can make it. I think, there's a bright future for all of us. And I want to help make it.

Never so much owed by so many to so few

2007-07-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

This was the inscription on a poster at the Military Hobbies building. Here my valiant Space Marines were utterly crushed by the combined might of Shane's Space Marines, Stan's Imperial Guard, and Justin's Space Marines. The poster depicted some half dozen laughing RAF pilots from WWII, and the quote is from Sir Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England during that terrible, terrible time.

There were many such posters, replicas from different periods of war. Some were quite graphic and disturbing, showing warped animals with human features twisted into sneers or faces of hate in a military uniform. Even I was able to easily pick out which nationality the 'evil' creatures were supposed to represent. I thought little of it except that a few days prior, someone had said to me (in response to my challenge when that person made a comment about another person) "It's ok she is (insert nationality), she is used to it."

Of course it's not ok. I was deeply saddened to realise that there were still deep rooted anti-racial sentiments alive in people. Of course I knew it was there, but I hadn't seen such a casual, dismissive remark right in front of me before. As I write this I have to wonder if I, too, have these kinds of feelings about different races that I won't know about until suddenly I say or do something and...oh, who knew I felt that way all along? I'd like to believe otherwise. Living in Australia means I am bumping in to and mingling with people from different nations, cultures and ethical natures all the time. But then I remembered I HAVE said things like this - because this person was a woman, I automatically assumed she would not like certain things. At the time I didn't understand her angry reaction but now I think I have some small spark of knowledge.

It was something to think about.

I will write more about the posters, and the uncomfortable feeling I got from playing wargames in such a place later, but now I have to go to work.

The Last Donut

2007-07-24T02:12:00.000-07:00

So, it's been a long time since I updated my blog.

There's a really good reason for it.

On Sunday night at 11 pm I officially finished baking for Donut King. I handed over the keys to my replacement, Lothar, Monika's father. The original agreement was that I was going to bake and train Lothar Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but somehow Monika extended it out to Wednesday morning because Lother wasn't available Thursday night. I had an unexpected ally in Lothar, who simply said to his daughter in his clipped German accent, "It is impossible." Monika wanted me to teach her father how to bake, how to make the cake donuts, how to ice the donuts, how to make the cream and custard, and how to clean the entire store.

"I don't want to do it," Lothar said, "It's impossible for me to learn in one week what you did in five years, it is kahrazee for her to expect it." What Lothar hadn't been taught, he obviously couldn't do. So, I 'forgot' to teach him how to ice donuts, make the custard and cream, or the cake donuts and, in fact, everything except what he - and I - were originally specifically hired for: Baking the yeast donuts.

Monika expected me to be in the shop tomorrow morning at 2 am, making the donuts and icing them, so that she can stride in at 6:45 and all the work will be nearly finished, so that I will have time to disappear, have a shower, get in to my new work clothes, and work from 9 - 5. She knows I will not be there because the only reason I would be, would be to train her father in these extra things that her father has already told her he will not do. This is exactly the situation I told her that she would face on the 21st of June if she did not hire additional staff. And yet I will not be surprised if I recieve a phone call at 6:45 am - "Why are you not here?" - and I will have to give the honest answer, "Because I have been captured by aliens and am in a human biodome inside Jupiter, please send help."

But seriously folks. She dragged out 'three weeks notice' to 'one month' and a replacement for me to train only arrived the day before finally reached the limit? It's just not good enough. If she had her way, I would still be working there forever until she sold the shop.

This part of my life is over. The door is closed, never to open again. I will not look back in this direction.

So, on more cheerful news...

Dani sent me a present for my birthday!

OMG PACKING TAPE? How to open?

I know how to open.

Rusty's Sword of the Seven Weasels In Your Pants STRIKE! (Insert cherry blossoms blown on wind).

The box lead me a merry chase but the battle is over. SPLODE!.

I lewt the corpse.

OMG! Potions of Mighty Awesome Power!

You don't believe? Behold.
Mighty.

Awesome.

Power.

But wait, there's more...

So much more...

I try to open the good old fashioned way but I r fail.

OMG! 20,000 years of evolution tells me...

SOLUTION GET.

(Close up so you can see my glorious, handsome features. You know, 'An Hero Cam')

I do this for Auir.

Pwned!!1111kek

Come on, MOAR cherry blossoms.

K, stop cherry blossoms.

Suddenly, with the packaging torn asunder, the holy goodness contained within is revealed.

Dani.

I am so happy.

Because of you, on this day, the light is with us.

Ahm chargin mah lazah.

Ahm still chargin mah lazah.

BI-DOO!!

Paladin Sky Paladin Salutes You for your very clever, thoughtful and wise choice. Thank you, Dani. I will put all of these things to good use.

Green is my favourite colour!

Sky gives this card a thumbs up for hilarity. (And thanks for signing it too, Twal!)

Additional Dani commentaries that she wrote that I wish to share with you so you can see just how clever she has been:

On the main box:

"To: The Illustrious Mr Christopher Dunn".

Oh ho ho. I am VERY susceptible to bribes.

On the silver, made of something-to-hard-for-me-to-eat box:

Sky's Epic Present
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Classes: Paladin
Requires Epic Win
Equip: Increase Reputation gain with all factions by 200% (where where you when I did Argent Dawn!?)
Use: Increases levels of win and awesome by 500%.

But seriously, thank you Dani. It was too much fun. I hope you enjoyed watching me open it even as half as much as my brother and I had opening it. For future reference, yes, AN EMTPY BOX is not only a suitable gift, it is a well planned out and thoughtful gift. Something is not natural about my brother and I.

Speaking of Rusty, he recently learned that there is more to the Internet than downloading pr0n and made a myspace page. He writes quite well for a child, but he should learn to spell check and praise me more often. That I am listed after Optimus Prime as a hero is acceptable, but to forget to mention me by name is...foolish.

What's been happening? I'll cut back to the last post that I unceremoniously abandoned.

Well, the netherstorm thing was a success. Ves and Mal escorted Bessy the undead cow back to her undead farmer, so that they could...hmm...make undead milk I suppose. What would that be? Yoghurt? Butter? Cheese? Well, it sure was worth it, and Mal walked away with a new belt to protect his, ah, belt area. I don't know why undead farmers are carrying high level gear, or even why the goblin run arena system has better pvp gear than the two main factions that have an entire arms industry devoted to supporting their soldiers, and I don't know why I was duel wielding swords in those pictures when a Paladin can't do that. Clearly, I am a super paladin. You know, like super man. "Look, up in the air, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Skyyyyy Paladin!" Hmm. Now that I think about it, being in the air IS the kind of place a Sky Paladin would be...

AND THUS SUPER PALADIN WAS BORN.

At the moment, WoW is on hold while I recover from the last week. I will probably be working on Taren to get his alchemy skill up. I also want him to get to use the level 35 Sword that Raziri, in an attempt to fatten him up before she eats him, put a whopping Crusader enchant on. Mal is currently on an extended mining expedition, attempting to find a living ruby in adamantite deposits and stockpiling the left overs for our favourite lady warlock, while both he and Ves wait for a group to go in the mana tombs with. It doesn't help that we are both ridiculously flat out right now and don't really have time to play at all.

So, my new job.

The official position is a computer programmer under the instruction of one William Scott, ex flat mate and also fencing buddy. What we are working on is not top secret but it is commercial so I'm kind of politely discouraged from talking about it in great detail. I haven't actually made very much programming progress at all, but I have made a number of improvements and suggestions to the overall design of the projects and apparently they were well recieved. My job is to write the user interface for one project, and design another project, ah, pretty much from scratch. Both of these need to be done by Christmas.

The first week was spent reading up on the programming languages I will be using, meeting people in the office, and discovering that about 50% of my time is spent talking to other people. The staff use MSN to communicate with each other. I despise MSN. I destroyed it and burned it out of my home computer, and vengefully hunted down the system processes and services and killed it there, too. I like mirc because it is simple and non intrusive. I hate msn for precisely the opposite reasons - when somebody writes to me, the little taskbar flashes continually. It's so distracting. I have to respond and most of the time it is just people making conversation. I don't mind being friendly, in fact I like it, but I also like to get my work done. On top of that, if I think I have managed to escape from a conversation, the people can send me a nudge or something to try and get my attention back. It's really intolerable. I can't stand it and wouldn't have put it on at all except that it's the only way everyone in the building communicates and I must know where the meetings are going to be.

There are two projects that I am working on. On Monday, my first day, we learned that the computer I had been given could not handle either of the programs I was supposed to write. The graphics card couldn't handle OpenGL past 1.1, and the machine was so old they couldn't find a replacement video card. So, this morning I got a new one! It is a much more flashier creature than the previous one.

I really like the new job. The environment is good, the people are friendly, and they share my sense of humor for the most part. Early Friday morning, by cooncidence, there was about a dozen of us lining up for coffee. Somebody commented on this, and I said "Prehistoric man's ability to find coffee in the wild helped bring our society through the treacherous Ice Age. Shorly after, the terrible coffee against tea drinker wars commenced. It was a dark time, a shadow upon humanity." At that point, one of my new co-workers announced he would only drink tea. We both glanced at my cup, filled with coffee, then at his cup, filled with tea. "Ah, my ancient enemy," I began, but then everyone started laughing - my work was done.

Yesterday I met with the professor who is also the boss of my boss about the work we are doing. It was supposed to be a meeting where I found out what the specific requirements of the program he wants me to write are, but this didn't eventuate. I really don't know what benefit the meeting was, as it didn't clarify anything for me. I keep hearing people say "People are talking about you", and the general impression is 'good', but so far I haven't ACTUALLY done any work, so, I don't know what it could be from. Maybe they like my clothes? Anna counselled me on colours, so, I think I owe her a big thanks sometime.

So, my first meeting was Monday at 11 am. It was a birthday get-together for one of the staff and also a celebration for someone who had recently moved in to a new office. (They like to have a meeting for just about anything. It's a wonder any work can get done.) I met a few familiar faces, which was a surprise, including one of my previous lecturers. Anyway, it's possible I am actually overdressed for the job. Mostly only the professors and senior staff are wearing a full suit, with tie. I am wearing a jacket, business shirt, neat dress pants with belt and shoes and no tie. Somebody commented that my belt was too loose. I looked down and, in fact, it was! Apparently I had set it one too many notches out. At the same time, somebody said that there was plenty of cake left, and encouraged us to eat it. So it was at this point I happily said to the nearby group, "Oh, I have to eat more to fill my pants up." Predictably everyone went silent just in time to hear this. The group near me knew the context was 'Eat CAKE to make the pants FIT' but everyone else heard 'eat CAKE to fill pants with SHIT'.

Awkward.

What was more awkward was when I then went to get a piece of said cake, and everyone went silent and watched me.

Aaawwwwwwkkkkkwwaaaardddddd.........

So I went all slo-mo and traded a piece of cake for an empty piece of air, Indiana Jones in the Temple'o'Doom style. Yeah.

The main thing I had going with the customers at Donut King was that I pretended to be a Pirate. I would often regale the customers of the birth of the donut, how ol' Captain Pete Heyn made the donut when he accidentally stepped on a bun with his peg leg, at the same time as his metal hook was struck by lighting and fried the donut. Like most of the things I say, I script them and practice them when nobody else is around to get the voice and the tone right, and can recite it from memory - fairly accurately. I'm working on the pirate theme in the office, but so far I am keeping it light. The occasional 'yaarrr' and 'ahoy matey' is all I've done so far. I'll give it a couple weeks before I start showin' up with me captains hat. At Donut King, this was met with looks of confusion, surprise, and terror. But here, so many computer programmers...actually understand what I am saying! It's not uncommon to get a counter 'yarrr!' and every now and then, someone who will claim they are a ninja, or that I will have to walk the plank, and...ah. It's just a good environment. I'm really happy.

Next of course is to introduce the epic battle between humans and dinosaurs.

Ok, Saturday.

Saturday I worked at Donut King. Then I met Sarah for coffee at short notice. Like really, really short notice. I walked out side and got a text message. I haven't seen Sarah for a long time, since she finished her PhD (So she's Dr Sarah now) and aside from the occasional e-mail we send each other every few weeks just to stay in touch, that's the only contact we have. I was very very hungry, so it should indicate how highly I think of her that I spent a long time eating my ham and cheese croissant because I was enjoying talking with her so much. The poor girl is so tired, I can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, I'm glad I made the decision to catch up with her even though I was in my filthy baking clothes. I don't really know her very well at all, and we're not all that close, but somehow we've just always kept in touch. Maybe we both understand that the other is crazy busy but we want to be friends? I don't know. Well, she is a person I would like to see more of and now that I have proper social hours, maybe! For one thing, she organises really good costume parties. The very first one was, in fact, a pirate theme. Ahoy!

Right after that it was drive home, pick up my brothers (Aero was down for the day) and go watch the new Harry Potter Movie. After we arrived, I went back to the car to put my ticket in there (so that the evil park Nazi's wouldn't give me a ticket) and, that's odd, I don't remember billowing clouds of steam issuing out from beneath the hood when I left. So I popped the hood and yes, you guessed it - a radiator hose had split. It wasn't a very severe split, but the timing was really annoying (but not as annoying as it would have been if it had happened even two minutes earlier, costing me another engine). I watched Harry while mulling about what to do with the situation - I had to get my brother back to the bus station and I knew there wasn't enough time to get the cable fixed before that...and it was already after noon, so (as I later found out) all the mechanics were shut. I eventually put Rusty and Aero in a taxi and paid to get them home, while I called the RAA and waited for them to come and fix my car.

RAA - Royal Automobile Association - will come out and get your car going or tow it somewhere, but it is usually prohibitively expensive to join up at the same time as you ask for help. I had been meaning to join with my first new-job-pay on this Thursday, but God decided he wanted me to have RAA membership NOW. I was able to solve the problem by throwing money at it, but due to the area the car was broken in, the mechanic couldn't get to me until 5 pm...by this time, the big football game finished, and the entire area became an immutable sea of cars. Somehow, immediately before this, Rusty had arrived back with his own car. What a good brother! What else could to men do when stuck in a place for a long time except go blow things up? So that is what we tried to do. We went to try some of the games at the nearby theatre, then decided it wasn't enough, and went in to watch Transformers instead. Wow.

Just wow.

Rusty has seen it four times. I can see why. It was perfect.

I came back late Saturday evening. I don't really...remember much of what happened in between Saturday night and Sunday night. I think I went to sleep, and got up at around 2 am ish. Anna was on, but it was too late to drink with her unfortunately. We had tried to arrange a chance for floor sky once more but because of our busy schedules it didn't work out this time.

Well, I wrote a lot. I'm going to leave it there and come back later. If you want something to do, go reply to Anna's blog. She wrote some really good questions and I will get on to them real soon.

I need to eat to fill my pants up.

2007-07-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

What a day.

It started quite well - Ves, Gnizzle, myself and two extra plebs were running Mana Tombs. Unfortunately right near the end, and the actual reason we had come there - the magic pants o'doom - one of the annoying plebs (there is always one) had to bail, and it kind of derailed us all. That said, the other pleb, the druid was really good. We (I mean Ves) tried to pursuade some of the other guild members to help us out but they were afk or busy. I feel sorry for Ves, she has been wanting the mana tombs run for about a month now and nobody seems to want to spare the hour or so it would take to run her through.

Oh, special mission! It's time to get the flight point in Netherstorm.

So I guess I will have to tell you the amusing story of why I announced "I need to eat to fill up my pants" to the entire board of my new job on my first day, some other time.

Music and Rant

2007-07-10T03:17:00.000-07:00

Most of the time misunderstandings between people are harmful and can get in the way of a good friendship. My experiences in this area started quite recently when I first encountered people who would deliberately withold information or change details slightly when passing on stories with the sole intent of hurting others. Somehow I had blundered through all of my life until my early twenties without encountering the highly dangerous thing called 'gossip'.

Having one person in a circle of friends who liked to lie and change details in this way is bad enough. It is easy to isolate and work out who the person is, and you can take everything they say with a 'grain of salt'. Even though you can still like the person and be friends with them, and have fun times and go places and so on, you just can't trust what they say. It's a sad feeling but you have to protect yourself. If it had of happened this way for me, probably it would have been difficult but no more so than high school.

When everyone in an area is this way it is not so fun. You start hearing your own words echoed back to you from people who weren't present for the original conversation, but TWISTED. "I don't enjoy to get up so early" becomes "Sky said he doesn't like to go to work" becomes "Sky hates working for you" becomes "Everyone tells me that you said you hate me." Compound this with some people who sincerely believe they have perfect memory, are flawless Christians or feel that it is their responsibility to mess with others affairs to 'help' them, and you result in an environment where my daily plots to destroy everything took on a more specific and a little too graphic role. It didn't help that one of these people was my girlfriend, the other was my boss, and the other was a workmate. Oh, did I mention my girlfriend was also a workmate?

However, this is not the purpose of this update; I will save this rant for another time. Living in this environment for the past five years had resulted in much of the damage that I have spent the last year undoing, and is a mighty, mighty cause for rejoicing that this dark time of my life will officially come to a close. In school, I could defeat my opposition through diligence, intelligence, or force of arms. I didn't know what to do in this kind of environment.

The reason I am writing this is because I had a conversation with Sebastian in mirc today that reminded me of something else.

On November 11, 2006 Belinda Emmett died of breast cancer. She was the wife of Rove MacManus (unfortunate last name) and one of the last things she did was compose a song for him.

Perhaps you have heard Big Girls Don't Cry before. If you have, then you know the truth of the situation. If you haven't, then I implore you to stop reading and play the music. Don't watch the video. Listen to it thinking that it was written and sung by a woman who knew she was dying, and that it was the final message she could write for her husband, something timeless that could reach out from beyond the grave to share to him the love that she had.

I am unashamed to admit that I cried when I first heard the song, knowing the reason for it's existence.

SPOILER.

So I was naturally disappointed and embarassed when I found out not only was it not written by Belinda, but it was a rip off of an older song. The real song Belinda wrote is So I am and it has far less impact.

END SPOILER

To cheer me up I am listening to Dragon Flame. Much like food, I enjoy many different types of music. It's a big change from when I was young and thought modern music was the tool of the Devil and that I had to avoid listening to it, avoid alcohol, sex, drugs, undesirable language and company, etc and so forth. So when I say I was practicing my 'possessed by demons' voice this morning you can see how I am a little different to how I was twenty years ago. Also, I am a little taller.

Ha, I should do some recordings and put some samples up. Or maybe not. People might get the wrong idea. Or the right idea, for the wrong reasons. ...

The start of musical corruption and slow descent into darkness was with Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds was written by the now long dead Hubert George Wells, who also wrote many other famous books that inspired movies such as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. I think it particularly appealed to me (aside from the outer space element) because of the part of the story that detailed the Thunder Child. Another rant I will talk more about it; most people go 'Hwah?' when I try to explain how the actions of the crew of the Torpedo Ram spoke so deeply to me.

However, right now I am listening to Iron Maiden's Seventh Son - The Prophecy. Hmm, it's not as good as I remembered it. I guess my musical tastes have moved on since ten thousand years ago.

Ramble ramble ramble.

Well, I wrote a lot and still haven't got to what I wanted to talk about. It's WoW related, and WoW is down right now for maintainence, but writing even this amount has relaxed me somewhat.

I guess I should do some more work.

Hair cut!

2007-07-09T00:58:00.000-07:00

I followed Dani's advice and went to this place to get some ideas of what kind of hair is the right hair for me.

The advice is simple and common sense. All this time I have been going to a hairdresser instead of a barber because of the price difference. I can get a hair cut for as little as $US8. I have never been satisfied with how it looks; one problem is because I genuinely don't know any hair terms and the other is that I was more interested in the price than the result. That was when I was working at Donut King, and I was always wearing a hat, so the primary objective of the hair cut was to 'not have it escape and enter a donut'.

Now I will be out and about during the day light, and people will be able to see me. After they have realised I am not a demonic manifestation of pure evil, hell bent on their material destruction and eternal damnation and have recovered from their fear, they will promptly recoil in shock and loathing at my unspeakably vile appearance. And that's during the night time. I could be arrested if people saw what I wore to work during the day time. No, really. Some of you have seen those pants, and for this, I am sorry.

Well, not really. They are kind of funny. I still have the green pants that need a bull clip to hold them up, and the black pants that have a big hole in an embarassing place, and the other black pants that have a big hole in another embarassing place. However, I now have nice sans-hole trackpants for wearing around the place and/or doing groceries/committing crimes so I only wear those wretched things for the amusement of others, or if I forgot to do my washing.

Or for old times sake.

Now, where was I? Ah yes. Hair cut.

I can't be sure because I don't have any front on photo's but I think my face counts as an oval type from the link I gave earlier. This means I should aim for a 'Matthew Fox' kind of hair style. I googled this fellow and all manner of hair styles came up, most of which would not look disgraceful on me, but some of them I lack the hair length to even fantasise about. This cut example, example 2, example 3 looks like a cut I have already had, except without the chip in the middle of the forehad. So I think I guessed right and am just lucky to have the right sized head. Apparently using forceps when I was born paid off in the long run, too. Thanks mum!

I think I'm going to go for a brush cut or a Caeser with a tapered back and slightly arched sides.

Most likely I'll say these things to the Barber and he will take one puff of his cigar (...why is he smoking a cigar? Did I go to a tattoo parlor by mistake? Oh no...) and grumpily announce, "You'll get what yer given, kid. Shut up and hold still."

My mum came back to the house as I finished this and said, "No, that guy (Matthew Fox) is totally wrong for your hair. Just say 'give me a number 4'."

:/

Well, if all else fails, I can always have 'Hat shopping' as my next blog post.

Donut countdown

2007-07-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

I have this afternoon off from work. I had expected to be working from 4 am through to 4 pm with a two hour break in between, however, this shift has now been shuffled to Wednesday from 4 am to 3:30 pm. This means I can catch up with my blog now.

Yesterday was the first day of actual filming. It was really cold! I sincerely expected for rain to come in and end it all, but in the end we were lucky and it didn't come at all. A quick recap - I am working with Rodney, Mick, Jamie, and some other people who I haven't met yet to compose this video. Rodney is the director, Mick is the lead camera and audio guy, and Jamie and myself are actors. I found out yesterday that Rodney had previously released 'Thrash Bus' and 'Thrash Bus 2' which were, basically, old, junk cards driven around in farm yard paddocks. The cinematography (I think that is a word) was really well done; it looks professional. Some of the footage was exceptional, and although the music was lifted straight from The Matrix it fitted disturbingly well. Most car chases in movies start with a beautiful, expensive car, that slowly has bits of it chipped away as it exchanges blows with other cars/parts of the city/bullets/rockets/pedestrians/cyclists/garbage bins. Thrash Bus starts with a car that they got from a junkard that still goes (but is not roadworthy) and parts fall off during filming for no apparent reason. You know, windscreen wipers, rear vision mirrors, that kind of thing. It's not a serious film and the 'plot' was strung together AFTER the filming.

Rodney also talked a bit about Urban Golf, which I incorrectly reported as 'Urban Gulf'. He explained that the premise of the movie is about a group of six golfers of excellent calibre and ability, but thus far unrecognised by the professional golfing community (due to a number of specific incidents that had them barred from playing professionally), who band together at night to play golf. Since they are barred from normal golfing greens, they tee off...from someones front lawn...and play across the city to a designated position elsewhere in the city where a temporary hole has been placed. It's basically mini-putt-putt golf, on a city scale. On the way they have to deal with the many, many obstacles that will be encountered - balls that land in pools, in people's backards, gutters, rooftops, that crash through car windows, etc, etc. It looks like a lot of fun. I hope I get to work in it.

So, yesterday. Saturday night I stayed up quite late and drank sake. At some point I had the brilliant idea, "Hey, this bottle is so close to being empty, why don't I finish it?" This kind of thought got me in to a lot of trouble later on when suddenly I was too drunk to remember what I was doing, where I was going...at the time I was playing WoW and had promised to put together some items with my smithing skills for Raziri to disenchant. I don't remember what happened. I remember getting on to the gryphon to fly to eastern plaguelands. Then it was suddenly the next day and I was in bed, still fully clothed. When rational thought returned to me and I discovered it was...hmm...seven hours later, I realised 'omg, Anna was waiting for this stuff.' So I got up and farmed the thorium I needed and mailed them off to her. Luckily I was spared Raziri's epic wrath, and Malachiel lives for another day. Eventually his usefullness will expire and that will be it for him. So it goes.

This took me to about noon, when I suddenly remembered, 'Oh, I was doing something Sunday...' CRAP! I had forgotten I had the filming starting in an hour. My house was a mess! The original plan was I was going to help with the filming, then there would be a three hour break, and I was going to clean up/shower during the break, and then the second part of the filming would take place in my bedroom. What actually happened was that filming took a lot longer than expected, and then they rolled straight over to my house and...oh God, I had cups and cans and bits of paper and dirty laundry everywhere. I managed to clean it all up in about five minutes, but it was so embarassing.

The actual filming was a lot of fun. I was manning the b-camera, while Mick had the a-camera (because he knew what he was doing). You can see some of the photos as well as the script and some other goodies at that site. As you can see, I need a hair cut and a shave. The not-shaving was deliberate; it's intended that my character (Jackie. OK. I am seriously being typecast in all of these things. Lords and Ladies? My characters are sex crazed wizard/evil coachman thug/various gender confused evil elves. Aside from the wizard (A young Ridcully), all of those character suffered injuries and/or death (Coachman: Knee to groin. Elf 1: Stabbed in gut by Queen Magrat. Elf 2: Head crushed by angry Librarian. Elf x: Number of small rolls in production that also involved various crushing and/or stabbing deaths, also, one especially fun 'crossbow headshot'. OK! As You Like it - Evil mobster Brutus. Later, wrestler Charles who likes the mens more than the ladies. Later, beaten and probably killed by the main actor, Thorrin aka Orlando. Exception: Corin the sheepherder was NOT evil or sex crazed. In this current film, I am evil. It's so much fun. But just once I would like to be a) not evil and b) not scantily clad) have some kind of defining feature to make me obviously older than Jamie, my younger brother (apparently). Obviously at 2x years old, Jackie is still living at home, so, it's a little embarassing for him. However, I really do need a hair cut. My last day of working out the front for Donut King is Wednesday. I will look forward to not having to wear pink again. So, hair cut will be Friday afternoon or on the weekend.

I never know what to say to a hairdresser when she says, "So, how do you want me to cut your hair?" Tips are appreciated.

My main role on the day was to provide a second camera angle and also for stereo audio. We did several takes (maybe five or six) for each shot and later Rodney will go through and pick out the ones he likes best. We did this for the main shots of Jamie leaving the school and arriving again, and for a couple of shots as he walked through the streets. Later I put on some shoes and pants that the pursuer will be wearing and they took a few shots of me being menacing and evil. Much later on...oh someone is here. brb.

Ok. My plans for the day are now "Parents are here, do stuff." So, I'll add more later...

Changing goalposts

2007-07-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

I finished updating the links in the furniture section that Anna went shopping for. Now all my furniture is picked out, I just have to wait for my first big phat pay check to roll in so I can spend it all.

In all seriousness, my first couple of pays will go on finally crushing out whatever remnants of debt I will still have. It's really ironic that I have at last got a professional job at around the same time I actually got my finances under control. Well, perhaps not. If I had rolled right into this job with the same spending habits I had six months ago, the situation would not have improved except that the quality of the things I was wasting my money on would improve substantially. Now I am actually in a position, and have an attitude, towards saving money towards my future.

I don't know where I will be in six months time. Fifteen years ago, I knew it all - I was going to become a games programmer, make kick ass games, and my life would be set. I didn't care where I was going to live because my life would be care free, I would be jet setting around the world on a perpetual holiday, stopping once every three or four months to release another major blockbuster that the gaming world would go mad over, before going on another luxury trip. Then as time went by and I started to get a better understanding, my vague ideas slowly coalesced into a better form - I was going to finish University, work at Ratbag (an Adelaide based computer games company), then move to Illinios and live with my at the time girlfriend Dana.

But things started to fall apart. I didn't reach the goals I had set for myself. Instead of blitzing through university with the top grades that I had honestly expected, I failed subjects, was delayed, and even eventually split up with Dana. It's ten years this year on what was supposed to have been a three year degree. Oh, it hasn't all been downhill! On the way there have been things that have slowed me down, true, but if I really sit back and am honest with myself a lot of the problems were because I took on too much volunteer stuff, failed a willpower thing, or didn't have the courage to say no to something that I couldn't afford to do. The problems I have had for the last five years are symptoms of bad decisions I made in the previous five. I don't blame anybody else for the situations I have been in. They were my own bad ideas, usually made from a selfish or childish opinion, with little forethought or based soley around dreams.

My natural father is a dreamer. He would always say, "I am going to do this," or "When I do this, this will happen," or "My plan is to..." I despised my fathers inability to finish anything that he had begun. His life is a history of part time jobs that he spent six months at, almost always in different fields - railroad worker, kitchen designer, hotel manager, retail assistant, photographer...to me this kind of indecisive nature is frustrating, unreliable and unsustainable. When I identify the flaws that I see in my father that I have previously criticised, it is a major shock to later find that I am the same as him in so many ways.

Are things truly different now? These last ten years have been difficult for me. A lot of it feels to have been wasted time, where I am just sitting around waiting for other events to happen so I can move forward again. Excuses that I have made as a reason not to do something so that it seems too hard so that I don't have to do it. Not calling somebody because my phone is disconnected, when there is a payphone outside. Not doing an assignment one night because I can do it the next day. Not working on my programming because there is no deadline for it...instead of honing my skills in areas that will matter some day, I seem to be pursuing intangible goals that have no real pay off. When I had two hours spare today, I bummed around the house, doing tiny errands in no order and wasted time when I could have, heavens, even been grinding something useful in WoW or working on REPAST.

I've come a long way in maturity in the last few years but I still don't really feel like an adult most of the time. On the surface it looks good (I think). I know the areas I need to improve in. For the last five years, my excuse for not doing these things has always been because of Donut King. In a few weeks time, I won't have that excuse anymore.

Will I do it? Will I be able to come out from hiding behind the reasons for not doing things, and defeat the demons of ten years of failure that have clouded me? I can't say for certain. But already I can see an attitude shift. Instead of thinking, "I can't do this because..." I find myself thinking, "I will be able to do this now that..." I'm simoultaneously excited and afraid. I'm nervous, but happy.

All the different roads of my life are coming together. I know where I want to be. I know how I'm going to get there. Every single major obstacle has been removed. The road is clear. I just have to walk it.

In response to Dani:
Taren is fury specced. Originally I picked a warrior for him because we were going to do the "Fill Tim's guild with nub drenai" thing; Erelah is a hunter, Funshinebear is a priest, it just seemed like the logical choice. I went with fury spec while Taren is levelling but I might respec at a later date if we start doing instances. However in the end game, I already have a prot spec character - Malachiel - if the guild wants tank at end game from me, I will put forward the Paladin. If there is already a main tank better than Mal, it makes better sense for a Fury warrior instead of another protection spec unit.

Malachiel has some pvp goals.

Grand Marshall's Quickblade - 20 Eye + 15300
Grand Marshall's Barricade - 20 Eye + 15300
Grand Marshall's Scaled Gauntlets - 20 AV + 10098
Grand Marshall's Scaled Shoulders - 20 AB + 10098
Grand Marshall's Scaled Legguards - 30 WSG + 16065
Grand Marshall's Scaled Helm - 30 AV + 16065
Veteran's Scaled Belt - 40 AB + 17850
Veteran's Scaled Bracers - 20 WSG + 11794
Veteran's Scaled Greaves - 20 Eye + 17850
Veteran's Band of Triumph (X2) - 20 AV + 30600
Veteran Pendant of Triump - 10 Eye + 15300

This requires 176320 honor, and the following marks:

Eye of the Storm: 70
Warsong Gulch: 50
Arathi Basin: 60
Alterac Valley: 70

Currently he has 24509 honor, and the following marks:

Eye of the Storm: 1
Warsong Gulch: 24
Arathi Basin: 15
Alterac Valley: 83.

It's really hard to get an Eye of the Storm game. If I don't log on for a pvp game before 11 am my time, it just doesn't happen, even during an honor weekend. It was also impossible to get an Alterac Valley game in the 40-59 bracket in Area 52 - I wonder if all the Eye of the Storm games are in the 70 bracket? The scaled armor set is surprisingly useful for Mal as a tank - it has less resilience and more stat and ability buffs, particularly +Str, +Sta and +Int, as well as a number of helpful set bonuses including decreased hammer of justice timers and increased Seal of the Crusader damage (which he uses almost all the time). I'm not satisfied with Mal's damage output at the moment, so I bought him a new sword today and am going to look at getting +attack power/+str gems to help increase it.

I probably won't pvp with Taren and focus on getting him up to a more useful level as a priority for him.

Update...

2007-07-01T18:50:00.001-07:00

I updated the links section (thanks Dani!) and fixed up most of the Ikea links from before so they don't wrap halfway off of the screen.

Unfortunately the Ikea site suddenly stopped talking to me about halfway through, I'll try do to the rest later.

I didn't get to go to Blackrock Depths yesterday. I slept in too long and everyone went without me, boo. I also didn't clean my room, so, I'll get on to it today. It's not in terrible condition, there is just a lot of cans and paperwork that I don't need to have in here.

I didn't meet my mother yesterday. I accidentally slept for seven and a half hours when I meant to have a half hour cat nap.

The Schoolyard Justice site has been updated! I have the role of 'Jackie' and you can see me in the storyboard, filling in for Karl who hadn't been selected for the role at that point. Unfortunately, Rodney elected to remove the lengthy scenes I wrote involving the love triangle, car chase, gun fight and banana peel incident. Of course he is still new at this directing business. I'd like to let him develop to find his own direction; but he needs to listen to a more experienced person from time to time.

Maybe I can get that banana peel back in again if I disguise it with a beard and moustache.

The week looks pretty clear for me at the moment. Tonight I have Rodney coming over to check out the house as a set for one of the scenes, and tomorrow I am going to a church thing with Rusty. One of the ladies there happens to be a book editor, and since Rusty is wanting to have a book published, she is probably a good person to talk to. She just returned from Japan with her new fiance who proposed to her on Mt Fuji two weeks ago so maybe it's not a good time, but it will be good to catch up with her - she was also the leading lady in As You Like it and Lords and Ladies. She's really a very talented actress. I quite like her, and her fiance is a good bloke too. I wish them the best of luck, but I am quite confident, they will work out just fine. Some people just fit really well together.

I'm working at Donut King during the day this Wednesday for the second to last time (hopefully).

In the not too distant future, my good friends Lance and William are having their birthdays. I know what to get William, but Lance is a bit trickier. Lance is also my fencing instructor, and the best Dungeons and Dragons DM I've ever met. I haven't had a chance to play for about five years now because the group became too much of a problem and he had to stop it. But yesterday, massive news! He's starting it again, with all new characters! This is a tiny bit sad, because I had a level 13 Paladin, but there's no reason I can't start the same character again with different stats. Maybe this version of Aslan d'Kinaugh will be more dangerous than his warhorse (Ned the Avenger. A normal warhorse that happened to roll max stats and seems to crit with every single attack) but somehow I doubt it. There's just something about those big, fat Ned dice that can't be beaten.

I broke it

2007-06-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

It's a long post, I'm indexing it so you can skip the wall-of-text parts that completely don't interest you, and go to the wall-of-text parts that semi-interest you.

Today I am trying color coordination, although in future I will try indexing with letters and see which works better. Sorry if the colors are annoying for you. I haven't seen yet how it will clash violently with my blogs color scheme...

World of Warcraft
Other Blogs
Donut King
Friends
Theater
Closing Thoughts
Everything Else

Last night I stayed up crazy late and drank sake while I talked with Anna. Reading it back I miraculously avoided saying anything especially stupid through careful application of typing errors...that is...I think that is what was going on.

So, I made it to exalted with Argent Dawn yesterday (Warcraft stuff). I have a number of objectives for Mal; one of them is to get to exalted with Stormpike, another is to have enough honor/marks to get some of the pvp honor sets when he finally dings 70, and the last is to get exalted with Thorium Brotherhood for the crazy dark iron blacksmith plans. Another, way off in the distance plan is to get those windfury gauntlet drops from Ragnoras in Molten Core so the guild can someday go do AQ40...and that sweet windkissed one handed sword.

After Blackrock Depths today, I won't be playing as Mal except to update auctions or to tank instances, and instead focus on getting Taren up to outlands. Taren doesn't have any specific objective, because he is alchemy/herbalism and I haven't really looked at what factions are important to him. The goal is 'get more powerful so you can make better potions and transmute stuff!'. I have a whole bunch of arcane crystals that really want to be arcanite and nobody to transmute them.

It was a really good day for WoW yesterday. I went around and did the flame quests, but missed Blackrock Spire so will have to go back there later. In the early to late evening, Anna and I went through a big chunk of Stratholme together. I really enjoy playing with her, even if it is just farming motes it's an enjoyable, relaxing experience. The last time we went to Strat, I had brought along some very low level accomplices. I think we actually did better without them. We eventually pushed in to the Scarlet Bastion and had a number of very close, very hard fights, burning long cooldowns, munching down on all the pots and everything we could think of to get through. We finally got through to the Scarlet commander, but he had a number of cruel tricks up his sleeve (including aoe stuns) and so we died. When we re-entered the instance, there were respawns already, so, we decided to call it quits for the night.

Well, there is more on WoW, but I decided not to spam everything about what I do in the game so I will leave it at that for now.

I wanted to add links in my blog to show the other bloggers in our group - Chris-, GoodTodd, Paradox, and Crystal - but I can't seem to find how I added that first bunch. So, 'I broke it'. Maybe when I am more awake I will find it but in the mean time, this is a 'Sorry guys! I'm not trying to ignore you! I'm just stupid!' note.

I'm really hungry. Rusty (my brother) cooked lasagna last night. I'm going to go eat some.

Oh yes. It's good. The kitchen is a bombshell though, I will need to clean it up this morning.

I had the difficult conversation with my boss at Donut King on Friday. Basically, I am casual and legally can walk out the door with as little as an hours notice. However, even though the conditions that I work in are really poor and the pay is bad, I can't help but have feelings of loyalty to my boss and the other staff. Really, the store has been degrading since about October last year when our last casual quit and it was just Moni, Michelle and myself running the place. When Moni started working at the other store (We are at 'Citi' - spelling correct. The other store is 'castle plaza') as well as our own it should have been really obvious that it was unsustainable. What if Michelle got sick? What if Sky got sick? Someone would have to fill in for the other person and if they had unmitigatable circumstances that day (eg Sky had an exam), what then?

Fortunately for Monika this never happened, however then she went and did something really stupid. Instead of hiring more staff, she applied for an extra job - a fun one, actually, but still an irresponsible risk. So as well as working 6 am til 4 pm at Citi and Castle, she will now be working 7pm until 1 am at the Circus as an usher. She knew she would be a zombie and unable to do much of the daytime shifts, so she expected Michelle and I to do extra work during the week to cover for her. The sudden news that I was leaving on July 16 was of course a slight spanner in the works.

The responsible thing for her to do would have been to immediately look at a new baker, or to hire a manager to work at Castle so her workload would be reduced by half and she could do the bake herself, or for her to cancel the job at the Circus (which runs from June 1 to June 30) since it was something she was only doing to 'try something different'. She wants to sell the Donut King as soon as she can, apparently, but the shop isn't even on the market yet. Instead, her parents told her that they don't want her to sell the store and will instead come in and work for her. A good idea! Except for one minor detail - they are on holiday in Europe and don't return until the 18th.

I gave Monika three weeks and two days notice. It's plenty of time for her to find someone for me to train (it will take about a week) but I know why she is doing this. It is because she will be unable to find someone who will do what I do for her for the crap pay. I walked out on a former employer because of this exact situation. I wanted to help and volunteered to do extra to assist the business when things were tough, but when everything went back to normal everyone had the expectation that I would continue to work for free and the manager was surprised - even outraged - that I expected to be paid. This is a similar situation at my current work, although not quite so bad, the trend is obvious and I can see it. The work load continues to increase, the hours I work go up, and there is no extra compensation, and even attempting to negotiate causes a hissy fit and sulking from my boss. Her decision to get her parents to do the job is nothing more than a major cost saving option for her.

I am willing to train her father to do the bake, but I am not willing to throw away this awesome job that I won for her selfishness. I told her exactly what I was prepared to do. If she expects more, she will be disappointed. I took a tremendous risk in even asking for three weeks delay in starting my new job. I won't further jeapordise it by showing up as a zombie. So far she has agreed to me just doing the bake part (about two hours work) in the evenings, after I finish at Uni. So I will be a zombie baker, not a zombie scientist, which is safer as I don't need my brain to bake.

But I know how it will go. At some point she will say, "I expected you to also do xxxx!" and I will have to remain firm. I want to remain friends with her, but in my heart, I know that the 'friendship' will only exist so long as she is making money from me. The moment it's more economic to not have me there anymore, which will be when her father is trained up enough to do the baking, she will be perfectly happy to never see me again.

Probably it's better that way.

In more cheerful events, my friend Lance has organised the group of us gamers to go watch Transformers on the 14th of July. I have low expectations of it, however my younger brother - a major Transformers fan - said it was 'better than he expected' and rated it 8/10. I tend to enjoy movies even if they are bad - if I really like a movie I will go and see it twice or more with different circles of friends. I liked Pirates 3, although there were some parts where I felt a bit uncomfortable, like the treatment of Elizabeth and the Shanghai scenes. Also, note to future directors - if you are going to have a non-major character have an important plot development role, please make sure their accent is understandable. Yes, I am looking at you Calypso. WTF is she saying? Most of the time all I hear is unintelligible gibberish that the rest of the cast recoil in fear from.

Speaking of directing, I went for the next step of Schoolyard Justice yesterday, the mini film that Rodney and Lochey are working on for...ah...well, I don't actually know what it is for. I am told it is going to be part of a package that will be screened to students to help them deal with issues in school like bullying. But yesterday they also said that it will be going to different film festivals and they will put together an acting port folio for the cast. I've never seriously considered acting as a career before, mostly because I don't think I'm very good at it when compared with the other cast members in performances I have been in, but as a hobby it sure is a lot of fun. Everyone I have spoken to has always said 'You are better than you think you are' but so far I have mysteriously been unable to watch any of the recordings of our performances...my friends being tactful?

I only have a small role in this one, and the same with the other performances. I don't audition for parts because everyone except for me in this area wants the parts as a desperately needed step on their career. If they need someone, they call me, which is what happened for Lords and Ladies, As You Like it, Schoolyard Justice and will likely happen for Urban Gulf. I'm looking forward to Urban Gulf - it's a series of small sketches that make fun of everyday city life, such as signs on ATM's that say 'you may be photographed while using this machine'. In this one, a woman is withdrawing money from an atm and the camera will slowly pan out to show several cameramen taking photos of her like it is a model shoot. Well, that kind of humor really appeals to me so I want to join in.

In Schoolyard Justice, I only have a small role. Yesterday I wasn't needed, but I went along to meet the other cast and to read in for a cast member who couldn't be there. It was a good location - I wonder if I can find it on googleearth...well, first I need to download it. It's Montifiore Hill in Adelaide, the place most scenic city-esque shots are taken for tourist stuff, and a lot of weddings take part here. (The other place is the botanic gardens or Torrens river). You get a better shot of the city from Windy Point, but that is harder to get to, and the wedding limousines probably do not enjoy the twisted, wretched road up that daunting cliff face.

Today I am going to: Shower, clean kitchen, clean bedroom, do laundry, play WoW for a bit, possibly meet my mother this afternoon or evening (my family never plans anything. Friday night example: "Hi, can you meet your father at (location) in an hour and a half for dinner?" Maybe if they had called earlier, sure! But I wasn't going to ditch my evenings plans for a five minute meeting that they had just come up with. Plus it was a forty minute drive there and back each way. If it was a nice restaurant, maybe! But McDonalds? :/) and have a play with this REPAST system that I am supposed to be using at the new job. If I am really lucky, Wood will have responded to my e-mail and we can finally find out what his situation is. I really miss that plucky little gnome.

2007-06-27T19:32:00.001-07:00

So, in case it's not obvious, Anna fixed my blog so it's not ugly.

I'm really tired today because of yesterdays crap hours, and I have an exam later today so I'll leave this pretty short.

My first task at my new job in the future is to find a way to get William's Lego Mindstorm scorpion to respond to his mobile phone blue tooth commands. The scorpion is very cool already. It moves forwards, and if something moves in front of it, it backs away all scared like. If the thing is really close, instead, it's tail goes forward and BAM! Dead. He also has a variety of smaller lego critters that have other roles, like picking up balls and announcing what color the ball is, and a tag team one that follow a path and interact together to move balls out of the way.

I'm not sure yet exactly what I am supposed to be doing, all I know is that it involves some system called REPATH and that I am supposed to be researching Java 3D and JoGL once my exam is done. Now, I already programmed in both of those before so I have a big head start. I also had a semi-complete ray tracer that I think I will kick start again.

Anna also took me shopping. Kind of. Since I will soon have enough money to not live out of tins, I was thinking of getting some furniture like a bed or a door. I live right across from Ikea - it's a sign from God! Here are Anna's suggestions...

(I'm fixing the HTML on these...will repost shortly)

TV Cabinet

Coffee Table

Side table

Corner sofa bed

White sofa

Armchair

Cushions

Lamp shade

Lamp base

Some kind of....throw rug....thing.... Maybe a scarf? I don't know.

Bookcase! I can trick girls into thinking I am smart by filling this up with books about, um...? Should I fill it with lots of traditional guy stuff, like books on tanks or cars, or go for the 'hawt in bed' angle with lots of books on Birds And Bees. I do have an "Art of Seduction for Dummies." Maybe I want to keep that one out of sight, though...

Shoe rack This one is really good idea. I wasn't sure at first, but looking at it more carefully, they look about the right size for junk mail, warhammer tanks, and even bottles of wine. I think I will get two.

Hat and coat rack is handy for those times when I am really drunk and forget where I put my jacket. I don't have any hats yet, but Rusty does, so it's sure to get some use. Plus, tank storage space.

Vases I'm a boy so I can't really put flowers in it, but I like the colors. I don't know how big they are. My grandparents have vases filled with different colored soils from around the world, but I don't know if it will really work with the vases having their own colors. I'm a big fan of clear vases filled with pretty rocks, though. Maybe I can put a fish in them or something.

Is this art? My favourite cityscape pictures are the ones at night that show the city lights. Sydney is probably my favourite. I got a brief glimpse of Osaka on my way to Ezhou, but there was heavy mist and I didn't get the full panorama that I had hoped for. Next time for sure. Actually, I'm a big fan of the Chicago pictures that you get in Subway's here.

Fruit bowl At least, that's what I think it is for. Maybe keys? I can probably put water in to it and have little floating candle things, too. Like the vases, I need to see how big it is before I can really think of what to do with it. Worst case scenario, it looks like a real fun thing to throw.

Wait, wait. If I turn it upside down, it would make a terrific piece of terrain for my Space Marines. I can put some stairs in to the side of it and POW instant bunker. Nothing's getting up that slope, and certainly not crazy Blood Angel Assault Marines. Yes I am looking at you, Rusty.

Rug This one is definately a rug, because it says 'rug'. So. It's a rug.

Table and chairs This was a really good suggestion because I don't have a proper table, or really any chairs. Most of the time I have to eat standing up. Of course since mostly I'm eating pizza or other junk food that's OK.

Deep plate I actually have many of these. No, wait. Rusty has many of these. Eventually when I move out on my own I will need to have bowls and stuff. I did actually have a set before moving here, but my flatmate had been taking my plates and bowls and letting her dogs eat out of them. You can wash them and use them afterwards I guess, but I didn't want to eat out of a dogs bowl so I left them for her. Maybe if they were my own pets my feeling would be different. I think it's ok if, say, my cat jumped up on the table and stole some food (because he would do it all the time. And not just meat, either. One time he made off with a potatoe. WTF?) while I wasn't looking, you can wash it and its fine. But I would come home after work and find my plate covered in dog drool and rotten meat filled with maggots. You can't clean that kind of image out of your mind. So, I left them all. I was a little uncomfortable about doing it. But the thing about the old place...much like getting away from Donut King...is that it was really important to me to get rid of all the links to the past. It was a bad time, and I want to burn it out. Keeping those plates will remind me of the terrible way I was treated and I don't want that in my life.

Maybe it's a stupid feeling, but it's my feeling, and I'll stand by it.

Coaster set I actually have some coasters already, blue University of South Australia ones that I got for helping out the marketting division last year. With two sets, I can have one nice set, and one set for throwing at people. Or maybe one set for normal times, and one set for special guests. My mum is one of those people who has super elite chinaware that only comes out once every three or four years. Probably there is a reason for it.

But coasters make excellent projectiles. They are like mini frisbees. It's one of my best memories of childhood, having coaster/teatowel wars. Of course Dad was the best at teatowel flicking. We wrote on the forum QQ nerf fathers, to no avail.

Dinner set Another really good suggestion. We have most of these things already - when I say 'we' I mean, Rusty owns it, so I have access to it. But when I am living on my own, I think my current inventory includes a few saucepans and......ah.....coffee cups. I used to have frying pans/toaster/kettle/etc but a decade of living with flatmates has meant anything of quality that I owned was used and destroyed very quickly.

Although the sandwhich frying machine was my own fault. I tried to wash it by putting it in the sink. Apparently delicate electronics and water aren't a good combination. Who knew? Ah, and that time when my grandmother nearly killed us all when she spilled water on the kettle through to the sink where I was washing the dishes. "This water feels funny," says I, as AC current was attempting to fry my brain. Good times.

Knife sharpener It's important to have sharp knives.

Of course, it's important to have knives also.

Bread knife. I actually like my breadknife at work better, but I don't know where I can find one like it. It's a massive, 15"/40cm long stainless steel TITANIUM PLATED thing that can cut through just about anything, and would happily factor in 'human flesh and bone' if I am not careful. I don't know why Monika splashed out for something so crazy sweet, but it's there, and if I can swipe it, I will. This knife, and Rusty's bread knife, always feature when I have zombie nightmares and have to duel wield kitchen knives. What, you don't have zombie nightmares?

Garlic press. I'm glad they clarified what it was because at first I thought it was for some entirely different thing. Of course this assumes I ever cook anything like garlic.

Hey, actually I DID make some mean surf and turf with garlic prawns ages ago. Unfortunately in the process I completely destroyed my frying pan. Maybe next time.

Dishwashing scrubs. I can't imagine what I could possibly use these for, but they sure are pretty colors. Maybe some kind of artistic wall hanging?

Timers. Insert poor taste homemade bomb joke of choice. Also, again, pretty colors. So shiny!

Paint tray. It's perfect! I don't have anywhere to put my paints. Thanks, Anna! (Edit: Oho, there is no sneaking things past this young woman. Yes. It its a spice rack.)

Tupperware containers (probably). It's important to have something to store all my flour, sugar, salt, and other stuff in to, so that some day when I go to open up my, say, oatmeal, it is not fine sticky grain swimming with weevils.

Plastic bag dispenser. For plastic bag dispensing.

12 Bottle Wine rack. What an excellent suggestion! I should try to fill it up as soon as possible. Then empty it. A lot.

It's a water jug!

Candlestick holder. I can't be sure, but it looks like the one from Cluedo. What are you trying to suggest, Anna?! I totally would use the revolver.

Mmm, delicious fire.

White bed set. Later we decided against white for the bedroom. White reflects light, and the last thing I want when trying to sleep in til late afternoon is a bedroom that glows. Well, that's not the real reason, but it will work for now.

A ke...a what? I always thought that this was a portable toilet for those desperate situations when you either a) were so terribly drunk you couldn't remember which was was down, and b) in the event of nuclear war so that you didn't have to stink up your room so much. I didn't know they made these still.

I am not sure why I would use it except for the "can't find the toilet" thing. Oh, and in the event of nuclear war. So, I will factor this under the 'almost never used, but when you need it, it's absolutely essential' category. Safety first!

This is the bed Anna eventually picked out for me. I really wanted the racing car one, but she didn't like the color of it, so, we went with this one instead.

Bedside cupboard. Remember, we decided not to go with white but I don't seem to have the link to the wood set anymore. I'm not sure what I would put in the bedside cupboard. Maybe booze. What do you think?

Wardrobe. Because you can never have too many places to hide.

Wardrobe(s). At the moment I am pretty set for wardrobes as I have two build into my room. However they are useless to me when it is time to move house.

I actually DID have two wardrobes when I moved here from West Lakes, but they were ugly, ugly things that had broken locks (kind of like WoW) so the doors would never stay closed. We went through all the effort of moving this wretched, spider ridden monstrosities here, only to leave them on the side of the road for people to come and take. The first one went in a few hours. The second one went a few days after. People will take just about anything if they think it is free. It was kind of strange sitting in my room watching people walk past, checking out the cupboards. One little girl even wanted to sit in it, but her parents didn't let her. Good idea! My underwear had been in that cupboard. It can't have been a happy place.

Chest of drawers. Ok, now we're talking. This is probably the item Anna picked out that I need most of all. At the moment to store my clothes (oh ho. As if I have them any place but the floor) I have the base of the two built in wardrobes. I can only stack my clothes up, or hang them from the clothes hangar. I have four tiny drawers for storing my socks, jocks, ladies underwear and suspicious items. There isn't any place to put bigger garments like jeans or shirts or so on. Something like this is perfect.

Shelf. I may not be a smart man, but I know a block of treated pine when I see it. I can't help but choke when I read it was 'designed' by Ikea. I could go to a hardware store and buy the same thing for cheaper, and in a variety of cuts and wood suiting my needs and budget. Permapine? Particle board? Of course since I am going for elite, I should find an expensive antique piece of furniture and buy it just so I can cut out one side of it, or perhaps one of those ten thousand year old redwoods.

Making fun of Ikea aside, a shelf is a really good idea. At West Lakes, I had one big long shelf that I was able to put about 50% of my entire army on. If I can get another bunch of shelves like this, I can probably have the whole bunch out, thus freeing up precious space in other places, and no doubt mightily impressing any ladies that happen to come over.

Quilt cover set. I'm not sure about the color, I am finally getting out of Donut King and having to wear pink, but I think the suggestion is a good one. At the moment I only have one quilt cover. If I wash it and forget to peg it up or it rains, I have to use a sheet for a quilt cover.

Laundry bag. Another really good suggestion. At the moment, all my dirty washing goes in a pile next to the washing machine. If I have a basket in my room, I can be even more lazy. Sweet!

Clothes hangars. My new job will have wearing swish button up shirts and suits on occasion while I compose the fine details on secret military projects. Should I go for the traditional red on that button, or a more aesthetically pleasing blue to match the tungsten and aquamarine finish? Decisions like these require the finest clothes, and the finest clothes require the finest of treatments. So I can't just leave them on the ground like everything else, I mean, folded up in my wardrobe. Yes.

(Edit: Fixed up all the links. Man, it took forever, but it sure was worth it. Thanks for taking the time to go shopping for me, Anna! It sure was a lot of fun!)

I probably would not get all of these since I don't plan to live here for much more than six months, but some of the items looked quite good (like the table and chairs) and what I don't take with me I can leave for my brother.

Guest post

2007-06-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sky,
How about this?
<3 Anna

2007-06-23T16:12:00.001-07:00

So, that's what my blog looks like!

Well, green is my favourite colour but the icons are kind of ugly. Let's see if I can switch it around to be a bit more stylish...

(Later)

I'm still not satisfied but I see there is an option to directly hack the html that makes this page up. But I've already blown two hours tinkering around with this thing so I should put it down for now and come back later.

Unit Ready

2007-06-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

I think the tradition is that you would explain what the purpose of your blog is or something like that in the first post. Since I am the kind of person that will go along with tradition only so long as it makes sense or is convenient for me, I'll abide by it this time.

It was surprisingly hard to find a unique blogspot name. All of my preferred favourites, the deep and meaningful ones that people would get a shiver from just typing in the web address, were taken. You know, the kinds of words that when put together in the right way have a powerful ability to change a person, words that transcend mere language and become alive, inspiring. So, in the end I just started stringing together random words from songs or books that I had read until something finally went through. I forget what I finally picked, and it doesn't say from this screen how to access it. So, ah, I hope I got an e-mail or something when I created it so I can get back to this page some day.

Now, where was I?

Currently I am a baker for Donut King. I work from four am through til nine thirty most days Monday to Thursday, and on Fridays from three thirty am through til ten. Some times I also do an additional day shift which effectively has me working from four am until three pm. This is about to change. I had been applying for some IT jobs awhile ago, but everyone was replying with 'You don't have a degree or relevant experience.' A long time ago, I finished my diploma, and am currently studying for the degree. But I knew that, come degree graduation day, having even some small IT experience under my belt would be the difference between having to burn 6 months -> years of my life getting IT experience so I could get a 'real' job. So it was a very pleasant surprise to get a phone call on Thursday last week that was inviting me to a surprise interview the next day. I hadn't even applied for this job. So, I am very thankful to my friend William from fencing and University for recommending me. It's six month contract work, finishing up at around the same time I graduate, and also, at around the same time my lease will expire. All of the chains around my neck that are holding me back financially are slowly falling away. My crippling car debt, my computer payments, my mobile phone payments...at the start of this year it looked very frightening for me. I was living in a bad place, afraid even to leave my room to cook meals. But now I am living well, I have good friends, the things that were causing me so much stress and suffering are vanishing like...I don't want to say "It's a miracle" but it really does feel like it.

I've wanted to make a blog for awhile now, but I knew I would just rant about the things that were causing me stress in real life, and with the way this world is I knew they would get back to the people it referred to somehow, and so I didn't write. Now I have an uncertain future, but in a good way. At the start of 2008, I will be debt free for the first time since I left home in 1996. It will be the first time where I will get a paycheck and I don't have to immediately divide all of it up for bills and repayments, and call up the most urgent bill and ask for an extension so I can have enough money for food. For more than a decade I have had to live like this. So, to suddenly see this...I didn't realise just how much the pressure was until it was suddenly taken away.

So, I'm really happy.

Later I will write more about me, what I do, what I like, and the kinds of things I think about. I tend to write a great deal of text, and prune back on it when I write elsewhere, but since this is my blog I am just going to write big walls of text, like this one. I know its terribly inconsiderate, so in long posts, I'll provide a summary and possibly index. I choose not to reference my work at this time.