I’m neglecting my blog. For the first time, I don’t have anything that even I would find interesting enough to write about.
Except today something strange did happened to me, I found out that I’m attached to an invisible girlfriend. It started this morning when the dodgy Croatian bus driver asked me when am I going to introduce him to her because supposedly she takes the same route as me.
I had to stop by work to drop off some letters and the receptionist quizzed me about my missus. The receptionist said that “(Coworker) would be really jealous which would be to my advantage because then I could get her in the sack faster”.
Then about 10 minutes ago, my mum walked up to me and said in her own eloquent way: “Bobby, do you have a girlfriend, what’s her name and when are you getting engaged?”
So I dare-say I have a psycho stalker on the prowl. Not to say I’m not flattered but just really, really scared. My last relationship ended eight months ago. Maybe going along with it will work to my advantage. Remember that time George from Seinfeld went to a party wearing a wedding ring… ok, bad example.
Well friends, last night closed a fairytale run for the Australian Socceroos team. It was amazing how the World Cup was able to garner more local interest than the last three Commonwealth Games put together. Now that Australia is out of the Cup the comment I hear most is ‘will Global Village return to SBS?’
It really came to me as no surprise. At work on Monday there were many lively discussions over lunch about how great it would be if Australia beat Italy and somehow magically made it into the semis. Then today, silence, nothing except for how’s the AFL ladder going and when is the Cricket starting again.
To Illustrate my point, I’ve created a 1337 line chart.
(Click for larger)
While the chart is by absolutely no means accurate it does proves without a shadow of a doubt that most Australians are bandwagon jumpers. You will note that as soon as Australia was knocked out of the World Cup, Australia lost almost total interest in the competition.
From what I have been told, this graph correlates directly with SBS’ World Cup advertising revenue.
I will admit, I’ve been lazy with updating my Flickr photostream mainly because I’ve lost the username and password to the account.
When I brought my digital camera six months ago, I didn’t realise that it would become my favourite and most used piece of technology. Bit bulky being a digital SLR but between the two memory cards, backup storage and computers I would say that I have taken well over 500 of people, places and objects.
Today was the first time I got some of them professionally printed. I felt a bit embarrassed walking up to the counter with the disk because I thought the salesperson would laugh at the shitty quality of the photos, she actually asked if they could take some copies of the best ones. I felt a bit better after that.
I was enjoying my afternoon off at Borders checking out some books when the lights when out. A few people got stuck in lifts, and half of the stores decided to close for the rest of the day.
On the way home tonight I nearly got run over at the intersection of Puckle Street and Mt Alexander Road in Moonee Ponds. This would be, with no real scientific calculation the third or fourth time I’ve recanted my position on religion. I’ve got the number plate, car model etc, maybe I should hand the details over to the police. The stupid bitch did knock the laptop bag off my shoulder, luckily nothing’s broken.
Its strange, isn’t it, the person who you would think to be least likely to succeed now earns more than you, has a more beautiful girlfriend than you never had and drives a faster car than the bus you take to get to work.
I met up with a friend of mine for coffee and a meal today. The last time I spoke to him was two years ago and out of the blue he rang me to see if I was free.
The last time I saw him he was on skid row trying to turn his fortunes around. He didn’t make a menial change to his life but a huge change. At 20 he now earns nearly $200,000 a year as a real estate agent, with no prior experience, and absolutely no higher education, he even stuffed up his VCE.
I’m happy for him but secretly I wish he was dead. I guess Karma dealt me a bum hand.
Engadget and its sister blog TUAW seem to be losing some of their editorial quality ever since Peter Rojas and some of the founding bloggers took management positions at Weblogs inc.
The writer was reporting about a university research lab which supposedly took dog brain cells, cultivated them and taught the cells how to play the video game Quake 3. Now if that doesn’t sound bogus, I daresay the large ‘This is a fake’ disclaimer at the bottom of the press release would have given it completely away.
So what did Engadget do? They deleted the entry completely. Now I know that we’re on teh intrawebs and shit but Engadget likes to be treated as a professional news source and the writer didn’t fess up to the error or write a retraction but rather hid his mistake behind the useful delete button.
At work we operate a custom financial system that was implemented in the early 80’s. Over the years it has been haphazardly improved with no significant changes except for the occasional bug fix. Lately, the administrative staff have been hell bent on replacing our older systems with newer web based solutions which as you can imagine costs a sizeable amount of the IT budget.
The financial system is the last to be replaced and with perfect timing. While the system is only used by one department and is not critical to business operations it has started to do some bizarre things, the worst is dating invoices and data entry reports in the future. The other odd bizarre quirk is that the printer that is attached to produce reports (an old dot matrix) starts up automatically printing of reams and reams of continuous feed paper containing nothing but characters and symbols.
I can only assume that the Y2K bug was six years late however, I do believe we are going to need an old priest and a young priest to sort this one out.
I just opened the credit card statement for the last month and I amounted a total of $25 dollars of fees and charges. Most of them came from paying off a loan early, which doesn’t make sense: why would you penalise someone for paying a loan off early?
The rest of the charges (almost $5.00), were as detailed in the transaction statement: ‘currency conversion’, ‘international transfer’ and ‘transfer confirmation’. I guess purchasing euro porn online is not worth it after all. But for whatever reason I feel like I’m being ripped off; wouldn’t a computer do all those tasks? I find it hard to believe that a large corporation can rationalise charging .35c for ‘transfer confirmation’.
In other news, I’ve finally updated the sidebar to include podcasts. In case its not deftly obvious enough for you they are hidden under ’shutup and listen’. Go on, click it, you know you want to.
I brought a TV tuner for my laptop. My main reason for purchasing the ‘little grey box’ was because my loving father controls the TV remote with an iron fist (who wears the pants in the could be debated). Anyway, the product itself is marketed as a portable unit suitable for laptop users. It includes a portable antenna which according to the web site is ’sufficient for metropolitan areas’. I live in a metropolitan area (at least I think) and the thing doesn’t pick up any signal whatsoever. I’ve connected it to one of the ‘casa del shitouse’ television sockets and it works fine. Problem for me is I wanted to set it up in the front lounge where there is no socket.
