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All 688 Posts in the Category: Life

23
Jul 23
Sun

Weekly Report: July 23, 2023

Observations

We’ve been on holiday. Here are a few photos:

Write up to come…

Further Observations

  • Aptos is Microsoft’s new standard font, succeeding Calibri, which was made standard around 2007. Calibri in turn replaced Times New Roman and Arial as Microsoft’s default fonts. I never liked Calibri, so I welcome the change. This is dating me, but TNR is still my default serif font of choice for writing large amounts of text.
  • In an example of the speed at which the government moves, in January 2023 the U.S. Department of State finally made Calibri (14-point) its standard font, replacing Times New Roman due to readability factors (sans serif fonts are regarded as being more readable than serif fonts). Just in time for Calibri to no longer be Microsoft’s default font. Prior to introducing Times New Roman in 2004, the State Department used Courier New, which is a monospaced font (otherwise known as a typewriter font where each character occupies the same width on the page).
  • Inflation seems to be back under control and the stock market is ripping again. It’s kind of crazy. More and more people are now literally buying into the prospect of a soft landing after tearing into Jerome Powell for first acting too late, and then acting too aggressively. I still think the other shoe is yet to drop. Interest rates went up 5%+ in record time, the labor market is still tight, and everything is suddenly back to the way it was before? I don’t buy it (literally).

Articles

Reviews

  • 🎪 Knuthenborg Safaripark (Maribo, Denmark)
    A surprising safari park in the south of Denmark where you can drive around and see a host of animals, including elephants, giraffes, tigers, lions (evacuated from Ukraine!), ostriches, etc. Also has a huge, super fun playground for the kids. We stayed overnight in a cabin that has a window looking directly into the tiger area. ★★★★
  • 🎪 Den Blå Planet (Kastrup, Denmark)
    Denmark’s national aquarium. Pretty decent, with a fun water playground outside. ★★★
  • 🎪 Frilandsmuseet (Lyngby, Denmark)
    Open air museum with what must be the world’s largest collection of old barns. Decent for the kids because there are a few activities there they can do, but not so much for adults, unless you love looking at barns. ★★
  • 🗺️ Nivå Strand (Nivå, Denmark)
    A nice beach for young kids with a shallow gradient out into the ocean. ★★★
  • 📺 Jack Ryan (Season 4)
    A reliable show to binge watch. I liked how all its seasons were self-contained. Unfortunately this is the final season, but it looks like it will be getting a spinoff. ★★★
  • 🎬 The Menu (2022)
    Nice looking movie. Characters are a bit of a mess. ★★½

On Twitter

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9
Jul 23
Sun

Weekly Report: July 9, 2023

Observations

🧵 versus 🐦

  • I’m on Threads: @stuloh.
  • In under 5 days, Threads will have hit 100 million users. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t exactly the world’s most beloved billionaire, but in a case of the enemy of my enemy, Elon Musk is even more polarizing given his behavior over the last year. Lots of people have been looking for a Twitter replacement, but the issue with any social network is achieving network effects. This issue has plagued Twitter clones like Blue Sky, Mastodon, and Post News. And the overwhelming majority of users simply don’t care whether the network is decentralized or whatever. It just can’t be a ghost town. Threads, launching off of Instagram’s 1 billion plus user base, doesn’t have that problem.
  • The historic adoption rate is despite Threads not being released in Europe. This is likely due to the $1.3 billion fine levied by the EU in May, which essentially said that various transfers of personal data they make from the EU to the U.S. are not legal because U.S. laws render that personal data incapable of being protected to the standards required by EU law. There is a new EU-U.S. data transfer framework that is being worked out that in theory will address the issue. However, it is the third incarnation of such a framework. After the European Court of Justice invalidated the first two, it’s uncertain whether the third attempt will actually solve the underlying problems, which all stem from U.S. government surveillance.
  • I was in the European Union when Threads was launched, but I was able to sign up. That is most likely because my Instagram account was pegged as an American one. The rules around which privacy laws apply to whose personal data can be complicated, but in general you can think of the laws being based on residency (where you live), not citizenship (which country’s passport you hold).
  • It will be interesting to see how Threads fares. It feels pretty vibrant for such a new product, but we’ll see if it has staying power. I must confess, like many others, it will be a big dose of schadenfreude to see Meta successfully swoop in and take out Twitter after months of “I know better than everyone else” behavior from its mercurial owner. And then things will eventually revert back to people criticizing Meta for how slimy a company it is.

Further Observations

  • In the meantime, Twitter is suing legendary law firm Wachtell over their huge fees from having successfully defended the company from Musk’s attempt to backtrack from the acquisition. Yeah, good luck there. Apparently, the $90 million fee was composed of $18 million in hourly rates, and the remainder being a massive success fee. Wachtell is perhaps one of the only corporate firms that can charge success fees.
  • I’ve been in the miles and points game for a decade now, but I’m still learning new tricks. Here’s how to get free cruises by gaming casino status matches. There are various on ramps to this process, but the goal is to attain status at two Vegas casino loyalty programs (Caesars Diamond or MGM Gold) and go from there. With MGM Gold status, it’s possible to get an almost-free 7+ night Carnival cruise for a couple (or a very cheap one for a family). some may be offered balcony rooms and longer cruises. The free Carnival cruise can, in turn, be matched to a free Royal Caribbean cruise. You can also match MGM Gold to Caesars Diamond, which may generate additional free cruises and other benefits like free hotel nights and credits. I have almost 2 years of Hyatt Globalist status courtesy of a Bilt promotion earlier this year, but unfortunately the challenging part is actually making the time for a cruise.
  • This thread from 2008 on a body building forum defies a satisfactory description and will give you brain damage.

Articles

Reviews

  • 🍽️ Kong Hans Kælder (Copenhagen, Denmark) ✽✽
    A decent meal that met but did not exceed expectations. Service was attentive (they gave Susanne a Danish menu and me an English menu) but impersonal. ★★★
  • 🎪 Experimentarium (Hellerup, Denmark)
    Like the Exploratorium in San Francisco, but oh so much better and with exhibits for kids of all ages. Signage is in Danish and English. ★★★★
  • ✈️ SFO-CPH on SK936 (A330-300, Premium Economy)
    Solid, new hard product, but the wifi didn’t work. Service was decent for a red eye flight. We bought a couple of these inflatable seat extensions so our kids could lie down to sleep and the flight attendants seemed cool with them (not all airlines are). Flight was full. Sit on the right hand side of the plane for a nice view of Copenhagen when circling to land. ★★★★
  • 🛋️ United Club Lounge (International Terminal, SFO)
    Overcrowded, cramped lounge with passable food. You’re better off hanging out in the terminal. ★★

Charts, Images & Videos

This maths lecture, “A world from a sheet of paper” by Stanford Professor Tadashi Tokieda is very engaging:

A beech tree I passed by on a walk earlier this week

On Twitter & Threads

https://www.threads.net/t/CuP48CiS5sx/

https://www.threads.net/t/CuYcHxWOnKn/

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2
Jul 23
Sun

Weekly Report: July 2, 2023

Observations

  • Last week at work, a sizable portion of my company gathered at a physical office in San Francisco and spent the week working physically together. It wasn’t an offsite — it was actual, regular work. It’s the first time in a few years since I’ve done that with a larger group of colleagues, and it felt refreshing. Everything is just much more dynamic. The side conversations during meetings, the option to have quick “drive by” chats, the ability to “read the room”, and even the small non-work diversions that keep you feeling connected to other people throughout the day. On the flip side, the interactions eat up more time, and finding focus is more difficult when you need to do work that doesn’t involve a discussion. But, the worst part of office work is by far and away the commute, and I was reminded about that when it took me 90 minutes to drive home in traffic (double the time it took to get in).
  • The toilets in the building we were working in were on the floor above us. That floor also happened to house the company shown in the photo below — a 2 year old AI company of 60 people that had literally just been acquired for a jaw-dropping amount.
MosaicML’s office
  • DPReview, the authoritative site for digital camera reviews, was scheduled to shut down after Amazon (its owner) conducted layoffs earlier this year. However, I was glad to learn that DPReview was acquired by Gear Patrol and will live on!
  • SCOTUS handed down two major judgments this week that were split 6-3 along party ideological lines.
  • As mentioned last week, short update this week. Happy Independence Day for Tuesday!

Articles

On Twitter

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25
Jun 23
Sun

Weekly Report: June 25, 2023

Observations

Hubris and the Deep Sea

The loss of the Titan, the submersible operated by a private company carrying five people attempting to view the Titanic, has captured the world’s attention for most of the week. After a multi-day search, vessel fragments found on the sea floor mean that the Titan had a catastrophic structural failure and imploded. Mercifully, it would have happened so rapidly that the passengers wouldn’t have realized what was happening.

  • “You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste.” That’s a quote from Stockton Rush, the late CEO of OceanGate who was piloting the Titan. A lot of reports now point to Rush confusing innovation with recklessness, having been repeatedly warned by experts in the past. It took several years for the warned-about risks to manifest.
  • “Regulations are written in blood,” is a common saying. In industries where serious injury or death is a real risk, innovation is slower for a good reason.
  • Hundreds are still missing from the disaster off the coast of Greece, where a boat carrying hundreds of people capsized. It is sad, but not surprising, that media coverage of the two news events has been so incredibly disproportionate.

Top 5

One reason attributed to declining birth rates in developed economies is a reluctance to bring children into a world that feels increasingly messed up. I periodically think about what kind of world my kids will be living in when they reach their 50s, by which time it will be the 2070s. Here is what I think are the most significant global generational issues that will dramatically shape how things unfold in the coming half-century:

  1. Climate change
  2. Declining birth rates
  3. Growing wealth inequality
  4. Political tribalism
  5. The U.S.-China relationship (and the question of Taiwan)

Not making the list for me (yet) are AI, dwindling natural resources, interplanetary travel, and the impact of social media. Disagree with the list? Am I missing anything?

Further Observations

  • Welcome to summer. The summer solstice was on Wednesday — the astronomical beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the longest day of the year. In Australia, the seasons are defined by calendar months, instead (winter runs from June 1 to August 31).
  • It’s been an unusually cool spring and start to summer in the Bay Area, but Texas is experiencing high heat at the moment. The Dallas-Fort Worth area was forecasted to reach as high as 46°C this weekend. And, El Niño is returning
  • The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list was released for 2023. In the past, some restaurants won so much that they are now on a list where they can’t win again. This year, restaurants in Lima have taken out 4 of the places, with Central taking out the top spot.
  • This week I learned: “Wakeup calls are a long-standing tradition of the NASA program. Each day during the mission, flight controllers in the Mission Control Center will greet the crew with an appropriate musical interlude.” Here’s an archive of wakeup calls from one of the Discovery missions. Some of the songs they played include Stairways to the Stars, Defying Gravity, and the theme from Stargate.
  • About the only time I listen to the radio these days is when I drive Susanne’s car to take my daughter to gym class on the weekend. The drive is only 10 minutes each way, but for the last 3 months, I will hear, without fail, The Weeknd’s Creepin’ at least twice, sometimes three times. (My daughter has heard it so much she knows the lyrics 😅.) It’s really annoying, and I recently stumbled across a video that explains why this is: Why radio stations sound the same.
  • Well, the whole Prigozhin thing was anticlimactic. What was the point?
  • The trailer for Dumb Money just dropped. It’s about the Gamestop saga, u/DeepFuckingValue, and comes out on October 20. Seth Rogan plays Gabe Plotkin. Looking forward to it!
  • Not sure if I will write a newsletter next weekend. It’ll be a short one if I do because it’s quarter end, followed by the July 4 holiday.

Articles

Reviews

  • 📺 The Bear (Season 2)
    I hope they renew this for another season. My favorite episodes were Honeydew (a nice interlude in Copenhagen), Forks (nice to see a troubled member of the crew catch a break), and the incredible Fishes (a double length episode with an ensemble cast). ★★★★

Charts, Images & Videos

Spotted in San Carlos

Hasan Minhaj interviews Barack Obama:

On Twitter

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18
Jun 23
Sun

Weekly Report: June 18, 2023

Observations

  • It’s the Juneteenth long weekend and for the only time in the year, our preschool is open on a holiday, so Susanne and I genuinely have the day off. Unfortunately, her Monday plans were unceremoniously derailed by not one but two clients on Friday who are pushing to sign deals early next week.
  • Susanne and I watched this YouTube video that plays the most popular song in each month since 1980. It’s almost an hour long, but it went by quickly. The 1980s had some amazing music, and I knew virtually every song that decade despite not being sentient (or even alive) for most of it. Studies have shown that people tend to stop discovering new music sometime around 30-35 years old. I started tapping out about midway through 2020, when I couldn’t recognize more than about 50% of songs and artists. It’s probably not a coincidence that this coincides with the start of the pandemic and the last time I had a regular commute for work.
  • My thinking on the Vision Pro has changed. After reading all of the glowing reviews, I think I’m going to buy one when it’s released… but only if Apple’s 14 day return policy applies to it. There are several Apple products that I’ve been indecisive about buying over the years. I ended up trying them out, only to send them back after a few days of use. They include the Apple Watch Ultra (found it to be a net detractor over the 20 year old automatic watch I currently wear that powers itself and doesn’t vibrate on my wrist every 5 minutes), the iPhone Pro 13 and iPhone 13 (I prefer the Mini’s form factor), and the AirPods Pro Gen 2 (I already have regular AirPods and the noise canceling that the Pros offer is unusable from a practical point of view when my kids are around… which is also when I probably most want to use them). I suspect the Vision Pro at home is an itch that will get scratched by trying it out for a few days.
  • The S&P 500 index is almost back to where it was in March 2022, when the Fed started the fastest series of rate hikes in history. Kind of crazy.

Articles

Charts, Images & Videos

On Twitter

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11
Jun 23
Sun

Weekly Report: June 11, 2023

Observations

Vision Pro

Apple launched its $3,499 Vision Pro AR/VR headset on Monday. With sales tax, the price will be closer to $3,850 where I live. If you wear glasses, like myself, you have to buy additional lenses that magnetically attach to the device. I imagine those will cost a few hundred dollars.

Nonetheless, as long as Apple decides to continue developing the product, we can expect the Vision Pro to get cheaper and smaller over the years. They’ll probably release a non-pro Apple Vision at some stage.

My take? The Vision Pro probably represents the best shot this decade at seeing whether AR/VR is ready for widespread daily adoption (if it ever becomes ready — I’m doubtful).

As I wrote last week, the promise of AR/VR is mainly hamstrung by the hardware. For example, if I could magically have some of the functionality of the Vision Pro in the glasses I already wear (kind of like a heads up display), without materially increasing their weight or looking dorky, I’d be more willing to stand in line for it.

What we have today with the Vision Pro is the best mass-production headset that you can design with today’s technology. It’s entirely controlled by voice and hand gestures, so you don’t have to lug hand controls (the VR world’s equivalent of the stylus) around like most other headsets. Apparently the eye tracking is pinpoint accurate. The battery has been offloaded to an external battery pack you stick in your pocket, ostensibly to reduce the weight of the headset and thus user fatigue. The screen resolution is the best in the industry. They try to mitigate the issue of being blocked off from the physical world by including a creepy simulated-eyes display in the front, and giving the user the ability to control how much of the outside world they want to see. Because wearing glasses degrades the experience, they require glasses wearers to buy special Zeiss lenses that attach to the device and use those instead. They even have a solid approach to privacy (advertisers can’t do analytics on where you’re looking).

The headset is far from perfect. Reports are that the headset will still starts to feel uncomfortable after some period of use. The corded external battery is still something extra to lug around. But let’s acknowledge for a moment that there is an incredible amount of technology packed into this thing. It’s been pointed out that it represents the culmination of all the different things that Apple has been working on in its other products — from the Apple Watch’s digital crown to the iPad’s Lidar, to the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera for Face ID, and the M2 chip — and then some.

Who knows if it will find meaningful traction? We’ll find out next year.

Some additional random thoughts:

  • John Gruber has a great review of his 30 minutes with the Vision Pro. “Most impressively, and uncannily, the field of view seemingly exactly matches what you see naturally. It’s not even slightly wider angle, or even slightly more telephoto. There is no fisheye effect and no aberrations or distortion in your peripheral vision. What you see in front of your face exactly matches what your own eyes see when you lift the Vision Pro up over your eyes.” Sounds like Apple absolutely nailed the technology.
  • Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks. I mean, it’s what you’d expect him to say, and he kind of has to publicly say that, even if he’s privately sweating. The cost is the main competitive advantage he has today. He points out that Apple’s portrayal of the Vision Pro world feels less social that Meta’s vision of their metaverse. While that may be true today (it’s a little tough to buy everyone in the family their own headset!), that will change if the price becomes more accessible. After all, the social aspect is just software and Apple has a bristling developer ecosystem. The hardware is the hard part.
  • The iPhone was niche when it was launched. But I was totally hyped about it and stood in line at the Apple Store in Sydney when the first one was released in the Australian market. (I had to ask my boss at the time for permission to leave work early for it. He’s one of the best technology lawyers I’ve ever worked with but even he didn’t appear all that curious about it and seemed amused at my earnestness!)
  • The iPhone is everywhere now (at least with the world’s richest 1 billion consumers) and the average price point today is, what, $1,000? When the iPhone was released it was around $600, whereas a BlackBerry could be had for around maybe half that (and Nokias were even cheaper). People will pony up lots of cash if something is good enough and essential enough. Phones are essential in today’s world, but were pretty much essential before the iPhone arrived on the scene too. AR/VR doesn’t have that positioning.
  • The simulated eyes thing are an interesting approach, but I find them creepy. I certainly wouldn’t want to interact with my kids that way. How we look at eyes for feedback is a primal thing… uncanny valley and all that.
  • The scene in the ad for the Vision Pro that I liked the most is where a woman is sitting on a plane and she tunes everything out by watching a movie (at the 0:49 mark). I wonder if the AirPods Pro will pair with the Vision Pro? It needs noise cancelling to be completely immersive. That’s escapism. Maybe a little bit dystopic too. From a practical point of view, it’s probably going to be annoying for people sitting next to you who need to pass by to use the toilet (both to get your attention and to maneuver past).
  • Apple was very careful not to mention the terms AR, VR, metaverse, or headset in its launch. It prefers the term “spatial computer”.
  • If weight fatigue is an issue, I can’t see it being used for more than an hour or two a day by most.
  • Microsoft’s HoloLens has some pretty nice promo videos.

Earning Airline Miles for Interest

Bask Bank offers a savings account that pays interest not in cash, but in American Airlines miles. As interest rates have risen, so too has their mileage rate, and each dollar deposited with them now earns 2.5 AA miles per year. They are currently running a promotion where if you deposit a certain amount of money with them for at least 180 days, they will give bonus miles. $50,000 gets you a 20,000 mile bonus on top of the regular 62,500 miles. So, is it worth it, compared to sticking your money in a 26-week treasury bill?

Here are the factors:

  • Treasury Bill: A 26-week treasury currently pays out 5.483% p.a. when held to maturity. The interest is not subject to state tax. I regard the post-tax interest on the t-bill as the opportunity cost here.
  • Bask Mileage Account: $50,000 deposited for 6 months nets 82,500 miles. Those miles are taxable, and Bask issues a 1099 that values miles at 0.42 cents each, for a taxable amount of $346.50.

Here’s how it breaks down:

  • View From the Wing values AA miles at 1.3 cents per mile (cpm). OMAAT values them at 1.5 cpm. That feels about right. Just note that miles are subject to devaluation over time, so they tend to become worth significantly less as time goes on.
  • In theory, a one-way first class partner award booking from the U.S. to Asia can cost as little as 80,000 AA miles… if you can find availability.

Further Observations

  • I have the details of two of my credit cards committed to memory. This can be a surprisingly useful thing to do.
  • Donald Trump was indicted on federal charges on Thursday relating to improper handling of classified documents. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump is alleged to have said. Uncharted waters…
  • Both Binance and Coinbase were sued by the SEC this week. The SEC’s complaint against Binance features this amazing quote:

Articles

Reviews

  • 📖 How To Invest: Masters of the Craft (David Rubenstein)
    Interviews given by Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein with investing legends such as Seth Klarman, Ray Dalio, Stan Druckenmiller, Jim Simons, Orlando Bravo, Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz. Full of intriguing insights — into their backgrounds as well as how they think. ★★★★

Charts, Images & Videos

Source: Catalist | By The New York Times
Singlish translator: cbbbbb, cao ni ma

On Twitter

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4
Jun 23
Sun

Weekly Report: June 4, 2023

Observations

Apple Goggles

Apple’s long-awaited VR/AR headset is rumored to be launched at WWDC on Monday. Around the internet, it seems that people are skeptical whether the device will become a successful product line for Apple, but no one is willing to rule them out given their track record of taking over markets they enter (see phones, tablets, wireless earphones, watches, etc.). However, the anticipated $3,000 price tag is a barrier that will probably see the first version remain a niche object, kind of like its top of the line Pro Display XDR monitor. Let’s see what they can do with it. (Meta also announced its Quest 3 headset. I bought a Quest 2 during the pandemic but it hasn’t seen much use.)

When I was in high school in the late 90s, I remember being totally hyped for the release of Ultima Online, one of the first massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) that, I’m surprised to see, is still operating today. The promise it held in my mind was a persistent world that I could explore with a bunch of friends. But it was not just about exploring dungeons and killing monsters—you could do stuff like form a guild, trade goods, and even buy virtual property. This meant it could be a place you could just hang out in and chat and “build a second life” in, so to speak, in between all the adventuring. (Second Life came a few years later.) It seemed to be a great place to hang out with real life friends and friends that I had made online.

The reality was decidedly less rosy. The first issue was that things were hamstrung by technology. Broadband in Australia was in its infancy and cost prohibitive, and accessing UO over a dial-up connection led to crazy bad lag. It was unplayable. The second issue, is that even when the connection was tolerable, Britannia (the name of the world in which UO is set) wasn’t a particularly fun place to actually hang out. While clearly there were enough people who the game engaged that it has survived to this day, I don’t remember playing it for more than a few weeks even though I played a lot of computer games back then.

MMORPGs are the original metaverses and they have been around for decades. While VR is tightly bound with the metaverse (as in, a way to fully immerse yourself in one), VR has broader applications. Nonetheless, just like UO, I think the early days of consumer-accessible VR are still pretty niche. Until a few things change, I see things remaining that way (although, with Apple’s reach, even a niche offering involves a lot of people).

First, the form factor is cumbersome. Fabricated mockups of Apple’s headset show a sleek pair of ski goggles which are easier to whip on than the Quest, but there is an external battery pack which I assume needs to be clipped somewhere to your body. This adds quite a bit of friction each time you want to use it, which contrasts to the “instant on” nature of its phones, computers, etc. (I remember the old days where computers didn’t have sleep mode and it could take 3+ minutes to boot up a desktop. That made using a computer a very intentional act.)

Second, current forms of VR disconnect you from the physical world. I imagine the Apple headset will have look-through functionality, but it still involves putting something in front of your eyes—your window to the world—blocking them completely. So it may be great for games and experiencing things that aren’t possible in the real world, but will that provide widespread daily utility?

Third, are there any real world interactions that are genuinely made better by VR goggles? I certainly don’t want to have meetings at work wearing them. Maybe there are some limited applications like doing virtual walkthroughs of buildings in real estate that are more convenient (but still inferior to actually being there).

Fourth, all of Apple’s major product lines are used by all age groups. It will be interesting to see what the uptake is of older age groups. Maybe it’s me just getting older, but the Quest 2 makes me dizzy sometimes.

All that said, MMORPGs have come a long way and some of them have developed very strong communities and are actually places in which a lot of people now hang out and socialize (and sometimes meet and get married IRL). And some people even make a bit of a living through it by selling virtual goods. I have no doubt that VR will continue to evolve and grow, but similar to MMORPGs, I’m not sure it will become something all pervasive, like the smartphone, or this new generation of AI technology that’s currently set the tech world ablaze. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but with Apple I suppose there’s a certain weight of expectation that whatever they do will literally change the world and become ubiquitous.

Augmented reality is probably the more interesting application, but I think it demands a different form factor to find more widespread adoption. But what would that be? Google Glass was an attempt, but it looked dorky. Maybe one day we’ll be able to integrate a chip and power source into glasses that are inconspicuous. Or maybe it will be something like this, where the technology just gets out of your way altogether.

Nonetheless, Apple’s headset is still probably going to be able to do some pretty cool stuff!

Further Observations

  • Every few issues of this newsletter, I will sign up a random friend or two to it. If you’re wondering why you suddenly started receiving these, that’s why. (Funnily enough, no one has ever replied to me asking, “Hey, why did I start getting these?”)
  • A shout out to the Dim Sum WhatsApp group! It was great seeing you all yesterday… and actually eating dim sum together for the first time in ages!

Articles

Reviews

  • 🎬 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
    As good an adaption as I could have hoped for. ★★★★
  • 📺 Succession (Season 4)
    First class TV, and they successfully landed the plane with the series finale. ★★★★★
  • 📺 The Diplomat (Season 1)
    Susanne put me on to this one. It’s really good. ★★★★
  • 📺 The Night Agent (Season 1)
    Watchable, but pretty standard spy show fare. ★★½
  • 🎪 Gilroy Gardens Theme Park (Gilroy, CA)
    Took the kids here over the Memorial Day weekend and it wasn’t as busy as I feared, which is probably telling. It’s a bit of a weird, aging, and tired theme park, and two of the rides broke down just as we reached the front of the line (which did not make for happy children). Membership is apparently tax-deductible. ★★

Charts, Images & Videos

On Twitter

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28
May 23
Sun

Weekly Report: May 28, 2023

Observations

Soft Landing?

Inflation is coming down, but I remain skeptical that we’ll get a soft landing.

A soft landing supposes that, by keeping interest rates roughly where they are, inflation will start to moderate back down to its 2% target and low unemployment and positive productivity growth will be maintained. Paul Krugman suggests things will be more resilient than the doom and gloom suggest.

But interest rates have skyrocketed in the last 12 months, after more than a decade of ZIRP and a generation of workers who haven’t experienced an environment in which money was not cheap.

Rate rises have never occurred so quickly in history, and I don’t think they’ve had a chance to bite. The longer you keep rates at this level, the longer the situation gets worse for people and businesses who are sensitive to rate rises. People are not used to interest rates being over 1%, much less over 5%. The effects of high rates should eventually flow through in the form of increased bankruptcies, defaults, and restructurings. The regional banks aside, we haven’t seen much of that yet, but it doesn’t gel with me that whoever levered up to the gills in the last few years isn’t going to face some sort of reckoning when their interest rates have suddenly multiplied. It will take some time to play out.

We’re already seeing some signs of stress.

Credit card debt did not decline in Q1 like it normally does and delinquencies are rising. The commercial real estate market is a ticking time bomb. The regional banking crisis is still lurking in the wings.

Economic cycles have tended to consist of periods of gradual growth followed by short and sharp declines. I’m not sure why it would be different this time when the powder keg is so large. Eventually, something will spark a prolonged panic and precipitate the next recession.

And maybe we’ll see cycles that are more volatile — a sudden slowdown could push the Fed to cut rates back down to zero again in a knee jerk reaction, and you end up with an economy in pilot-induced oscillation (“when the airplane begins a departure from the desired flight path, and the pilot applies inappropriate, excessive or mis-timed corrections that result in ever-increasing excursions that threaten to force the airplane out of control”).

Perhaps something at play is that things happen so fast these days, and attention spans are short. The lack of bad things happening quickly might be interpreted as a sign that the bears are forever crying that the sky is falling, but we’re actually on a path to recovery.

I just don’t see it happening.

Further Observations

  • Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces in a conversation with Elon Musk and David Sacks. As is common for Musk’s events, it started late and then just got more awkward as the servers overloaded.
  • Uber’s Chief DEI Officer was placed on leave after a couple “Don’t Call Me Karen” talks she hosted went sideways after various employees felt antagonized by what she said. Things feel a bit out of control, and it’s telling that I don’t really feel comfortable publicly expressing a view what was said, knowing that it could come back to bite me at some stage. All I’ll say is that this chilling effect on speech isn’t a good outcome.
  • This was NVIDIA after earnings release on Wednesday. That stratospheric price reflects $180B+ of market cap added in the space of an hour, all because of AI. (Only Apple and Amazon have recorded larger one-day increases.) Its PE ratio is now over 200.

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21
May 23
Sun

Weekly Report: May 21, 2023

Observations

The Debt Ceiling

The Republicans are playing chicken with the debt ceiling again. It’s a travesty how the system works here – namely, that the budget is approved by Congress first, and then as a separate step, Congress has to approve raising the debt ceiling so that the U.S. Treasury can issue new debt to pay for the spending that Congress already approved. This process is almost unique in the world. (Denmark is the other country that works this way, but they don’t practice brinkmanship over there.)

It’s almost impossible to imagine Congress actually taking things over the precipice, but no one is 100% absolutely sure that won’t happen, even though the consequences would be catastrophic if the U.S. were to default on its debt.

  • After months of President Biden effectively saying that he wouldn’t negotiate with terrorists who were holding the debt ceiling hostage, it’s telling that he is now negotiating. Clearly, there’s pressure from the Democrats who think the Republicans might let things go too far.

“X-date” is the deadline where the government effectively runs out of money. It fluctuates because it depends on day-to-day tax revenue collected and spending, but “as early as June 1” is the guidance that the Treasury has given.

  • The last time things got this down to the wire was in 2011 when the debt ceiling was raised with potentially only a day or two before the government ran out of money. In response, S&P downgraded the U.S.’ credit rating from AAA (the highest) to AA+. In the month leading up to the resolution of the crisis, the stock market fell 17%.
  • U.S. Treasury Bonds are regarded as “risk free” assets (or the closest thing you can have to risk free) given the reserve status of the U.S. dollar, the fact that the U.S. economy is the largest in the world, and the ability for the U.S. government to print more money at will. If the U.S. were to default on its debt, it would be entirely self-inflicted.

Interestingly, the market is not reacting like it did in 2011, staying relatively buoyant despite June 1 being a little over a week away. This means the market is expecting things will be resolved before x-date. It has been observed that this means that insurance against a debt default is selling for cheap. This insurance comes in the form of put options on the S&P index (via an S&P index ETF), or alternatively call options on the price of gold or against the VIX (volatility index).

  • On May 18, one unit of SPY (an S&P index ETF) was about $415 (about the same as where it was a month ago). A put option on SPY expiring on June 2 at a strike price of $385 (~7% under the ETF’s current value), was selling for $0.40. Should SPY decrease by 17% (the same as in 2011) over the next 2 weeks to $345, the option would return about $40 for a ~100x return. This has not gone unnoticed.

One potential solution to the crisis, where the U.S. Mint mints a $1 trillion coin and deposits it in the Federal Reserve’s Treasury account, has been taken off the table by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. As explained by Wikipedia: “The concept of striking a trillion-dollar coin that would generate one trillion dollars in seigniorage, which would be off-budget, or numismatic profit, which would be on-budget, and be transferred to the Treasury, is based on the authority granted by Section 31 U.S.C. § 5112 of the United States Code for the Treasury Department to “mint and issue platinum bullion coins” in any denominations the Secretary of the Treasury may choose. Thus, if the Treasury were to mint one-trillion dollar coins, it could deposit such coins at the Federal Reserve’s Treasury account instead of issuing new debt.”

Further Observations

  • Michael Lewis’ book on Sam Bankman-Fried is called Going Infinite and it will be released in October. I’m looking forward to it.
  • Sometimes I’m so exhausted that I fall asleep putting my kids to bed and end up waking up a few hours later at around 11pm. After shaking off the wooziness, I then spend the next few hours relatively clear-headed and productive, catching up on emails, work, and household admin, before heading back to bed at around 2am or 3am. I was worried that this messed up schedule might become a bad habit, but it turns out that it’s a natural sleep pattern called biphasic sleep that was common in medieval times: “A couple of hours later, people would begin rousing from this initial slumber. The night-time wakefulness usually lasted from around 23:00 to about 01:00, depending on what time they went to bed. It was not generally caused by noise or other disturbances in the night – and neither was it initiated by any kind of alarm … The period of wakefulness that followed was known as ‘the watch’ – and it was a surprisingly useful window in which to get things done. ‘[The records] describe how people did just about anything and everything after they awakened from their first sleep,’ says Ekirch. … One servant Ekirch came across even brewed a batch of beer for her Westmorland employer one night, between midnight and 02:00.” That makes me feel a bit better.
  • A Berkeley student commuted from Los Angeles for an entire academic year. He did this ostensibly to avoid paying rent in the Bay Area (he had free accommodation in LA). From a pure money perspective, the numbers checked out. From a practical perspective, well… His daily commute averaged 4-5 hours each way, and involved a car, plane, and BART ride. He managed to schedule his classes so he only had 3 days a week for most of the year, but during some periods he did have a 5 day week. On some days, he needed to wake up before 4am to catch his flight, and some days his flight back departed at 9pm. But, he managed to make it to every class, every day. The sheer planning and discipline involved, and fortune to not be impacted by delayed or canceled flights, is impressive. He breaks everything down in this great Flyertalk post. There was a 6-month period of my life when I was commuting at least 5 hours a day, every weekday, and I swore I’d never do that again. (Standing in a hot un-air conditioned train for an hour every day is not fun. I once fell asleep while standing up.)
  • Here’s how one of his days looked:

    “8/11/2022 Thursday LAX-SFO-LAX
    AS3342 LAX-SFO E175 $5.60+5000 AS miles
    AS3435 SFO-LAX E175 $5.60+5000 AS miles
    Leave home 410am
    Car Parked 436am
    Reach Airport 456am
    Flight Departs 600am
    Flight Arrives 745am
    BART Departs 935am
    BART Arrives 1047am
    Arrive Class 1100am
    [4 hours 20 minutes at class]
    Leave Class 320pm
    BART Departs 333pm
    BART Arrives 448pm
    Flight Departs 623pm
    Flight Arrives 757pm
    Airport Landside 804pm
    Reach Parking Lot 822pm
    Arrive Home 858pm

    That’s when I started questioning myself: 6am flight everyday, is it really worth it? Especially given that I only slept 4.5hrs the night before. But anyways, once I boarded, I slept like a baby until we reached SFO.”

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Look at that inverted yield curve:

Source: FRED

Now let’s zoom out further…

Source: FRED

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14
May 23
Sun

Weekly Report: May 14, 2023

Observations

Mycology

I’m somewhat embarrassed to have only discovered the amazing library system in our part of the Bay Area. There is a small offshoot branch of the main city library about 2 minutes’ drive from our house that has a great selection of new releases and children’s books. And, through that library, I can request books online from any of the dozen or so other libraries in the same system. They ship the book to my local branch and notify me when it’s ready for pickup. They seem to get all the major new releases. Self-checkout is simple — they have a neat scanning machine where you pile all the books you’re checking out on top of the checkout surface. The machine detects all of them and deactivates the security tags in one fell swoop. The books are initially lent for 3 weeks, but as long as no one has a hold placed on them, the library will automatically renew them for you. They let you check out 50 books at a time! I visit with my daughter every second Saturday.

Anyway, the library is not what this post is actually about. While at the library, I picked up a field guide to identifying mushrooms (on a total whim) and learned a few things, including what a “spore print” was. Basically, it’s a method of identifying mushrooms by observing the attributes of the spores they drop, such as their color and drop pattern.

I tried to make one. It’s easy: I bought a portabella mushroom from the supermarket, cut the stem, placed it gills down on a piece of paper and covered it overnight with a glass container. The next day, you get your spore print on the paper. (And if you spray it with a fixative, like hair spray, you have something you can hang on the wall.) Below was the result:

I also learned that portabella mushrooms are the same species of mushrooms as white mushrooms, button mushrooms, and cremini (brown) mushrooms — all supermarket staples.

Mushrooms are just one part of a fungus. Similar to an apple on an apple tree, mushrooms are the fruiting body for the underlying mycelium (a threadlike network that exists in soil or a substrate like wood) that makes up the rest of the fungus. Mushrooms are the way fungi reproduce, since they are basically receptacles for dispersing spores.

Mushrooms are incredibly diverse, but I was particularly intrigued by giant puffballs. They can grow larger than a soccer ball and, for a limited span of their lifecycle, are edible!

Further Observations

  • In a civil case, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. He is appealing. I doubt this will significantly change whatever trajectory he’s currently on. Once DeSantis enters the race, things will get interesting.
  • In another case of chickens appearing to come home to roost, habitual liar and member of Congress George Santos has been indicted on 13 federal counts including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making false statements to Congress. He has pled not guilty.
  • Warriors :(

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Movies & TV

  • Beef (Season 1)
    Sucked me in deeper and deeper with each episode. The main characters are mostly Asian and about my age, which in a strange way (because things get really crazy) made this show more relatable. Worth a watch. ★★★★
  • Air
    I’m a sucker for Damon/Affleck flicks. The 80s montages were also spot on. ★★★
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    Surprisingly good for a third installment. A little dark, a lot of fun. ★★★★

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7
May 23
Sun

Weekly Report, May 7, 2023

Observations

  • One of our kids got the whole family sick this week, so just a short update.
  • Following the demise of First Republic Bank, all regional bank stocks took a bath on Thursday. They rallied slightly on Friday, but the signal sent by plummeting stock prices could affect confidence and lead to a run on a bank by its depositors. If this continues, it’s hard to see where it stops with regional banks unless the government steps in and changes policy — most likely by doing something with the FDIC’s 250K insurance limit. Pac West and Western Alliance appear to be the most vulnerable at the moment.
  • King Charles III had his coronation ceremony yesterday. I have been told by our resident royal watcher that historically the UK’s coronation ceremonies were not attended by foreign monarchs because the ceremonies were considered to be the business of the people of the UK alone. Now that the British Royal Family is considered to be one of the UK’s primary “exports,” times have changed… If you are curious who attended, here’s a list.

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Movies & TV

  • The Mandalorian (Season 3)
    Entertaining fodder.

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30
Apr 23
Sun

Weekly Report: April 30, 2023

Observations

  • On Friday evening, we arrived home after dinner to find that one of the large Modesto Ash trees in our front yard had split in two. The split half was being precariously held up by the branch of another tree, and that branch was the only thing preventing everything from collapsing. Nonetheless, the whole tree was now tilting like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and hanging over the sidewalk like a gigantic Sword of Damocles for people taking their evening walks.
  • I quickly printed out a couple warning signs and stuck them to the tree. But now what?
  • We had actually realized the tree was in the process of dying a couple months ago and called an arborist. After tapping the trunk and several branches with a pen, he recommended we take the tree down, but there wasn’t any rush as the winter storm season had passed. We signed a contract with them ($1,500 for the removal, plus more for stump grinding) a couple weeks ago, but then they strangely ghosted us, despite multiple follow ups. A call to their emergency line went unanswered.
  • In any event, after Googling, it turns out that even when a tree of this size is clearly dead, you need a tree permit from the city to remove it. Tree permits take about 10 days to process, unless it’s an emergency. Two problems: the permitting office was closed since the weekend had basically started, and the tree permit required an arborist’s report for submission.
  • We didn’t feel comfortable waiting until Monday, and it was a toss up who would collapse first over the weekend: First Republic Bank, the Warriors, or our tree.
  • Susanne got some quotes from other arborists through Yelp. We were surprised to get several immediate responses. Some were willing to come out on Saturday to give us a quote. One asked for $2,000 off the bat (ouch).
  • I called the city works department, which was closed, but a recorded message pointed me to an emergency line for issues like burst water mains and leaking sewer lines. The person who answered was as helpful as they could be — they didn’t know who would handle our issue, but took down my contact details and promised to get back to me.
  • Not knowing how long that would take, I then turned to Nextdoor and a few helpful neighbors suggested I call the non-emergency line for the police. (I later read in the city ordinances that the police can authorize a tree being removed if it’s a safety threat.) After calling, we were told someone else had apparently reported the issue already (it wasn’t our earlier call to the works department), and they would be sending someone around to inspect.
  • About an hour later, we got a knock on the door from a city worker. We took him to the tree. He shone his torch on the trunk, “Hmm, yeah I can see the split.” Then we directed him to look into the canopy where the other tree was supporting its half-fallen compatriot like a drunken sailor. “Oh. Oh yeah. That’s not safe. That’s not safe. I didn’t even see that. This is a tree on your property, but we’re going to call someone out to take some of these branches down because it’s not safe. We can cut it up but we can’t haul the debris away for you.”
  • Not a problem with us! We had already planned to pay for that, and now the city was telling us they were going to do it for free. We asked how long that would take, expecting it to be some time the next day, but were amazed to learn a crew would be out within the hour. (He was actually apologetic, “Well the guys have got to go and pick up the equipment they need first.”)
  • Sure enough, a guy with a cherry picker and a chainsaw showed up and spent the next couple of hours cutting down the tree, one chunk at a time. He was done just before midnight and we were super appreciative.
  • Because bureaucracy is bureaucracy, he told us we still needed to file for an emergency tree permit for the removal. “However, it shouldn’t be a problem because this was an emergency situation and my boss is the person who approves those permits.”

Further Observations

  • First Republic Bank is going the way of Silicon Valley Bank. A lot of the VCs that were extremely vocal on Twitter about saving Silicon Valley Bank depositors when the bank was melting down have been strangely silent. “The government has to save all the depositors or the regional banking sector is going to die!” But this weekend, not a peep from the Twitterati. Not hard to figure out why.
  • H-1B visas are the most common form of visa for international students looking to stay in the U.S. to work. If you have a master’s degree, there are only 85,000 available each year. This April there were over 780,000 applications. Yikes. When I applied for my H-1B back in 2010, the silver lining of being in the depths of the great financial crisis was that there were more than enough H-1Bs to go around.

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If you think you’re having a hard week, just be glad you’re not doing this:

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23
Apr 23
Sun

Weekly Report: April 23, 2023

Observations

  • This week was the series finale of Star Trek: Picard. I’ve been a Trekkie for a long time and I have blog entries dating back from as long as 25 years ago (!!) writing about Trek. Given the special nature of the season, it felt appropriate to write a few more words about it. Spoilers ahead.
  • The last time we saw the whole TNG cast together was in Star Trek: Nemesis. Unlike the original series cast’s swan song in Star Trek VI, the TNG cast never had a proper send off, as poor results at the box office for the decidedly sub-standard Nemesis saw their time on the screen come to an abrupt end.
  • Now, a little over 20 years later, the whole senior TNG cast — naturally playing characters that are also 20+ years older — has been reunited in a fitting end and satisfying closure to the TNG crew’s journeys together.
  • The previous two seasons of Picard were forgettable and the writers of Season 3 did their best to do so. Season 3 was much better.
  • I found Season 3 deeply nostalgic, and the writers made sure to throw in tons of callbacks and easter eggs to stoke that nostalgia. So much fan service, and I loved it. It would have been nice to see more cameos from DS9 and Voyager folks (apparently they ran out of budget), but they did include an oblique reference to Odo, who was played by the late Rene Auberjonois.
  • When you see someone continually over the course of years, you don’t notice the aging process so much. But the last time we saw the crew, they were much younger. So suddenly seeing them all together again on the screen, 20 years later, was a stark and constant reminder of the passage of time. For me, it brought back memories of the times I spent watching and discussing episodes of TNG and DS9 with a couple of my best friends during high school and university (screening at 11pm on Channel 9 during a weeknight). Occasionally we would scoop up whatever VHS tapes we could get our hands on at the local Video Ezy and watch episodes late into the night. And it was also a sobering reminder that life has moved on — with the onset of middle age, we now each have our own “next generation” to bring into the world.
  • The closing scenes were great — Picard delivering lines from Julius Caesar and a poker game to mirror the end of All Good Things… Apparently they filmed the cast casually playing poker for about 45 minutes, took an excerpt from it, and rolled it over the closing credits. (Oh, and Q is back.)
  • Anyway, much feels, and time to move on…

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16
Apr 23
Sun

Weekly Report: April 16, 2023

Observations

TikTok

I was asked for my thoughts on TikTok. My thoughts are pretty simple.

The potential for social media to do harm in various forms has been recognized for many years now. Ad-driven social media business models rely on engagement and attention, and their algorithms optimize for that. That often means displaying content that is provocative or even incendiary. It leads users down rabbit holes and into echo chambers. It influences emotions and perspectives and messes with adults psychologically. For kids, it’s even worse. I believe it can really mess up kids during their most formative years — especially if they are left with it for hours unsupervised, each day. (Gen Z believes it too. See “Do the Kids Think They’re Alright?” in the Articles section below.)

TikTok has incredible engagement and reach. People spend hours on it each day. It has over 100 million users in the U.S. As a business, I wish I could invest in it. As a product, I’m not a user. But some of the content on there and the creativity on display is pretty incredible.

Overlaid on top of all of this is the fact that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a $300B Chinese company. Chinese companies (and particularly tech companies, as of late) are vulnerable to interference by the Chinese government far beyond a level that exists in the U.S. The Chinese government even has a board seat and some ownership of a key ByteDance company. (ByteDance also has several other apps that rank very well in U.S. app stores.)

Facebook has been used by domestic and foreign actors to spread misinformation, influence hearts and minds, and generally damage the fabric of society.

It then doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that if the company responsible for the algorithm itself were trying to set an agenda (in this case, at the behest of the CCP), it could do so by directly altering the algorithm in a way that could have much more significant impact than by external actors trying to game the system. It’d be a good way to subtly spread propaganda or stoke social discord in a mostly inscrutible way.

Data surveillance is also an issue, but that doesn’t seem as significant. The U.S. government certainly has the ability to covertly compel production of certain data from private companies. You’d also think someone would notice if the apps were trojan horses for spying on whatever else is happening on a user’s device.

TikTok is banned within China itself, which is pretty telling.

The result is a national security threat that seems very real. It’s hard to see another outcome from this situation other than for TikTok to be spun, or banned. I won’t be sad if either of those things happen.

Some may argue that banning TikTok would be hypocritical of the U.S. The U.S. regularly decries China for muscling out U.S. tech companies from the Chinese market — only to threaten to turn around and do the same thing. This is a whataboutism-type argument which doesn’t respond to, nor undermine, the genuine concerns above. Nor does it undermine the notions of sovereignty and what’s in the national interest that allow countries to engage in this behavior. It’s not ideal, but there’s no reciprocity here.

Further Observations

  • I found out what happens when you forget to remove crayons from the pockets of your pants before you throw them in the wash. It looks like my toddler drew all over our clothes. Bits of melted wax everywhere. The internet’s solution of washing the clothes in very hot water, dish detergent, vinegar and washing detergent was not completely effective. ChatGPT was unhelpful. Wife not amused.
  • And while I was at it, my wallet also took a bath in the washing machine.
  • We’re almost at the end of Season 3 of Picard and not only is it far superior to the other two seasons, they dialed the nostalgia up to 11, and they did it pretty tastefully. This week’s episode is the penultimate one for the series, and it was amazing. TNG was an indelible part of my adolescence, and it’s kind of wild seeing the entire cast re-assembled, 30 years later.

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9
Apr 23
Sun

Weekly Report: April 9, 2023

Observations

  • The kids picked up something nasty at pre-school and it took the whole family down this weekend. So, only a short update for this week, but a long and interesting articles list below.
  • Google Flights is my tool of choice for finding paid airplane tickets. It’s quick, flexible, and links off to other sites to complete the booking (I greatly prefer booking directly with airlines rather than third parties like Booking.com, Dreamz, etc., which can be a huge pain to deal with if something goes wrong.) Google flights now offers a limited guarantee where they will reimburse the difference if the fare drops after you book. There are limitations, of course:
    • You need to be signed in your Google account and use U.S. details when you make your booking (currency, phone, address).
    • The booking needs to be no more than 60 days in the future
    • It’s only offered for some itineraries (denoted by a badge).
    • $500 maximum reimbursement, max 3 times a year.
  • Apparently an unofficial slide that an associate at Paul Hastings prepared has been making the rounds:
  • While Paul Hastings was quick to disclaim this as the firm’s official position, about 70% of this is accurate, I think. Even for someone who routinely spends these dollars on outside counsel, #3 is not a reasonable expectation (except, perhaps, during crunch time of a major transaction) and firms should be able to manage staffing to give their staff time off and appropriate coverage. #4 I don’t expect everything to be done yesterday. It’s not always possible, I try to give reasonable timeframes and don’t like to put outside counsel through needless fire drills. #7 “No poor connections” — we’re all at the mercy of Comcast. #9 is totally an acceptable answer for an associate, as long as you follow it up with, “but I’ll find out”. #5 is an important point. If you pay $1,000+ per hour to anyone for anything in life, you’re going to expect gold-plated service.

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Source: Reddit

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26
Mar 23
Sun

Weekly Report: March 26, 2023

Observations

  • The Fed raised interest rates by 0.25% on Wednesday to a range of 4.75-5.00%. The upper range of that bound is now 20 times what it was a mere 12 months ago. Rapidly rising rates were always going to put pressure on various sectors of the economy that have benefited from cheap money for the last decade plus (that’s kind of the point). We’ve seen it with startups who scored cheap equity financing a couple years ago that are now having trouble raising up rounds. We’ve seen it with families no longer being able to afford mortgages that are as large (with monthly interest payments almost tripling), resulting in a housing market slowdown. We’ve seen it with the regional bank runs that declines in the values of banks’ bond portfolios have sparked.
  • The question is now which sector is going to be the domino that tips the economy over the edge into a recession? Commercial real estate seems to have arisen as the most likely candidate, with falling tenancy rates combining with a lot of maturing loans that are coming up for refinancing at today’s much higher rates appearing as storm clouds on the horizon.
  • We had our third prolonged power outage this year. Again on a Tuesday. An extra-tropical cyclone parked itself just off the coast of San Francisco causing more fallen trees and localized flooding. Power was out for us for about 30 hours, and we ended up spending yet another night in our hotel. We now also have a great view into our neighbor’s back yard because most of our fence is gone. And next Tuesday the forecast is for another period of “excessive rainfall with localized flooding”. Sigh.
  • Last week, I wrote about the fallout from a protest incident at Stanford Law School. This week, SLS Dean Martinez penned a detailed explanation of why she did what she did. It’s a well written missive, and I agree with almost all of it. However, I had two observations. The first is the practical impact of deciding not to sanction anyone for their behavior, ostensibly because it was too hard to figure out who was breaking policy and who was not. Everyone is instead going to have to sit through a mandatory training. Will this mean that a future protest tactic is to flood a talk with bodies because it’s just too hard to identify who was doing what? The second is that the letter only mentions in passing something about respectful discourse. The letter also expressly notes that asking vulgar and provocative questions when you’re given the microphone is ok and not disruptive. That may be true from the point of view of free speech, but as lawyers, respectful argument is part of the job and—normally—a positive value to encourage. (Try spewing profanities at a judge in court and see how far that gets you.) One protester allegedly called for the judge’s daughters to be raped. 
  • “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a speech on Monday. He was referencing an IPCC report which once again is warning we’re nearing the point at which it will not be possible to avoid a rise in the global average temperature by the end of the century of a magnitude that will cause severe human misery. “Unless nations adopt new environmental policies — and follow through on the ones already in place — global average temperatures could warm by 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the synthesis report says. In that scenario, a child born today would live to see several feet of sea level rise, the extinction of hundreds of species and the migration of millions of people from places where they can no longer survive.” It’s going to be a slow burn, but wild weather is going to be increasingly common, and difficult to adapt to in our lifetimes, regardless of where you live in the world.
  • For those who have the fortune of being able to decide where they want to live and work in the world, I think climate factors are going to rise to one of the top considerations within the next couple of decades. Not just whether the weather is “nice”, but whether that cliffside house or oceanfront view is such a good idea, or whether 100 year flood zones really are 10 year flood zones, or whether water scarcity might be a real problem.
  • Deal Alert: We use Doordash a lot. If you live near a Lucky Supermarket, they have a promotion right now where you can buy six $50 Doordash gift cards and you’ll get 6000 rewards points, which is good for $66 of store credit (and which can be applied to buy more gift cards). Buy with an Amex Gold card and you’ll also get 1200 Membership Rewards points.

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Not sure this data is surprising, but it’s a good reminder that landings are rarely soft

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19
Mar 23
Sun

Weekly Report: March 19, 2023

Observations

On March 9, Stanford Law students heckled and shouted down a 5th Circuit Judge who was giving a talk hosted by the school’s student chapter of the Federalist Society. Among the grievances of the heavily progressive student body was that the judge had refused to use, in a 2020 opinion, the preferred pronouns of a transgender person who had been convicted of several offenses related to child pornography. (“In conjunction with his appeal, Varner also moves that he be addressed with female pronouns. We will deny that motion.”)

The judge was reportedly unable to complete his prepared remarks, and during question time was subjected to invective, such as the question, “I fuck men, I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the clit?”

Apparently, when one of the school’s diversity deans arrived to “restore order,” she ended up criticizing the judge, while other administrators failed to tell protesting students to allow the judge to speak without being interrupted.

Student members of the Federalist Society were further subjected to a name and shame campaign, and allegedly “encircled” and abused at the event after federal marshals escorted the judge away.

The judge later remarked, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m a life-tenured federal judge. What outrages me is that these kids are being treated like dog shit by fellow students and administrators.”

On March 11, the Dean of the law school, Jenny Martinez, and the University President, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, sent a written apology to the judge:

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.

Dean Martinez followed that up with an email to alumni clarifying the law school’s stance on free speech.

In response to the apology, “hundreds of student protestors wearing masks and all-black clothing lined the hallways outside Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez’s classroom” where she was teaching a con law class. She “arrived to find her whiteboard covered in fliers ridiculing Duncan and defending those who disrupted his speech. The fliers echoed the opinion of student activists and some administrators who claimed hecklers derailing Duncan’s talk was a form of free speech.”

“They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black” and join the crowd, first-year law student Luke Schumacher said. “It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating.”

As a law school alumnus, I found this behavior incredibly embarrassing.

You only have to flip the roles to highlight how ridiculous it is. What if it were a left-leaning circuit judge being yelled at and insulted by a motivated group of right-leaning students? Would the same progressive students who yelled down Judge Duncan support the right’s right to do so then? I doubt it.

I am not familiar with the judge’s jurisprudence, but to be clear, with respect to the viewpoints of his that were reported by the media, I do not agree with them. But that should not matter here.

I can’t think of any other country which has a more expansive right to free speech than the U.S., and it is a fundamental enough right that it is enshrined in the constitution. However, if you seek to wield that right, you wield a double-edged sword. The same right that allows anyone to speak out on political topics without fear of government prosecution, allows other people to picket (at a distance) the funerals of gay murder victims with hate speech. But that is kind of the point. As a result, censorship is something that runs contrary to free speech values, and not letting someone talk by shouting over them en masse is a form of censorship. And, at some point, that kind of disruption can cross the line into unlawful speech—harassment, threats, slander, and the like.

Stanford is a private university and is not legally required to uphold free speech values. However, these values share much in common with the notion of academic freedom, and so it is unsurprising when Dean Martinez writes, “Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle for our community at SLS, the university, and our democratic society. … The way the event with Judge Duncan unfolded was not aligned with our institutional commitment to freedom of speech.”

It’s not clear in the reporting whether the protesters were law school students, or students from other parts of the university (events like these are normally open to all to attend). If they are law school students, what are they going to do when they become lawyers and get in front of a judge they disagree vehemently with, but still need to present a case to?

(Sidenote: Interestingly, unlike the U.S., a few countries like England and Australia, practice the “cab-rank rule” which obliges barristers to accept work from any client as long as they are competent enough to handle it, and regardless of any personal distaste the barrister may have for their client’s reputation, character, etc. “Without the cab-rank rule, an unpopular person might not get legal representation; barristers who acted for them might be criticized for doing so.” So in these countries, you not only need to have the ability to present a case respectfully in front of a judge you may personally hate, but you may also need to do it on behalf of a client you find repugnant. Not easy but, in my opinion, an important part of the justice system.)

Further Observations

  • Last week’s newsletter about SVB produced the highest number of views out of all my past newsletters. The drama continued this week, with regional banks under pressure. One of the most notable among these banks is First Republic, a San Francisco-based bank that serves a lot of high net worth individuals. First Republic has been experiencing an outflow of deposits which has led to efforts to shore up its balance sheet. In addition to obtaining a $70 billion credit line, a consortium of large banks deposited $30 billion on Thursday. First Republic was reportedly also looking for an acquiror. However, those efforts failed to calm the markets, and the stock closed down for the week, reflecting skepticism that First Republic will be able to weather the storm without going into receivership.
  • On the other side of the Atlantic, UBS has agreed to buy Credit Suisse for about $3.2 billion in an all stock deal which is expected to close by the end of this year. That’s 0.50 Swiss francs per share, which is about a quarter of CS’ stock price at market close on Friday.
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Oscars last Sunday. Unusually, EEAAO took out most of the top shelf awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and three acting awards, despite being a sci-fi flick. Also unusual was that two Asians from the movie landed two of the acting awards: Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Ke Huy Quan won Best Actor in a Supporting Role. (Jamie Lee Curtis landed the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.) Yeoh is the first Asian winner of her award in Oscars history. Harrison Ford presented the awards, which was a nice touch seeing that Ke Huy Quan last appeared on screen with him in Temple of Doom as Short Round. EEAAO is an absurdist film that I found difficult to follow at times, but it’s quite a spectacle with some memorable scenes, including one featuring butt plugs which people are doing their best to sit on.
  • Strong winds caused another power outage at our home on Tuesday. It lasted 12 hours for us, but 48 hours for our kids’ preschool. Due to the recent rains saturating the ground, a lot of large trees were uprooted, leading to widespread blackouts throughout the Bay Area. We had to spend a night at a hotel again.
  • In other news, Tesla has finally started selling its Powerwall on a standalone basis again. Due to supply constraints over the last couple of years, Tesla would only sell Powerwalls bundled with solar panels. The recent blackouts have pushed us towards buying a pair.

Articles

Books

  • Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss)
    A very interesting book written by a former hostage negotiator for the FBI. It highlights the shortcomings of a more traditional “principled” approach to negotiation, where rationality rules the day, and focuses more on the emotional and human aspects of negotiation. Voss asserts that compromising (”splitting the difference”) is a cheap way out that often leads to sub-optimal results for both parties. Sometimes there’s a way to get all of what you want, even when it appears you have little or no leverage, and without blowing up the relationship.

Hotels

  • Residence Inn by Marriott San Mateo – San Francisco Airport (San Mateo)
    Unfortunately, the nearer (and nicer) Residence Inn we stayed at during the last power outage was all booked out. This hotel is older, but still pretty well equipped and pretty good to work from. We got upgraded to a two bedroom, two bathroom suite split over two levels.

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12
Mar 23
Sun

Weekly Report: March 12, 2023

Observations

The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

Silicon Valley Bank is, relatively speaking, just down the road from me. As one the top 20 largest banks in the U.S., it is the banker to half of the startup industry but, fortuitously, not to my employer.

At the start of this week, SVB held about $170 billion of deposits from its customers. On Thursday, it fell victim to a bank run. SVB’s customers, within the space of about 24 hours, withdrew $40 billion—a quarter of its deposit book. This is a tremendous amount, and SVB did not have enough cash on hand. In fact, at the end of the day, it had a cash shortfall of almost $1 billion dollars. When a company is unable to pay its debts as and when they fall due (and on Thursday, $40 billion suddenly fell due), the company is considered insolvent and cannot continue business as usual.

On Friday, SVB was placed into receivership. A federal government agency called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), took over management of SVB and immediately closed it for business. Anyone still with money in SVB was now unable to get it out. “Anyone” turns out to be mostly startups, who are now facing an uncertain and very stressful few days.

But how did we end up here? Why did customers suddenly want to pull out $40 billion? And if took in $160 billion in deposits, why did they have not enough cash to pay $40 billion back?

What happened?

We don’t normally think about things in this way, but a deposit in a regular bank account is basically a loan to the bank that you can ask the bank to repay at any time (which essentially happens when you go to an ATM and withdraw cash, or ask Venmo to send money from your bank account to a friend). In exchange for lending money to the bank, they pay you interest (normally). Banks use your money to make money. Typically, this is done by lending those deposits to other people, at higher interest rates. So, for example, you might lend the bank $100,000 and they pay you 1% interest, but then someone else might borrow that $100,000 from the bank to buy a house (i.e. a mortgage loan) and pay the bank 3% interest. They pocket the 2% difference.

But the loans that banks make aren’t “on demand”. If you have a 30 year mortgage, you only need to repay a certain amount, plus interest, each month. The bank normally can’t force you to pay more than that. On the other hand, the money you lend to the bank in a regular savings account is “on demand”. This is sometimes referred to as “borrow short and lend long” and is just how banks work.

So, given that timing mismatch, how can the bank lend any money out? After all, it’s no good if you go to the bank one day and want your $100,000 back, only to be told “sorry, we lent your money to someone else and we have to wait 30 years before we get it all back”.

Enter “fractional reserve banking”. In reality, people rarely ask for all their money back at once, and never does everyone ask for all their money back at once, so banks only need to hold back a fraction of their deposits as cash, and can lend the rest of it out (or invest it in other things that are expected to produce a positive return). The fraction that banks need to hold in reserve is fittingly called the reserve requirement, and is set by banking regulations.

There are situations in which unusually high amounts of withdrawals may exhaust a bank’s reserves, but there are usually also facilities available under which banks can borrow money (typically from other banks) on a short-term basis to fill any holes while they scramble to convert their other assets (loans and investments) back to cash.

SVB was in a slightly different situation, but the basic principles are the same. The main difference is that their client base is heavily composed of tech startups. Most tech startups are not profitable or cash flow positive, so they finance their operations by raising equity financing (giving up a piece of the company in exchange for money), rather than debt financing (paying interest in exchange for money). Missing an interest payment on a loan can be deleterious, so when you’re not reliably making money as a startup, debt can be dangerous and is usually avoided. As a result, SVB didn’t have a lot of avenues for lending out the money it had received from its customers to other customers, so it needed to find another place to invest that money to earn a return.

For this, SVB invested a lot in debt in the form of U.S. treasury bonds and mortgage backed securities. When you buy a U.S. treasury bond, you are lending the U.S. government money, and they pay you interest. Treasuries are considered “risk free” in the sense that the U.S. government will always be able to pay you back. They can do this because they can just print money, if they need to. (Let’s leave to one side for now the game of chicken that politicians play every few years with the debt limit.) So from a creditworthiness perspective, treasuries are a very conservative investment vehicle. They are also a very liquid asset, which means there is a deep and active market that lets you buy and sell a lot of bonds quickly.

Because the short-term interest rates have been near zero for so long, SVB decided to invest in $90 billion worth of longer-term bonds that returned a little less than 2% of interest per year, and the full amount of principal after several years.

During the pandemic years, investment in tech startups blossomed, with equity financing pouring into companies at ever increasing valuations. Consequently, because of how concentrated SVB’s client base is in tech startups, their deposits trebled from about $60B at the start of 2020 to almost $200B just a couple years later.

In 2022, after over a decade of near-zero interest rates, rates began rising sharply, to around 5% today. SVB started to find itself having to pay more interest on its deposits, increasing the need for SVB to earn a return on all that money that its customers had lent it. However, most of its money was locked up in those long-term bonds, which was one problem.

The other problem, is that due to increasing rates, the funding environment for startups tightened right up—instead of investing in startups, more people were now investing in treasuries, which were yielding more than they had for over a decade (and remember, treasuries, unlike startup investments, are considered risk free). On the other hand, tech company valuations were getting slashed. This meant that as startups spent their money, no new funding was coming in to replace it. SVB’s deposits started to fall by billions of dollars as startups withdrew money to pay employees and vendors.

SVB needed to start converting some of its investments back to cash so that it could pay those customer withdrawals. Here’s where the problem started.

Most of SVB’s assets were treasuries. If those treasuries are held to maturity, SVB gets all its money back. But if it needs the money now, SVB needs to sell those treasuries now. Unfortunately, if SVB paid $100 for a treasury bond that only pays $2 in interest a year, no one today is going to buy that bond for $100 because the U.S. government is currently issuing bonds that pay $5 in interest. So if SVB sells those bonds, they are going to have to sell them for something less than $100.

This was a problem for SVB, because let’s say it sold some bonds for 95% of what they bought them for. Accounting rules require SVB to consider that its entire bond portfolio is now only worth 95% of its original value. For a $90 billion portfolio, that’s a $4.5 billion decrease. In reality, it’s reported that the bond portfolio had actually lost $15 billion in value. So if they sold some of those bonds, they would have a massive $15 billion hole in their assets that they’d have to plug somehow (remember, that’s $15 billion they no longer have to cover the deposits they’ve taken in). So those bonds were effectively untouchable in the short term.

Instead, SVB sold substantially all of its other investments for cash—$21 billion worth—it also tapped out some other lines of credit it had. As a forced seller, it incurred a $1.8 billion loss on the sale because those investments had declined in value. To plug that hole, SVB tried to do what all of its startup clients do—raise $1.75 billion equity financing. In the press release for the equity raise, the $1.8 billion dollar loss is mentioned in the last paragraph, almost as an afterthought.

People noticed, and this news spooked people. People started to wonder why SVB decided to liquidate $21 billion at a significant loss, and rumors started to fly about whether SVB was in trouble.

Bank Run

Silicon Valley is a pretty interconnected community and news spreads fast. For example, my CEO was plugged into his CEO and VC network and hearing what was going down. Our head of finance was talking to other heads of finance at peer companies. I was reading buzz from a mailing list with hundreds of head of legal on it. Word started circulating that companies were getting their money out of SVB, just in case. It became an echo chamber.

The other thing about having tech startups as clients is that they are tech experts, not finance experts. A large number of tech startups are run by talented under-35 founders who have not experienced a financial crisis in their professional lives, nor are they finance experts. As a result, they logically turned to their VCs for advice on what to do when the rumors started. After all, VCs are “the money guys” and they should know much more about financial management since that’s the industry they effectively operate in. So when one VC says “get your money out,” that causes a whole bunch of their portfolio companies to do just that.

Having seen how fast things unravelled in 2008 (“Bear Stearns is fine!”), my initial reaction to hearing the news was: Get your money out of SVB right fucking NOW… if you can. As in, drop whatever you’re doing and get those wire instructions in. If it’s nothing, you can always move the money back.

If you didn’t have a second bank account, or you had a loan with SVB that contractually required you to keep your cash with them, things got a bit trickier, and you then had to make calls like whether to move the cash into a founder’s personal bank account, or ignore your loan covenants, and then worry about any legal ramifications afterwards.

The next morning, and $40 billion in withdrawal requests later, SVB was dead. The FDIC announced that SVB was both insolvent and failing its regulatory liquidity requirements.

There has been some blowback against some VCs for fanning the flames of a bank run that might have been avoidable, but I don’t think VCs are to blame here. As a company, you have to look out for your own employees and business and, in this case, taking your money out if you could was the right call. If it’s a false alarm, there’s little downside. But if it’s real, then you don’t want to be stuck in a tough place… especially if it was avoidable. The herd mentality is a powerful driver of financial markets and you want to at least be part of the stampede—not be crushed by it.

What now?

Through the FDIC, the U.S. government provides deposit insurance at all FDIC-insured banks. If a bank collapses, the FDIC will ensure that depositors will be able to get at least $250,000 of their funds back. (This limit used to be $100,000 but was raised after 2008 Great Financial Crisis.) This is very helpful for the average person, who is likely to have less than $250,000 cash lying around in a bank account. It is not so helpful for a company, that is likely to have much more than that. Apparently, about 96% of SVB depositors were not fully covered by FDIC insurance, compared to about 38% at Bank of America.

This insurance kicks in very quickly. On Friday, the FDIC created a new bank called the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara (DINB). The insured portion of all SVB bank accounts was then transferred to the new bank, and depositors will have access to those new bank accounts on Monday. The uninsured portion of those bank accounts (anything over $250K per depositor) was then effectively frozen, with the FDIC issuing a “receivership certificate” to each depositor that represents an unsecured claim on the remaining assets of SVB up to the amount of the uninsured funds.

Next, the FDIC’s job will be to sell off SVB in a way that maximizes the money they receive. That money is then distributed to a list of people, starting with secured creditors, then depositors, then other unsecured creditors, then subordinated debt holders, then anything remaining goes to SVB’s stockholders.

As the FDIC sells off SVB, it will issue a dividend to receivership certificate holders. It’s rumored that the FDIC has been hard at work flogging off tens of billions of dollars’ worth of SVB’s assets and will issue an “advance dividend” of about 50% of the value of a certificate sometime in the next week.

The best outcome now is for another bank with a strong enough balance sheet to buy SVB and assume all the deposits in one fell swoop, which will allow accounts to be unfrozen. I think that is a likely outcome. If that doesn’t happen, then SVB will be sold off in pieces, and uninsured depositors will get their money back over time. I think that depositors will get most, if not all, of their money back, but it will take months, or even years.

In the meantime, the timing uncertainty and inability to access funds is incredibly stressful to affected startups. Payroll is due next week. Failure to pay wages is one of the things that can “pierce the corporate veil”, meaning that liability for that failure spills beyond the company, and may impact officers, directors and stockholders personally. However, one would think that if employees get paid a few days late, they’re going to be understanding and not litigious.

This weekend, startups are trying to find sources of immediate-term funding, ranging from loans from VCs, bridge loans, credit cards, and selling their receivership claims at a discount to opportunistic investors.

And teams of bankers, lawyers, and bureaucrats are spending a sleepless weekend trying to figure out what to do with SVB before the markets open on Monday.

I think the majority of SVB startups will be fine at the end of the day. There may be a severe liquidity issue for startups with short runways (e.g. if you had a 12 month runway and only get 50% of your funds back next week, you now have a 6 month runway and no idea when the remainder of the money will come back, and you’re now thinking about whether you need to lay off people to conserve cash).

[UPDATE: It’s over; startups can feel relief. 30 minutes before this post was scheduled to go out: ‘The Federal Reserve, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced in a joint statement that “depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.” The agencies also said that they would enact a “similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank,” which the government disclosed was closed on Sunday by its state chartering authority.’ (per the New York Times) “Separately, the Federal Reserve announced that it was creating a new lending facility for the nation’s banks, designed to buttress them against financial risks caused by Friday’s collapse of SVB.” (per the Washington Post).]

Bail outs?

Several prominent VCs and investors have been screaming for the federal government to come in and backstop deposits in full—not just $250K. In other words, the government should effectively insure everything, and then get reimbursed as FDIC sells off SVB.

This is not a bailout of SVB. SVB is no more—its board and executive team will find themselves looking for new employment (if not already), and the equity holders will likely be wiped out.

But it is a bailout of depositors, and that has other people screaming that the U.S. taxpayer should not have to do that either. Let capitalism take its course. (And, as usual, the whole situation has been politicized.)

The issue is more nuanced than that. As I mentioned above, although depositing money at a bank is essentially lending the bank money (and therefore a form of investment), people don’t really see it like that. And you’re not really thinking that the 16th largest bank in the U.S., which has been around for 40 years and is regulated, is a credit risk. The average person on the street certainly isn’t going to be thinking about that. They’re just looking for a place to put money that isn’t under their mattress. During my time in the U.S., I have had personal bank accounts at a lot of different financial institutions (more than half a dozen), and creditworthiness was never something that crossed my mind.

So is it fair or desirable that depositors should suffer—particularly when what we are talking about here are small innovative businesses that employ thousands of people between them?

But then should we just make FDIC insurance unlimited for everyone going forward? If not, why not?

Some suggest that a failure by the government to backstop depositors here will catalyze a chain reaction that leads to catastrophic bank runs at other (small) banks. The argument goes that why would anyone put money in a smaller bank that is at risk of a bank run? People will just move money into the biggest 4 banks in the U.S., which will cause further bank runs, kill small banks, and lead to more concentration and less competition in the banking industry, which is bad for everyone. I’m not very convinced by this argument. I think we are in a specific situation exacerbated by the uniquely concentrated customer base that SVB had (only 3% retail clients!) which produced a high proportion of uninsured deposits.

This was also a liquidity issue, not a situation where SVB plowed billions into FTX stock that is now worthless and they now can’t cover the hole. SVB apparently has enough assets to cover its deposit liabilities—it just needs time to sell them off. People probably aren’t going to lose a lot of money, unlike when your crypto exchange goes belly up.

As for the question why anyone will now deposit in small banks if there’s no backstop—in most banks, the existing backstop covers most depositors. Secondly, why do people bank with smaller banks today? Because their product is positively differentiated in various ways. I’m skeptical that the perception of a potential threat of a bank run happening to a smaller bank is going to outweigh all the other reasons that smaller banks exist in a way that leads to an existential crisis for them. But let’s see what happens when the markets open on Monday.

Another thing that is clear to me is that we now have a generation of workers who have been exposed to a financial crisis for the first time. To be sure, it’s mostly localized to tech startups (for now), but for almost 15 years now, money has been cheap and free-flowing and the last 9 months have been a huge shock to the system. It will be intriguing to see how these interesting times shape the psyche of Gen Z and younger millennials, just like how the financial habits of the Silent Generation were shaped for a lifetime after growing up through the Great Depression.

More to come

I still think the worst is yet to come for the economy as a whole. If interest rates are sustained at current levels (and it’s starting to look that way, as employment is still strong and inflation remains elevated), we’ll start to see them bite into the parts of the economy that are the most sensitive to rate rises, and that will cause a domino effect. I’m not sure where that is, but I could see, for example, companies that have maturing loans getting into trouble when they have to refinance at much higher market rates. Or unrealized losses that bondholders being forced to be realized due to liquidity needs.

Buckle up.

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5
Mar 23
Sun

Weekly Report: March 5, 2023

Observations

Berkshire Annual Report

Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter was published as part of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report last week. This year’s was quite brief, but as usual, very accessible and a repeated reminder of the simple themes that have served him well over the decades.

  • After the growthy period of 2019-2021, Berkshire returned to outperforming the S&P index, returning 4.0% in a year where the market fell 18.1%.
  • “We are understanding about business mistakes; our tolerance for personal misconduct is zero.”
  • Berkshire buys businesses and also invests in public companies with the expectation of holding each indefinitely and therefore looks for enduring businesses with trustworthy managers. He notes that private, controlled businesses are almost never available at bargain valuations.
  • He notes that they make, on average, one “truly good” decision every 5 years, and that the performance of their portfolio of businesses includes “a large group that are marginal” but many that are “very good” and a few that are “truly extraordinary”.
  • For example, he highlights the performance of a 28-year holding of Coca-Cola. Cost base was $1.3B. As of 2022, it threw of $704M in cash dividends (53% annual yield on the original investment!) with a market value of $25B (19x capital gain).Put another way, if my parents had invested $100k in Coke when I was in primary school, that investment would today be almost $2M and generating $53k in dividends. Makes me think about what I should do for my kids to leverage the power of compounding. They are each currently, as Morgan Housel puts it, “time billionaires”.
  • Last year, Berkshire acquired another property-casualty insurer, growing its insurance float from $147B to $164M (the premiums it holds).
  • Berkshire holds a “boatload of cash and U.S. Treasury bills” and avoids behavior that could result in uncomfortable cash needs at inconvenient times, including financial panics and unprecedented insurance losses. Seems like a good personal approach too.
  • He rails against the politicization of stock buybacks. As a pure matter of mathematics, stock buybacks, when performed at a good (undervalued) price, are beneficial to all remaining shareholders.
  • His formula: retaining earnings in its businesses (Berkshire doesn’t pay dividends) + compounding + avoiding major mistakes + what he calls the American Tailwind: “America would have done fine withour Berkshire. The reverse is not true.”
  • Berkshire’s annual corporate tax bill of $31B is 0.1% of the entire American tax base.
  • He shares a bullet point list of some things Charlie Munger said on a podcast, including the value of being a patient, long-term investor, the dangers of leverage in wealth destruction, that you “don’t need to own a lot of things to get rich”, and that investing requires adapting as the world changes.
  • In reference to Charlie Munger: “Find a very smart high-grade partner — preferably slightly older than you — and then listen very carefully to what he says.”

Phones at Work

When I was younger, I generally disliked talking on the phone (there was a measure of anxiety attached to it), so the advent of SMS, emails, and IMs felt like a blessing to me, and more so as the younger generations pushed adoption of that socially, and then in the workplace. However, especially in tech workplaces, I now find myself missing phone calls.

To contact someone now, people typically reach out via Slack and then wait. Or schedule some time on their calendar and then wait. Or if it’s really urgent, they’ll send a text and then wait. It’s less intrusive, but also there’s no way to guarantee a quick answer for small things — even if the person is completely available, they just might not see your message for a while. And for a lot of these calls you simply don’t need video. You just need to get some shit done.

When I was a junior lawyer at a firm, we had these Cisco IP phones on our desk. People would just dial each other up by punching in 4 digit extensions. It was spontaneous, marvelously tactile, and it wasn’t a big deal. If the other person was unavailable (in a meeting, on another call, or just under the gun getting something out), they would ignore the call or send it to voicemail. (And if it was super urgent and you weren’t answering, they would physically show up at your door.) No one really worried about interrupting anyone. Clients would call out of the blue as well.

For a period I had an office next door to my supervising partner (I still remember his 4-digit extension, 15 years on), and he would still call me despite the physical proximity. I was thankful that he didn’t scream through the wall, even though that would have been marginally quicker.

These calls were a great way to deal with things in a minute that can now take quite a lot of minutes and relative effort to resolve over chat. Also, it’s a great way to ask a bunch of questions in a way that feels natural but, when done over a textual medium, can feel interrogational and even aggressive.

No one does this anymore, and I think you lose a valuable communication method and tool.

Further Observations

  • This week I learned that the U.S. Supreme Court opens each term with the pronouncement “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” Oyez is an Anglo-Norman word that means “Hear Ye!” It’s kind of weird that it took me so long to learn that given that I work in law and also started a blog called Hear Ye! over 20 years ago.
  • A 15-lawyer Canadian litigation law firm tried the 4-day work week for 2 years and published its results (Wednesday was their off day). They are pragmatic and interesting:
    • “Sometimes you’d have to work 5, 6, or 7 days a week and that is OK; that’s just life.” In other words, at a normal law firm you sometimes have to work weekends. In this case, the weekend is 3 days long, and you may have to work weekends. Particularly since clients expect availability and the courts have their own schedules. “In my interviews with our lawyers, they said they have had to work at least 1 hour or more on over 50% of Wednesdays.”
    • It takes “a lot of planning and thought”.
    • “You can attract the wrong crowd by advertising 4-day work weeks and need to get your message right and clear.” They put in a 3 month probationary period that requires new hires to work 5 days in the office until they get an idea of their work ethic.
    • “We have way, way less turnover.” This makes sense. And this suggests people chuck sickies quite often: “Our sick day requests have been reduced by over 80%.”
    • They still managed to grow revenue over that period (more than 2x over 2 years).

Articles

Movies & TV

  • Drive to Survive (Season 5)
    “It’s not a documentary. It’s closer to Top Gun than a documentary.” —Toto Wolff. Great way to whet the appetite for the new F1 season, which started this week!

Charts, Images & Videos

From Americans in Their 30s are Piling On Debt (Wall Street Journal):

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26
Feb 23
Sun

Weekly Report: February 26, 2023

Observations

Blackout

In a previous newsletter, I mentioned we have a lengthy power outage on average once per quarter. That’s not an exaggeration. This week, we endured our longest outage yet.

At about 1pm on Tuesday, our power went out and didn’t come back until Thursday evening — more than 50 hours later. It all happened as unusual weather arrived in Bay Area, with several inches of snow falling at altitudes of as low as 250 feet. It basically never snows in the Bay Area. Less than 5 miles away in Woodside, the scene looked like this:

Stephen Lam/The Chronicle

We didn’t get snow, but our area was buffeted by gale force winds that uprooted large trees, crushing power lines and transformers.

Within a few hours, power was out across swathes of Redwood City, Woodside, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Stanford.

We ended up staying in hotels for 3 nights. The hotels were filled with locals — mostly families with young children and older people carting along oxygen containers.

At the first hotel, a Holiday Inn, we were offered a welcome bag of snacks at check in. “The robot will deliver them to your door,” the guy at the counter said, pointing to what looked like a trash can on wheels in the corner. I won’t lie — it was the most Silicon Valley thing ever, and I was more excited about it than was rational.

Some time after we got settled into the room, we got a call from the front desk. “The robot is outside your door.” I opened the door and there sat the robot. It did nothing. The screen on top of the robot featured two blinking eyes, with a speech bubble above in which was written “None.”

We stared at each other for a bit. After poking and prodding at the thing, I finally determined it wasn’t working, and called up the front desk. They fiddled with a few things on their end to no avail.

“We’re going to reset it and try again.”

Reset meant that someone had to come up to our room and manually wheel the robot back to its base. A few minutes later, the robot showed up at our door again. The result was not different.

Again?!” an exasperated voice from the front desk said after I called them. And once again, they had to “reset” the robot.

Finally, the front desk clerk showed up at our door, his arms overflowing with snacks and beverages. “Sorry about that — we’re having uh, technical issues. I got you some extra things.”

Gradually, the power started to come back on in various places. We noticed that power in the most affluent areas was restored first — Atherton, Woodside, Palo Alto — while Redwood City and East Palo Alto were out of luck for hours longer. Maybe a coincidence, but we have our suspicions.

The most annoying part of the outage was all the food we had to throw out from our fridge and freezer.

The Rewriting of Roald

I entered Year 3 as a 7 year old, and some of the classroom memories I retained from that year include:

  • My teacher read to us The Hobbit and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which was the first time I was exposed to fantasy and set in motion a lifelong affinity for that genre.
  • He read to us The Great Piratical Rumbustification and proceeded to put the last three words of that title on the next week’s spelling test.
  • He read to us Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, my first Roald Dahl book. During the course of primary school, I followed up by reading most of the rest of his novels, as well as his autobiographical Boy and Going Solo.
  • He was telling us about what to bring to an excursion to the mangroves of the newly-opened Bicentennial Park and mentioned we should bring “several drinks”. I thought that meant seven drinks, which seemed like quite a lot to me. I put my hand up. “Sir, do we have to bring several drinks?” He looked confused and said, “Well, you don’t need to but I would recommend you do.” I was satisfied that I wouldn’t get into trouble if I didn’t bring seven poppers and it was not until much later that I learned what “several” really meant.

In hindsight, many of those memories involved books, which brings us to the topic of Roald Dahl. Dahl is best known for his children’s novels, although he also had a repetoire of adult writing. His books were formative to me growing up. Last week, it was reported that Dahl’s books would be rewritten to remove language “now deemed too offensive”.

The laundry list of changes includes describing Augustus Gloop as “enormous” instead of “fat” (?!), removing many instances of “white” and “black” as descriptors in non-racial contexts (such as where you might describe a “face going white” for when the blood drains from the face in fright), and excising any mention of Joseph Conrad or Rudyard Kipling and replacing them with Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. One can only surmise that the associations of Conrad and Kipling with colonialism have been deemed too painful to tolerate.

The changes are reminiscent of a “Harmful Language” list that was published by a group within Stanford University. As that list would have it, words like “brave”, “tribe”, “abort”, “stupid”, “victim”, “immigration”, “submit” and “American” were considered harmful. The list was widely pilloried, and the university swiftly had it removed.

Online, it would appear that the changes to Dahl’s books are facing a similar backlash. This Reddit post is basically filled with people who are screaming “nobody asked for this”. In fact, one of the only negative comments I came across online was a one-star review that someone left 4 years ago for a 16-book collection of Dahl’s writings sold by Costco: “I bought this excited to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the rest of the books with my kids. Then we got into the Great Glass Elevator, which has a chapter devoted to totally worn out racist tropes that made me stop reading.”

They’re not wrong about the racist tropes. Check out this passage from Great Glass Elevator:

The President threw the phone across the room at the Postmaster General. It hit him in the stomach. ‘What’s the matter with this thing?’ shouted the President.
‘It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,’ said the Postmaster General. ‘The country’s so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.’
‘You’re not kidding,’ said the President.

The President again picked up the receiver.
‘Gleetings, honourable Mr Plesident,’ said a soft faraway voice. ‘Here is Assistant-Plemier Chu-On-Dat speaking. How can I do for you?’
‘Knock-Knock.’ said the President.
‘Who der?’
‘Ginger.’
‘Ginger who?’
‘Ginger yourself much when you fell off the Great Wall of China?’ said the President. ‘Okay, Chu-On-Dat. Let me speak to Premier How-Yu-Bin.’
‘Much regret Plemier How-Yu-Bin not here just this second, Mr. Plesident.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He outside mending a puncture on his bicycle.’
‘Oh no he isn’t,’ said the President. ‘You can’t fool me, you crafty old mandarin!’

It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?

As a child of the 80s of oriental persuasion, I am acutely aware of racism and being bullied in the playground for how my eyes looked as a “fucking ching chong chinaman”.

But I don’t think rewriting old works is the right thing to do. This is the progressive equivalent of censorship, and not much better than the troubling wave of book banning in more conservative parts of America.

History can be a great teacher, and only if you are aware of what happened in the past can you learn from it. Changing Dahl’s words is kind of like attempting to avoid history because it’s too painful, and seems similar in vein to avoiding teaching about the Holocaust in school.

Older books are products of their times and make good discussion points. I think it’s better that a child stumbles across the phrase “queer ramshackle house”, gets confused, and asks an adult how a house can be gay. That can spark a useful conversation.

It doesn’t seem much different to studying Shakespeare, where there are a lot of confusing, archaic words and phrases that high school students spend hours scratching their heads over. And I’m not sure that reading Shakespeare perpetuates the use of those dated terms.

I am far more fearful about what my kids will find online, than in a book from centuries past. I am more fearful about what text-generative AI might mean for critical thought and disinformation.

The other thing is, and this is perhaps controversial, is that there is a time and a place for ethnic stereotypes, and that is comedy. There’s a reason why Russell Peters’ jokes about Chinese and Indians (and everyone else) are so hilarious, and that we find Colin Jost reading out Michael Che’s jokes about black people funny. That comedy is only funny if you’re aware about those stereotypes in the first place.

I think the approach taken by Warner Bros. is the right one. For some of their older cartoons, they now display the following disclaimer at the start:

The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.

Articles

Movies & TV

  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Disney+)
    I fell asleep midway through, so not that great. The first one was better. 2/5.
  • Only Murders in the Building (Season 2)
    This whodunnit series, featuring the unusual but endearing combination of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez has really grown on us this season. It’s got a really random brand of humor that we like. We’re looking forward to Season 3, which is going to feature Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd. 4/5.

Hotels

  • Holiday Inn Redwood City (Redwood City, CA)
    Where we stayed for the first night. A standard, no frills hotel room. Clean and relatively comfortable.
  • Residence Inn Redwood City (San Carlos, CA)
    This place was surprisingly good, and actually a great place to stay if you are a business traveler. All rooms have a kitchen, two large tables, and are clean, spacious, and well appointed. There’s also a laundry on site. The breakfast is not bad.

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19
Feb 23
Sun

Weekly Report: February 19, 2023

Observations

FTX’s Lawyers

  • Financial Times article reporting on the final days of FTX featured the following email that a partner from Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm managing FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings, sent to SBF in an effort to get him to sign documents where he’d step down as CEO of FTX and allow FTX to file for bankruptcy.
    • EMAIL – NOV 10, 22:36 FROM: ANDY DIETDERICH TO: SAM BANKMAN-FRIED Can we please have an update? We have many people in NY and Delaware waiting to proceed. We have done the work we can without Sam’s signature. If Sam is not going to sign the instruction appointing Ray tonight, we will send people home and regroup in the morning. Australia has commenced voluntary proceedings and we can expect more shortly. If Sam is signing relatively promptly, we can stay around. Please let us know promptly if we should continue to wait. Andy
  • We now have learned just how “many people” from SullCrom were working on the matter and standing by. Per Coindesk: During a 19 day period from November 12 to 30, “A total of over 6,500 hours were worked by 32 partners, 85 associates and 34 nonlegal staff, the filing said. Hourly rates are as high as $2,165. The company said charges for senior staff already represent a discount, and the firm is seeking payment of only 80% of a $9.5 million total.”
  • The GC of FTX US is an ex-SullCrom partner, and while it may look a bit shady that he has given a ton of lucrative work to buddies at his old firm, this is actually an above-board and common practice for ex-law firm lawyers who go in-house (I have done this myself… but obviously not on this scale).
  • Meanwhile, SBF still thinks he knows better than everyone else and is allegedly trying to reach out to potential witnesses via encrypted messaging apps and using a VPN, raising the ire of the judge presiding over his case.

Further Observations

  • If you want to your son to be a partner at a Bay Area-headquartered law firm, you should name him Aaron Rubin:
  • In the 3 months after my son turned 2, his vocabulary exploded. He went from a smattering of single words to speaking 5-word sentences seemingly overnight. I found myself wondering whether the trajectory of our daughter’s speaking skills was as steep, but it’s actually really hard to remember. We thought it wasn’t, but when we pulled out videos, it turns out that she was pretty talkative at that age too. The takeaway is: take lots of videos of your children, including of random, seemingly inane moments.
  • The next generation of kids will be the first generation that will be able to see pictures of what their parents looked like during every single month of their lives. That’s kind of wild. My kids will only be able to see pictures of how I looked like every month of my life since my mid-20s, which I’m thankful for.

Articles

Charts, Images & Videos

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12
Feb 23
Sun

Weekly Report: February 12, 2023

Observations

Mostly random personal updates this week. Always so much work and so many household chores to catch up on after coming back from a vacation.

Air Travel Tips

Here are some international travel habits that I’ve developed over the years:

  • I fill up an empty Zojirushi water bottle with ice before I leave the house. It’s a very well-insulated flask — over a 24 hour period, the ice barely melts so you can take it through security because it’s not a liquid. Then, you can pour in water later on to melt some of the ice and get a cold drink.
  • I wear a long sleeved t-shirt onto planes. The cabin gets colder after take off, and it helps not having bare skin exposed to drafts. On the ground, cabins can get pretty warm if you’re somewhere hot and sunny. A light jacket that you have to take off is just one more item you have to juggle, so I prefer just being able to push up my t-shirt sleeves instead. Incidentally, U.S. airlines tend to keep cabins noticeably colder than Asian airlines.
  • My hands down favorite backpack is the MacPac Korora 16L. It’s compact with well thought-out compartments. There are two deep side pockets so water bottles don’t slip out and an easy-access zipped pocket at the top. Inside the main compartment, there’s a mesh divider and another pocket at the top that has slots for pens and a clip for hanging keys. It easily fits a 14” MacBook Pro in a sleeve, book, and jacket with room to spare. It’s been around the world with me several times — both on work and leisure trips — and has proven to be durable. It’s also water resistant.
    • I keep a phone charger cable and Airpods in the outside top pocket, and a backup battery and super compact Anker 65W 3-port USB-C + USB-A charger in the side pocket, together with a USB-C cable that has a dongle for converting one end to a lightning connector.
    • The only thing I would change is to remove the chest strap and buckles that are pretty useless.
  • We used to avoid checking in luggage if we could help it, but we can now no longer help it. Now we pack a light, empty duffle bag in our suitcase in case we need emergency extra space — such as when encountering a check-in agent that is insistent that the weight limit is 50 lbs and 52 lbs is completely unacceptable.
  • For the kids, we bought an inflatable footrest. It blows up to fill in the space in the footwell and becomes level with the seat. This lets the two of them sleep side by side across two seats each. When they’re awake, it helps provide a bit of an area to crawl around and reduces the amount of items that drop on the floor. Caution: some airlines don’t permit these because of purported safety reasons (we’ve been successful on American, Fiji Airways, and United, but not Air France).

Further Observations

  • I’ve been eyeing a weather station for years, so I was thrilled when I received an Ambient Weather one as a gift from my family last Christmas. We experience multiple long power outages each year, so I bought a probe thermometer that broadcasts data to the weather station and stuck it in the fridge to monitor the temperature. I figured it would be helpful when we were traveling so we don’t unknowingly come home to a fridge full of spoiled food. The weather station streams the data it collects online and sends text alerts when the temperature reaches certain thresholds (and we have a UPS for our internet equipment so the house stays connected for a couple hours even when the power is out).
  • Our fridge is set to 2°C and the temperature graph looks like this:
  • This is not the temperature profile I’d have expected. It never occurred to me that the fridge spends most of its time below 2°C, and sometimes below freezing. However, when you think about it for a minute, that’s the only way it could really work. The fridge doesn’t blow in air at the temperature it’s set at — it blows in really cold air at a fixed temperature and tries to average it out at the set temperature.
  • I contacted Amazon customer support recently after an order they had marked as having been successfully delivered actually hadn’t been delivered. It got weird:
  • Regarding the spate of layoffs in tech: what does it really mean when a CEO says they “take full responsibility” for over-hiring? Presumably it means that they are owning making the original decision that caused a bunch of people to then lose their jobs through no fault of their own? But we don’t really hear if there any real accountability or personal consequence to go with that responsibility… And what about the companies that go through multiple layoffs in succession?

Articles

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5
Feb 23
Sun

Weekly Report: February 5, 2023

Observations

Australia

  • We recently returned from a trip to Australia, my first in almost four years and the longest I’ve ever been away from it. It was also my kids’ first visit. Because of the age of our kids and jet lag, we set ourselves a modest goal of doing one thing a day. Apart from family, I only told like, 3 sets of friends that we were visiting Sydney, and even then we only managed to meet up with 2 of them. (Sorry everyone else — maybe next time!)
  • It was interesting seeing our kids meet their grandparents in person (for the first time ever for one of them), and fun watching them take in the sights of Sydney. Our hotel balcony had a nice view of the overseas passenger terminal at Circular Quay and watching massive cruise liners silently dock enthralled all of us early each morning.
  • We stayed at a hotel in the CBD for half of the trip, and my parents’ house for the other half. It was nostalgic taking my kids to the parks that I used to play in as a kid. Unfortunately, the one down the street from my parents’ house has been redone twice, each time ostensibly making the playground safer, but decidedly much less fun. Gone is the 3 metre-high straight metal slide, the flying fox, monkey bars, and swings on long chains that I loved to get height on. They have now been replaced with small, boring plastic things.
  • Sydney continues to grow. Lots of cranes dotted the CBD and the light rail system is now in full operation. We visited Barangaroo and walked through the lobby of the new Crown Casino building. The water park at Darling Harbour was a hit with the kids. Even the Circular Quay skyline has changed. When I used to work in Sydney, for a few months I had loan of a Senior Associate’s office with a thin window on the 57th floor that overlooked the harbour. There was an AMP building between us and the foreshore, but it was less than half the height of our building so the view was unobstructed. In the last couple of years, the AMP building has been extended, doubling in height and it now blocks some of those million dollar views.
  • For old time’s sake (and because my son loves trains), when relocating to my parents’ house, we took the train — the same route I used to take to and from uni. I felt like an old man reminiscing that back in those days, most of the trains weren’t air-conditioned, and there were no smartphones to occupy the time during the one hour journey.
  • The trip coincided with Chinese New Year, so we were fortunate to celebrate that with the grandparents and to see some of the festivities in Chinatown (that my daughter had only read about in books up until then).

Fiji

  • On the way back from Sydney, we experimented with breaking up the flight by stopping over in Fiji for a few days. We decided to stay at Nanuku Resort, mainly because it offered free childcare (one babysitter per child, available from 8am to 8pm!). Also, because it was on the same island as the international airport, we didn’t need to take another plane to get there. (However, the advertised 2 hour drive from the airport turned out to be closer to 3 hours.)
  • Nanuku is operated by Auberge Resorts, and some of their executives were visiting it when we were there, including its CEO. After finishing up a kayak ride, we bumped into the CEO who took the opportunity to ask why we picked Nanuku (childcare), how we had discovered it (Google + Hyatt partnership), and encourage us — several times — to “come again and tell our friends to visit too” (talk about grassroots marketing!). He asked where we were from, and it turns out that he had grown up in San Mateo (the next city over from us) and was now living in Marin. He happened to be on the same flight as us back to San Francisco. When we joined the immigration line in SFO, our kids were acting up for whatever reason and screaming. He passed us in the queue and joked: ”I bet you wish you were still at Nanuku!”
  • The staff at Nanuku were all super-friendly and welcoming. Attention to detail was a bit hit and miss, but everyone was well-intentioned which to me counts for a lot. (For example, most staff knew the names of our kids, but it was 50:50 whether they remembered that we needed a high chair at meals for our youngest. There’s only one restaurant on the property.)
  • The resort had a very relaxed atmosphere, which is exactly what we were looking for. We arrived a couple weeks after peak season, so the resort wasn’t busy and at times it felt empty (which is a good thing at places like these). We overheard the Auberge execs worrying about how occupancy in February was going to be even lower.
  • They have a decent beach that guests don’t seem to use, and offered a variety of free and paid activities. We (tried to) learn how to start a fire using wood, weave a basket out of a palm frond, and grill prawns using bamboo. We also paddled a kayak down a nearby river, and took a jetski out onto the ocean. Susanne snorkeled out to a nearby reef but the water was too choppy for me (the wind picks up mid-morning so you need to get out early).
  • We booked partially on Hyatt points (great value at only 30K a night), and partially through the Amex FHR program (which offers discounted rates and a free couples massage). We had a room with a spa out the front and an outdoors shower, which both we and the kids loved.
  • One of the few resorts where the rooms looked better in real life than the photos!
  • The flight timings from Fiji back to SFO are good — night departure, long enough to get close to a full night’s rest, and not much filler time on either side. Due to the time zone difference, you land around noon on the same date that you leave.

Further Observations

  • Going to be interesting to see how the whole affair with Adani turns out.

Articles

Movies & TV

  • The Witcher: Blood Origins
    This 4-episode miniseries was a great way to whet the appetite for the next season of The Witcher, although Henry Cavill’s shoes will be tough to fill. It also stars Michelle Yeoh, who has had a great run as of late (unlike Henry Cavill).
  • Glass Onion
    Daniel Craig, playing a southern detective called Benoit Blanc, is a hoot in this thoroughly entertaining whodunnit.
  • Knives Out
    This is the first Benoit Blanc movie, but we only watched it after enjoying Glass Onion. Also highly watchable, but not as funny.

Charts, Images & Videos

Pandemic years aside, employment growth is gradual, and unemployment growth is sudden. We haven’t hit the “sudden” part of the current economic cycle yet.

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8
Jan 23
Sun

Weekly Report: January 8, 2023

Observations

  • One thing I miss from Sydney are thunderstorms. It may be a strange thing to miss, but one fond childhood memory I have was of the “southerly buster”. It’s a weather phenomenon that typically happens after a series of hot summer days — the temperature suddenly plummets, huge grey clouds roll in, the rain pelts down, and the sky puts on a dramatic show. I remember gazing out into our backyard as lightning danced in the sky and thunder literally shook the windows. (My father had also drilled it into me that if there was lightning around, I needed to immediately turn off the computer, lest a surge of electricity fry it.)
  • Thunderstorms don’t really exist in the Bay Area. I’ve been here for almost 15 years and I can count on one hand the number of times I remember hearing thunder. So when the Bay Area experienced a “storm” earlier this week — one that made the national news and saw weather warnings blanket the airwaves — there’s a reason I put storm in quotation marks. To be sure, there was rain and it got quite windy. But, objectively speaking, it was not that wild. I’ve been in rain so heavy that it hurts the skin, and experienced gale force winds that dim the lights. None of those things happened this week in our city. Yet, there was flooding, genuine danger to life, closed schools, and a weather-induced 3-hour blackout in our neighborhood. The Bay Area is just really fragile when it comes to inclement weather.
  • This week’s 🍿 news story was the vote for the Speakership of the House of Representatives. Kevin McCarthy finally got his gavel, at the cost of selling the last remnants of his soul. Seems like a pyrrhic victory to me, and it’s hard to see it inflicting anything but pain on the country when a small group of Republicans ends up holding everyone else hostage to their demands. And will their brinksmanship turn the prospect a federal debt default from the unthinkable into the possible?
  • Taking a break, so no newsletter for the next couple of weekends. Will resume in a couple of weeks!

Articles

Movies & TV

  • Jack Ryan (Season 3)
    Another entertaining season, this time with a Russia theme. The last season aired all the way back in 2019!

Charts, Images & Videos

Source: New York Times

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73 (with airport transits), 65 (excluding airport transits)

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1
Jan 23
Sun

Weekly Report: January 1, 2023

Observations

Happy 2023! For the last couple of years, I’ve written a Year In Review post that is sent to friends and family. It contains a “What we remember personally” section, which is about personal events, and a “What we remember in the world” section. Below is the latter section from those writings.

The Economy. For the first time in about 13 years, the economy and the markets are deteriorating. For years I’ve believed that inflation was the main thing that was going to catalyze another recession, but I didn’t have a clue what might spark that inflation. At the start of this year, a confluence of factors such as the Ukraine invasion and supply chain shocks, have led to the highest inflation rates in 40 years, which in turn have led to the fastest series of interest rate rises in history.

When interest rates rise, equities become less attractive relative to other assets, and valuations fall. Accordingly, most of the market took a dump, with growth stocks (mostly tech companies) getting hit the worst.

Tech companies, suddenly confronted with an inability to continue raising funds at the same inflated valuations they previously received (or to raise funds at all), were now staring at their runway trying to figure out if they had enough cash to weather the storm. Some laid off employees by the thousands, and the focus moved from growing the top line at all costs, to getting to profitability at the least cost.

However, the market is not the economy, and we have this interesting situation where things feel bad and lots of techies are losing their jobs, but the economy actually isn’t in bad shape just yet. In the U.S. and Australia, for example, unemployment is currently still under 4%, which is pretty much the lowest it’s been for the last 20+ years. A lot of companies are simply reacting before the storm hits. This time, companies are trying to get ahead of it.

I think the real pain of a recession is yet to come. Obviously I could be wrong, but don’t see a soft landing on the cards when the Fed is spamming the interest rate increase button. Sudden changes don’t seem conducive to letting businesses adapt over time to changing conditions, and it presumes that the Fed won’t be late to react again, this time to cooling inflation.

It’s also going to be interesting to see what happens socially and to workplace culture if we do have some sort of economic crisis. The experiences you go through shape your perception of the world, and most people under 33 have not experienced a downturn in their working lives. It’s been halcyon days for a long time. Not knowing any other world, younger workers perhaps have come to take for granted job mobility, a seller’s market for employment, and that dips in the market are simply short-lived buying opportunities.

I have been through two economic downturns — graduating at the nadir of the dot com crash in the 2002, and again during the GFC in 2009. In 2009, the job market had completely dried up and I was proofreading documents for $13/hour and trawling for contract jobs on Craigslist (I actually found a couple) to make ends meet and try to maintain my U.S. visa status. I was down to about $600 in my bank account at one stage, sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with 3 other people. I always had a backup plan — returning to Australia and a job that I had taken a 3-year leave of absence from — but through that experience, I know how tough things can get in bad times and sometimes you just have to leave your ego at the door.

Housing affordability is another problem, and one problem has been swapped for another: record low interest rates pushed housing prices through the roof, making deposits difficult to afford for younger millennials and Gen Z. Now higher interest rates are pushing interest payments through the roof, while housing prices are still very elevated.

One thing this indicates is that there is no end in sight for the growing economic inequality between younger and older generations. I don’t know what this means exactly, but the trend is unsustainable and will eventually end in trouble if not reversed.

Roe v. Wade was overturned by Dobbs. In June, a precedent that stood for almost 50 years was overturned by the Supreme Court. The ruling split 6–3 along ideological lines (some would say party lines). It is impossible to overstate how deeply the court’s composition has and could impact the fabric of American society over the next generation. Let’s just say that for now we are relieved we live in California, but it’s a reminder of how quickly things can shift. Also, Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed to the Supreme Court.

AI. One of the most notable technological developments in a while is the raft of consumer-accessible AI software that gained prominence this year: ChatGPT, DALL•E 2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Jasper, Lensa, Notion AI, etc. Unlike web3 or the Metaverse, which are solutions in search of a problem, the utility and impact of these forms of AI are immediately understandable. I think these technologies will make the biggest impact on society since the shift from desktop to mobile a decade ago. The tech is already pretty eye-opening, and OpenAI is still to release GPT-4, which is rumored to be a couple orders of magnitude more powerful.

Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022. She was such a fixture in the world that it still feels weird that she’s gone and we have a King Charles III. Oh, and Liz Truss’ short reign as PM is kind of a footnote to this event. My wife points out that, remarkably, her Queen Margrethe is now the world’s only current female monarch. Margrethe II celebrated her golden jubilee (50 years on the throne) this year.

Scomo was voted out. In May, Australia held an election and voted Scott Morrison out. Not sad to see the departure of Scotty from Marketing who left his mark in Engadine.

Xi Jinping was elected to a new 5 year term. Xi Jinping was elected to an unprecedented third 5-year term, solidifying his autocratic grasp on power. However, cracks are starting to take their toll on China. One of the sad casualties through all this has been Hong Kong, which now seems like a shell of its former vibrant self.

November mid-term elections. I called this one wrong last year. I thought it would be a landslide, but it wasn’t and the Democrats even expanded their control of the Senate. The results gave us some hope here that Trumpism is on the wane. It was also the first U.S. federal election that I voted in.

The Metaverse. Lots of coverage about this, but I don’t see anyone of any generation scrambling to get on board the metaverse train. If there is a metaverse that takes traction, it ain’t going to be Meta’s — my prediction is that it will come from a gaming company. (Scott Galloway on the ~$1B a month Meta is spending: “Instead, spend the money on employee retention, and every workday at HQ raffle off an Airbus A380 (resale value: $50 million) to a lucky employee.” A380s are more expensive than that, but the underlying point is still valid.)

Elon Musk & Twitter. A morbidly entertaining saga. It will be interesting to see what comes of Twitter in 2023. Things are so random it’s tough to make a prediction here, but I don’t think Twitter is getting back to its $44B valuation in the next 5 years (if ever).

FTX blew up. I’ve written about this at length, but it’s been another morbidly entertaining story. I can’t wait to read Michael Lewis’ book and watch the movie.

Crypto winter. This year, the get rich quick scheme that perhaps many recent participants in the market hoped to capitalize on turned into a get poor quick scheme. I believe crypto is correlated with the larger market, and it will largely move in line with what happens to the economy next year (just more violently). And hopefully the sector picks up some regulation to protect more consumers from losing their shirts to bad actors.

Uvalde School Shooting. In America’s third deadliest school shooting, 19 students and 2 teachers died while police controversially waited for over an hour to engage the shooter, instead confronting parents who were trying to get in and save their kids.

Shinzo Abe was assassinated. Assassinations are always jarring news.

J-Lo and Ben Affleck got married. Not much to say here, but this was one of the main things Susie said she remembered from the year! Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, and Johnny Depp winning his defamation case against Amber Heard, rounds up other memorable celebrity events.

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The Cosmic Cliffs, a region on the edge of the gigantic, gaseous Carina Nebula, as seen by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera. Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
A close-up of the star Earendel (red arrow). At a co-moving distance of 28 billion light years, it’s the most distant individual star ever seen. Source: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

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25
Dec 22
Sun

Weekly Report: December 25, 2022

Observations

  • Merry Christmas! I hope you are enjoying a nice long holiday weekend with your friends and family. Just a short update this week. Next week I’m planning to do a Year In Review.
  • Sam Bankman-Fried is hosed. Earlier this week, he agreed to be extradited back to the States. Bail was set at $250M, which means that anyone who’s willing to post bail for him (i.e. his parents) will basically be bankrupted if he skips town. His co-founder Gary Wang and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison both pleaded guilty to various criminal counts and are cooperating with authorities in their criminal and civil cases against SBF. More of his former associates are expected to flip. Hard to see how he doesn’t get put away for a long time.
  • A perpetrator claims to have obtained the data of 400+ million Twitter users through a vulnerability.

Reviews

  • Frozen: The Musical. We took our daughter to see this at the Orpheum (her first musical!). Frozen is a phenomenon and not easy source material to adapt for the stage, so I was curious to see how it would play out. The result is a musical that shines at moments, but otherwise lacks the dynamism of its animated compatriot. There are a variety of new songs that were created just for the musical (written by the original music writers), but none of them were memorable. It all felt like filler music, lacking any tunes that really catch. The performance of a new song called Hygge stuck in my mind, but I can’t recall the melody at all.

    The most authentic response was probably looking at how our daughter reacted. Like probably every other child (and parent) in the audience, she has watched Frozen dozens of times, and has made us play the soundtrack in the car at least several hundred times (I have the Spotify stats to back that up). Our daughter was completely enthralled with the major set pieces: Do you want to build a snowman?For the first time in foreverLove is an open door and, of course, Let it go. The way young Elsa and Anna were portrayed were a delight. But Frozenfront-loads all its big musical pieces, and as the second half dives deeper into a darker story, her attention started to wander. She seemed bored with the new songs and I wonder what was going through her mind when they replaced the cute rotund trolls with “hidden folk” — essentially wildlings in rags. I think they did the best that they could, but the movie is a tough act to follow!

    Trivia: Frozen is set in Norway, but the movie’s is loosely based around Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (Snedronningen).

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The GOAT. Team trophies on left. Personal trophies on right.

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18
Dec 22
Sun

Weekly Report: December 18, 2022

Observations

  • Well that happened fast. Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested on Monday, the day after he said in a Twitter Space session, “I don’t think I’ll be arrested.” He’s been criminally indicted and slapped with a civil suit and he’s now being held in a nasty ass Bahamian prison awaiting extradition. Cluelessness or arrogance? How about both.
  • The World Cup is now over and what a final! It was a really enjoyable tournament with lots of memorable upsets (including, finally, one for Australia!) and a fairy tale ending for Argentina and Lionel Messi. Mbappe is only 23 and already has 12 world cup goals. Next time: The World Cup comes to North America!
  • Fantasy League final result: ended up squarely in the middle of pack, 7 out of 14. Some learnings:
    • It’s harder to get ahead in the late stages. People end up picking the same players and it’s clearer which players are in good form.
    • Have to keep on top of injuries in the late stages; it’s a long campaign and it takes its toll.
    • Making opinionated, defensive bets where you stack the defensive line with a single country is a high risk strategy, but it can work as a hail mary if you’re lagging.
  • Head-to-head betting final result: a big run during the early knockout stages put me deep in the black. Also, we have extra bets for penalty kicks and I ended up on the right side of all 5 of them (incidentally, that’s the most PKs in World Cup history).
Lower = better for me
  • Active week for financial data. The Fed raised rates by 50bps as the market expected, and Powell gave guidance that they are not done with rate rises (also expected). CPI came in at 7.1%, down from 7.7% last month, and under the 7.3% expected by the market. The market closed the week lower. Bitcoin has been relatively stable, but despite that, Coinbase stock has been smashed.
  • Scientists, for the first time, have created a net energy output from a nuclear fusion reaction. I’m not sure if it will happen in my lifetime — fusion research has been happening long since before I was born — but if they crack it and then make it economical, it’ll revolutionize the world and probably go a long way towards solving climate change.
  • Having a real Christmas tree in the house is pretty nice, but the hassle has always been way too much for me. Fortunately I have a wife who is so dead set on having a real tree that each year she drives out to a tree lot, bundles it into her car, and lugs it into the house. By herself. I don’t help with any stage of this process, other than extending a lukewarm offer to help, which she brushes off muttering that I’d just get in the way. Bless her.
  • Our kids invented a game they call “see-sum”. No idea where that word came from or what it means, but the game involves pulling down all of our blankets and pillows onto the floor, climbing onto the bed and then diving into the bedding. We don’t like it.

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11
Dec 22
Sun

Weekly Report: December 11, 2022

Observations

ChatGPT has been in the news this last week. It’s an AI chat bot, but that’s an innocuous description for a pretty eye-opening technological development. We’ve come a long way from Dr. Sbaitso, which I played with as a tween in the early 90s (although its main novelty was a text-to-speech synthesizer).

There are lots of examples people have been posting on Twitter. I thought ChatGPT’s ability to output source code is pretty crazy… although apparently it’s frequently wrong. Here are some random thoughts I have about this.

High School Homework. This one is on the top of everyone’s minds. ChatGPT has been trained on a massive corpus of text, and it can construct a relatively well-written, cogent, albeit insipid essay on just about anything you’d teach a high schooler. It’s not quite plagiarism, but it’s a form of cheating, and one that’s hard to detect in isolation. Maybe it’s kind of like testing for PEDs – if a student is writing better than expected, maybe it warrants a spot inspection? Or just random inspections? (”What are your sources and citations? Tell me more about this paragraph that you wrote?”)

Speaking of plagiarism, the jury is out about whether the training of ChatGPT and similar models on copyrighted works constitutes copyright infringement, as well as whether the authoring of new works that are indirectly based on copyrighted works also constitutes copyright infringement. At first blush, maybe there’s an argument for the former? For the latter, as long as there isn’t a direct copying of large blocks of copyrighted text, it might be analogous to doing research and synthesizing and paraphrasing information from a variety of sources. (However, direct copying of large blocks of copyrighted text has been an issue with GitHub Copilot.)

Speaking of insipid essays, ChatGPT and similar technologies like Jasper are great for generating SEO fodder – webpages written for search engine algorithms to pick up and rank. I wonder how Google will adjust?

Speaking of Google, people have been wondering whether Google has been resting on its laurels, with people comparing Google search’s results against ChatGPT’s responses. An Alphabet employee provided an explanation. The other reason is that Google is primarily designed to output links that go to relevant materials that address search queries. ChatGPT is specifically designed to answer questions. Try asking ChatGPT: “Give me links to 10 webpages that explain XYZ” and compare…

Speaking of search, an amalgamation of ChatGPT-style responses plus Google Search results is probably the next evolution of search. Google does provide direct answers to some questions at the top of its search results, but — apart from answers to factual questions like “how far is the sun from the earth?” — they are basically quotes from webpages.

Then a next step is to wire in real-time, real-world data. (ChatGPT has only been trained on data up to 2021.)

Then a next step is to enable a GPT AI engine to perform actions to create a supercharged virtual assistant. Imagine: “What are the best Star Alliance flights next month leaving on a Friday from San Francisco to Sydney with a 4-day stopover in Tahiti?” followed by “Is the fare refundable and what is the luggage allowance?” and then “Ok book me that flight using my visa card.” and so on.

This kind of technology can automate some functional forms of writing, which will save time. “Write me an email telling my landlord I want to cancel my lease 30 days from today.”

You should never use real answers to security questions like “what is your mother’s maiden name?”

No, it’s not going to replace lawyers.

Who knows if all the information it returns is accurate? It’s hard to vet unless you fact check it. Also, AI models can still be abused and influenced. They are still a bunch algorithms at the end of the day, even if the inner workings are inscrutable to us. ChatGPT provides this disclaimer: “While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.”

This is starting to look like sci-fi AI. But self-awareness and Skynet-type sentience — or the idea of singularity — is still a big leap away. AI that can make its own discoveries or contribute novel ideas to the sum of human knowledge is still sci-fi. ChatGPT pieces together information from existing human knowledge, but it can’t really build upon that corpus.

That said, sometimes breakthroughs in human knowledge come from combining techniques, insights and methods from apparently disparate fields and applying them to a specific problem. For example, the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem drew from many different mathematical fields: “Wiles’s proof uses many techniques from algebraic geometry and number theory, and has many ramifications in these branches of mathematics. It also uses standard constructions of modern algebraic geometry, such as the category of schemes and Iwasawa theory … Wiles’s path to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, by way of proving the modularity theorem for the special case of semistable elliptic curves , established powerful modularity lifting techniques and opened up entire new approaches to numerous other problems.” Perhaps a future version of ChatGPT will be able to able to expand knowledge by combining existing knowledge in novel ways.

All in all, ChatGPT has some very clear use cases with high utility that I’m sure we’ll see commercialized in compelling ways in the upcoming years. There’s a reason why its developer, OpenAI, is valued at so much.

Further Observations

  • World Cup Fantasy League Update: Our fantasy league group has been using ChatGPT to write trash talk to each other. After the first two knockout phases this week and an unusual number of penalty shootouts, I find myself languishing in 9th. The Brazil upset was brutal, as many of us had loaded up our team with a full complement of Brazilians, who were promptly sent packing by Croatia. England was, well, England. Out in the quarters on penalties.
  • World Cup Head-to-Head Betting Update: This is faring better for me, and I went on a crazy run of good luck (sorry, Dave):
In this case, lower is better for me

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4
Dec 22
Sun

Weekly Report: December 4, 2022

Observations

  • I would say that one of the biggest adjustments I had to make with parenthood was coming to terms with losing at least 35 hours each week. It’s not just the time spent actively looking after the kids, but it’s all the extra stuff around it as well — the extra laundry, food prep, clean up, transportation, and picking up toys from random places around the house. That’s a lot of hours each week. In my pre-kid days, I would say about a third to half of that lost time was spent working (and occasionally all of it), and the remainder was spent pursuing other activities. My tip for people in their 20s who eventually want to have children: if career is important to you, that decade is the time to go really hard in the paint (and to that end, I have no regrets personally). There’s been a bit of chatter about Musk’s edict that Twitter’s work culture should be “extremely hardcore”, coupled with a general realization that the economic climate has been good to tech companies for a long time and that the expectations of how intense working at a startup should be have perhaps moderated during that time.
  • BlockFi filed for bankruptcy and SBF has been going around giving interviews saying he basically had no real idea what was happening at the trading firm he founded and that managed most of his personal wealth. Personally, I find the stench overwhelming, and I don’t know whether it’s a fear of defamation or something else, but all the coverage of him by major news outlets is not what I would call hard-hitting journalism. It now looks like the dude took billions of dollars of other people’s money and gambled it away, after promising customers that they would not do that.
  • I very much enjoyed Australia’s 1-0 victory over Denmark this week. My wife, not so much. I now have 4 years to enjoy this. Unfortunately, Australia fell to Argentina after being in it with a shot.
  • In our Fantasy League, after moving to 4th in the middle of the week, I now find myself languishing in the middle of the table (8 out of 14) after a complete inability to pick any effective midfielders. In head-to-head betting, I was briefly in the black before it swung around again.
The bold line is $0

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Source: Reddit

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27
Nov 22
Sun

Weekly Report: November 27, 2022

Observations

  • It’s a long holiday weekend, so a light update for this week. Happy Thanksgiving!
  • We went to CostCo on Friday and they were selling full Thanksgiving meals marked down from $40 to $15. I’m guessing they thought everyone was going to be all turkeyed out, but we’re never ones to turn down a great deal!
  • World Cup updates after 28 games:
    • Lots of upsets! France looks pretty solid.
    • Fantasy League: 5th out of 14 after the first week.
    • Head-to-Head Betting: Started off with a bad run but clawed most of it back after calling 5 games in a row.
Progressive losses (higher = bad for me)

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Movies & TV

  • Andor (Season 1)
    Almost universally acclaimed, and for good reason. I found the Narkina 5 storyline particularly enthralling.

Hotels

  • InterContinental San Francisco (San Francisco, CA)
    We spent part of the weekend up in the city and used a free IHG night here. The hotel feels aged and nothing to write home about. The showers were terrible, with the water constantly fluctuating between hot and cold.

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20
Nov 22
Sun

Weekly Report: November 20, 2022

Observations

The 2022 World Cup kicked off today in controversy-ridden Qatar. The time zone is poor for where we are, with most matches occurring in the early morning.

I participate in two longstanding World Cup traditions. The first is a fantasy league which is running for the sixth time (which means the first was held 20 years ago when I was an undergrad!). Nothing is on the line except glory. We got a trophy made and every 4 years we engrave the winner’s name on it. I normally tend to fare pretty well but I’ve never won it and the victors always like to channel Ricky Bobby: “If you ain’t first, you’re last!”

The second is a 1 on 1 betting match where a friend and I bet on every single match against each other. After the group stage, we progressively increase the wager as it moves through the knockout stage, and add bonuses for penalty shootout outcomes. We alternate selecting the winner of each match, using Asian handicaps from this site to keep it fair. It’s all tracked in a Google Sheet and we added columns for gloating and sledging each other after each match. We sometimes do this for the Euro championships too, and the results are normally quite close… although I typically find myself on the negative side of the ledger. We now both live on opposite sides of the planet, so settling the debt sometimes takes time and creativity. (For 2018, my friend asked me to spend his winnings on Powerball tickets, which returned less than the cost of the tickets. I still owe him for my losses in the 2021 Euro Cup.)

On the home front, my family represents 3 different nationalities, each of which is participating this year: Australia, Denmark and the USA. For the second World Cup running, Australia, Denmark and France find themselves in the same group. Alas, Australia is not expected to survive the group stages.

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FTX’s one-of-a-kind balance sheet
FTX’s org chart
Source: Dealbook / Yahoo Finance

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13
Nov 22
Sun

Weekly Report: November 13, 2022

Observations

This week was one of those “weeks where decades happen”. It’s been endlessly fascinating and entertaining. Let’s get into it.

FTX!

You can read about what happened in all the articles linked below, but here are a few things that struck me about the situation.

FTX hit a $32 billion valuation within 3 years and dealt with tens of billions of dollars. It all vaporized in the space of a little more than 3 days. Typically when an organization gets to that scale, the founders bring on seasoned execs. That didn’t happen at FTX. (This is in part a failure of FTX’s investors, who felt so much FOMO that they were satisfied with whatever surface-level diligence they performed and willing to overlook the fact they had no board seats or other protective rights that VCs typically have.) Not only did it remain an underweight organization (apparently with only about 400 people, compared to Binance with almost 20x that), but if you look at the key players, including of their sister trading shop, Aladema Research, they are almost all inexperienced. Reports are that a bunch of them lived out of a shared $30+ million penthouse in the Bahamas and dated each other.

  • Caroline Ellison was the CEO of Alameda and, at 28 years old, mostly managed SBF’s money and reportedly dated him “at times”. She graduated from Stanford with a math degree in 2016 and had only one job prior to Alameda — 19 months at storied firm Jane Street as a quant trader. In a now infamous video, she mentions that “being comfortable with risk” in the job is “very important” and that they “tend not to have things like stop losses”. Risk management was clearly not her forte and she seemed to confuse being comfortable with risk with being reckless with risk.

  • Constance Wang was COO of FTX. She graduated from NUS in 2016 with 2:1 honors and took an entry-level job at Credit Suisse working as an analyst doing AML/KYC checks and risk controls. She was there for barely 2 years, jumped over to another crypto exchange (Huobi) for 8 months and then took the COO role at FTX. This site mentions that “Wang clearly wasn’t responsible for the misfortune that’s befallen FTX,” but she took the title and in any other firm managing that amount of money in a position with that title, you pretty much are responsible in some capacity.

  • Gary Wang (Zixiao Wang) co-founded FTX but appeared to avoid the limelight, unlike SBF. He attended MIT (like SBF) and apparently met SBF at a math camp in Canada.

  • Dan Friedberg was Chief Regulatory Officer at FTX. Apparently, Friedberg was embroiled in an online poker cheating scandal and cover up in the past — a period of time that reportedly appeared as a big gap in his now-deleted LinkedIn profile. Friedberg was either a partner or counsel at Fenwick & West running their blockchain practice from Seattle. He took the job after the poker scandal, so one wonders what kind of due diligence both Fenwick and FTX did on a pretty darn senior legal hire (and if they knew about it, why didn’t they care?). It appears that Friedberg joined as General Counsel but then transitioned over into the regulatory role after Can Sun joined.

  • Can Sun joined as General Counsel in mid-2021. He was a colleague of Friedberg in Seattle and co-chaired Fenwick’s blockchain practice with Friedberg. Sun certainly has pedigree (Yale Law, PhD from Princeton, a year at David Polk followed by almost 7 years at Fenwick as an associate), but no in-house experience prior to FTX. Sun abruptly resigned (as did most of his legal team, it was reported) a couple days after the news broke.

  • Sam Bankman-Fried is the son of two tenured Stanford Law professors — Professor Bankman (who teaches tax law at SLS) and Professor Fried (now emerita). According to his LinkedIn profile, he graduated in 2014 from MIT and was at Jane Street for a little over 3 years. He founded FTX after reportedly making a shit-ton exploiting the many crypto arbitrage opportunities that opened up around 2017 via Alameda Research. (Me and a couple friends got in on this action at the end of 2017, but our scale was many orders of magnitude smaller than what SBF achieved.)

  • I looked at Alameda Research’s site before it was taken down. It had the team’s photos on there and they all looked young.

From these profiles, you can see one main theme emerge: inexperience. There’s also nepotism, but that happens all the time in tech startups, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as the person being hired is a good fit for the job.

Inexperience, though, is far more dangerous — particularly in a field where you’re dealing with other people’s money. This is people’s lives, we’re talking about. The fallout will be felt in the coming weeks and months, but some people have now lost a huge amount of their life’s savings, and suicide risk is real. There are also signs in the news that the reason for the gaping $8 billion hole in FTX’s finances extends beyond manifest incompetence to some sort of criminal malfeasance. At the least, the abuse of client funds in the manner reported in the media would likely be criminal in TradFi.

Which brings me to my thoughts on the crypto space as a whole. I believe there are two types of people: (1) principled “believers” who are genuinely invested in the technology and the promise of building something actually useful with it, and (2) people who see an opportunity to make money. There are a lot more of type 2 than type 1. And there are a lot of people who claim to be type 1 but are really type 2.

Crypto is a modern day gold rush — people see fortunes to be made and flock out to the wild west.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But when you’re there to make money, it doesn’t matter whether it’s crypto or DeFi or TradFi… it’s just finance. The difference is that TradFi is build up on centuries of experience, and the regulatory framework is developed.

There’s a lot about crypto that’s new, but that’s often confused with what’s not, and the crypto world is “rediscovering” learnings that are already well-trodden in TradFi — such as basic risk management and the dangers of leverage. (This reminds me of a time back when Netflix was still mailing out DVDs, I saw a post online asking “Why isn’t there a startup where we can borrow books, like a Netflix for books?” only to receive a disgruntled reply, “Yeah, it’s called a library.”)

The wild west metaphor is apt because crypto is relatively unregulated. That is just fine for the many crypto enthusiasts with libertarian leanings, but in the real world that means people lose their figurative shirts as a result.

This is not to say that TradFi doesn’t have its Big Problems. The GFC in 2008 is clear evidence of that, and the fact that it led to bailouts was a travesty. But TradFi doesn’t see the speed and sheer frequency of damage that the crypto space has inflicted on consumers (and institutions). Pump and dump schemes, market manipulation, and fraud are commonplace. Literally billions of dollars have vanished this year alone due to hacks or coding flaws. Entire crypto exchanges fold. And it’s mostly unchecked — there are few consequences for perpetrators of some of these schemes, and it just attracts more scammers.

One blessing is that crypto is mostly separate from the mainstream economy, so we haven’t really seen much, if any, contagion. And that’s just the thing — it’s never going to be mainstream as long as it’s unregulated or weakly regulated. It’s never going to be a tool that a family uses (or should use) to buy a house, or keep their retirement savings in.

In the same way that communism sounds kind of OK in theory but is very different in practice due to human nature, I feel the same way about unregulated crypto.

There’s a common refrain used by crypto enthusiasts arising from the FTX disaster: “Not your keys, not your coins.” (This refers to how if you don’t have the private keys that signify ownership of cryptocurrency, you don’t actually own it at all. When you buy Bitcoin from an exchange like Coinbase, they are actually coins owned by the exchange (you hope), and they assign ownership of those coins to you on paper. But you have to withdraw the coins out to your own wallet if you actually want to ensure ownership. Better yet, keep them in cold storage.)

There’s a slight edge to that axiom: it’s your own damn fault if you decided to buy crypto through a centralized exchange — you assumed the risk. If you want to ensure that doesn’t happen to you, keep your coins under your own digital mattress. And that’s just it — it’s not practical. If I want to daytrade crypto, I can’t do that easily through my Ledger wallet. It’s just not convenient. I need an exchange. (I know there are decentralized exchanges, but they have their own issues and don’t solve the underlying problem of lack of regulation.)

So, until the various government agencies get with the program and start regulating things in a thoughtful manner, crypto is not going to replace TradFi in any meaningful capacity, and it’s just going to be a place where both really interesting innovation occurs, and where people get their faces ripped off by avarice.

A sidenote on NFTs: IP lawyers I’ve spoken to are confused why NFTs have any value, given there is a valid question about the worth of the intellectual property you actually own. Similar to how DeFi is still finance, NFTs to me are just luxury goods. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and luxury goods are the epitome of when intrinsic value diverges from perceived value. That’s all it is.

Birkin bag, or the Mona Lisa, is only valuable because enough people think it is. The materials for a Birkin do not cost $30,000 and the bags do not provide utility that is worth $30,000. But a knock-off Birkin is considerably cheaper than a genuine one. NFTs are exactly the same. They are intangible luxury goods. It doesn’t really matter that from a legal perspective, it’s questionable what, exactly, you own. It doesn’t matter that your picture of a bored ape can be copied with a couple clicks of a mouse (I mean, that kind of sums up the whole software industry). All that is irrelevant. NFTs have value because people believe they have value. And, like the tulip bulbs of the 17th century, if the fad passes, that value will evaporate. The question is: will the value endure?

The glory days of inefficient global crypto markets when we could make 23% on a single trade!

Twitter

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

I feel for what Twitter employees are going through at the moment. The two weeks after the acquisition have been a case of doing everything that good management practices say you shouldn’t do. It sounds like a terrible working environment.

Yet, there is a certain fascination about whether this might actually turn out ok — or even well — in the end. This whole thing is a bit of an experiment. This is a unique situation, and no one’s had the ability, gall or gumption to try what Musk is trying at this speed and scale.

There is a difference between taking a huge but calculated risk and being reckless (see Alameda Research, above), but for the Twitter x Musk combination, this may only become clear in hindsight.

Can you cut 50% of the workforce within 2 weeks, push out features without much apparent thought or planning, send everyone back to the office on no notice, do all the other stuff that’s happened there, and still manage to pull a company out of a spiral? I am not hopeful, but if this is even possible to pull off, I suppose it can only be someone like Musk. CEOs around the world are watching.

Elections. Well, my prediction last week was wrong. With the Dems holding the Senate, I’m pleasantly surprised at the outcome of the mid-term elections. And Trump has been even more unmoored lately and it looks like it’s turning people off.

Meta layoffs. 11K+ people were laid off at Meta this week. The company is still a cash cow, but I think Zuck’s “bet the company” approach on the Metaverse is doomed.

Inflation. On Thursday, the inflation number printed lower than expected. The stock market ripped up and the U.S. dollar fell. However, we’re far from out of the woods.

Lunar eclipse. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the last full lunar eclipse in 3 years occurred. Unfortunately, it was raining and overcast where I am.

Powerball. A single person won the $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot on Wednesday.

  • The headline $2.04 billion jackpot is based on taking payouts over 30 years. Paid as a lump sum, the cash prize is $929.1 million, which is based on discounting future cash flows back to present values (you could invest the $929.1 million into treasuries yourself and end up with the same ~$2 billion). This calculation is sensitive to interest rates, which are higher than they’ve been for almost 15 years, allowing Powerball to advertise such a large headline figure.

  • The prize is taxable, but because the winning ticket was bought in California, no state taxes apply.

  • Yeah, we bought ourselves 5 tickets. Out of the 30 numbers that we got, only 1 matched a drawn number.
The Powerball jackpot was so big that the display at our local supermarket ran out of numbers

Articles

Pretty much just FTX and Twitter articles this week…

Charts, Images & Videos

Source: r/TrueReddit

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6
Nov 22
Sun

Weekly Report: November 6, 2022

Observations

  • Halloween was on Monday. My wife and I didn’t grow up in America, so Halloween still feels foreign to us. We used to be able to ignore it. (We still could, I guess, but that would be mean to our kids.) It’s my least favorite holiday. For one, it normally falls on a weekday, so it’s not even really a holiday. It’s work and effort.
  • We went trick-or-treating in the Allied Arts neighborhood of Menlo Park, near where we used to live. It has a good density of houses and throngs of trick-or-treaters which makes for a good atmosphere. It’s also an expensive area so the variety of quality giveaways is typically pretty good. The kids had fun, at least.
  • Because we were out of the house, we left out a full bowl of candy, which was a mistake. Our security camera showed a group of 5 tweens rocking up early in the evening and emptying the whole thing. At least they didn’t take the bowl, which apparently was a problem for some people in our neighborhood.
  • Election Day is on Tuesday. I think the Republicans will easily retake the House and Senate, and then we have 2 years of a Congress where even less gets done.
  • Lots of painful layoffs at tech companies this week. Musk fired half of Twitter on Friday. I actually think Twitter will be fine despite suddenly feeling short-handed. If that turns out to be the case, that suggests that previous management left a lot to be desired. But you still have to feel for the people who find themselves heading into the holiday season unemployed.
  • The Fed raised interest rates by another 75bps this week, as did the Bank of England. The RBA only raised rates by 25bps, which I think is just crazy. I reckon the Fed will raise by another 50bps in December. Some of our savings now earn more interest than we pay on our mortgage.
  • Daylight Saving Time ends this Sunday morning. I actually like waking up in near darkness because it makes me feel like I’m waking up earlier than I actually am. (I like the idea of rising early. My body hates the practical reality of it.) Nonetheless, America might be transitioning to permanent daylight savings time at some point, which essentially means that California will become a UTC -7 time zone. The Senate passed a bill in March — the Sunshine Protection Act — that would achieve that… but the House has yet to vote on it.
In case there’s any doubt that women do the lion’s share of caring for kids, this is the sign up list for an event at our pre-school (one parent from each family was requested). Most, if not all, of these are working mums.

Articles

Charts, Images & Videos

Amazing what a consumer drone can do in air that thin

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30
Oct 22
Sun

Weekly Report: October 30, 2022

Observations

  • It’s school enrollment season and we have been busy deciphering the California school system. Here’s how we understand how it works (an understanding that may be faulty). You live in a school district that covers a certain geographic zone. The district is divided into neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has a public elementary school that gives enrollment priority to kids living in that neighborhood. While you can still apply to a neighborhood school outside of your neighborhood via what’s called a “School of Choice” application, it will be on a “space available” basis. Additionally, some schools in the district are not designated to a specific neighborhood and can be applied to with a School of Choice application. Selections are done by lottery. There are also private schools that can be applied to, but they are expensive and may impact priority if you later decide to transfer your child to a public school in the future (e.g. a quasi-selective public school).
  • Public schools are funded in large part by property taxes. Each year, property owners pay a little more than 1% of their assessed property value to the county, and this is used to fund various things. Through a quirk of the system, the assessed property value is basically tied to when the property was last sold, and modestly increased each year. This means that some people who have been living in their house for decades are paying property tax based on an assessed value that is significantly below market.
  • This also means that property prices are driven tremendously by what school district and neighborhood a house is in.
  • The system in Australia is different, and the boundaries are not so rigid. It’s not unusual to start applying to schools for kids when they are born. I recall my parents trying to get me into Year 3 of a particular school. My dad happened to know the brother-in-law of the state premier at the time (he was a patient), and somehow obtained a letter of recommendation from the premier that got sent to the school. Whether it was the letter or the results of my aptitude test, I don’t know, but I got in. Like my dad, I am a first-generation migrant, but unlike him, I have no such connections here. We’re anxious.
  • The IRS is increasing the 401(k) contribution limit to $22,500 for 2023 (from $20,500 this year).

Articles

Books

  • Smart Brevity (Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz)
    “Smart brevity” is what the folks at news company Axios call their writing style. Known for its newsletters, Axios reports news concisely through a series of “axiomatic” headings and bullet points. The style has its many haters— typically journalists who lament the inevitable loss of nuance and thoughtfulness when you attempt to distill everything down to its essence — but I find the writing style pretty compelling for specific use cases. Long form writing still has its place (and the authors point that out), but I think this style of writing can be very effective in the business world where people’s attention and bandwidth are limited, and chat has displaced email as the favored medium of communicating. The book itself is, true to its name, quick and easy to read — about the only type of book I can read these days with young kids. The hard work is in practicing and eventually internalizing the writing style (“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”). Recommended.

Movies & TV

  • House of the Dragon (Season 1)
    Wasn’t expecting it to be groundbreaking like its predecessor, and it’s not, but it has been good enough to earn a spot in our weekly routine. Season 1 is dialog-heavy with mostly single-threaded stories that would fill the royalty pages of a medieval tabloid. Strong end to the season, and a long wait for Season 2 in 2024.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 3)
    Another entertaining season!

Charts, Images & Videos

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23
Oct 22
Sun

Weekly Report: October 23, 2022

Observations

Childcare is eye-wateringly expensive in the Bay Area. We pay our pre-school almost $5,000 a month to take care of our kids during the day. Sadly, that is not unusual here. And while we really like our pre-school, it’s not exactly a celebrity pre-school where kids get visits from former first ladies.

This level of expense means that, apart from a decent amount of ethnic diversity at our pre-school, the families with kids there are otherwise remarkably (but perhaps unsurprisingly) homogeneous: two parents in their mid-30s to early-40s who are both working professionals in good jobs with one, two, or maybe three children. A good deal of them, like us, grew up overseas.* The street turns into a parking lot for Teslas during drop off and pick up times.

We’re now going through a phase of life where we’re attending 4th and 5th birthday parties almost every weekend. This is a new experience for us. I quickly realized that these parties are always well-attended. It’s not because 4 and 5 year olds are inseparable best friends that are good at showing up for each other, but because it’s an easy way for parents to keep their kids occupied for a couple of hours while someone else has figured out how to feed and entertain them. The price of admission is a gift that you have probably regifted from someone who attended your own child’s birthday and regifted something that had already been regifted to theirs. There are only so many good gift ideas.

It’s difficult to avoid the temptation of comparing birthday parties. Each party is a public display of time, money, and by extension in an observing parent’s irrational and paranoid mind, love.

Every weekend, my mind spirals into the same pattern as I walk by yet another party with a bouncing castle: Am I doing enough for my child? Do I not love my child enough? Is my child going to think they aren’t loved because they didn’t have a bouncing castle? Why aren’t we ever invited to the parties with the bouncing castles? Or the Oscar-style party favor bags? Or the tonnage of balloon decorations that I’m sure are the cause for the nation’s helium shortage? And so on and so on.

I also find these parties awkward. Some families invite the whole class and maybe we know a handful of the parents there. Ten years ago, given the homogenous bunch we are, we probably would have got along just fine had we met at some random party. But it’s next to impossible to have a conversation of substance with the constant interruptions of a pre-schooler and their toddler sibling.

Also, my parental mind suspects that everyone is judging everyone else at these events. This part is not paranoia.

To wit, last weekend’s party. It was at a park that we had never been to before. New is good, as far as our kids are concerned, and they immediately raced off to find the nearest muddy puddle to jump into. The party was well-attended, very nicely done, and Formula 1-themed with liberal, unlicensed use of Ferrari insignia sprawled across six tables. It was immediately clear to us that these parents loved their child more than we loved ours.

Nonetheless, not all parents were so easily impressed. Shortly after we arrived we witnessed an exchange between one guest’s father and the birthday boy’s mother.

Guest’s Father: “Do you have a vegetarian table?”

There is a moment of silence while the birthday boy’s mother — a Persian woman who does not appear to be someone who is normally lost for words — is seen visibly struggling with how to respond.

“… no.” she finally says.

The guest’s father makes an equally visible annoyed face back.

The mother regains her footing and shoots back with thinly masked disdain: “Sorry I, um, forgot that children could be vegetarian.”*

Later in the party, the same father decides to share his perspective about an activity table where the kids are busy submerging a fleet of knockoff matchbox cars in a rainbow of glitter glue.

The vegetarian father, making a show of examining his frizzy wool sweater with disgust, sidles up to another person, who happens to be the birthday boy’s father.

“Glitter glue is the worst! You never, ever, ever give kids glitter! I’m going to leave here with glitter on me!”

The birthday boy’s father is unapologetic. “Well it doesn’t help you’re wearing a glitter magnet.”

As the party begins to wrap up, party favor bags are distributed. In the bag is a whistle. Seconds later, every kid discovers the joy of their Favorite New Toy. And also in that moment, everyone is judging the birthday boy’s parents.

When we leave, we pass by another party that has been setting set up for the past three hours and whose costumed guests are finally starting to arrive. It is a 3 year old’s birthday and it features freshly grilled food, drinks in four huge Yeti coolers, and the nation’s missing helium supply.

I pull my daughter back as she attempts to crash the party.

“Why can’t we go to that one daddy?”

* I literally only just realized why the word “abroad” is used more frequently in the U.S. to describe foreign lands than the word “overseas”, which is far more common in Australia. It is probably because, in Australia, every foreign country is across a sea.

** L’esprit de l’escalier: “Yes, but your kid is the only one who’s vegetarian so he’s going to be sitting all by himself.”

Further Observations

  • Series I Bonds purchased by October 31, 2022 will yield 9.62% for the next 6 months. This yield is expected to drop to ~6% in November. There’s been a lot made online about purchasing I bonds before November to lock in the 9.62% rate, but given annual purchase limits, there’s something to be said about waiting. This is because the interest rate on I bonds is composed of a fixed rate and a variable inflation rate. While the fixed rate has been 0% for the last 3 years and <1% for the last 15 years, interest rates have risen sharply over the last 6 months and any fixed rate above 0% is good for the 30 year life of the bond – which may result in a better return over time versus buying a bond today with a 0% fixed rate component.
  • As the CCP Congress closes, China enters a new, troubling era. Several friends, some of whom have spent many years of their lives and careers working in or with China, now express a reluctance to even physically set foot in the country. Whereas the China my generation knew while growing up seemed full of promise and reform, the China my kids will grow up knowing will be darker.

Articles

Movies & TV

  • Thor: Love & Thunder (Disney+)
    Reasonably amusing, but not particularly memorable. Actually fell asleep during the final fight scene (#parentlife). 3/5.

Charts, Images & Videos

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16
Oct 22
Sun

Weekly Report: October 16, 2022

Observations

When I was in my mid-20s, an older cousin of mine decided he had to own an expensive sports car at least once in his life. When his shiny new Mercedes SLK AMG convertible arrived, I eagerly accepted his invitation to take a ride with him. It was a thrilling experience. The monthly lease payments on the thing were more than my salary at the time, and there were two things I remember most about that experience. The first was the seats, which were lowset and snug. As the engine revved to life, the seat belts automatically tightened — a wholly unexpected, but gentle and comforting embrace that signaled: this was something special. The second was that, as we pulled up to our first traffic light with the top down, it started to rain. Then the lights turned green. The hard-top roof only took about 15 seconds to close, but as we sat there immobile, waiting for salvation, we could only pretend not to notice everyone around smirking at us with a mix of withering ridicule and annoyance.

I was recently reminded of that experience in a surprising way. My one year old loves to give hugs, but only to his mother. He gives me no such affection. Occasionally, I need to take him from his mother’s arms. Upon seeing me approach with outstretched hands, he will yelp and bury himself into her, arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Susanne describes the experience as “heavenly”. My experience is different. Once the limpet is pried away from his lifegiver, I am instead left with a screaming, writhing infant who is doing his best to kick me.

So I was surprised earlier this week when I was out walking with him in the neighborhood (or rather carrying him, since it is impossible to get anywhere when every rock, flower and poisonous berry by the sidewalk warrants an inspection). Normally outward facing, he suddenly turned around, buried his face in my shoulder, and squeezed tight.

It didn’t take me long to realize that this was because we were approaching a house with a lawn full of particularly creepy animatronic halloween decorations, and he did not like it. As we passed a zombie struggling to take a stake out of its chest, he squeezed even tighter in silent terror.

For him, it was a death grip. But for me it was, as advertised, heavenly.

Taking advantage of the situation, I walked back and forth between the zombie and a skeleton, with Alex’s hug tightening in inverse proportion to our distance from the undead.

After I had my fill of manufactured affection at the expense of my child’s mental health, we continued our walk. A few feet later, I passed a skeletal jack-in-the-box, which suddenly leapt 8 feet into the air and towered over the sidewalk. I screamed like a baby. Alex giggled, and I could only pretend to laugh in response to the smirks of passers-by.

Further Observations

  • A friend I was texting with believes the Ukraine war will drag on for a long, long time. His reasoning was that it’s the scenario that’s most in the United States’ interest: while it continues, it saps Russia economically and militarily, weakens Europe relative to the U.S., and strengthens NATO (of which the U.S. is the most influential member)… and all at the relatively low cost of shipping materiel to Ukraine. As long as tactical nukes don’t make an appearance, I can’t say I disagree with him. Just because it’s a cynical take doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
  • Voting by mail is so convenient. My vote-by-mail pack came in this week, and I already mailed it in. No need to line up at a polling booth on a Tuesday!
  • The inflation numbers came out on Thursday and they are still high (8.2% y/y versus 8.3% y/y for last month).
  • Kwasi Kwarteng was fired as the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer after 39 days on the job. That is only the second shortest tenure for that position in modern UK history. The dubious honor of the shortest tenure belongs to Iain Macleod, who died in office only after 31 days.

Articles

Books

  • Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (Michael Lewis)
    A laugh-out-loud funny, all-too-true compilation of personal anecdotes on fatherhood by my favorite non-fiction author that makes me feel just a little better about my own questionable parenting skills.

Charts, Images & Videos

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9
Oct 22
Sun

Weekly Report: October 9, 2022

Observations

  • Interest rates are up, so bank savings account interest rates are up as well. Given how long ZIRP has been in place, this feels unusual, but back in my uni days, I had my savings in an ING Direct online savings account that was paying 7% interest. That seemed normal at the time. I didn’t understand how interest rates worked, so I thought it was just the “normal” rate of interest for an online bank.
  • I don’t know why it took me so long, but I discovered this week that you can buy treasury bills, notes, and bonds directly from the U.S. Treasury as a consumer. These are all debt instruments of varying maturity periods backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government. Here’s the significance: First, these instruments currently offer better rates than any bank account or certificate of deposit (CD). At Ally Bank, a 12 month CD currently pays 3.1% APR. A 52-week T-Bill currently pays at 4.134%. Second, interest from these instruments is exempt from state and local taxes. Third, they’re very easy to buy – you open a Treasury Direct account, link your bank account, and Treasury will automatically debit your account upon purchase, and credit your account upon maturity. The main downside is that it’s not easy to get rid of treasury instruments if you don’t want to hold them to maturity. You can sell them after a 45-day minimum holding period, but you need to transfer them to another institution first. Here’s more information.
  • If you’ve bought Series I Bonds (now in vogue given the current 9.62% rates), you will already have a Treasury Direct account. We hold some of our emergency cash in I Bonds.
  • My youngest learned how to say his own name this week!

Articles

Charts, Images & Videos

Spotted near home: “XRP” and “F*** the SEC”
Filming aerial scenes for the $1.5B grossing Top Gun: Maverick

On Twitter

Warning: Lots of loud swearing👇

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2
Oct 22
Sun

Weekly Report: October 2, 2022

Observations

  • I received my “Official Voter Information Guide” this week for the November 8 midterm elections. It’ll be the first general election I’m eligible to vote in. The guide is 127 pages, with information about 7 propositions for new California laws (including the text of those laws, legislative analysis, and arguments and rebuttals from each side), candidate statements for state and federal office, information about various California Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal justices to be confirmed, and information on how to vote. That’s a lot of information to process if you want to make an informed decision about everything that’s up for a vote, but it’s great that it’s there.

Articles

Charts, Images & Videos

Eurozone inflation

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25
Sep 22
Sun

Weekly Report: September 25, 2022

Observations

  • The Fed raised rates by 0.75% to an upper bound of 3.25% this week. The market expects further raises to 4.25% or 4.50% by the end of this year, and the market reacted accordingly. The U.S. dollar continues its inexorable run upwards against every other major world currency. The yen hit a 24 year low (146 JPY to the dollar), prompting the Bank of Japan to intervene and prop up their currency for the first time in as many years. The pound hit a 37 year low (falling to $1.084), and the euro a 20 year low (falling to $0.9689). The Australian dollar “only” hit a 2 year low (at $0.651), having sharply plummeted to under $0.57 during the early days of the pandemic. Interest rate differentials will encourage further USD inflows, which will continue until U.S. interest rates pull back, and a recession bites. (If the recession is global, which I think is likely, the USD may continue rallying for a while due to flight from risk.) If the past is any indication, the time the Fed starts cutting rates will roughly coincide with the start of a crash and subsequent recession. Susanne and I have been slowly buying Australian dollars and Danish kroner (which is pegged to the euro) on the bet that these historically low rates won’t be a high watermark, and things will recover in a few years.
  • A second company fell prey to a high profile hack in as many weeks: Take Two (which actually got hacked twice). While details about the Take Two hacks are sparse, I’d wager that, like the Uber incident, it all started with a social engineering attack.
  • Susanne is already regretting telling me about this, but KOKS, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the picturesque Faroe Islands, is temporarily moving to the small village of Ilimanaq, Greenland next summer. If you want to dine inside the Arctic Circle, you have to buy a package deal, which comes with a boat transfer through a fjord from nearby Ilulissat, and a hotel night (KOKS will also feed you breakfast). It sounds incredible, but the logistics of pulling off a trip there are imposing.

Articles

Charts, Images & Videos

Data: YCharts, Chart: Simran Parwani/Axios

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18
Sep 22
Sun

Weekly Report: September 19, 2022

Observations

  • Inflation numbers remained high this month. The market expects the Fed to continue hiking interest rates at a good pace and reacted accordingly. Mortgage rates rose above 6% for the first time since 2008. I think the pain of a sharp recession is still to come as the much of the world has become used to record low interest rates for most of the last decade. Higher rates have a knock on effect that will catalyze a downturn, causing a stronger USD, higher debt servicing burdens, decreasing demand, drying liquidity, and slowing the economy. Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.
  • Adobe agreed to acquire Figma for $20B in cash and stock which, at signing, is the largest private tech acquisition in history. (In 2014, Whatsapp agreed to be sold for $16B, which rose to $22B at closing as Facebook stock rose.) Adobe shareholders and Figma users didn’t love the news, but early Figma shareholders did.
  • Andor, the latest Star Wars series, is out on Disney+ next Wednesday and the reviews are apparently excellent.

Articles

Movies & TV

  • Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 3)
    Started watching this season. The series is a lot of fun. And somehow, they still keep it canon!

Restaurants

  • Bluestone Lane Cafe (Los Altos)
    Billed as an Australian-style cafe, we go there occasionally for a weekend brunch. The food is a facsimile of a Sydney breakfast, but I’ll take what I can get. (They sell fairy bread there but use sprinkles instead of 100s and 1000s. Heresy!) Bonus: two free Tesla charging stations. 3/5.

Charts & Images

Our 4th blackout this year that has lasted more than 30 minutes. This time happened just as we were about to bathe the kids. No power means no hot water.
Mortgage rates. Source: New York Times

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11
Sep 22
Sun

Weekly Report: September 11, 2022

Observations

  • A heatwave lasting half the week in the Bay Area saw temperatures hit an all-time high of 47ºC. For us, temperatures exceeded 40ºC on 3 days this week, which makes working from home challenging in the afternoon as we don’t have air conditioning (typical for homes here). The southwestern U.S. is currently in a drought that is the worst on record (and the records — tree rings —go back 1,200 years).
  • Queen Elizabeth II died on Thursday. She led an incredible, unique life and felt particularly well respected and admired, despite having to carry all of the colonial baggage that the British monarchy brings. In the words of former President Trump, “There was nobody like her!” King Charles III now takes her place.
  • I was barely old enough to vote “yes” when Australia held a referendum about whether to become a republic at the turn of the millennium. The “no” votes prevailed, but the margin was only 55/45. I suspect that the next time they hold such a referendum, it will be within my lifetime and the answer will be different.
  • Sunday marks the 21st anniversary of 9/11. I’d say that every 20-30 years a generational event comes along and changes the world. The pandemic, of course, is the most recent one. 9/11 was the first in my living memory and I’m sure at some point my kids will ask me, “What were you doing when you found out about 9/11?” The answer is that I woke up to the news that morning. I think someone had texted me to turn on the TV, and when I did, I saw the shocking images of the towers burning. I was in Sydney, so it had all happened while I was asleep. After being glued to the TV for as long as I could, I left for work. I was a web developer doing an industry placement at EDS at the time, working on the Commonwealth Bank’s website. I grabbed an old walkman, popped on earphones, tuned into a news radio station, and hopped on the bus, and then the train. It was a pretty sombre, quiet commute, and you could tell the news was hanging in the air with everyone.

Articles

Movies & TV

  • House of the Dragon (Season 1)
    My wife and I started dating at about the same time as Game of Thrones premiered, and it became a weekly ritual for us (together with eating take out from Su Hong, now called Chef Kwan’s in Menlo Park). Despite GoT’s series-destroying final season, we decided to work House of the Dragon into our weekly routine for old times’ sake. We’ve seen the first 3 episodes, and the jury is still out on whether it’ll stay in our weekly routine.

Hotels

  • Courtyard by Marriott Redwood City (Redwood City, CA)
    I had an unused free hotel night that was going to expire next month, so I decided to work out of a hotel room on one of the days where it got really hot. I was just there for the air conditioning so I didn’t stay for the night, but it’s a basic, no-frills hotel in the middle of nowhere.

Charts & Images

On Twitter

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31
Dec 19
Tue

Year in Review 2019

It’s the last year of the decade! Happy New Year! In a few moments, we leave the 2010s and enter the 20s. And so I’m taking a few moments for a bit of introspection about the year just past and prognostication about the year to come.

But first, what happened over the last decade, in a paragraph? Most of my 30s has been spent in this decade. In the first half, I spent a lot of time doing two things: working and traveling. The happy confluence of discovering travel hacking and being of the age where friends were getting married meant I got to attend weddings in 10 countries! The second half of the decade was far more personally eventful: some big life milestones (mortgagee, started a family), 3 startups (sold one, left one, still working on one), did some legal consulting with a bunch of clients, and ended up going full time employed with one. The second half was also significantly more stressful.

2019

Travels. We took a trip in February to catch up with our extended family in Singapore and Copenhagen, with a side trip to Bali where we stayed at the amazing Amankila. While in Copenhagen, I also managed to squeeze a quick side trip to London, Helsinki and Tallinn. Domestically, we spent a weekend in San Diego for Susanne’s birthday, and some time in Palm Springs with Susanne’s parents for a break. Later in the year, we all went back to Copenhagen for Susanne’s dad’s 70th birthday. Work trips were unusually varied. A crazy deal took Susanne to Montreal twice, and Stuart went to Taipei, Kaoshiung, Sydney and Kyiv.

Work. Susanne had her highest billing month this year. I started a new job at Pango, which is a small company headquartered in Redwood City that sells products to protect consumer privacy and security, including a VPN product that has hundreds of millions of users. I continue to help out with Aerofiler, and the company landed its first 10 customers this year. We exhibited at CLOC Sydney and the Sydney-based team visited Silicon Valley as a part of UNSW’s 10x program.

2020

Politics. Some predictions:

  • Brexit: It’s coming January 31, 2020, this time for sure. Boris has a mandate (strong conviction).
  • Impeachment: Trump will be acquitted by the Senate (absolute conviction).
  • Democratic Presidential Candidate: Biden, probably (weak conviction).
  • US Presidential Election: Trump gets re-elected (medium conviction).

The Economy. The low interest rate environment continues along with asset price inflation. Global debt continues to build, growing a massive powder keg that is in search of a spark. A spark could come in the form of increased interests rates, but central banks have little appetite to be hawkish. Wealth inequality will keep CPI low (all the inflation is in boomer assets and bananas duct-taped to walls, not wage growth for the blue collar worker, despite generationally-low employment rates). All this suggests that low interest rates are here to stay for a long time yet. Trump will try to juice the economy as much as he can to keep it going through to the election. There’s always the chance of a blow up somewhere in the world catalyzing a global crash, but it’s hard to see what that will be at this time (but I guess it always is).

Inequality. The growing wealth inequality continues, and I don’t see any way the trend reverses, short of social unrest and dramatical changes in the political landscape. One pedestrian example of how the gap between the haves and have nots increases: We were doing the maths on owning versus renting a house here, and if you consider the costs of home ownership (mortgage interest, homeowner’s insurance, and property tax), due to the tax deductibility of mortgage interest, we’re only paying slightly more for our house than the 2-bed 1-bath apartment we were renting a few years ago (and rents have since gone up). Additionally, mortgage principal repayments are a form of forced saving, and exposure to capital appreciation has been good in the current economic climate.

Real Estate. I’m expecting the Bay Area market to continue treading water. After 2019’s spate of IPOs, property prices haven’t really moved. The media has reported a bunch of IPOs bombing, but it’s all relative. A bunch of people still made millions – just not as many millions. Except for the poor sods at WeWork not named Adam Neumann. As to which, see the inequality point above.

In the meantime, Denmark’s residential mortgage rates (as low as -0.5%) tempted me to take a look into the Copenhagen market. It turns out that Denmark is pretty xenophobic and that it’s pretty tough to own property unless you know how to properly pronounce the word “hvad”. Luckily, I have access to such an individual, but she thinks that everything is too expensive. I reminded her that I thought property in Menlo Park was too expensive for the last 7 years and look where my prognosticating got us. Not in Menlo Park.

Tech. The IPO I’m most anticipating in 2020 is Airbnb. Assuming their financials hold up (they spent a lot of money on marketing in their last leaked financials), I don’t think the WeWork debacle and Uber disappointment will act as a drag. They’re meant to be profitable or at least profit-able (excluding stock-based comp, which is somewhat misleading but par for the course for private companies around here).

Privacy. Will continue to get a lot of scrutiny and Facebook will continue to be a punching bag. Their reputation when it comes to privacy has been in the muck for some time now. But as always, people will complain, and then keep using it. I think that’s going to be true with any service that has a lot of utility – privacy is a theoretical issue, but your ability to see photos of your friends in exotic locations, the latest Trump tweet, or memes provide an immediate shot of dopamine (or maybe just a dose of FOMO) that just steamrolls it. Indeed, Facebook’s stock is at a high, so they’re continuing to make more money in spite of all that has happened. The only way that changes is that the government breaks it up.

On the privacy regulation front, I’ve been a bit skeptical ever since Ashley Madison happened. The absolute nuclear event for a privacy lawyer is a security breach where all your customer data is exposed to the public. Ashley Madison is a site for people who want to have affairs. They experienced that nuclear event in 2015. Real names, home addresses, search history, and credit card information were all exposed. 60 gigabytes of it (granted, most of it was fake accounts). All of it obviously extremely sensitive. People reportedly committed suicide over the leak. This should have shut them down for good, but the site settled its lawsuits is still alive today. I don’t think that the privacy laws that have been passed in Europe and California since would have changed this much.

We have Alexa, Siri, Google, and Cortana in our homes – always listening. We use devices (mobile phones, cars) that let people we don’t know, know where we are 24/7. No one really seems to care. I mean, truly care. Of course, everyone talks about it, but no one really does much about it.

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11
Oct 15
Sun

Flying Lesson Update: Cross-Country Solos

Over the last couple months I’ve been trying to get my cross-country solo requirements out of the way. For the purposes of meeting the requirements to get a private pilot certificate, a “cross-country” flight is any that involves you landing at a different airport than the one you took off from, where the airports are at least 50 nautical miles apart (in a straight line). I was a fair bit more nervous about the solo cross-country (XC) flights than my first solo flight, because you really are kind of alone up there. When you’re going around the traffic pattern, that’s familiar, but when you’re going to somewhere you’ve never been with before, and you’re in the skies sharing the frequencies with the airline carriers, it’s something else.

XC 1: KPAO-KSNS-KPAO (Palo Alto – Salinas – Palo Alto)

The first XC was a relatively easy one, as John had taken me on two XCs to Salinas before, so I knew what was going on.

At Palo Alto, I called ground control to ask them for a left Dumbarton departure with flight following to Salinas. A left Dumbarton departure is one where you take off from the runway and hang a left at the Dumbarton bridge, which is a couple miles North of the airport. Flight following is basically a service that air traffic control offers to VFR pilots. When you’re flying VFR (visual flight rules) – in other words, flying by looking out the window – you’re pretty much on your own.  You’re not speaking with air traffic control, and no one’s telling you where to go. (The exception is if you want to enter the airspace of a towered airport, then you need to talk to ATC.) When you pick up flight following, ATC keeps tabs on where you are. They help you spot traffic and guide you around it (although the pilot always has ultimate responsibility for avoiding traffic), and sound the alarm if your radar blip unexpectedly vanishes from their screen.

I took the coastal route down to Salinas, flying over the Santa Cruz mountains, over Santa Cruz, Moss Landing and into Salinas. It was a nice, clear day, and a lot of GA traffic seemed to be heading down to Monterey. Palo Alto tower handed me off to Norcal Approach, and when I told them my intended altitude was 5500, they cleared me into San Francisco Airport’s airspace to get there (since it was above me at the time). SFO’s airspace is a category called Class B airspace, which is what surrounds all major U.S. airports normally up to 30 nautical miles in radius (the airspace looks like an upside down layered wedding cake). My flying club doesn’t allow students to fly solo into Class B airspace because it’s just a bit too busy in the Bay Area. (My instructor didn’t think much of that rule, and he gave me a Class B solo endorsement anyway, even though it’s just symbolic.) I declined the B clearance and ATC told me to stay underneath the Class B shelf.

After overflying the mountains, I realized that there was almost nowhere good to land – it basically was miles of densely forested hills. The alternative would have been to ask for a downwind departure and fly down the peninsula on the Bay side of the hills. But I’m not sure that it’s dramatically better – I guess you could land on the 280 in an emergency, but it’s still heavily populated, and the airspace is busier, especially as you skirt by San Jose’s airspace.

I made it over the Santa Cruz pier and headed across Monterey Bay. Salinas was somewhere in the distance, but the ground was a bit hazy. I was vectored for traffic briefly, before turning back to the short. The airport came into view after I passed abeam the smoke stacks of the power plant at Moss Landing.

Salinas’ tower works at a different pace to Palo Alto’s. The controllers speak slower and trip up on their words a little more, but on the other hand, there’s not a lot of traffic there so there’s no need to speak quickly.

I joined the downwind too close to the runway and overshot final by an embarrassing amount. No matter. I landed, taxied back, and took off for the return journey.

 

On the return, Norcal Approach twice asked me to confirm my destination was Palo Alto. The second time, I realized they were asking because they were curious – the direct route back to Palo Alto would have been via the Bay side of the mountains, but I was heading up via the mountains and then to Woodside, where I’d make a right turn and cut back in towards the Bay. But they didn’t know that, so I told them I was going to Woodside first. John told me later on that I should have mentioned any unusual routes when picking up flight following so they don’t get confused.

Our normal practice area is up near Woodside, and that afternoon was swarming with students doing maneuvers. “Cessna 1SC, caution multiple targets,” I was told. I always find that terminology peculiar, since targets connotes something you’re trying to aim at, and in this case you’re most decidedly not.

I cut back over the hills into more traffic. A Cessna ahead of me was also going to Palo Alto, and I was told to follow him. A Surf Air Pilatus was also crossing in front of my path from right to left.

“Cessna 1SC confirm you have Pilatus in sight, your 12 o’clock”

“1SC has traffic in sight”

“…and confirm that you have traffic you’re following as well”

“1SC has traffic in… uh… that traffic in sight as well,” I responded awkwardly as my eyes were glued out of the window.

Back in Palo Alto’s familiar airspace, I put the plane down and was exhausted.

xc1

XC 2: KPAO-KSCK-KSAC-KPAO (Palo Alto – Stockton – Sacramento Executive – Palo Alto)

The second XC was my “long” solo XC, which requires landing at 3 different airports, separated by at least 150 nautical miles. John set up my route to Stockton (where we had been once before) and Sacramento Executive (which we had not). Although both were large, towered airports, they were supposed to be relatively sleepy places.

xc2

I asked for a right Dumbarton departure, headed to my default Eastbound waypoint of the Sunol golf course, crossed Mission Pass and was in the Central Valley. Pleasanton to the left, Livermore below, wind farms, and then miles upon miles of fields. The weather in the Central Valley at this time of year is pretty consistent – warm to hot (low 30s Celsius) and clear skies with some haze.

The flight to and landing at Stockton went fine. After landing at Stockton, I contacted the tower instead of ground because the flip-flop switch in 501SC is sticky and has a habit of flipping twice when you press it once (and I didn’t double check the frequency change). Tower set me straight. Then in the runup area, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to switch over tower or wait until ground told me to switch (it’s meant to be the former), and ended up deciding to make a call to tower, except that I had forgotten to switch over to tower and was still on ground. Oh well. The tower kindly set up flight following for me to Sacramento. Stockton tower wished me a “safe flight” upon departing their airspace and I wonder if they chose that valediction because they figured out I was a student pilot.

I made a right 45 departure from Stockton and decided to set the autopilot. I told Norcal I was going up to 4500 and set the auto pilot. I mustn’t have set something correctly, because auto pilot blew through 4500 and I only realized when I was at 4600. I tried to fiddle around with the autopilot to try and fix it, and unthinkingly tried pushing down on the yoke with autopilot still engaged (to which the plane responded with a verbal reprimand, although I can’t remember what it said – something about trim). By the time I finally got with the program and disengaged the autopilot, the plane was almost at 5000 feet.

I found Sacramento Executive without much of a problem, made a good approach and then spoiled everything with a horrible landing. Ballooned, lost a bit too much airspeed, and came down a bit hard and bounced (at least it was on the rear wheels!). Then I slammed on the brakes and the tires were screeching (I wasn’t sure why because they don’t normally).

The departure was the worst part of the flight and a great learning experience. Sacramento Executive Tower had cleared me for a straight out departure and told me that I would get my squawk code “in the air” (the code that lets ATC track you when you have flight following). I took off and moments later was given my squawk code. I was about to type it in, when it was followed by a traffic advisory at 11 o’clock. So I diverted my attention to looking for an RV that was coming in to land and entering the downwind. In the meantime, my GPS navigation was showing that the next waypoint was off to the left, when it should be straight ahead, and I was confused. The tower radioed in again and asked me to set my squawk code. Followed by another traffic advisory. Meanwhile I’m trying to concentrate on take off and pitching to the right angle and bringing up flaps. Tower radios and asks me why I’m turning left. And I’m not trying to, but I had hit task saturation in trying to attend to the take off, squawk code, traffic, and the weird GPS issue. The result was that I dropped the ball on my heading and had started to drift off to the left. I had just finished setting my squawk code when tower radioed again, this time very irate, and told me to set my squawk and what the hell I was doing still turning left (he didn’t say “hell” – they keep the words professional in the air, although the tone sometimes isn’t). Still a bit confused, I asked what heading I should be on and was told that I had already turned so it didn’t matter, and that I wasn’t supposed to turn until I was told to. Later on, I realized the GPS was still using the previous flight plan and I hadn’t activated the flight plan for the next leg, so it was showing the old inbound track to the airport.

A few learning moments:

1. I could have asked to wait for the squawk code on the ground. That would have been one less thing to worry about during a critical stage of flight.

2. I had my priorities wrong and should have completely ignored the GPS – while I was under tower control, my focus should have been on following their instructions and not on something that really didn’t matter at that stage.

3. I could have set a heading bug when lining up on the runway.

4. I could have mentioned I was a student pilot.

Anyway, I was a bit shaken up after that. Fortunately, the final leg was the longest one, and I had a bit of time to relax a little and take in my surroundings. I set auto pilot again, watching the altitude like a hawk. It blew through my target again, but this time I was ready for it – I disengaged autopilot, leveled the plane and put the autopilot into altitude capture model. I had some great views on the way back, with Mount Diablo passing by my right wing.

Getting back to Palo Alto was relatively uneventful, although I had another poor landing. It was a 2.5 hour flight, but I felt completely wasted. When I got home I took a nap.

XC 3: KPAO-O27-KPAO (Palo Alto – Oakdale – Palo Alto)

You need to clock 5 hours of solo XC time, so I needed to do one more solo. This time, John sent me to Oakdale, which was near Modesto. Oakdale is a small, single runway untowered airport in whoop whoop. I had only been to one untowered airport – Half Moon Bay – and only once, when there wasn’t anyone else in the pattern at 8am on a weekday. I thought Oakdale wouldn’t be too bad because of its location, and the fact that my course in would be a 45 entry into the left downwind, so I didn’t have to do any maneuvering to get into the pattern.

Norcal terminated flight following, and I switched over to the CTAF frequency for Oakdale (the common comms frequency that people talk on when there’s no tower). I was immediately hit by a barrage of position calls for Oakdale.

“Oakdale traffic, Young Eagle 123 is over the candy factory, making left traffic for 28, Oakdale.”

“Oakdale traffic, Cessna 12345 is turning final for 28, Oakdale.”

“Oakdale traffic, Young Eagle 234 is over the ammo depot…”

At 1500 feet, I was having trouble spotting the airport. And I hadn’t the faintest clue where the candy factory or ammo depot were. They weren’t landmarks on the charts. And what was Young Eagle?

I immediately began to get very nervous. It was clear there was a lot of traffic in the area, and I didn’t know where any of it was.

A plane – it looked like an old military prop plane – materialized off my right wing. He was flying on the 45 for a left downwind entry like me, and I didn’t know what to do. I recalled something about a plane on the left having right of way or something (the correct answer is actually that the plane on the right had right of way), but in the time I was searching my memory banks, the other plane had quickly sped ahead, resolving that problem for me. I fell in behind him.

I sighted the runway and made my call: “Oakdale traffic, Skyhawk 824LB entering left downwind for 28, Oakdale.”

Except that it wasn’t the runway. It was just a road. I frantically looked around for the airport again and, with relief, located it. I didn’t know what to do regarding my erroneous position report and I had probably just confused everyone else in the area. There was so much comms traffic that I was trying to listen to, I didn’t end up correcting my call. I just made it again when I was actually on downwind and hoped no one would get hissy. More people were reporting over the chocolate factory and ammo plant. (One day I’ll have to head back there and check out the chocolates.)

“Ok, I think I’m number 3,” someone said over the radio. Hmm. I started quickly scanning the pattern. There’s one plane on short final. Another turning base. Don’t see anything else… that can’t be good. Is number 3 behind me? What number am I? Then I saw number 3 ahead of me on the downwind. I put in 20 degrees of flaps and slowed down more, waiting for the plane to turn base and final and pass me before I turned base. Ok I hope I’m number 4 and I didn’t cut someone off who thought they were number4 . I finally got on final, saw the plane ahead clear the runway, and relaxed. The landing was a decent one.

On the ground, there seemed to be a bunch of people in older military-style planes going around, but I taxied past them all back to the runway and didn’t get a good look.

On the way back, I got vectored around some skydivers and had some traffic to look out for, but otherwise had an uneventful return.

xc3

 

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6
Sep 15
Sun

Where do you come from?

“Where do you come from?” is an awkward way to ask someone what their origin is. For anyone who has a multicultural background, it’s hard to figure out if you’re being asked where you were born, where your parents came from, where you spent your childhood, where you currently live, or what’s your ethnicity. Adding “Originally?” to the end of that question only removes one of those possibilities, and it also can generate snide comebacks. “Yes, I was originally from Australia too.”

I find when I ask that question, I’m trying to find out where the person spent most of their formative years – where they got their accent, where did get their early education, where they were with their parents. I heard someone ask a version of this question a while ago that has now become my go to question: “Where did you grow up?” This invites the person being asked to answer how they want, without loading the question with any awkward assumptions.

Then, if you want, you can follow up with – did your parents grow up there too?

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30
Jun 15
Tue

First Solo Flight!

Haven’t posted for a while, but thought this lesson warranted one.

On Sunday, John told me that today was a possibility for my first solo flight. He would go a few rounds with me, and if he was happy with my landings, he would step out of the plane. On Monday night, the weather forecast was showing IFR conditions and mist at 8am, but happily the sky was pretty clear when I woke up.

John jumped in the plane after another battle with traffic on the 101 which allowed me to catch up on some work emails while I waited for him after pre-flighting, and we took off. Even though my flight was at 8am, someone had taken the plane out for a couple hours earlier in the day so the fuel tanks were only half full. As a result, the lighter plane handled differently and I ballooned the first couple of landings quite a lot. John was silent the whole time, and I know he was just trying to simulate me not having him next to me on a solo, but I was struggling not to interpret the silence as sullen disappointment at the landings.

We then did a short approach and I came in way too high and had to go around.

To my surprise, after another couple landings, John said that he was going to step out of the plane and let me try flying it alone – the standard three take offs and full stop landings for the first solo. But we were going to taxi over to transient parking first to refuel so that the plane would handle more familiarly (especially given that John would no longer be in the plane). John signed my solo endorsement, wished me luck, and I was alone. It was very quiet in the cockpit.

“Palo Alto Ground, Skyhawk 501SC is a student pilot on first solo, at transient parking with Foxtrot, taxi for closed traffic.”

I was a little nervous, but far less than I had expected. I forgot to lean the mixture after starting up the engine until I got to the run up area, but otherwise I got up into the air fine. The traffic pattern was thankfully fairly quiet – a few others coming and going, but nothing confusing.

The first landing attempt felt wonky during the round out and I went around.

On the second attempt I had what was probably my best landing in a long time – a greaser. I pulled into the parallel where John was observing with his dog, and he gave me the A-OK sign.

My second landing was not so good – I dropped the plane in a little at the end. Taxiing back down the parallel, John was waving his hand at me, palm down. I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with mediocrity.

My final landing was ok – a few issues with the rudder saw me bounce a bit from wheel to wheel on landing, but the flare was fine. Done!

I taxied back to the club and was switching off the plane when John arrived and congratulated me. I have to say, it felt pretty awesome.

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19
Apr 14
Sat

From Instagram: The excesses of the LH FCT: a humidor of cigars,…

The excesses of the LH FCT: a humidor of cigars, a never ending liquor supply, lolly towers and... a water bar?!
The excesses of the LH FCT: a humidor of cigars, a never ending liquor supply, lolly towers and… a water bar?!

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From Instagram: The LH First Class Terminal: nap rooms, a meat buzzsaw,…

The LH First Class Terminal: nap rooms, a meat buzzsaw, chaffeured plane transfers, and rubber duckies
The LH First Class Terminal: nap rooms, a meat buzzsaw, chaffeured plane transfers, and rubber duckies

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18
Apr 14
Fri

From Instagram: Pretty slick, Lufthansa! New F in an A330-300

Pretty slick, Lufthansa! New F in an A330-300
Pretty slick, Lufthansa! New F in an A330-300

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31
Mar 14
Mon

From Instagram: Joey, the latest addition to our apartment

Joey, the latest addition to our apartment
Joey, the latest addition to our apartment

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22
Feb 14
Sat

From Instagram: Congratulations Roger & Shuang!

Congratulations Roger & Shuang!
Congratulations Roger & Shuang!

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12
Jan 14
Sun

From Instagram: My ride home! (Thanks to AA points)

My ride home! (Thanks to AA points)
My ride home! (Thanks to AA points)

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From Instagram: The ritual pre-flight meal

The ritual pre-flight meal
The ritual pre-flight meal

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31
Dec 13
Tue

From Instagram: Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!

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29
Dec 13
Sun

From Instagram: Final part of the long, long journey back to Sydney…

Final part of the long, long journey back to Sydney...
Final part of the long, long journey back to Sydney…

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28
Dec 13
Sat

From Instagram: Part 2 of a 55 hour journey back to Sydney!

Part 2 of a 55 hour journey back to Sydney!
Part 2 of a 55 hour journey back to Sydney!

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From Instagram: Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park – lots of German food…

Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park - lots of German food there for some reason
Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park – lots of German food there for some reason

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27
Dec 13
Fri

From Instagram: American’s trademark ice cream sundae!

American's trademark ice cream sundae!
American’s trademark ice cream sundae!

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From Instagram: LAX-LHR on one of AA’s new 777-300ERs! Tons better seats…

LAX-LHR on one of AA's new 777-300ERs! Tons better seats in the B cabin than their older planes.
LAX-LHR on one of AA’s new 777-300ERs! Tons better seats in the B cabin than their older planes.

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From Instagram: Part 1 of a 55 hour journey back to Sydney!

Part 1 of a 55 hour journey back to Sydney!
Part 1 of a 55 hour journey back to Sydney!

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17
Dec 13
Tue

From Instagram: Warriors courtside!

Warriors courtside!
Warriors courtside!

  9:22pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
9
Nov 13
Sat

From Instagram: My flatmate Sonny and I were shopping at our local…

My flatmate Sonny and I were shopping at our local Safeway when he suddenly grabbed my arm, turned me around and said, "Hey that's Meg! Take a photo of us!" She obliged! #hp
My flatmate Sonny and I were shopping at our local Safeway when he suddenly grabbed my arm, turned me around and said, “Hey that’s Meg! Take a photo of us!” She obliged! #hp

  6:07pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
20
Oct 13
Sun

From Instagram: Almost done…

Almost done...
Almost done…

  9:21am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
27
Sep 13
Fri

From Instagram: A toilet with a view…

A toilet with a view...
A toilet with a view…

  12:06am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
26
Sep 13
Thu

From Instagram: I bet you international travel for this dude is not…

I bet you international travel for this dude is not fun
I bet you international travel for this dude is not fun

  3:51pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
25
Sep 13
Wed

From Instagram: Lunch at the absolutely stunning Ithaa underwater restaurant

Lunch at the absolutely stunning Ithaa underwater restaurant
Lunch at the absolutely stunning Ithaa underwater restaurant

  2:37am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
24
Sep 13
Tue

From Instagram: A little island out in the Indian Ocean…

A little island out in the Indian Ocean...
A little island out in the Indian Ocean…

  4:52am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
22
Sep 13
Sun

From Instagram: Unmistakably Japan

Unmistakably Japan
Unmistakably Japan

  4:01am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
21
Sep 13
Sat

From Instagram: Ok let’s do this. Off to Singapore!

Ok let's do this. Off to Singapore!
Ok let’s do this. Off to Singapore!

  2:06pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
8
Sep 13
Sun

From Instagram: Plane food can sometimes be pretty good :)

Plane food can sometimes be pretty good :)
Plane food can sometimes be pretty good :)

  10:31pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Egg tart, fresh out of the oven

Egg tart, fresh out of the oven
Egg tart, fresh out of the oven

  3:36am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
6
Sep 13
Fri

From Instagram: Good morning Hong Kong!

Good morning Hong Kong!
Good morning Hong Kong!

  4:17pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: A room on the 54th

A room on the 54th
A room on the 54th

  8:17am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
5
Sep 13
Thu

From Instagram: Off again on a good ol’ 747

Off again on a good ol' 747
Off again on a good ol’ 747

  1:01pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
2
Sep 13
Mon

From Instagram: Blackstone Glacier calving

Blackstone Glacier calving
Blackstone Glacier calving

  3:45pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
1
Sep 13
Sun

From Instagram: Chopper ride over the glaciers – Alaska’s gorgeous!

Chopper ride over the glaciers - Alaska's gorgeous!
Chopper ride over the glaciers – Alaska’s gorgeous!

  1:16pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
31
Aug 13
Sat

From Instagram: Hello Alaska

Hello Alaska
Hello Alaska

  9:36pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
8
Aug 13
Thu

From Instagram: Monkeys in Vegas!

Monkeys in Vegas!
Monkeys in Vegas!

  2:51pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
27
Jul 13
Sat

From Instagram: Castle and bridge

Castle and bridge
Castle and bridge

  10:56am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
24
Jul 13
Wed

From Instagram: The famous Pastéis de Belém – different and better than…

The famous Pastéis de Belém - different and better than the 蛋撻 you get at yum cha
The famous Pastéis de Belém – different and better than the 蛋撻 you get at yum cha

  4:56pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: SurveyMonkey Lisboa!

SurveyMonkey Lisboa! #surveymonkey
SurveyMonkey Lisboa! #surveymonkey

  8:17am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
21
Jul 13
Sun

From Instagram: Architecture at Madrid’s Barajas Airport

Architecture at Madrid's Barajas Airport
Architecture at Madrid’s Barajas Airport

  4:46am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
20
Jul 13
Sat

From Instagram: Off to Lisbon!

Off to Lisbon!
Off to Lisbon!

  8:01am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
19
Jul 13
Fri

From Instagram: A little afternoon pick-me-up courtesy of and

A little afternoon pick-me-up courtesy of #ubericecream and #surveymonkey
A little afternoon pick-me-up courtesy of #ubericecream and #surveymonkey

  6:11pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
5
Jul 13
Fri

From Instagram: 4th of July SF Symphony concert with fireworks!

4th of July SF Symphony concert with fireworks!
4th of July SF Symphony concert with fireworks!

  1:21am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
28
Jun 13
Fri

From Instagram: GC Panel at the 10th SLS E-Commerce Best Practices Conference

GC Panel at the 10th SLS E-Commerce Best Practices Conference
GC Panel at the 10th SLS E-Commerce Best Practices Conference

  8:26pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
1
Jun 13
Sat

From Instagram: Home

Home
Home

  5:11pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: English breakfast (oh how I’ve missed those baked beans)

English breakfast (oh how I've missed those baked beans)
English breakfast (oh how I’ve missed those baked beans)

  5:06am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram:

  5:01am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
31
May 13
Fri

From Instagram: The world’s tallest man made structure

The world's tallest man made structure
The world’s tallest man made structure

  8:31am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
30
May 13
Thu

From Instagram: Meat and seafood with great company in HK. Mmmm…

Meat and seafood with great company in HK. Mmmm...
Meat and seafood with great company in HK. Mmmm…

  8:41am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
29
May 13
Wed

From Instagram: Hello, Hong Kong! I’ve eaten vegetarian for 6 straight days…

Hello, Hong Kong! I've eaten vegetarian for 6 straight days in India. Now show me your food.
Hello, Hong Kong! I’ve eaten vegetarian for 6 straight days in India. Now show me your food.

  9:22pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Quick pit stop in Colombo before heading onto HKG

Quick pit stop in Colombo before heading onto HKG
Quick pit stop in Colombo before heading onto HKG

  11:27am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Niru and Hemant’s wedding ceremony

Niru and Hemant's wedding ceremony
Niru and Hemant’s wedding ceremony

  7:46am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
26
May 13
Sun

From Instagram: Niru & Hemant’s reception

Niru & Hemant's reception
Niru & Hemant’s reception

  5:32am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
23
May 13
Thu

From Instagram: Pit stop in HKG. Sometimes I wish I could drink…

Pit stop in HKG. Sometimes I wish I could drink...
Pit stop in HKG. Sometimes I wish I could drink…

  6:02am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
22
May 13
Wed

From Instagram: SFO CX lounge

SFO CX lounge
SFO CX lounge

  12:21pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: An auspicious upgrade on an oversold flight to start the…

An auspicious upgrade on an oversold flight to start the trip
An auspicious upgrade on an oversold flight to start the trip

  12:21pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
4
May 13
Sat

From Instagram: An SR-71. The Blackbird is a beauty…

An SR-71. The Blackbird is a beauty...
An SR-71. The Blackbird is a beauty…

  3:56pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: BRK AGM

BRK AGM
BRK AGM

  5:06am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
28
Apr 13
Sun

From Instagram: Great views of the Bay on a warm Sunday arvo

Great views of the Bay on a warm Sunday arvo
Great views of the Bay on a warm Sunday arvo

  6:07pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
21
Apr 13
Sun

From Instagram: Our two resident bartenders mix it up…

Our two resident bartenders mix it up...
Our two resident bartenders mix it up…

  11:01am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
30
Mar 13
Sat

From Instagram: My flatmate got an article published on the cover of…

My flatmate got an article published on the cover of Nature last week. His team lead just returned from giving a talk in Paris on their research (3D displays without needing glasses!)
My flatmate got an article published on the cover of Nature last week. His team lead just returned from giving a talk in Paris on their research (3D displays without needing glasses!)

  3:27pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
9
Mar 13
Sat

From Instagram: Flying lesson in a Cessna

Flying lesson in a Cessna
Flying lesson in a Cessna

  5:07pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
26
Jan 13
Sat

From Instagram: Cold in MKE

Cold in MKE
Cold in MKE

  3:12pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
12
Jan 13
Sat

From Instagram: Little value to society

Little value to society
Little value to society

  2:17pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
6
Jan 13
Sun

From Instagram: Snow on an early NYC morning

Snow on an early NYC morning
Snow on an early NYC morning

  8:53am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Nyhavn

Nyhavn
Nyhavn

  8:53am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Last day of Tivoli’s Christmas season

Last day of Tivoli's Christmas season
Last day of Tivoli’s Christmas season

  8:53am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Watching planes take off at Heathrow…

Watching planes take off at Heathrow...
Watching planes take off at Heathrow…

  8:53am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
24
Nov 12
Sat

From Instagram: Picking up some meat for the BBQ (not the wagyu)

Picking up some meat for the BBQ (not the wagyu)
Picking up some meat for the BBQ (not the wagyu)

  3:56pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Dinnertime at Momofuku

Dinnertime at Momofuku
Dinnertime at Momofuku

  12:56am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
21
Nov 12
Wed

From Instagram: At the offices of Mint Wireless (which works in the…

At the offices of Mint Wireless (which works in the mobile payments space)
At the offices of Mint Wireless (which works in the mobile payments space)

  7:36pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Sydney startup scene – at the offices of One Big…

Sydney startup scene - at the offices of One Big Switch
Sydney startup scene – at the offices of One Big Switch

  3:51am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
18
Nov 12
Sun

From Instagram: Out on a farm in Leppington

Out on a farm in Leppington
Out on a farm in Leppington

  5:21pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Cleaning out old hardware at home PC mice from 1989…

Cleaning out old hardware at home... PC mice from 1989 onwards (DB-25 Serial, DE-9 Serial, PS/2, USB, Wireless USB). Also, an Apple IIC mouse from 1984 (not pictured)
Cleaning out old hardware at home… PC mice from 1989 onwards (DB-25 Serial, DE-9 Serial, PS/2, USB, Wireless USB). Also, an Apple IIC mouse from 1984 (not pictured)

  4:42am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
17
Nov 12
Sat

From Instagram: Bronte

Bronte
Bronte

  11:06pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
16
Nov 12
Fri

From Instagram: Hello, Sydney – why so gloomy?

Hello, Sydney - why so gloomy?
Hello, Sydney – why so gloomy?

  3:31pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Quick email stop at ICN

Quick email stop at ICN
Quick email stop at ICN

  1:46am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
15
Nov 12
Thu

From Instagram: On board OZ213 yes I’m going to be dumping a…

On board OZ213... yes I'm going to be dumping a lot of crappy photos on Instagram this week
On board OZ213… yes I’m going to be dumping a lot of crappy photos on Instagram this week

  11:52am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Boarding SFO-ICN

Boarding SFO-ICN
Boarding SFO-ICN

  11:52am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

From Instagram: Early start in the Air China/Asiana lounge

Early start in the Air China/Asiana lounge
Early start in the Air China/Asiana lounge

  11:37am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
13
Nov 12
Tue

From Instagram: Test post

Test post
Test post using the pretty great Instagrabber plugin. The creator is cool too – I emailed him about a customization issue I had and he responded with the answer pretty quickly.

  7:41pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
12
Nov 12
Mon

From Instagram: Yes, it’s a remote controlled floating shark

Yes, it's a remote controlled floating shark
Yes, it’s a remote controlled floating shark

  8:46pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
4
Oct 12
Thu

Growing passion

Pete sent me a link to this article in the NY Times which takes a different stance to the “find your passion” school of thought.

If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

Hah. The article then goes on to say:

As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)

These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

The author, a CS prof at Georgetown, tries to divorce “a job’s specifics” from whether people love their work. However, two of the things he then goes on to list in the very next sentence – sense of autonomy and having an impact on the world – are inextricably tied with a job’s specifics. Foxconn factory line workers put in long hours and some are doubtless really good at their jobs. But try and find autonomy and world-changing qualities to that job, and it’s blood from a stone.

I kind of see what he’s getting at, although he’s not really saying it explicitly – it’s a commitment issue with our generation. Employment mobility is really high, and it’s more common than not for Gen Ys to skip through 3-4 jobs over the course of a decade. Sometimes it takes time to grow into a job, so people need to give themselves enough chance to skill up – once you know how to do things, things usually do get better. But some jobs require years and years to skill up, and what happens if you get 6 or 7 years down that path and the passion doesn’t arrive?

  12:23am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
19
Aug 12
Sun

Déjà vu… except that je ne vois pas

Was at Great America yesterday, and I lost my glasses. Not in the way that you’d think you’d normally them at a theme park. I did the responsible thing and took them off before getting on a ride (which quite frankly was unnecessary), and then when I went to collect them on the other side, they were gone. Vanished. Just like that. I filled out a lost & found card but I doubt I’ll see them again.

Alas, this is not the first time that this has happened. The first time was 14 years ago, at another theme park. In January 1998, in fact – I know because I wrote a blog post about it (actually like the fifth blog post I ever wrote).

Anyway, I felt like this for the rest of the day (NSFW):

My friends had to drive my car home for me. Might be time to start thinking about Lasik again.

  5:55pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
13
May 12
Sun

Overzealous parking inspectors

I got ticketed for a parking violation in Sausalito yesterday… in between the time it took for me to park my car and walk to the parking meter about 30 metres away to pay. What the hell?!

  10:59am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
23
Mar 11
Wed

Five most common regrets after a lifetime

Bronnie Ware, a nurse working in palliative care, tended to patients in the final 1-4 months of their lives. She asked them to share with her what their biggest regrets in life were – what they would have done differently if they could have changed something. Then she condensed it down into a list of the five most common regrets. In summary form, they are:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The full article is well worth a read. (Thanks Ros for the link!)

  12:15am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
2
Mar 11
Wed

When an hour is worth more than an hour: calculating your hourly rate

Some industries are known for their brutal work hours. For example, if you’re a service provider involved in helping large cap companies with their M&A transactions, it’s likely that you’re not a stranger to the 100+ hour work week. Although the remuneration for these jobs is usually very high relative to other occupations with more reasonable hours, cash compensation is often normalized by converting it to a per hour metric. Take your salary+bonus and divide it by an estimate of the number of hours you work per year. If you work 50% more hours than your peer but only get paid 20% more, your peer is actually making 20% more than you when you convert it to an hourly rate. Of course, absolute remuneration still counts for something – if you are making 20% more per hour, but are limited in the number of hours you can work, you can’t really take advantage of that better rate to make more money. And salaried workers don’t get paid by the hour, so the question is moot – you can’t make more money in your job by working more hours. You have to use the extra time you have to find another source of income.

But back to the idea of calculating an hourly rate. On reflection, I think that this simple calculation doesn’t take into account quality of life considerations. After all, an hour of work spent between 3-4pm is a lot different to an hour of work spent between 3-4am. It’s far less enjoyable when you’d rather be in bed, for one (I always say, I don’t care how much you enjoy your job – it’s hard to enjoy anything at 8am when you’ve just pulled an all-nighter). To account for this, we need to assign a greater value to time which is outside of “normal” working hours. For example, outside of the usual hours most people work, say 7am-7pm, you start to give up things that most people don’t. Dinner with friends, your own free time, sleep, and, potentially in the long term, health. So, if you work from 8am to 11pm, that 15 hour day should actually be considered to be worth more than 15 hours, because at the end of the day you begin to sacrifice things that most others don’t. I think there needs to be a graduated scale, with abnormal working hours being weighted with a multiplier.

One model of this could be as follows:

Time Multiplier Notes
7.00am-7.00pm 1.0 Typical working hours
7.00pm-10.00pm 1.25 Giving up free time for meals, socialising
10.00pm-1.00am 1.33 Giving up free time for R&R, hobbies, etc.
1.00am-7.00am 1.5 Sacrificing sleep
* Additional 25% added for weekend work during these hours.

 

For example, if you typically work a 70 hour week, with 12 hour days from 9am-9pm and 10 hours on the weekend, then each weekday would actually be considered to be a 12hr 30min day, and work on the weekend would count as 12.5 hours, giving a total of 75 hours. Another example is if you pull a 9am-3am day, the 18 hours actually counts for 22h45m (12h + 3h45m + 4h + 3h). The result is a decrease in your effective hourly rate of compensation.

The numbers I have picked are arbitrary, but my main point is the concept. Ultimately if you genuinely love your job and there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing (as is the case with many entrepreneurs), the hours don’t matter as much. However, weighting hourly calculations this way is a good way to quantitatively factor in other important things in life, like health, relationships, and so on. Different people may choose to weight numbers differently depending on what’s important to them in life. The next time you try and figure out if a job has really been “worth it”, consider the quality of the hours you’ve had to give up.

  11:04pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
9
Jan 11
Sun

Camden South

Well I never! My hometown, census population of 4,653, has its own Wiki page. I also learned that, as at 2001, there are more Anglicans than Catholics there (which is quite unusual). More info.

  3:15pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
25
Dec 10
Sat

Merry Christmas!

May your days be merry and bright!

Oh, and this is awesome:

  1:35am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
10
Oct 10
Sun

10/10/10

Thank you, that is all.

  2:06am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
30
Sep 10
Thu

“Valium, he gave me Valium”

Dad occasionally tells me interesting stories about his encounters with patients (all on a strictly anonymous basis, of course). This was a good one he sent me the other day:

After over 30 years in general practice, you gain a sixth sense for when a patient is actually a drug addict trying to scam a prescription from you. Such was the case yesterday. Just before closing time, in walked a new patient – a young man in his early twenties with a tattooed forearm. He was from out of town, which always rings alarm bells. They come in at the last minute because they think that you are eager to go home and will honour their request quickly. They have often tried all of the doctors in their home area who have quickly become familiar with their stories. Of course these facts in themselves do not make them guilty. However, when they come to you with an elaborate story then the red flag really goes up.

As stories go this was a real doozie.

He started by saying he would let me in on a secret. He had booked a flight to take his girlfriend to New York later that night where he was going to propose to her in the Empire State Building on the 7th anniversary of their initial meeting, which happened to be on the 27/9. His girfriend was still in the dark about it. As he was petrified of flying, he needed something to calm him down. “Something a previous doctor gave me,” he said, but confessing that he forgot what it was. Instantly I was aware that he wanted a script for Valium. But I acted dumb and said that since I do not know what the other doctor had prescribed, I was unable to help him. He screwed up his face and pretended to think hard for a few seconds, before exclaiming: “Valium, he gave me valium!”

Most drug addicts will not come straight up and ask for what they want. That would be too obvious, so they rather manoeuvre you in such a way that you offer it to them. If it is not the right one, they will say that they are allergic to it and you propose another until they get what they want.

As he was consulting with me on the evening of 27/9, I told him that it was physically impossible for him to be at the Empire State Building by the 27th. He said that I had not accounted for the fact that New York was a day behind (which of course I knew). I thought to myself that even if he were to fly off immediately after seeing me, he would still not make it to NY on time as he had to transit in LAX or SFO. So I baited him and casually asked him when his flight was that evening and he replied that he needed to be at the airport at 9pm. He even volunteered the information that he needed to be there at least a couple of hours before his flight. I know that there is a curfew at Sydney airport from 11pm, and it is most unlikely that any airline will schedule a departure time at 11pm. I then explained why I didn’t think that he would be flying off at 11pm and asked him what airline he would be using. He hesitated and, sounding unsure, said Qantas. To prove that Qantas does not fly to LAX in the evening, I logged into the Sydney airport site and showed him that he had already missed his flight.

He was still adamant that he had a flight to catch that evening and said that it was probably at 10pm and not 11pm. I again explained that it was not possible. Qantas does not fly to LAX at that time of the night. Then he finally accepted that fact and said that he screwed up. But it was not over yet.

To prove that he was still going to NY, he then “rang” his girlfriend up and explained the situation to her, then told her to ring up Qantas to rebook the flight for the next day even if he had to “pay a thousand dollars more” (all this without giving her any other details). I’m sure the gf must have been hysterical to find out that she was booked to fly to NY in a couple of hour, but even though I was sitting just across from him, I could not hear her voice at all. Maybe she had a soft voice but I’m not convinced that anyone was on the other line.

In the end I did not honour his request for a script for Valium. To my surprise, he did not get angry – he was just embarrassed to be caught out.

Moral of the story: don’t screw with a doctor who has been practising for longer than you have been alive.

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29
Aug 10
Sun
17
May 10
Mon

Daily news rundown

  • Waddell & Reed not the cause of the May 6 temporary crash? – back to the investigation drawing board. Link
  • Standard Chartered gives employees a choice between BlackBerries and iPhones – big corporate-culture-shift win for Apple
  • Mallesons/Clifford Chance merger rumors cropping up again – fourth time lucky? Link
  • Apple now sells more mobile handsets than Motorola – with 8.75m iPhones shipped in Q1 versus Moto’s 8.5m – Apple now has 3% of global mobile phone market – that is nothing short of extraordinary (remember that Apple only sells one model… "you can have it in any color as long as it’s black"). Link – Nokia of course leads with 37%, but at least one analyst believes that Symbian’s days are numbered
  • Taiwanese manufacturers reckon 4.5m iPhone 4Gs to be sold in 24 days – according to rumor (I’ll be one of them… my 3G is on its last legs). Link
  • Engineer Alex Payne leaves Twitter to found BankSimple – an appealing idea – sounds like they will be eschewing some exception fees (but I think it’s gonna be very tough to pull off). Link
  • Booyah raises $20m – from Accel Partners – funded in an earlier round by Kleiner Perkins
  • Gilt Groupe raises $35m – from General Atlantic and Matrix – they’ve been in the news a lot recently
  • Groupon acquires German startup Citydeal – sounds like a very smart move and a good way to get into Europe – this is Groupon’s second acquisition after Mob.ly
  • Prominent names revealed as investors in Canvas, Moot’s startup – this is Moot of 4chan fame – investors include Conway, Andreessen, Josh Schachter (del.icio.us), Chris Dixon (Hunch) and Kenneth Lerer (Huffpost)
  • (Yes, too much Apple news.)
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13
May 10
Thu

My family tree went viral

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across Geni, which is a website which allows you to construct your family tree. It’s very intuitive to use, and it has quite a lot of functionality. For every person you add, it also emails that person and invites them to join.

I was idly trying out the service and seeded by family tree with my parents, an aunt, uncle and a cousin.  Then I logged in today and saw the Loh family tree had turned into this:

I was very pleasantly surprised. And this is just a partial display – there are several more branches which you can drill down into. The tree is tracking well over 100 family members. It looks like my relatives picked up the idea and ran with it and things spread virally as everyone filled in their area of the family tree (I guess no one wants to feel left out!). My dad has 7 siblings, so the tree mushroomed very quickly from there. I found out a lot about my extended family, including several great aunts and uncles I have never heard of, and the explosive multiplication that can result from an era where polygamy was legal.

Interestingly, much of the heavy lifting was done by relatives in my parents’ generation – people in their 50s and 60s – so it looks like we’ve finally entered an age where everyone is beginning to feel comfortable with technology. I am still bemused by the knowledge that my grandfather uses Skype.

Geni also hooks into the usual array of social networks, and helps you to keep track of far flung relatives (I discovered that the relatives on the tree are living in about a dozen different countries) and record biographical information about them. Geni also tells you the actual relationship you have with someone, so now you can confidently identify your second cousin, twice removed. Very cool!

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2
May 10
Sun

At 8.00am PDT, May 2, 2010

My submission to the Times’ project, A Timely Global Mosaic, Created by All of Us (it was way too early on a Sunday morning to get creative):

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27
Apr 10
Tue

Conference

Just booked myself in for the E-Commerce Best Practices Conference at SLS. Looking very forward to it – should be very interesting! Most of the topics there are pretty much the areas of law that I deal with on a day-to-day basis at work. I might liveblog some of the talks, actually.

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14
Apr 10
Wed

500+ unread in Google Reader…

…argh. Time to declare RSS bankruptcy and just clear it all? Maybe this wouldn’t happen if I had an iPad… HMM…

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13
Feb 10
Sat

Timber?

Got an email from my dad the other day saying that the tree outside his workplace had fallen down. Then I looked at the photo he attached. That gum tree was a pretty big sucker. If it had fallen the other way… well, let’s just say that dad would have been able to go on holiday for a few weeks. He even got quoted in the local papers about it (page 6)!

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9
Jan 10
Sat

How to live longer, healthily

Dan Buettner gives a really fascinating TED talk on longevity.

The initial premise is that the human body is biologically engineered to live about 90 years, but average life expectancy in America is about 78 years (give or take). The missing 12 years is primarily due to lifestyle and environmental factors, rather than genetics. So, the goal of longevity is not to extend the 90 years, which is currently unattainable for those of us currently living, but to try and access these missing years.

Buettner then describes a research project which identified several “blue zones” throughout the world, in which the people there lived for materially longer lives than the rest of the world. The amazing thing is that these blue zones contain a large amount of people who live beyond 78 years, but the 80-, 90- and 100 year old people there live healthy, active lives. The blue zoners had a tendency to remain healthy and free of chronic disease in their old age and, appealingly, to die peacefully in their sleep.

The most significant factor is having family and friends close by, and belonging to the right community (of like-minded people). Buettner drops in an anecdote of an Okinawan group (moai) of five elderly women who have been together for 97 years and have an average age of 102. He also mentions an amazing array of people over than 90 who are still doing things like heart surgery, or karate.

Other factors include an ongoing purpose – a reason why you look forward to waking up the next morning – and in part this links in with community. So when you retire, you still need something to do – something to look forward to.

Interestingly, diet and exercise play a lesser role, and the role they play is different to what you might expect. People in blue zones actually don’t regularly exercise, although they do have lifestyles which keep them “naturally active” – which means something as simple as walking around throughout the day. They have a diet which is weighted towards vegetables and they don’t overeat.

So there’s no silver bullet, no single fix or magic diet – it’s a total lifestyle approach. But the thing is… it sounds like a pretty darn appealing lifestyle. No starving yourself, no brutal workout regime.

This video reminds of one time when I was in Hong Kong. I was staying over at a friend’s house, which is a 3-storey building, with a steep wooden staircase connecting each floor. My friend’s grandfather stays there, where he lives on the top floor. Every day, he treks up and down those stairs without a walking stick, and every few days he will go out to yum cha with his friends. He is about 90 years old.

The video is 20 minutes but is well worth it.

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8
Jan 10
Fri

My thoughts exactly

Was browsing through the Stanford Classifieds and noticed that someone was selling off a 2001 Porsche Boxster. Not something you see everyday on a student trading post. With about 100,000 k’s on the odometer, it was going for under $10k. Cars are so cheap in the US! But the thing that cracked me up was this part of the ad:

Not so good things about the car:
* Got keyed on the surface–some guy carved “Rich Stanford” on its back :( (decent paint job can be done with ~$1000, if you do care a lot)

Click through to see the pictures.

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5
Jan 10
Tue

Year In Review (Part 5)

This is the fifth and final post in a series. The previous post is here.

7. The LLM Experience

At the end of my time at Stanford, I decided to put together a photo book. The project quickly ballooned, and the book become much larger than I initially intended. With the inclusion of infographics, charts, collages, stories, and lots of other stuff, the book turned into a yearbook of sorts. (I say “of sorts” because it was put together from my point of view alone.) I made it available in hard-copy format through Blurb. You can also download a low-res digital copy of it here (sans cover).

8. A New Decade

2010 marks the start of a new decade. I entered the last decade as an 18 year old and left it as a 28 year old. It is sobering to think that — at least in terms of age — these were the so-called prime years of life. It’s been quite a ride. I’m not going to sum the decade up, so I’ll just leave you with a few miscellaneous statistics and images that represent some aspects of my noughties. You can click most of them to view them full size.

Flight map

A map of the flight routes I’ve taken.


Where I was during New Year’s Eve over the last decade:

My photo album histogram

This is a portion of the frequency histogram showing the number of photos in my photo album by month. (I use Photoshop Elements to organize my photos.) As you can see, I didn’t get out very much during 2007. Such was the life of a banking and finance lawyer.

Hear Ye! Statistics

I last generated these graphs in 2006.

I like this graph. The stream of posts that form a vertical line in the graph was a 24-hour posting streak for Blogathon.

I'm hoping that 2010 will be more active than any of the last 5 years.

You need to click on this to see what it's about.

And that’s all folks!

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2
Jan 10
Sat

Year In Review (Part 4)

This is the fourth post in a series. The previous post is here.

6. A tale of three and a half startups & the major lessons I learned

In a nutshell, “venture capital” refers to money and other resources (capital) which are given to new businesses (ventures) in order to help them grow. Venture capitalists, or “VCs”, refers to the people who decide which ventures this capital should be allocated to. Similar to a private equity fund or a mutual fund focused on equities, VCs raise money from investors who want to invest in a particular type of investment. In this case, the start-up industry (young, small companies). VCs put this money into a VC fund which is then invested in a portfolio of start-up companies. In exchange, the VCs take ownership of a part of the start-up and therefore partake in any of its growth.

Silicon Valley is home to the largest VC industry in the world. And since start-ups go hand-in-hand with VC, the Valley is a hotbed of entrepreneurialism. This is not merely a catchphrase, but something which pervades the area. It’s not just that the Valley is inhabited by a mix of intelligent and ambitious people, or that it provides access to a lot of money, or that it contains a world-class university pumping out motivated grads and producing useful research. It’s also that the culture of entrepreneurialism – including its ups but also its downs – is embedded in the very culture of the place.

This is a rare environment. A smaller version exists in Israel, and I suspect China has a rapidly growing VC-funded industry. No place like this exists in Australia. I had the opportunity to get some exposure to the world of start-ups and there are two things I observed that nicely demonstrate this “culture of entrepreneurialism” to which I refer.

Let’s say someone asks you what you do for a living. You tell them that you work for a “start-up”. They do a bit more digging and it turns out that you are working out of your apartment with two other guys, not getting paid anything, and are currently going around asking people for money so you can launch your product, which is a website that allows people to do stuff. In most places in the world, the reaction you’d get would vary from dubiousness to disdain. In contrast, the reaction here is quite different – usually one of genuine interest in what you’re doing. The powerful result of this near-universal social validation is that joining a start-up is a perfectly valid career path here. It encourages people to take risks that they would not have otherwise been taken if these social support structures not been there. The heightened risk appetite that exists in human capital therefore enables start-ups to source talent for less cash (in exchange for equity or the future promise of equity in the form stock options).

The second aspect is that failing holds little to no stigma in the Valley. The vast majority of start-ups fail. And the entrepreneurs who have succeeded often have been previously involved in failed ventures. Instead, the focus here is not on the fact that someone failed, but on the reasons why they failed, and what they learned from the experience. It’s a very supportive atmosphere, and that’s what you need to foster entrepreneurialism.

» Continue reading whole article »

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1
Jan 10
Fri

Year in Review (Part 3)

This is the third post in a series. The previous post is here.

4. Getting a job (or at least trying to)

It was 4.00am on a Friday morning in October, and I was bearing witness to carnage.

Having just flown in from San Francisco a few hours ago, I was sitting in my hotel room bed, wide awake and trying in vain to shake off the jetlag before an interview that was only about five hours away. Only a month after arriving into the US, in early September 2008, I had been invited to interview with a major US law firm. They had offered to fly me, along with about a hundred other LLM students from universities around the country, up to New York for the weekend and had booked us all into the downtown Hilton. I had never been the beneficiary of such corporate largesse, and it seemed that things were still going well in corporate America.

» Continue reading whole article »

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Year in Review (Part 2)

This is the second post in a series. The first post is here.

2. Getting to know some very interesting people

The most valuable thing I got from Stanford was the contact with so many interesting people.

Starting with my coursemates, I had never been exposed to people who were nationals of so many different countries in the same place before. The admissions committee did a great job of getting together such a diverse group of people. And what was remarkable was that everyone was nice. No one really had an ego, and I’m really sensitive to people with overblown egos.

» Continue reading whole article »

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31
Dec 09
Thu

Year in Review (Part 1)

As the end of the year, and indeed a decade, draws to a close, here’s a customary introspective post.

It’s been a very full year, so I picked out a few themes to write about and broke up the post under those themes. I haven’t written up everything yet, so I’ll be breaking the post up into multiple parts. Some will be posted in the new year.

1. Getting another piece of paper

2009 started with my second and final semester at Stanford.  By the time  my classmates and I had come back from Winter break, we had well and truly settled in and were now focused on making the most out of our remaining time. Spanning only 9 months, the time needed to complete an LL.M. is – unfortunately, in my opinion – the shortest time in which you can get a degree. So, after it all, what did I get out of it, other than another piece of paper and a large hole in my wallet? Did it meet my expectations? What did I learn?

» Continue reading whole article »

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24
Dec 09
Thu

Merry Christmas!

May you have a day filled with joy and many of the same to follow!

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21
Dec 09
Mon

New Digs

This weekend I just finished moving into a new apartment in Menlo Park. Found a real gem – about 1200 sq ft (110 sq m) and cheaper than what I was paying back in Sydney or on campus. Leafy, quiet neighborhood, free laundry, a Safeway and Trader Joe’s within walking distance, central heating, and a bunch of other stuff. But the real luxury is that it’s within walking distance of work.

And it’s incomparable to the “transit” accommodation I had for the last 2 months. I had to find a place in a rush and I paid the price. Let me say that living in a 2-bedroom apartment with 3 other guys (2 of them literally living in the living room with questionable hygienic standards) is not fun. Here’s a tip: if there are food chunks all over the dish drying rack, you haven’t washed your shit up properly.

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New Photos on Facebook

This is a bit of a self-reminder to find out if anyone has written a plugin which takes Facebook wall posts and pushes them into WordPress. But for now, click through to see:

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19
Dec 09
Sat

Videos from Shen & Xiao Min’s wedding

From last October in Sydney. Nicely edited together by Reuben.


Wedding Ceremony

 


Reception (I think there were at least 3 other speeches that don’t feature in the video, not to mention Reuben’s guitar performances… you might also notice that two members of the bridal party are pulling double duty as MCs)
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8
Dec 09
Tue

Brrr

How’d it get so damn cold here? Yes that’s a layer of frost on my windscreen!

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13
Oct 09
Tue

4 Peeves about Sydney

I love Sydney and all, but there are four things that have annoyed me about it over the last couple of weeks:

1. Lack of Wifi. Maybe I don’t know where to look, but it’s so difficult to find free Wifi around the CBD. They have it in the state library (where I am at the moment, actually), but the HSC must be currently in full swing because the place is filled with what looks like Year 12 students reading crib books.

2. Cityrail. They redid the train timetables this week. Night services from the city to Campbelltown used to take about 55 minutes on the East Hills line. They replaced all the East Hills schedules with all-stops trains, and now the same journey takes at least 1 hour 20. That’s almost 50% longer! WTF.

3. Poor mobile reception. The train tunnels under the CBD have zero mobile phone reception. Every other major developed city in the world has mobile reception in the subway. Why not Sydney? (And it’s not like we have a huge number of underground tunnels!) Same thing with the East Hills line – including the bit that passes by the airport.

4. Weather. What the hell happened to the weather this month? A lot of people have been returning from London and New York this month for weddings so the common line is that they brought their weather with them. Obviously I haven’t been properly representing California because it’s been windy, cloudy and rainy for 2 straight weeks.

29
Apr 09
Wed

E-mail stats

Been playing around with Xobni, an indexing and analytics plug-in for Outlook. Once it’s created an index, It’s pretty snappy with searches, much more than Outlook’s own search function (I never understood why Outlook’s search was so poor). What’s more interesting is the analytics which produces all sorts of stats, such as who sends emails to you the most, the average time people take to reply to your emails, and the times of day you receive the most email. Here are some graphs generated from the last 11 months of my inbox history (June 08 to April 09).

Click for full sized image
Distribution of email received by hour of day: Clearly, people like emailing before and after lunch

Click for full sized image
Distribution of email sent by hour of day: I do a lot of emailing between midnight-1am, as well as a bunch in the morning after I’ve woken up (10am-noon). Clear dips in emailing during lunch (noon-2pm) and dinner (7-9pm)

Click for full sized image
Email volumes over the last 11 months: I came to Stanford in August last year and the email traffic jumped.

Click for full sized image
Uniques: This graph surprised me – this shows the number of unique people mail was sent/received to/from throughout the course of each month. The received graph is somewhat inflated by email received from mailing lists and other non-human email addresses.

Click for full sized image
Average time for me to respond to emails: No surprises here – I took longer to respond to emails during the Christmas holiday.

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21
Feb 09
Sat

‘Tis the season for rejection

Time to check in to my blog again. Lots of doom and gloom this week. I attended a panel discussion hosted by the Churchill Club, an organization that brings together members of the Valley’s venture capital community, and the general consensus was the economy was really bad and only going to get worse. The number of startups funded has fallen, the number of startups folding has risen, VC firms are finding it tough to raise funds, and so on. Times are really, really tough and the job market is brutal. This has been clearly reflected in my ongoing job search – it’s pretty much impossible to get firms to even look at my resume, even if applications are sent through personal contacts and not via HR. The reason is depressingly simple – virtually every law firm has just completed one or more rounds of lay-offs, and in that climate, they’re not going to turn around and hire more people – especially with an uncertain deal pipeline. The question is, will things recover over the next few months, or will the hiring freeze continue (or worse, will there be more lay-offs)? The university is suffering as well – the endowment is expected to take a huge hit and continue to shrink over the next year. One result is that a few Masters students here who wanted to do PhDs have been unable to obtain PhD funding. I was out with a friend tonight who is working towards a PhD and we walked past a large sign saying “We are hiring! Inquire within!” Jose turned to me and remarked, “Wow, that’s rare to see during an ad like that in these economic conditions! I wonder if they hire PhDs?” The sign was on the wall of a fast food joint.

So for a variety of reasons, professional but unfortunately also personal, it’s been a Real Bad Week for me.

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2
Feb 09
Mon

Ok Twitterers and Facebookians, so it’s snowing in England. We get it already. But it’s winter here too, and I’m walking around in a t-shirt. Hah.

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1
Jan 09
Thu

Happy New Year!

We went out looking for a drink last night after watching the fireworks over the bay, only to be stymied when we discovered that California has laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol in bars after 2.00am. (In Palo Alto, everything shuts at 1 or 2am, but I always thought that was only because it was Palo Alto, not because the alcohol has to stop flowing…) This country still surprises me sometimes.

I also learnt that in Japan, New Year’s traditions include making mochi – gooey rice cakes. Unfortunately, this tradition also has the side effect of causing several elderly Japanese people to choke to death each year while eating mochi. We get annual holiday road death tolls, in Japan they get annual holiday mochi death tolls. So each year, the Japanese distribute tips on how to avoid death by mochi, including the popular solution of shoving a vacuum cleaner down someone’s throat if they start gagging. My Japanese coursemates insisted this was not a joke. I was still dubious but Google appeared to confirm this improbable tale. Apparently the Heimlich manoevure doesn’t work too well.

In Berlin, New Year’s was described to me as a “war zone”, with people taking to the streets with roman candles, bangers, rockets and all manner of fireworks and miscellaneous incendiaries. And they fire them at each other.

Someone should do a “top 10 most dangerous places to celebrate New Year’s” feature…

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30
Dec 08
Tue

A (belated) Merry Christmas and (premature) Happy New Year

My parents came to visit over the Christmas break. I showed them around the campus, then we spent a few days in San Fran, with a nice daytrip down the coast to Monterey and Carmel. The only thing we did in Monterey was visit the aquarium, which was of particular interest to me since it was one of the filming locations for my favourite Trek movie. As the aquarium doesn’t actually have any whales, nor a whale tank, the digital effects guys had to digitally construct them, along with a backdrop of the San Francisco skyline. The movie was filmed in the 80s and although the aquarium has been updated quite a bit since then, all of the filming spots were pretty much unchanged. Apparently, people have gone to the aquarium after watching Star Trek IV only to be disappointed to find the closest thing to a whale there is the life-sized plastic model they have suspended from the roof.

Click for full sized image

South of Monterey is the famed Pebble Beach golf course which borders the Pacific Ocean. At $495 for a round, it’s a rich person’s course. Staying there costs a few thousand bucks a night. One of my dad’s friends had the opportunity to play there, but he unfortunately didn’t have time to enjoy the views. Apparently they place marshalls at each hole to keep players moving quickly – they try and push as many groups through as possible since they clear about $2k for each foursome. There are a whole bunch of golf courses in the area, including Cypress Point. Cypress Point is a very difficult course, but it has some admired holes, including the notorious 16th. It’s a par 3, but to make the front of the green, you have to be able to carry your ball over 200 yards. In between the green and tee area, it’s all ocean. I’d need at least a spoon (3 wood) to make that distance. There’s a “bail out” zone to the left, but you still have to carry 150 yards.

Click for full sized image

On the 22nd, we flew into Dallas to spend Christmas with my uncle’s family. It was a chilly zero degrees C when we arrived. One of my cousins is studying in Boston and he had planned to fly in on the same day, but the weather up there was way below zero and his flight was cancelled. He arrived a couple days later.

Click for full sized image

I had only been to Dallas once, and that was exactly 15 years ago. My uncle pulled out some old camcorder footage which showed me playing with my cousins in the backyard – we were firing super soakers and chucking water balloons at each other in the dead of winter! This time around, I visited the Sixth Floor Museum, which is housed in the building from which JFK was shot. Quite an interesting place, especially in light of the references to JFK’s civil rights work and display text which was written in a pre-Barack Obama world. Of course, the pall of assassination hanging over the place is sobering, and obviously a concern today. On Christmas Day, we attended a midnight mass which was novelly conducted in English and repeated in Spanish (which really drew out the service…) and went to a Christmas party at a neighbour’s house (to which my uncle’s family had been attending for the last 15 or so years). On Boxing Day, the weather warmed up considerably, hitting an incredible 26 degrees. We took the opportunity to hit the factory outlets. We also did a lot of eating. All in all, it was a good trip.

I’m back in California for New Year’s… I’ve realised that out of the last nine January 1sts, I’ve only been in Australia for one of them. Running back through the past nine New Year’s Days, I’ve been in Hong Kong, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Singapore, Lucerne and Hong Kong. Kind of a pity, since Sydney fireworks are such a great spectacle. But I do enjoy Hong Kong where I’m of average height so I can actually see things going on instead of smelling armpits the whole night.

Some photos:
Miscellaneous Bay Area pics
Winter Holiday pics

Facebook is a pretty convenient place to post photos these days. One gripe I have though is that I wish they allowed higher resolution photos (perhaps they eventually will, just as YouTube now caters for HD vids). You can’t make prints from photos 604 pixels wide.

Click for full sized image

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16
Dec 08
Tue

“Blissfully cholera free”

The law school still has exams running to the end of this week, but finals for the rest of the uni finished up last Friday and the campus has pretty muched cleared out since then with people going home or elsewhere on holiday. Friends have started putting up status messages on Facebook telling everyone where they are or where they’re going to be, but the one below was just surreal (he’s Indian-Zimbabwean and his family is in Zimbabwe). And in the meantime, more sinister stuff is going down in that country…

Click for full sized image

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22
Nov 08
Sat

An update on campus life

It’s been a while since I wrote something substantive on here. Almost four months in, and this place continues to amaze me. I’m dreading the day it all finishes.

After an afternoon of study today, I played squash with a group of LLMs and got my ass majorly kicked. I grabbed dinner afterwards with a friend, an eighth year lawyer from Brazil, during which we jointly commiserated over the painful depreciation of our respective currencies (the Brazilian Real has gone down more than the Aussie Dollar!). I then headed over to a neighborhood “dessert night”. I stay in Escondido Village, which is a large on-campus residential area for graduate students, and each section of the village regularly runs community events. I only intended to drop by for a half hour to gorge myself on some ice cream before returning to hit the books but unfortunately I was late and the ice cream had run out by the time I arrived. I got involved in a conversation instead. It was one of those conversations that was so engrossing that everyone ended up standing around talking for three hours despite the presence of perfectly good couches only a couple of metres away. We were six people who grew up on six different continents, and the spark which initiated everything was when one of us admitted to being a conservative and was lamenting about four years of Democrat rule. A Republican, much less a Republican who is willing to admit it, in this part of the country, is a rare thing. But diversity of views is always good – when everyone shares the same views, there is too much self-congratulatory back-patting and agreement which, while potentially therapeutic, isn’t so interesting. Reasonable disagreement is that much more stimulating and productive. The conversation lurched from topic to topic – universal healthcare, economic bailouts, Detroit, fiscal management, feminism, the Presidential campaigns, the role of languages in a multicultural society, voting in California, differing notions of democracy around the world, oil and alternative energy, the drinking age, and so on. We all had different academic backgrounds and upbringings, so even among the liberals, there were widely differing worldviews (I, for one, am economically more to the right than I am on other issues). But what made it work was that people were not rabid supporters of their personal views (ie, in the same way that support is shown by the nuts in the Republican party base whose reflexive instinct on hearing the word “Obama” is to boo). There was always intelligent give and take, and while you can’t expect a conversation like that to make people switch sides, you do expect it to bring people closer to the centre. These comments may be trite, and my wonderment quaint, but I can’t say I’ve ever been in an environment like this before. I would certainly be hard pressed to find one in Australia.

And here’s what I did on a day earlier this week.

Woke up about twenty minutes before a 10am contract drafting class and dashed off to make it. We spent the hour dissecting a Stock Purchase Agreement. I then biked over to the b-school to meet a couple MBAs to discuss a very interesting business idea they had. There’s a b-school course which teaches about starting up a start-up and they were looking for a law student to join their team. Then I rode back to the law school for lunch with Larry Lessig. Various faculty Professors make themselves available throughout the semester to a small group of students for a talk with them over lunch on a first-rsvp first-served basis. Since Professor Lessig is not teaching any cyberlaw courses this year, I jumped on the opportunity. He took questions from all of us and answered them one by one. As expected, he was extremely eloquent in expressing his thoughts which recently have been turning to examining corruption in democracies (not so much overt corruption, but conflicts of interest and competing influences on decision makers).

After a thought-provoking lunch, I moved to the library to work on a case study presentation for an International Deal Making class (involving an LBO of several Taiwanese companies by, coincidentally, an Australian conglomerate). Spoke with a friend about the status of the job market and our expectations of US work culture. I typically think of New York as being the most intense place to work in the world. However, she used to work in the Cairo office of a US law firm – as a lawyer in an understaffed office, in an emerging market economy, and in a culture where clients don’t understand the concept of personal time, the hours she pulled were very scary.

Then I rode to the b-school again to meet with an MBA who was interested in an idea I have about an IT application for streamlining administrative tasks that lawyers always complain about in law firms. I was planning on attending a talk about microfinance initiatives in Africa afterwards, but our discussion ran overtime. I instead attended a presentation by Professor Frans De Waal, a famous biologist known for his work on primates, who spoke about whether animals have the capacity for empathy. It was a fascinating presentation. (The evidence is pretty strong that apes do have empathy which extends to an inter-species level.)

I went home to cook dinner, do some study, and then went over to a wine and cheese night that the French Student Association was hosting (a friend is the President of the association, which is where the connection lies). I don’t normally attend wine functions for reasons that are obvious to those that know me, but I needed to get out and do something social. The French seem to have a mansion called La Maison Française all to themselves in which they can host events. I’m not sure, but it was probably bought by some French alumnus or alumna who wanted to donate something back to the university. I was told that ze Germans have their own house as well.

I think I was the only one drinking coke there, but it fooled more than a few people into thinking it was a glass of red wine. I walked up to a person with a jacket that had “Australia” written on it, only to find out he was actually Swedish. We spoke for a while and I found out he was involved in a funded startup which provides a service that converts bitmap images to vector images. A group of us then adjourned to a bar in Palo Alto where we ended the night bitching about how much work we had to do. (The line of the night was that one of us had applied to Stanford for the sole reason that it was on the West Coast. He thought it would be chilled, laid back, and a good place to have a holiday from work, only to find, much to his chagrin, that he was working harder here than he was at the Magic Circle firm he used to work at.) I arrived home at about 2.00am, put in a couple more hours of work and then went to sleep. We have exams in two weeks.

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5
Nov 08
Wed

My election night experience

This has been excerpted from my Backbench article.

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA — November 4, 2008. The student lounge began filling up at 3.00pm, as the first polls around the country began to close on the East Coast. The flyers advertising the event said that no alcohol would be provided, but nonetheless, cases of beer and bottles of wine had been procured — though hopefully they would be used to toast to victory rather than drown our sorrows.

The mood was light and positive. Whenever CNN, or MSNBC called a state for Obama, people would cheer. When states were called for McCain there was silence, but, most notably, never were they any jeers or booing.

East Coast counting was well underway when I had to go to class just after 4.00pm, with some toss-up states shaping up to be a close battle. There was a large amount of distraction during a normally engrossing class on international deal making.

In class, I kept refreshing the New York Times’ “Big Board” summary page and various liveblogs and saw Obama’s EV count edge slowly up past 100, 150, and then 200. It hovered there for a while, with states such as Indiana, Missouri, Florida and North Carolina still hanging in the balance. Iowa fell to Obama. By 6.45pm, I was crawling up the walls as class ran overtime.

I got back in time for the 7.00pm round of polls to close to find that the student lounge was standing-room only. It was relatively uneventful for that hour, but we were kept entertained, not least of all by reporters appearing “via hologram” on CNN. There was the occasional cheer as various other less-crucial states were called, but the real lead up came just before 8.00pm, when the West Coast polls were due to close. Obama was still about 60 EVs short of hitting 270 and anticipation was growing in the atmosphere.

As CNN counted down the seconds to 8.00pm, the crowd joined in.

Five. Four. Three. Two

The projector screen went blank. A second of confusion, then the first boos of the night. The television feed had been lost.

Continue reading this article on the Backbench.

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4
Nov 08
Tue

Change has come

Barack Obama is President-Elect of the United States of America. Pause a while and consider that. Absolutely amazing. What a country.

The mood around campus is incredible — euphoric is how I’d describe it.


Euphoria, as CNN calls the election for Obama. At 8.00pm PST tonight, the west coast polls closed. The television networks immediately called California, Oregon and Washington for Obama, catapulting him from the low 200s, straight past the magic 270 vote mark.

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2
Nov 08
Sun

Prediction for the US Elections

My call: 364-174, Obama-McCain. Optimistic? Maybe, but I called the Rudd-Howard election optimistically as well, and look how that turned out. Also at issue is whether the Dems will get the 60 seats to avoid filibusters.

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26
Oct 08
Sun

Nocturnal writings

After trying to figure out how to start writing a paper all day, it is more than a little annoying when the inspiration suddenly strikes in the wee hours and you get on a bit of a roll. And I’m meant to be playing tennis at 9am today…

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25
Sep 08
Thu

Calendar sample

I only have 14 contact hours per week, but my calendar for this week looks like this:

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This is caused, in part, by the amount of events they hold here, which is insane. There’s often several events during lunch or in the evening that are worth attending – though unfortunately they tend to conflict – and it doesn’t hurt that most of the events provide a free meal (seriously, you could go through a whole semester and not have to buy lunch). The events are mostly student organised, and the things is, the entire law school only has about 550 students. Then there are university functions, housing community functions, graduate functions, etc… So it’s busy, but it’s definitely a good type of busy.

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24
Aug 08
Sun

A couple panoramas

Got sick of studying this afternoon so I dropped by the driving range today, hit a few balls then went for a bike ride around The Dish (view route map) and snapped a couple of panoramas. It’s really nice having a recreational track just down the road… but apparently you have to watch out for the mountain lions.

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Manual geotag

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Manual geotag

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Sage advice

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A week in the life…

Brief-ish rundown of what happened during the first week. Took a while to write, so I’m not expecting to write anymore posts like this!

Monday, Aug. 11
First day of class. All the LLMs and most of the SPILS students have enrolled in this class which seems designed to be a super-quick overview of the American legal system. The lecture theatre is the size of a large classroom – three rows of desks with the back rows elevated above the front rows. Seats about 40. The class is pretty diverse. This year’s Master’s intake has the following stats: 26 LLMs (12 in Science and Tech stream, 14 in the Corporate stream) and 13 SPILS.

There are 21 countries represented: China (6), Japan (5), Brazil (3), Germany (3), Israel (3), Colombia (2), Argentina (2), Singapore (2) and one each from Italy, France, Belgium, Thailand (although he’s a UK-educated lawyer), Finland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Spain, Taiwan, Egypt, Kenya and Uzbekistan. So, all but 6 of the class are civil law lawyers. The average age is probably about 29, with most people having a moderate amount of seniority in the firm from which they came (it probably averages about the 5 year PQE stage). One of my fellow LLMs was actually a partner at a large Chinese law firm. Unlike in the US and most Australian universities, a law degree in many countries is an undergraduate level degree, so those people can be practicing by the time they are 21 years old. However, there are also about a half-dozen PhDs as well.

The first class was mainly about U.S. law school pedagogy – and our lecturer played the infamous first scene from the Paper Chase to introduce us to the Socratic method. Comfortingly, the environment was fairly familiar to me. I went to UNSW Law School and the great thing about it is that they try to employ the Socratic method – all courses are taught in smallish classes of about 25-35 as opposed to lecture halls of hundreds of students. I think it’s a great way to learn and the input that came from everyone else really made the interaction and learning more interesting.

How many law students does it take to watch a DVD? At least a dozen.

We managed to borrow the Paper Chase DVD from the lecturer and a group of us gathered in the common lounge of one of the studio apartment complexes. Unfortunately, when we arrived there at 9pm, we discovered that someone had absconded with the DVD player. After way too much discussion (an hour of it actually), we finally resorted to watching it on a laptop. All eleven of us.

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That’s a lot of people huddled around a small laptop screen

Side note: it just occurred to me that the answer that Hart gives to Kingsfield’s question of, “What should the doctor pay the boy?” is wrong. Hart replies, “He should pay for the difference between what the boy had, a burned hand, and what the doctor gave him, a… burned and hairy hand?” The damages, being expectation damages, should be the difference between a perfect hand and a burned and hairy hand. But of course, we don’t know whether the movie was written to show Hart giving a correct or incorrect answer.

Tuesday, Aug. 12
Class today introduced us to the common law system of finding the law in cases. All familiar stuff to me, but there was lots of input from the civil law lawyers which was informative. They have cases too, but their law seems to reside first and foremost in civil codes, which are exhaustively written. Cases which interpret the codes are persuasive, but there isn’t the same sort of precedent system that common law systems have. Of course, statutes exist in the common law system as well, but the difference is that the statutes aren’t exhaustive. There’s a lot of law that’s just out there floating in the case books. Nonetheless, despite these differences, the general analytical approach to a legal problem is the same in principle regardless of whether the system is common or civil.

In the afternoon, we got a free lunch and had a presentation from the careers office detailing the options open to us foreign students in terms of finding a job after graduation. They offered each of us a personal resume review session, an opportunity which most people took up. US resumes are pretty compact one-page affairs, since firms normally spend about 30 seconds skimming one before moving on.

That night we had dinner at the Graduate Community Center (otherwise referred to as the GCC), which is the only bar on campus. I took the opportunity to watch the Olympics there, although NBC’s coverage is awful. If Americans weren’t involved, they didn’t screen it. The coverage was incredibly ethnocentric.

Wednesday, Aug. 13
Class today was about statutory interpretation. There was also discussion about how many judges in the US are elected rather than appointed. Virtually everyone in our class found this to be an anathema. We had Westlaw training in the afternoon.

Thursday, Aug. 14
We had two guest lecturers today. A Wilson Sonsini partner came to lecture us on civil procedure. Of course, there is no divided legal profession in the US – attorneys are attorneys, and any of them can technically appear in court. A law school professor lectured us on criminal procedure. LexisNexis came in and gave us a training session in the afternoon.

My $80 bike from Walmart broke. I guess you get what you pay for. Luckily, Walmart has a very liberal return policy, so I was able to return the bike and get a cash refund, no questions asked.

That night, the law school held a movie night and screened A Civil Action. Free pizza and beer.

Friday, Aug. 15
Probably the first day covering substantive law, we had a class on constitutional law. Very interesting stuff to compare and contrast with the legal systems around the world. I knew that England didn’t have a hard constitution, but I didn’t know (or maybe I forgot) that New Zealand didn’t have one too. Of course, it was quite embarrassing to admit that Australia didn’t have a Bill of Rights. The other students from the West were aghast.

“Free speech is not constitutionally protected?”
“No, it’s a negative right – it exists to the extent that the legislature does not take away from it.”
“But that’s like saying you have a negative right to a fair trial… until you don’t.”
“Uh… but we do have a right to political communication. Which is implied.”

Still, not as bad as New Zealand, which its Parliament could technically transform into a dictatorship overnight, if they had the numbers. :)

Incidentally, the American right to free speech in the First Amendment is incredibly, incredibly broad, to the extent that America probably has the laxest hate speech laws in the world.

It was also interesting comparing the US federal system to Australia’s. There’s a lot more interest in state independence in the US. States have wide ranging plenary power (as they do in Australia) but for matters of state law, a state’s Supreme Court is the final arbiter. The federal courts and US Supreme Court can generally only hear matters if they involve federal laws or a constitutional issue, or are “diversity of jurisdiction” case (a dispute involving laws of multiple states).

Also, most of the things in by the Constitution apply (expressly) only at the federal level (eg, the Bill of Rights). There’s a Fourteenth Amendment which contains a “Due Process Clause” requiring states not to deny due process. Various rights under the Constitution are then classified as necessary for due process by case law and thereby bind state governments.

In the afternoon, Bloomberg held a training session in the law library. The law library is pretty cool, as far as libraries go. At work, there was a big commotion when they decided to upgrade all of the firm’s chairs to Herman Mueller mesh chairs, which were touted to cost over $1000 each (but I’m sure there was a volume discount involved). In the law library, all of the chairs are those Herman Mueller ones. They also give free printing to all students (subject to a “fair use” policy of 10,000 pages per month).

The library also has bikes available for loan! I borrowed one while my Walmart one was out of commission.

Anyway, Bloomberg came in and gave us a training session. It seems like they are trying to get into the legal space, but their strength is still financial and corporate information. Apparently access to Bloomberg costs companies $20k per year per employee, but Bloomberg was using a “crack dealer” strategy (Bloomberg’s words, not mine) to get law students hooked. We all got a free year’s subscription to it and a nifty biometric card to go with it – to log on to Bloomberg you have to scan your finger on this card and hold it up to the computer monitor. The card reads a flashing light off the screen and then spits out a token which you use to log on. Very cool stuff, but Bloomberg’s UI has all the elegance of a beached whale. It’s probably most useful for M&A lawyers – all the merger agreements and loan documentation from public transactions are available for download.

That afternoon, the South Americans arranged a soccer game. All three Brazilians and all two Argentineans turned up. Everyone else was intimidated. But it was quite good fun despite my lack of fitness. The sporting facilities at Stanford are amazing.

Went out to watch the Woody Allen movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona in the evening. Our resident Spaniard, Maria, took a fair bit of bagging out after that. Movie was pretty good. Then we had drinks at a bar in downtown Palo Alto. The confused bouncer was confronted with a menagerie of foreign language driver’s licenses, but he let us through anyway. It was only $2 for a Coke there.

Saturday, Aug. 16
We hired a car from the car rental shop on campus. Did a lot of shopping today, including for a used car in Santa Clara. One of the used car salesmen there put the hard sell on us. We passed by a car that was yet to pass mandatory safety and smog inspections. We were informed that the car would not be able to be test driven by us until these inspections had occurred. When we expressed interest in the car, they started throwing around numbers.

“Sure, but we will need to test drive it first.”
“Look, legally we can’t permit that, but we assure you that it will pass the safety inspection.”
“Fine, then we’ll come back and test drive it then.”
“But it might be gone by then!”
“But you said it had to pass inspections first.”
“Yes but we might wholesale it in the meantime.”
“Well, if that happens it happens, we’re willing to take that risk.”
“Look we’re giving you a great price. Listen… why don’t you take it out for a test drive now?”
“…”

Notes: The nearest Walmart is in San Antonio. Cheap fruit and veg to be found at the Milk Pail nearby. Safeway is good for groceries (except fruit and veg), is open 24 hours, and will also deliver to your door (the first delivery is free, otherwise it costs about $10). Make sure you sign up for a free Safeway card at the checkout lane to get the discounts. Trader Joe’s has organic groceries.

Sunday, Aug. 17
Went to San Francisco and visited the Berkeley campus. The food options around Berkeley are heaps better than Stanford. But the weather is not so good. Boalt Hall (Berkeley’s law school) was under construction at the time, so it probably didn’t look as good as it should.

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The hilly approach to Lombard St, San Francisco

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UC Berkeley’s School of Law

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Panorama of the Bay

Monday, Aug. 18
During class there was a peninsula-wide power outage that lasted for several hours, so we got an early mark. We ate lunch at Manzanita, one of the all-you-can-eat dining halls around campus. If you use Cardinal dollars to pay (which is basically prepaid credit stored on your student card), you can get lunch for about $6.75, which is great value and there’s heaps of variety (although the ice cream was soft because the power was out!). Met our first 1L JD who was in the process of completing a PhD in Political Science at Oxford. Everyone here is interesting!

Bought a used bike at the campus bike store and also met with my program advisor to discuss my selection of courses over the next year.

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My new used bike

Gave Yvonne a short tour of the Stanford campus and then had dinner on Castro with her and two other Aussie Googlers, Juvita and Roger.

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Stanford

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The postcard shot – giving Von a campus tour

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University or country club?

More photos in Facebook, but I’ll leave you with this one:

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Google’s toilets – clearly imported from Japan

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23
Aug 08
Sat

Ok…

Americans seem to think I’m British. The last one that thought that told me, “it’s because you enunciate your words. … Australians don’t. And Australians say ‘mate’ a lot too.” Right.

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8
Aug 08
Fri

Stanford: The First Week

I had planned to meet with three other grad law students upon arrival at San Francisco Airport – Jesse, Daryl and Vincent (a Kiwi, a Singaporean and a German respectively). I arrived at about 1pm, but Daryl’s flight was delayed and Vincent’s flight had been cancelled. So Jesse, Daryl and I shared a shuttle heading for Stanford with an American family, the parents of which we discovered were both Stanford alumni and were overflowing with praise for the university. Eventually, we made it onto Stanford’s sprawling campus some hours later, entering by the much-postcarded Palm Drive.

Stanford’s campus is without doubt beautiful, but almost completely impractical. I was told that the campus was the second largest in the world. Although I have my doubts about the veracity of that claim, there is no doubt that the campus is huge. It would not be overstating things to say it is at least 6 times larger than UNSW’s Kensington campus. The academic core of the campus is made up of a variety of single storey and low-rise buildings, based on a hodgepodge of early 1900s architecture. Scattered around these are an array of student residential buildings, including my home precinct of Escondido Village which is entirely populated by a variety of graduate students (walking through the area is somewhat reminiscent of walking through a retirement village). There is no apparent logic to the arrangement of buildings and bewildered new visitors are often found wandering around the grounds with a map in hand. I know I still am.

Getting around campus on foot can be punishing. Even staying on campus, it takes 15 minutes to walk to the law school, and I am living relatively close to it. Back in Sydney, I was staying off campus and I could get up to the law school in 12. Consequently, many students use a bike to get around and bike racks are happily ubiquitous. But ultimately, Stanford and the surrounding suburbs (Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc) are made for cars. In fact, the whole of California is made for cars. One of the biggest problems with Stanford is that there are no supermarkets or national bank branches on campus! It’s currently summer holidays and there is no public transport to the local Wal-mart or Safeway. And even if you get there somehow, there’s the problem of carrying things back home – when you’re moving in, there’s a lot of stuff you need to buy.

Fortunately for me, my flatmate has a car and he graciously drove me (and three other law buddies) to Wal-mart for our first shopping run. The car was loaded to the brim and it was with a great deal of humor that we squeezed everything into the trunk, under the seats, and on top of laps. The car was virtually dragging on its mudguards as it chugged out of the carpark. My flatmate is a really nice guy. He’s a Californian doing a PhD in applied physics (researching something along the lines of manufacturing a laser capable of reading/writing discs with the potential to store 400 gigs of data).

Stanford does provide a free shuttle service called the Marguerite which has stops around campus and also in surrounding areas such as Palo Alto. Unfortunately, my experience with it has led me to believe that it is notoriously unreliable. The whole system is partially broken and I could think of many things that could make it better – such as marking shuttle stops clearer, marking shuttle stops with directions/arrows, keeping timetables posted at the stops up to date (especially as the buses operate on a different schedule during summer), overlaying the shuttle route maps on the main campus map and most of all, making sure that routes are contiguous. We were trying to get back from the Bank of America, only to find that the bus terminated mid-route and we had to switch buses. So we switched buses and were on our way again. Only to have that bus terminate. Then we had to wait 10 minutes for the next bus to come along. This did not happen to us only once.

The weather has been decent, although not what I expected. It’s the tail end of summer and daytime highs reach the low 20s. Mornings are cold and I need to wear a jumper in the evening. Still, it’s been sunny and from what I hear, it doesn’t rain.

Yvonne graciously took me out to dinner at the main Google campus and gave me a tour of it a few nights ago. The place is insane (in a mindbendingly good way)! It was everything I’d read about and more. The best way for me to describe it is that it has such a vibrant university atmosphere – so much so you don’t feel like it’s a workplace. Visitors commonly wonder how any work gets done. Arriving there at 6.30pm, I found people playing beach volleyball, people swimming in swimming pool “treadmills” (complete with lifeguards), dogs cavorting on the lawns and a continuing bustle of Googlers in totally casual attire. Controlled chaos is an apt descriptor of the work environment inside. The whole deal might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but to me it is a dream. And I mean, how many people can say, “Let me take you out to dinner at my workplace,” and actually make that sound like a really attractive proposition?

Today was the first orientation day for us new LLM and JSM students. A really diverse crowd of law students – we have people from Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Israel, Egypt, Kenya, Japan, China, Singapore, Thailand and New Zealand (and me from Australia). Lots of people from Japan and China actually (they comprise maybe 25% of the total intake). I was surprised that there wasn’t UK representation, but then I found out that our resident Thai went to high school there and studied at LSE. Everyone seems pretty nice and down-to-earth, which is terrific. Not too many cultural differences at this stage, apart from some differences in types of humour (a joke not understood and not explained can be counterproductive!) and Jesse having to readjust the pronunication of his name (with the Great Kiwi Vowel Shift, he normally says “Juss-ee” which is then interpreted as “J.C.”).

Class starts on Monday and part of the assigned reading is the famous Hawkins v. McGee (the “hairy hand” case), which is basically the American equivalent of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company (the “carbolic smoke ball” case), although the former is about contractual damages and the latter about offer and acceptance. Hawkins appears to be used as the first case that law students are exposed to in the US. However, as our lecturer has insisted on us calling her “Muffie” (her real name is Beth), I doubt my first day will be a Professor Kingsfield-ian experience as depicted in the Paper Chase:

“Mr Hart. Could you recite the facts of Hawkins versus McGee?”

Incidentally, there is a library here, the Green Library, which has 14000 DVDs for overnight hire (including blockbusters, indie flicks, foreign films, etc). I need to rent the Paper Chase since I haven’t actually since the whole movie…

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6
Aug 08
Wed

Holding post

Made it to Stanford… running around trying to get all the administrative stuff done. This campus is huuuge and there isn’t a decent supermarket anywhere near that is easily accessible with public transport (at least during the summer holidays, which it now is). Also, I visited and had dinner at the Googleplex tonight!! More on it all later…

30
Jul 08
Wed

Back in Sydney…

… with a cold unfortunately. Trying to pack for the US but am not in the mood to do much of anything at the moment. In my zoning out, I just realized that I’ve slept in six different places over the last six nights: the resort in Redang, friend’s place in Singapore, Aunt’s place, the plane, my place and my parents’ place. Post on Singapore is yet to be written…

18
Jun 08
Wed

The highlight of my week

“Oh my gosh, you’re all suited up! You’re gonna be out of place here.”

She wasn’t wrong. I had just left the staid, black basalt and grey carpet surroundings of my law firm, hauled ass all the way across the CBD, and now found myself sitting on some plush primary-coloured furniture among a lava lamp and several bright, giant inflatable exercise balls. I was slightly clammy with sweat from the trek despite the winter weather, and the tie didn’t help things. But the mild discomfort was overshadowed by the fact that I was now excitedly sitting in the waiting room of Google’s Sydney office and was finally going to get the chance to check it out.

As luck would have it, a friend scored a job at Google several weeks ago. Google serves its staff freshly cooked meals and they are allowed to bring in friends for a 3-course lunch (apparently up to 4 times a month, accordingly to the rarely-enforced internal policy). I saw this as my opportunity to shamelessly invite myself over and she had graciously accommodated.

You might’ve seen the photos when the office was first opened. Things were certainly as cool as they appear in the photos. The Sydney office is relatively small – only about 200 people – and all of them are supposed to be moving to better premises at Pyrmont in about 9 months. We walked through the cube farm on Level 18, where all the non-techies reside (sales staff, etc). Dell 24″ widescreens appeared to be standard. A number of vacant desks had nameplates reading “Future Googler”. At just after noon, lunch had been prepared so we made our way into the dining room. Apart from the daily buffet lunch that had been set up, the dining room had two well-stocked drinks fridges, a counter laden with snacks, a pool table and a massage chair turned around so it faced towards the window. A small LCD screen showed the day’s menu. They appear to cater for vegans and on Fridays they serve halal food.

We settled at a desk by the window. Various Googlers filtered through the room, all without exception in casual attire (not casual as in “business casual” of “casual Friday”, but true casual). A guy in a t-shirt and shorts walked by in a pair of thongs. Thongs! I need a job where I can wear open-toed footwear. Failing that, there’s always going back to being a university student…

After lunch we headed down to Level 11, where Google keeps most of its engineers. I was told that Google also had some secret stuff going down on Level 16, but we gave that level a miss. The office is very open plan with low cubicle walls, so it was a little surprising that the floor was so quiet (but that may have been because most of the people were in the lunch room because it was pizza day). The Level 11 lunch room also has a table tennis table. There were 30″ Dells everywhere. A few people were working on dual screens as well as laptops (for testing?). The vibe is very relaxed – you could almost feel the innovation in the atmosphere. I don’t think staff morale is a problem at this company.

The hour was up all too soon and I had to return to my office.

My next related mission in life: scam a visit to the Googleplex in Mountain View (and grab lunch there too)!

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21
May 08
Wed

Health checks

We had our annual “health and wellbeing” fair at work today. They turned the main function room into a bustling health fair of sorts and set up different stations where you can do all manner of different things.

The firm is currently running through the graduate recruitment process so there’s a constant stream of uni students waiting in reception to be interviewed. The main function room happens to be right next to the reception area, the mild bewilderment of the interviewees was evident as they watched people go into this room which looked like some sort of corporate funhouse and then emerge with showbags. (Hint to guys interviewing: please do not wear white socks with a suit and black shoes.)

I went to the body composition station and the massage station, but they had things like reflexology, iridology, heart checks, etc. They set the massage chairs along the North wall so you get a beautiful view of the harbour as well. Very relaxing. Somewhat surprisingly, my health appears to be fine… I’ve put on about 5kgs since I started working, but it’s still well within the healthy range. They measured some obscure stats as well. Apparently my basal metabolic age is 12(!), which is a good thing, but I’ve been warned it slows with age, making it easier to pack on the kilos. My hydration level is 63%, which is within the average range of 50-65%. This was very surprising, given my low daily intake of water. I get by on one 600ml bottle of water, then have a couple cups of water in the evening. My daily intake typically isn’t much more than a litre. Apparently my bones also weigh about 3 kilos and I have a visceral fat rating of 2.

At the end of the analysis, the person talking me through my stats wrote down some suggestions for me. One of them reads: “Increase physical activity, e.g., take stairs instead of lift.” Sitting on a floor 200 metres above ground level, I still can’t tell if she was joking or not.

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1
May 08
Thu

Throwback to Twitter… Y2K style

About 8 years ago I figured out how to use my mobile phone to post to the web. It was a sort of early, personal edition version of Twitter, as can be seen by my location-tracking posts throughout the course of a day. I also added a location and timezone tagging feature to it so that I could “twitter” overseas… although at up to 75 cents a pop (or about half a cent per letter), it wasn’t the most effective way of updating the blog. If only I had thought to make it multiuser :)

Sidenote: Regarding that second post I linked… oh for the days I could leave work at 5.30pm. I actually got into work at 6.30am today. (Note to aspiring law clerks and grads: “cross-border legal work” sounds much more glamorous than it really is. Much.) And sleep deprivation causes transient bouts of erratic peculiarity. Ros. How are you coping with those private equity deals?

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20
Mar 08
Thu

Happy Easter

Hope you all have a restful break.

Awesome skit. Starts off a bit slowly, but it sends a chill up my spine everytime at 3:48 and 4.35, especially when you hear the crowd lift.

6
Feb 08
Wed

Nice try, Paul

I received a letter from my state MP today – Paul Pearce, the member for Coogee. It arrived in an auspiciously-coloured red envelope and had four Chinese characters written on it. I can’t read Chinese, but it wasn’t rocket science to figure out it said “kung hei fat choi”. It’s Chinese New Year Eve, after all. It appears that Mr Pearce’s staff had gone through the electoral rolls and added anyone with a Chinese-sounding surname to the mass mailing list.

The letter reads, “As we farewell the Year of the Dog and welcome in the Year of the Pig, may I wish you and your family peace, happiness, [etc]”.

Most unfortunately for Mr Pearce, we are actually farewelling the Year of the Pig and welcoming the Year of the Rat. Whoops!

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26
Dec 07
Wed

A small post

Greetings. I’m now on holidays and it’s time for a much overdue post on some random bits and pieces. It’s been a long but, for the most part, a fairly uneventful year for me.

Tomorrow I leave for my annual overseas trip. Only two stops this time – Hong Kong and Tanzania. In Tanzania, I’ll be climbing Mt Kilimanjaro and going on a short safari through the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. Quite excited but feeling a bit of trepidation as well…

In the last couple years I’ve never really posted about what I actually do for a crust, so now’s a good a time as any. I’ve been working as a finance lawyer for about a year. In a nutshell, this means we help lenders lend money, and help borrowers borrow it. We prepare and negotiate the contracts that allow this to happen, and also provide advice when things go wrong. A lot of things have gone wrong this year. The “credit crunch” which has been prevalent in headlines for the last few months was sparked off by homeowners in the US not being able to make their mortgage payments. This set in motion a chain reaction which now means people are much less willing to lend money, which is a problem especially if your business depends on being able to get borrowed money… The work’s very interesting, and some lending arrangements can get pretty complex.

This has been the year of Facebook. It seems to have burst out from being a US-centric student’s social network. I’ve found it interesting see people’s different reactions to it… It’s basically the new mobile phone. When mobiles started getting popular at the turn of the millennium, the uptake was generally rapid. Maybe 75% of people in my first year of uni had them? But there was always a small minority who were steadfast in their refusal to get one. They had all sorts of reasons for not wanting them – they could use a payphone, or they valued their privacy and didn’t want to always be contactable, or it was another thing they’d have to carry around. It took several years, but mobiles became a part of mainstream culture and no one complains about “what the fuss about mobiles is”. They’re just nothing particularly “special” anymore.

Facebook is similar. The uptake has generally been rapid, but there’s always a small band of stalwarts who refuse to open an account because they “don’t see the point”. I’m sure that in time, as happened with mobiles, these people will eventually get accounts. Facebook will shift from being a “new fad” and just become a part of cultural norms. A friend has even sent out his annual Christmas “email” by Facebook this year, eschewing the traditional mass email.

24
Dec 07
Mon

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas holiday.

24
Nov 07
Sat

We have a new government

This is an historical day.

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23
Nov 07
Fri

Election coverage – live

6.30pm: I smell a landslide to Labor. Early counts put several marginals at swings of over 5%, but it’s still early days.
6.33pm: notional seats won: ALP/Coalition/In doubt: 12/13/125 (target: 75).
6.40pm: Notional count: 21/20, no swing reported in Bennelong.
6.43pm: Eastern states show 3.5% swing to ALP but 6% in safe seats. Nick Minchin is getting cocky (on ABC).
6.45pm: Bennelong: 0.2% count, 56.2 to 43.8 ALP. Crowd on ABC going crazy, but people, there’s only been 200 votes counted!! Preferences are significant for McKew.
6.46pm: Notional count: 29/24.
6.51pm: Notional count: 32/28.
7.00pm: Boo, ABC having technical problems – no graphs.
7.05pm: Notional count: 41/31.
7.06pm: Macarthur showing swing to ALP in the order of magnitude of 10%!
7.09pm: Bennelong – 3 booths, 4.9% swing. They won’t call this for ages…
7.16pm: Wentworth, 0.5% swing to Turmbull.
7.27pm: Green says PM still on track to lose seat. Eden-Monaro borderline but towards ALP.
7.33pm: Deakin and Corangamite looks towards ALP winning. Computer is calling 4 seats going over to Labor in NSW. Bennelong is one of them. Notional: 58/37 – 4.8% swing 16.3% counted, Queensland still to report. More cheers in background, Green: “not sure why they’re getting excited about that”.
7.36pm: BENNELONG: 6.6% swing AGAINST PM with 6% counted. Phenomenal. Minchin is no longer cocky.
7.40pm: Notional: 61/41. At what point does a landslide become an avalanche?
7.42pm: Green has all but called it for Labor.
7.43pm: Macarthur called for Coalition by computer.
7.50pm: Bennelong swing is increasing…

Election 07 – Game on

This will be an exciting day. Just got back from donning one of the purple Maxine McKew t-shirts and handing out how-to-vote cards at one of the polling booths in Bennelong. With 13 candidates, there are all sorts of people out and about thrusting paper at voters. There are pretty much three types of people: the jaded ones who refuse to take any paper, the party loyal who brandish one piece of paper and tell off anyone who tries to give then another, and the undecided/bewildered ones who take anything you give them. It’s also pretty fascinating trying to spot what party a person would vote based on appearances.

Rumour has it that the Libs had hired out people at $80/hour to hand out how-to-vote cards, and I suspect there is some truth to that given the disproportionately high number of people from mainland China doing that.

Update (25/11): Our booth recorded a 8.75% swing.

27
Oct 07
Sat

EMP Race Report

Earlier in October, I once again participated in the annual EMP Race, this year donating towards the Starlight Foundation.

The event kicked off at Belmore Park, just outside Central Station at the somewhat rude time of 9.00am on a Saturday. Things were reasonably well organised (perhaps not as well as previous years though – for example, there were clue sheet shortages). The route was also shorter than the organisers expected by at least 1-2 hours and some of the clues were, shall we say… highly questionable. The race route was also highly concentrated around the CBD, although this is the first year where the Race has crossed the Harbour.


Larger map of the Race Route

After a small game involving swapping cards with other teams to spell words, we solved an anagram which directed us to head to Pyrmont Bay Park, opposite Star City. This was done on foot. There, we did a wheelbarrow race where the person holding the legs of their partner was blindfolded and directed from one end of the park to the other. The unblindfolded partner was then required to instruct their blindfolded compatriot to draw various things. Then we were sent back to the Harbourside shopping complex and made to fill out a question sheet about the shops in the surrounding area and find a particular photo from the nearby Yann Arthus-Bertrand photographic exhibition, “The Earth from Above” (which I very highly recommend you check out, if you’re in Darling Harbour).

The next checkpoint sent us to UNSW. We made a dash (or more like a quick walk at this stage) up to Elizabeth Street to catch a bus. There’s something about tourists and buses on Saturday morning. As with last year, just as about the bus was about to leave, this tourist gets on and engages the drive in a 5 minute-long conversation, much to the chagrin of all the racer on board the bus (and delight of all those running for it).

Pulling up at UNSW, we were directed to perform a three-legged walk up and down the main uni walkway, looking for numbers stuck on the back of lampposts. These numbers had to be combined mathematically and exchanged for the next clue, which was the first stupid clue of the race: “Where is a place that you can play ‘HIDE & SEEK‘? The location is hidden somwhere in the clue.”

Think about that one for a while. And keep thinking. After several very long minutes of guessing, it turns out that it the location was Hyde Park. We hopped on a bus again and headed back into the city. The task there was an eating one – each team had to eat a whole chilli and a whole lemon. Dorian foolishly elected to eat the chilli. There’s little that’s funnier than watching someone munch into a chilli thinking that it’s not so bad, only to react like they’ve been smacked in the head a split second later. With that task done, we took a 30 minute mandatory lunch break and then headed off to our next destination – Martin Place.

When we got there we were handed a collection tin and asked to collect at least one donation for the Starlight Foundation. Dorian immediately intercepted a group of three girls and practically demanded they give him one coin. Mortified, I caught up with him and hastily explained what we were actually collecting money for. They took a moment to consider, and then Dorian (it’s always class with him) goaded, “come on, you don’t want to look cheap do you?” I was even more mortified. “Mate, you can’t say that!” If someone had said that to me I would have walked off. But, amazingly, the girls were goaded into action and quite a few coins clunked into our tin.

We were then dispatched to Circular Quay to inspect all the plaques embedded in the ground (part of the “Writers’ Walk”) looking for writer’s surnames which started with the letter “D” (although the clue sheet had been misprinted as surnames ending with the letter “D”). Dorian and I split up, each taking one side of the Quay. We met back up to find, rather worringly, that neither of us had discovered any names at all, so we swapped sides and managed to find four names which the other had completely missed on the first sweep.

The next stop was Observatory Hill, which took some time getting to because we took a couple wrong turns and getting there the long way. Once there, we had to roll down a hill (very dizzy!), inflate a beach ball (even dizzier!) and then kick it up the hill and back. Our next clue was another stupid one: “Go to the place where you’d find the wild mouse.” We were stuck there for a good 20 minutes trying to figure that one out.

We finally figured out where we had to go to next, taking the ferry to Luna Park, the final checkpoint. The last task was to find a guy milling about in the park with a lightning bolt drawn in texta above his eye (a Harry Potter reference). That was pretty fun actually, until we spotted him and he decided to sprint away. We started to pursue him, but quickly determined we were in no mood to run that late in the day and finally caught up with him when he got tired. We finished in a mediocre way, at about 3.00pm in the middle of the pack, an hour behind the leaders (after only being 15-20 minutes behind at lunchtime). Nonetheless, a fun day was had by all!

11
Oct 07
Thu

The Invasion

At work, hordes of moths have invaded the foyer. Hundreds of black specks flutter under the high glass roof of the atrium and impromptu colonies blacken the walls, tightly clustered and nestled in the sandstone and granite corners. The scene in the foyer, normally a staid, prim centre of corporatism, is almost comical. Workers navigate the floor, their gait punctuated by erratic ducking and weaving, as if evading phantom punches. Some people have their camera phones out. Some people are visibly afraid. Outside my window, some fifty-something floors up, moths occasionally thud against the glass. The roads are littered with torn wings and dried moth torsos and the footpaths blotted with a million oily patches.

It’s that time of year again: the Bogong moths are on the move. They know summer’s coming and they’re migrating to the cooler climes of Snowy Mountain caves. Along the way, the nocturnal moths become distracted by the bright city lights and, thinking that the sun’s come up, descend upon Sydney by the thousands. Bogongs are univoltine, which means that they breed one generation each year (yep, I found that off Wikipedia) and therefore the migration is an annual event. Those that do get to the caves aestivate (which is the same as hibernation, but in summer).

Meanwhile, back in the foyer, building management has hired a cleaning guy and equipped him with a back-mounted vacuum cleaner fitted with a 3 metre long attachment. Each day he slowly makes his way around the foyer performing the Sisyphean task of sucking dead moths off the floors, couches, concierge desks and chasing down the live ones crawling on the walls. At least we can all be thankful that they’re not stinging insects.

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4
Sep 07
Tue

APEC summit

My workplace is more or less near the centre of the CBD’s “declared area“. Buses terminate at Martin Place where crowds of suits are herded into the pedestrian channels, lined by 3 metre high metal fences anchored by massive concrete blocks. Police linger on each street corner. Newly-installed loudspeakers attached to traffic lights as part of Sydney’s new emergency warning system add that extra bit of East Berlin-charm to the CBD. Helicopters hover in the skies above… even once inside my building, you can hear them, periodically buzzing by the window. My window overlooks the Intercontinental (Dubya’s hotel during the summit) and I can see snipers on its roof. Sirens occasionally wail through the streets from vehicles engaged in what are (hopefully) training exercises. The streets around Circular Quay are virtually devoid of people and vehicles. It’s all quite surreal and a little disconcerting. And the newspapers say that the police are currently in “minimum security mode”. Dubya is going to arrive in the next couple hours and they are going to lock things down even more tomorrow. Employees have been advised to carry proof of ID and employment at all times.

APEC would be a more exciting prospect if they didn’t keep Sydneysiders away from everything with a 500 metre stick. It’s an honour to be hosting it, but to the person on the street, it sure doesn’t feel like it.

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27
Aug 07
Mon

A death in the family

I got a phone call from Dad this morning while at work. Bad news. One of my grandmothers died sometime during the night in Singapore. My uncle had the terrible experience of discovering her in the morning slumped in an easy chair. The whole family is in shock – she was in good health and relatively young. No one had time to say goodbye.

I called my grandfather this evening. Judging by the background noise on the call, the house was a hive of activity as everyone had gone over to pay their respects and offer their condolences. It was good to hear that and at least I knew my grandfather was receiving support and comfort.

People often ask me how it’s like being an only child. I think the worst thing about it is the lack of people available to support each other if something bad does happen in the family. At least in my parents’ generation, they have 5, 10, even 15 siblings to help them through times like that. So for me, in lieu of brothers or sisters to turn to, I guess that makes my closest friends just that little bit more special.

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10
Aug 07
Fri

Sighted on George St

I don’t know about you, but I’m not too sure about renting a place whose biggest selling point is that there’s no one living on the balcony.

Couldn’t find any mention of how many bedrooms the apartment has, but I suspect they are trying to fit six people into a one bedroom apartment.

28
Jul 07
Sat

Flatmate #3

Got a new flatmate today. Currently at the barely-know-each-other stage. So you exchange the usual pleasantries etc, but if you really want to know someone these days you Google them :). And this one came with a blog. I’m sure Fred will eventually find this blog entry and may or may not freak out a little (hi Fred).

As the very first question he asked me when he turned up was, “What broadband plan are you on?” I have a feeling we will get along just fine. Except, it seems, where it comes to football. Could be a few fireworks there :).

9
Apr 07
Mon

Upon closer inspection

Was walking down Anzac Parade a while ago and there was this bright yellow poster on the wall with the title “Spreadable” emblazoned on it (along with a picture of a tub of margarine). So my initial impression was that it was another one of those ads for a dance party with a particularly creative (although somewhat graphic) name. But it turned out to be an ad for a Christian event. Maybe they should have given some thought about the name. (Or maybe I shouldn’t have!)

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24
Dec 06
Sun

Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone has a fantastic break!

15
Oct 06
Sun

Comment on global warming

First of all, I haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth. Second of all, I’m not disputing in this post that global warming is likely to be occurring. However, I do have a bone to pick with people who think that Saturday’s beautiful 36 degree weather is “yet another sign of global warming so why doesn’t the government do anything about it?”

Global warming only requires a relatively small change in mean surface temperature to cause significant changes in the global environment. Let’s check out from Wikipedia and see what we find with regard to temperature projections over the next century.

Models referenced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) project that global temperatures may increase between 1.4 and 5.8 °C (2.5 to 10.5 °F) between 1990 and 2100. The uncertainty in this range results from both the difficulty of estimating the volume of future greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty about climate sensitivity.

Assume the most aggressive estimate of a rise in average temperature over the next century holds true: a 6°C rise over 100 years. A temperature change that large would be pretty horrific. But taken a year at a time, that’s only a rise of 0.06°C each year (on average). No one can feel a temperature difference that small. Let’s look at it another way. If we add the average daily temperatures throughout the year (“Yearly Aggregate”), a 0.06°C rise in the average temperature means that the following year should yield a Yearly Aggregate of about 22 degrees more. In practical terms, this could be manifested in a 3 week period where the temperature is one degree warmer, or it could be manifested in a three day heat wave where the temperature is 7 degrees warmer than the average temperature for that time of year. So my point is that given this, it just doesn’t make sense to say “Summer came early this year” and point to that anecdotal gut feeling as corroborating scientific evidence of rising temperatures. It basically shouldn’t be possible to notice global warming just by looking at the temperature report on the news or counting how many beach days there were last summer. The temperature differences are just too small for the average Joe to notice, even over a 10 year period. Therefore, the throwaway lines about the weather just don’t hold water.

Of course, if someone provided me with a better reason, then I might agree with those anecdotal observations. Perhaps something along the lines of – global warming causes more extremes in temperature, so you get more hotter-than-average days and more colder-than-average days (though on balance, there are more hot days than cold ones) which means it’s more noticeable. But I’d only be guessing there.

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Events of the week

Went to the Australia vs Bahrain football match on Wednesday. It was good for the first half hour or so. Then we started to see so many stretches come out onto the field you’d think there was a war going on. The Bahrain players appeared to fall for seemingly innocuous contacts, writhing about the field in agony long enough for the stretcher to come out. But of course, as soon as the stretcher appeared, lo and behold, the player was standing up again, miraculously healed and limp-free. Their delaying tactics worked and Bahrain’s under-21 team walked away with an respectable 2-0 loss, achieved in an unfortunately unrespectable fashion.

On the way home on the bus, we noticed a whole bunch of police cars and ambulances around the uni walkway entrance to UNSW. Gang violence? No. Just a bunch of rowdy underagers at an underage dance party bashing each other over the head with pool cues. They must think they’re so hard while the rest of Sydney shakes their heads in amusement. Not such a cool look when you’re writhing on the ground after copping a faceful of capsicum spray! (I’m getting images of Vinnie Jones walking up to the Roundhouse and saying, “I ‘eard you say you were ‘ard… ARE YOU ‘ARD?!“).

Saw a James Morrison gig at The Basement. Great performance, except that next time I’m booking a table. Had a few interesting “added extras” including his new vocal synthesiser and digital trumpet. He also squeezed three notes simultaneously out of his trombone in a pretty cool display of multiphonics. The man also has an impressive set of lungs combined with a circular breathing technique that made him look like a frenetic puffer fish on speed. Great stuff.

Watched The Departed. It’s a Western adaptation of the Infernal Affairs trilogy – a set of Hong Kong films, the first of which came out about 4 years ago starring a big name cast. The Western version, directed by Scorsese is actually pretty good. There are several changes made to the story, but the guts of it remain the same. I’d recommend it, but you must also see the original films (or at least the first one). I thought the original was snappier and more of a fun rollercoaster ride than the Scorsese one which felt a little drawn out and not as twisty. But maybe that’s because I had an idea of where the plot was heading the second time around.

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10
Oct 06
Tue

Werewolf

I went to a Werewolf night recently. Werewolf is a game also commonly known as Mafia. The rules are simple and you don’t need anything to play it except people. Sly, backstabbing, two-faced, lying, shameless people. And the more the better.

Let’s say you have 12 people playing (plus 1 person who is the game’s “narrator”). You allocate, by some random, secret means, three people to be werewolves, and the rest to be villagers. The game has two phases, day and night. In the night time, the narrator gets everyone to close their eyes. The werewolves then open their eyes and by hand gestures, indicate to the narrator which villager to kill. The werewolves close their eyes.

The day phase starts with everyone opening their eyes. The narrator tells who was killed during the night – that person is then removed from the game (but spectating is quite fun). People then have to work out who are the werewolves. At the end of the “day” everyone votes. The person who receives the most votes is lynched. The identity of the lynched person is then revealed. The task of the villagers is to kill all the werewolves during the day. The task of the werewolves is to bring the villager population down to the same size as the werewolf population (during the night and by manipulating votes during the day).

Variants can be added in, with people being allocated “special roles”. For example, a seer is a villager who gets to wake up during the night and obtain the identity of a player from the narrator. The seer can then disclose this information in the daytime (although they are likely to die quickly that night). The other problem is that multiple people can then claim to be seers.

It kept us entertained for hours, was good for helping people remember people’s names and breaking the ice. At the start of the night the group was fairly hesitant and quiet, but by the end of it slander and accusations were being blasted about left, right and centre.

I just have to recount one game where I managed to thread the eye of the needle. There were 14 players including 2 werewolves and 1 werehampster (Jonathan, myself and Jo), 1 seer and 1 witch. On the very first day, the crowd sentiment disturbingly looked like it was turning towards Jonathan so on a whim I decided to vote for him, despite him being a fellow werewolf. Much to his chagrin, he was narrowly voted off with 4 votes. The loss proved to be a boon for me further down the track. In the second round, in an amazing case of bad luck for us werebeings, suspicions turned to Jo and she was voted off nearly unanimously (sensing the bloodthirsty atmosphere, I was forced to jump on the bandwagon). So there I was, 1 werewolf against 10 raging villagers. And to my surprise, I began to pick them off one by one. Suspicions never rested on me for very long because I could always point to voting against Jonathan and Jo. The other issue was selecting very carefully who to kill at night. Even when Simon developed an accusatory attitude towards me, I left him alone for several rounds at night. In the end, I managed to turn his seemingly wild accusations against him during the day, convincing the rest that his crusade against me was evidence he was a wolf. He was promptly voted off. I also tried to quickly kill off those physically closest to me so they wouldn’t hear me moving around at night. The other consideration was to kill off people who “vigourously” voted for someone else in the previous round – in the daytime you could then accuse that someone else of committing a revenge killing to shut up his or her “vigourous accuser”. In the end, it was down to three. I had enough trust at that point to be the person in the “pivot role” – with the other two people trying to convince me that they weren’t the wolf. All I had to do was confirm they were going to vote for the other person and my work was done.

But that destroyed my credibility for the night. In the next game I was unanimously voted off in the first round (I was a villager).

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5
Oct 06
Thu

In other news…

I get admitted as a lawyer tomorrow. More on the weekend.

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7
Sep 06
Thu

EMP Race Report

The second day of Spring, last Saturday, was a great day for holding the annual EMP Race – an Amazing Race-style one-day competition around Sydney with entry proceeds going to Canteen.

The start this year was in the Domain, with around 30 teams impatiently waiting for the start in the hot sun. There was a bit of a delay, but we got going at 11.00am. The first task was to win five games of rock, paper, scissors against any other team, followed by a short wheelbarrow race to the first checkpoint.


Larger map of the Race Route

The first checkpoint was a detour. We were to proceed to the State Art Gallery and pick whether to do a bunch of Sudoku puzzles, or go look for cows in the Gallery. Alison was pretty quick to veto Sudoku (if only I had a 3G mobile), so we were off in the Gallery looking for a room that “looked like a hat” which had a painting called Canterbury Meadows in it. After wandering around for a few worrying minutes, we didn’t find any room that looked remotely like a hat, but we did find a room with a bunch of Racers furiously pointing at a painting filled with farm animals. In a few minutes, we were off to report our results (how many cows we had counted) to the checkpoint people, passing a bunch of perplexed Racers on the Gallery steps who were still trying to put numbers into boxes.

The next clue took us to Pitt St and a store which “Megan Gale should not be seen promoting”. We darted across Hyde Park, up Market St and into Pitt St Mall outside Myer. There we had to sing a nursery rhyme for three minutes (we got Old Macdonald had a farm) before being directed to go to the Fish Markets. As I was trying to figure out what bus we should take, Alison was already running to the bus stop behind the QVB (and this is despite her being a Pom for most of her life). Our timing was impeccable, and the bus pulled up as we got there. Unfortunately, hordes of Saturday morning tourists were taking their sweet time embarking, so we must have sat there for about 5 stressed minutes before the bus finally chugged off.

At the Fish Markets we had to gather a few prices, read the “conditions of entry” to the markets (maximum $500 fine if you bring a pet there!), and other miscellaneous tasks. The next clue directed us to the field where “Nerds FC” was filmed. As luck would have it, I used to do dragonboating in the area, and we used to buy lunch at the fishmarkets and eat it in the park next to it – Wentworth Park – which was also the Nerds FC stomping grounds.

There, we found another detour – either kick a soccer ball around the pitch, or colour in an outline of your partner on a large roll of butcher’s paper. We made short work of that, thanks to the small size of Alison’s profile. We were then sent to Railway Square. Failing to determine if there was any way via public transport, we basically jogged to George Street and caught a bus up to Railway Square. (It turned out that at least one other team decided to pay for and catch a tram to Central and walk to Railway Square.)

At the Square, we discovered we were currently in the pole position. We were then handed two bits of paper. On one was a bunch of countries’ flags which we had to identify. The other contained a “catch-phrase” type game which produced names of train stations. Once the train stations were determined, we had to find out what platform trains going to those stations left from. A well placed phone call to Kev made short work of the flags (who handily had a wall atlas with world flags on it). However, we made a mistake with one of the train station names (picture of trumpets and a bee – we incorrectly guessed Toongabbie) and had to waste a good 5 minutes tracking back to Central to rectify our mistake (the correct station was Hornsby).

The next clue sent us to Newtown via bus, where we met with frustration. The task involved finding out the names of various shops along King St, but we had to retrace our steps several times trying to find the correct stores. By the time we got to the checkpoint, there were already several teams ahead of us.

After the thirty minute mandatory rest period, the Race organisers decided to give us an unusual two-part task. First we had to count the 600+ tiles on some steps, and second we had to cover a meat tray (the type you get mince on at the supermarket) completely with string (there were rolls and rolls of the stuff). The latter task took considerable time, during which several half-bemused passers-by shot confused looks our way as Racers kept muttering, “You can’t be serious.”

With meat tray successfully wrapped, the next clue sent us off to the Paddington Gate of Centennial Park. The lunch break had cooled my muscles down, and the sudden re-exertion on them threatened to cramp them up. Luckily I had a few bus rides to stretch out. To get to Paddington, we had two options – a 378 from Railway Square, which I had never taken before, and a 380 from Elizabeth Street, which I had taken before, but was further away. One other team was on the same bus out of Newtown as we were. They elected for the 378 but we made for the 380.

At Centennial Park, we arrived at another detour. Option 1 was to make and wear a newspaper skirt, as well as drink a Tabasco, chilli, vinegar and lemon “shot”, eat a spoonful of Vegemite and a Weet-bix (Alison once again was quick to veto this). Option 2 was to shred five carrots and make a picture out of the shreddings representing the theme, “all the money in the world”. Which was quite fitting given the gratuitous wasting of food we were engaged in – something that would be unthinkable in most parts of the world. One abstract art masterpiece later and we were off to the “Icebergs side of Bondi Beach” to look for someone named Jeff.

We got to the bus stop, but our run of serendipity with buses came to an end and we had to wait for some time for a bus. Another team had arrived in that time, but they elected to catch a 378 which only went to Bondi Junction – which is not Bondi Beach. A 380 finally came and we hopped on.

The 380 crawled through Bondi Junction where sizeable crowds of people were enjoying a nice Saturday afternoon of shopping. It was quite hot – just like a summer’s day and the bus ride made us incredibly drowsy. All the running about was taking its toll.

Finally we got to Bondi and we made a beeline for Icebergs. We couldn’t find anyone that looked like they were part of the Race. We asked the bouncer but he replied that there wasn’t a Jeff there. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, we ascertained we were meant to be down on the beach and not up at Icebergs. On the beach, we were to build up a pile of sand to knee height. Exploiting the lack of guidelines surrounding that instruction, we simply took a previous team’s pile and moved it across one metre to make our own.

Next destination: “Take a 30 minute walk to Tamarama.” And walk we did, because there was no way we were going to be running at that stage. On the way, we walked past Icebergs again, past a group of guys in newpaper skirts talking to a bouncer who was yelling: “For the tenth time, there’s no Jeff here! Now go away!”

The coastal walk between the eastern suburbs beaches (Bondi, Tamarama, Bronte, Clovelly, Coogee) is normally a nice one, but we weren’t really in a condition to appreciate the view. Along the way we had time to digest the next clue, which detailed a manual labour task involving filling up a bucket with seawater using a milk carton with holes poked into it. That was the description, but the reality was a rude shock.

When we pulled up at Tamarama, the “buckets” were large margarine containers and the “milk cartons” were the small containers your grandmother keeps her pills in. With a hole in the bottom of them. The containers were all placed at least 25 metres from the sea, necessitating a dozen torturous trips over the soft sand to shuttle water to our container.

After that sadistic task, the final leg was a painful walk down to Bronte Beach. (My calf muscles had all but packed it in at that stage and I was literally on the verge of cramping with every step.)

We finished just before 4.30pm, placing 5th, with the winners ariving at 4.13pm. Despite the pain involved, it was actually a very fun day! Till next year then.

23
Aug 06
Wed

Thredbo and the end of Winter


Skiing in Australia

Okay, well Thredbo wasn’t that dismal, but when people were wandering around the village in t-shirts, we were left wondering if we would be better off bushwalking instead. As expected there were lots of icy patches, exposed grass, dirt, rocks. Still, there were a few passable runs.

Don uploaded some trip photos here. (To explain a picture there, that spoon I’m carrying has a bit of cognac in it… in lieu of a tumbler, which would surely have killed me.)

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14
Aug 06
Mon

Electronic census teething problems?

Received under the door, a card: “I called today to remind you to return your completed Census form(s), however no one was at home.” The card contained the census collector’s phone number. Robin called him to say we had filled out the online form. The reply was that the form wasn’t filled in correctly. However, he could not identify which online form was the culprit (Robin and I filled out separate forms), nor could he explain why we had received confirmation numbers after successfully filling out the form. Of course, once you complete the form, you’re locked out and can’t get back in. At least I kept my confirmation number and know they can’t fine me straight away. It’ll be ironic if filling out the online form proves to be more hassle than just handing in the paper version.

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13
Aug 06
Sun

City 2 Surf

My legs are currently in a fair deal of pain. I guess training beforehand is a good idea.

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Blogathon thanks

Just a note of thanks to Wade and the anonymous donor who sponsored and donated to World Vision for Blogathon. Much appreciated, guys.

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29
Jul 06
Sat

Blogathon Post 22

Always in the mood for a good prank.

Link of the half-hour: Gas pump prank (video).

Blogathon Post 21

My brain is still not working at this hour.

Link of the half-hour: Microsoft’s Photosynth idea.

Blogathon Post 20

They say the hour before dawn is the darkest. I wonder why? I bet you Google will know…

Link of the half-hour: “The darkest hour is before dawn“. Oh, it’s just an idiom. I’m disappointed, I thought there was some fact behind it.

Blogathon Post 19

5.00am.

Link of the half-hour: “I’m her… daddy!” (video). Why don’t Australian companies ever make ads like this?

Blogathon Post 18

It’s still dark outside.

Link of the half-hour: Some pretty cool photos. You might have seen some of them before.

Blogathon Post

*Yawn*. Good morning. It’s dark outside. That’s just wrong. Hmm I see Doz has done a spate of posts on movies.

Link of the half-hour: People get maths tuitioning, science tuitioning, piano lessons… but now, at rates of over US$50, computer gaming lessons.

Blogathon Post 3

Okay things should be right to handover now.

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Blogathon Post 2

Still waiting for Doz to get back… and I’m having a few problems getting his user ID and timezone settings set up. Never had to add an extra user to this blog before…

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Blogathon Post 1

And we’re off. I’m going to hand over the posting to Doz soon when he gets back from his party, so I can grab a little shut-eye before the long haul. I’ll probably cobble together some posts with actual content on the other side of sleep.

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8
May 06
Mon

Disjointed and somewhat random

Site is looking a bit lonely, so I’m going to chuck in a series of disjointed and somewhat random sentences: Got around to watching Firefly. It really is a fantastic series, pity it was cut so short. Getting really cold in the mornings, and it’s not even Winter yet. After five years, I finally tried the Colombian restaurant down the road (La Cumbia), it’s not bad, but I can’t say I’ll be back there anytime soon. Went to paintball on Anzac Day, which is sort of an unpatriotic thing to do because it’s not like you can pretend that your team are the Anzacs storming the beach (if you’re on the winning side). Action Paintball has got a good variety of game scenarios, but I still prefer Heartbreak Ridge. Saw Mission Impossible 3 – thought it was pretty decent, although Maggie Q’s Cantonese is shocking (and that’s coming from me!). Doing Trust Accounting for College of Law – it’s bringing back bad memories of first year Accounting.

The site’s photo album is on the fritz. Was working one moment, gone the next. Pesky hosting company did something to it. I’ll get around to fixing it one day, but as I suspect it requires a complete reinstall, that one day may be some time off. I’ll post on the front page instead. Here’s some photos from Suma’s camera of the aftermath of this year’s Lachs moot. Bit more lively than last year!

 

 

 

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30
Apr 06
Sun

Reader feedback required

It is alleged that there is a hard and fast rule that when you’re in the early stages of dating someone (first couple months, say), it is a dealbreaker for the guy to SMS the girl in substitute for a phone call. Supposedly, this signals either non-interest on the guy’s part, or if that is not true, gross laziness which is to be avoided at all costs. In other words, if such a girl receives an SMS, it is more probable than not that she will terminate the relationship. This was the first any of us three guys tonight had heard of this “rule”. Yet, all three girls were in total agreement over the matter, as if it were a matter of universally known social courtesy. Independent verification is required: do you agree? Comments, please?

19
Apr 06
Wed

College of Law

Civil Litigation exam tomorrow. Suck.

Q: What do these words have in common: pre-trial, status, final, case management, evaluation, trial management?
A: They are all types of conferences that you have to go through before you get a hearing (depending on what court you’re in). Oh yes, fascinating.

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7
Apr 06
Fri

I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse

Ok here’s the deal. You’re at a party in a townhouse attached to Teascapes Cafe at The Spot, Randwick. The time is 2.00am, the temperature outside is about 18 degrees. After a protracted negotiation, you have six reasonably attractive girls offering to kiss you anywhere you want above the waist, either together or one by one (if on the mouth, tongue not included, boo). Photographic evidence will be taken and provided to you for your posterity. In order to collect on this offer, you have to strip to your underwear (briefs not boxers), pop on some sneakers, and walk to the Ritz Cinemas, only 50 metres away. You must strike several poses in front of the Ritz’s front doors, get photographed, and then return home. You are drunk. Do you accept? Do you?

Last night, one fellow who shall not be named, with some um… gentle persuasion, accepted the challenge and was applauded and whistled at by several passers-by for his efforts. Unfortunately upon returning, overcome by a blood alcohol level in the permanent liver damage-range, he passed out cold before he could reap his rewards. Photographic evidence is now available to the highest bidder.

1
Apr 06
Sat

Time extension!

An extra hour to sleep in, or an excuse to stay up an extra hour later?

12
Mar 06
Sun

A quick word

I have a new flatmate! Robin moved in today. First College exam is on Thursday, yuck. That’s all for now.

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28
Feb 06
Tue

Don’t look down

I thought I’d better pop in and make a real post. It’s my third week into work. I like corporate bathrooms. They’re always quite sanitary and there’s never a problem with finding a dry, clean toilet seat. But the ones at work kinda freak me out. The cubicles in particular.

You see, the floors are made of black granite. It’s polished stone, therefore it shines and is reflective. So one day when I sat down on a toilet to do my business, I looked around the cubicle as you do when you have no other way of occupying yourself while on the john. I looked down at the floor and saw a faint reflection. It took a couple seconds for my eyes to resolve the image, but I realised that I was seeing a reflection of someone in the adjacent cubicle, from a bottom-up perspective through the gap underneath the cubicle wall. I couldn’t see anything clearly, but I could generally see what he was doing. He was reading a newspaper (and taking a shit, of course). My eyes weren’t going to wait until he started wiping his ass, so I went straight back to entertaining myself by reading the building evacuation plan stuck on the cubicle door. Someone didn’t think things through when designing that bathroom…

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13
Feb 06
Mon

Bits and pieces

I start work on Thursday (this time, for real!). It’s probably about time, all my friends who are my age have already hit this stage of life… and despite my constant whining, I am actually looking forward to it.

Been fiddling around with AJAX (I can’t believe they gave something like that a name) and stuck a counter on the sidebar. The Javascript checks the hit count every 15 seconds and updates the page if it needs changing. The sparkline-driven graph lists a rolling graph of hits over the last 14 24-hour periods. Also brought back the random photos. Uploaded a couple extra photos here.

4
Dec 05
Sun

On doing nothing

I used to be a uni bum, but now I’m just a bum. Having zero commitments is a very strange feeling. It actually comes with a bit of guilt and I have to keep reminding myself that this was the plan all along. Haven’t been working towards anything, just treading water, taking each week as it comes. I often have nothing planned for the next week, but by the weekend, the next week has filled up with stuff to do… catching up with friends, movies and a concert, indoor rock climbing, lan parties, getting some exercise in the gym, cooking, reading, catching up on TV episodes, casino scalping, etc… all the sort of stuff that tends to fall by the wayside when there are more things we like to regard as “important” to do. When you have all the time in the world, even the mundane things are pleasant – grocery runs, cleaning – because they’re not stuff you have to get out of the way so you can get on to the “important” stuff. It’s nice to be able to say “yes” to everything. I think it’s an experience everyone should try and not have to wait until retirement to try it. I start work in mid-February.

As you may have realised from the sidebar, I’m travelling around the world again soon. This time I’m with parents which explains my financial ability to go again. I’m with them up until Italy, then I’m splitting off to HK and KL which I’m looking forward to a lot. I think jet lag will be a real problem on this trip since it’s heading eastwards with a couple of 8 hour timezone jumps. There’s meant to be a largish family gathering in freezing-cold Vancouver though it’s with my dad’s sister-in-law’s side of the family so there’ll be lots of new faces. Though through the marvels of the net, I know one of them is a professional poker player which ought to be interesting. Someone also organised a Secret Santa list which will be interesting because I don’t even know the person I’m meant to be buying stuff for – no age, background, nothing except gender.

29
Nov 05
Tue

Auction – everything priced to clear!

It is a sad day. In a little over a week, my fantastic flatmate of five years is moving permanently back to the humid shores of Malaysia. Unfortunately, his funds have been seriously depleted after a budgeting mishap stemming from alcohol abuse last Friday. In an effort to rejuvenate these funds via high-risk high-return investing, a further, uh… mishap, at Star City has eliminated whatever vestige of hope he had of paying his bus fare to the airport next week.

Accordingly, he is having a firesale of his remaining assets on eBay with rock bottom starting prices. Check out the stationery grab bag – it’s a true bargain!

Bid now!

24
Jun 05
Fri

It’s All Over

I handed in my very last law exam on Tuesday. It was for Industrial and Intellectual Property, which is a subject that for some reason is perennially popular, but is actually a lot less glamourous than it sounds. What an Australian statute is doing by defining a phrase by stubbornly referring the reader to a UK Act passed in 1623 (and which the UK itself itself has long since replaced) is quite bizarre.

But anyway, it’s the end of my six and a half year stint at UNSW. I pulled up my library borrowing record and it shows:

Borrowing record

Three items. As you can see, I’m a prodigious library user. One loan was for a set of keys to a moot room which I used for tutoring, one is a loan for a friend doing Med, and the other was an open reserve loan for another friend. So, in effect, I’ve never borrowed a book for myself from the library. God bless the Internet and electronic resources.

I’m definitely going to miss my time at uni. Now seems like an opportune time to answer the five questions Sarni asked of me a while ago:

1. Do you think you foresee any problems reconciling your faith with your work as a lawyer?
I’ve never seen law as an inherently evil profession, even before I became a law student, and regardless of whether the lawyer is one working in a community legal centre, LegalAid, in a Fortune 500 company or a large commercial firm. It’s a popular view that lawyers are evil, and one that’s not going to change in a hurry, but there’s not much we can do about that except influence those closest to us to recognise otherwise.

As a corporate lawyer, I think I see the biggest danger is the lifestyle pitfall. The long hours and vaulting ambition that most people have can make work all consuming and there’s a danger of beginning to “define yourself” by the work you do. Not to say that this is a bad thing, but it’s not something I want. I always thought that it was strange that the types of people who get into these types of firms have a very well rounded lifestyles, yet for a few of them when they start working, life becomes very one dimensional. This takes away from everything else in life, faith especially.

2. Who would be the five people at your ideal dinner party (dead or living)?
Ideally, I would invite four close friends and the fifth would be one interesting personality. But if this question is really asking which five people I would like to have a chat with, I would say, off the top of my head… Bill Gates, Meg Whitman, Michael Kirby, Gene Roddenberry and Bill Clinton. I don’t like these listing type questions because I always think of something better later on, but oh well.

3. If you were to have children, would you consider being the stay at home dad? Under what circumstances?
Possibly, yes. The circumstances would have to be that firstly finances weren’t an issue, especially in terms of being able to provide kids with a good education and the opportunity to have opportunities. Secondly, that I still would have freedom for other pursuits – perhaps genuine part time work that I can do from home. I enjoy variety in life, and I think it’s possible to raise a family and still be involved in other things. Or perhaps I’m being incredibly naive, I dunno. I’m sure I’ll eventually learn one way or the other.

4. How would you describe the differences between IT and law?
I think that in an abstract sense both professions are more similar than different. Both have two aspects: one of them everyone is familiar with – problem solving when things go wrong. The second of them is when things need to get built and IT and law act to support and facilitate the building (eg, if you start up a business, you’ll need someone to provide you with the IT gear to manage it, and a lawyer to draft up the lease agreements and so on). The problem with IT is that it’s often a thankless profession. There’s never really a good reason for why things go wrong, even if it’s the user that stuffs things up (“you should have built it simpler!”). People get irate and for some reason take it out on IT. When you do fix things up because it’s fixing something that shouldn’t have gone wrong in the first place, “you can sod off back to your call centre now so I can get on with my work”. It’s trite but true that when IT is doing their job well, they are invisible. So much for job satisfaction. On the other hand, the other aspect of IT, the creative, building side of things, is fun but there doesn’t seem to be much of that around since the Dot Com Bust, and the Australian IT industry was never very entrepreneurial in that sense anyway.

Law is about problem solving as well, but because the problems/issues are often client-caused and involve a third party, you don’t start off on a bad footing with them – the “opposition” is the third party. And in many cases, there is no opposition – you’re simply facilitating a business deal, helping someone to write their will, or so on.

Apart from that, I don’t think they are all that different.

5. What are the most important things your parents have taught you?
Typically Asian, the first is the importance of education, and atypically Asian, the second is to do what I enjoy. Regarding the first, I don’t think education is important because of what you learn in 3-unit maths or at univeristy, or that piece of paper you get at the end of it all. You can be successful in life with neither. I think education is important because of the people you meet during it, which really broadens your worldview, and the opportunities that arise through it.

Regarding the second, it’s a simple concept, I’ve written about it before. I tutor a couple of first-year law students and in the first tutoring session, I asked them why they chose law. “Because I didn’t get the marks to get into med.” Ok, but why law? “Because I got the marks to get into law.” For people that intelligent, you’d think their reasoning would be a little more well-thought out. I was lucky in having the freedom to choose a course that I thought would be interesting, yet I know that for lots of other people, their parents would have made it unthinkable to select a course whose entrance cutoff was 6% lower than the UAI they received. In the end, I figured out for myself that IT perhaps wasn’t what I wanted, but I wouldn’t have chosen differently even if I could do it all again, because I was able to make the choice for myself. My parents gave me advice, but didn’t choose for me.

14
Jun 05
Tue

You can tell it’s exam time

The Corps Act is kicking my ass, and travel planning is very distracting. Proper updates will resume when the stress levels subside.

30
May 05
Mon

Today is special for some

:P

Update: A big thank you to those who today called, smsed, e-mailed, left a comment, bought me a meal or some combination of these things, as the case may be!

26
May 05
Thu

*Sniff*

Currently have this damn cold that’s been obstinately lingering around since the weekend. I woke up today to find my voice sounding like someone had rammed a dozen clothes pegs up my nose and a bunch of feathers down my throat (they feel that way too). There’s a cocktail of amoxycillin, potassium clavulanate, terbutaline sulfate, oxymetazoline hydrochloride, ibuprofen and pseudoephedrine hydrochlorine currently circulating in my bloodstream which is possibly doing me more harm than good. Not been a great year in terms of health – third time in five months I’ve come down with a cold, normally it’s only one or maybe two per year.

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19
May 05
Thu

It’s that time of year

I’m doing a fourth year subject in an undergraduate class this year and I’m hearing a lot of clerkship application “buzz” which I thankfully missed last year. As with all final year students, I also come into contact with a lot of people that are beginning to take the next step into the world of work and I’m always fascinated by the different perspectives people have about it, and consequently, life in general. The unfortunate fact is that many people’s lives are defined by their working life – which is not all that surprising if you spend the best parts of the weekdays stuck in an office.

Anyway, I came across this post which has another perspective. The comments attached to that post are also interesting. There is a bit of talk about how compatible corporate law work is with Christianity. A while ago I discovered this article written by a partner at Clayton Utz titled “A Christian Reflection on Commercial Law Firm Practice“. It’s good reading.

I’ve had two peer groups now from different backgrounds who’ve had to go through the whole career choosing thing. I could write pages of stuff about choosing a career, which is similar to a discussion about choosing the right path after high school, but I’ll confine myself to saying that my general philosophy is that whatever you do – you have to actively enjoy what you are doing. Talking about what you do in your job, or what you study, with some measure of passion to others is a good indication of that. A job doesn’t have to involve glory or prestige or be world changing or whatever, for you to enjoy it. Even when an industry is “meant” to be glamourous, but in fact is not, doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed. It just means you should know what you are really getting into first, before doing it.

My dad always said to me that whatever I did, I had to be able to wake up in 20 years and still like what I was doing. Our generation is luckier in that the days of “one job for life” are long gone, and we are more mobile (both geographically and industrially) in terms of what we do. Keeping an open mind regarding opportunities, taking on board advice from friends and others, but not succumbing to peer or societal pressure if you really have your heart set on something is important. I really admire people who are able to do this. One of my best friends is going to do some missionary work in the Sudan next month. It’s something he’s always wanted to do, and despite some very intense family pressure against it, and at a not insignificant personal cost, he’s doing it.

It really is all a personal choice, one centered around personal values, which are different for everyone. Some people derive more satisfaction from cash than others, some people value free time more. Neither is inherently better than the other.

I tutor one person who today was telling me about their marks – they had done much better in a law mid-session than in an accounting mid-session. Turns out that they hate accounting, but of course, their parents wouldn’t have any of it and just told them to “work harder”. Changing courses or majors is a good option for someone in this situation, but parental pressure is considerable when parents think they know best and reckon that a commerce degree is “good grounding for getting a job in business”, despite a zero enjoyment level.

At this age I gues if you’re in something and you discover you don’t like it and in reality you don’t really need to do it, don’t tread water for too long. Thinking that if you rough it out for 5-6 years so you can get “comfortable” and then find something better is, as Warren Buffet said, like saving up sex for old age.

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16
May 05
Mon

Random countdowns

Advanced Contracts exam in 2.5 hours. Star Wars 3 premiere in 32.5 hours. Over 100 3000-word assignments due to be finished marking in 72.5 hours. One month left until my time as an undergraduate is over for good! :(

23
Apr 05
Sat

Is there a dentist in the family?

So I just got a phone call from Dad a couple hours ago. There’s some unusual background noise so I ask, “Where are you?”
“At the airport.”
“What are you doing at the airport?”
“Picking up your grandparents.”
“What? Mama and Yehyeh are in Sydney?! How come I never heard about this?”
“He’s here for dental work from your cousin.”
“Huh? What’s wrong with Singaporean dentists?”

Turns out that my grandfather chipped his tooth on Thursday and the following conversation transpired (ok it didn’t, but something like this must have been said):

Grandfather: “Damn, chipped my tooth. But that’s ok, we have a dentist in the family!”
Grandmother: “Yes, but you’re in Singapore and he’s in Sydney.”
Grandfather: “So?”

The next thing we know is that on Friday the three of them (yes, three) have booked a flight in and today here they are in Sydney for “emergency” dental surgery. I’m still incredulous.

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8
Apr 05
Fri

Just a little longer…

Ok, the last few weeks have been a write-off blogwise. There’s been like, 3 posts in 3 weeks. It’s been so busy. I even turned off my RSS feed reader two weeks ago, so I’m horribly out of touch with any news which is less significant than the sad death of the Pope. I think he was an outstanding leader of the Church.

I reckon normal posting will resume after next week. There’s a stack of things that’ll be finished by then: months of prep for the space moot competition will finally come to a head – it kicks off this Tuesday and runs over five days. Advanced Contracts finishes next week too, so I’ll be down from 3 uni subjects to 2, and there are other bits and pieces that will have been tied up by then.

Of course in a couple of weeks I start clerking again, there’ll be several uni essays to do and journal articles to review, but I think I should then have enough time to get around to what really matters this semester: finalising post-uni travel plans! Went to Yoshii last week, will have to remember to do a writeup on that as well.

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30
Mar 05
Wed

Still Alive

Mid-session break? What break???

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7
Mar 05
Mon

But it’s only week 2!

There are times, thankfully very occasionally, when I wish the human body did not need to eat, sleep or visit the toilet. This week is one of them…

28
Feb 05
Mon

The Final Semester

1000 pages photocopied, 1 toner shortage, 1 paper jam, 28 staples for $3. And so began my final semester at uni.

Finally finished the memorials today at 4.30am. Woke up at 8.00am to get into uni to print off the copies needed. There were lots of first year law students wandering around trying to figure out why the library lifts only go up to level 7 even though there are buttons all the way up to 14. Found out that the law school doesn’t have any staplers that can go through 45 page documents, so we had to take everything down to the printery. The printery was insanely busy, so they stuck us on the job queue and we had to reschedule the courier pick up time to late afternoon. By the time I got into IP, I was feeling pretty out of it. Falling asleep in the front row in the first class of the year is not a good way to start a subject with a 20% class participation component.

Anyway the memorials are all in now, and strangely enough, it feels like I’m on holidays now. It’s been a busy summer, but it’s time to enjoy the last semester, which is looking pretty interesting:

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21
Feb 05
Mon

Some Rain Photos

Been spending around 15 hours a day over the last week on the moot memorials. Slowly going crazy. But anyway, here are some snapshots of the heavy rains that came through over the weekend. My street turned into a river.

The last one was taken some time after the rain stopped when I was playing around with the camera. There’s still a fair amount of water on the road since you can see the car’s reflection on it.

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9
Feb 05
Wed

Happy CNY?

Happy Chinese New Year. Ok, so I’m one day late.

I have to say that CNY (especially went spent in Australia) holds next to no significance for me whatsoever, which has left my parents a little flustered. “But you’re Chinese! It’s significant!” they told me. I was amused that Dad sent me an email today saying, “What, no mention of CNY on your blog?”

Growing up in a western country and knowing nothing but the Gregorian calendar is probably responsible for this. CNY is a day I have little conception of, and I’d argue, a day most overseas-born Chinese know little about as well. Ok, so everyone knows CNY was yesterday and it’s now the year of the Rooster. Perhaps you know that the year is based on a lunar calendar. But I bet most people don’t know what year it is on the Chinese calendar. (Hint: It’s not 2005.) I mean, how can you celebrate the new year, when you don’t even know what year it is? Do people even know what the Chinese calendar looks like? How about its leap years (which include leap months)?

In the western world, a new year signifies renewal (in the same manner it does for the Chinese I’m guessing). For us, a year is significant because a huge number of things in our lives are broken up into years (school, birthdays, anniversaries, etc). It’s a bit bizarre turning in a new year on the Chinese calendar when I have no conception of what the calendar is. I was born in the year of the Rooster, so it’s apparently “my year”. Again, what’s the significance? I don’t pay attention to the western zodiac, why would I pay attention to the Chinese one?

Turns out the Chinese calendar is pretty intricate. Intricate enough that a mathematician at NUS wrote a 39-page paper on it.

It’s sort of like what happens on Labour Day every year. No one celebrates anything, because no one knows what it is, except that they get the day off work.

2
Feb 05
Wed

Five pieces of advice from Warren Buffet

Darren Johnson got to spend a few hours with Warren Buffet and came across five pieces of advice. You’ve probably heard them before, but to hear them from the world’s second richest man adds that extra sheen onto things. I like point 5: He said that many people talk about how they are going to just work at a high-paying job “for a little while” and then go do what they love – he equated that to “saving up sex for old age.” He said to “never do something that doesn’t excite you or that you dislike.”

I’m guilty of thinking in that way. However, sometimes to afford to do the things you love, you need the money.

25
Jan 05
Tue

Seeking Aid

The other day, heading back into the office with lunch, I was stopped by an Oxfam volunteer. Have you heard of Oxfam? “Yes.” Do you know what we do? “Ahh… I know you’re an international aid organisation that… hmm… I’m not sure.” which was invitation enough for her to launch into a spiel about how they help everyone with everything, everywhere. Do you know what ailment 30,000 people die from each day? “Uh… Cholera? Typhoid?” I offered. No, diarrhoea. That’s right, such a preventable thing kills thousands each day! (As a sidenote, Typhoid kills around 600,000 people each year, and diarrhoea is a symptom of it.)

I asked where I could find out more information about Oxfam, which was probably not a good thing to do, because I think she sensed she had just closed a deal. She pulled out a payment book. I don’t have any brochures to give you – we being a voluntary aid organisation and relying solely on donations and all, but if you sign up now for a monthly donation scheme, we’ll be happy to give you more information. Obviously in this situation, when asked to enter into a continuous donation plan, most people would like to know more about an organisation and how it compares to the other worthy global aid organisations out there.

“Sounds like a good cause. I’d like to find out more about it first, though.” Ah yes, but if you don’t sign up now, you won’t get the chance! “Why’s that? I can’t donate online?” Oh no, as I said, we’re a voluntary aid organisation and are under-resourced – there’s no way to donate online. “No phone number I can call?” No, same reason. Basically it’s just us volunteers, roaming around the city, trying to reach as many people as possible. Did you know your donations are completely tax deductible? “So if I don’t donate now, I won’t be able to later on?” That’s right, unless you can find one of us on the street. I don’t like being put on the spot, and especially not when I was starting to think she was either a little ignorant or being deceitful. As if a massive organisation like Oxfam wouldn’t make it as convenient as possible to accept donations. I thanked her for her time, walked off, and checked the Oxfam website. Sure enough, there are many ways to donate – online, via the phone and more.

4
Jan 05
Tue

Grandma’s 80th Birthday Pics

To family and family friends: pics from Hong Wai Ching’s 80th birthday are online here. I don’t know who most of the people are, so any help you can give with names will be appreciated.

I wasn’t in Singapore for the event, having other commitments, but sounds like it was an interesting night. I swear I’ve never seen my grandmother anywhere near as animated as she is here. Must be the grog.

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3
Jan 05
Mon

A Few Thumbnails of Egypt

Parents got back today. Armed with a nice new lens (EF 17-40mm f/4L USM) and a digital album, Dad went crazy with the photos overseas, snapping over 3000 shots in about three weeks. I look forward to test driving the lens in Beijing.

Thumbnails of Egypt

After complaining about how my current memory stick (or thumb-drive or pen-drive or whatever you call them) is too fat and sometimes takes up two USB slots, Dad picked me up a new one in Singapore. I didn’t know they made them so small these days… it’s miniscule!

Thumb drive

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1
Jan 05
Sat

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2005! The New Year’s fireworks display on Sydney Harbour was excellent.

We were walking down Elizabeth Street later in the night when this car slowly drives past filled with four burly guys of middle-eastern appearance. They have the windows wound down and have some cheesy 80s hit blasting on the radio, which they are singing along with at the top of their lungs. The crowds on the streets are in a pretty good mood, so there are a few that join in the singing. Suddenly, this guy walks by and dumps a glass of wine into the car through an open backseat window, laughs and jogs off.

There’s a scream of rage from the backseat of the car. The brake lights slam on and it screeches to a dead stop in the middle of the road. The radio turns off and the guy who has just had wine dumped on him clambers out of the car. He’s a little inebriated and has a bit of trouble freeing himself from his seat belt. In the meantime, the prankster has realised that the guy is actually coming after him and has bolted off into Hyde Park. If that’s not enough, the car quickly pulls over to the kerb, and the three other people in the car get out and are soon hauling ass across the park after this poor sod whose New Year is about to get unhappy very quickly. The car, lights still on, doors unlocked and keys still in the ignition, is just sitting there, empty on the curb. Ten minutes pass by and they’re still not back. I don’t know what happened to the guy they were chasing, but I suspect it wasn’t pretty.

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30
Dec 04
Thu

Year In Review

I’ll try to keep this short. It’s been a good year personally and a very interesting and tumultuous one in terms of world events. After kicking off 2004 with an enjoyable summer holiday in South-East Asia and Melbourne, it was time to knuckle down to a pretty full on year. I suppose my number one goal was to get a decent clerkship in a step towards securing employment for when I graduate next year, and also to try out “the corporate law thing”. I am really happy about the outcome of the process, which took a good 2-3 months and resulted in a clerkship that I’m finding positive. The downside of this is that the social side of life has been fairly quiet for me this year, replaced by interview stress and trying to bolster my average at the last minute. Winter holidays were cut short by having to do two subjects. This summer is no better, and there’s the clerkship on top of that. But this pain is all for a delayed payoff, and although 2005 will still be busy, the difference is that it should be relatively stress free and fun. And of course, because I should finish uni in July, I look forward to doing some travelling!

I got broadband in April, and still haven’t gotten over it.

Hear Ye! turns seven next month. I’ve been intending to do a redesign, separating out the design from the content with CSS, adding an XML-RPC posting interface and tweaking a few more things, but really haven’t been able to find the time. Maybe next year.

I’ve watched about 34 movies at the cinemas this year. It’s been a decent year for movies. The era of good, Braveheart-scale historical epics seems to be over though, with Troy and King Arthur disappointing. It was a good year for comedy and sequels. Added to the mix were a couple documentaries (Super-size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11).

World affairs have been off the scale this year, with the US and Australian federal elections, a boatload full of Iraq related news, a few corporate scandals, Google floating, and most recently, the tsunami tragedy in Asia. Wikipedia does a far better job of remembering the news events of 2004.

I don’t play computer games as much anymore, due to a geriatric video card, but it was a big year for game releases. There was, of course, the triumvirate of Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft.

My money this year went almost all to food and other going-out expenses. I spent very little on anything tangible and for once bought virtually nothing computer-related (apart from a DVD burner I got last month). Broadband has alleviated some of the money I would otherwise have spent on DVDs, movies and CDs. It’s all been saved up for travel, although funnily enough, this was never a conscious decision, it just sort of worked out that way.

I’m heading out to the harbour tonight to catch the fireworks and welcome in the New Year. Here’s to 2005!

A couple mundane Garage Tales

For as long as I’ve lived here, and I suspect for many more years than that, there’s a small group of Mediterranean people living on the corner of my street, probably retirees, who run a garage sale every single Sunday. I’ve walked past it many times on the way to the busstop and they have an amazing agglomeration of paraphernalia on sale: VCRs, TVs, picture frames, bicycles, tapes, books, chairs, other furniture and at least 3 microwaves. I don’t think they actually ever sold anything, because the pile of junk never seemed to grow smaller. They’d just sit out on the footpath watching people pass by and chat among themselves to pass the day.

One evening, a few weeks ago, I saw flashing red and blue lights from my bedroom balcony. Fire engines arrived down the end of the street, but, not being able to see any actual fire, I forgot about it. The next morning, as I stepped out of the building, I was assaulted by the smell of burnt… something. Turns out the garage had caught on fire (a defective microwave, maybe?). The blaze had blackened everything within a five metre radius of the garage, including the footpath and the grass on the nature strip. The contents of the garage was obliterated, now sitting on the footpath in one large, charred, still-smoking heap. You could smell it from hundreds of metres away.

They no longer run Sunday garage sales there anymore, and I suspect never will again. They still keep the garage door perpetually open, airing out a completely blackened, empty garage which still smells of charcoal.

There’s a taxi sitting in our apartment’s garage. It’s been there for over a year. It doesn’t have any rego plates, and the “Combined Taxi Services” decal has been peeled off from the side. It gathered a layer of dust and dirt so thick you could no longer see through the windows into its interior. One day I decided to scrawl the hackneyed “Wash Me” on the windscreen in big, thick letters. A few days later, the words “Don’t write on me” and “Bite Me” were written underneath it. And that’s when our entire apartment block decided to turn it into a bulletin board. Every day, there’d be a new retort and soon the taxi was overrun with messages in the dust. It was fun until we ran out of space to write and someone wiped off all the dirt. Just have to wait a few months for it to build up again. Well, you know what they say about small things amusing small minds…

23
Dec 04
Thu

It’s Christmas Eve

I’m finally on holidays so I went sea kayaking this morning with the newly-engaged Nick (congrats mate!) around The Spit, that was really enjoyable. Ducked into the city for a moot team meeting, then headed off to a bar for a few drinks.

End of the year is just around the corner, it has a very different feel for me this year. For one, I’m in Sydney, which hasn’t happened for five years. And secondly, I’m not spending it with family. Any family I have in Australia has unceremoniously ditched me and buggered off overseas to celebrate my grandmother’s 80th birthday in Singapore. Pffft. And to rub it in, I get a daily “vacation update” SMS from Dad which has included:

– “At the pyramids now awesome”
– “On train to Cairo How is everything Got hundreds of photos”
– “Going to Abu Simbel now its 3am now”
– “Got to go in a convoy takes 3 hours to get there by bus”
– “hi have u been receiving my msg on the nile going to Edfu everything is fine mum having great time”
– “Do you want a Galabiya a egyptian dress” [what the?]

He clearly hasn’t worked out how to put punctuation in his text messages, but hey, can’t ask too much can we?

Hmm, I just realised how ironic the term “vacation work” is.

20
Dec 04
Mon

An Update

Time for a post on this neglected website.

Work
Overall it’s going well. Not every bit of work I’ve received is exciting, but since it’s all so completely new to me, it’s still quite interesting and it’s been one big learning experience so far. When there haven’t been any evening functions (the minority of days), work finishes anywhere from 6.00pm to 7.30pm. The good thing is that it isn’t a struggle to make it to that time – when I’m kept occupied with varied tasks, time passes fairly smoothly.

In terms of environment, it’s very different to anywhere else I’ve worked. Most law firms still haven’t switched to open-plan and the result is that it’s a very quiet working environment most of the time. Some clerks have complained about feeling isolated, but the flipside is that it allows you to really focus on work without too many distractions, except when the view from my office dramatically changes when those late afternoon storms roll in.

It’s been good catching up with friends in the city during lunch. I bumped into one today I haven’t seen for over a year. He was a BIT who did a finance masters afterward and is now working in an investment bank doing M&A work. Always interesting to see what people have done with their careers.

We had the firm Christmas party last Friday at Luna Park. I’ve never been there before. They gave us a free ride pass and I went on a few of the rides, although it’s a bit weird riding a roller coaster in a suit. Great views and location, but it’s a pretty small amusement park, and I’d be disappointed if I had to pay for it. During dinner, they held something akin to Australian Idol, with several staff members getting up on stage to sing in front of the thousand or so people there. They even got Dicko on to judge. There was also a “mystery guest performer” who turned out to be Flynn. As some girls discovered later in the night on the dance floor, Flynn is apparently as seedy as he looks.

Flynn
“You see me on TV, yes?”

Space Moot
The other bit of work which has replaced my holidays is drafting the 24,000 words required for our moot memorials. Fi got back from her Linklaters clerkship last week (where she was working longer hours than me!) and we finally have started putting pen to paper. We’re meant to have our first draft complete by the time I leave for China, which means the 10-day Christmas/New Year break I have is broken.

On the idiot box
Went to a Lord of the Rings marathon at Shan’s. The three extended edition DVDs, back to back – 11am start, 12.30am finish. Also been wading through Stargate DVD box sets from season 1 onwards. It’s pretty good sci-fi.

Hmm, I also won this double Hoyts movie pass after entering into a contest on the back of a packet of M&Ms… so these competitions are legitimate after all!

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28
Nov 04
Sun

The Summer Ahead

It hit 40 degrees today. Summer’s only a couple days away and I start my clerkship tomorrow. Hopefully it’s not that hot this week – nothing worse than going home in a crowded, humid bus on sticky vinyl seats. I’m working a three-day week, not sure which days yet. The other two days will be spent with Shan and Fi working on the space moot, unfortunately most of that time will probably be in the library. The uni gave us 24 hour access to the law library and I went up there late at night during the exams a couple weeks ago for a change of environment. It’s pretty eerie there at 1am – it’s dead silent because the airconditioning switches off after hours – but it’s also kinda cool how the place is deserted, no distractions and all that. Except for the distraction of Dave lasciviously ranting on about all the KASI SIKIT action you could get in a deserted library (sorry, injoke).

The Dolls
Which reminds me. On the way back from another late night Maccas runs, we drove past the Creepy Doll again, just for kicks. When I pulled up alongside the house, the doll was dangling off the clothesline as usual, but my heart skipped a beat when I realised that there was the silhouette of a person sitting down on a chair underneath the doll, its eyes staring back at me. We freaked out, I hit the accelerator and we were off.

I drove by the house the next day and snapped a photo:

You can imagine how unsettling that would look at night in the shadows, this row of dolls staring out into an alleyway at passer-bys. Why would someone do something like that???

Wanderlust
I always get the travel bug during exam times. Procrastination takes me to a bunch of travel blogs which make me wish I was somewhere far away. Parents leave for Singapore, Egypt and Taiwan in the week after next. Unfortunately, I’m stuck here, but at least there’s Beijing for me in January, which apparently is getting bloody cold:

Beijing is getting bloody cold. Forecast for snow today, but as yet has not started, but the wind is worse than when we were in Vienna, and all the locals laugh at me when I ask whether this is normal… ominously they say that this is nothing, and the best is yet to come. Apparently the worst is February, so when you come in January, be prepared.

Next Year
On the topic of travel, current plans are to finish my degree in the first half of next year and spend the remainder of it travelling. Don’t know where yet, but I’m happy as long as it’s somewhere I haven’t been before. Don’t know with who, but I’ve got a couple of friends who are interested. Anyone else free at any point during the second-half of next year who’s interested? E-mail me.

And now for something completely different
Sighted at last night’s birthday party:

I am so going to get in trouble for posting this

Photo courtesy of Papparazzi Dan.

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2
Nov 04
Tue

Midnight Macca’s Run Mascot

It’s that time of year again. Exams are around the corner. I’m currently ploughing through Litigation 2, otherwise know as rules of evidence. Evidence is probably the most intricate and technical law subject I’ve had so far. There’s virtually a thousand hoops a piece of evidence may have to jump through in order to be admitted into court. Want to give evidence in court about what someone said to you? Welcome to the Hearsay Rule and its 101 exceptions! The thing about Lit 2 is that the whole course is intricately connected – a single piece of evidence may be affected by relevance considerations, the credibility rule, the hearsay rule, general discretions and so on – and these are all separate topics which are hard enough to understand on their own, let alone when you try to combine them. Horrible!

I'll CLIP you!

But anyway, exam time also means the reappearance of late night trips down to Maccas (they really need to open another 24 hour eatery around here). Our route there takes us into this dingy, narrow side road. On that road is a property with an old pre-Hills Hoist clothesline, and on that clothesline is hung a doll. It’s a rather creepy doll. It’s been there for years and it hangs there in the orange gloom cast by a mercury-vapour streetlamp further down the road. Although the clothesline can rotate, the foot-high doll always faces outwards towards the road.

11
Oct 04
Mon

It’s a Nice, Warm Day

Temperature’s finally broken past the 30˚C mark and is currently hovering around 35˚C! Finally, back to t-shirt and shorts weather.

13
Sep 04
Mon

A Brief Respite

I was at an end-of-subject dinner for Space Law last week. By the end of dinner, I came to the somewhat startling realisation that I was the only one seated at our half of the table that had lived solely in Sydney. Our lecturer had spent many years lawyering in Europe and then investment banking in Asia. One friend had studied in New York for four years, another had worked in the Philippines and Canada for an extended period of time. Yet another grew up in the UK and had lived in Singapore for a stint. One girl had grown up in South Africa, and another in Hong Kong with expat parents. The incredible diversity of people that I come into contact with at uni never ceases to amaze me. For the most part, most people at law school have had incredibly privileged lives (myself included, all things considered).

Here’s a person who’s lived in England, Australia, Pakistan, Israel and the US, all by the time he finished High School.

31
Aug 04
Tue

Time for an Update

Apologies for the lack of substantive posts recently. Things are getting ridiculously busy. Clerkship recruitment is in full swing over the next month or so and there’s a slew of dinners and birthday events ahead filling in the gaps. I also got selected to the uni’s Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot team, which is going to take up a fair whack of my time throughout the next six months or so (especially over summer). More on all of this in time… until then, you’ll just have to look at quicklinks :)

16
Jul 04
Fri

Uni Results

A bit disappointing for last session. Three low-range Ds with Litigation results still pending (slackers!). Screwed up the property exam by neglecting to see (well, not so much see as remember) half of a very important sentence in the exam question, so I was expecting a reduced mark. Ironically, Legal Theory, which I thought was last session’s horror subject, turned out to be the best. Fed Con result was very unremarkable. I had the same lecturer for those latter two subjects who incidentally writes the briefest e-mail replies ever. Normally they consist of four letters, always lower-case, always on one line: “ok ag”.

Update (21/7/04): Haha I don’t believe it, I got an HD for Litigation!

4
Jul 04
Sun

Thredbo Trip

The skiing was terrific. The consensus among the locals was that the snow hadn’t been this good, this early in the season for over a decade.

We were accommodated at Boloco Station, a large pastoral property almost an hour away from the slopes. Boloco was owned and operated by the grandparents of a mate from school – a wonderfully hospitable, generous and amazingly healthy couple in their eighties. The property has been in their family for many generations, passed down by an unbroken line of first-born sons since Australia was settled by the Brits. The family tradition since then has been to name the eldest son Reuben, and with four living Reubens, it gets quite confusing at times which one people are referring to! For clarity they refer to each other as Ben, Reuben Snr, Reuben Jnr and little Ben.

When we got there, we heard reports that winds had caused the power station at Jindabyne to “fall over” the day before, so we were a little nervous about the conditions at Thredbo. The first morning there was extremely windy, but by lunchtime the wind had disappeared and conditions were excellent. There was a good coverage of snow, but slopes were pretty icy which is normal for Australia I suppose. Also developed a hatred for T-Bars after falling off not once, but three times. On the next day, all the lifts were in operation and we took Karels T-Bar to Australia’s highest lifted point. Shen had the bright idea of going down the black (and closed) Golf Course Bowl run, and we ended up going cross-country across the mountain side. Had a much better run with T-Bars this day, though. Looks like a good snow season ahead, especially if you’re thinking of going at the end of this month or later. Photos here.

30
Jun 04
Wed

Whew

Long day, but work finished much earlier than anticipated. It appears that some buses were still running this morning despite the strike. The plan was originally to walk up to Bondi Junction and catch a train into town from there. However, upon reaching Randwick, it seemed that some buses were still running. By a fluke, I arrived at work only ten minutes late after catching an express service.

I’m off to the snow until Sunday. Unfortunately, even while I’m down in Thredbo, I still have to mark exam papers during the evenings. At least it ends up paying for the trip.

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29
Jun 04
Tue

Bedtime

Work has gone crazy… got back from it at about midnight and that was only because the systems had to shut down for the night. Lots of business to be done at financial year end, and of all the bloody days in year, the bus drivers decide to hold a fucking bus strike from 6-10am later today. On the busiest business day of the year. I have to walk to work. Not happy.

18
Jun 04
Fri

Exams! Dead Ahead!

Ok, just finished the note taking phase of my exam prep. I now have a completed set of notes for Property 1 and Litigation 1. Time to start reading through them. Property exam’s next Monday, and Litigation is on Wednesday, as I noted earlier. And that’s it. All over and done with within the first three days of the exam period. That means I have a bonus one and a half weeks of holidays! Which means I get time to: work during the last week of the financial year where everything goes crazy; watch the two seasons of Lana, I mean, Smallville episodes that are waiting for me; proof an article by Bob Debus for the Law Journal; torment my beleaguered flatmate who only finishes exams the following Thursday; and relax.

12
Jun 04
Sat

Advice Needed

(Thank you to those who commented on this post.)

At the Malaya At the Malaya

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30
May 04
Sun

Another day…

… another year.

26
May 04
Wed

Sickness sets in

Starting to get sick again. Feels like a frog has crawled into my throat and died there. And the stores are shut so I can’t get to my magical sore throat panacea.

Three and a half weeks until exams. Less than a week to enjoy still being 22!

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10
May 04
Mon

Argh

I have so much piling up right now that insanity is just a few short steps away. It’s crap having to turn opportunities down because of lack of time.

29
Apr 04
Thu

Alas…

The NZ snow fields beckon. I’m beginning to think that enrolling in Restitution for Winter Session at uni was a bad idea.

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24
Apr 04
Sat

Defensive Driving Course

Finally used up my gift voucher for a defensive driving course. The day-long course was held down at Oran Park Raceway and I found it very informative. A great deal of the day was spent practising emergency braking – straight line, around corners and swerving, which is not a huge deal if you have ABS, but pretty interesting when you don’t, like my car. The aim is not to jump on the brakes (which is intuitive), but to quickly squeeze the brakes as much as possible without locking the wheels and skidding. To illustrate the point, the instructor did a neat demo where he showed that he could apply the proper braking pressure using his hand instead of his foot to hit the brakes. It takes a few goes to get the pressure right, and it’s not the sort of thing you’d try out by yourself – not to mention that the car smells of singed rubber afterwards! Saw a lot of demonstrations showing rear wheel lockups (and subsequent spins), front wheel lockups, oversteer, understeer, and what not to do in such situations. Then we got to try it all out, which was the fun bit.

It’s a bit pricey, but I would recommend one of these courses, they are surprisingly worthwhile and you pick up a lot of extra info about your car and how to handle it.

Lunch at Apple

Caught up with an old high school teacher for lunch on Friday. He left the school in the same year I finished to work for Apple, so I drove up to Apple’s Australia HQ in French’s Forest to meet him. Back in school they had these old Mac SEs and other assorted Apple paraphrenalia. I always used to trash Macs whenever I got the opportunity (I still do :). It was good when they switched over to Pentium-166MXes because that meant we could occasionally play Quake during lunchtime.

Anyway, Apple has grown leaps and bounds over the last five years. I still enjoy bagging out
Macs because, well, they’re Macs and they only have one mouse button. Nonetheless, Apple’s industrial design is second-to-none in the computing industry. Although the Apple HQ is pretty much just a corporate venue, the reception area is decked out like an Apple store with a range of Powerbooks, iMacs and so on on display just begging to be played with and touched (and they can be). I got a brief tour of the place and there isn’t much there, but it very much has a dot-commy feel to it. Techies in jeans, funky furniture, weird walls, crazy chairs and lots of translucency. The call centre there, which handles tech support for the Asia-Pacific region is called the “green room”. The floor is done in a lime green (garish or soothing, it’s a matter of opinion) and the walls are ceiling-to-floor blackboards. Not a CRT to be seen.

My eyes lit up when I got to play with what was alleged to be the first and only non-imported Mini iPod currently in Australia (its April release date was delayed). It’s tiny. It’s sexy. It’s cool. It’s fun to use. I want one. Unfortunately, for someone a poor uni student like me, just a bit too pricey (especially compared with the 15GB model) to justify forking out that much cash for it. I was assured that Apple was in fact making very slim margins on the iPods, but if you want to be cynical, I guess this is counteracted by the limited battery life of them requiring a repurchase after a year or two.

Shish, he says hi to you as well.

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12
Apr 04
Mon

Blah

I hope the Easter break was a good one for you. I went to the gym for the first time in a while, overdid it a little and was hobbling around for most of the weekend. Very sore.

Not many people have complained about putting our public holidays on Christian-centric dates, but I found this article about religion making its way into politics again interesting. This is far from relapsing back into the darker days of a theocracy. However, it does seem that Churches are beginning to realise that if they want to do something about legislating according to their beliefs, they have to get people with similar convictions into power.

30
Mar 04
Tue

Hmmm

My net connection dropped out a little while ago. I just reconnected. At 49.2kbps. It’s never connected above 28kbps before. It’s downloading at almost 5kB/s. It’s never done more than 3.6kB/s before. Could it be? Could it finally be?????

28
Mar 04
Sun

Daylight Saving Over

Extra hour of sleep, but now it starts to get dark fast.

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25
Mar 04
Thu

Lightning Striking Twice

Holy shit. Ok. So I was at the Sydney Law Careers Fair at Darling Harbour today. Hundreds of law students from around Sydney flocking to a few handfuls of large law corporate firms like seagulls after a few hot chips. That’s not the interesting bit. After I’d finished my interrogations and gathering the armfuls of brochures and pens and mousepads and whatnot, I started to head for home. I’m making my way out the door when a voice calls out from the side at me, “Hey! Hi!” I turned around and got the shock of my life.

It was Anne. The softdrink marketing surveyor chick. Yes, that Anne.

“Remember me?” How could I forget? Turns out she graduated from law at UTS in 2001, took a year or two off and was now after her PLT and a job. I extricated myself from the conversation as quickly as possible and left.

After all that, you might say I should go out and buy a lottery ticket, but it’s probable that if I did, I’d get struck by a bolt of lightning on the way to the newsagency.

The Careers Fair
It was actually quite different from last night’s expo (see yesterday’s entry). Australian firms place a lot more focus on all-round achievement compared with the Hong Kong firms, which is nice to see. Not all, but still very much the majority, of firms were very friendly and approachable – notably Freehills, Blakes and AAR, but I suppose it depends which individual of those firms you get to chat to. All of the top tier firms naturally sound highly attractive. As is expected, the competition is pretty intensive for them. However, unlike other blue-ribbon industries like i-banking or consulting, most of the law firms are accepting anywhere from 15 to 30 clerks for the summer clerkship programs.

Also interesting was that no particular emphasis is placed upon a commerce background, despite them all being commercial law firms (unlike i-banking where finance is a plus). I suppose the rationale for this is that you cover commercial subjects in law school anyway, so you have some relevant background. It’s definitely good for me in that although people will look at my resume, see BIT and stereotypically think “computer guy”, it theoretically won’t matter (in my experience, recruiters tend to skip the “B” part in BIT). But ultimately recruitment for all these top tier firms reminds me of this little exchange in Starship Troopers:

Zim: I see you specifically requested transfer from Fort Cronkite to this training group…
Dizzy: Sir, I heard it was the best, sir!
Zim: It is the best… BUT WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE GOOD ENOUGH??

The summer clerkship application season opens around July-August, so we’ll see how we go.

Blah

It’s been a really busy session so far, haven’t been getting out very much. Can’t wait until the mid-session break in a few weeks’ time. Every session there’s always one subject that I hate, and this session it’s the compulsory jurisprudential subject – Legal Theory. Way too abstract for me. I guess I wasn’t cut out for philosophy!

Went to an International Law Careers Fair tonight at uni. A more apt title would be “Hong Kong Law Careers Fair” as all the firms there except one (Linklaters) were Hong Kong based. This was bad because I don’t speak any form of Chinese whatsoever. Language skills are something that are quite dependent on environment. Where you were born and where you grew up have a huge bearing upon what languages you pick up. Sure, you can pick up languages later on in life, but most people will only pick up fluency in one language learnt in this way. And only then if they spend some amount of time in a country that speaks that language. (Programming languages don’t count.) Do I wish I could speak another language? Sure. But it’s more a feeling of resignation than regret that I never picked up one when I was young, when the brain is geared for rapid learning.

I guess this is why I’m somewhat annoyed when relatives ask me, “Why can’t you speak Chinese?” as if I was supposed to be able to speak it by mere virtue of my race and as if I have some sort of genetic defect because I can’t. Actually, I might start replying to that with, “Why can’t you speak proper English?”

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14
Mar 04
Sun

The Broadband Saga Continues

We rang up Telstra again today to see if anything had changed in the last year or so regarding our broadband situation. Cable is nearly impossible to get because they have to install some sort of cable box into the apartment complex, and that requires the consent of most of the residents as well as strata approval. So it comes down to ADSL. Now, the telephone wiring into this apartment is strange. It may be pair gain, but I don’t think pair gain is normally used to hook up 18 units. Anyway, the most we can connect at on dial-up is 28.8k. Back to Telstra. The person on the line informed us that we were probably close enough to the local exchange (which is on Todman Ave), but they would have to do some line testing. She put through a “transposition request” which is supposed to move us onto a suitable copper line at the exchange. It’s not a guaranteed thing. They said they will get back to us in 5 to 6 weeks, but I won’t be holding my breath. Taking bets: it’s about 1000 to 1 odds that we will be able to get ADSL.

8
Mar 04
Mon

It’s a Dry Heat

Ok, I take it back. Out came the shorts and miniskirts at uni again as the temperature rocketed to 40 today. The wind was blowing, but it wasn’t cooling – it felt like walking into a fan-forced oven.

1
Mar 04
Mon

Summer’s Gone

Weather sucks. I’ve had to start packing jumpers for the first time in months.

18
Feb 04
Wed

Grrr

I hate writing cover letters. Thank you, that is all.

11
Feb 04
Wed

Optometrist Appointment

Since 18 months ago it seems that the eyesight in my right eye has declined a little more, taking it to 575. My left eye is stable at 525. There’s a point during the checkup when the optometrist gets up really really close with one of those magnifying eyepieces to peer into my eye. It may be just me, but I find the image of him squinting up close, head turned at a 90 degree angle, comical and I swear I have to bite my tongue to stop laughing. I wasn’t laughing when he told me I needed a new pair of glasses and hit me with the bill. It’s a half-rimmed pair of Hugo Boss frames, and I don’t understand how a little bit of metal wiring can cost so much. All the other brands were in the same price range as well. Health care can be so expensive.

9
Dec 03
Tue

Branson Q&A

Sir Richard BransonExcellent Q&A session with Sir Richard Branson this evening at UNSW. He’s a very clear spoken, doesn’t use a lot of buzzwords (which was really noticeable when compared with the closing remarks of Prof Whittred, the faculty Dean) and is just plain understandable. Starting a business at abour age 15 and slightly dyslexic, Branson is the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. The hour session basically could be condensed down into four points:

1. You’ve got to get out there and take a risk if you want to get anywhere. That may mean laying everything out on the line.

2. The most important part to business is simple People. The audience basically adopted Branson’s mantra of “People people people”. Surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and that are different from you. Learn to delegate. He emphasised this again and again, that he has attributed his success to finding the right people, as it is the people that run the business. (Obviously, Branson doesn’t have time to run all the aspects of a business.)

3. Have a passion for what you’re starting up a business in. Don’t just do it because you think it will make money.

4. Have a good company name that you can attach a strong brand to. One that can be global, even if you never make it that far (you never know).

He also mentioned that people should stay away from banks as much as is possible in terms of obtaining initial funding, because they can be ruthless.

Also interesting was his thoughts on university. He noted that virtually none of the entrepreneurs of his generation were tertiary educated. Has the trend towards more of the population getting tertiary education changed things though? Perhaps. Branson acknowledged that university provides a very good safety net in terms of finding a job. However, with regards to entrepreneurialism, which is really only where the really massive gains can be made from, life changes as you get older. People become more conservative, getting tied down with relationships, perhaps mortgages and so on. And this conservative nature runs contrary to being an entrepreneur, which is all about getting out there and giving it a go, and to hell with the consequences (which in most cases is limited to corporate bankruptcy). Basically it’s a risk versus return argument.

Just a note on business failures, it seems to be that Australia’s business culture doesn’t foster entrepreneurialism as much as, say, America. Venture capital flows like water there, compared to here, and it seems that the Americans aren’t as perturbed about business failures (they just pick themselves off the floor, try again and start a new one).

One question he fielded was from a Com/Law undergrad who was wondering whether he should take up an investment banking job, or whether he should try starting up his own business first. The answer was for the latter, because the job, you can potentially fall back on, but a business idea is hard to go back to. First mover advantage.

Bumped into Kit outside afterwards, then decided to head back inside where we grabbed Branson’s autograph. Kev mobbed him and virtually fell down on his knees begging good Sir Richard to write his business philosophy onto the card (naturally: “people, people, people”).

As always, inspirational and deceptively simple, but, given that there are so few hugely successful entrepreneurs floating around, it’s not.

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8
Dec 03
Mon

Down Time

I’ve always said that in a firm whose core competencies are not in IT, IT support staff are grossly underappreciated. Anyway, one of the systems has been down for a while, hence a lot of sitting around at work and doing nothing. I guess when you don’t drive the profit line, and a lot of your work is to do with fixing problems which never should have happened in the first place, it’s hard to gauge just how much worth you’re contributing to an organisation. The ironic thing is that, most organisations simply cannot function without an IT department these days. It’s weird being on the other side of the fence, conscious of the fact that while we wait for the systems to come back up, the “slow and useless” ISD staff are working overtime trying to figure out what some user did to stuff things up.

Speaking of stuff ups, it is rumoured that UNSW hired an IT consulting firm a couple years ago to webify the student enrolment system in the form of “New South Student”. It was an absolutely horrible implementation, I think I have bitched about it before. Anyway, they’ve done an overhaul of the system and it looks nicer, and runs much smoother now: My UNSW.

5
Dec 03
Fri

The Week

Almost there… a busy, although quite monotonous week at work. Apparently when you’re at a computer for prolonged periods, you’re meant to refocus your eyes every thirty minutes or so to reduce eyestrain. It’s quite easy to do at work when you’ve got a window seat. For some reason, although the view is nothing special, I don’t get sick of looking outside – sort of like staring out of an airplane window. There’s something cool about seeing the storm clouds and rain roll in across the city too. But enough of my idiosyncracies.

Received news today that I got selected as a social justice Intern at the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre for second session of next year! “The principal goal of the Program is to provide students with training and practical experience in research, writing and advocacy on aspects of policy and practice relating to social justice (especially the reduction of inequity and exploitation).” Should be a terrific experience!

Next Tuesday evening I’m going to hear Sir Richard Branson talk at UNSW. Definitely will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

27
Nov 03
Thu

Holidays!

And with today’s exam over, another academic year is all over and three glorious months of holidays await. What’s ahead…

Not completely out of the woods… I have to mark a bunch of uni exams for an IS course by next Monday. Paintball on Saturday – a little violence always helps to reduce stress. A few dinners scattered around here and there. I have a short spate of work at Mac Bank starting tomorrow and running through to the 9th of December. Should be a nice injection of cash before I head overseas on the 10th. The itinerary is:

– 10/12/03: Sydney to Singapore
– 11/12/03: Singapore to Kuala Lumpur
– 19/12/03: Kuala Lumpur to Singapore
– 22/12/03: Singapore to Bangkok and Hat Yai
– 29/12/03: Bangkok to Singapore
– 6/1/04: Singapore to Sydney

Getting taken around KL by my hospitable flatmate who has asserted that the gastronomic tour he’ll take me on will be guaranteed to give me the runs. Which is really very unsavoury given the state of public toilets in Asia. Hopefully should catch the Return of the King in Malaysia on the 18th. The dollar has rallied nicely over the year, so much so that everything in Singapore is effectively 20% off. The Ringgit to Aussie dollar exchange rate is roughly 2.7 to 1. Shopping time! Time to put back on all that weight I lost by eating too many instant noodles over the exam period. Mmmm hawker food…

If you’re a long-term reader of this site, you’ll notice I’ve been to Thailand twice in the last couple years. The reason why we’re going for a third year running is that it’s my grandfather’s 80th birthday. He seems to have some bizarre and objectionable fascination with Bangkok (I’d rather not dwell too deeply on the reason why) which is why the family is “humouring him” and going there AGAIN this year. Ah well, the upside are those damn nice Thai massages…

Before I head off, I hope to implement MMS/PXT posting to this website. Just need to write a MIME parser and something to handle image linking. When I get back, it’s time to give this site a much needed overhaul, both front and back.

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20
Nov 03
Thu

Yabby Update

We’re not having much luck with freshwater crabs. The one Dave got for his 21st a few months back died suddenly the other day. It had the entire tank to itself, so the cause is unknown. Meanwhile, the mother yabby moulted while her babies were still hanging on to the underside of her tail. Yabbies eat their old shell to regain some calcium, so the babies were chomped up too. By the time we realised the moult had happened, the father had already dragged the tail shell back into the log to munch on. Oh well, apparently they breed several times during Spring/Summer, so there may be more on the way. And we now have a vacant tank to relocate any new babies.

14
Nov 03
Fri

Studying at Home

Time for a time-out with my journal. It’s late again, and I’ve just finished covering the wonders of judicial review of administrative decisions. Tomorrow I have to cover natural justice (aka procedural fairness, due process, what Hicks is getting none of because he’s outside the boundaries of the Rule of Law), prerogative writs and equitable remedies. But I’m sure you’re as interested in hearing about that as I am in reading about it. So, moving on, I found this amusing {src: Swhat}. Anyhoo… this is what I really wanted to say:

Stop deluding yourself, you’re not going to the library to study.

I have never found the concept of going to the library to study attractive. It takes time to get there and you have to lug all your stuff around with you. It’s not like you actually use any of the thousands of books that are around you. The chairs are hard and uncomfortable, you’re not allowed food or drinks, and the air is stale.

So, the rationale is that there’s no distractions like at home (“Hmmm I wonder if Fark updated”, or, “Hmmm a second Paris Hilton video where she’s allegedly in a threesome is floating around on the net”, or even, “Gee these bookshelves really need to be dusted!”). But let’s face it, you’ve everything you need at home. Food, drinks, a comfy chair, all your books, notes, paper and a computer. Maybe the computer is the bane – the ultimate procrastination device, the time-acceleration machine – but typing up notes is a helluva lot faster than writing them. The library doesn’t have computers. Well, it does, but they all have high speed internet connections so that doesn’t do jack for getting away from distractions. Bring a laptop? That’s assuming I could afford one, and anyway with the uniwide wireless network, you can’t escape a net connection these days. And there are people around in the library. You’ll bump into friends, then you’ll end up chatting, then realise you’re getting absolutely no work done, and end up going downstairs for a coffee that lasts three hours. When you’re at home, you’re a Nigel, true. But studying, albeit appearing more enjoyable, is not terribly effective when it’s a social event.

Idiotic leader / Deranged teddy bear
(With apologies to Paste)

All this is logically, probative evidence that it’s better to just stay at home. Besides, your bed is much more comfortable than the graffitied library desk in front of you.

3
Nov 03
Mon

Exams-a-Coming

That means there about 2400 pages of readings we’re meant to revise. Hah. This is Week 14, next week is Stuvac, and then the week after that, the real pain starts. I am sooooo gone for Admin Law, the subject from hell. Is there anything more scintillating than the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth)? Oh no, I don’t think so. Time to get back to it.

29
Oct 03
Wed

How Not To Run a Door-to-Door Survey

That’s it. I’m not answering the doorbell anymore. No good can come out of it. I’ve had countless telecomm salespeople, religious nuts and midnight parcel delivery psychopaths. However, this afternoon was a watershed for traumatic door encounters.

So someone buzzes the door this afternoon. My ever-so-dependable “Stuart you answer the door” wussy flatmate happened to be legitimately indisposed at the time.

“Hello, I am doing door-to-door surveys, would you like to do one?”
“Erm, no sorry.”
“You get a scratchie.”
“Oh. Ok. Come right up.”

So this pudgy Asian girl bounded up the stairs and into my apartment, said, “Nice place you have here,” and launched straight into a rather lengthy self-administered questionnaire without any survey introduction at all.

Twenty minutes later, after answering countless mindnumbing questions on my softdrink drinking habits, I started questioning whether it was worth the scratchie. Example questions:

“Do you identify any of these drinks as masculine? What about feminine?”

“Do you strongly or slightly agree or disagree with the statement, ‘Solo is low on the fizz so you can slam it down fast?'”
To this, I just cracked up laughing and said, “Uh, I suppose so? Strongly?”

It did make me somewhat self-conscious when she asked, “What softdrink types do you know?” and I rattled off a list so fast that she had to ask me to repeat it several times because she couldn’t keep up (and all she had to do was circle the brands). I guess we are all guilty of consumerism when we can run off a list of 10 different
softdrinks without thinking. I was relieved when the demographics section, signalling the end of the survey, arrived.

“Would you be interested in participating in any focus groups?”
“Definitely not.”
“Do you have an internet connection? Yeah? What about our online research program?”
“Hmmm, yeah ok.”

I got this really weird look from her, like she didn’t realise how much more comfortable it is to answer questionnaires online. Anyway, she took down my contact details, and it was only when she asked for my e-mail address that I thought it probably would have been wise to ask her if there was a privacy policy or something attached to the information I was giving. And it only occurred to me because the event of disclosing my e-mail
address signalled, “Spam! Spam! Spam!” in my head. So I gave her an email address I had set up for situations like this.

Luckily, she later pulled out a slip of paper disclosing Millward Brown’s privacy policy, passed me two scratchies, and a slip of paper to sign. That’s when things got… interesting. As I was filling out the piece of paper, she continued asking rapid-fire questions and
talkingreallyfasteventhoughthesurveyhadfinished:

“So you’re a uni student right? What do you study?”
“Law.”
“Oh cool, at New South?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Ah, so what year are you in?”
“First year.”

This always elicits a quizzical look, because I don’t look like I’m 18 (despite what the cinema box office staff think), so inevitably I had to follow it up with an explanation.

“Oh this is my second degree. I did an IT degree first.”
“So how long was your first degree?”
“Four years.”
“And how long is law?”
“It’s another three years, yeah it’s a long slog!”
“Damn. I can’t imagine studying for five years, let alone seven…”
“Ah, but uni life is excellent. The only problem is that you don’t make money while you’re doing it!” I joked.
“Yeah… so you’re like… poor.”
“Uh…”
“Don’t you feel like you need to work? And why is law taking so long?”
“Well, in my first degree, I worked for about 18 months full-time and decided from that that the working life could wait.”
“Why didn’t you do law at the start? Didn’t you get the marks?”
“Yeah I did, but I wanted to do IT, and the course I did meant that I couldn’t do combined law at that stage.”

Quizzical look. More explanation required. A disturbing suspicion and discomfort growing.

“I got a scholarship for IT which meant that I couldn’t combine it with law, hence the longer time it takes to do the two degrees separately.”
“Oh wow, you got a scholarship?”
“Yeah.”
“At New South?”
“Yeah.”
“And now you’re doing law?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you really smart?”

What the? How the fuck are you supposed to answer a question like that?

“I’m alright, I suppose,” I muttered with a disturbed chuckle. Cue the bomb.
“Do you have a girlfriend?–“
“Uh… I–“
“–do you want to go out with me?”

I think I held my composure in a physical sense, but it took me a split second to regain my mental composure, which had been momentarily obliterated. (She was quite unattractive, by the way – that’s an important point.)

“Look, I don’t know you. And all you really know about me is that I drink too much Coke for my own good.”
“Oh…”

She left soon afterwards.

I felt violated. And I only won a measly $4 off the scratchies.

So, no more doorbells. Unless they’re really good looking.

25
Oct 03
Sat

Amalgamated Post

Daylight saving is back. It’s the start of Week 13 tomorrow. That means exams are three weeks away. Luckily, after a long week, all the assessments and assignments for this session are out of the way. Had a crim law presentation on attempted crimes, followed by a gruelling finance exam on Tuesday (let this be a lesson that while it is possible to learn, virtually from scratch, an entire semester’s worth of Applied Valuation over three evenings, it is most definitely not recommended). Got a couple of assignments back and it never ceases to amaze me how savagely they mark law essays. Went to Oktoberfest in which I performed my bi-annual test to check if my alcohol allergy was still around. Yep, it was. I think UNSW smashed through Macquarie’s pitiful world record for people drinking shots on the same day.

Elsewhere…
– iTunes? This is me. Although a Winamp 5 beta has been released. It’s version 5 and not 4 because it’s Winamp 2 + 3. What is with companies and version numbers? Even Adobe has caught on, naming their latest version of Photoshop as “Photoshop CS” which stands for Creative Studio, I think.
– New 5MP Sony digicam with zoom lens that’ll comfortably fit in most pockets. Very nice.
– Warren, of Virgin 5c SMS messages fame, has a web site. *Shudder*
– Native Koreans tend to have a very difficult time grappling with English, but I don’t think resorting to surgery (“frenotomy”) is the panacea to your child’s pronounciation problems. I’m pretty sure that all Australian-born Koreans have no problems with the Aussie accent.
Google hunting for I-Bank to underwrite its IPO, wants US$16bn valuation. I’d invest.

13
Oct 03
Mon

Lawrence (1917 – 2003)

Word arrived that my grandfather passed away in Singapore last week. Mum went back to visit him a couple months ago. After a doctor’s report came through early last week that he only had a few days to live, Mum had booked a flight straight away. Unfortunately, the doctors overestimated how much time he had left to live (something extremely unusual given their usual conservative estimates), and he succumbed to lung cancer on Wednesday. Mum’s flight left on Thursday.

This is not an obituary. Obituaries are written by people who know the deceased well. This is more like a diary entry, because it seemed fitting to write something to record the sad event. Like most grandchildren who are born overseas, I never was especially close to my grandfather. Didn’t see him enough. When I did see him, communication difficulties were the main issue, even when I grew old enough to be reasonably conversant with adults. It didn’t help that he was quite hard of hearing and I almost had to shout to get my words across.

It was ironic in a way. His command of English was by no means perfect, but he was still more or less fluent, which is a bonus with Asians of his generation. By all accounts, he knew how to speak six or seven different languages/dialects, which to me is absolutely amazing.

In contrast, I only know a single language – the product of years of growing up in a country town public school in the mid-80s where everyone still went around calling Asians “ching-chong Chinaman!” and then pushing up the corners of their eyes to make them slanty. (Relatives keep chiding me for not picking up my mother tongue when I was young. But why would a 6-year old, the only Asian in the class, learn Cantonese when it’s something that would serve no useful purpose other than to make you seem even more alien from your peers? No thanks, I’ll stick to English. 6-year olds simply don’t have the foresight to see past that kind of relentless teasing. My remedy back then to those situations was a well placed fist-to-the-face that saw me get hauled up in front of the Principal on several occasions where he pulled out the old “sticks and stones” aphorism. Nonetheless, I found that the brawls were quite effective in stopping all the racist teasing!)

I was in Singapore by myself in early 2001, and Mum had demanded that I pay a visit to my grandfather out of respect. Always a strongly independent person, he lived alone, by choice. Well, almost alone. There was quite a stir because a mainland Chinese girl – a student, supposedly – had recently moved in, renting out a room in his flat. Most of the family were convinced that she was after his money, and tried to get him to kick her out. However, he refused to turn her away because he appreciated her “companionship”.

Anyway, I was quite reluctant to visit him. Not out of disrespect, but mainly because of awkwardness. I would be there by myself for a few hours. What would I talk to him about? What would he say to me? I’d never had a conversation with him in my life. The whole prospect was unusually daunting. And this was my own grandfather no less!

A few hours later, another relative dropped by to pick me up. Of course, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Sure the conversation at times ground to a halt. There were periods of silence. There were times when he seemed to zone out for a few minutes, perhaps lost in thought. But it wasn’t as if we had nothing to talk about. I’d just come in from Europe, and that sparked off a round of stories from him about his travels when he was young. Old people always have stories to tell. (And there was one moment when the phone rang and I witnessed the most unexpected sight of an 80-something year old answering a mobile phone!) Don’t get me wrong, I still felt awkward, but I was glad that I had dropped by.

When Mum called up later to check how everything was, word got back to me that my grandfather had enjoyed the visit immensely, and it occurred to me just how important companionship was to the widower. To me it was just an awkward couple of hours, but to him it was much more. And in that light, it didn’t seem so awkward anymore. I’ll miss him dearly.

1
Oct 03
Wed

Story Time

After seeing the trailer for Return of the King, I got all fired up about LOTR again. When it gets released in December though, I’ll most probably be in Malaysia. Based on the previous two overseas experiences, watching the premieres of the first two instalments in Bangkok and Singapore, I gained a new appreciation for the excellent quality of Australian cinemas – comfy seats, adequately tiered seating, terrific sound and huge screens (if you get the right cinemas). Dave is going to try and book out a bunch of seats in Kuala Lumpur at the end of the year in the “gold seating” area of the cinema. Incidentally, a premium ticket there is cheaper than an ordinary ticket in Australia. However, I remain skeptical about the quality of cinema screens in Asia. I also appreciate the “first come, first served” nature of ticketing in Australia. We don’t give a stuff how much money you have, if you want good seats then you’ll just have to line up earlier. (Excepting those gold class and La Premiere yuppies who are getting ripped off.)

I was grumbling to Dad about Asian cinemas when he promptly launched into an anecdote about how the cinemas of the good ol’ days totally 0wN3d today’s cinemas. No, he didn’t actually use the word “owned”.

During the middle of the 20th century, Singapore used to have a huge cinema which sat over a thousand people. The seats were zoned and priced accordingly. There was upper level seating (“circle seating”) in addition to the regular floor seating. The seats closest to the screen cost $1, those further away cost $2, and the circle seating was $3. The circle seating was mainly occupied by the British colonialists who were still fairly prominent in Singaporean society at that time, comfortably segregated from the slantier-eyed plebians sitting below.

Going to the movies was a bigger deal back then than it was now, no doubt due to the relatively costly nature of it. Dad recalled when one day his grandfather took him and my uncle out to the movies. My great-grandfather was a well known business tycoon, making his millions doing something or other with palm oil in the shipping industry. Despite the respect he garnered among even the colonialists, he never adopted the coat and tie attire of the West, preferring to wear the simple garb of “Chinamen”. More than one occasion arose where he was mistaken for a simple pauper and shooed away from stores, only to return clutching an imposing wad of paper bills to the intense chagrin of the store owner.

Family legend has it that he went shopping for a fridge one day. Upon inquiring about the price, the sales attendant snidely remarked, “Uncle, if you can afford it, I will give it to you for free!” My great-grandfather chuckled and declared that he would buy all the fridges on display. The amused attendant didn’t recognise the simply-dressed man, but the store owner certainly did. He was an acquitance of my great-grandfather. After a flurry of apologies, the owner chased off the sales attendant, reprimanding him. “Do you know who that man is?”

My great-grandfather was a strange fellow. He had money — money which has long since evaporated through the spending and vice of the following generations — so I guess that made him eccentric. One day he arrived home in the evening and declared to my Dad, about 12 at the time, and my uncle that he would be taking them to a movie. They both expressed delight at the treat, and went off to get changed from their pajamas into something more presentable. Before they could move, however, the old man grabbed them by the wrists and whisked them into the waiting car with a stern, “No! There’s no time! Let’s go!”

What followed was a period of extreme mortification for Dad. I can only imagine the scene. A simple-looking chinaman arrives at the circle seats of the cinema, among the formally-dressed, pecunious upper-class white folk. He is dragging his two utterly embarrassed grandchildren, who are wearing nothing but PJs. He received strange stares all night. It’s like rocking up to A-grade opera seats in PJs today. Dad claims he still has nightmares about the incident.

Baby Yabbies

When she got pregnant, it was time to rename “Marsellus” to get her gender correct. One of our yabbies got laid a few weeks ago, and right now she’s packing hundreds of baby yabbies underneath her tail. It’s quite a repulsive sight actually, but I’m sure once the yabbies mature they will be a bit cuter.

Pregnant Yabby
The piece of shell in the picture is a leftover from a recent moult
(or more accurately, a recent occurrence of ecdysis)

I went scouring for a bit more information about Yabby breeding habits, since I’ve heard that yabbies eat anything, and that anything includes their young. And if they don’t eat their young, then we still have a slight problem if nearly 100 baby yabbies are roaming around the tank.

PDF Datasheet

Yabby FAQ

When freshwater crayfish mate, the male deposits a small packet of sperm gel on the female, near the reproductive openings. The female then passes the eggs out through the openings and across the sperm packet, during which process they become fertilised. The eggs are guided to the underside of the tail (kept cupped during egg laying), where they are fastened on to the swimmerettes (the small legs on the abdomen) and carried until they hatch. Juveniles have special hooks on their legs to allow them to cling to the hairs of the female’s swimmerettes; they moult several times before leaving the parent.

The female protects the eggs carefully. If the level of dissolved oxygen falls, she elevates her tail and fans the eggs. If the water becomes too warm, she will find a cooler place. However, because the eggs are large, and because of the time and energy she devotes to them, she can afford to produce only a few hundred compared with the hundreds of thousands of relatively minute eggs of the marine lobsters. The newly hatched young are known as ‘juveniles’; they resemble the adults and do not pass through the free-living larval stages of lobsters, prawns and many other crustaceans. The juvenile yabby is consequently better equipped for survival than the young of most of the marine crustaceans and not as vulnerable to predation.

Breeding begins in spring when the water temperature reaches 15 to 16*C. The first batch of eggs (100 to 500 eggs per individual, depending upon the size of the female) hatches 8 to 10 weeks later in early summer. As soon as the young have left (a further 3 weeks later), the female is ready to breed again. Because of the higher water temperatures in summer, the second brood takes only 3 to 4 weeks to incubate. Some females will breed three or more times during the breeding season [oh shit], which, if the temperature remains high enough, can extend into autumn. In the warmer water in the west of the State, the breeding season may continue almost year around. … The yabby is not averse to attacking and eating its own kind, especially when the prey is smaller, or soft after moulting. (Src)

In courtship the male yabby uses his claws to impress the female. After mating the male has no interest at all in the upbringing of the young yabbies. The eggs which have been fertilised lies between the females rear legs so she curls her tail around them to cover them. Hundreds are laid at a time though not all hatch. After birth the young hang onto their mother for 4 to 6 weeks At this stage they are known as “Larvae”. (Src)

i have been raising yabbies for about a year and a half now, and everything has been going really well. in fact, 3 weeks after introducing a new female into the tank with my big male, she got pregnant. unfortunately i have not had another tank spare to move the female and the young ones to, and now i have around 70 to 100 baby yabbies roaming the tank. a problem has arisen from this, however, as i had an internal power filter running on the tank, but the babies were being sucked into the filter and i have taken it out. this leaves me with no filtration and no aeration, which brings me to my point. has anyone got any suggestions on how i might go about aerating the water? (Src)

Hmm. Yes, the aquarium’s going to be interesting over the next few weeks.

28
Sep 03
Sun

Mooting

Made it through to the semis (where we probably will be shot down in flames)! Unfortunately, it also truncates my holiday by at least two days. Grrr.

22
Sep 03
Mon

Holidays

Saw the Man U vs Arsenal match last night at Souths. It finished at 3am, which was rather rash considering I had to go into uni at 9am to drop in a moot submission. Nonetheless, we won the moot in the evening, so the three days of holidays sacrificed wasn’t for naught! Two week break. The whole graduate law class pretty much needs it – the stress of two essays due in the same week was greater than I would have thought possible. Within the last fortnight, one person has dropped out, another is going to drop out of Torts, and another two are seriously rethinking whether they want to continue. The class is shrinking… But a session and a half on, I’m pretty sure that doing law was a good decision for me personally.

12
Sep 03
Fri

Caeephr Skooner

I find myself procrastinating again in place of writing an essay on a rather ugly Torts assignment to do with liability of statutory authorities, pure nervous shock and non-delegable duty. How thrilling. Anyway, we found a new place to play snooker down at Coogee, and it only costs us $0.80 an hour. That’s right, 18 times less expensive than the 8-ball parlour near the beach. It has five well-maintained tables. A bit time-consuming getting down there though, but only one more week until mid-session break (well, technically it’s called “Reading Week”).

Also, Bonhomme sent this in:

Xueli: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

It’s pretty cool once you realise you can actually read that paragraph at almost full speed. Be interesting to see how much slower reading scrambled words actually is. Just write a script to scramble all but the first and last letters of all the words on a page of text from a novel, then time how long it takes for different people to read through various scrambled and unscrambled passages. (Hmm, doesn’t really work too well with the title of this post though! I guess you need more contextual clues.)

5
Sep 03
Fri

Open Day

Urk… I have the 9am shift helping the School of Info Sys in the computer labs. And in typical uni fashion, there is not a soul around at this time of day. They’re supposed to be running a quiz which students collect down at the Quad, bring up to the labs to do a bit of “research” (ie, run Google queries) and bring back down to redeem for tokens which are exchangeable for uni memorabilia.

4
Sep 03
Thu

Trivia

Kicked ass again in trivia tonight at Churchills with a four person team. Only won another case of VB though. Saving it up for Oktoberfest. (The prizes are better at the Paddo RSL.)

25
Aug 03
Mon

Aquarium Update

Admin Law test tomorrow, so brief update before I sleep. Our aquariums have been fairly dull over the last few months, each yabby having its own tank. Jess bought Dave another crab today. It’s absolutely tiny, so instead of dropping it in with a yabby and leaving the crab to its tender mercies, we shifted the two yabbies into the big tank, and the small crab into the small one. I wonder if the yabbies will get along. I give them two days before the big one starts abusing the little one.

In other news, I now think the talk with Jess a couple nights ago can be attributed (almost) entirely to alcohol, especially upon hearing it’s the first time she’s actually been drunk :). I guess a few people actually get more articulate with booze.

Uni work is beginning to pile up. Two assignments and a class presentation next week. Have a catchup dinner tomorrow night, judging the PwC Mgt Comp for Wednesday night… how oh how am I going to get my readings done?!

24
Aug 03
Sun

Dave’s 21st

Big 21st Birthday greets to my flatmate Dave! The actual date is tomorrow, but he held the party last night. It was very enjoyable. Since I would imagine everyone there was too plastered to remember much of anything, here’s my blow-by-blow account of how the not-so-venerable evening unfolded. Remember people, we have photos. We also have videos.

6.30pm: The time rolls around for people to begin arriving. Dave starts to pace up and down waiting for “the scum” to pick us up, muttering something about the unreliability of Malaysians.
6.45pm: Dave starts to worry that he’s been stood up by everyone…

Click for more pics
Click to continue…

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11
Aug 03
Mon

Even Fedex Doesn’t Do Midnight

Dave and I lost a chunk of sleep last night. Someone buzzed our doorbell at abour 12.30am, which is not a completely unusual occurrence, save for the fact that we weren’t expecting anyone. I picked up the handset which links with the speaker at the front entrance to our apartment complex and was greeted by a foreign voice on the other end of the line. It was a rather strange voice. A woman’s – strange accent of undiscernable origin with a very trembly/warbly tenor – not trembly as you’d find in the elderly (she sounded middle-aged), but more a peculiar, anxious type of trembly. Anyway, she intoned that she was after a certain address, which wasn’t ours, so I just told Her that she had the wrong address. Hearing nothing else on the other end, I hung up.

Now, this requires a bit of contextualisation to understand why what happened next makes us seem like a bunch of pansies. At the time the doorbell rang, Dave and I were watching this rather surreal B-grade thriller/horror flick on the TV. We’d tuned in half way to find that this stewardess was wandering around a plane in which everyone had mysteriously died (thus leaving the plane pilotless). Unfortunate timing, given the mood it set.

The doorbell rang again, and I decided to ignore it – I told Her once already it was the wrong address. Our doorbell is such that it will ring continuously as long as the button is depressed. A few seconds later, the doorbell rang again and kept ringing until Dave got annoyed and went to answer it.

“No you’ve got the wrong address… what? A parcel? You what? … Hey Stu she wants to deliver a parcel.”
“A parcel?! At this hour, you gotta be kidding, tell her to come back another day.”
“Err, can you come back at another time? … Really? … She says she came yesterday afternoon already.”
“Huh? Whatever, who in their right mind goes around making deliveries at 12.30 in the morning?”
“Look we don’t know anything about a delivery, can you come back at a reasonable hour? What? … Hey she says she wants to talk with us.”
“Man, this sounds dodgy, tell her to get lost.”
“No thanks, come again, good bye.”

A few moments later, the bell rang again, but we ignored it. So now we were a little spooked, because the situation was turning bizarre. Over the next full hour, the doorbell rang sporadically and Dave and I began to get increasingly edgy. Nothing good could come out of this. It wasn’t long before we could hear the loony downstairs buzzing other apartments as well. Luckily, no one let Her into the building. Dave remarked that while he was speaking with the mystery woman that he heard other voices in the background. We decided to go to sleep, but had the slight problem of the racket the doorbell was making. Since we were too chicken to tramp out onto the balcony, wave a dragonboat oar about and yell, “You want some of this, bitch?! Keep ringing that doorbell and we’ll come down and give you some!!”, we ended up taping down the phonehook, smothering the receiver with two towels and shoving the whole lot into a gym bag so we didn’t have to put up with the infernal buzzing noise. Then I called a friend who lived across the road, waking him up in the process, and asked him if he could see the person at our door from his balcony. Unforunately, neither he nor we had a clear line of sight down to the front entrance. If someone had let her into the apartment complex, we’d have called the cops, but luckily it didn’t come down to that. Dave borrowed one of the oars from my room for “protection”, and then we eventually got to sleep.

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7
Aug 03
Thu

Relocation

Got relocated today up to L26! Window seat, semi-decent view of the city. Should bring my camera along next week.

6
Aug 03
Wed

Psycho Teacher

Raffles Junior College teacher blasts student (Quicktime movie). The background to this video can be read here. The wonderful thing about this is that it was caught on video.

I think the post-high school maturation period definitely changes a person. My initial response to the video was that if I had a teacher like that, I’d slap her silly. I love it when she says, “you’re trying to cover up your insolence, your defiance, your laziness, your apathy, your lethargy and your bad attitude!” and then pauses like she’s expecting applause because she learnt some extra vocab from her “training as a university student”. But then I thought back, and the world appears a lot different to a 15 year old (even if you’re taller than the teacher). School’s pretty much run like a dictatorship, and I sure have personally come across teachers that were much more fiery than the one caught on video. One particularly memorable occasion was witnessing a student being interrogated by a teacher. He was so hysterical, that as he shouted, a long glob of saliva slopped out of his mouth onto the floor and he kept screaming without missing a beat. In year 4 I remember our teacher shrieking at someone because he wasn’t ruling straight lines – she took his ruler and snapped it. In year 6 I remember my maths teacher had this abnormal abhorrence towards beeping digital watches. On more than one occasion, some hapless student’s watch would beep on the hour and the teacher would confiscate the watch. Not only that, but he’d throw the watch onto the ground, then proceed to place his foot on it. The watch, subjected to the not inconsiderable weight of the teacher, would then transform into a work of abstract art, never to beep again. Then you have Chemistry teachers purporting to squirt acid at talking students – it wasn’t acid, but legally speaking you’d be able to sue the teacher for assault. And don’t get me started on cadet camps! Ah, those were the days. If only Clie PDAs were available back then (not that I could’ve afforded one)… but I do have some tapes of some lessons secreted away somewhere, and I also recall a friend getting so incensed at a teacher’s gruffness that he taped the lesson to use in a complaint against the teacher (but never followed up with it).

I passed the link on to Dad, who is coincidentally an alumni of Raffles Institute. His abrupt response: “I didn’t think that it was that bad. I have seen teachers that are worse.” heheh

Also, there’s a point in the video where I swear I’m hearing this from the teacher: “I said, ‘Actions speaks [sic] louder than words!’ So you are a sly fucking old brat. Aren’t you? That is using the literary language from my training as a university student.”

My ears must be deceiving me, but I really can’t figure out what she’s saying other than the profane phrasing above. Maybe it’s the Singlish accent :).

29
Jul 03
Tue

Misc

Uni’s started up again. Half of the subjects this session are continuations from the last: Contracts and Criminal Law (which will hopefully be much more substantive than procedural this time around), together with Torts and Administrative Law. They all appear very interesting, save for Admin Law which is basically about bureaucracy, bureaucratic decision making and judicial review of that. The first Admin class today was only an hour but I somehow managed to microsleep throughout the last half hour of it. Shan jabbed me in the side at some point to wake me up, telling me afterwards, “Your head was nodding up and down as usual, but at one point your headed drifted down… and down… and kept going down and I thought, ‘uh oh, I don’t think that head is going to come back up if I don’t do something’.” Not a good way to start session sitting 2 metres away from the lecturer in a subject with 20% participation marks. And also, browsing through the course outline, the required readings for Admin are a load of up to 50 pages per class. It’s gonna be one of those subjects…

Dave came back from the land of $4/hr snooker and proceeded to beat me 4-2. Fluke artist.

Going to the Matchbox 20 concert tomorrow. Should be awesome.

Fantasy League is starting up again for this season. I have yet to select my team… have to set aside some time this weekend.

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26
Jul 03
Sat

A Visit to The Block

Kev and I went down to inspect The Block at Bondi. I must say, the apartments have been renovated very nicely. The two things that stood out for me was the giant bubbling urn ornament in the back garden, and the bathroom that was picked as the best one out of the four on the show. The faucets, the glass, the mirror, the sink, everything – beaut bathroom! All those apartments are going to be horribly, horribly overpriced. Especially if they are predicting 10000 curious onlookers on auction day. Each of the couples stands to make nearly six figures in profit I reckon.

25
Jul 03
Fri

Stuff

Haven’t been up to a terrific amount of stuff these holidays, mostly a mixture of work, relaxing, and heading into uni for competition preparation. I was selected to the team representing UNSW at the BCG intervarsity business strategy competition. The competition simulates a management consulting case and centres on preparing a 10 minute presentation recommending business strategies to a Board of directors, after 3 hours of preparation time. This is followed up by a 10 minute Q&A session where the judges (mostly BCG consultants) grill you on the strategies you’ve proposed. It’s an extremely intense 200 minutes. We had the state finals today, and unfortunately we placed one place off progressing to the nationals. After being initially overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data they gave us (about 60 or so pages), we eventually digested the key points of the case, which was about the Australian wine industry. The flaw with our preparation was that we missed the target audience of the question, which is a fatal flaw in any sort of answer. Normally cases revolve around improving the growth of a single business entity. This case focussed on improving the growth of the Australian wine industry, as a whole, relative to the rest of the world. Not only this, but the advice delivered was meant to be to an industry body (not in itself a wine producer) charged with promoting the growth of Australian wines. While we delivered strategies targeting key markets around the world, the strategies as they were were not implementable by that particular industry body (as they were not a company, but an entity which facilitated dialog between companies in the industry).

Q: “So, we being an industry body with no reach into these markets, how do we implement these strategies to expand into them?”
*dead silence*
A: “Uh… talk to the companies about it?”

A much better answer would have been that, given the role of the industry body, to perhaps encourage Australian wine producers to enter into alliances when expanding overseas. Resulting economies of scale would be beneficial to both firms, and the potential for growth internationally is highly lucrative for all Australian companies. While they are normally competitors in the domestic market, and competition regulation prevents consolidation within Australia, there is nothing preventing them from jointly entering foreign markets. The industry body’s ability to facilitate dialogue between Australian wine producers would thus play a key role in notifying industry of potential markets and potential entry strategies centred around domestic alliances.

Nonetheless, despite the disappointment, it was a terrific learning experience and something I’d definitely do again next year should I get the chance. (Unfortunately, 4 out of our team of 6 graduate at the end of the year, so we need a fresh bunch of people, but that shouldn’t be a problem given that none of us knew each other at the start of the holidays and we gelled quite well when it came to the competition today.)

Got my law results back for all but one subject: 1 D and 3 HDs. Uni starts again next week.

18
Jul 03
Fri

Amiel

It’s one thing to ask, why we break up
Have you ever, wondered why it is we fall in love?
Can you tell me, do you know what it is you’re looking for?
Why do we need? Can you tell me why I care?
How is that we heed, that voice that says, “I want you there”?

Thanks you’ve been fuel for thought,
Now I’m more lonely than before
But, that’s okay,
I’ve just ‘ready made another stupid love song;
And thanks you’ve been fuel for thought
Now I’m more lonely than before
But, that’s okay,
I’ve just ‘ready made another stupid love song.

In a single moment, you might be perfect
And sit in a window of my life
But how much… how much more would I yearn to see?
What would I strive to hide? Now there will be no compromise
So take it in your stride, I’ll believe you now with a smile

Thanks you’ve been fuel for thought,
Now I’m more lonely than before
But, that’s okay,
I’ve just ‘ready made another stupid love song;
And thanks you’ve been fuel for thought
Now I’m more lonely than before
But, that’s okay,
I’ve just ‘ready made another stupid love song

Look into my eyes, ours was no love sacrifice
For it has helped us to grow
And I’m sorry I know just how far I have to go alone

Thanks you’ve been fuel for thought
Now I’m more lonely than before
But, that’s okay,
I’ve just ‘ready made another stupid love song;
And thanks you’ve been fuel for thought
Now I’m more lonely than before
But, that’s okay,
I’ve just ‘ready made another stupid love song

I’ve just ‘ready made another love song
Just ‘ready made another love song

11
Jul 03
Fri

A few spare moments

The joys of coming into work at 8.45 on a Saturday, bleh… throat and nose are still jammed up with phlegm from the cold.

7
Jul 03
Mon

Colds and Flu

I guess after a few weeks of poor dieting and zero exercise, a string of late, active, post-exam nights out hit my body too hard. Now sick and suffering from the effects of a cold. Bleh.

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24
Jun 03
Tue

Focus

The sky is leaden, it is drizzling outside and the mid-winter gloom projects only a murky light into the apartment room. The twilight will soon descend swiftly, dissolving the outlines of the buildings outside with an ethereal hue. Inside, a single incandescent bulb drapes the room in a sallow glow. A heater purrs in the corner, a warden against the chill pervading through the glass veranda door. Music plays softly in the background, and a solitary figure, rugged up, sits at a computer. The music stops momentarily as one song ends. The silence is punctuated by fingers pecking on a keyboard. He looks at the pile of paper on the desk and pauses. Another wave of drowsiness sweeps over him. The bed nearby beckons, its plump blanket a visual siren call. He casts a wistful gaze out the window. The view is already becoming indistinct and it keeps him strangely mesmerised. He lets his eyes defocus and for the moment he is lost in a detached reverie. Another song starts up and his room snaps back into focus. He sighs, turns back to the computer, and resumes typing.

22
Jun 03
Sun

Contracts Exam

Pretty harrowing experience today. I normally set two alarms to wake up: my mobile, which has an incredibly loud alarm, and a talking clock which has an obnoxious digitised crowing rooster alarm. The exam was at 8.45, so I set the alarms for 7.45. At 6.30, my mobile starts to ring. Disgruntled that someone disturbed me from my slumber, I reached over, saw the caller didn’t have caller ID, and answered. No one on the other end. I tossed the phone back on the table and tried to get back to sleep. The phone rang again. I answered it again, this time to hear music on the other end of the line, but no voice. Seemed like a case of someone accidentally dialing my number while they were driving in a car or something. By this stage I was awake again, and exam nerves made it hard for me to get back to sleep. After, about 15-20 minutes I managed to drift back to sleep. The next thing I knew, I woke up, glanced at my watch, and saw 8.20 on it.

“OH, FUCK!!!”

I changed and was out the door in 5 minutes, hoping I hadn’t forgotten to pack everything in my bag. The exam was in the Mathews building (which is upper campus), so it normally takes 15 minutes to get there from my apartment. I managed to reach there by 8.40, after a few tense moments when I couldn’t find the exam room. By the time reading time started, I was half-asleep, dazed, out-of-breath, suffering adrenaline OD and thoroughly disorientated. Not the best way to start an exam. My hands were trembling as well.

I don’t know what happened, but I figure that I either went back into a deep sleep after being woken up by the phone calls, and missed both alarms. Or perhaps I did switch off both alarms, but it was an automatic response and not a conscious one which is why I don’t remember hearing the alarms go off. As a result, the start of my exam answer was extremely wobbly (I totally screwed up the application of Butler Machine v Ex-Cell-O Corp to the case), although I managed to get it together somewhat after that. Shitty.

10
Jun 03
Tue

Exams

Exams are coming! Arrrgh!

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3
Jun 03
Tue

Zed (2002-2003)

“Who’s Zed?”
“Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”


Zed the Yabby

I stumbled out into the kitchen this morning to be confronted with a bucket sitting on the benchtop. I peered inside, and there was Zed, sitting motionless in a shallow pool of water. I picked up a nearby chopstick and gave him a prod. Apart from the presence of a bucket of water with a yabby in it on my kitchen bench, which was already decidedly strange, what was stranger was that Zed wasn’t moving. Mark, crashed out on the sofa bed after an all-nighter stirred and groaned out to me: “He died last night. Dave and I found him, upside down in the tank.” And so, our prized yabby kicked the bucket some time between 2.30 and 3am today.

We have three yabbies: Zed, Marsellus and Butch. These are appropriate names. Zed was the biggest of our yabbies. He was a bully, always muscling food away from the others. Crab killer, goldfish terroriser (he dispatched four), owner of the ceramic log. And the yabby that molested all the other yabbies from behind.

Butch used to be in the tank with Zed before we got Marsellus. Zed took all of Butch’s food and terrorised him so much that he was conditioned not to eat even when we dropped food right in front of him. As a result, Zed grew into a tank and Butch lost his pincer and became a shrimp. We kept him there until our crab, Gimp, was found eaten one morning. We decided the humane thing to do would be to separate Butch out into his own tank.

Marsellus is the runt, which we bought to replace Gimp. Having no third tank, we just dropped him into the tank with Zed. Remarkably, the two have lived together in near harmony for the past few months with only the loss of one of Marsellus’ pincers. Meanwhile, Butch, safe in his own little tank has flourished into one mean mofo, snapping at us with a vengeance whenever we feed him.

Last week Zed moulted. This event signifies another leap forward in growth. In the 24-48 hours after a moult, a yabby’s exoskeleton is quite soft, so it was very amusing to see Marsellus wave his pincer at Zed, and see Zed leap back in fear. It’s like a scrawny 50kg teenager waving a fist at a 200kg 7 foot wrestler. However, Zed never quite regained his regality after that last moult. He seemingly grew too large for his log, and just stood there for hours, motionless in the corner of the tank. Then a few days later – this morning – he inverted himself and expired. After we removed him from the tank, Marsellus was seen to be running excitedly around the now threat-free tank, chomping on Zed’s old shell.

We are still clueless as to what killed Zed, because when a yabby moults, it grows, and growth implies health. View more pictures.

30
May 03
Fri

Happy Birthday to Me

I’m 22. I didn’t tell anyone this year. Let’s see who remembers.

19
May 03
Mon

About a Year Ago

I was doing some tidying up, when I found this note that was stuck on our door about a year ago.


“Are you moving furniture every night?”

It was somewhat bizarre. We weren’t aware we were making that much noise such that the apartment directly underneath us was being bothered. Anyway, we kept doing whatever we were doing that they claimed was making noise (well, we couldn’t stop making noises that we didn’t know we were making!) and in time they stopped leaving notes.

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15
May 03
Thu

FD Fund

Now stands at $370.

9
May 03
Fri

Graduation

BIT/ISM Class of 2002
BSc (BIT) and BCom (ISM) Class of 2002

Graduated yesterday. The ceremony, the $65-rent-a-gown, the tradition was all pretty ordinary. However, it was definitely a good time catching up with (or at least briefly seeing) friends. I don’t doubt that I won’t be seeing some of them again for years, but we still have the wonder of mailing lists. (And Congrats to Kit for taking out the uni medal!)

1
May 03
Thu

The Fund

Relatively poor showing tonight, only $30. Brings FDF total to $200.

24
Apr 03
Thu

Fine Dining Fund

The fund now stands at $170 after an equal first and second placing tonight.

12
Apr 03
Sat

The Fine Dining Fund

From time to time over the last couple months, a bunch of us have been going down to Paddington RSL on Thursday evenings for trivia nights. It’s a nice relaxing night out with good company over a few drinks, in an unpretentious RSL atmosphere complete with indoor neon lighting that could be straight from the 70s and with the chance to win some cash. Half the entertainment comes from the host, Mr Bagoomba (who unfortunately has been absent lately, being replaced by a self-admitted blonde bimbo). He’s a loquacious middle-aged balding Mediterranean guy with a repertoire full of bad jokes, mistimed calls and an impossibly garish jacket with stars on it. But he keeps things fun with joke telling and push-up competitions and the like.

Our team changes slightly from week to week because of people’s commitments, but last Thurday we had a farmer, an immigration consultant, an AO recipient who was formerly the Chinese and North Korean ambassador for Australia, a filmmaker, a banker, an Arts student and me. We’ve had in the past lawyers and someone who’s worked for the UN interpreting for President Megawati, but we’ve also discovered that it all doesn’t count unless you have someone who (1) really knows their 80s music, (2) knows what happened in the footy over the weekend, and (3) really knows their 30s music. Anyway, we won $100 last week and decided to begin to put this money into a pot and save up for dinner at one of the fine dining joints around Sydney. At this rate it’ll take us the whole year. There’s a jackpot which is now about $1900, but you have to answer three obscure questions that change each week to get it.

29
Mar 03
Sat

The Week

Another busy week, courtesy of a couple assignments due this Tueday. Went to trivia at the Paddington RSL on Thursday night and our team ended up winning it (at last!). Problem was that we also tied with two other teams. The prize was split and we ended up with some peasant amount of cash. I started work at Macquarie on Friday. Once again as is normally the case on first days, no computer account had been set up for me yet, so it was a pretty uneventful day. Seems like a nice workplace though. A very enjoyable Friday night was spent at a friend’s farewell party – he’s off to work for UNESCO in Korea for a few months which sounds like a fantastic experience. That’ll sure be an interesting place when the war ends and the focus shifts more back to North Korea, which has all but vanished from front-page news. I returned home to a drinks and card night my flatmate was hosting (and losing) and slept away most of Saturday. More law reading for today. Daylight saving ended this morning, make sure your clocks go back one hour.

21
Mar 03
Fri

State Election Today

I predict Labor will win by quite a bit. So are the bookies. :)

16
Mar 03
Sun

Busy

Uni has been extremely busy as you can observe by the decline in my already low posting frequency. Law’s inundated us with a lot of reading – gotta use all those textbooks I suppose! I got a part time job at Macquarie with the Margin Lending Division. It’s going to be pretty menial stuff, but should help to pay off those bills.

Went white water rafting last weekend. Really, really fun! It was up near Penrith on an artificial river at an Olympic site. Never one to emerge from outings unscathed, I was the first to flip over the edge when the raft decided to do an aquatic version of a wheelie at an inconvenient moment. Luckily, I still had one hand grasping onto the raft’s outer rope, and the other still obstinately clutching my paddle, so I was able to be dragged – spluttering – back on board.

Today is the 17th and is meant to be the final day before the US begins the process of levelling Iraq, with Johnny following, firmly attached to Bush’s backside. Hong Kong (yet again) is the centre of a freakish health scare – this time by a virulent strain of Pneumonia. Australia is steamrolling over all opposition in the World Cup. The state election this weekend will probably see Bob Carr in government (which is a good thing in my opinion). In other news, Bin Laden’s niece is thinking of launching a singing career in the UK.

6
Mar 03
Thu

Sagacious Advice

I got vaccinated for Meningitis C last week. I hate needles, and Dad had great glee at seeing my reaction when he attached a three inch one to the syringe “just to see the look on my face”. He sent me a follow-up e-mail today:

Please note that you are vaccinated only against the C strain of the bacteria. This
accounts for only about 30% of outbreaks. i.e you don’t have immunity against the other 70%.

If there is an outbreak, run.

Gee, thanks Dad.

19
Jan 03
Sun

Time Capsule

Continuation from this. I opened my time capsule. It was sealed in 1986, when I was five. It contained these things. The SMH masthead is dated April 12, 1986. Even back then, Australia was phasing out smoking in public, as the back of the newspaper clipping shows. 1986 was also the year of Halley’s Comet, a photo of which was enclosed. There’s also a roll of 20 1986 $1 coins, the “International Year of Peace”.

It’s almost 16 years ago… so long ago. The memories those items brought back were fond indeed.

16
Dec 02
Mon

Happy Holidays!

Leaving for Singapore tomorrow, 5pm flight. As usual, I’ll try and shoot off a one-line post from the departure gate at the airport. Of course, if that fails, there is always the good ol’ SMS update. International roaming is enabled, so if anyone wants to drop me an SMS, you know where to get me. Have a Merry Christmas everyone, and another crazy New Year (in a good way, of course)!

15
Dec 02
Sun

Thesis

Received all my uni results back today. Got two HDs, and first class honours. My thesis is downloadable in PDF format (3mb), if you are interested in seeing what one looks like. I can finally graduate!

Star Wars Exhibit

Went to see the Star Wars Exhibit at the Powerhouse Museum. It’s a decent visit at $11 for students, although the $18 adult entry fee is pushing it. Some of the models really gave a feeling of scale (like Chewbacca). If you have nothing else to do over these holidays, or are a Star Wars fan, go and visit.

Tough Times

About three weeks ago I had a Saturday night that was triple booked. There was a surprise 22nd birthday dinner for a good friend which I had previously agreed to come to, a dinner with my girlfriend and her family including her father who had come over for a brief holiday in Australia, and a dinner with my family and grandfather who had likewise come over for a holiday. I ended up going for the latter, in light of the fact that my grandfather had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Still, at 85, he’s already lived a long and good life, which is some comfort to the bad news.

Things haven’t always gone my way this year, and all in all, I don’t regard it as a very good year for myself. Nonetheless, I am still satisfied and grateful to be in my current position in virtually all aspects of life.

Perspective is always good, however. I visited this site the other day. It’s run by a friend of a friend, who I’ve met a few times previously, last in October, but didn’t have a clue what had happened to him. I was pretty shocked to read what had transpired for him. Even more so, when I realised that the first entry is dated in September, but he’s feeling even worse today, three months later. Time heals wounds, but some wounds develop infections, I guess (to analogise). Betrayals and break ups are awful.

How about this site: Thinking Out Loud. To summarise, read the entries for 14 July 2002 and today.

What’s worse, though? Here’s another heart wrenching site: page 1, page 2. It’s kept by a girl who has now passed away after contracting cancer. It’s only a few months long, but it shows the descent of her health as she struggles to maintain the semblance of a normal life. In her case, it’s not only the pain of her own health failing, but the effect it would have on her close ones.

It is a curse to note that there are a lot of teenagers in this world who are willing to commit suicide while I am here trying to desprately live when I am wasting my life away through vommiting and also starvation. My life is indeed a living hell, but I always make the best out of it. How much endurance do I posses? How much tolerance do I have? How much more pain and sorrow can I take? With everytime I cry, my tears flow out. With every news that comes it only cracks my heart and still I am standing here breathing. Do I have to be a living example of a Zombie? It is also already bad enough that I have label on me that states “Dying” and that I must have to have special treatment due to my handicap. This is not the life that I want to lead. This is not the life that I should lead. I strive each time to normalize the things that I used to do and everytime I do so, my efforts would crumble to the ground.

Very emphatic words, especially noteworthy for people like this. Her diary ends with that entry.

I apologise for the series of rather depressing sites above, but they do provide perspective (although maybe not comfort) for people in “lesser” circumstances. I tried searching for blogs and journals which had people undergoing tough times, and was thankful that they are actually quite hard to find.

10
Dec 02
Tue

Time Capsule

Denise’s post about time capsules just made a neuron in my brain reconnect itself to another section in my brain that has long laid dormant. Fifteen years ago, when I was six, Dad helped me put together a time capsule. It was to be opened when I was 21, and I’ve just remembered it. Now I am 21, and I feel strangely reluctant to open that yellow Chrysanthemum tea tin which contains objects from my 80s childhood. All I recall is that I stuck a matchbox car in there. What else there is, I have long forgotten. Unfortunately, it’s currently somewhere back in the Camden house, and I’m in Kingsford, so when I get back there next week, I’ll open it up. Then we’ll get to see what 15 year old relics I left myself all that time ago. (I also made another time capsule when I was about 12. Perhaps I’ll open that one in another decade or so.)

8
Dec 02
Sun

The Eclipse

The eclipse was an awesome experience. We didn’t end up camping in the outback, but instead decided to risk driving at night back to Port Augusta. We figured that the chances of us hitting a stray roo on the way back would be reduced with the large number of people driving on the highway after the eclipse was over. I’ve done a lengthy write up of the whole experience, of course including photos!

30
Nov 02
Sat

Dog Pics

As previously mentioned: Brodie’s pics.

27
Nov 02
Wed

The Road Ahead

“The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.” -Lincoln

Monday was a scorcher: 40 degrees in the city and not yet Summer. Opening windows to cool the apartment merely invites dry gusts of hot wind to invade the tepid un-conditioned air inside. This summer is going to be sweltering. It only takes a few days of similar temperament, and the air will start to acquire the sooty smell of bushfires. The drought conditions don’t help either. Perhaps water restrictions will be enforced, just like in the mid-nineties.

I caught up with Kit at lunch, and we decided to head down to the local supermarket and pick up something cold to lessen the amount of sweat making our clothes stick to our clammy selves. Up at the back of the store, I stood there in front of the ice cream fridge, holding the door open, letting the misty tendrils of chilled water vapour swathe me. A sole box of lemonade icy poles caught our eyes and we made off with that. I don’t think I’ve had icy poles since school. 35 cents each they were at the school canteen, perfect for those sweaty summer lunch times. Not as economical as those 20 cent frozen-lolly-water Zooper Doopers, but still affordable. I remember one day, when I was feeling particularly sweaty and wealthy, I splurged extravagantly on three Zooper Doopers. The last tube was a sickly sweet liquid by the time I got around to consuming it, but that was all the better. The immense sugar boost from it was used to fuel another 20 minutes of running around the playground. Prices seem to have doubled since then.

So there I was on Monday afternoon, with a box of 8 icy poles all to myself (well 7, because Kit had one). I chomped through five of them straight and fulfilled an age old childhood fantasy. Instead of being re-energised, however, I went straight for the couch and had a nap. How times change.

Last Friday’s exam marked not only the end of the academic year (for others too), but also the concluding exam of my four year degree at uni. And with that, another stage of life is over. After the pre-cognitive, taking-each-day-as-it-comes lifestyle of infants, the carefree abandon of primary school, the fond memories and growing worldliness of high school, and the freedom and independence of uni life comes the working life. Where suddenly, the better 40 or more hours in the week are no longer accessible for one’s own devices. The transition seems jarring. Over 21 years of relative freedom, cut short by the responsibilities of adulthood, which will last for decades more.

I’m not quite at the end of my uni life, though, having elected to do grad law. Uni life has everything going for it, except the money inflows. Over the years, I’ve come to realise just how different people from different faculties are. Without mentioning any specific generalisations, education really affects people’s worldviews and perspectives on things. After mixing with a Commerce/Science bunch for four years, it’ll be interesting to mix with some of the more humanities oriented law people, where ideas are expressed in words, instead of diagrams, tables and code. Which is funny, because in high school I hated the humanities. I suppose the difference is that high school was very competitive and mark orientated. Humanities were so subjective, and while I enjoyed the subject matter, I found it hard to guarantee a decent mark for assignments and exams. The amount of time invested in those subjects were never really correlated to the marks received, which was discouraging. However in uni, that rampant competitiveness seems to be absent (in my degree, anyhow). That allows people to do what courses they want to do, not because they can score the highest marks in them, but because they enjoy them. The UAI entrance score for degrees are not always correlated with the salaries of the jobs associated with them, which seems to be a large misconception. Which is why picking the right uni degree is so important. Anyone can stumble through a degree, but it really does help if you enjoy it.

My degree wasn’t actually completed until yesterday, when I submitted my thesis. After a complaint to the faculty dean, the thesis’ original due date of December 3 was reinstated. However, they only gave us two weeks notice before the earlier November 15 due date, so I had already prepared for a submission then. I gave the completed draft to my supervisor for feedback and revisions on the Monday before the 15th, and that’s when things got drawn out. The 15th came and went, but still no feedback. I arranged a meeting with him on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thurday and Friday of the following week, but always in the hour before the meeting, I’d get a phone call from him telling me to change a few things and come in the next day because he still hadn’t finished reading through my document. It was quite frustrating because I just wanted to get the damn thing out of the way. The TEC exam was on Friday, and I still couldn’t fully enjoy myself after that because the thesis still lingered. Finally, on Tuesday he gave me the remaining pages with revisions, and the approval to print the final document. Thus, because of the series of “false summits”, this page has been neglected, despite last Thursday’s post.

Uni results are released on the December 13, but there’s not much to do now except chill out. (The biggest news item I’ve heard from the last two weeks has been of the guy who incredulously burnt his dick with his laptop. I swear everyone’s been mailing or ICQing me that link. Sounds more like a radiation burn than a heat burn, which is rather disturbing given the area it occurred in.) To other things now.

Things
Last Sunday I went to the Moonlight Over Manhattan concerts in the Botanical Gardens. The concert was mainly of pieces from Gershwin’s repertoire of musicals, sung by Julie Anthony, Simon Gallaher, Juan Jackson and with Simon Tedeschi on piano. A very pleasant way to spend a balmy Sunday evening, lazing out on a picnic mat as the evening darkness slowly crept over the park. I looked forward to hearing Tedeschi’s rendition of Rhapsody In Blue, but they had decided to create a “special arrangement” for it, introducing a second piano into the composition. Which would have been alright, if the other guy had managed to keep in time with Tedeschi (or the other way around). However, having notes quarter or half beat out of sync is fairly distracting. Oh well.

Soph got a new dog, a delightfully cute Golden Retriever puppy (hm, I tried, but there really isn’t a more masculine way to describe puppies :). She named him Brodie, which neither I or her brother really approve of, but it’s her dog I guess. I’d have preferred Bailey as a name, it being the same colour as the drink, but one of her friend’s dogs was already called that. Obligatory pictures soon.

Dave finished his exams on Tuesday, and he had his engineering friends over at the apartment. Joyce brought her PS2 along (we really need to get ourselves a games console, but we’re misers), along with a new copy of LOTR which we completed over the course of the night. We walked down to the 24 hour Maccas afterwards, only to find out that the dining room was closed between 3-5am, but drive-thru was open. So there were 7 of us tramping through the drive through, with cars either side of us giving us funny looks. Dave felt a little too stupid walking through drive-thru, so we made Tony and Mark go pick up the car back at the apartment while we just hung around the parking lot. 10 minutes later, they arrived and we went through drive-thru in the car, which felt just as stupid. We took our stuff down to Coogee. (7 people in a station wagon = 1 person visible in the boot and 4 people without seatbelts. Earlier in the night for dinner in Randwick, when we were looking for parking, we somehow ended up behind a large van marked “Police Rescue”, freaking out Tony who hurriedly reversed into a side street and made everyone get out.) In an attempt to avert our eyes from the possibility of fat drunk couples screwing on the beach, some genius decided to pick a park table to eat at, which also happened to be directly downwind of the toilets which were emitting an unearthly stench.

There is a distinct lack of places to eat that are open for 24 hours in Sydney (McDonald’s doesn’t really count as food, does it?) Dave and I are looking forward to heading back to Asia and the round-the-clock availability of cheap, real food, as we have been subsisting on a diet of mouldy tofu for the last few weeks.

Nocturnal Diversions
Speaking of couples screwing, there’s been some interesting activity happening across the road. About a month ago at about 11pm, Mark and Dave are working on an engineering assignment in the lounge when Dave yells out, “Hey come quick!” I go out of my room and they are both staring out the balcony window at the apartment across the street, opposite us. On the top level of the building, there’s one brightly lit room where we can see everything going down in. Including the girl who has just slunk into the room… onto this shirtless guy. So they start making out and slowly descend from the vertical hug position down to the horizontal dance position, where, unfortunately they disappear momentarily out of view, although we can see the guy’s back occasionally rising above the window line. A few moments later the guy reemerges upwards and that was that.

A few minutes later, the scene virtually repeats itself. Mark, Dave and I are pretty distracted from our studies at this stage. Dave says to me, “Do you have a telescope or something?”
“No, but I have a video camera… it’s got zoom.”
“Fucker! Go get it…”
“Uh… that’s not right…”
“Ehh… 450x digital zoom!”

Meanwhile, Mark is trying to have nothing to do with us, but he’s still gawking out the window. Unfortunately, the camera battery was flat, foiling Dave’s plan. So we started charging the battery and went back to studying.

An hour later, back at the window…

Mark goes, “Hey, someone’s walking around the apartment topless, not sure if its the guy or the girl… hmm… oooh, ok it’s the girl.”

And it was indeed, based on the side profile. She turned away from us and started bending up
and down. Repeatedly. The guy was no where to be seen, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the room, if you know what I mean. She walked away when suddenly, poof! Out went the lights, down went the blinds, ending our little stint of voyeurism for the night.

Amongst our friends, it’s become a very well known apartment, although I think our gawking has been a little too obvious. Well, it would be if there were six faces pressed up against windows, peering at you from across the street. On more than one occassion, they have waved at us, before shutting the blinds and getting down and dirty. Oh well, perhaps one day they’ll get caught up in the passion of the moment and forget there’s a bunch of perves across the street from them hehe. (But hey, if you’re going to be that visible, expect to be watched!)

Have a 22nd on Saturday, a 21st next Saturday (Happy Birthday Denise!). They are both themed parties. What is it with those themes? Argh… hate em… too much thought required. Happy 22nd Birtdhay to Pro as well!

Eclipse
Heading down to South Australia next Tuesday for three days to experience the solar eclipse. Ceduna, which is in the middle of the eclipse path, is expected to be packed full of observers, and there have been overnight “tent cities” set up along the eclipse path. We have opted to go to the Wirraminna rail sidings instead, in the outback, to view it. Being further inland, the eclipse will last an insignificant two seconds shorter, and the place is in the middle of nowhere, but the chance of rain is much decreased compared to coastal Ceduna (despite the drought conditions present in Australia). We’ll probably be camping overnight there too. Without the light pollution of cities, I expect the night sky will be brilliant. Looking forward to it.

Overseas
Heading overseas in December too. Itinerary is:

– 18/12: Sydney to Singapore
– 19/12: Singapore to Hat Yai
– 21/12: Hat Yai to Singapore
– 22/12: Singapore to Hong Kong
– Between 22/12 and 02/01: 2 days in Guangzhou, visiting my grandmother’s home town
– 02/01: Hong Kong to Singapore
– 04/01: Singapore

Unfortunately there’s a lot of travelling involved which will suck up much time. I’m looking for a new digital camera while in Singapore. Something in the ultra-portable class that fits into pockets with room to spare so it won’t impale me in the groin when I sit down. The new Canon Digital Ixus v3 looks appealing (250g, 3.1 megapixels).

21
Nov 02
Thu

Wait

Final exam later today. Regular updates resume soon. Promise!

13
Nov 02
Wed

57,000 words later…

And the draft of my thesis has been completed. It’s currently with my supervisor awaiting feedback. Final submission date looks to be Friday or next Monday. Meanwhile, I’ll be putting in the study for my one subject this session, which is telecommunications for e-commerce (mysteriously named, for it has nothing really to do with e-commerce – it’s a networking subject). Exam is next Friday.

2
Nov 02
Sat

Thesis Update

37000 words in, without appendices, and just under two weeks to go. I ran six system demonstrations/surveys this week, with eight to run by next Wednesday. I should have the results analysed by the weekend, and hopefully a completed draft ready to undergo a brief one week proofread and revision. The one week process is too brief for my liking, but they brought the submission deadline forward by two weeks a few months ago. A complaint was recently lodged with the faculty dean, and there will be a meeting to inquire into the state of affairs, but it’s unlikely the deadline will change. It seems that the majority of the 20 or so BIT honours students will be graduating late because the deadline is just too near. Nonetheless, I don’t intend on dragging out this thesis for another couple months, so I’m aiming for an on time submission on the 15th. The final exam is on the 22nd, which also marks the end of my four year degree. A bunch of us plan to head out into the city after that exam… and just not come back for a while ;).

In other news, I got a paper accepted for publication at the Collecter e-commerce conference. Man… no time, no time… unlike some socialites who have time for loungeroom art!

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28
Oct 02
Mon

I’m So Bored

I have a few spare minutes, so let me recount a fairly mundane memory for a fairly mundane day, which came back to me after I discovered an old namecard, a remnant from highschool.

In Year 9, we had this crazy teacher (who I’ll refer to as Dougie) for commerce who employed somewhat peculiar means to maintain discipline within the class. He created this system of responsibilities. If we failed to comply with any of these responsibilities, he’d apply some sort of remedial action. This “remedial action” escalated in severity each time a responsibility was broken by a person. The list of responsibilities numbered five, and we had them all written down on this name card we had to display on our desk.

1. Do not speak while the teacher or someone else is speaking.
2. Do not get out of your seat without teacher’s permission.
3. Do not distract others.
4. Raise your hand. Do not call out.
5. Do your work.

So you’d be enjoying a nice little chat with the friend next to you and suddenly a voice would sound out from across the room.

“Stuart!”
“Yes sir?”
“Please tell me responsibility number 1.”
“(Groan) Do not speak while the teacher or someone else is speaking.”
“And what is my responsibility to you?”

This final question refered to the list of remedial actions which were, in order of severity:

1. One warning.
2. You will be moved.
3. You will see me after class.
4. You will see me at lunch.
5. You will be excluded from the class.

I quote the above verbatim, as I wrote on my namecard seven years ago. Anyway this system operated throughout the entire year and as a result, sparked some retaliatory antics from us in response to the bizarrity of the “responsibility system”. Ways would be found to bend the responsibilities – such as number 2, which had everyone sliding their chairs around the room in order to move about. It was even better because we had commerce classes in a biology lab, so there were a lot of props we made use of, like sitting the model skeleton in the teacher’s chair before Dougie arrived, whipping the gas taps on and loudly exclaiming, “Aww who farted?!” and so on. Anyway one day, near the end of the year, we were lining up at the teacher’s desk to collect exams back or something like that. Someone had nicked one of the whiteboard markers and wrote a large word onto the metal front of the teacher’s desk saying, “IDIOT”, or something similar, and an arrow pointing to Dougie. Anyway, as we all took our tests back and sat down, we started cracking up one by one. By the time everyone had sat down, we were all sniggering. It took him the rest of class to figure out what was going on. When he eventually managed to suss out the source of his public humiliation, he was not a happy chappy. The Routine began again, but it was a little different this time:

“You.”
“Yes sir?”
“What is responsibility number six?”
“Uh… six? There is no six?”
“Yes there is.”
“Uh… umm…”
“It is: Do not be a moron. Now get out.”
“But your responsibility to me is a warning…”
“GET OUT!!”

Meanwhile, the rest of the class is in an uproar of laughter and Dougie is vainly handing out warnings and moving people left, right and centre in an effort to get us to shut up… And that was the end of that unproductive class for the day. Ok that was just a memory from a while ago. I didn’t say it was interesting.

26
Oct 02
Sat

Urk

I am currently going through a bit of honours thesis hell. After discovering that the original plan of testing my software in a real world business wasn’t going to happen due to the low adoption in Sydney of the e-commerce system that my software runs on, my supervisor suggested a scope change to running a case study instead. So, I spent the last fortnight preparing for a case study that was meant to be done on fraud in the RTA. Unfortunately, the approval hadn’t actually been passed for me to run interviews, and last Thursday, I got a call from my supervisor to say that RTA management had turned down the request. Rumour has it that they are having a bit of trouble with internal system security, which means that they aren’t exactly in the mood to have some inquisitive uni student come in and tell them all the things they are doing wrong. Strike 2. Upon further discussion, it was decided that I would be running a survey instead. So, throw out the last two weeks worth of work, or about 4000 words of well researched material (if I do say so myself), and restart. The thesis is due on November 15. The process of Packing Shit has not started just yet, but I guarantee that within a week or two, I will definitely be packing it.

In other news, daylight saving starts. Therefore, we all lose an hour of sleep tonight, meaning I will be extra tired at dragonboat tomorrow morning. Tuesday night I’ll be going out to dinner with the world trip crew. Out of the other three, I haven’t seen Von in a very long time, so it will be good to catch up with her. We’re going to a Nepalese restaurant in Surry Hills, and then Gelatissimo in the CBD, which everyone tells me is the latest popular ice cream joint. (I’m inclined to believe this because they pave their ice cream into cones. Real ice cream is paved, not scooped!) Those choices were naturally made in line with the two most favourite countries we visited a couple years ago. Ok then, back to the stressful grind of the thesis.

One more thing. Soon mailed me with an amusing conspiracy theory about the Millennium trains. They sure are rare.

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16
Oct 02
Wed

Thesis News

It’s just rolled over into the one month left stage, until my thesis is due. The workload is mounting and I have yet to commence a case study I need to do for it (not that I’ve been lazy, my supervisor discovered that a sudden change in thesis objectives was necessary last week). I’ve been staring at Word for so long over the past fortnight that I’ve taken to pacing about the apartment just to get away from it. Thus, I present to you a flash game worthy of my current state of mind: Poke the Penguin. Thanks Dan.

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10
Oct 02
Thu

Yabbies

Well it finally happened, our little freshwater crab was eaten by the smaller of our yabbies. :(

State of our aquarium

8
Oct 02
Tue

Last Night…

[00:59:12] Chris: eheheh… a person just called … wrong phone number…
Him: “hi… is this Asian Darlings?”
Me: “umm… i’m pretty sure you got the wrong number”
Him: *click*

7
Oct 02
Mon

The Weekend

The place we ended up at over the weekend was Bermagui. Bermagui is a small town, about five hours south of Sydney, near Bega. It’s on the coast, and reputed to be one of the best fishing spots in Australia. Our hosts were a couple of family friends, Ron and Betty. Ron is a fishing enthusiast.

It was after dinner, about 9pm when we arrived at their house. It was in a quiet, unlit street, lined sporadically on one side with houses, and a cemetary shrouded in bushland on the other (“So Betty won’t have to go far to cart me!” Ron quipped later on, producing a furrowed brow from Betty.) Ron greeted us, “We thought you got lost! Come in, come in, I just got a fresh batch of nippers for bait when we go out tomorrow!” It wasn’t until we entered his garage that we realised how much of an enthusiast he was. In addition to his large red game fishing boat, Ron owned a second smaller vessel for river runs. It was that boat we were going to go out on the next day, as the ocean was a bit too choppy for open sea fishing. On the roof was a vast array of fishing rods, twenty or so. They all looked pretty similar to me.

“Why’ve you got so many rods?” mum exclaimed incredulously.
“Let me answer that with this: Why’ve you got so many dresses?”
“Oh, because each dress is for a different occassion…”
And that pretty much ended that.

He gesticulated wildly. “…And this is for barramundi. This is for bass. That one is for beach fishing. And these ones,” he paused, finger hovering up at series of around six rods covered with cloth, “are for marlin.” He climbed up a step ladder, dislodged one of the marlin rods, and came down. Marlin rods are big. Well, they need to be, especially when you’re trying to reel in an animal that can be more than four times heavier than you. The reel is a large, bulky clunk of metal, around which is wrapped some 600-pound fishing wire. My arms were getting tired just supporting it. Luckily when fishing, in most cases, the rod is held into place by a socket between your legs, in the chair on the game boat. The weight of the rod is supported by a harness strapped around your body.

“That metal clunk you’re holding is $3000,” Ron said.
“Uh, you better have it back then,” handing it quickly back to him. He chuckled.

The garage wall was adorned with various photos of Ron alongside marlin. One that took him seven minutes to catch. One that took thirty minutes. One that took over three hours. Apparently, on one trip out, he managed to land nine of the critters.

The next morning, I walked out the front door as Ron was finishing connecting the trailer to his 4-wheel drive. A couple of neighbours had come over for a chat. Their tiny three-legged dog, called Bandit, was hopping around with her nose in the bucket where all the nippers were, absolutely fascinated. Occasionally her head would jerk back with a yelp as one of the nippers grabbed at her nose. We fished out a nipper and gave it to her. She retreated off to the front lawn and proceeded to toy with the squirming crustacean, before gobbling it up. Bandit had lost her hind right leg when a tractor accidentally backed over it.

We arrived at the river at the top of high tide. It was an inlet to the sea, so it was a diluted saltwater that made the river. The fishing season was only starting up, so our catch wasn’t as bountiful as other times of the year. Three hours later, we’d caught some bream, blackfish, trevally, some poisonous pufferfish, and a few stingrays. Only five of the fish were above the minimum legal limit, and that was what we added to our dinner menu in addition to some fresh oysters, balmain bugs and calamari. At around 3pm, the tide was retreating rapidly, and threatened to maroon our boat in the river – some parts of which, were only a foot or so deep at that time. We actually did get stuck on a sandbank on the way back and had to jump out and pull the boat over it.

Dinner was a banquet of fresh seafood. We caught the second half of the footy grand final. Ron, being the doggies supporter that he is indignantly pointed out that, “The roosters only won because of the bulldogs,” and then watched The Cider House Rules. We got back to Sydney this evening. There are actually quite a lot of decent places around NSW for a long weekend getaway.

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4
Oct 02
Fri

Long Weekend

I’m off, down south along the coast until Monday. Family friend has a boat or something and we’re doing… stuff. Yeah you can tell I’ve been clued in to what’s going on… I don’t even remember the name of the place we’re going, it’s got some weird name.

3
Oct 02
Thu

This story has been dramatised for the web

Dave came back from Melbourne today, told me a pretty amusing story which I will now relay here. Dave and eleven of his friends hired three cars and set off west from Melbourne on the Great Ocean Drive. They had decided not to prebook accommodation, feeling “it would be more exciting that way”. They eventually arrived at Apollo Bay around 9pm and found a motel to stay in. However, they being a bunch of miserly, broke uni students, attempted to get themselves a discount. They told the innkeeper that there were only eight of them. To their dismay, their scam was undone when the third car in their convoy, which they had ordered to stay well out of sight until later, came trundling up the driveway. The innkeeper promptly kicked all of them out.

Now they had to find a new place to stay. Unfortunately, that day coincided with the end of the AFL Grand Final, and after doing the rounds in Apollo Bay, found there was absolutely zero accommodation left. So they sent off on the road again. They came to the next town along the road. Same result. No space. And the next. And the next. Well, there were spare rooms, but no establishment that could fit 12 extra bodies in. They could’ve split up and picked separate motels, but no, they were obstinate. They also started to declare they were a party of twelve, instead of eight, having learnt their lesson.

They hit the road again. By this time they were beginning to get freaked out. Midnight was approaching, the roads were deserted, and periodically a kangaroo would bound across the road out of the murky darkness, jolting the drivers back to alertness (their cars were bullbarless). They passed a lonely B&B joint along the highway but were too scared to enquire within. And so on and on they drove. Eventually, the convoy arrived at Port Campbell, I think it was, and still there was nothing. Options were starting to be thrown around, including sleeping in the car. I can only imagine the mood in each of the cars. A bunch of tired, grumpy, desparate uni students in the middle of nowhere, looking for shelter (I told you this story was dramatised).

Finally, at 1.30am, they arrived in Warrnambool, exhausted, and managed to book themselves into a motor inn, over 4 hours later. And get this, they had tried checking in to at least 25 different places after Apollo Bay.

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26
Sep 02
Thu

A Week in the Life

It seems that the updates to this site have somewhat petered out this session. I guess it’s because I seem to be spending less time on the Net. Apart from the daily rounds, I don’t really browse through much else. My thesis is due November 15, and I have a shitload of work left to do for that. I’m using IBM WebSphere for it, and due to some obscure bug that was preventing a proper install, I had to lug my computer up to St Leonard’s for them to look at it (incidentally, the view they have from the top floor at reception is incredible). With a day’s effort and luck, we managed to get WebSphere working on my computer, so it was worth the trip. The thesis is what occupies most of my time these days, although progress is very slow.

I went to a dragonboat training session last Sunday and I don’t think my deltoids have hurt so much in my life – the exertion isn’t so much in the stroking, it’s in keeping the oar held up. Been hitting the gym twice a week, including a Pilates class. I had a midsession quiz yesterday for my only subject this session, Telecomms for E-Commerce, basically a course on networks. It was… ok. Now we’re on our one week midsession break, but with my 3 hour weeks, it won’t feel any different for me. My flatmate is taking off to Melbourne for the week, leaving tonight. Hmm, I’ve never been to Melbourne myself. Soph just got offered a permanent position at ING, which is terrific news.

Looking ahead, there’s a 21st at Centennial park tomorrow and a BBQ on Sunday. Co-op ball is coming up, where I will have to go through the hassles and cost of hiring appropriate attire (grumble). I’ve also convinced mum and dad to take 3 days off work to watch the once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse over South Australia in December. We’re planning to hop on a plane to Adelaide, hire a car, drive up to Ceduna, or thereabouts, and return by the same method. There’s going to be another family holiday at the year’s end to Singapore, Hat Yai (Thailand) and Hong Kong, which means I’m going to miss another Christmas and New Year’s in Australia… the 4th year running :(. My cousin has been dodgy over ICQ again and has somehow managed to score us a good looking Honkie “tour guide” while we’re over there (despite the presence of friends-we-already-know that will be there). That happened the last time too. And more. But that’s another story.

8
Sep 02
Sun

Alternative uses for shrapnel

Another classic Fuzzy story, this time about loose change charity. My roommate came in to pay his half of the phone bill tonight and the bum paid me the $4 non-notes portion of the bill in 5c and 10c coins, out of the stockpile he’s been “waiting for the right moment to get rid of”. I’m tempted to copycat Fuzzy’s antics. Except, I live in an block of about 16 apartments, and the mailboxes outside are all in one place. So it wouldn’t be too difficult to drop change into say, my next door neighbour’s box without looking too conspicuous.

5
Sep 02
Thu

Stuff

My PSU blew on my LAN box (which is also the machine I am doing my thesis on). The weird thing is, the computer was off at the time. I guess it must’ve been the residual charge running through the system to keep the network card powered… but still, that’s not very much voltage. Bizarre. Oh well, time to fork out more cash – this is the 4th or 5th power supply to have conked out on me.

Oh, belated happy 21st to Napalm!

29
Aug 02
Thu

Uni Stuff

Yesterday, 4pm, UNSW: I had a meeting with my thesis supervisor.

“I want you to write a 5000 word conference paper.”
“Ok.”
“Yeah. Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning?!”
“Uh huh. Say, 9.30am?”
“Uh… o… k…”

So that kept me nice and awake until 6am today.

I’ve just finished doing the revisions we discussed at the 9.30 meeting, so hopefully that’s out of the way for now. I took a trek up to the Law Faculty admin office after the meeting and got their enrolment prospectus. UAC has opened for 2003 enrolments. Lately I’ve began giving serious consideration into doing graduate law, and I seem to be moving in that direction. It’ll add another 3 years to my uni life (or 2.5, if I overload) and 7 years in uni would make me old. Then again anyone with a combined honours degree would need 6 years anyway, so an extra half year couldn’t hurt that much could it? It’s unlikely that I would get the opportunity to do law in my life if I don’t do it when I’m young, but then again 2 years of full-time work is a pretty good start in life too. Hmm, I think I’ll enrol (deadline is end of September) and see how the year pans out. At least that gives me options either way. Anyone able to offer me advice on this?

18
Aug 02
Sun

Hearing

I’ve always been mildly deaf since childhood, so I went for a hearing test last week to see if the situation had changed at all. A hearing test is not all that dissimilar in principle to an eyesight test. They stick you into a soundproofed room (even isolated from the air conditioning system), and play you tones through headphones. The tones are played at a variety of frequencies at different levels of volume. You hit a button when you hear a tone. It gets quite deceptive, because at quieter levels, you’re not sure what is a tone and what is your imagination. They also play words and you’re meant to repeat what you hear, or at least, what you think you hear. The last stage of the test involves them sticking probes into your ear to measure middle and inner ear things.

In the tone test, they measure tonal ranges from 500Hz to 8000Hz which is roughly the normal human vocal range. Normal hearing, like 20/20 vision, should allow people to hear down to 20 decibels. I have mild permanent deafness in the upper ranges (2kHz-8kHz) where sounds must be above 40dB for me to hear – note that the decibel scale is logarithmical. Which to me is slightly worrying because a 20dB difference means those frequencies must be 100 times “louder”, or at least 100 times more powerful, for me to hear, than the normal person, unless I have misinterpreted something. Luckily, it’s still categorised as minor loss. In practical terms, that means I sometimes miss high frequency/low volume parts of words such as affricatives (“ch”) and fricatives (“th”, “sh”, “ss”), but context and limited lip reading ability (that the doctor told I have apparently subconsciously developed) fill in the gaps most of the time. It also explained for me why I can never seem to hear people when they whisper to me… it’s because I simply can’t.

18
Jul 02
Thu

Today

Woke up at about 9.30 today. Uni results were released at 8am, but as usual the NSS system shat itself under the load of students checking their marks. After a good 15 minutes of clicking reload, I retrieved my mark for this session, an HD for IS Security, which was a good start to the day.

Pro dropped around and we headed off for brunch. We intended to go to Coogee but our approach was all bad, hitting a series of No Right Turn signs and ending up in Clovelly. No matter, we ate there at a cafe on the beachside. The beach at Clovelly is nicely tucked away and not heavily trafficked, and the day was just beautiful. The fresh aroma of sea salt in the air, good view of the beach, the soporific sounds of waves breaking, and to cap it off, warm, strong sunshine. Not bad for the middle of Winter, but then again, this is Sydney. Walked off our food along the rocks. Lots of people out with their dogs who were swimming in rockpools. It sure felt like a weekend day. I love holidays.

Dropped into uni to drop in a couple history essays and then went off to the city to catch Blade 2. Shen went up to buy his ticket only to be asked for proof of age – Blade is restricted to 15+ unless accompanied by a guardian over 18. He was incredulous: “Are you serious??” We gave him a ribbing for that, “Don’t worry Shen, we can be your guardians” (despite the fact that he was the eldest of all of us). Until all three of us got stopped at the door by an overzealous usher intent on keeping minor minors out of Blade. But damn, I am pretty sure that at 21, none of us look like 14 year olds.

Blade 2’s cool. Violence, gore, swords, guns, blood, and badass attitude. Guy’s flick. If you are squeamish, go watch it. Desensitise yourself. The only thing that detracted from it was the old fogie sitting behind us exclaiming, “Oh Wowwwww” in the most annoying nasally voice you can imagine, every 5 minutes.

Off to the snow on Saturday, can’t wait. One week of skiing, then back to uni for my final semester. I’ve shoved everything (Thesis, Telecomms for E-Commerce) onto a Thursday, so I only have a one day week at uni. Snazzy. See you in a week.

11
Jul 02
Thu

What’s Not Fun

When friends give you a hard time when you decide to spend time with other friends, who in turn do the same thing. Give me a fucking break.

2
Jul 02
Tue

Stuff

Just finished my 60 page thesis proposal. It’s due in with my supervisor tomorrow, hopefully he won’t drown it in red, chuck it back in my face and say it’s not good enough. But I get this feeling that that may be the case. It doesn’t end there, I have this one annoying pissy half-subject I need to get done and uni has scheduled it in for Friday to Sunday. All day, 10 to 6pm. So I’m going in to uni in the holidays on a weekend to do work. Yuck. So next week is when my holidays really begin.

27
Jun 02
Thu

Stuff

Last day of work. Origin was a blast on Wednesday night, too bad about the result. Went out to catch the Brazil-Turkey match in the city afterwards, then overslept and turned up late to work the following day.

Crude comment of the night, delivered by the plastered blokes behind us at the footy who provided the night’s commentary: (To one of the cheerleaders) “Show us where you got hit by the axe!”

25
Jun 02
Tue

Hmm

You know, it’s a bit of a scary thing when you realise that peoples e-mail addresses in your address book are no longer ending in “@hotmail.com” or “@student.unsw.edu.au”, but “@corporation.com.au” and “@company.com”.

Finished my IS Security exam today, just have to get the thesis proposal in next Monday, finish up at OneSteel this Friday, and I’m on holidays! Going to Stadium Oz to watch the State of Origin match (go the blues!) tonight and probably head into the city afterwards and catch the soccer. The semester from hell is almost over!

18
Jun 02
Tue

New Printer

We have a new 55 page per minute printer here at work. It’s a Beast. Those pages just fly out…

6
Jun 02
Thu

Dave bet on Uruguay to win last night which meant that they didn’t. (They drew.)France is in real trouble now – the next game is a must win one, and preferably one where they win by a large a goal difference as possible. For tonight, I would back Argentina, but a better bet would be to check who Dave has his money on and go the other way :).

4
Jun 02
Tue

Go

I learnt how to play Go last night. I love it, it’s a really cool game. You know how in chess some guy moves a pawn and the commentary is something along the lines of, “dominating move, wresting control of the critical squares from his opponent, choking his supply lines”, and every normal person is like… wtf? Well, the cool thing about Go is that you can actually describe the board that descriptively, just by the patterns of pieces of the board. Go has been described as fighting a multi-front war, and, although that’s a fairly extravagant description for any board game, it’s true. The 19×19 square board is massive – I haven’t played a game on the full board yet. Go is not Reversi/Othello. The object is not to put down as many pieces of yours on the board as possible, but to control as much territory as possible. As opposed to chess, the emphasis is on controlling space through linking pieces and not through movement. Naturally, I’m a total newbie at this game, but it’s far easier to pick up than chess.

This game is flawed!

3
Jun 02
Mon

Privacy Assignment

We got our privacy group assignment back in record time after handing it in last Friday. We scored 94% which was immensely gratifying.

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30
May 02
Thu

21st Birthday

Well, this is it, the Big 21. Strange age to “move” into adulthood, really. Australians, at 18, have all the legal rights and responsibilities of an adult. I guess it takes three years for the maturation process to start occurring – you go silly with those newfound rights one has at 18. Then, you slowly get over the fact that you can now walk into a bar, club or porn store without getting kicked out. Life has sure changed a lot since I was in first-year uni. Back then, there really was not a lot to worry about. Uni subjects were easy (and ultimately unimportant), free time flowed like beer on St Patrick’s day. There were so many new people to meet, and uni itself was fresh, new and the sudden freedom after 13 years of school life was liberating. Now, at the tail end of a uni degree, the pressure is on to find a job, push out a quality thesis, and prepare to move on to the next stage of life. Free time now flows like beer after 1am in NSW country towns. But anyway, that’s probably because I’ve been working full time for a year now on top of a lot of other stuff. I will be making the most of the rest of uni and living it up.

My cousin, who rented a car and taught me how to drive a manual last year, is claiming that his present this year will top that idea. He claims the present will (1) potentially save my life and (2) make me shit my pants. I wait in anticipation.

Timezones deem that I won’t be able to (legally) drink in the US for another 16 hours.

Overheard

On the bus today, some girl in reference to a baby: “He’s so cute I could EAT him!”

I sure haven’t heard that expression before. Oh wait, I have. Mike Tyson said it, but the word “cute” didn’t enter into it.

28
May 02
Tue

B’day

My 21st is on Friday but I have been so damn busy that the party probably won’t be till July. Sucks. Oh well, 4 more weeks of work left.

Putting the finishing touches on a group uni assignment for IS Security where we have to do a privacy report on an e-business company. With lack of a suitable organisation, we eventually turned to the Australian branch of Internet.com and interviewed Niki Scevak (pays to have co-op connections sometimes heh). So that’s due Friday. The exam is on the 26th, and that, along with the literature review for my thesis, will be all that’s left this semester in terms of uni work. I need a break. I’m going skiing in Victoria these holidays.

20
May 02
Mon

Brrr

Today was way too fricking cold. The daytime was bad enough, but I had uni this evening, and in typical Kensington fashion, it was blustery. The wind seems to bypass all clothing and strips heat straight from the skin. Catching hypothermia on the walks home this Winter is a distinct possibility :). I always pass a few payphones on the way home from uni. They are in the middle of the street in residential zoning, and they always seem to have someone using them at all odd hours. Fair enough, people may use those phones to make a quick call, but the type of people that use them speak for ages – up to an hour long… surely a home phone would be better (and it would be out of the cold)? Or are people that desparate for a chat? I’ve never figured this one out.

If you check out Google, it looks like they are releasing a new logo this Friday and are selling mugs this week only, to commemorate the event. For some reason, I’d really dig a mug with the Google logo on it, but to order it to Australia would cost $40. I ain’t paying $40 for a cup.

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19
May 02
Sun

Storm

Here’s a photo of the storm that swept over Sydney last Thursday (that I got caught in, without an umbrella!) It’s pretty cool. The view is from a building somewhere in North Sydney. Thanks to Pro.

Yabbies!

Yabbies
They’re no longer all in the same tank, unfortunately. The big one kept dismembering the others.

12
May 02
Sun

Recruitment

This has been an incredibly tough season for finding a job. Industry in general is still in a slump, despite an upturn in business. As a result, the numbers of graduates companies are willing to take on is but a fraction of the levels they were during the dot com boom time of 98/99. I filled out job application forms or sent in my resume to about 15 companies in strategy consulting, IT consulting, IT positions in financial services and IT companies. As of today, I’ve spoken my way through 16 interviews.

The whole process is incredibly draining. Firstly, the masses of application forms are bad enough to fill in. Online forms are the worst, especially the ones with about a hundred open-ended “name a situation where you have displayed teamwork/leadership/initiative etc.” type questions. Then there’s the resume, cover letter and academic transcript (at $10 per transcript, the uni is virtually running a mint). For some online forms you have to retype your resume done in Word as text, which is a major pain. In the end, I got truly sick of filling out form after form and just stopped.

Secondly, there’s the interview phase. Getting called up for the first few are encouraging. But then you realise that your schedule is starting to pile up with them. I have been going to interviews more often than work in the past three weeks. The interviews are 30-60 minutes on average. They really tax the brain as you attempt to construct a coherent, insightful answer, all while trying to sound sincere. With experience, it starts to become second nature though, and again, eventually you get sick of answering the same (slightly reworded) questions and get lazy. At this stage, it’s also pretty clear to the interviewer whether you have any real interest in the job. It’s been a few weeks of hoping that the last missed mobile phone call wasn’t from graduate recruitment, or that you come home to an empty letterbox (snail mail correspondence is reserved for rejections), or that the public transport system doesn’t collapse because that would make you late to the interview.

Strategic Consulting
The majority of the population, when they hear “management consulting company”, immediately think “PwC”, “Deloitte” and the other big names of the big 5 (or is that big 4 and a half now?). Unfortunately, that would be a misconception, for there is a band of companies pitched above those that make up the select group of “pure” strategic consultancies. The largest three, collectively known as M/B/B, are incredible companies to work for.

Competition for these companies is murderous. They hire from literally any discipline – engineering, law, med, commerce, science – and applicants are generally the pick of the crop of their fields. If you apply for these companies and get turned down as many are, it is all too easy to become discouraged or disillusioned with the job search process – I have witnessed some extremely talented people getting turned down for these companies. Realise however, that this year McKinsey, Poynton and Booz each hired a mere two grads out of thousands of applicants (and the other firms also hiring in the single digits). The number of grad positions open across the entire strategic consulting industry is less than the intake of PwC Consulting. Three years ago, the positions available would have been around triple what they are today.

I applied to these companies not expecting anything out of it, apart from experience. I received outright application rejections for all but two firms. One of them I have already bowed out of the interview process. I made it through to the second round of interviews for the remaining firm (16 people going for 3 positions), but was again unsuccessful.

All consulting firms hold case interviews, which are different from the ordinary behavioural based ones. Case interviews consist of a business case you work through with the interviewer – the aim of which is to see how well you can analyse a problem and structure a response. Questions I got ranged from things like, “How many tires are there in the world?” and “What is the market size for staple guns in the US?” to longer problems such as exploring market growth for a timber manufacturer and doing a market assessment and comparison between quarries and concrete suppliers. I actually prefer cases to behaviourals, but they are tougher to do, and it is all too easy to be unlucky and receive a tough case you just aren’t in the right mindset to solve.

It also seems that these firms are quite wary of IT grads. A friend who made it to the Bain interviews commented that he was the sole IT person there amongst a sea of combined Law degrees. Again, 3 years ago, things would have been quite different. (McKinsey actually used to be a sponsor for BIT!)

IT Consulting
Strategic consulting companies held their recruitment period a month before all the other industries. Application deadlines for IT Consultancies were set roughly at the time most strategy consultancies were handing out offers. Only three consultancies were recruiting this year: PwC Consulting (25 grads), Deloitte Consulting (up to 60 grads) and Accenture (about 20 grads). All the consulting companies have now splintered off their parent accounting ones after Andersen disintegrated, so they are effectively all separate entities.

PwCC: These guys will be undergoing a rebranding some time later this year, once they figure out what their new name is going to be. My degree (BIT) is part of a co-operative program with PwC as a sponsor, so we all got “special treatment” in terms of fast tracking the interview process. For us, they hold everything on one day – aptitude tests and interviews with a buffet lunch thrown in. I was asked, “What do you think of the situation in Zimbabwe?” which has to be one of the more unusual questions I’ve recevied. Offers will be extended in about 3-4 weeks. Their training course in Tampa, Florida sounds quite appealing.

Accenture: No special treatment with them, although they too are a program sponsor. Three rounds of interviews. Got rejected after the first round, which is highly perplexing, to say the least.

A few friends have been receiving interview offers by KPMG via SMS. That’s just cheap.

The Rest
I also applied for IBM, Aspect, Macquarie Bank, and UBS Warburg (IT divisions). Waiting to hear from Aspect. Currently in the pipeline for IBM and Macquarie. Was unsuccessful for UBS.

I have an interview on Wednesday, but the recruitment season is starting to wind down. Things should all be over by the month’s end.

Yabbies!

That was a longer time away from posting than I originally thought I would take. Everything’s just been so incredibly busy! I’ve had the ever increasing urge to post, but haven’t found a lull in activity (and corresponding burst of energy needed) up until now. The great majority of my time has been spent with recruitment related activities, interspersed with spurts of uni and thesis research on top of work. I’m going to over my recruiting experiences, but first, something else.

We got an aquarium in the apartment. It’s got no fish, only a crab and two yabbies. The first remark most people make about this is, “Crustaceans and no fish? How boring!” … only to spend the next half hour staring fascinated into the glass tank.

Why this is so relies on the nature of the beasts. Of the two yabbies, one is an absolute bully. He’ll attack others without provocation. As a result of constantly muscling away food from the others, he moulted first (shed his shell to grow bigger) and is practically doubled in size overnight. He looks like a tank compared to the others. He’s also ripped off one of the other yabby’s pincers. The crab keeps mainly to herself, only striking out in self-defence when any of the other two get too close. The little yabby is copping a beating, and more often than not, the big one will chase the him around. The little one will retreat backwards, only to back into the crab who will give him a nip in the butt. A yabby’s quick retreat mechanism is its tail flick. By using this, it can catapult itself halfway across the tank in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, when the little one flicks its tail after getting pinched by the crab, it normally ends up catapulting forward, straight into the arms of the big yabby, who lashes out with its own pincers. Tail flick again, but this time, backwards. Into the crab. The result is something like a game of tennis.

The big fights, however, are between the crab and the big yabby. The resemblance to a boxing match is uncanny – they’ll take swipes at each other, getting closer and closer, until their claws are entangled. Without a referee to yell out “break!” however, both critters are free to try and bite off each other’s ears. Well, that’s if they had visible ears – they don’t, but eyes work just as well. Incidentally, the scientific name for yabbies is cheerax destructor. They’ve lasted over three weeks now without killing each other. You can call it sadistic, but we call it natural selection. And it’s a lot more interesting than watching goldfish with 30 second memories swim around bumping into the glass.

Update: Big bully has ripped off the second pincer of the second yabby, so Dave moved him out into his gf’s aquarium. The carnage continued unabated, however, and the crab lost two of its legs in the battles that ensued. She too has been moved into a second aquarium Dave bought today.

9
May 02
Thu

Hi

I’m alive. Stay tuned for a Big-Ass post in the upcoming days… I’ve just gone through 16 interviews in the last 3 weeks. I’ve also moved workplace to Parramatta, which actually has shops within walking distance (gasp!)

7
Apr 02
Sun

Aquarium

Dave bought an aquarium yesterday. It looks like we’re going to be keeping a couple of yabbies in our apartment. It’s sitting on the kitchen bench. I remember back in school, our tutor kept a yabbie in her lab. Every house period, everyone would find some way to traumatise the poor thing when she wasn’t looking (it’s amazing what tools you can find in a science lab). Eventually it died due to shock or so we were told. We were convinced it was all those bananas she kept feeding it. Have you seen the mess and stink a banana makes when it slowly disintegrates in water?

3
Apr 02
Wed

Recruitment

Well April is underway and so too is the recruiting silly season. Strat consulting firms are the first to recruit, and I finally sent in all those forms in the last few weeks. That is, M/B/B, Booz, and a couple boutiques. Naturally, you can’t expect a position in those firms unless you are in the freak category, so the other industries I’m applying for include IT Consultancies, namely the consulting arms of the Big 5, IT departments of i-banking firms (they pay well, apparently), and IT firms. PwC Consulting is holding an information night for BITs tonight. It will be interesting to see how they pitch themselves. Their intake for consulting this year is around 25, which is only slightly less than the probable total intake across all the strat consulting firms I applied to. Next week we have a BIT recruitment night, where our course sponsors and us get together for an evening to sell ourselves to each other.

The first company to kick off interviewing is McK on the 10th. No one I know has heard anything from any of the firms as yet. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

1
Apr 02
Mon

Easter

I hope the break for you was enjoyable. Four day long weekend did me a heap of good.

25
Mar 02
Mon

Leadership Camp

I got back from Leadership camp on Sunday. Awesome time. The worst part of the day was being blasted awake at 6.30am, but after that, it was all good. They ran teams of us through a series of problem solving activities – get out of prison, get over a pit with these materials, build this as fast as possible, etc. – followed by debrief sessions that put things in context of leadership. It was surprisingly effective, given that I never thought that leadership was a skill that could be “taught”. It was all incredibly fun, and effective. Activities finished before dinner and after that we were pretty much left up to our own devices (which meant getting pissed, for most of us). Exhausting. Thank goodness for the four day week this week…

20
Mar 02
Wed

On Camp

I am off down to Kangaroo Valley for a leadership camp. It will be a blast. Back Sunday.

16
Mar 02
Sat

I had a car accident today. Neither I nor the other party was hurt, but I am pretty shaken up about it.

14
Mar 02
Thu

Recruitment

Yes, I know my site is becoming ill-maintained yet again. I’ve been flat out.

Thesis – I finally got my topic finalised. It’s on continuous auditing and e-commerce.

Recruitment – Been attending all the information seminars this week. Deloitte Consulting on Monday, Bain on Tuesday, Port Jackson Partners on Wednesday and The Firm yesterday (that’d be McKinsey). All strategic consulting firms (except for DC, which is more mixed), all high powered, and all highly desirable places to work at, careerwise. Next week is BCG, and I’ll be interested to see how they present compared to McKinsey which was distinctly unflashy. Not that they need to be flashy, they already have a Reputation. I finally have developed my resume to a point where I’m satisfied with it. The resumes start going in next week, with interview offers being extended late March/early April. Working in strategy consulting would be an absolute blast (the travel, training, diverse experience, networking, money – it’s all there). However, the calibre of applicants and the acceptance rate (<<1%) for firms in that line of business makes all applications daunting. (As a result, I’m applying for as many strat consult firms as I can.)

5
Mar 02
Tue

Bus Strike!

Sydney is now suffering a 48 hour bus strike. It’s not a “free-fare” day like they normally hold, they’ve taken all buses off the road. The strike is expected to impact 600,000 people over the next few days.

Traffic on major roads, as can be expected, is an absolute car park. Especially from places whose only available form of public transport are buses (UNSW and the eastern suburbs, for instance). On the way to work the people waiting on roadsides for – what I can only assume – car pools was readily noticeable. And of course, there are bound to be people who just haven’t heard about the strike. There is a bus stop right outside this building, and sure enough when I was walking in for work, there was a Korean girl standing there waiting. I told her about the strike, which as expected, she hadn’t heard of. It must’ve thrown a spanner into the works with her plans for the day. Kev, who lives across the road from me took up a tutoring position at UTS. Unable to find an available car, and unwilling to take a taxi, he is walking to UTS (should take a little over an hour). Then he’s grabbing a lift with me back (probably will take the same amount of time with the traffic! :).

3
Mar 02
Sun

Ok that was a strange voicemail… Someone rang up my mobile, got my voicemail, said a couple words (“hello?” and “ring”), and then placed my voicemail on callwaiting (the Telstra callwaiting piano music came on). Riiight.

Session 1

Uni commences today, start of my final year as an undergrad. The most I got to check out of o-week last week was a view of the stalls up the uni walkway as I drove to and back from work on Anzac Parade. Dave got back from Malaysia last Friday and my apartment is no longer empty. Hmm… not that Dave is home much, but you know what I mean :). People ask me if living alone is, well, lonely. For me, not really. Over the past few months I’ve enjoyed the fact that I have the whole place to myself, and the privacy that comes with that. I think loneliness only sets in with boredom, and I haven’t had much time to be bored lately. Actually, the only times I’m really home are during weekday evenings (zoned out in front of the tv or doing menial housework). Weekends, if there’s nothing else on, I’m back at Camden. Anyhow, time to take a deep breath and launch into a new semester.

11
Feb 02
Mon

Opening Hours

Shop opening hours in Sydney. A real problem. I want to buy a pedometer (it’s just a device I’ve always wanted for no reason other than curiousity). I know I can buy one in the CBD. I do not work in the CBD. I finish work at 5. Shops close at 5. I suppose there is Thursday, but that being V-Day means that this Thursday is out. There is next week, but still… things close too early in this city.

You know that cold I caught last week? Well, the cold has gone, but the virus or bacteria or whatever infected me totally ravaged my throat. As a result, I’ve been coughing every two minutes since then. There is a buildup of thick phlegm down my trachea that is proving incredibly difficult to dislodge. Unfortunately, most of my coughs are dry (that is, not throaty) which is very distracting, because I can feel the itchy, gluggy mass at the back of my throat, but the coughing is doing nothing to get it out. As a result, on the weekend my voicebox was traumatised such that my vocal range dropped a octave or two. Yesterday, I understood how a coughing fit can bring about a stroke after developing a splitting headache because of one (a coughing fit, not a stroke). And today, the coughing is somehow giving me upper back pain. When I was back home on the weekend, Mum coerced me to drink some bitter concoction brewed with ginseng which she swears will provide relief from every symptom related to colds and flu. In 20 years, I don’t think it’s given me any relief to me at all. Dad gave me some medicine, but all in all, I think all I can do is wait for time to clear out the crap stuck in my neck.

CNY

Well, while we’re on the topic of the zodiac, it’s now the year of the horse, first day of the Chinese New Year. We had a New Year’s gathering last Sunday – a barbeque of all things.

I’ve mouthed the words “Happy New Year” a few times in the last few days, but all in all, CNY doesn’t really hold much significance for me, it’s just an observance I follow. It’s a time when family and friends normally get together, and hoong pow are distributed (scored a small stash this year, to the tunes of my uncle muttering “why don’t you all go get married so we don’t have to keep giving you free money each year?”). Oh yes, and there’s that dragon dancing through Chinatown.

I know nothing about the Chinese year, save that it’s based on the moon and not the sun which is why the new year starts on a different day each year. How many months does it have? Are there months? If a lunar month is 28 days, why does CNY always fall in January/February? Why doesn’t it progressively occur earlier and earlier in the Gregorian year? I’m sure I’m not the only one ignorant about the Chinese calendar, so I found a link that explains it all out. While you’re at it, there’s also the Indian, Islamic and Jewish calendars explained there, in addition to several deprecated ones. (The answer to the question above is that there are 12 months, but a Chinese leap year has, not an extra day, but an extra month.)

4
Feb 02
Mon

Stuff

Rain-lashed Sydney turns into waterworld.

Well, that headline just about says it all. The Summer rains arrived a few days ago and they haven’t stopped since. Work is always better when the weather outside is crap – when its brighter and warmer inside than outside. Nonetheless, all this water is playing havoc with the traffic. There was a mudslide on the M5 yesterday that shut down the citybound route, and accidents galore. It’s now taking me 60-70 minutes to drive to work instead of the usual 40-45, with many sections of the road on the way flooded. One part yesterday was at least a foot underwater, and right in the middle of it were two stalled cars who had tried, in vain, to plough through the knee deep torrent. I got this e-mail from dad today. Waterlogged freeways can be treacherous:

Last night Uncle Ben had an accident. Fortunately he was not hurt. He was driving down the F5 at 100kph when he struck a wet patch on a straight road but the vehicle aquaplaned and caused his vehicle to slide sideways. It went on the median strip (fortunately it was grassed and very wide otherwise he would have ended on the opposite side of the traffic). The car flipped on the passenger side and continued sliding until it struck the barrier.

The sound of rain rhythmically pattering outside is quite somnolent – normally it makes falling asleep easier (at work too!). That is, except for the times when one of the neighbouring apartments thinks it’s a good idea to test drive his new karaoke system at 1.30 in the morning.

What have I been doing at work? I spent the first couple weeks developing an online ordering system in ASP. Did a touch of QuickBasic (!), some VB, some Access. Apparently I’m going to be involved in OLAP/Data Mining soon as the company moves the EIS over from Essbase to Cognos. Got my machine rebuilt with Win2k yesterday. Setting up a laptop currently (not mine, unfortunately).

Vodafone still haven’t sent me a replacement mobile, and Harris Tech still hasn’t sent back a replacement hard drive. My computer, which has been down for the last month, is now working again – more or less – with a new power supply and hard drive in it. Have to upgrade 2000 to XP in the next week or so and reinstall everything.

Uni starts in March. In addition to starting my thesis (when I find a damn topic to research), I’m taking Information Systems Security, one of those info sys subjects full of fluff. The recruitment drive also begins in March with a series of information sessions with big name firms. I haven’t really figured out what I want to do, except for some vague notions of either management or IT-oriented consulting. Consulting doesn’t look bright, with the graduate intake last year being alarmingly low (not to mention the revocation of job offers already handed out). I wouldn’t mind a job overseas in a place like Singapore, either.

Another thing I have only recently started seriously considering is staying for another 3 years at uni and doing grad law. I suppose an added benefit of a law degree is that it’s more “stable”. By this I mean, the demand for it, combined with another degree, doesn’t seem to be as seasonal as IT has been. And if you believe in 7-year economic cycles, the economy should have picked itself up again in 3 years. However, it is another 3 years. Although I am still young, it still would leave me 3 years behind the rest of the cohort who would have, in that time, accrued nearly enough work experience to undertake an MBA or similar. I suppose it all hinges on the job hunt…

28
Jan 02
Mon

Long Weekend

Was pretty relaxing. Movie and a 21st on Friday, a small LAN party on Saturday through Sunday (network hooked up to freshly installed Optus cable still on its 14 day grace period… the modem was smoking after we had finished with it), tennis on Sunday, down to the beach yesterday. Makes me wish I was still on uni holidays and not working…

14
Jan 02
Mon

Bored

SQL Server Analysis Services, Excel VBA Programming… man, I am beyond boredom right now.

13
Jan 02
Sun

My computer is down. It has either blown its power supply, or its motherboard.

Work starts tomorrow at OneSteel.

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7
Jan 02
Mon

I’m back in Camden. Yet to unpack, yet to drive all the loot back to my apartment. I got to sort out all the crap with my hard drive and mobile phone soon. Need to figure out a thesis topic. Recruitment from April onwards. Work starts next Monday. It’s going to be a very busy 6 months.

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21
Dec 01
Fri

Still Here

Well that was certainly a memorable 21st… the end of the night saw a series of post-midnight pool dunkings. After the mob took hold of me, they removed my shoes, wallet and keys (for safekeeping heh, not for keeps :), but failed to realise I was still carrying my mobile. 6210 + water = defunct phone. Great timing, eh? First phone stolen, second phone water damaged. At least this phone is insured, but I lost all 170 or so phone numbers stored on the phone, as opposed to the sim card, which only has a capacity of 100 numbers. Then there was a bit of a scare when all my keys were misplaced and only found after a half hour of searching. This week has been a week for losing things :( Great 21st nonetheless.

It’s late, I’m tired, I haven’t packed, and I have to get back to Camden tomorrow morning (ie: in a few hours) and then back to the airport by mid arvo. Good night.

20
Dec 01
Thu

Holidays!

Have to say, woke up feeling like shit today. Not sure why, but there’s this constant queasiness in my stomach that won’t go away. But anyway, it’s finally my last day of work at EDS and it’s welcome. Holidays have finally come… I have a 21st tonight, and then it’s off overseas tomorrow. And I haven’t even packed yet. Luckily, the flight tomorrow is at 5pm, so it looks like I’ll have Saturday morning to do the packing. How’s that for doing things at the last minute? I don’t know if I’m going to get the opportunity to post before I leave (depends whether I can hop on a net terminal at the airport tomorrow), but if not, you’ll be next hearing from me in Bangkok. Until then, have a fantastic Christmas everyone!

17
Dec 01
Mon

I lost my hard drive over the weekend. 45 gigs – 30000 emails, over 100 megs of icq logs, 5 years of school and uni documents, all the web sites I’ve ever made since 93/94, a fair chunk of my mp3 collection… all gone. It came without warning – an unrecoverable head crash (the drive is making a clicking noise) during operation. Motherboards won’t detect the drive, so using software to recover data is not possible. IBM 75GXPs are notorious for their unreliability and I guess I found out how true that is. Mine was only 15 months old. The computer still boots, I have another 45 gigger in there where the OS is installed, it’s just that I lost my data drive. God, it’s fucking painful.

I rang up IBM who referred me to Digiland (their hard drive distributor), and of course they don’t repair drives, only replace them. They couldn’t refer me to a data recovery service, but those guys are exorbitant (about $100 per gigabyte recovered I think.)

Of course, people will say “backup backup backup” but how do you backup 100 gigs of data? There was a Slashdot thread on this recently, but even if I bought another hard drive, it would be soon filled with new data, and not backup data.

Companies on my hard drive blacklist now include Quantum, Fujitsu and IBM. Next time a Western Digital or Seagate will be the way to go.

Responses

I had a similar experience with a 6Gb (or so) Western Digital a few years back. It was not such a large loss because it was only 6Gb, but scale back the time, and the amount of space each document and item takes up. I lost like 6-8 years of accumulated data, it was devastating.

From what I understand, Western Digital has cleaned up their act, but I still don’t take chances. I have a Seagate, Quantum and Maxtor in my computer, and it gets backed up onto the server every evening in chunks, it takes one week to complete a backup cycle, with all “recent” docs getting priority… Once a month I use my CDRW to burn a “hard” copy… it’s worth the effort, trust me.

A Canadian reader,
Kevin

—–

Sorry to hear about it, but after what I’ve seen recently with my home machine it doesn’t
surprise me. I lost a 40 gig IBM drive about 3 months ago, and with it 4 years of Quake
demos and screenshots. At work we had a bad batch of 36 gig SCSI drives in 4 new servers.
In the end we forced our supplier to replace all 15 new drives with Seagate drives.

The new seagate barracuda drives are damn quick and very quiet. They don’t produce
anywhere near as much heat as the IBM drives either.

I’ve gone through the same thing as you by the sounds of it. I used to be a big fan of
Quantum drives, had 3 fireball drives until a bad experience with one of them. IBM were
good for a while, but I wouldn’t touch them now. Seagate is my choice for now :)
– Fuzzy

—–

I suggest you forego some drive space and set up a RAID if you want
reliable data storage. You may have to shell out for a RAID controller,
if your mobo doesn’t have one built in (ie. you didn’t decide to spend
an extra $40 or so to have the feature “just in case” when you bought
the mobo), and your 2 45 gig drives will give you considerably less than
90 gig of space (how much less depends on the configuration), but it
will be reasonably reliable. The point of a RAID is that the data is
duplicated on other drives to minimise data loss when one drive dies …
of course this is more effective with more than 2 drives but hey. Also
I’ve got a Maxtor drive that I still use that’s well over 6 years old
(it’s 1.3gb, what does that tell you) that still doesn’t have any
problems. And 2 Quantum Fireballs, one is a 1gb SCSI about 5 years old
(only now beginning to play up, but works well enough that I got all
important data off it just in case), and one 6 gb (6.4 if you use 1gb =
10^9 bytes, as quantum does) that’s about 3 years old and working fine.
Although the cable jam in my case has caused some of the cables to go
dodgy and occasionally I have to open up the case and jiggle them to get
windows to boot. So the way I see it, you’re just plain goddamn unlucky.
The only piece of IDE hardware I’ve had that ever went so bad I had to
replace it was an old Creative CDROM drive, and even that put in about 4
years of faithful service first. So maybe you should consider putting
the warranty replacement drive in the centre of a pentagram with candles
and sacrificing a goat or something.
– Victor

Well, I’d be inclined to agree with you about the drive’s failure as being a freak accident, but 75GXPs are not held in good esteem. Check out Storage Review’s Reliability survey (registration req) and see how IBM’s 75GXP range fares. It’s not good. In fact, in the US there is a class action lawsuit underway, suing IBM for not delivering a product as advertised – the false advertising is, you guessed it, reliability. My cousin owns about 5 GXPs, and he’s experienced failures in 3 of them (not complete failures, but significant data corruption/recoverable clicking).

Quantum has given out on me twice before. I have a couple old 2 and 6GB drives (Maxtor I think) that are years old now and they are still chugging away fine.

The only problem with RAID1 is that you have to double your expenditure on hard drives to back up the data. You have, in effect, 50% of unusable hard drive space. I also assume that if the hard disk controller dies, you’ve lost your raid array (unless you have disk duplexing, but you need another controller for that). RAID5 would alleviate this problem only wasting one drive (if you have more than two drives), but most onboard mobo raid controllers only support RAID1. Nonetheless, for consumers, having to buy extra drives for RAID1 is expensive, and when you have 100gb or more that requires mirroring, RAID1 is not cheap. Furthermore, most data on the drive is not important – only documents and media require backing up (as opposed to program files). So, I guess the alternative is to buy a separate physical hard drive and use it partially for backups of data, and use the rest of the space for installing programs. For automated directory backups I can recommend Second Copy. Because of Second Copy, I have a mail archive that was made last August. Unfortunately, after August, my registry’s software hive got corrupted (dodgy IBM hardware again!) and I had to reinstall all my programs. I got lazy and didn’t set up Second Copy again.

9
Dec 01
Sun

Canyoning

Went canyoning today at Empress Falls in the Blue Mountains. Canyoning is basically following a river which has carved a canyon into the surrounding rockbed. I’ve never been before and Empress Falls was a relatively short introductory course capped off by an abseil down through a 25m waterfall. Really fun and not very strenuous. But bloody cold. The river water was freezing and I lost feeling in my fingers and toes before too long. A hot summer’s day with the sun shining would’ve made things better (we got a cool, breezy, cloudy day). And the abseil at the end gave me a wedgie that hurts to just think about, but apart from that it was a pretty cool experience. I’d recommend it – whether you’re a guy or girl!

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4
Dec 01
Tue

What’s in Store

Uni holidays have come, but I still have 3 weeks of work left with EDS before I begin mine. The tourist medium season ends this week, and with high season meaning increased airfares, a lot of people have left the Aussie shores already. Among them are my flatmate (for Malaysia) and my girl (for Taiwan & HK). It feels a bit lonelier now. I so need a holiday. Uni marks get released on Saturday. I’m sitting on an 84.5 average (w/o geneds), but this semester’s marks are no doubt going to drag that down a bit. Ah well. I have roughly three weeks of holidays before a six month placement at OneSteel, which is located in the nethersuburb of Chiswick. In two of those three weeks, however, I too am heading overseas, with family.

We fly off to Singapore on the 22nd, stay for a night, then the next day fly to Bangkok. We’ll stay in Thailand until the 29th, also visiting Chiang Mai and Pattaya while there. New Year’s will be spent in Singapore before we embark on a three-day cruise partway up the Straits of Malacca to Port Klang (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). A couple more days in Singapore, and then it’s back to Australia.

The whole trip is supposedly a small family reunion on my dad’s side which my grandfather has organised. Dad’s side of the family is small for an Asian one: 12 aunts/uncles but only 8 cousins(!) But naturally there are other more distant relos that make the family tree a bit more intertwined than that. Now I don’t mind travelling with the family, but you really need someone around your age to enjoy travel – autonomy is important! My interests are obviously going to be different from my parents’, and likewise different to my aunts and uncles toting their 8 year old handfuls. Luckily, a cousin roughly my age is coming, so no doubt we’ll dump “the olds” whenever we get the chance and go off and get lost.

I have heard only a bit about Thailand. Most of it revolves around Patpong, “marriage proposals” and stories about seedy men standing in doorways ushering tourists into what are euphemistically referred to as “ping pong banana shows”. Sounds like another reason to ditch the olds. Is it that surprising though, when you have a capital city that is called Bangkok? Another place that warrants a visit is Panthip Plaza. Singapore has cracked down on piracy quite successfully, but the Thai police do not share the same conviction as the Singaporeans in clamping down on the illegal CD/VCD/DVD trade. There is also much shopping to be done. I was advised that Thailand was a good place to get a suit custom-made, although I should be wary about the quality of material used.

Apart from shopping Thailand has a rich history and there are many monuments and sites in evidence of this. Apparently my grandfather has arranged one of those package tours that will take us for a “fishbowl visit” to these historical sites (roaming around in a bus gazing out its windows, occasionally stepping down for a few happy snaps, before heading off again). Thailand holds the distinction of being the only Asian country never to be colonialised, testament to the deftness of the country’s much loved monarchy in handling the European colonialists.

Back in Singapore, we’ll be going on a brief cruise. We were originally going to go on the longer one that would go to Phuket, but it turns out that the cruise company had reserved the majority of tickets for foreigners (non-Singaporeans). As a result, while people like Dad and I could still get tickets, tickets for Singaporean citizens (as Mum still is) had already sold out. This policy of setting aside so many tickets to foreigners not surprisingly enraged many Singaporeans. A family reunion cruise to Phuket would not happen, so a berth on the shorter cruise was made. Then September 11 happened, and foreign bookings for the Phuket cruise were cancelled en masse. The cruise company frantically made the vacated places available to everyone. However, the Singaporean public was unsympathetic and snubbed the company by refusing to buy up the new tickets, our family included. The cruise is exactly the same as the one I went on two years ago. It’s extremely relaxing and potentially quite fattening.

I’ll be capitalising on the cheapness of computer hardware in Singapore as well. That’s what I’ve been saving most of my money for, actually. I have a wishlist I’ve putting together that I’ll possibly post later. Well… three weeks left. I wish they would go faster!

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1
Dec 01
Sat

Urk

hello goodnight… does anybody else, when you get home after a late one out, get the urge to check your email just before crashing into bed?

Up at Patonga today (yesterday) for a 21st… it was by the beach, great weather (just a little windy), but a beaut day to kick off Summer!

29
Nov 01
Thu

Summer

Tomorrow begins the final month of the year and marks the start of Summer. The
holiday season starts to ramp up, as do the temperatures. Summer is quintessentially Australian: constantly fanning away the incessant blowflies, watching the colony of Bogong moths gather on the flyscreen in the evenings. The sticky fingers from the melted icecream cone you didn’t eat fast enough. The submission to lethargy in the torrid Summer sun. The ability to iron clothes without turning the iron on. Melted plastic objects that have disintegrated from having been left in the car for too long. Late sunsets. Diving into the refreshingly cool water of the local pool or beach. Tossing and
turning in bed at night, clothes clammy from the sweat. T-shirts, shorts and thongs. Guys around the barbie, women inside preparing the salad. Cringing around the house trying not to let anything touch your sunburn. Warm water coming out of the “cold” tap in the shower. Sudden but brief floor-shaking thunderstorms.

24
Nov 01
Sat

Rumba

The weather cleared up yesterday nicely for Rumba! It’s a beaut day today as well. Ahhh… almost Summer.

Update: A more detailed account of Rumba.

15
Nov 01
Thu

Bored?

As some of you have no doubt realised, I haven’t been very busy at work. There hasn’t been any of it to do over the last two days. I have 5 weeks left at EDS and will resume working again next January at OneSteel for another six months. So meanwhile I’ve been surfing and reading, but there really is a lack of interesting material to go through (it doesn’t help that EDS’ application gateway filters out Flash and Java applets from web pages). Or maybe I just can’t find it. Boredom will drive you to do weird things. Anyway, this morning I have discovered:

That the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo are two entirely different countries. I’ve worked out that “Great Britain” refers to the union of Scotland and England and that “United Kingdom” comprises of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I know all six Balkan nations. I have read about Mongolia only to find out that no one says anything about it because it’s a really boring country. I’ve know all the capitals of the ‘stans. I’ve tried to look for the world’s poorest nation and it seems to be a toss up between Mozambique and Sierra Leone. I know why Sudan is sometimes referred to as “The Sudan”. I know a little history about the shifting geography of Indochina. I know what a “bicameral” and “unicameral” government system is. I know where and what the heck “Western Sahara” is. I’ve learn what the word “katabatic” means.

Yeah, I’m just a little bored. But my geography now is kick ass.

Meanwhile Jamie, sitting next to me, is bored too. I interrupted her reading of a really exciting book (on Java) and got her to translate the page I linked in the post below for me. Apparently it’s a shareware/freeware site. Hehe, so it claims. But normal shareware sites do not include serial numbers and registration codes in their program archives! Jamie is now as bored as me apparently, cos she’s just requested the links to those pages on Africa I was reading a moment ago.

11
Nov 01
Sun

Free CD

Turns out that HSBC did end up giving me that Free CD.

8
Nov 01
Thu

Bangkok

So, there I was today watching a couple of little kids rumbling with each other in the park, watching a bunch of schoolkids grabbing lunch from Westfield… and I realise that after this Friday, my third year of uni is over. I hand in the 64 page research design document I’ve been slaving on and that’s it. (I have no exams, woohoo!) It’s a little depressing, I guess it’s something that depresses everyone – growing up in general – but life must go on. This post, however, isn’t about growing up. When I saw the little kids going at it with each other, I remembered this incident in school…

It was back in Year 8 when we were still tiny. We always used to get into brawls amongst ourselves to keep amused throughout lunch. It kept getting us into trouble everytime a teacher went past, but since each time it was a different teacher, we just kept attacking each other (punching, kicking, tackling, strangling, ferocious slaps that left angry red marks on legs, chinese burns, nipple gripples, etc., it was all there). I had a friend, let’s just call him Pip. Back then he was overweight, missing a neck and seemingly waddled around. Easy target. Even so, nature still provides the most vulnerable of animals with some sort of defence mechanism. So what did he do when there were people picking on him that were twice his size? Hit em back, naturally. Hit em back where no self-respecting boxer would hit. No, hit em back where no self-respecting man would hit. And it was effective.

In the interests of the Geneva Convention, we made him warn us whenever he was going to pull that stunt. The, uh… “safe word”, he’d yell out when he’d had enough off people laying
into him was “Bangkok!” (or derivations of it, eg: “Now departing for Bangkok!”). Upon yelling that word, people would vacate his vicinity like illegal boat people from a ship about to be boarded by the Australian navy, lest they feel the pain. From a safe distance we’d then resume the attack with verbal comments about his questionable sexuality. We were so mature for 13/14 year olds :).

Anyway, one day we were having lunch in the place that was our area for the six years we were at the school, when this rather large-sized Year 12 guy wandered in. I don’t know how it eventuated, but things led to an exchange of bag outs. Pip was sitting down, and the Year 12 was standing up. When Pip ended up paying the guy out for his prowess in squash (he was the school champion). The Year 12 guy took particular offense and gave him a swift knock on the head. Pip wasn’t
happy. He cleared his throat and asked, “Hey, have you ever been to Bangkok?” The guy stopped, bewildered by the inexplicable change of subject. The rest of us, however, froze. What happened next was a scene from a Hong Kong-made action movie. Slow-mo, with action replays from multiple angles.

We all immediately knew what was going on. The year 12 guy didn’t. The year 12 guy was twice the size of Pip, and in a valiant attempt to prevent serious injury occurring to both parties involved, I screamed out, “Coverrrrr yoooouuurrrrr diiiiick–“

But it was too late. The year 12 guy’s face barely had time to register a quizzical expression at my comment, before the sickening sound of fist on flesh slapped out. Totally unexpected, it was a perfect hit like never before. Quizzical turned to abject horror, followed immediately by one of ultimate pain.

The guy instantly doubled over, clutching his crotch, shuddering convulsively. We all stood there, stunned, and a few people started gathering around to see what the commotion was about. If I was Pip, I would’ve ran the hell out of there. But he didn’t, he stayed there, I speculate it was to admire his “handiwork”. After a few seconds of moaning, spluttering, muttered profanities, clutching and coughing, he recovered enough to lift his torso above the 3:30 position. He shot out one hand and grabbed Pip around the neck and squeezed his throat. The other hand hit Pip in the chest, ramming him hard into the wall behind. Pip started gargling.

Fortunately for Pip, the pain was just too intense for the poor guy, who needed both hands to tend to his troubles. He let go and doubled over again. Still very much in a world of pain he hobbled off for the bathroom. The rest of us
made a discreet exit.

To this day I regard him lucky that his pre-emptive strike was so devastating, because had the hit been not so dead center, I’m sure Pip would be rolling around in a wheelchair today. He stopped with his low blows soon after that when everyone henceforth declared it very much against the “rules of engagement”.

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30
Oct 01
Tue

Halloween

We don’t really celebrate Halloween in Australia. When I was younger, back in Camden waves of kids would stick on a costume and go around trick or treating. This was in the 80s. Nowadays, however, the door-knocking has stopped completely. I mean, the practice just died. I don’t know why this happened – perhaps the neighbourhood has grown up (which is unlikely)?

Sleep

I had a bad night last night. For some reason I can’t fathom, I just couldn’t get to sleep – at all. It was totally weird. Normally when that happens it’s because there’s something significant troubling me or making me nervous, or excited, but there was nothing like that this time. You know how sometimes your mind is still wide awake, and even though your body is trying to get to sleep, thoughts keep popping into your head? That kept happening to me up till about 2am. So, completely annoyed, I got up, walked around a little bit, checked my e-mail (I think everyone does that when they can’t get to sleep at that hour) and tried to get back to it. No luck. My mind stopped thinking, but I continued to toss and turn. 3am… 4am… Around about 4.30am I drifted into that zone where you’re semi-conscious, and when I roused from it at about 5.30, it didn’t feel like I’d been asleep, but I wasn’t sure either. I decided to give in at 6am and “woke up”.

Staying awake at work has been a superhuman effort. I guess it’s a good thing that I had to solve some Mac compatibility issues today. The department’s only Mac requires a walk halfway across the floor, and it’s those treks that have been keeping me barely awake. I think I passed the pain barrier a little while after lunch, so it’s not so bad now. At least tonight I know I’m going to zonk out completely…

Stanford Prison Experiment

Phil sent this in:

Anyway, I noticed you mentioned the Stanford Prison Experiment… an excellent exercise in psychology.  Funny you should say that “I’d imagine that any similar research proposed today would be turned down for ethical reasons”, because…

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0110/30/entertainment/entertain5.html

Hopefully the ABC will pick up the doco and slap it onto DVD for us Antipodeans.  ^_^

Co-incidence, eh? I suppose the ethics of television are a little different from academia…

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Jury Duty

Well, turns out that my panel was deferred, then discharged. No duty for me, and I am exempted for one year from being re-selected.

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28
Oct 01
Sun

Week 14

Wow. It’s the Week 14 of uni. That means it’s the last week of uni. For some, that means it’s the last week of uni, ever (as an undergrad, anyway). Being a third year, that means that many close friends are actually going to graduate soon. People seem to go out with mixed feelings. For me, after experiencing full-time work, I can say that I prefer uni to work. Work makes money, and some people think that makes all the difference (I guess if you earnt enough money, work does become more attractive than uni). However, the amount of free time and social contact you have in uni is incredible, and something that won’t really come around again until retirement. What’s the use of money if you have little time to enjoy it? Alas, work is something we all have to do eventually!

However, week 14 for me right now only means I have a research design document to write up really quickly (10,000 words or thereabouts). Not good.

27
Oct 01
Sat

Daylight Saving Starts

Once again, if it weren’t for the computer, I wouldn’t have known daylight saving had started. I thought it was next week. I have jury duty tomorrow.

25
Oct 01
Thu

Promotion Codes

I signed up for an HSBC online savings account yesterday. No fees, 5 free ATM transactions/month from any ATM and unlike CBA’s 0.05% interest rate, has a 4% rate. Anyway, that’s not the point. I filled out the online application which had a field for a promotion code. I had none, but I decided it might be a good idea to give google a spin with this search. And whaddaya know – scored a free $30 CD online voucher.

Well, at least I think so. HSBC called today. I thought they were going to tell me my account number, but it turns out it was a rather puzzled woman trying to figure out where I got that promotion code from because, “HSBC isn’t running any promotion.” When I told her it was on the HSBC site itself, it left her even more puzzled. I’m not sure that I’m still going to get my free CD. Oh well, the point of this is – Google can find you promotion codes. Even ones that you aren’t supposed to know.

21
Oct 01
Sun

Was buying lunch from a Vietnamese bread store today. I was waiting in the queue, when I heard the lady taking the orders crack off a movie-perfect, “And Den?” to the guy in front. As much as I tried, I just couldn’t wipe the silly smile off my face for the next 5 minutes…

20
Oct 01
Sat

Grandparents

My grandparents on dad’s side are coming over from Singapore today. They were only here in August. They do little but travel around the world these days and have been to an absolutely incredible amount of countries throughout the 6 inhabitable continents. They may be elderly, but they certainly aren’t immobile. I guess when you are retired, there’s not that much else to do and travel took their fancy. There’s going to be a family reunion of sorts at the end of the year, so I’ll be seeing them again back in Singapore. We’re also going to Thailand.

Jury Duty

I’m up for jury duty next Monday. The case is back in Campbelltown so no doubt it’ll be about assault or car theft or something similar :). I get paid about $70/day for it if I end up getting empanelled.

17
Oct 01
Wed

Electricity

I just got a “disconnection notice” from Energy Australia for my electricity supply. That’s not a good thing, so I gave them a call. Haha, it turns out that since I moved into this place early this year, they have this property registered as vacant. And it’s taken them this long to realise the electricity is still running in a “vacant” property. So that’s why I haven’t been receiving any bills… Unfortunately, they are backdating the next bill and making me pay from last March.

3
Aug 01
Fri

Update

Just two words to say: “His Way” ;)

17
Jul 01
Tue

Work at EDS

This week I started work in the eSolutions division of EDS. The group I’m in uses ASPs extensively to do their sites (mainly the Commonwealth Bank site). I’ve previously learnt PHP and Cold Fusion but not really ASPs, so I guess having to work with it will give me experience in the last of the trio of major server scripting languages. I don’t like VBScript much, though – it’s not as structured or clear as Java-style syntax and code. Too bad that most companies choose to use VBScript to deploy their ASPs. Apart from scripting, I’ve been told I’ll finally get the chance to learn XML/XSL (something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time) and also to bring myself back up to scratch on DHTML. EDS has also standardised the use of XHTML for some of the Commbank site. So, even though I can see that some (most?) of the work I’ll be doing won’t be the most interesting of tasks, at least it’ll all be a learning experience. Web development like this, however, is probably not a job I would like to go into when I graduate. But who knows, maybe my opinion will change within the upcoming months?

15
Jul 01
Sun

Update

A site redesign (mainly backend) is slowly in progress.

Saw Alegria (run by the French Canuckian Circus of the Sun) today. Cirque du Soleil was in Sydney a few years ago with Saltimbanco, and although I missed that, it looked quite ornate, surreal, dark and not like “traditional circus”. Alegria is a Spanish word for “jubilation”, so although not “dark”, it wasn’t traditional circus either. Very flamboyant, much work was put into costuming, choreography and a rich and wonderful soundtrack. It was a little surreal in the costuming department, with garb and wigs that look like they were taken from the 18th century and further embellished. On the other hand, there was perhaps less emphasis on the acts. The opening gymnastics act was quite ordinary, as was the strongman. The trampolining looked good, as did the fire guy. The contortonist gave me a back ache watching her :) The hoop girl was pretty amazing too. Unfortunately, each of those acts were divided by clowns prancing around. I’ve never been a big fan of clowns, and although the snowstorm effect was well done, I’m still clueless why they started blasting bits of white paper at us. Alegria is recommended for the experience, but not highly.

Sara-Marie voted off Big Brother. Thank you, I have been waiting for that for ages.

Evolution: Looks like a crack up in the trailers, but the movie isn’t really. Lots of quirky jokes that pull smiles and chuckles, but no big belly laughs. It didn’t work for me. Wasn’t a waste of money, but I don’t recommend it.

11
Jul 01
Wed

Update

Finally, EDS HR has pulled their finger out and I start work a week late next Monday. I’m in the Internet development group which is part of eSolutions and based out in Burwood. I spent most of this week on the phone calling up various EDS staff, and waiting for phone calls, which is not a happiness-inducing activity.

In other news, I just finished doing a link system thing for the List over to the left. I haven’t converted it over yet, but when I eventually do, it’ll be running of a relational database (as opposed to a flat text db) and maintenance will be a helluva lot easier as the system can check for dead servers and 404s on its own.

8
Jul 01
Sun

Home

Back home from a beaut getaway at Kangaroo Valley. I was meant to start work at EDS today, but HR stuffed up my placement and the person taking care of it has taken off on long service leave, so I’ve got to chase up that now. More later.

1
Jul 01
Sun

Screwed

So I get back to Kingsford after spending a few days back in Camden. I boot up the computer and… Blue Screen. Somehow my Software hive shat itself and I have a corrupted registry. So, instead of reinstalling Win 2K from scratch, I replaced the software hive with a copy I found made over a year ago… It helped, but only a bit. I don’t have to go through the pain of driver reinstalls, but I have to reinstall most of my programs meaning basically that my computer is in chaos right now. So much for “getting back to regular updates”, this is going to keep me busy for days. I’m out of town from Wednesday to Saturday too… arrgh, I’m meant to be on holidays.

26
Jun 01
Tue

Session of Hell

The exams are over! The session is over! Unfortunately I have only one and a half weeks of holidays. Then I start working at EDS. Oh well, will be heading down to Kangaroo Valley for a few days with friends to relax a bit, will make the most of it.

16
Jun 01
Sat

Update

Another monolithic update during a break from studying the finer points of link-layer protocols (networks exam is next Tuesday). I now “know” more than I ever wanted to know about PPP, multiple access protocols and 802.11. Handed in that bastard revised research proposal yesterday.

Everyone’s been drooling over this 61″ (1.55m) plasma TV from NEC. I’d hate to think of the cost. A 40″ one goes for about $13k, a 51″ for about $40k+.

An interesting archive of subway/train system network maps all around the world. The full New York MTA map is simply gigantic.

I have a Malaysian flatmate and he’s got the typical thick, distinctive Malaysian accent. He speaks fluent Manglish. Anyhow the Coxford Singlish Dictionary has a rather comprehensive list of Singlish/Manglish phrases. (Singlish is Singaporean English, Manglish is Mangled (Malaysian) English. Because those two countries are a melting pot of cultures and language dialects, many expressions from dialects such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Malay are integrated into English. This, combined with a restructuring of English grammar, produces a unique variant of English. Sometimes very blur one, lah.)

Here’s a few things I got for my b’day:

  • HP Scanjet 5370c
  • Newton’s Cradle
  • Southpark figurines
  • A couple DVDs
  • Some clothing
  • 2 brandy schooners
  • “A Cookbook for a man who probably owns only one saucepan” (yeh that’s me :)
  • A lesson on how to drive a manual. I got my Ps on an auto, and the only time I’ve driven a manual was briefly on a friend’s 100-acre property using his ute… So my cousin got a rental car from Thrifty and spent the day teaching me how to drive car with a gear stick. The only problem with learning at this stage of driving is I didn’t have L or P plates to hide behind. So whenever I stalled, people just think “what a shit driver, how did this guy get his license?” (never got horned though, funnily enough). I had problems with shifting into first gear smoothly without jerking the car… he was going to make me drive through Burger King drive-through, but I talked him out of it :) “Would you like an air freshener to go with that burning clutch?” Anyway by the end of the day most of the problems I had were straightened out and I now know how to drive a manual.
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9
Jun 01
Sat

Update

You would not believe how fucking busy it has been over the last month. Hell, I can’t believe it myself. It doesn’t end until the 26th, when session ends. I hereby promise to return to regular updates after then. But for now…

  • Networking assignment I had to do was enough to turn me off Java for a very long time.
  • Air in the computer labs is bad (talk about B.O. and computer/software engineers!). I reckon I caught the flu from a few too many hours in those labs.
  • Had a birthday dinner last night at a Spanish restaurant on Liverpool. The paella is better in Spain than in Sydney.
  • Pearl Harbour (yes, spelt with a “u”) is not worth it.
  • Valentine is certainly not, either.
  • Moulin Rouge may or may not be worth it (depends on your tastes).
  • Series 7 is worth it (considering I got in for free :).
  • Went to a Trek convention yesterday. Guests were all from Voyager – Roxann Dawson, Garrett Wang (pronounced “Wong” apparently), and Tim Russ. All Trek actors seem to have two things in common. They are all (1) theatre trained and (2) wannabe singers. It was an expensive day. The convention organisers are running a mint when they hold those events. Managed to nab a few autographs (at a price, like everything else there). Nonetheless it was an absolute blast, more details later.
  • This site rocks.
30
May 01
Wed

My Birthday

Well, hit the big two-oh and into the third decade of my life. I’m no longer a teenager, unfortunately :).

Ugh

Two 1.30am nights at uni don’t do a lot of good.

27
May 01
Sun

Still Alive

Give me a couple weeks. Two large assignments and one quiz down, three to go (programming a reliable data transfer protocol, writing a thesis proposal revisal, writing a seminar critique… fun fun fun, not). This is one part of one of the assignments for my E-commerce subject: The Spot. Catchya in a bit. Anyone who sent in their site URL will get it posted eventually.

17
May 01
Thu

Erm

This has to be said… you would not believe how much that Girls = Evil mathematical proof has been going around. I have received about 7 copies of that same mail forwarded from different people. I don’t need a mathematical proof to know that :)

14
May 01
Mon

11 Days

11 Days without an update? What’s going on? Um… a whole lot of laziness combined with other stuff. It’s that time of session again and I find myself having 6 fairly major deliverables (mostly group assignments) due within the next fortnight, and none of those are more than half done. Ok excuses, excuses. Once the holidays come, I’ll start working on a content management system in php to facilitate posting. Anyway, there is no guaranteed date that I will make my next post on, so make do with this large update :). Birthday is this month too… luckily, by the 31st, most of my assignments have been handed in and I can actually go out and do something.

Birthday shouts to TBA for hitting 23 on the 16th of May, btw!

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22
Apr 01
Sun

Paintball

A bundle of aching joints and sore muscles are testament to another day at paintball. Last Friday saw a group of about 30 of us head off for Paintball Pete’s at Mount White (up North near Woy Woy). Shen, who organised the entire thing had decided to take a gamble on the venue where we hadn’t played before. Unfortunately, the gamble did not pay off and Pete’s turned out to be the worst of the three fields we’ve now been to. Its claim to be the closest field to Sydney was unfounded, the leisurely drive taking an hour on the way up, and 100 minutes on the not so leisurely way back (traffic!). About 20 headed off from Strathfield (15 arriving fashionably late despite threats of a $5 surcharge for late arrivals by Paintball Pete himself), 10 from Hornsby, under the cover of some grey, angry looking overcast skies.

Anyhow, as I was driving off with a friend when I got a call on my mobile. It was Doz.

“Hey man, you’ve got room in your car right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re gonna have to give me and George a lift.”
“Uh, why?”
“Our car battery’s flat.”

Around I turned and picked them up. Turns out that they had to jumpstart the car that morning. The 20 minute drive to Strathfield didn’t recharge the dodgy battery, though, and thus the car was now stranded in the 1-hour carpark. By the time we thought about leaving a note on the windscreen for the parking inspector, we were out of town. Oh well. Doz called his dad who expressed concern not about a parking ticket, but that the car might be stolen. This resulted in much laughter. Woe be to the thief that tries to steal a car with a flat battery (unless he has a spare set of leads or car battery in his pockets).

Pete’s is a small, ragged paintball outfit. Their prices are competitive, but there’s a tradeoff for that. We all pulled up at the Mt White Village Store, where our entourage of cars then headed off to the actual paintball fields – some 12 km down a sideroad, half of it which was unsealed. Briefing was conducted by Mandy, a woman with an unhealthy fixation about ball cleaning (“I’m the best ball cleaner on the Central Coast! You damage your balls, I’ll clean ’em for ya!”). After a few too many groan-inducing puns regarding testicles, we took to the fields. Pete’s only has 5 fields, and we had the opportunity to play a mere 3 of them. The drizzle turned dirt to mud and the presence of generous amounts of cow shit on the fields made any form of rapid movement perilous (part of the fun I tell you! As long as you don’t do a faceplant into a pile of something that looks like mud but looks distinctly organic). Unfortunately, gameplay was restricted by the rather dubious “5 meter rule” that had never been used on any other paintball field we had played at. This effectively meant that one man could hole himself behind a barricade indefinitely, even against a battalion of people, as approaching within 5 meters of a player was a no-no. That is exactly what happened. One capture the flag scenario saw our team moving into the opposing base with about 8 people. The other team had two left, cowering behind barricades. Of course, an en masse rush would have crushed them, but we weren’t allowed to do that. We couldn’t go around either – the right barricade was too close to the side line (less than 5m away from it) so we couldn’t flank around there. The left barricade was too close to a creek (and no one felt like wading around waist deep in water in this weather). Five minutes later and the only attrition occurring was on our nerves and the game ended without result. The 5m rule sucks. Free lunch at Pete’s was a cold one, and we all stopped playing soon after. I can’t recommend this field. It’s not the closest field to Sydney. Heartbreak Ridge near Blacktown is still the most professional bunch, and that’s where we’ll be going next time.

But wait, there’s more. The car drama didn’t end there. We arrived back at Strathfield – Doz’s car hadn’t been booked by the cops yet. Lucky. After rummaging through a few friends’ garages, we discovered no one had a set of jacks for jumpstarting. The local servo didn’t have one either (!). Strathfield seemed to be devoid of the damn cables. So, Shen drove Doz back to his home in Ashfield, called a mechanic, and fetched a set of leads there. They rested for about an hour (yes, you feel pretty buggered after paintball and a long drive) and headed back to Strathfield. There at the car park, a scene not unlike the following ensued:

Doz: Dude, where’s my car?
George: Where’s your car dude?
Doz: Dude, where’s my car?
George: Where’s your car dude?
Doz: Not funny dude. Dude, where’s my car?
George: Where’s your car dude?
Doz: Fuck.
George: Are you fucking serious?
Asian Woman: And then?

And then… “maybe they towed my car away?” Or maybe not – a call to the RTA revealed that they do not tow cars away from car parks. That left only one other possibility… As of yet we still do not know where the car has vanished to. But if you’re in Strathfield, keep your eye out for a seedy looking guy running around with a spare set of jumper leads and a car battery down the back of his pants. He’s a car thief.

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18
Apr 01
Wed

Inferno has been…

… sucked off into a void. The void of writing a last minute research proposals, assignments and whatever remnants of holiday I can dredge up after all that. Uh, that didn’t really make sense. I even missed this week’s DS9 episode because I forgot it was on (shit… and it was the only season 6 ep I haven’t seen yet). Next time I return I’ll have stuff to post. Promise.

11
Apr 01
Wed

Damnit.

My parents are currently off holidaying in Singapore and China. Dad sent back an SMS from China yesterday asking me to find out the exchange rate for the Pacific Peso vs the greenback and Sing dollar. Hmm, strange currency, I thought. What would he be doing with Pacific Pesos? I went off to Oanda and scrolled through the currencies list. No “pacific peso” listed. So I shot back an SMS saying, “can’t find the pacific peso – is it under a different name?” The reply came back today: “Yes, the Australian dollar.”

D’oh. I’ve been a bit slow this week…

I Owe, I Owe, It’s off to work I go…

I’m working fulltime at the multinational (but relatively unknown to the layperson) IT firm EDS for a 6 month stint starting next semester.

Holidays

Mid-session break is here… I’m off to Canberra for a couple days.

I’d run a Aussie branch of PE/NGA but I think I’d be the only one in the continent in it :P. Off to the driving range again today in lieu of an imp workshop tutorial at uni…

Shen dropped around with a copy of Black & White and forced me to load it onto my computer. I’m not going to forgive him for that… there goes any pretense of “getting work done”.

9
Apr 01
Mon

USS Constellation

That 80 kiloton aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation pulled out of Sydney today. I went to visit it on Sunday, here’s the photos. It was almost a 4 hour wait to see the damn thing, and it was only just worth it. Nonetheless, I was glad I went – it’s a mofo of a ship that we be decommissioned in 2003 (its successor will be 10% heavier).

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Petrol Prices Online

Shell’s letting us check petrol prices online. Check out the petrol excise! And look at the price variance between suburbs (price per liter in cents for Unleaded):

Bathurst: 101.9 (Out bush :)
Baulkam Hills: 90.9 (Outer North)
Camden: 91.4 (Outerwest – south)
Chatswood: 92.9 (North Shore)
Hurstville: 91.9 (South)
Kingsford: 93.9 (East)
Neutral Bay: 94.9 (East Harbourshore-ish)
Penrith: 89.9 (Outerwest – north)
Ryde: 92.4 (North)
Strathfield: 92.9 (Innerwest)
Surry Hills: 93.9 (Near CBD)
[Approximation of locale may be slightly inaccurate!]

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3
Apr 01
Tue

The Couch

A couple guys came in to replace the couch today. The first couch they delivered was the wrong model, so today they came in and delivered this new one. They got the proper model into the apartment fine. Next, they picked up the old couch and started off with it. They made it as far as the door when the couch thunked against something – the top of the doorframe. “Fuck! Why is this couch taller than the other one?”

They soon realised that the one they had to take out was about 3 inches higher than the one they just put in. 3 inches, which made its height higher than the door. Furthermore, the “foyer” is set in an alcove, so even if the couch was smaller, it still had to be maneuvered so that it slid around the corner. Yep, they needed a topological genius to do it. There was much more cursing. The Kiwi bloke was convinced that if it could’ve gone in, then it must be able to come out – which must be true – but neither of them could figure it out. In the end, after about 30 minutes, they gave up and left, saying they’d return within the hour. With a topological genius, I hope. Otherwise, I don’t mind having two couches :)

Update: They came back with another guy and this time got it out first go. Impressive.

1
Apr 01
Sun

Thesis

I need a topic to write my thesis on. It has to be in the field of information systems. I’m looking for something in the field of m-commerce or mobile comms & connectivity. The proposal is due in 3 weeks and I don’t even have my topic yet…

19
Mar 01
Mon

Mm.

Had the housewarming last Friday night. Carpet got Christened by a red wine spill (thanks Josh :) but apart from that it was good. Ikea ran out of stock of dining table chairs so basically the apartment has two chairs in it. I borrowed about 10 chairs from friends for the housewarming so people had a place to sit but what happened? Everyone sat on the floor leaving a whole lot of empty chairs. Why do I bother?

It’s Week 4 of uni and I finally decided that it might be a good idea to buy my textbooks. Got to the bookstore and all 4 books I was after had sold out. Oops.

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8
Mar 01
Thu

G’day! S’good to be back…

I’m back to regular posting now. The past weeks have been busy. On the university front, UNSW replaced their enrolment system with a new one that is all done online. It would have been great, if it worked properly – system errors are everywhere. Anyway, that was all one big headache. On the home front, well, I’ve moved away from home. I’m now living in an apartment much closer to uni (5 minutes walk, as opposed to a 2 hour commute). We’ve been moving up furniture and stuff up from Camden and there’s still things to be installed. A phone line, for instance. Telstra, ineffectual company that it is, told me it would take 10 days to get a phone line reconnected to the apartment. Hence, no net access. Did I also mention that ADSL and Cable are not available here? I am severely pissed off. I move into the city and find that I still can’t get broadband. Telstra, move your fat ass and at least ADSL enable the local exchange! On the work front, I’ve got some work. Goodness knows, I am broke after that round the world 11 week trip and I need to pay off a lot of things for this new apartment. Luckily, I only have a 3-day uni week, so I’ve got a bit of spare time. On the web front, I am writing up a big diary of the trip. Three of us got our photos back last Thursday. Between us we had 57 rolls, over 1500 photos, and it cost us $500 to develop (add in Yvonne’s photos and we shot over 2000 snaps). The poor girl at the pharmacy had her work cut out for her when we rocked up with our bagload of film canisters. I’ve got a lot of scanning to do. I may be back to regular posting, but it may take a little while to get back into the groove.

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1
Dec 00
Fri

It’s Summer

Yes it is. There was a lightning storm again today. If I had money, I’d be thinking about investing in an APC UPS. But I don’t, so I’m not (or trying not to, at least). Finished 3 exams (Bus. Data Networks, System Analysis & Design and IT Law), 2 to go (Data Org, and the killer, stats). I’m so screwed for stats… Anyhow, only 6 more days till I’m off overseas! Vaguely excited. I’m sure that excitement will grow exponentially once I finish the final exam. By the sounds of it, virtually everyone is off overseas these hols.

Anyhow, I may make one more update to this page sometime in the next few days before I go off to Yankland.

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27
Nov 00
Mon

Study

I managed to cram and summarise 400 previously unread textbook pages within one day. Now we just got to work on retention. It’s another perfect day outside, and guess who still has 4 exams to go?

25
Nov 00
Sat

Today

It’s a beaut day today and I’m stuck inside studying. I am not amused.

ADSL in Camden

Looks like I’m stuck with 56K.

Dear Sir/Madam,

In response to your query regarding ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line), we regret to advise that iPrimus is currently unable to provide you with this service.

We anticipate extending our network coverage, however, this will take some time.

Thank you for your interest in iPrimus’ ADSL product.

23
Nov 00
Thu

Quite Mysterious

I just got one of those “pimpin’ cupid” mails (y’know, the spark ones?). I’ve got no idea who it is. (I’ve got a good idea of who I’d like it to be, though ;).

21
Nov 00
Tue

56K…

At last! The local exchange lines around country-town Camden have finally been upgraded to digital and I now pack a crappy 56K connection and not a crappy analog-line restricted 28K! Woooh, the speed, the speed. My load times have halved! (Shut up Dave, Pro, and all the rest of you cable whores. Stop laughing or you’ll suffocate.)

And thanks to CompleteUnknown for plugging UODU. You others should take note :)

19
Nov 00
Sun

In Stuvac

The week I attempt to cram the 14 weeks of work I’ve been neglecting into one is what we all fondly know as stuvac. I was studying IT Law (license agreements, to be exact) at some early hour of the morning when I coincidentally came across this cartoon. It was amusing at the time.

14
Nov 00
Tue

Rainy Day

I almost got bogged again in the car park today. Even a small drizzle will turn the dirt field muddy. Today had constant rain and by the time I got back, the place had turned into a muddy swamp full of huge puddles masking deep holes. Not only that, but some total fool parked so that he completely blocked the exit to the car park, such that anyone wanting to get out had to drive off the kerb and straight into a roundabout to get out. But it is a field, and there are no laws regarding parking in a field (I think). Nonetheless, a bat taken to the windscreen of people who do stuff like that should deter further recurrences.

8
Nov 00
Wed

Busy

Yeh it’s that time of year… exams. I had 7 assignments and 3 tests on my plate two weeks ago, now it’s down to 3 assignments and 1 test. One week of uni left, then stuvac.

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30
Oct 00
Mon

Darn

Daylight Savings “started” over the weekend (of course it really started before the Olympics this year). The clocks on all the computers got set forward an hour (and Win2000 doesn’t even notify you it’s done this). I was wondering how time passed so quickly when I glanced at the clock and saw it was 2am…

28
Oct 00
Sat

Busy

Wow, the academic year’s almost over. 7 assignments and 2 tests left to do in the next 3 weeks (craaaap), plus exams in the fortnight after.

20
Oct 00
Fri

Got The Flu

Feeling pretty shit. Anyhow, watched all the Neon Genesis series in the last two days. Whoo that is some deep and weird stuff in the last few episodes… really an enjoyable watch though. Now I’m going to be thinking about it for the next week or so… Anyway while scouring about for NGE links, I came across this page. It’s entitled, uh, The Ugliest Clothes in Anime.

Also had a blood test, got vaccinated for polio, and received a tetanus shot today, all in preparation for the trip (which I’ve been busy creating a site for). Still got a meningitis shot, hepatitis shots, and who knows what other diseases I have to be vaccinated against, to go. It doesn’t help when dad broke out laughing (at something I said) while drawing blood from me… he started jiggling the needle because of it, while it was still embedded, damn that hurt. I hate needles.

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16
Oct 00
Mon

Body Fat

Got my body fat percentage measured on the weekend by some sort of scales that send an electric charge through the body. I’m 10% fat… Sites on the net say that’s an “athlete’s level” of fat, although I can’t say that I exercise regularly.

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11
Oct 00
Wed

Haha!

That stats test I had today… I found out yesterday it was, (i) Multiple Choice and (ii) Open Book. Today I found out that (iii) Open Book meant not only text book, but also notes as well and (iv) They used slightly modified tute questions for the test and didn’t bother thinking up original ones. So I go from looking at a fail to a fairly decent mark :). Not only that, but we got a week extension on our law essay (the one about Napster).

Mum’s a legend, heh… there’s 60 cans of Dew sitting downstairs (well, 59 now)… they must have been on special.

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9
Oct 00
Mon

Currently…

Packing shit. I have a Stats exam tomorrow and I don’t know anything… have you ever tried to learn from scratch, 300 pages of maths in about 3 days? Don’t.

7
Oct 00
Sat

Uni Restarts

Tomorrow. No more holidays :(

You Know This Summer is Going to be Hot When…

It’s October and the cold water taps are spitting out warm water mid-afternoon.

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1
Oct 00
Sun

Contact Lenses

I’ve got another appointment with the Optometrist tomorrow to try out some contacts. Those 24/7 month-long lenses sound good… I will have to ask him about them as he never mentioned ’em.

I hated them.  Couldn’t ever get ’em in my damn eyes.  I would stand there, like a gimp, in front of the mirror for like, half an hour gouging myself to no avail.  Apparently, this gets easier as time goes on, but I just stopped trying.  Mind you, I am the lazy sort who doesn’t bother to wear his glasses either, and prefers to walk around squinting all the time.  Anyway, good luck if you decide to go through with them. –-f

contacts are somewhat of a hassle.. at first, it takes a while to get them in.. but you get used to it.. hopefully, your doctor won’t be dumb like mine and get two different size contacts (i can barely see out of my right eye). anyway, after a while, it’s easy to just pop them in. you don’t have to clean them every night, but it’s good to clean them out at least once or twice a week. always have the little contact holder, filled to the brim, with you. it’ll be much easier if one falls out. –bry

I’ve had contacts for about 9 years or so.  They’re nice at first, but at least for me I’ve found that they really dry out your eyes.  Like after a couple years my eyes would be blood-streaked red if I wore them all day.  So I switched to glasses.  Yeah I’m also thinking about laser eye surgery.  Only thing that bothers me is that if your eyes get worse after the surgery, can you do it again a couple years later? –grv

Hi man, just replying to your post about the contact lenses question. I thought i may as well write and tell you about the experiences ive had with them.

Ive been through a couple of different types: Soft permanent lenses (they last 2 years – same lenses, and have to be taken out everynight and be put in every morning also have to be disinfected once a week). They were ‘OK’ and at the time they were heaps better than glasses.

Soft disposible lenses (last 2 weeks per lens and have to be taken out every night and be put back in every morning tho no disinfection is needed, they feel better  because you get new lenses every week, and you dont have to worry about loosing them).

Then about 6months ago i got these new lenses which you can leave in 24/7 for a month each lens. For me these are the next best thing to laser. Not having to take them out when you sleep and put them back in is fucking awesome. Like you can goto a party and sleep there and not worry about waking up with saw eyes. Or if you have a women, you dont have to worry about guessing what your touching (which is also a pain in the arse..) or having to take them out when you sleep.

From memory the monthly 24/7 lenses are about $120 for 3months supply (6lenses all up). So they are pretty good in that respect too. Im not too sure about the pricing for the other ones, sorry.

Id just go and talk to a optomotrist about what would be best for you. But until i can afford laser, the 24/7 ones are all good for me.

Hope that helps man,
Think

For the most part, I’ve found them worth the money. I’ve got disposable (as in monthly) lenses. The cleanings a breeze, when you take them out at night, squirt some solution into there case, put em in and there clean overnight. Once you get used to putting them in its easy, I mean like 30 sec for both. Do to aussie doctors do free trials? Up here in USA I got to test out a pair of them (though not exactly my prescription..trials..but were near-same) for a month. Also now they make those contacts that you can leave in the whole week and even sleep in, then throw away. I couldnt get those because of my astigmatism, but they look like there worth checking out. Like I said..you just gotta try them out to see if they work for you.
Stuart

Thanks to those who dropped me those mails!

28
Sep 00
Thu

The Olds

My grandparents are over again. It’s quite distressing how much they talk about their bladder problems. What’s worse, is how my parents are also starting to relate to them (“oh yeah, that’s normal, it happens to me as well”). The thing that’s distressing is that we’re all probably going to end up like that and I don’t need to overhear those problems in specific detail. My grandmother needs to go to the toilet with a frequency that’s scary. Old people sleep usually are early sleepers and early risers, so she’ll be in bed at around 10.30 or so. I’ll be up late on the computer, and like clockwork, she’ll glide past my bedroom door about every 90 minutes. She’s like a ghost when she goes around the house… I swear, she doesn’t make a sound. Having a gaunt-looking figure suddenly flicker by the doorway on your peripheral vision at 3am is quite startling. Actually, I don’t know who was startled more when she went by and found me still typing away at 4am the other night.

Eyesight

Went to see the optometrist earlier this week. My eyesight has dropped to about -5.25 (that makes me legally blind). I don’t need stronger glasses, thankfully, and he claims that my vision is starting to stabilise. A couple years down the track I’ll be looking at getting laser surgery done on them I reckon. Can anyone tell me about contact lenses? Like, are they worth the whole hassle (cleaning/inserting/cost etc.)? Drop me a mail please.

7
Sep 00
Thu

Revised Train Timetables

After a late night at uni, got to Central around midnight. No trains back to Campbelltown via East Hills! I ended up having to take the Granville train back. Stupid announcer made a mistake, announcing, “This is the Campbelltown via Granville service. Terminating a Lidcombe, first stop Redfern…” (If it terminates at Lidcombe, which it didn’t, thankfully, why say it goes to Campbelltown?) Luckily I’m on holidays now – there’s a big sign at Campbelltown station saying that the carparks will be closed for the duration of the Olympics. WHY? Where is everyone going to park?

One good thing, though – trains are running 24 hours as of next week. Trains from the city leave for Campbelltown every 15 minutes which is awesome cos I’ll never have to worry about how I’m going to get home after a late night out.

[Re: No Bins] Haven’t you seen those people walk up and down the trains in the morning picking up the junk with an arm and bag?
How many indians have you seen getting free travel using fake passes? –Sleeper

Speaking of the Olympics… here’s that link off Burgatronics where a bunch of guys buggered off with an Olympic torch after crashtackling two cops, an escort runner and the torchbearer. They then proceed to, uh… enthusiastically stroke the torch in various… positions. Complete with pictures.

2
Sep 00
Sat

Uni

Lotsa uni work due, but only one more week left of it – then I’m on a month-long Olympic break. The construction and work around Sydney is beginning to pay off. The rings on the Harbour Bridge are up, the train stations have all been upgraded with those schmick LCD train information screens, the blue marathon line has been painted on the roads, roadside Olympic banners have started to fly… It’s all coming together, basically. The torch relay passes by my house in a couple days. I’m only two streets off the highway which is where the torch is supposedly going to pass.  I wonder how much the Sydney atmosphere will change when all the tourists start coming?

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Overheard

“I’m not going to do engineering. Too many guys. Scary.”

I overhead this when I went in to uni today to help run the Co-op stand for courses and careers day (helping Year 12s decide what uni course they should do post-HSC). It’s probably the real reason why there is a dearth of women doing engineering/science courses :).

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26
Aug 00
Sat

Petrol

Petrol’s now tipped over the dollar mark and petrol stations all around are rushing to add that extra digit onto the price boards. Of course, what they are really saying is this. Thanks Pete.

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The Olympics

Daylight saving kicked in early this year (today) because of the Olympics. It’s funny that Windows Millennium actually has the correct daylight saving times for Australia this year, but it’s being publicly released too late for it to be of any use (that figures…). I don’t have any tickets for any events so it looks like I’ll be parking myself in front of Foxtel/Channel 7 when I want to see any of it. The tourists should start to come in a couple of weeks and the public transport system is really going to go to shit then. If you think I bitch a lot about transport, I listened to two people complaining about CityRail for a whole 50 minutes on the way home. I reckon it’d be interesting to go into the city and do some “tourist-watching” :).

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10
Aug 00
Thu

Sleep

I went to bed at 10.30pm last night. That is incredible, because I can’t remember the last time I went to bed before 12 (I know it hasn’t happened this year). I don’t know whether it was psychological, or physical, but I did feel a little more alert today than I’ve been, at uni, this week. Still, I managed to doze off in the train on the way back.

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House or Hotel?

About a month or so ago, mum’s friend’s son came up from Canberra on a visit to Sydney. He stayed over at our house. Then, we had relatives over a couple weeks back from Singapore. Last week, an uncle (more like a cousin to me, agewise) from England came over. He leaves tomorrow. Now, I’ve just found out that next week more relos from Singapore are coming over. Yeesh.

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5
Aug 00
Sat

Frozen Sunnies

Was just going through some old photos the other night and came across a couple that made me crack up. Let me tell you the story behind them. It was back in Year 10 in high school. We were down at Thredbo on a debating camp. “Debating camp” is actually a misnomer, because we never did any debating on those camps, so it is safe to call it a ski trip. Anyhow, there was this pond down the road near the lodge we were staying in, and being in the middle of Winter, it was frozen over with a thin layer of ice. We’d go down there, break off chunks of ice from near the shore and begin tossing them onto the pond. The sheets of ice, which looked much like frosted glass would then shatter leaving ice fragments on top of the surface. So one day when we were waiting for lunch, a bunch of us were stuffing around down at the pond. Ka Sen then accomplished something I still can’t work out how he did. He somehow (accidentally, I might add) knocked off Tom’s sunnies, which I believe were still on his face at that time, and sent them flying through the air. They came to rest on the pond’s surface, about 5 metres (~15 feet) from the shore. We all stared incredulously for a few seconds, then cracked up laughing. Tom just stood there staring incredulously, uttering profanities. I happened to have my camera on me, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to help future listeners of this anecdote to visualise the scene. [Photo]

The ice was too thin to support someone’s weight. After a few in vain attempts of reaching out and hoping our 1 metre arms might stretch out 5 metres, we gave up on that. Tom uttered a few more profanities. Eventually, someone went back into the lodge and managed to find a long cardboard tube – like the tube that lines the inside of toilet paper rolls, except this one, for some indescribable reason, was about 4 metres long. The sunnies were retrieved [Photo] and we went back in for lunch, grinning all the way.

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3
Aug 00
Thu

Nocturnal

I am indisputably a Night Person. I’ve always everything comes easier in the period most people are about to turn in for the night. And something from that page’s misconceptions section:

Misconception: We [night people] think we’re vampires or have some other kind of odd self image.
Reality: Do you think you’re the sun god Amon-Ra just because you’re a Day Person?

22
Jul 00
Sat

Happy Birthday, Dad!

19
Jul 00
Wed

Mum

Mum went into hospital earlier today for her hysterectomy. Dad and my uncle, who are both doctors, have been updating the rest of the family via email:

The operation should be quite straightforward (only about 4 in 10000 develop serious complications). She saw the oncologist (specialist in the field of chemotherapy and radiotherapy) who said she has a 80% 5 year survival rate. I thought that he was too clinical and unfeeling to come up with a statement like that. 2 out of 10 dying is a very high figure. We are finding for her  to see another oncologist who perhaps care more about a patient’s feelings.

She should be out of hospital in 3 days. Here’s to wishing it all goes well…

16
Jul 00
Sun

Uni

Session 2 starts tomorrow.

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12
Jul 00
Wed

Uni

Uni starts next week. 5 subjects + lots of books to buy + GST = too much money. Got my results for last session… one HD, one CR (that’s my first credit… damn gen ed marxism quiz :)

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1
Jul 00
Sat

A New Month

We’ve past the halfway point this year, and this also means a few things.

The GST (Goods and Services Tax – 10%) came into practice nationwide today. It’s pretty ridiculous… you now get train tickets and receipts from McDonald’s labelled “Tax Invoice” and the harbour bridge fare is now $2.20, meaning you have to scrounge around for extra loose change (some tollways are $2.50… does that mean they are now $2.75?).

It also means that Session 1 for uni has finished, and I have completed my 6 month industrial training period at Aspect. Holidays!!! No more 6am wake ups or long hours (I scheduled uni next session so I don’t start before 11am on any day :).

While I can’t say working at Aspect was a tremendous barrel of fun (full time, no pay), I can say it was a great learning experience. And it did have its moments. Like the evening they took down power to the building to do maintenance on the phone system. We decided then would be the perfect time to install a new server, since without power, no one would be logged on to the network anyway. At around 6pm I was sent up to tell everyone to log off, and then we waited a bit. About 10 minutes before power came down, someone had a sudden realisation that if power was going off – so too would the lights. Since rackmounting a server in pitch black isn’t something that is recommended, we just went home. And the time when the “Iloveyou” virus got on to the network. We’d controlled it, pretty much, but one computer on the network had let it loose. The tech services team got together to track who did it. Guess who? None other than the MD :) Everyone makes mistakes hehe. And I managed to pick up a few freebies there:

Freebies!

Yes, that is a Palm Vx they gave me at lunch yesterday :). Which means I now have two of them. I think dad wants it. There’s also 5 mugs, a bundle of writing pads and a stackload of courseware (plus an el cheapo sports bag which has since been misplaced).

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Mum (it’s not “Mom”, dammit!)

Mum is back at home convalescing, having returned from the hospital. Unfortunately, she has to go back in to hospital in a month’s time to have a total hysterectomy. This is a precautionary measure, since estrogen is supposed to be a source of “food” for cancer cells. There may still be rogue cells present, and it is important that not a single one be alive (all it takes is one mutated cell). In addition she’ll be on a lesser form of chemotherapy (just a tablet a day) for the next 5 years.

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23
Jun 00
Fri

On How Life Is

What a week.

After much nail-biting, queasiness and stress in general, Mum’s lymph tests came back with no trace of cancer. Thank God! And I mean that. Not in the bastardised, tagged-on-the-end-of-a-sentence, “Thank God”, but a conscious and emphatic, Thank God. The operation went well, resulting in the removal of the 1.5cm tumour. Mum was actually mobile and showering herself the morning after the operation (with a bag of blood that’s used to store the drainage from the wound hanging from her side, nonetheless). A biopsy was performed on 13 lymph nodes yesterday and all were found cancer free, which basically means we’re almost out of the woods. There are a couple more tests that will be returned on Monday to detect any stray cancer cells that may have been missed, but the main ones have come back with flying colours. She’ll remain in hospital for about a week until drainage finishes.

We’ve been really lucky that the results have been so positive. We’ve also been lucky to have got so much support from people (literally from all around the world!). Thanks again to absolutely everyone who gave us their support. Whether it was an e-mail/phone call from overseas to me, dad or mum, or sending her flowers (the hospital room looks like a florist’s shop!), or relatives and friends visiting her in the hospital ward – every bit was a comfort and greatly appreciated.

In other news, Session 1 of uni has finished with a botched exam (but I reckon I’ll pass – that’s that main thing). Pfft… whoever thought they’d test us on decomposition algorithms?

Friday was the last time I’ll have to wear a suit for a very long time (thank goodness). I finished up my time in tech support at Aspect with the department giving a nice 4 hour lunch (no one wanted to go back to work, evidently :) and with the manager giving me a really good rap on my student evaluation form. I actually have one week left of work at Aspect, but they are sending me on a TCP/IP course – hence, no suit. And it’s not really work :). I’ll be a very happy person come the end of this week, I reckon. Holidays! I can go back to bludging as a full time uni student hehe…

Ce/nsus results will be out these hols now that things are thankfully starting to quiet down.

As far as my stolen phone goes, I haven’t heard back from the cops, and I’m not expecting to. In the meantime, my Aunt has leant me her spare mobile and I’ve got a replacement Sim Card, so I’m contactable once again (the number hasn’t changed).

19
Jun 00
Mon

Quick Update

Mum goes in for her operation this afternoon. Wish her luck. She’ll be in hospital for about a week recovering, and also waiting for the tests on her lymph nodes to come back. Basically, this 2-3 hour operation, a radical masectomy, will remove the entire breast, and the cancer along with it. However, it is possible that the cancer has spread. The lymphatic system is the most likely place for it to go, so it will be a week or two before the tests on the nodes come back to determine if it has spread beyond the breast. If it hasn’t that’s fantastic news and we can breathe a sigh of relief and thanks. If it has, however, that’s not good news and mum will most be given chemotherapy/radiotherapy. This waiting about is excruciating. Better get back to studying… I have an exam tomorrow. Going to visit her in hospital on Wednesday after it.

BTW, are there any European readers who know about the Nokia 6210 phone having been released in Europe? Let me know please.

18
Jun 00
Sun

Shit

Some absolute fucking wanker stole my mobile. I was at my cousin’s surgery in Narellan setting up his computer network, and three of us (the builder, my cousin and myself) happened to be in the back room for a few minutes. During those one or two minutes, someone had walked in and grabbed my mobile (and left the builder’s mobile there, which was sitting right beside it). Luckily, someone there had seen the whole incident, and even knew the name of the guy who stole it – seems he’s a “well-known” fucking heroin addict around the area. So if I ever bump into Brent Davies who lives around Richardson Road in Narellan, I’m going to fucking rip his head off and string him upside-down by his anal hairs (figuratively speaking, of course). I cancelled the Optus account and called the cops, but I don’t think that will do much.

Fortunately I only have one month left on my contract… I wanted to wait until the Nokia 6210 came out, but it looks like I can’t. Damn…

More Bad News

This is from an e-mail my Uncle sent out to the family (regarding my grandfather):

Good and bad news about Dad. Good news is that he had his angiogram done sucessfully.

Bad news is that he had 100% blockage in one of the artery and a 90% blockage in a second one. The 90% blockage was successfuly re-opened, but the 100% blockage artery could not be re-opened because there is no room to insert the catheter because it was completely blocked. There a by-pass operation is necessary (ie surgery that involve taking a vein from somewhere else, usually from the leg, and grafting it into the affected coronary artery bypassing the blockage.

If the info is correct, then it was just as well that Dad had the angiogram, cause the blockage is serious. There are 3 major arteries to the heart, if 2 are blocked, then the blood flow to the heart is really compromised. The chances of Dad having a fatal heart attack is really high, like a timebomb ready to go off at any time.

I guess the good thing is that the problem has been spotted, and a bypass operation these days, while still major, is a well known procedure.

14
Jun 00
Wed

Train Tales

Ok let me explain what triggered off the mobile phone post below. It started when I left work. You should use this map for reference :)
5.10pm – 2 out of the 3 lifts in the building are broken. 5 minutes of waiting and the lift comes. It’s full. Keep waiting. After another 5 minute wait, the lift finally came. I set off for a brisk walk.
5.35pm – Arrived at Town Hall Station. Walked to Platform 6 to the announcement that “trains to Macarthur have resumed.” Strange. Nonetheless, the main point was they were running. Interesting that the platform was less populated than usual.
5.45pm – Fell asleep on the train.
6.10pm – Woke up to an SMS from Burga saying: “from what i saw on the news you are probably waiting 2 hours to get a bus home from work….just go via granville in stead :]” Too late, mate… we were already in the airport tunnel :). I went back to sleep.
6.30pm – Woke up to the train crawling along at a snail’s pace somewhere past Kingsgrove and the guard saying that the train was running 40 minutes behind schedule because we were stuck behind an all stops East Hills train. Great. Couldn’t get back to sleep.
7.00pm – Normally, I would’ve been home by now.
7.10pm – We got past East Hills and finally started travelling at full speed. 5 minutes later we ground to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere, but somewhere between Holsworthy and Glenfield (which is as good as nowhere). The announcer came on again (he was beginning to get real annoying… he had the volume turned up and was shouting into the PA system) and said we were going to be stationary for 5 minutes while waiting for the train from Liverpool to pass. Real bloody smart. The Liverpool-originating train happened to be an all stops to Campbelltown so once again, our “express train” was caught up chugging behind it. “Chugging” comprised of inching forwards a bit, then grinding to a stop every 2 minutes. It was truly ridiculous. There were a few people in the vestibule area that started making quips at Cityrail:
7.20pm – “Hey, it’s not often you pay for a 60 minute train ride and get a 2 hours one! Freebie!”
7.25pm – Annoying PA guy: “Due to factors I have zero control over, we are now running 52 minutes late.” People start clapping. If there clapping could ever sound sarcastic, it did tonight. 
7.30pm – “Let’s get out and push… we’ll get there faster.”
7.31pm – “Screw pushing, I’m walking.”
7.40pm – Annoying PA guy: “For those who have missed the final connecting bus service home at Campbelltown, please go to the stationmaster and demand that he pay for your taxi fare home.”
7.41pm – Train stops again. “Haha…that guy doesn’t like the stationmaster… and the stationmaster probably heard that and stopped the train. We’re never going to reach Campbelltown now.”
7.50pm – “Hey dontcha feel sorry for the people going to Macarthur? They’ll probably say the train is terminating at Campbelltown for today only.”
7.58pm – Annoying PA guy: “Ladies and gentlemen, this train is not going to Macarthur and will be terminating at Campbelltown for today only. Alllllll out, Alllll change!”
7.59pm – Trainful of irate passengers (in unison): “Fuck off!!!”
8.00pm – Train pulls into Campbelltown.
8.20pm – I arrive home, a mere 190 minutes after leaving work.

And that is why they lock the driver and guard compartments on trains. Two weeks of work left! When I’m on holidays I guarantee you won’t hear a peep about trains (I know you’re all sick to death of my train stories, but you’ll just have to live with it, cos I have to :)

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12
Jun 00
Mon

Thank You

A very big thank you to everyone (whether personally known or not) wishing mum, and the rest of us, the best.

On reflection it’s not that strange posting her e-mail address up. Mum sees me on the net quite a bit, but never really knows what I’m actually doing. She knows that I keep a web page and that I communicate with people continents away that I’ve never met. As with most parents, she tends to be quite suspicious of “net people”. It came to her as a pleasant surprise then, that these people I spent all this time writing to, and communicating with (through this web page, or other form) cared enough so as to drop her (and me) an e-mail with some reassuring words. Thanks all, we definitely appreciate it.

Check out what Dennis put up in the top right of his site – what a nice gesture. Thanks man.

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10
Jun 00
Sat

Hard Hitting

I make absolutely no apologies for lack of updates with any substance over the last week.

I discovered this week that my Mum has breast cancer.

As can be imagined I’ve been feeling pretty shit. It’s been graded as a “stage 2” tumour, which means it wasn’t detected very early, nor very late. Apparently the inch-big tumour hasn’t spread to the axillary lymph nodes, which is a good sign, but that can’t be confirmed until the operation which is Wednesday week. She’ll be undergoing a radical masectomy. She seems to be taking it well, although I can’t say the same about myself, or Dad. Life is surreal. It’s mostly normal, but everything to me is cast in light of Mum’s condition, and it’s inherently depressing.

A few weeks ago I wrote how the closer an event is to you, the more it makes you pause and re-evaluate life. Let me tell you that is particularly true in this case. It’s worse when the thought crosses my mind that it could be the last time I ever did something with her.

I am a strong Christian, and although I usually keep religious matters mostly personal (just because I’m a introvert), on this occasion I request that, if you are too, that you pray for her that the outcome will be favourable. If anyone (women readers?) has had any experience with breast cancer at all, I would be happy to get an e-mail if you have anything to say about it. She can be e-mailed here if anyone should wish to send her good wishes (hey, I saw Solo ask this when his mum’s birthday came along last year!).

7
Jun 00
Wed

Next Update

Next update – sometime tomorrow. I never realised how bad not being able to check e-mail for the greater part of the week could be… got this junk pile sitting in the mailbox I gotta go through :/

6
Jun 00
Tue

Blah

Expect very few updates in the upcoming week – I have too much stuff due: an Oracle database, a test on Marxism, an essay on Postmodernism, and a presentation to the management staff at Aspect… The census results will be out in a couple weeks.

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4
Jun 00
Sun

This Week

I will be rarely posting from work this week. Reason is, I’m on a Windows 2000 course (1560 – Updating Support Skills…) and the lab environment is in an internal LAN. I can get access to the net, but I have to keep flicking between the static IP settings required for the labs, and the DHCP assigned IP needed for getting on the same subnet as the proxy server. So, it’s a bit of a bother.

1
Jun 00
Thu

And You Thought List-en was bad…

Everyone in my uni course is subscribed to a mailing list called bitwork (cos we’re all on 6 months of industrial training). It was set up so we could keep in contact with each other (the truth actually is – that it was set up because the majority of us have nothing better to do at work than e-mail each other). As the final week of work draws nearer, it’s started getting wacky. The last 50 mails I’ve got from it over the last 3 hours are all written in rhyme (mostly limer i cks, actually). Example:

Hey Renai, you’re such a joke
what did I ever do?
I didn’t even poke.
Stop your sledging
stop your poems.
GET BACK TO WORK
YOU FUCKING JERK.

Save me. I know these people.

30
May 00
Tue

Cityrail *Bitch* *Moan*

Finally got in the office at 9.45am. That’s about 2 hours spent on the train (only 80 minutes of it was actually spent moving). If “time is money”, then CityRail’s “free rail day” isn’t free after all. Unfortunately I can’t claim that my time is money, cos it’s not. :)

Butt Naked

Ok, something like this doesn’t happen everyday. Or at least I’d hope not.

I went in to work last Saturday to install a new server. Meanwhile, construction work was being performed as renovations were taking place around the building. The server install went fine and I started to head home. I got off the lift at level 5 (upper ground) and before heading on the long trip home, decided a quick trip to the toilet would be in order.

I pushed open the door. The next half-second flashed by quickly, but vividly. There was a construction worker standing in front of the sink, pants down around his ankles, completely naked on his bottom half. He was scrubbing at something. My eyes widened, I let go of the door and I retreated a few steps back. As the door started to slowly drift shut (there was no door handle to pull on, on my side) the guy screamed “Aye, yai yai, yai yai!”, spun around, and slammed the door completely shut. I just stood there frozen in the vestibule (“airlock”) area of the toilet as I heard a stream of apologies emanating from the other side of the door. I could only manage an, “uh…” before stutteringly enquiring whether he was decent and it was safe to go in.

He rapidly assured me it was and I reopened the door to see him tucking in his shirt. “Sorry about that, mate! You caught me coming out of the toilet. I needed to wash this yellow insulation shit off me but the cubicles are too damn small, y’know? It was making me all itchy and shit so I had to come out to clean it off! I swear no funny business, nothing was going on! No funny ideas, ok? How embarrassing!” All this explanation while I was doing my business in front of the urinal, feeling rather uncomfortable.

“Well, I guess you weren’t expecting anyone to come in, it being Saturday and all…”
“Exactly!”
“Well I’ll just leave you in private now. Cya.”
“Yeah, have a good day…”
“You too.” [Exeunt]

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29
May 00
Mon

Shit.

“Your location is not due to be covered before the end of August 2000. Telstra is progressively expanding its ADSL coverage areas. To find out whether your area will be covered in the next round of expansions please revisit this site regularly.”

28
May 00
Sun

Dammit

It’s cold and windy. It’s not Winter yet. My hands are cold. Once that happens, it is impossible to warm my hands up again without sticking them in front of a heater for 5 minutes. Oh well, guess I’ll have to live with cold hands for the rest of the day (I can’t sit on my hands to warm them up and type at the same time, unfortunately. Hmm. Another use for voice recognition software…)

24
May 00
Wed

Free Train Tickets

Actually, what I said before wasn’t entirely accurate – anyone buying a weekly/travelpass next week will get a 20% discount. So, I get both a free day’s travel and $4.40 off my travelpass. They should have these “goodwill gestures” more often.

CityRail

Next Wednesday, CityRail is allowing all passengers to travel for free on the train system. It’s a “goodwill” move that attempts to apologise for the crap we’ve had to put up with for ages (and most especially in the last week). The gesture is expected to cost them $2 million. Of course, this is bad luck for the people that buy weeklies and travelpasses on Monday. However, I got lucky. I buy my travelpass on Tuesday evening, so my ticket cycle goes from Wednesday to the n e xt Tuesday. Therefore, I can skip buying it on Wednesday and get it on Thursday instead :). Although I go off at CityRail every day, you gotta remember that many CityRail employees are just as frustrated and stressed. I wonder how long I will have to wait tonight for a train home?

23
May 00
Tue

New Record…

A new record! Tonight I had to watch 8 trains go past my platform before the one to Campbelltown rocked up. Only had to wait 45-50 minutes for it. That bites. “Hear Ye! Complaining about Cityrail 24/7” :)

22
May 00
Mon

Um…

Phone call: “Our records show that you’ve purchased IBM products from us in the past. We’re wondering if you’re interested in purchasing some IBM Netfinity servers from us at all?” Reply: “First of all you’ve called the help desk, secondly, we’re a Netfinity reseller.”

16
May 00
Tue

Blah

Something of passing interest happened yesterday when I was heading home on the train. We’d just crossed the Harbour Bridge and entered the tunnel and the train pulled to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Nothing unusual there – that was standard procedure for CityRail in peak hour. Then the airconditioning turned off, the engine powered off, and finally half the carriage lights went off. And there was silence. I mean, complete and utter silence. A packed out train carriag e with a peak hour crowd and no more standing room, and you couldn’t hear a single noise. There was someone turning the page in a novel in the semi-darkness, but that was about it.

11
May 00
Thu

Work

After today, I only have 7 weeks of work left. Then I can get back to being a full time uni bludger.

Telcos Suck

I can’t help it, but there is a massive grin on my face (read with regards to yesterday’s post):

FUCK OPTUS!!!!!!!!!!! There’s been a problem and the installation has been moved to the 22nd of June, which is more than a months wait.

I’ve been waiting for cable since December last year. I think I should just cancel this bloody application and pretend cable never existed. It’s let me down far too many times.

I AM NOT going to believe I’ll get it 22/6 … I AM NOT going to believe I’ll get it 22/6 … I AM NOT going to believe I’ll get it 22/6

Hmm… you’re probably thinking. Hmm.. Dave… that’s what you get for rubbing it in the face of someone who won’t be getting it in the coming year. =) Geez.

Try, “someone who won’t be getting it in the upcoming decade”. I live in rural Australia here (or at least on the boundary of where rural meets urban)… we get Foxtel Pay TV by satellite and the street I’m on has underground electricity/phone cables anyhow so even if it does come to Camden, they’re not going to tear up the neighbourhood to lay new cables in a hurry.

10
May 00
Wed

E-Mail: “Cable in a week. Not rubbing it in this time.”

Stu,
Dam. Did u know that 1 week may not sound like a lot but its like eternity when you’re in my position. You’ll understand … someday . =)

regards,
Dave

Dave, I’m gonna kill you. :Þ

2
May 00
Tue

View From the Office

This is the view I have at work. Sometime in the mid-morning, they switch the traffic flow direction of 3 lanes and I’ve never caught them doing it, yet. Look down, look back up and suddenly the cars are travelling the opposite direction.

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1
May 00
Mon

5/5/2000

That date ring a bell with anyone? Yes, that’s right. It’s one of those doomsday dates.

27
Apr 00
Thu

Weekend

The 3-day week is over, I’m leaving the education department at work, it’s the start of the weekend and I’m heading in to the city. :) Too bad you yanks still have Friday to get through heh. The benefits of living 15 hours ahead. I wonder if some city derro is going to ask me for money tonight? Happened yesterday. Always does.

On Travelling…

Gavern wrote:

Hey man, you have my sympathies – just saw your *travel log* showing the 7:05am to 8:55am journey time. Urghhhhh.

Couple of years ago I lived in Richmond & worked in Pymble. Even by motorbike that was an hour each way, which was a great ride both ways – especially through Galston Gorge.

But I CAN understand the horror you go through each morning and evening, ‘cos there was a 3 month period when the bike was off the road that I had to train it every day – 6:30am to 9:00am and 5:00pm to 7:30pm with changes at Riverstone, Blacktown, North Sydney and EVEN sometimes at Gordon.

Bugger that for a joke – I now work in the heart of the city and live a 5 minute walk away, less than 1 km. But still I ride to work sometimes – just for the fun of cutting up the traffic!!!  (Well, in Perth anyway…..)

Cheers,
Gavern

That’s a hell of a lot of line changes! And 2.5 hours is a killer travel time…

I don’t drive in because (i) Petrol Prices, (ii) Parking in North Sydney (or the city) – there isn’t, (iii) You can’t sleep and drive (and live) at the same time. Incidentally I got into UNSW’s Week 8’s Blitz magazine, in the travel article.

26
Apr 00
Wed

What I Accomplished Today

As you can see by the frequency of posts, I’ve done pretty much nothing today but surf the web. Why? My supervisor didn’t turn up, nor did anyone else that could’ve given me work (they’re all on leave, apparently). Bleh. I also changed the mobile phone update script so those posts go into this section (remote posts) instead of the section at the top. I’ll have to install it later.

17
Apr 00
Mon

Oh For Goodness Sake

Geez, I’m on a 33.6K connection! This is absurd.

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16
Apr 00
Sun

Hrrrm

Relos coming over from Singapore and the US this week (yes I have um… yanks for… relatives). I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing (they better not read this).

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Cityrail: Signals

Burgatron reveals the secrets of cityrail signals (thanks mate!). Something I’ve always wondered about… [Post modified to account for early-morning-email-typos]

Well, signal faliures are when the signals stop working, (just like when the traffic lights blank out or stop working). What mostly happens is the signal stays at red (stop) when it should go back to green. Most signals have a trip device on them… if you look down on the ground near a signal you will see a white arm pointing up on a 45 degree angle or just pointing down. When the signal is at stop, the arm should point up (about 45 degrees). Trains have a trip valve connected to the brakes. If a train goes past a red signal, the trip valve hits the white arm, the brakes come on and the train stops. This is so trains can’t just drive round willy nilly without obeying the indication of signals. So, another reason a signal may have failed is that the signal is green but the arm has stayed in the raised position. When the train goes past the green signal, it will trip its brakes, and then the train will have to stop and wait a few mintutes till the air fills its brakes again.

What I want to know now is, what happens when the signals stay at green, when they should be red? Hrm…

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12
Apr 00
Wed

No Updates?

I’m not getting enough sleep. I turned up late to work today, not that it mattered since the marketing department here (which seems to consist of all of 2 people) are managing a Win2K seminar in the city. When you run on about 5-6 hours of sleep each night, the fatigue’s gotta strike sooner or later, and after a few weeks of it, it’s hitting me now. This can’t be healthy. And if what they say is true about a temporary “virtual loss” of 1 IQ point per each hour of sleep you miss (under the requisite 8 hours), I’ll be a vegetable soon (heh, temporarily spastic :). Yes, I’m still getting your e-mails and SMSes, but I haven’t actually been able to update at home.

10
Apr 00
Mon

I Don’t Believe It

They started using the ticket gates at Campbelltown station. They’ve been sitting there for about 10 months, disused. I give it one week before someone takes to them with a baseball bat.

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9
Apr 00
Sun

Derailed Train

Last Thursday (or was it Friday?), 5 carriages of a train derailed off platform 1 of Redfern. Burgatronics has a pic of it. I saw it on the way to work. I don’t think anyone besides the driver was on it, though, but it’s a worry…

3
Apr 00
Mon

SQL Server Course

What a nice break from work. A 5-day $2300 course provided completely free :). I even get a free $9 lunch voucher each day heh. SQL Server really rocks. (What a geeky thing to say, eh? :Þ)

1
Apr 00
Sat

No Posts…

…because for the last two days I haven’t been home except to sleep and shower. Mmm… weekend… and no more tech support for me! I’m outta the tech services department at work as of yesterday… After the SQL server course next week I go to the marketing (1 week), education (2 weeks) and accounts (1 week) department.

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28
Mar 00
Tue

Work

Turns out I am going on course next week… just not TCP/IP but SQL Server instead. Cool.

27
Mar 00
Mon

Work

You gotta be kidding me. They cancelled the TCP/IP course that’s meant to happen next week. Grrrr.

25
Mar 00
Sat

Work

As luck would have it… my stay in the tech services department has been extended for a week. Thus, MCSE+I training starts in two. That bites.

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22
Mar 00
Wed

Quicky Update

Quick post. Got home late and I got work tomorrow (uh… make that today). Got the Palm :) It’s awesome. More on that later of course, and can’t forget the Trek episode gobbet. And the ton of SMSes. You’ll have to wait when I get home… and I’ve also got uni this evening too.

21
Mar 00
Tue

Norton Strikes Again

The General Manager at this company just installed Norton Utilities and ran a defrag on the system. Upon reboot he was greeted by a bluescreen. Now I have to rebuild his system. Screw you, Peter Norton. I advise everyone to stay away from Norton software. Norton Anti-virus stuffs things around too. The only one that works properly seems to be PCAnywhere, but even then I prefer Laplink to it. Go PowerQuest instead.

A Moment of Bitching

Hanson and The Queen are in the country. Ack. I freaked when I turned on the radio driving home tonight and Hanson was playing live on 2day-fm… And I might as well complain about the shitty rainy weather that we’ve been having for the last two days. I actually don’t mind it when I’m in the office, but outside it’s a different story. Not to mention that Campbelltown car park turns into a muddy paddock with large puddles everywhere when it rains. And it looks as though Phil got cable and Fuzzy is going to be getting it. ::wail:: Oh yes, and Norton Ghost refuses to work properly.

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20
Mar 00
Mon

<3

Those trying to piss me off by sending <3s through SMS… you’re doing a good job of it :/ Does anyone have a program that can convert or open Word 97 docs (without using Word 97/2000)? I have a corrupt document I need to recover, and I want to get at the contents, I don’t care about preserving formatting. Word hangs when it loads the file, so I need an alternate way to get at the data.

Update: When I said I want to get at the contents, I mean I need to get at the content that is READABLE. These solutions don’t work: “rename as .txt can then open with notepad”, “Just open the file using notepad (or any text editor) I’ve had to do this a number of times with files that people have saved using “save as word 6.0/95″ option in word!” A suggestion from Bonhomme De Neige (henceforth abbreviated to BDN) for using this Linux program doesn’t work simply cos Linux doesn’t exist at IPS, “There’s a nice linux program called word2x. I’ve no idea where you might find it though. Look around =)” Thanks anyhow.

18
Mar 00
Sat

Work this Week..

10th week of work and 5 days left in the Ops Center doing Tech Support, then a week of the first subject in +I training (TCP/IP, I think). They are sending me off to IPS on Clarence street for most of the upcoming week to set up a standard operating environment for them.

In uni, the Info Sys labs are screwed. None of the lab exercises have worked due to the fact that someone didn’t set everything up correctly. I can’t believe my (bad) luck – my Advanced Database Systems tutor is the same one I got last year for another subject. She has an unpronounceable first name, “Zixiu”, an undecipherable accent and an obstinate personality. Anyway, she was lending out copies of Oracle to assignment groups for home use, but only if we gave her our student card or driver’s license (until the CD was returned). And she was adamant about that. My student card doubles as a concession card and gives me 50% off travel fares. That’s a saving of $22 a week, and I was buggered if I was going to give my card to her to keep for a week. Couldn’t give her my license either – buying a $22 train ticket but not being able to drive home from the station isn’t very good is it? She wouldn’t accept last year’s student card either. Luckily Joel was willing to give his in. Why did she have to be so difficult?!

Shaolin Monks

Saw the “Shaolin Kung Fu Monks” last night at the Entertainment Centre. Some incredible stuff there, and even more so when you realise these people have not learnt these skills with the intention of performing them (as opposed to circus workers who learn their skills for the sole purpose of performing them). Of course, the performances the monks put on was made much more “showy” so as to entertain an audience. I wonder what it must be like for them to perform to western music? And although it was really enjoyable, it just felt sorta wrong that they’re now performing for money in a foreign land, which I think, goes against tradition.

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16
Mar 00
Thu

Bored

Hehe the printer in the room has an IR port and I’ve been amusing myself by using my mobile to print documents to it :)

15
Mar 00
Wed

Busy

You know how it is… nothing to do for a couple days then you get a whole heap dumped on you. That’s me now. :/ Well, almost lunchtime…

10
Mar 00
Fri

Excuses, Excuses

Finally, the weekend… a chance to sleep in majorly and update

“so where the hell you been, down under?” -Solo (via SMS)

Good question. Well ok, I have a 6.30am start each day, leaving the house at 7 to get to work by 9. On Wednesday, I had uni after work (well, the IT2000 convention in this week’s case :) and thus eventually got home at 11. Then Thursday, I had uni after work again, but after that, went to the Bitsa AGM which ran until 9.30pm. Got back to Campbelltown station at about 11pm, but (and damn this is embarrassing) found I had left my headlights on since 7.30am (it was raining in the morning, which is why the lights were on). Battery was flat as a tack. I didn’t know you couldn’t even lock the doors from the inside (without use of the key), because the locking was powered. NRMA came at 12.30am and jumpstarted me and I got home at 1am. Interesting that the NRMA guy that serviced me had a work shift from 3pm to 6am – that must suck. 5 hours of sleep later and I was out of the house again. So, this is really the first opportunity I’ve had to update.

6
Mar 00
Mon

Off Sick

Yeah I caught the flu so quit bugging me to update :/.

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*Sniffle*

I’m going now. Damn flu. Not strong enough to keep me bedridden and from going to work (thanks to the Vit C I reckon), but enough to be damn annoying and weakening.

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27
Feb 00
Sun

I’m Shocked

Uni starts tomorrow… and… and there’s no strike! How irregular.

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Screw Cityrail

I got screwed by cityrail again today. I had to wait 70 minutes for a friggin train. 40 minutes on platform 6, no sign of the train. “Passengers waiting for the train on platform 6 are advised to go to platform 1.” So I did. 20 minutes pass. “Passengers on platform 1 are advised the train will now depart from platform 6.”

And I wish the deroes that hang around train stations would PISS OFF. I got approached four times today for people looking for “loose change”. I swear, one day they are going to ask the wrong person, and that someone is going to slam them in the face.

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Hey, I Know Who That Is…

I was reading the Educom site a few days back, and I noticed this on their page about the “student boot camp“:

Results speak for themselves
Of the 12 students who completed EDUCOM’s Boot Camp beginning in January 1999, 11 have secured good jobs in organisations such as Optus, BHP-IT, Microsoft, AMP, State Rail, EMS, and EDUCOM. One has elected to pursue full time university by choice.

I wonder who that odd-person-out is – the one that “elected to pursue full time university by choice”? ;) This might help jog your memory.

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24
Feb 00
Thu

Work

Ok the router failed to work. The place we went to, in Chatswood, was a firm that takes photos of appliances for company catalogs and stuff. They use Macs there. *Ugh*. And they’ve decided to not purchase any more PCs cos they claim macs are cheaper. *Shudder*. Anyway the Mac refused to co-operate with the AS/400. In fact, when it connected, it crashed and required a reboot. Right.

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23
Feb 00
Wed

Work

I can’t believe I have to make it in to North Sydney by 7.30am tomorrow morning. Shite, I’m going to be a walking zombie. We’re supposed to be configuring a router and finishing up a network installation. On the flipside, I have a terrific view of the northern shores including the Opera House and some of the harbour bridge from where I am on the 11th floor of Aspect.

Additionally, I was surprised to see that Aspect got quite a good write up in the SMH yesterday from Graeme Philipson. I wasn’t really aware it was one of Australia’s largest private companies (although the LANSA division is being separated into a subsidiary company and will be floated on NASDAQ) with 1300 employees worldwide. However, it’s still true that they keep a low profile – they are virtually unknown. “Aspect? What do they do?”

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11
Feb 00
Fri

Work

Great, no more testing. Testing is such a boring job. There’s virtually no room for innovation or creativity. When I do get a job in the IT industry I want to be either creating or managing something. No debugging, support, maintenance, testing or data processing. I start a 6 week stint in the technical services department on Monday, and although no one seems to know what they do, the mention of “RS/6000” and “getting my hands dirty with them” is promising :).

I’m also going to get booked in for free training to get the +Internet bit to my MCSE as well as upgrading it to the Win2000 track (the damn NT4 cert expires at the end of 2001).

9
Feb 00
Wed

Weather

It was bloody hot on the train today :/ Couldn’t sleep, either, got too sweaty… just one hour of oppressive heat. Then I got to back to Campbelltown and by late afternoon, the car’s a furnace, and its airconditioning is broken. Of course, all winding down the windows does is get hot air blown in my face.

5
Feb 00
Sat

Today

It’s the Chinese New Year today. It’s strange, I’ve lived in Australia for all my life, born and bred, so this celebration has next to no significance for me. Nonetheless I enjoy the occasions – the dinners and of course, Red Packets. It’s an asian tradition. In lieu of presents, you get “red packets”. Small red envelopes filled with cash. You give them out only if you’re married, and only to the generations below you. I’m not married, and a generation below me doesn’t exist yet. So I sit there and receive, and that’s why I make money off New Year.

This year is the year of the Dragon. Not only that, it’s a “golden dragon” year, which comes around every 60 years (something to do with lunar alignment… I think there are “13” months this year or something). The dragon is an auspcious sign, and to be born under a golden dragon year is especially so. But wait, there’s more. It’s the new millennium in western culture, so that’s another plus. Those Chinese are going to be screwing around like crazy this year. I guess they had to to have 1.2 billion people in one country in the first place. 

Mum just blew the phone bill making a tonne of new years international calls back to Singapore (special deals from the telcos). Then she traded ICQ numbers with a friend there and I had to teach her the basics of ICQ. Do you know how scary it is to have mum chatting on ICQ? I tried her to get her to use the digital camera last night and she basically freaked out… I had to spend a couple minutes convincing her it was used exactly like a normal camera. :)

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Weather

What a scorcher today. 43ºC (110ºF). Now that’s Summer weather. Going to be the same tomorrow too. I predict a thunderstorm right after.

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3
Feb 00
Thu

Busy

Chinese New Year is Saturday… that means red packets… that means money :) Not sure I’ll have time for an update tomorrow. Sorry.

Only one more week in the testing department… and the new version of Lansa should be released in a couple days time too.

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Communal Crier

New
• JB Online

Plug
• I’m going to plug Listen again. The ball has started rolling, there’s a fair few on the list, and enough messages flying about to warrant filtering the mail into a separate folder. It’s an E/N Community mailing list, for those not in the know. So, join up and be sure to post something introducing yourself!

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30
Jan 00
Sun

Discovering the Net…

I signed mum up an e-mail account last night and taught her how to use Outlook Express. She’s replying to mail on the other computer as I type this. I find that sort of scary for some reason :). Mum’s normally a luddite… but I guess women just gotta communicate and gossip above all else hehe :) Hey come on… you know the gossip part is true :).

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22
Jan 00
Sat

Work

Week one is over. I’m still in the testing department. Testing is boring, no doubt about it, but someone has to do it. It’s important. The R&D department is an extremely quiet place to work. Very little conversation (suits me, cos I’m a quiet person). I’m learning virtually nothing, though. I’d learn more from Solo giving me a Cold Fusion server to work across the net on, than a month in testing.

I got net access today. Needed the correct proxy settings, but yes I do have net access. No more friggin Lynx. No company e-mail address though :/. I must be the only BIT without one.

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Weather

It’s been hot lately. A couple days nudging the 40°C mark (over 100°F for the metrically challenged), and I’ve been stuck on Sydney trains. The non-air-conditioned silver rattlers. Oh well, at least the office has aircon.

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19
Jan 00
Wed

Waiting To Install

Just thought I might as well make a post, given that I’m doing install testing and this machine is a 486-66 and is taking its own sweet time :/. Oh yeah, Transmeta released their mobile CPU. It’s a significant “contribution” to the computing world, but not revolutionary. The problem with being mobile, still, is being connected. More later, when I get home. [Posted from Work @ Aspect, North Sydney]

Work

Ok, so it was marginally better today. I’m off docs testing and doing installation testing. Nothing thrilling, but I wasn’t nodding off as much, which is a good thing. Had a bit of “fun” at the installation farm trying to install Lansa on French and Japanese boxes. I had to translate (decipher more like it…) the French dialog boxes and correlate the buttons with the Japanese one. I ended up firing up an install on an English box and using that to guide me instead :).

I discovered I do have net access, but it’s limited. DNS is available, but the proxy is blocking external http transfers. Telnet, however, hasn’t been blocked, which means I can check my mail. Hah! And I can surf with Lynx if I get that desparate :P.

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18
Jan 00
Tue

2nd Day @ Work

First month, I’m being assigned to the R&D department – a department which revolves around a sole product, Lansa, an IBM AS/400 product. I thought this would be interesting. That is, until they stuck me in the testing department. Documentation testing. Go through the readme files and look for typos. Helpful to them? In the smallest sense. Challenging? Ahahahahaha. Mind-numbing? Absolutely. I mean, I’m sure normal testing isn’t as bad, but since I lack any knowledge about Lansa (and AS/400s), I can’t really test anything more complex than docs. Things better improve. Here’s what a friend is doing in comparison to me:

well, right from day 1 (in fact from about 4 hours into my IT placement) i’ve been doing monthly customer reports for our network clients. this basically involves pulling in a whole lot of network utilisation and response time data from the routers, processing it with a bit of java, producing some graphs, and creating a word document that tells them that we are providing a good service to them. I’ve also been producing similar weekly reports for some customers.

apart from all that, i’m working on a java servlets program that will act as a front-end to our databases (DB2, Oracle and Sybase). The servlet will have to be able to work with any type of database table and will do things like add new records, delete records and edit records.

i’m also doing a capacity planning project for one of our customers, basically involving a whole shitload of network data that I graph, add trendlines, etc, etc, and in the end again tell them that we are doing a wonderful job for them

one of my other projects is helping to set a standard design and configuration for the servers at our USF (Universal Server Farm)…but I’ve only just started that one.

i’m also doing a whole load of databasey stuff (yes, bdm DOES help) and learning PSQL on the side.

…..and finally, i’m also helping our expert java programmer (yep, he’s the only guy i’ve met outside of our uni that knows haskell) in redesigning and rebuilding our main front-end to our DB2 database

but what takes the cake is this:

hehehe……well, you know how they took me to that chinese restaurant for yum-cha as our welcome lunch. well, about a week later, we had a christmas lunch just for the “boys”. it was at a strip-club down the road. it was hilarious watching my managers go crazy at the sight of all these naked women around us!

So, take pity on me. Brighten up my day and page me on my mobile (I don’t have a net connection at work, let alone an e-mail address) while I’m working with a message, or some obscenities… or something (message restricted to 130 chars):

Name :     
E-mail :
Message :

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17
Jan 00
Mon

Working

Expect less posts during weekdays. I’m tired. More about work later. Let’s just say these are looking very appealing to be bought, right now, cos I don’t drink coffee *gasp*.

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13
Jan 00
Thu

Hmmm

I’m getting an offer for a job that essentially is the design of a single web site. The only problem is I start full time work (industrial training) at Aspect next Monday. Combine that with a few evenings back at uni for a couple subjects, and the four hours I spend on public transport each day, and that might leave just enough time for something that vaguely resembles a social life or free time. But now I’m getting this offer which I want to take, but don’t know if I can. The company’s based up in North Sydney, like Aspect, and I just agreed to a meeting with the guy who runs it during a lunch break sometime next week. Hm. Dunno what I should do.

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9
Jan 00
Sun

I’m Back

And we’re still unpacking our bags. Normal operations will resume shortly.

17
Dec 99
Fri

HSC 99 Results Out

This time last year was quite euphoric and somewhat surreal for me. I hope anyone who sat the HSC this year feels the same way. They made the UAI available through the Net this year, and it’s about bloody time. Surprising they didn’t do that last year.

16
Dec 99
Thu

Cross-Pacific Weather

Sunny. Warm. And not a cyclone in sight. Well not in Sydney, anyway. The cyclones that do hit Australia are often on its relatively unpopulated Northwestern coasts. Notice that the highest number of people mentioned in this news report is 12 Aussies (as opposed to the 2 million Floridian evacuees mentioned when hurricanes hit Florida earlier this year). Who cares about these obscure outback outposts anyway? j/k :) It’s all still better than hurricanes in the East, and earthquakes in the West, Solo. HA! :) Hmm… I got sunburnt on the face the other day. Not pleasant at all.

10
Dec 99
Fri

Famous Last Words: “Mate, just be there, you’re in!”

Last night, 10.45pm, outside Home Nightclub, Darling Harbour
We’re at the entrance to Home, and there’s no queue there. We ask the bouncers what time it opens. Extremely strange for a nightclub that holds over 1000 people, and that opens in 15 minutes, that there’s absolutely no queue. Nonetheless, we figure we’re lucky and line up anyway.

10 minutes pass. The bouncer comes up to us. “Can I see your tickets, please?” And we’re thinking, “WTF? What tickets?”

“Guys, you do know that tonight is a gay night.”

Silence.

Aw, fuck.

Shuffle away. Quick. That explains the two guys in tight shiny leather standing behind us.

Of all the nights we choose, we get the gay night. We ended up further down the wharf in Pontoon, which was shit (especially compared to Home) – the girls were complaining about the sleeze, dance floor too cramped etc. Now my dilemma is, should I go to sleep, or shouldn’t I? I feel awake.

6
Dec 99
Mon

Weather

It’s started getting warm. And that’s not good for computers. Heat = more frequent computer crashes. Especially for an overclocked cpu with no extra cooling. Well better the computer gets hot than me freeze my balls off in the Northern hemisphere. Think I better turn on the aircon.

12
Nov 99
Fri

Cold Fusion

Just started learning Cold Fusion from Allaire’s product documentation and my Win2k server… bad, bad timing… Actually it’s not that bad – I get to practice my SQL and databasing stuff for my BDM exam next week :).

9
Nov 99
Tue

Exams.

Ich hasse Maths.

Especially Algebra. It shits me. It shits me big time.

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5
Nov 99
Fri

Referendum Day

Well after this post I’m off to the polling booths. For me it’ll be one “yes” vote for the republic, and one “yes” vote for the constitutional preamble. Something tells me, however, that Australia is not ready to move on. Dad asked 8 people today at work. All but 1 were naysayers. By the time all the votes are counted, the constitution might be updated, but we’ll still all be subjects of the Her Majesty.

Live updates from 6pm. Complete with nice on-the-fly images generated by Macromedia Generator.

28
Oct 99
Thu

Pay TV

There’s a satellite dish now sitting on the roof. Hey we got World Movies as well :). Unfortunately Dad’s hogging the TV now :/

26
Oct 99
Tue

All Done!

Finally got that compiler mofo outta the way! Now I can get back to updating…

% give cs1021 compiler Compiler.java Compiler??.java
Submission: compiler
——————————
Files found: Compiler.java Compiler00.java Compiler01.java Compiler02.java Compiler03.java Compiler04.java Compiler05.java Compiler06.java Compiler07.java Compiler08.java Compiler09.java Compiler10.java Compiler11.java Compiler12.java Compiler13.java
——————————

Running submission through simple test…
Compiling your program …
Submission compiled succesfully
Testing your compiler on /home/cs1021/public_html/simpleJava/examples/0/Simple0b.java
The output from the simpleRISC program it produced is:

42

Your submission produced a correct SimpleRISC program.

Submission datestamp: Tue Oct 26 21:56:48 1999
Assignment deadline: Tue Oct 26 23:59:00 1999
This submission is on time.
Submission accepted
%

And here’s some quasi-assembler the program generates to crack your head on (heh – gibberish to those who’ve never dealt with assembler before). This is actually a Stack Quicksort program.

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24
Oct 99
Sun

Alive and Insane

Sorry, been really slack lately. I’ve spent the whole weekend on the last assignment I have to do for this year – the writing of a Java Compiler… in Java. Got through most of it except I’m stuck on parsing complex (multi operator) expressions. And I’m still stuck after thinking about it all weekend. Anyway, I will chip in a small update for today.

16
Oct 99
Sat

Pay TV

Finally… we get Foxtel on the 28th. Of course, Camden (whoop whoop) doesn’t have any cable laid within 30 ks (which also means no cable modem, even if Telstra’s pricing wasn’t so exorbitant). So we have to get it in by satellite.

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14
Oct 99
Thu

Ack

The database has dodgy stamped all over it, but I’m entirely apathetic right now. Funny… about 15 friends, all with the same assignment due, online all the way through to 2am, then dropped off to 10 at 3am… Now there’s 4 of us and we’re not sleeping anytime soon.

Possessed Computer 2

Chatting to Noddy, and he sent me to this link which is vaguely related to my possessed box – pretty interesting trivia-type stuff. It’s about broadcasting radio signals using the CPU. This seems to have originated from this Slashdot thread. Also from him,

You can also produce different pitched sounds by moving the head of a floppy drive at different speeds. There was a virus for ( it’s name was Gaddafi ) for AmigaOS that would occasionaly play “El Condor Pasa” with the internal 3,5″ floppy ! The coolest virus ever :-)

there your virus idea

Heh thanks for that link. That served to freak me out a little more. The database is still being worked on…

Buses

Little anecdote comes to mind… sitting on the bus on the back seat a couple days ago. Chatting to a friend when I turn my head… there’s this seedy looking guy in the corner drawing these nude pics in a dishevelled scrapbook (I think it was a diary, actually). Bad thing was, he couldn’t draw and the chicks that came out were… <shudder> let’s just say I didn’t make too many glances at his (I’m sure he’d call it) “art”.

Reminds me of Solosier, the 40 year old, and a rather unfortunate typo :)

of course, this chick is like 40, and i would touch her with a 10 ft pole, and she can hardly speak english (yes, i met her), but that is NOT the point, damn it.

… Or was it a typo?

Possessed Computer

I was working away on an assignment last night when my other computer started blurting stuff from the speakers. Strange. There weren’t any applications open. I turned the volume up and I’m hearing radio chatter… and not only that, but police radio chatter. So I shut everything down (the computer is networked to my main computer and accesses the net via proxy) including the stuff in the system tray. Radio chatter continues. I give the three finger salute. The task list reveals a crashed-while-closing Netscape. So I force that to quit. Still chatter. And it wasn’t a file, because it wasn’t looping and it had been going for quite a while. I shut down the proxy server on the main computer, so the other computer wasn’t connected to the Net anymore. Nothing. Then I shut down each task listed app in the Cont-Alt-Del menu one by one. No good. I pulled out Wintop (process viewer, like WinNT’s task manager and Linux’s ‘top’ command) and began shutting down non-system tasks. In there end there wasn’t anything running on the system, and still I was getting noise from cop cars and radios. Freaky shit. I rebooted and it didn’t happen again. I still am totally bewildered… if it was a virus, it’s a weird one… that’s the only possibility I can think of, and not a very possible one at that.

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Life

Two assignments, both last minute jobs. Some accounting essay analysing Southcorp and a BDM (business data management – a full of shit information systems subject) database to do in MS Access. The spec for the BDM isn’t. As in, the specific-ation isn’t specific. It’s the single most ambiguous document (username: INFS1603, password: BDM – both case sensitive) I’ve seen this year. It’s due tomorrow, it’s not finished, and I’m updating this page. Looks like another all-nighter. The State Transit Authority almost decided to pull another fucking strike which would have made things particularly tough for me, since I need the bus to get to uni, and I need to get to uni to hand the dbase in… got an offer for a lift in, but that would involve me getting up at some unholy hour to get to Central on time. But they aren’t striking anymore, thankfully.

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8
Oct 99
Fri

Some Trivia

Well if it wasn’t a sign of the times last night… BITSA held a trivia night last night and we were a table of 7. It didn’t take us long to realise how yuppie we looked with 5 mobiles laid out on the table (these days, the average uni student is a yuppie). Anyway there were about 10 rounds of 10 questions each (mixed in with some bonus rounds like some ridiculous scavenger hunt where you had to dig up a piece of underwear without taking any clothes off – ie, have one in your bag or something). Round 2 came along…

“What does the medical term epistaxis refer to?”
“WTF? We’re not med students… we’re IT students!”
“Hey, Dad’s a doctor… maybe I should call him…” (fiddling with phone idly)
“Yeah! Good idea! Do it!”
“Are you serious???”
“Yeah!”

(moments later)

“Guys, guys… got it… epywhatever is a nose bleed.”

Of course once the first phone call was made, that was just the beginning. We were all pulling out phones calling home for trivia answers :) Luckily the phone calls were all free coutesy of Optus ‘Yes’ time! I think in the end I had dad sitting next to his mobile with an atlas and dictionary beside him. Then we got some crazy ideas about getting someone with an Optus mobile down to the computer labs (with its chunky net connection) for quick Net searching hehe. Maybe next time :)

The final question of the night was a coincidence…

“Last question… finish off this verse by Wordsworth.”
[Big groan from everyone]
“I wandered lonely as a cloud / Tha–“
[Big excited gasp from me] “Shit! I know this! I know this!”
“–floats on high o’er vales and hills / When all I once I saw a crowd…”
[Still excited] “um… um… a host of golden daffodils!”
[From rest of table] “Shhhhhhhh.”

Year 11 I had to do some big ass project on the past 6 centuries of English verse (it was like 15,000 words) and the verbal component was the from-memory recitation of some poem from that era. And tada… that was the very poem I had chosen. But no, I didn’t trust my memory.

“Um dad, is the computer on? It is? Can you quickly go to the D drive… Documents folder… what do you mean there’s no documents folder? … Told you it was there… now Old docs, School work, Year 11… look for something with poetry recitation or Wordsworth. Found it? Cool! Read it out!”

Well it was pretty funny at the time – not sure whether it was cheating or not :) I guess last night was an exception to what’s displayed on my phone normally…

:)

My original idea :)

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30
Sep 99
Thu

New Month

Almost midway through Spring. Temperature starting to drop for you guys in the Northern Hemisphere yet? hah :) Supposed to go paintballing later today. “Real-life Half-life Counterstrike on one hit point and inaccurate guns” it’s been described to me as :) I intend to OD on adrenaline. And I gotta wake up at 7am (bloody hell) for it, so I’m gonna do the unthinkable and go to bed … soon. I’ll be pumped later on, that’s for sure :)

29
Sep 99
Wed

CityRail

I’d like to extend the finger to CityRail for another strike today. I’m stranded at home again.

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25
Sep 99
Sat

SMS

Someone actually sent me an SMS from the MobileAlert site. Thanks Shaun (from CompSoc at UNSW, no less).

23
Sep 99
Thu

::Yawn::

Stranded in Camden for the rest of the day. Damn. Screw this train strike tomorrow. They only had a bus strike last week.

22
Sep 99
Wed

Uni

Haha! That’s four maths tests done with a night-before job! And I actually did well in all of them. Anyway that’s half the session gone… got a week off next week – one I really need.

13
Sep 99
Mon
5
Sep 99
Sun

Industrial Training Placements

They sent them out two days early… Next semester I’m gonna be working at Aspect (my 2nd preference) in North Sydney. Hopefully I can scab some free training off them. Unfortunately they don’t do Cisco certification (damn) but I can perhaps do the +I component of the MCSE, or pick up Novell cert. Maybe even an MCSD? Suggestions? Assuming they let me take up training (I actually should be working…)

4
Sep 99
Sat

Lethargy

Went to a party up near Manly. I missed a whole night’s sleep and my sleep patterns are all screwed. Got a lift back to Town Hall station via the harbour tunnel. I’ve never been through the harbour tunnel until today. Bumped into a friend from primary school who I hadn’t seen for 7 years. Good to catch up with him. 1999 has been the year of coincidences for me. Played countless games of pool. Tested my allergy to alcohol again with a shot of QF and Midori. No good. My stomach couldn’t even handle 60mL of alcohol… Think I’ve got the flu now.

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Adminspotting Shirts

I didn’t know anyone (who I don’t know personally) from UNSW read this page, but stranger things have happened :). Got this mail from the Compsoc treasurer. Those adminspotting t-shirts might drop more in price. Good to hear.

Yaaaay! *ahem*

Thanks for the plug, but due to an official decision we haven’t actually made yet, we’ll probably be dropping the price down to $10. Even if we don’t, you can have one for $10 *grin*.

– Shaun
Compsoc Treasurer

*I* can get one for $10? Hey I’m half considering it heh.

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26
Aug 99
Thu

Computing

Well look at that… the assignment got finally released. WTF? We have to write a simple RISC emulator? I hope that’s not as tough as it sounds…

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25
Aug 99
Wed

Computing

While we’re on the topic of university faculties, the school of computing is pretty disorganised as well. Our first java assignment was meant to come out last Friday. Didn’t happen, should be out Monday the lecturer said. So Tuesday rolls around, and there’s a note on the site that says “available late Tues evening.” Nuh-uh. Today’s Wednesday. I get home, and the note has been revised to “available 9pm Wednesday.” Check back a couple hours later, and what does it now read? “Available Thursday.” Of course, I’m in no rush to receive the assignment, but I get the feeling that the due date isn’t moving…

23
Aug 99
Mon

Industrial Training

Part of my uni course is 18 months of industrial training (scattered throughout the 4 years). The first 6 months start next year. They handed out the preference forms last week – where we list which companies we’d like to go to from the 40 or so sponsors available (big list to choose from… companies like PWC, IBM, Telstra, Com Tech, Oracle, Lotus etc). Funnily enough, no one wants to go to the RTA. I chose Com Tech, Aspect, Advantra and EDS as my top 4 prefs. If I get either the first or second, I’ll be looking for accreditation of sorts – maybe even Cisco certification, but that may be pushing it. Might have to settle for the +I bit to my MCSE, A+ cert or Novell cert. Of course, that’s assuming I get those companies. There are limited spots, and the faculty provides 5 days for us to swap companies with each other. There will be sparks flying… Com Tech and PWC are the more popular ones… anyone with those will be powerbrokers if they decide they don’t want to go to those companies ultimately. I should be told which company I’m to go to in 2 weeks time.

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8
Aug 99
Sun

Train Movies

One of my friends and I developed a euphemism for referring to “scenes” in real life as “movies”. If there’s a fight brewing on the streets, we say, “there’s a free movie going on there” or something like that and hang around to watch :). Whenever I come back on the trains at night there’s almost always a movie to watch. Last Friday night was no different. The train was surprisingly packed out (standing space only) at 11:30pm.

There was a group of semi-drunk people on the middle deck by the door who were being a little rowdy, but it was mainly talk. Security comes along (unlike last time, these guys were big, and spoke proper English) and tells them to chuck out the cans of Jim Beam they’re drinking. One of the drunks turns to the other, grabs his can and goes, “mate you heard what he said, chuck yer can out!” before tossing the can out the door. He’s still holding onto his own can though. He takes a swag from it and said, “Oops. Sorry I’ll chuck this can out at the next stop.”

At the next stop this couple speaking in Spanish wait at the door and before long, the drunks start asking where everyone on the carriage is from. One guy didn’t take very kindly to it saying, “it’s none of your damn business mate.” Security comes around again to find out what the noise is about before leaving again.

We pull up at Riverwood station and the group decides to have a go at a couple of Asians getting off the train. Before I knew what was happening, the previews were over and the movie started. Within the next five minutes, I heard the word “Fuck” more times than I heard in the past year. It wasn’t that every second word said was fuck – it was that every third or fourth word yelled wasn’t fuck. The train doors couldn’t close cos the Asians were blocking it so we were stuck there. The drunks were insulting the Asians while one of the Asians (who must’ve been part of some gang) went utterly ballistic. He was screaming his head off and asking them to step off the train and fight. Someone would’ve been bashed if it weren’t for the security guards who came around and stood there (they didn’t actually do anything). Half the carriage must’ve got up and moved towards the yelling to get a look at what was going on. Eventually the train got moving again and one of the drunks said, “I’m all for one on one mate, y’know? But they’re like three on one…” Security made most of them get off at the next stop.

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29
Jul 99
Thu

Tricks

For the unbelievers (“how can you not roll your tongue?”) here’s a little mail regarding tongue rolling:

hehe, well I suck and can’t really do most anything on the list.  Well, anything of any difficulty anyway.
But what I wanted to share was that I am one of the lucky few who cannot roll their tongues.  I think one in like 50 people are unable to do it.  And when I was little I always just thought I was too stupid. Hehe.  Just thought I would share that with you.
I can, however, flip my tongue upside down.  Well, not with the barbell in it.   But that’s about it.

spoon lady

Tongue pierced? I’ve got a story about that (hope I haven’t told this already)… a friend last year got his tongue pierced. Went to some concert. Someone was crowd surfing and he got kicked right in the face. The tongue piece dislodged and he swallowed it. I was cracking myself up laughing at this point cos I really don’t understand the concept of piercing body parts such as the tongue (that, and him being a Vegan)… Anyway that’s not it… the metal thing costed about $90, so he had to go out and buy a new one (the only other alternative would be to go around sifting through shit, and even after that, would you want that thing in your mouth??) By the time he got around to getting a new piece, the tongue hole had closed up and he had to go through the painful process of getting his tongue pierced again. Hahaha.

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Computing

This semester’s computing lecturer is immediately identifiable as one. He bears a remarkable resemblance to that bearded guy from User Friendly whose name escapes me right now- the techie, and I’m not thinking about Pitr… Shorts, sockless shoes, tatty t-shirt. Better than last session’s comp lecturer though. Thongs and the same shirt and shorts two weeks in a row. We had accounting today too. The accounting lecturer was in a suit. The contrast.

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X-Ray

Now there’s just four holes. This picture of my gob was taken in January this year (surgeon only just gave it back). I was sorta hoping the top teeth could just slide out along the 2nd molars. But that’s not how it works.

See those double red lines? Those are nerves. Bruise them, and part of your face goes numb.

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26
Jul 99
Mon

Back to Uni

Back in university for 2nd semester. No tutes on this week, so I get tomorrow (well, today, now) off. Apparently the academics are striking on Wednesday (yet again) and I’m not complaining. So that could be two days off. I learn Java and some SQL this semester. Might start tinkering with mySQL now and see if I can integrate a dbase with perl.

20
Jul 99
Tue

Train Security

They have security on trains past 7.30pm. They lock off half the train, and herd everyone into “nightsafe” carriages. There’s a pair of guards patrolling the train, but once they travel the length of the train, they stop at the end of the carriage and always have a chat for about 15 minutes before setting off for the other end. Anyway since the journey home was about an hour, I settled down to sleep (yeah, it’s a wonder I haven’t been mugged yet). I awoke to someone shouting his head off at the end of the carriage. Apparently some big, burly yobbo got pissed at the guards having their 15 minute chats and decided to have a go at them. The guards couldn’t speak English (properly), and as a result had the shit bagged out of them. The ruckus went something like this:

“Do your fucking job! I pay my fucking taxes for your job and you go have a chit chat with your mate. Shit! Go take a walk!”
“No–“
“There, that can, pick up that can!”
“That’s not my job.”
“Fuck! Just… just get lost, do your job!”
“No–“
“Nononono NO. that’s all you can say isn’t it? Pieces of shit. Fuck off. What disturbing the other passengers am I? What’re gonna do about it? Chuck me off the train? Go on, I’ll take both of ya on. Wankers.”

This went on for about 10 minutes. Everyone tried to appear they were ignoring what was happening but you knew they were listening in on every word. The guards were incompetent cos they obviously couldn’t handle the guy (and I think they were too scared to chuck him off the train. “Security” was totally unarmed.) That yobbo was a total dick, and finally some passenger got frustrated enough and told him to “shut the fuck up.” He didn’t, but the two “guards” started their patrol again and it quietened down a bit after that. It wasn’t a dangerous situation – the guy wasn’t drunk, just crazy. It was just scary that the cityrail security perhaps isn’t very competent. At least hire people that can speak English. Or arm them with something. Maybe it was just this pair of guards. The yobbo got off at the same station as me and took the opportunity to approach the train driver and taunt him. I couldn’t hear what the driver said, but as the train doors closed and locked, the driver must’ve said something that made the yobbo shout, “How rude! Fuckwit.”

I wanna see the Blair Witch Project. Cable modem, or ADSL would be nice too. No international postage, overpriced CDs, trans-Pacific lag etc. etc. Oh yeah, none of those 800 numbers too :). I’m living on the wrong side of the world for all this :(.

18
Jul 99
Sun

Dazed and Hungry

It wasn’t that bad. I got admitted to hospital at about 6.30 in the morning. The nurse came around to ask the usual questions. You know, the list of questions you either answer “no” or “yes” to. And when she gets halfway down the list, you’re thinking, “There must be a way to vary the yeses and nos. I’m beginning to sound mentally incompetent.” But by then she’s got down to the not-so-usual usual questions. The ones you can’t help smiling uncomfortably at, or vigourously denying. Are you wearing any nail polish? (Don’t laugh, I’ve had a person come in here before who had some on his toenails.) Are you taking drugs of any kind? (Legal or illegal, you know what I mean.) Are you pregnant? (I could just have skipped this one altogether, but I’ll just say it to see your reaction.)

Ben, the guy in the bed next to me apparently was going to have seven teeth extracted. His operation took place hours before mine though, so he was wheeled out of the room, and I was left alone to immerse myself in the world of Midkemia. I had borrowed Magician from the library for this occasion, but even before operation day, I had already completed half of the 650 page book. A result of “I’ll read just the first chapter to get me started.” Just as well Raymond E. Feist had so much story to tell (and I’ve developed quite a liking for his writing). I didn’t get my pre-med injection until about 10 o’clock. The “needle in the arse” was actually quick and painless, but it itched like hell. I was told I would feel drowsy as a result of it, but 30 minutes passed and I was still awake, and reasonably aware. I was thinking about what the anaesthetist had said before (he noted he had read Magician too) – that I wouldn’t dream whilst I was under. What was dreaming? And how did they know that? I didn’t know dreaming required a certain state of consciousness. I guess people in comas don’t dream? Then what about people who claim they saw visions whilst near-death? I opened my eyes again, asked for the time and found it was 11:15. I indignantly acknowledged to myself I had fallen asleep. But if I had woken again, did this mean the injection was wearing off? At this point I tossed off these fears with apathy (and probably, help from the injection). If it happens, it happens.

The nurse came to wheel the bed to the operating theatre. Between lengthy blinks, the fluroscent lights on the ceiling scrolled down my vision, but due to the nurses stopping to chat along the way, at a far more pokier pace than E.R. and those hour-long TV dramas. They asked me questions confirming my identity again, which I answered with my eyes closed. I wondered if I was being rude. Apathy. They put these inflating cuffs on my ankles and right wrist, for aiding circulation. The mobile bed came to a stop next to the operating table and I clambered over on it, dragging the blankets along. I wasn’t sure that I was meant to do that, but they didn’t seem to mind. The anaesthetist materialised to my left, recognised more by his beard than anything else, said something that gave me the impression he was about to stick a drip in me. Apathy again, accompanied by an irritating discomfort in my left arm. I didn’t know if I was meant to, but I fell asleep at that point.

I regained semi-consciousness. Bracing for an explosion of pain that never came, I was left wondering if the operation had actually taken place. Common sense would have told me otherwise, but it was currently as drugged out as me. I bit down cautiously and felt some strange foreign object (later discovered to be cotton wool) down where my wisdoms should have been. At least I knew the operation had happened. It was about 7 o’clock in the evening at this point, and when I finally decided to try and rouse myself from my drowsy state, I realised my tongue was completely numb. And the left side of my face. I put it down to the “long-lasting” local anaesthetic they gave me as a (I must say rather effective) painkiller. Talking was difficult, not to mention how remarkably good a job I did of sounding like I was mentally impaired. I was really disorientated after that, but apart from my head, the rest of my body was in a passable condition. Except that I was constipated. That, and the drugs, made pissing a new experience. It was a stop-start endeavour. Mix in dizziness, and you have a recipe for pissing all over the toilet seat, which, although I managed not to do, left me quite exhausted afterwards.

By the time it was 11 pm, I had arrived back home, and the facial numbness had subsided. On the right hand side. The left side of my face, lip and would you believe, left half of my tongue were numb. Not totally numb. It was sort of like a mild pins and needles sensation. Touch in that area was discomforting. All the talk about nerves being compressed, or even cut, was making me uneasy. It didn’t help to find out (from e-mail received, and more official sources, such as my orthodontist) that bruised nerves may take up to months, or even years to heal. Shit. I wasn’t going to walk around like this for a month.

I began my regiment of penicillin, savacol mouthwash and panadeine forte (nice, strong and sedative – everything you need in an analgesic). Swallowing water was peculiar. The right side of my tongue would feel the coolness of the liquid, whilst the left side felt no temperature at all. My face had started to swell in the meantime, which drew comparisons to me looking like a chipmunk from Dad. I wasn’t amused. The numbness wore off the next day, thankfully, and I was left to the unwanted diet of no-solid food for a few days. I’m still hungry.

Oh yeah, and thanks to all those who sent me mail about the ‘teeth. Funny thing was, a lot of last minute mail I got about the operation told me it wasn’t that bad.

11
Jul 99
Sun

Wisdom Teeth again

Because I’m having them out on Wednesday (meant to be in hospital at 6.30am. Ow.) I’m going to take a break from updates for the week or so it takes me to recover (then I can write all about it). From other people’s “war stories” it’s not an operation that’s pleasant. Maybe I can get Dad to prescribe me some sedatives or something :).

“I was bleeding for eight hours after the operation.”
“I couldn’t control my dribbling. It was really pathetic.”
“Your cheeks bloat up and you look like a gold fish.”
“Yoghurt for a week! Hahah!”
“Brutal.”

Then there’s the possibility of a cut nerve. There’s this nerve that runs through the jaw area, under the root of the tooth. If the surgeon cuts it (a small chance) your jaw goes numb on one side for, I assume, life. Another interesting thing I’ve heard is, if you undergo a local anaesthetic instead of a general one (where you get totally knocked out) the surgeon takes more care instead of hacking away, because you’re awake and aware.

Once more. They hack away the gum, pull out the tooth (all four wisdoms for me) and you’re left with a gaping hole afterwards that you can’t let get infected. I’ll see if I can get my teeth back after the operation. Here’s a picture. Wince with me.

Impacted.

3
Jul 99
Sat

Sleep

Last Thursday I went to a party. I got to sleep at 6am, on Friday. I woke up at 7am, Friday. Can we say “tired?”.

29
Jun 99
Tue

Exams

Are over baby!!! Gotta catch up on my updates and 30 or so pieces of mail waiting. One tip… never start reading a good fiction book the afternoon before an exam. I got bored studying so I decided to pull out Krondor: The Betrayal which my friend gave me last Christmas (but never got around to reading). Mistake. Eight hours and 350 pages later and I had finished it – just in time to go to sleep. Been a long, long time since I’ve read a novel of my own accord, actually.

17
Jun 99
Thu

G’s Jet Lagged without leaving the country

What I meant, G, was that by going to sleep at 5am, and by your readjusted body clock, that you’re “living” in another time zone… I mean, if you flew to one of those places (islands in the Pacific Ocean hehe), your body clock would be perfectly adjusted to it, and you wouldn’t suffer from jet lag at all. Similarly for me if I ended up in India somehow (my body is very much still in Sydney). I know your body is on the East coast of the US, but your mind might as well be a few thousand kilometers to the West :).

Time Zones

By my estimates, G is actually living in Vanuatu, New Caledonia or the Solomon Islands (albeit, one day in the past – GMT +11, or more accurately, “-13” which doesn’t exist). I’m living somewhere in India… like Mumbai (GMT +5.5). Neat worldtime shockwave thing here.

Accounting Exam

Yeah yeah yeah. Maths exam on Tuesday.

16
Jun 99
Wed

Exams

I have my final accounting exam tomorrow. First out of four exams. What am I doing online?

14
Jun 99
Mon

Sleeping Habits

Yesterday – 4.00a, 12.30p
Today – 3.00a, 12.30p

Sauce: Absurdity is a funny thing. Even when we know something is definitely absurd, we try our best to rationalise it. I dropped my harmonica, Albert. Worse

13
Jun 99
Sun

Wallet Junk

My wallet is starting to bulge, but not from money (damn). 21 movie tickets for this year and 14 weekly train tickets.

Sleeping Habits

Slept 4.15am
Woke 1.00pm

Wisdom Teeth

A post on Brain Damage reminded me my wisdom teeth operation is but one month away. Four out at once. Ow.

Ok, now stop laughing.

12
Jun 99
Sat

Stuvac!

Now I can get down to updating this page instead of studying for exams like I’m meant to. I also pronounce Computer Information Systems 1 as the most damn useless piece of shit subject ever contrived. Here’s a short excerpt from the 500 page textbook which is a bible on how to pull incredulous amounts of shit from your ass.

This initial step of defining the problem is surprisingly difficult because people may not reach a consensus about what the problem is. Sometimes the disagreements are subconscious…

Then there’s the five friggin’ pages they spend discussing whether “management is a business process”. Who gives a toss?

2
Jun 99
Wed

I’m Back

It’s all done! The Matrix AI computing assignment, the Matrix CGI assignment, and the maths test on Matrices (yeah yeah – The Matrix… it’s all around us).

I think I made the final Top 20 “shootout” for the Matrix AI competition, and I’ve also completed my MatrixCGI assignment. It’s a crappy, clunky 2 minute-per-move CGI role-playing game without a plot. But it looks nice :). Check out what I spent 20 hours of my shitty weekend programming, right here. Please. Make sure you check out the sliding dhtml moon thing too.

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30
May 99
Sun

I’m Legal :)

29
May 99
Sat

18th

Finally… my 18th b’day is tomorrow! I must’ve got over 15 virtual cards over ICQ. They aren’t quite the same as the real thing, but that should go without saying. Mmm the magic 18 :)

Work First

Still working to get this computing assignment in my Monday night (already written about 1500 lines of code), and I still haven’t started the second part of it. I promise I’ll do some updating next week!

23
May 99
Sun

Work Work Work

Stupid accounting practice set. Anyways the Matrix competition for Computing started (see earlier post). If you want to see my program getting whooped by other people’s programs, this address has the results that are updated with each nightly round (updated realtime). My student number is 2251550 if you want to see how I’m going.

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18
May 99
Tue

As you can see

… I decided not to turn up to uni today :)

VSU Action Day

Hmmm no Computing lecture tomorrow. Apparently the rally against Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU) is “too disruptive” so the uni won’t be holding normal lectures. That leaves me with a maths tutorial run by a crazy Russian woman who can’t speak English, and a 1 hour maths lecture on Integration. Four hours travel to uni for a one hour lecture. Huh. Staying at home tomorrow is looking like a good prospect right now :).

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16
May 99
Sun

Matrix Assignment

That post I made about the Matrix assignment… well they released Part two which involves constructing a CGI version of The Matrix. Basically you can do anything you want with the Maze/Matrix – you have to turn it into a game that can be run via the web. You know what that means… when I’m done in a couple weeks, I’ll be posting the link so you can all play it ;). I think I’ll make it an RPG style game… Now it won’t exactly be an Ultima Ascension, but it’ll be like those shareware text based RPGs harking back to the start of this decade. Anyone got any plot ideas?

14
May 99
Fri

Boredom can sometimes be good…

I only wish I can say I was bored. I have so much work to do. And I thought the last year of high school would be as bad as it would ever get. Hahahaha. I thought wrong. Oh well… six or seven more weeks left in this session (it’s Week 10 now), then a nice one month holiday.

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10
May 99
Mon

Assignment 2, Stage 2

This is scary. As soon as I finish Stage 1 of the computing assignment they release Stage 2. Give us a break! But that’s not the scary bit. They based this assignment on The Matrix (?!). It’s all about having this Maze (called a “Matrix”), and programming AI for the bad guys (the agents) to chase the good guy (the “person”) who has to visit as many rooms of the Matrix as possible. Hehe I have a friend who’s a programming guru and he’s turned up in trenchcoat and sunnies a few days now. We started calling him “Neo” and “The One”. But now since the assignment specs came out today, if he wins the competition part of the assignment, I can justifiably call him that :) hah! If you’re bored, read through the assignment specs and mail me if you have any good strats for evading agents (or chasing “the person”) in a maze (no code, just strategies).

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9
May 99
Sun

Stress Week

Wow it’s been one whole week since I last posted. There’s an explanation for this (as always). If there’s one subject that’s time consuming, it’s computing. Had to finish a computing assignment, and had to study for the computing practical exam. Throw that in with an Algebra test you haven’t studied for, an accounting essay, and ICQ (absolutely bloody useless when you want to get work done ~200 messages in one hour is a lot of damn typing!) and you have a recipe for a busy and frustrating week. Well I got my Maze AI program out, think I got a 10 for the prac exam (sidenote – apparently UNIX crashed on someone while they did their prac exam… I hate to think of what would happen if they made us sit the exam on Windows boxes), did the accounting and guessed through the Vectors test. And I still managed to fit in something for Mum for today :).

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30
Apr 99
Fri

Warm Thing

Dad brought home this sandbag type thing (sort of like a small pillow filled with sand or something). It’s about the size of a telephone, and it’s meant to be a “back warmer”. You stick it in the microwave for two minutes (that’s the weird bit…) and it warms up and stays warm for an hour or so. Good for those long nights at the computer when you get cold feet and hands doing crazy computing assignments like this.

2
Apr 99
Fri

Fuck Murphy and his laws

It so happens that the CD-Writer is faulty. Bad spindle or head alignment or something like that. Back to Yamaha it goes.

Boom

Murphy’s Law at its worst. While trying to install an obstinate CD Writer and SCSI card, my computer’s power supply blew up. I grabbed one from the old computer, but now I’ve got hardware conflicts left right and centre. Seems like there’s not enough IRQs for all those PCI cards in there. Anyway I’m going to be out of action for a while. “Plug and play” my ass.

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23
Mar 99
Tue

Shitting Bricks

It takes me about 1 hour 45 minutes to get to university by car, train and bus (on a good day). That’s just a one way trip, too. Some days I leave uni during peak hour (5-6pm) and by the time the train arrives at Central station, there aren’t any seats left so I have to stand for the whole hour. I got told of a way to beat the crowds by a friend, who also goes to my station (Campbelltown). Although Campbelltown is a suburban station, it’s an interchange for country trains as well (it’s right on the edge). His advice was to catch a country train that went to Goulburn (about 3 hours drive from Campbelltown) – it would travel direct to Campbelltown stopping at only one station on the way (as opposed to 10 or so). Additionally, there’s always seats available, the train is air-conditioned and has a toilet. So, today I tried taking this country train. Oh yeah it was good – nice comfortable seats. I lent back and went to sleep.

I woke up again to see a station fly past the window… “Menangle Park” the sign said. WTF? Where the hell was Menangle Park? I had missed my damn stop by lord knows how far. The train was travelling really fast (faster than it had been through the suburbs) and we were passing farms and fields and shit… Meanwhile my parents were on the way to pick me up from Campbelltown. I hopped off at the next stop, “Menangle”. Damn. It was a two platform station in the middle of nowhere. A few other people got out, but they drove off in cars. I tell you, that station was totally deserted. No cars in the car park, no station attendants, no trains going past. Nothing. Well I always had my mobile phone. One slight problem… zero reception. It wasn’t even registering my phone company. I headed over to the public phone booth… to find that someone had removed the entire phone from the booth. I looked about – I’d have to find a house and ask if someone could let me use their phone, but I looked around and there weren’t any damn houses – just barns! Now I was worrying. It was getting dark and I was starting to freeze. I took out the mobile again, and lo and behold — Reception! Half an hour later I was on the way back home.

Everyone has a story where they’ve missed their train/bus (even plane) stop, and this is mine :).

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19
Mar 99
Fri

Wisdom Teeth

I have impacted wisdom teeth. That is a bad thing. 90% of the human race get impacted wisdom teeth. That makes me feel a bit better. Today we submitted my form confirming that I want the operation – $770 it’s costing! All four wisdoms are being extracted when I go on holidays in about 10-11 weeks from now. Sounds like pain.

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Job Interview

I got one tomorrow for a webmastering position. I submitted the applying e-mail over a month ago. Apparently the delay was because 800 people applied. It’s good because if I get the job, they give me shares and I can work from home, but I don’t know how good the company is because it just started up. Side note: webmastering has been rated as the best job to have (another one of those links seen on multiple sites).

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17
Mar 99
Wed

Bowling

Went bowling today, a group of about 20 of us, and some very bizarre things happened. It started when I bowled a gutter ball (about my 10th one :). It bounced back out (I didn’t misthrow it that badly!). Then another guy playing got himself in a split pins situation, so he decided to bowl two balls down the alley. One ball reached the pins first, and the mechanism that sweeps away pins and sets them, came down before the second ball reached the pins and stopped it. So there I was, about to bowl with this ball stuck in the gutter. I stuffed my throw (again), and my ball headed straight for the stuck ball. Quite unintentionally I hit the stuck ball and it richoched. My ball flew off the alley under the ball return conveyor belt, and the stuck ball ended up in the other gutter. And I failed to knock over any pins.

After that the whole system stuffed up and the pins failed to get reset. So we just bowled our balls down the alley, without there being any pins to bowl at. Our “hit” is recorded as a strike. When the next frame rolled around, the pins finally reset themselves. I think we screwed the system somehow :) Then a friend went on to make five legitamate strikes in a row. Crazy stuff.

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6
Mar 99
Sat

I think it’s meant to be an MCSE course…

A room full of MCSE-to-be adolescents (MCSE? what’s that?). A networked room hooked up to a chunky ISDN line (Hey! this is Australia – free use of 128 Kbps of bandwidth is a dream!). What would you expect? We were meant to be covering the MCSE IIS4 course, but instead everyone ended up covering their desktop with bikini women wallpaper (This site is an… example), dance music blaring in the background whilst nuking computers in another classroom who had “hacked” us earlier. Dropping off anonymous e-mail love letters to the tech support guy down the corridor.

And of course there’s how we burnt up one laser printer toner cartridge in about three hours. I think the printer went through about 700 sheets of paper in those three hours while we ran off copies of exams and crib notes. Then we had the gall to ask for more toner :). Unfortunately when we talked to the tech support guy it was about 5:10pm. He said, “Stuff you, I’m off my shift now. I’m outta here.” (In so many words)

Why didn’t our instructor care? I don’t know, but I can say he seemed to enjoy browsing through a variety of gross sites like Rotten, GoreGallery, anus.com and so on. Did I mention he has two theological degrees in Christianity? Very strange.

We’re cursed, I tell you

The temperature was up in the high 30s today (Yank conversion: around 100 degrees). It was hot as hell with not a cloud in the sky… and the public transport system decided to give us hell. A friend and I were going back home from a BBQ at Coogee beach. Bus to Central Station, Train to Ashfield Station. Should be a 30 minutes trip, tops. Uh huh.

Round and round we go.
You’ll need this map if you want to follow my story and you aren’t a Sydney-sider.

The bus to Central was fine. We wait at Central. The first train to Ashfield that arrives is jam-packed, so we wait for the next train, which might be an express, if we’re lucky. Deciding to give the frist train a miss was a mistake. Twenty minutes later, the second train pulls up. While it wasn’t an express, at least there was room to breathe in the carriage. Some derro (slang for derelict, in case you are unaware) was sitting on the stairs that go to the upper carriage level. He wouldn’t move, so people had to clamber over him to get to the exit, eliciting comments from people such as, “You stupid fucking old fart.” The doors shut, but the train didn’t move. The heat was making everyone lethargic. The silence in the carriage was punctuated by the derro mumbling some weird shit – “How’s your mum? Oh you don’t have a mum or dad,” and “Fuck this. Don’t have one.” I don’t think anyone was in a mood today to be sympathetic or empathetic.

Five minutes later, an announcement comes. The train has broken down, catch it from the other platform. But someone forgot to open the train doors, and we were effectively locked in. People started hammering on the doors. Finally someone forced the door open and jammed it. We got to the platform we were referred to and caught a train to Town Hall. Since the entire line we were travelling on was blocked by the train on Central, we headed for the bus stop. However, it was announced that “due to a fault in a train in Central, trains on the Granville line will leave from Platform 6 instead of 1.” We turned around – they had rerouted the trains! Now some people don’t have any frigging common sense. We headed down the escalator to Platform 6, and the train’s there just about to depart. The problem is, no one had the consideration to keep to the left on the escalator, and although we were in a rush to catch the train that was about to leave, there were thirty people blocking us. Luckily, we managed to claw our way to the train. Except that this train wasn’t going to Central. It was going the other way (further away from Ashfield), and to make matters worse, it was on another line. The train made a lap of the city circle (via Circular Quay – see map) and stopped about 100 metres before Central station. Shit. The broken-down train had well and truly stuffed everything – it hadn’t been moved yet, and until it did, we weren’t going anywhere. So we baked for another interminable period and finally dismounted at Redfern, the last stop before the the lines (train routes) diverged and we ended up somewhere obscure.

At Redfern, we walked to the correct platform. The “next train” board said, “First Stop, Ashfield.” Shit! We snagged an express! Should be home in 5 minutes. Then the conductor popped out of his room, retracted the “First Stop, Ashfield” sign, and replaced it with an “All Stops” sign. Bull. No, not just bull, but bull + shit. The train came, we got on, the doors shut and the train didn’t move. Five minutes later they announced they had made a mistake with the train’s destination. They told the new destination, which sent everyone clambering for the route maps, but fortunately Ashfield was still one of the stops. The train didn’t blow up or get hijacked, which we were half expecting.

The whole journey took over two hours. Funny how everything stuffs up in the worst possible weather conditions.

(Sorry about the grammar, I’m aware I’ve switched from past tense to present tense and back again several times.)

4
Mar 99
Thu

University

Uni has been a major pain in the ass so far. They’ve spent the whole of the first week on administrivia™. I’ve only got four subjects, but there’s too much going on. Registering for labs and tutorials. Submitting forms. Getting schedules and just remembering where the hell I’m meant to go and do. And don’t get me started on the text books. The cost of textbooks for this session (half of the year) comes up to about half a grand. It’s like they’re having a friggin competition to see who can write the biggest book and sell it at the highest price. The maths textbook is 1200 pages and weighs more than me. Then of course, for homework, we have to go on the net to find out what we’re meant to do. I guess they’re too lazy to just photocopy handouts at tutorials for us. Argh… as a friend said, “I’m gonna kill someone soon.”

28
Feb 99
Sun

University

Today would be the first day of uni… except that the academic staff decided to strike on the first two days. O-week was an interesting experience. It wasn’t a truckload of fun, but I guess it was worth going there for a couple days. The atmosphere is definitely more lax than school, which is good and bad, but its just another thing to get used to. I have to go in tomorrow for one damn hour because the School of Accounting decided not to strike.

23
Feb 99
Tue

Orientation Week

“O-Week” for my University started this week. I’ll be going Thursday and Friday, and since I’ll be staying overnight at a friend’s, there will be no updates in that time. Along the same lines, the course I’m doing (BIT) sort of featured in this article in the Australian newspaper. Good to know IT grads are in demand :).

16
Feb 99
Tue

Today, Column 8 in the SMH

Doctors get all sorts of things when drug company representatives advertise their medical wares to them. Pens are the most common of freebies, which is why you see people like me (children of doctors) going around with pencil cases full of novelly shaped pens labelled with cryptic words like “Cardizem CD”, “Erythromycin” and “Fragmin.” And, of course, they’re also labelled with not so cryptic words such as “Panadol” and “Viagra.” Yes I’m proud to say I have a Viagra pen, courtesy of the Pfizer drug company. No, it’s not shaped phallically or in a way ol’ Sigmund F. would comment on. Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. A few days ago we got, not the ubiquitous drug company pen, but three juggling balls – each marked with the words “Atrovent (ipratropium bromide).” Using these I’ve taught myself how to juggle fairly well in three days. I’m not dropping the balls on the floor as often now, but a couple days ago I grew accustomed to the regular thumping noise caused by my uncoordination. *thump* “Damn!” *thump* “Shit!” *thump* “Ah stuff it. I give up.” Ultimately I stuck with it and now I can juggle three balls reasonably well. I can also do two balls with one hand (uh… Sigmund would have something to say about that last sentence).

Learn to juggle. All you need are balls and plenty of time. It’s one of those things you only need to learn once.

14
Feb 99
Sun

Chinese New Year Tomorrow!

Got a Chinese New Year dinner tomorrow at a relative’s. That means two things. Half-Life (network of two overclocked Celerons in that house), and more importantly, Red Packets! What are Red Packets? Well according to Chinese tradition, people hand around little red envelopes filled with money. And, with a little luck, you get many of them. Don’t you wish you were Asian now? ;)

3
Feb 99
Wed

MCSE Course

Passed my NT Workstation 4 and NT Server 4 Exams today. 2 down, 4 to go.

28
Jan 99
Thu

University

I enrol today for university at 2pm. Also, my first MCSE exam is next Thursday.

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19
Jan 99
Tue

Alive

Very much alive. It’s just that over the past few days I’ve successfully constructed by new computer – the hardware side of it anyway. It’s currently sitting there with no operating system because I’m trying to work out how to get a dual boot system working. You can be assured I’ll be writing again once I get this damned thing up and running.

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13
Jan 99
Wed

New Computer – Part II

Going shopping for separate parts of the new computer tomorrow. I’m going to be building it from base components with my cousin and it seems we’ve settled on a 300a overclocked to 450. Apparently they run as fast, or faster (in some specific cases) than a P2-450, which really rocks, cos the Celeron is a whole grand less expensive. I’ll post the complete specs (so I can boast about how kickass the new computer is :) once they are finalised.

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Sorry

Wow. Two months of pure bludging, then you get hit with a 9 to 5 workday with over 3 hours of travelling to boot. Makes me realise how long I’ve been out of it. The reason for the lack of updates is because I’ve started attending the MCSE course in North Sydney. Three days of the course and 500 pages of text later, I’m buggered :).

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3
Jan 99
Sun

Sunday, January 31, 1999

Got on national tv today (3 channels) for all of two seconds :). They had some media conference for 99 people who got above 90 for all of their subjects today. I got to go, but it was almost awful somehow. You feel really ordinary in a crowd like that… people have been saying to me jokingly for the past few days, “You’re too smart for me to talk to, we’re not worthy” and it was my turn to think that today :) Some Sydney Grammar guy (freak +++) came first in the state for 4 Unit Maths and 3 Unit English (don’t be stupid, of course he got 100.00uai). That’s just ridiculous :). Another thing… everyone from Sydney Grammar seems to talk funny – sort of a pompous tone of voice. Bit boring today though – didn’t have anyone to talk to ‘cept one Grammar guy and a girl from Strathfield high(?) but the conversation somehow led on to religion. Huh. Well back into the ordinary world now, and I like it that way hehe.

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1
Jan 99
Fri

Feelings

I can’t sleep. It’s a mixture of jubilation from the results, and the fact that I’ve been going to bed at 3-4am for most of the past fortnight. So what of this enigmatic UAI? As I’ve said time and time again over the past year, the UAI is one of the most important figures in a New South Welshman high school student’s life. Yet, I realise that six months into university, it will fade into something of little to no consequence. Perhaps it may fill up one line in the resume, but that is perhaps it. It is a passport to open up the chances for you to take up your desired career path – no UAI, no uni, basically. Nonetheless, I like to enjoy the moment while it lasts, however fleeting it may be. Everyone who’s worked their ass off and achieved their goals deserves this.

WTF is it with UAC/Board of Studies

You’re probably wondering what the hell is happening with the HSC results. This is the situation as I understand it. Please note there are TWO parts to the HSC results:

1. The UAI (just that single number), which is handled by UAC. This can only be accessed through the UAC PHONE line : 1900 957 500. Available from January 3, 7AM.
2. The HSC Results, which is handled by the Board of Studies. This includes your SUBJECT marks ONLY (course, assessment and exam marks). This can be accessed through the Board’s PHONE or the Net at the address listed on the Board’s page. Available from January 2, 6AM.

Late Friday afternoon the UAC phoneline opened two days prematurely. This made the UAIs available through UAC, but NOT the Board’s HSC Results (net and phone access). The UAI line remained opened until a little while after 11pm January 1. Why this happened is unknown, but I guess UAC stuffed up. Until then, looks like the UAIs will have to wait until January 3. HSC Results should be out in a few hours from time of writing. Another weird occurrance is that if you ring up the Board’s phone line, the recorded messages say it will open at 5AM and not 6AM.

HSC Results

(UAI) 99.95

Damn shit fuck shit damn! Missed by 0.05 :) haha No I’m not serious about that last comment.
UAIs got released almost 2 days prematurely – I have no idea why, but that’s my UAI. Oh yeah, I’m pissing myself with happiness :D.

Head swell? If you take it that way then yeah I guess. But we’ve all earned it haven’t we? Locked in a room trudging through notes and other shit. For a whole year. Btw, if you’re here, you’re either one of the few regulars who visit this page, or you asked my how I went. I’m making it policy not to volunteer my UAI. I will not unless someone asks :).

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30
Dec 98
Wed

New Year’s Eve

Here we say farewell to 1998 and welcome in 1999. No doubt we will all spend the first month (or more) trying to remember to write “99” as the date and not “98”. It’s gonna be even worse in 2000, after writing “9” as the first digit of the year for a decade, we’ll have to change to “0”. But that’s another 365 days away.

As a sidenote – my thoughts on the Millenium Bug? I don’t have any. You simply cannot ask a lay-person to give an opinion of Y2K. If there are major problems when the millenium turns, they will be with major systems – mainframes and proprietary (spelling?) operating systems. I mean, unless you have a vague idea of what airport control computers are running on (that’s just an example) you’re not going to have any clue as to how the change in year will affect airports and airplanes. You have to be in some way connected with the IT industry to even have an informed guess as to what happens. Other than that, as far as O/Ses go for the home user (you and me), Windows 98 is it. While Win98 isn’t 100% compliant (don’t worry – MS released a patch to solve it, but even without the patch Win98 won’t die when it hits 1/1/00), anything that fails on a house level will be a minor annoyance. It’s the major infrastructure and big company networks that have the potential to cause widespread problems, and guess what? I don’t know jack about them. Do you know how the traffic light system works?

When 1999 does roll around, I promise some updates of substance. Along with that, I’ll post my HSC results on the page. Everyone will almost certainly be messaging around on ICQ asking for everyone else’s results, so instead of re-typing out marks for 5 subjects, I’ll just forward on the address of this page :).

Until then, here’s a line you’ve probably been hearing all through the past week: I’ll see you next year!

23
Dec 98
Wed

Ten Days…

Only 10 days until the HSC results are released. I wonder how many will be waking up at 6AM just to check their results. While the phones will be jammed, the Net won’t (hopefully the traffic won’t crash the server hehe). I’ve been going to bed at ridiculous hours lately (I’m a late, late, night person), so it’s unlikely that I could get up at 6AM, so what I’m probably going to do is not go to sleep at all :). My ICQ online list is going to be burgeoning when the day rolls around – half of of everyone has taken off on holidays or overseas, but between Christmas and New Year’s day, there’s gonna be an influx of people returning to grab their results.

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16
Dec 98
Wed

Weather

After three days of temperature nudging 40 degrees, it started pissing down a couple days ago. It even started hailing, and of course, we had a momentary blackout… while my computer was on. No thunder/lightning, otherwise I would have shutdown straight away. Paranoia maybe, but I’ve heard of consoles being blown up by lightning-induced electrical surges, and people leaving modems on during thunderstorms, only to return to a smoking box.

14
Dec 98
Mon

Inferno is happy

After going through the torturous process of an interview, I got an offer of a uni scholarship! It’s not so much the scholarship I’m happy about, it’s the money they’re giving me :) and the fact that I can do a course that I actually *want* to do at a university I want to go to! It’s for business information technology at this place, by the way.

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10
Dec 98
Thu

Weather

It hit about 37 degrees today. Summer’s coming… We’ve got this thermometer that keeps track of maximum and minimum temperatures outside, and for a few years now the max temp has been 45 degrees. I wonder if that will get broken this year.

9
Dec 98
Wed

A New Computer – I

The search for a new computer has begun. My P-133 “classic” is falling down around me. Pentium Classics are out of production. I’m probably looking at getting one in January – hopefully prices will drop a bit post-Christmas. It’s gonna be a kick-ass system ;).

Strange, slightly repulsive stray thought

Does anyone else notice a large buildup of phlegm in the throat/mouth after drinking a cup of orange juice?

5
Dec 98
Sat

Alcohol

Went to a party yesterday (well… day before yesterday, actually), and once again confirmed that I can’t drink wine – red or white. I don’t like the taste, but it’s more than that… any more than a couple mouthfuls and I start to feel nauseous. It’s not the alcohol, either, because I don’t get the same reaction from beer. Beer doesn’t taste fantastic either… Tried some vodka (Glen brought along some Stoli) – potent, but good, mixed :). Didn’t have much, but I turned a bright red and got a headache. However, I still haven’t been drunk yet, which I guess is an accomplishment, given the opportunities I’ve had lately.

Formal Pics

Pics of me and some friends at our grade’s formal are up somewhere on the net. But where? :) I’m not telling… which reminds me – I have a swag of scanning to do for a few pages I have to write.

2
Dec 98
Wed

Christmas Month

Been out for this week. Speech night, Uni Open Day, Formal Night (fun, but ultimately toxic, with all the cigarette smoke in the air and shattered glass on the floor :), and an interview tomorrow for a uni course (which for some reason I don’t think I’ll get). Oh.. yeah and Christmas is just round the corner. Cash gifts please :) j/k.

26
Nov 98
Thu

Bureaucracy

For the last 2 to 3 weeks I’ve been working on a redesign of the State’s National Party Page. The National Party is the 3rd largest political party in the nation and currently is in government as one half of the coalition (that’s for all those non-Aussies out there). Anyway, I’m beginning to realise that the hard part probably is not designing the page, but attempting to get it viewed, approved, and uploaded to the “official location”. Here is the new site (at my web space), here is the current site.

It doesn’t help when the whole National Party network runs on a bunch of 486s (“we’re getting a new system this Christmas! Thank God for that! Oops… sorry.” one woman told me) running Netscape 2 (and you wonder why they get Javascript errors – I even catered for the soon-to-be obsolete Netscape 3, and they still undercut me). To make matters worse, the person in charge of managing the web site is on holidays… at the other side of the country (in Perth). So I had my first taste of bureaucracy – being referred to all these different phone numbers of computer illiterate people to semi-illiterate people. It also causes anxiety when you’re fresh out of school and talking to politicians (and those involved in politics). I don’t think I have had a phone conversation with anyone as important, even though I’ve “met” all these really important people through Economics at school (you won’t know what I’m talking about if you don’t go to Trinity, but feel free to ask). Finally I agreed to upload the page to their site. I think they are going to try and change their password, and once I have uploaded the files, they will change the password back. We’ll see what happens. No I’m not accepting and suggestions to put “questionable unapproved material” their site. I’ll keep you informed, of course :).

Link

This page is a cack. It’s a listing of pranks that have been pulled off in the past.

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25
Nov 98
Wed

HSC Results Online URL

This site is not online yet. However, when it does come online, everyone who sat the HSC (which finished about 7 hours ago) will be able to grab their UAI starting from 6am, January 2. http://www.hsc.aust.com. Sourced from the Board of Studies website, so this is 100% reliable.

24
Nov 98
Tue

Wrong Numbers

Okay, while we’re on the topic of wrong phone numbers (see here), I was reminded of this. Actually, I’m not sure if I wrote about this before, but screw that, I’ll tell it again.

I was speaking to my cousin on the phone when the call waiting beep starts to sound. The regulatory “who’s side is that call waiting on?” question was asked, and then that music came on. A little while later, my cousin comes back with a story, “Well I got rang up by someone looking for a Sarah,” noting that Sarah is the name of his girlfriend, “so I told them she was at the hospital catching babies,” noting that this means she’s a med student at uni, and was delivering babies, “to which they replied, ‘What??’. So I said to her, ‘Who is this?’ because it was a little weird that they should be calling my house, instead of her’s. The reply was, ‘This is her sister’. Sarah doesn’t have a sister, at least not one that I know of, heh. Wrong number. Different Sarah.” So he sent her on her way.

That’s not all, though. About a week later, I gave a call to my cousin, and I got greeted by an answering machine: “Hi, this is Sarah, leave you name, number and message after the beep.” I rerang and got my cousin. I didn’t know he had an answering machine, and why would Sarah’s voice be on it? “Do you have an answering machine?” “No.” “Ah. I must’ve got a wrong number.

Answering machines… the worst thing to hear when you’ve only got a payphone and 40 cents left to make a call. Even worse when, as with that same cousin above, you buy a block of time (30 minutes I think) for a single overseas call, and end up having a 60 second conversation with an answering machine.

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18
Nov 98
Wed

Tomorrow

No updates for tomorrow – going to be out for the next couple days. Got an interview at UTS (a university), so I’m feeling pretty nervous right now. It also seems that no one knows the complete meaning of “black tie” (as in dress or attire). I kept getting half-replies, unsure replies and differing replies. What does the term mean exactly??

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17
Nov 98
Tue

FREEEEEDOM!!! Well I’m back with this big-ass update on what’s happened over the past month or so. It hasn’t been awfully exciting, but still it’s been, probably, one of the most important periods in my life (and for everyone else doing the damn HSC). Anyway, I’ll divide up this update into sections and if one starts to bore you, skip to the next.

The Higher School Ceritificate (HSC)
If you’re not from NSW, Australia, you just won’t understand how big a set of examinations this is. For most, this is the be all and end all of future career paths (despite what those feel-good people who say “you can still get where you want to get in life without getting a university degree” – yeah you can but honestly, how much harder is it gonna be?). It’s basically the culmination of 2 years of work (or 13 years of work for Maths and English) condensed into a set of exams that run for a month. Then, making it even worse, your performance is then turned into a single number (from 0.00 to 100.00 in 0.05 increments), which determines what university courses you’re eligible for. Apparently 65,667 people are taking the HSC this year, and that single number is your ranking – it measures the percentage of people you beat in the State.

Anyway, no doubt you’ll realise this was a particularly stressful time. I’m sure you’ve heard about the urban myth of the girl who sat a paper and realised she was stuffed, so she stuck two pencils, sharp end first, up her nostrils and slammed her head down on the desk (sorry for that gory image there, but we were joking about it before the exams just to try to relax – “Damnit girl! You got all this blood over my exam paper!”). When it all finished for me, midway through last week, the high I experienced when I came out of the Chemistry exam was … not drug induced :) Now here’s what I have to say about each exam.

2 Unit General English (Paper 1 – Reading/Writing/Topic Area)
“Anything that resembles the scrotum of the Jolly Green Giant is not meant for the dinner table.”

This is the famous “choko” paper. After the day this exam was held, the Sydney Morning Herald put on the front page “HSC Furore Over the Humble Choko”. What happened was that the comprehension section of this paper was a passage about a choko. However, it turns out that no one knows what a choko is and there were quite a few complaints that were lodged about people of “ethnic origin” (like me) not being exposed to food such as the choko, and thus how they were at a disadvantage. One guy even was reported to have come out of the exam saying “I still don’t know what a choko is.” This is total and utter pathetic bullshit. Here are a few quotations from the passage, and you tell me if you can figure out what a choko is :

“Under the alias of some rather exotic names, the common choko is rising to culinary heights.”
“‘They’re for dinner … I’m doing them with a bechamel sauce.” [bechamel defined in footnote]
“[The choko] is the dullard and the wimp of the vegetable world.”
“An irregularly-ridged, pear-shaped squash … growing on a trailing vine…”

Now they were just four references to what a choko is – there were tons more, and people are trying to say they don’t know what a choko was and therefore can’t answer the passage? Come on! Perhaps that’s why they call it “comprehension”. The rest of the paper was not fantastic, but okay – the writing task was a bit dodgy, however, because it constricted you to writing a letter. The Crossing Boundaries topic area question was a bit limiting, though.

2 Unit General English (Paper 2 – Drama, Poetry, Novel)
“What is the point of poetry?”

Nothing really exciting about this paper. Your ordinary English paper, but the poetry question (above) was quite an open ended one – initially hard for me to plan – but ultimately not a bad one. The novel (Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender – yeah I’m meant to underline titles, but screw that) and the Drama (Diving for Pearls) were pretty standard questions. I didn’t write brilliant essays, but I hope I went well, still.

2 Unit Economics
Quite a tough paper, actually. A friend of mine got a quote in the paper about it – something about the paper being like South Park, and how it required “analytical interpretation” (that is, thought :). Well, the whole state found it hard, so that’s a good thing.

4 Unit Maths
To copy a 4 Unit maths question onto an html page without scanning a picture of the question would be madness, so I won’t bother.

This was the paper of the hardest subject available in the whole HSC, and I had to sit it. Strangely, this year’s paper was, well I won’t say easy, but comparatively easy with regards to past years. So I felt quite good coming out of the exam (been stuffing up maths all year). It wasn’t as traumatic as it could have been. However, it still holds that an average person doing 2 unit maths could not score more than 10 / 120 in this paper :).

3 Unit Economics
Slightly harder than past years, but else, was ok. I neglected one part of a question, so I hope I don’t get penalised too much for it. Damn, eh? It was only a 1.5 hour paper where we had to write two essays.

3 Unit Maths
This paper, apparently wasn’t too tough. However, on this exam and on the day I took it… I just died. Nothing was working out for me and the whole thing turned out to be disastrous for me. But, as the saying that is normally reserved for 4-Unit maths exams goes, “I don’t need luck… I just need scaling!” I hope my 4-Unit will help my overall maths mark.

2 Unit Physics
“It is possible for someone on the ground to see lightning but not hear thunder.”

Stock-standard, but interesting paper. The quotation above is from a question in which they lead you to show how that is true (it’s got to do with refraction of sound), so I guess I learnt something new that day :). I felt I went quite well in it, which was a relief after the big maths stuffup.

2 Unit Chemistry
“Define the term fuel.”

Chemistry was my best subject, and it was quite amusing that just before I went into the exam I asked a few friends “What is a fuel?” Lo and behold, the question appeared! In another coincidence, we have an elderly Chem teacher from Egypt who was telling us about childhood experiences. He told us about how when he was a child, these Egyptian camel drivers (or something) used these special lamps. Inside the lamp case was a rock, and they used to drip water onto the rock, and it produced some sort of gas which could be lit to give a light source. Later, he found out that it was Calcium Carbide they were dripping water on, and it reacted with water to give ethyne gas which could be lit. This question then appeared in the paper :

Ethyne lamps were once used by cavers. The lamps worked by dripping water onto a supply of calcium carbide (CaC2), thereby generating a constant supply of ethyne gas. Light was obtained by igniting the ethyne gas.

I couldn’t believe that when I saw it :). It didn’t help that I knew the story beforehand, but it was a coincidence, nonetheless.

So, that was my HSC. Exciting, stressful and downright torturous. Results come out January 2, but I’ll worry about them later :).

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22
Oct 98
Thu

Excuse me while I pop back out of existence

I could say that I’ve been snowed under with work (which would be correct), but there are some of you who have seen me on the net, so all I can say about this journal is that I’ve been really really lazy. However, I can guarantee you no more updates until my last HSC exam, November 11. Expect to hear from me within days  of that date (if I haven’t gotten blind drunk and walked into the path of a truck). I’ve got a stack of quotes to put up too, so you have something to “look forward to”. Despite my prodigious use of the net, I’ve been fluctuating between 6 to 11 hours of study a day, which is still not enough. Anyway wish me luck. Exams start next Monday. BTW, check out sonic’s new layout at his new site address. Off I step into oblivion again.

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28
Sep 98
Mon

Comms Blackout

As the HSC rolls closer, there will be no further journal entries – unless something very important happens.

In Review : The Final Week of School for me (ever)

• Sometime after Sept 14
11 Boys were suspended from school for streaking in a g-string across the grounds of other girl schools. They took off at Lunch. In “retaliation”, only days after, some girls from MLC (or some similar school) jumped in a few cars and drove up and down the street at the back entrance of the school – they were horning repeatedly with half-naked chicks leaning out of windows and out of the occassional sunroof. The Head Master came out afterwards asking, “Did anyone get the plates?” Back of course – who the hell would be looking at license plates when there are better things to look at? :)

• Wednesday (Sept 23)
We had a “farewell lesson” for our Maths teacher today. For those who don’t know, our teacher is the kind of teacher who wouldn’t know what a detention is. If you videotaped a single lesson he conducted, the stuff on that tape would get him fired (smoker drinker gamble with a massive beard – see the link under the “sponsored by” section in the side bar on the left). Anyway the gifts we decided to get him were… 2 packs of cigarettes (never been done before, ever, in this school :), bottle of wine, and a quit smoking pack with nicotine patch and tape. I’ve got photos of the event, and when I get heaps of time (ie after the HSC. I’ll devote one page to the occassion). That lesson was hillarious and will definitely remain in my memory for decades to come!

• Thursday (Sept 24)
This was the second last day of school for me, and the formal day of school for all us Year 12 students. Today was the day everyone brought in their shirts to be signed, and also to get their Year 12 diaries signed (little books people write comments in – either wishing good luck for the future, or hurling bags-outs culminated from 6 years of school life). This day in school is traditionally termed as “muck-up day” (self-explanatory I hope). Now, in what may have been one of the worst decisions made by the school, they sent us home, without prior notice or warning, at recess (about 11am, or two hours into the day) – probably in an effort to thwart any muck-up attempts. Bad mistake. Many people were angry because they still had some shirts to get signed, and many had absolutely nothing to do (some went to the pub tho), so what did happen in the end?

Basically, you had hordes of students from our school roving all over Sydney, targetting other students’ houses, and other schools with eggs, water bombs and flour. Students in cars drove all around Sydney from Ashfield to Marrickville to Five Dock etc. PLC was apparently assaulted pretty badly – I heard that there were guys dumping flour in girls’ hair in front of parents and chucking eggs out car windows in “drive-by eggings”.

I was in on some of this too (only water bombs though, and only against people I know – eggs are too dangerous/messy and I didn’t want to get busted). After we were sent home, I went to a friend’s place (I live an hour away from school, remember – so I wasn’t going back that early). From there we took a car armed with water bombs to another friend’s place which we heard was “under seige” by a group of other guys in our grade. Anyway we drove into the street. No one there. So we coasted slowly down the road until we saw a couple guys with bombs in their hands. We were about to offload our bombs on them when suddenly, about 20 guys appeared out of nowhere – all with bombs. We sped off, of course, with only a couple bombs impacting. Making a trip around the block, two of us jumped out of the car with a bucket of bombs (“who wants to be a hero?”) as we made another pass. This time it was much worse – we saw the mob, decided not to chuck any bombs, wound up the windows and locked the doors, an jumped on the accelerator. I swear it sounded like cannons going off as the bombs smacked into the car – you couldn’t see out of the windows because of all the water. Anyway it turned out the attack had bloody well broken the windscreen wiper. After picking it up we turned around and slowed down to speak with “the mob” to see what they were planning to do afterwards (only one more bomb was chucked, and that was at the two guys who got down from the car earlier, and who were making their way back into the car).

Here’s another tale from a friend as heard over ICQ : “yeah, my car got attacked as well
sid stopped in front of us so we winded the windows down yelling “fuck u, dickhead, asshole etc then out of nowhere fuad blocked the road with his car….. then all 5 of them came out of the car with w bombs, u can imagine how desperate we were winding up the windows!!! it’s like one of those mafia thing u see on the telly
” He was using powered windows too… “yeah, but u know it’s fast with only one [window], but all four at the same time it slows down a bit. one bomb got into my car BTW“.

There are many other various stories and experiences – but in our draconian school, they could potentially get people busted, so I won’t tell them here.

• Friday (Sept 23)
An informal day, because, according to tradition, Year 12 got sent to the beach. However, today was horrible… overcast, cool, windy and rainy. The Head Master said before we left said, “The forecast says it’ll clear up by the time you reach there.” So 1 and a half hours later we reach the beach, get out of the buses and it’s still overcast windy and raining. After about 15 minutes of shivering under some shelter (I’ve got a photo of a group of about 50 of us huddling under this small covered area), we head back into the bus. Someone tried to ring for pizza, but we were so far out of Sydney that there was no mobile phone network available there. About 1 hour after that, we are on our way back to school. That was about it for the trip – except that we dialed Pizza Hut again, only to find they didn’t deliver to moving vehicles :) “Fine! We’ll try Pizza Haven instead!” was the hangup line… That’s about it for the interesting, memorable stuff. Certainly one of the most interesting and entertaining weeks I’ll have in my whole life.

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I’m BACK!

I regained the use of my computer last week (new hard drive), but I haven’t had the opportunity to update this journal because last week was the final week of school I’ll ever have in my life, and the prelude up to the mother of all Australian exams – the HSC. In lieu of regular updates, I’m recounting the events of the past week.

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14
Sep 98
Mon

She’s Breakin’ Up, Captain!

It’s finally happened! My computer has decided to die on me. Yesterday, after a year of many components of the computer stuffing up, the hard disk decided to take a dive, and there are bad sectors written all across the hard disk – including the registry. Right now I can’t access windows – I’ve lost most of my data and yes I’m not very happy about it (that’s an understatement). I’ll need a new hard disk, but that’s gonna take some time to get. Well, a couple more months and I should have a brand new system, fortunately.

Anyway, the implications for this page are that I won’t be able to update it until I can do something about my stuffed hard drive. Until then, go and visit Digital Discourse to check out some other fine journals (and of course, you’ll hear from Digital Discourse’s news page when I get back online, as well).

I really need a new system. The whole thing is crashing down around me:
•The CD-Rom drive is stuffed – the tracking mechanism is misaligned and sometimes it can’t even recognise there’s a CD in the drive.
•The crappy el cheapo speakers are stuffed – one of them cuts out when you turn the volume too high.
•There was that time when I spilt orange juice on my keyboard (even though I got it fixed, the zero on the numpad still doesn’t work).
•The old laser printer needs lubrication big time (it squeaks and whines really loudly when paper goes through it).
•The graphics card blew a while ago, and we had to get it fixed.
•The power supply blew a fuse a while ago, and again, we had to send it in for repairs.
•Now the hard disk has crashed.
•I’m really looking forward to a new system right about now :).

Okay that’s enough whining and feeling sorry for myself :). No more updates until I can get this whole thing fixed. That bites.

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8
Sep 98
Tue

School Story

You will never meet a more serious person (not strict, but serious) than our physics teacher. Anyway, one day he was away from class and there was this message on the whiteboard saying “Would a prefect or monitor please mark the role?” Now the way absenteeism works in the school is that one person goes around the classes picking up forms which have the names of people missing from class. Then the school sends out forms during morning assembly asking absent people to go to the office to “explain their absense from class”, and if you can’t, you get a detention. The forms are sent to the House Captains (the school is divided into 16 houses) in the morning to distribute to members of the house. Anyway, one smart-arse goes and marks down our teacher as being absent. This morning, one of the house captains (a friend who just happened to be in the same physics class ;) got a slip of paper with our physics teacher’s name on it. None of us could believe it! Hahahahaha…it appears the school has no idea about checking to see if the name is valid or not, and that all we have to do now is hide the slip and wait for the detention to come around :).

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7
Sep 98
Mon

Almost there…

Work on that Something is almost done. I should be able to say something about it soon. On a tangent, (because nothing else happened today) school reports are going to be sent out Friday apparently…

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5
Sep 98
Sat

HSC Countdown

We’ve broken the 50-day mark on the way to The Exams… it’s getting scaringly close now. Pretty soon I’ll be virtually locked away in my room studying, so there’ll be a “comms blackout” for about a month while I do the exams :(. But after that… well… life’ll get about 100 times better :). Three weeks left of high school for me – the last three weeks ever. I suppose that’s a good thing and a bad thing. Ah well… life goes on.

Uni of New South Wales Open Day

Went to a uni open day today. The lectures weren’t that bad – pretty informative I guess. Pretty miserable day because it was raining all day – totally overcast. Funny thing was that at the main quadrangle, they had this 100m track in the shape of a figure 8, and get this… they were holding a solar car competition at the time. It was pretty much a joke – 90% of the cars stopped after the first bend because there wasn’t enough sunlight, and the water on the track was stuffing the cars’ motion. They had to get some guy in to use a broom to sweep the water off the track. The worst of the cars stopped after 5 metres. There was also some announcer… “And race 14 has started… [5 seconds later] and race 14 has finished!” Well that was about as exciting as it got for the whole day.

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3
Sep 98
Thu

Arrrgh!

I’ve been snowed under with all sorts of things to do, and things I’d like to do (but can’t get around to it), in the past two days:

I’ve had/have to…
• Study for the HSC (der)
• to write a web page for a friend (whose friend’s father died)
• to write a whole web site
• I have to fill out about 4 forms for various things
• arrange seating for the table I’m going to be sitting at for the valedictory dinner (thank goodness Nick got my e-mail when he did) – the form which has to be in next Monday
• co-write a report for the school’s end of year magazine
• to help a friend fix up his computer which had various critical systems files corrupted due to bad sectors on his hard drive (he’s made 5 phone calls to me today)
• to help another friend fix up his computer which got a virus which wiped his win.com and stuffed up his a:\ drive in some mysterious way (he’s giving me a call tomorrow)
• do two past HSC maths papers
• write an English essay
• get a web forum online
• go to a uni open day on Saturday
• think about what I’ve forgotten to do, that I have to do…

What I’d like to do:

• update this page (which I’m now doing :)
• put some hours into something in the vein of “Something Big” and “Something Swank” … I term it “Something I hope will make us famous” :)
• other stuff that I can’t do because of the bloody huge list above

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1
Sep 98
Tue

Keanu Reeves???

Hahaha a really funny thing happened to a friend (who will probably kill me if I say his name :) last weekend. He went off to a Uni open day and on the way back he dropped into a store which sells posters. You know how the posters on the rack are numbered, so you can go up to the counter, say the number (instead of having to describe the poster you want) and the store will pick out a fresh copy of the poster (already rolled up in a tube) with the corresponding number? Well my friend bought a poster of Starship Troopers – poster number 58. He pays his ten bucks, gets a poster numbered 58 and goes home. Anyway, it’s about midnight and he’s about to go to bed and he decides to take the poster out. And lo and behold, it’s a half-naked picture of Keanu Reeves and not of Starship Troopers. I would’ve paid money to see the look on his face when he saw that. Now, as you know, Keanu Reeves is gay, so my friend starts panicking (I mean, what would the rest of his family think, if he went out and bought a picture of Keanu Reeves topless? This is a male friend, btw :). So now it’s hidden somewhere in his room, and he’s praying his brother doesn’t find it (cos he’ll be crucified) hahahahaha… We’ve been bagging him out about it all day (“Bought the poster so you could use it late at night, eh? ‘Ohh Keanu… uh uh uh’ We know the truth…” etc.) Cheap shots, but damn hilarious. He’s absolutely furious about it and he’s going back to the store this Saturday to trade the poster. Hahahaha.

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29
Aug 98
Sat

Water

Well, it appears that Camden isn’t affected by the water bugs… we’re too far from Sydney :). So now I don’t have to boil a big pot of water, take it up to the bathroom, and use that to brush my teeth. Meanwhile, all the city-dwellers have to continue boiling that water.

28
Aug 98
Fri

Trial Results

Well after the exams come the results… I guess I did okay – could have done better (as usual). I just dunno what the teachers are going to do with all that weighting and scaling crap.

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25
Aug 98
Tue

Back to School

Well school resumes on Thursday as 60,000 people gear up for the big exams. Meanwhile the doomsday clock continues its countdown. Just watch as the journal entries get less and less lengthier and further and further apart… Oh well. Only 3 months to go.

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24
Aug 98
Mon

Body Mass Index

I may be short, but I make it into the healthy BMI range. I found a link to a BMI calculator on sonic junkie‘s Cranial disorder… 170cm (5 foot 7) and 58kg (128lb) comes out at 20. Haha and guess who came out at 30 (27 is overweight)? One General Batram. :)

23
Aug 98
Sun

Ecos Assessment

More evidence that the school’s economics department isn’t quite right… we’re the only subject that gets assessment tasks after the final exams… But I’ve finished them already. It seems that no one else has started and they are due Thursday! Suck it guys muahahaha :)

18
Aug 98
Tue

Water and floods

Camden got hit pretty bad… for a day, there was only one road into Camden. That’s right – one bridge from Camden to the city. It’s funny, dad’s work is only a 5 minute drive away, but since everyone had to use that main road to get into and out of Camden, he took 40 minutes to drive up. Mum arrived at work in about 10 minutes because she was smart enough to use the back roads. Hahaha.

Flooded rivers look so intimidating. The Nepean River flooded was about 3 times it’s normal width and it looks powerful… big. The other river flooded out the entire bridge so that exit out of Camden was closed for the day, but the water level is still pretty high.

TRIALS!!!

Finished!!! Read all I have to say about HSC Trials HERE. (It’s an article)

2
Aug 98
Sun

Argh

I’m not going to bother moving July to the archive yet… too time consuming. Anyway today the phone has been ringing once an hour and its getting really annoying because I’m the only one at home to answer it today. And I’m trying to study. I got a call from Mum, a call from one of Mum’s friends (who can’t speak English properly, so that was fun… :), a friend from school, my cousin, and goodness knows who else. The latest one was a stupid woman who was given a wrong number to dial:

Hello, is Lorraine there?
“Uhh… Sorry, there’s no one by that name here. I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
“I got given this number <blah blah blah>
“Yes, that is this number, but you’ve still got the wrong number… you said were after Lorraine?”
Yes. It was about buying a horse.” [Horse?!]
“Then you’ve got the wrong number.”

And then I hung up. Just venting a little stress. Come to think of it, my neighbour’s name is Lorraine… but I don’t know her phone number, and she breeds poodles… not horses. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Not even a tiny bit.

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27
Jul 98
Mon

Final Countdown

The final countdown to The Trials has begun. 13 more days from tomorrow. 13 days, and what happens? We get slammed with an Economics assessment which potentially could be 40 to 50 pages long. However, this assessment is really quite good in that it is essentially an aid to exam revision, so I’m not really complaining.

Oh, and don’t expect very many journal entries in the next four weeks (I keep saying that, but I somehow manage to find a few spare moments).

If you were wondering, it takes me about 5-10 minutes to make a journal entry so it’s definitely not taking up a chunk of time that would be better used doing something else. I don’t upload the page as soon as I write an entry, but I upload whenever I log on to the net, or when dad logs on. At this stage, something like this can’t take up a substantial amount of time – I can’t afford it. This entry has taken me precisely 8 minutes – I’ve already been studying for 2 hours, so I guess this is a break. Back to work now.

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23
Jul 98
Thu

A Maths Excursion??

I went on a “maths excursion” (I didn’t know you could combine those two words :) to Uni of NSW and went to three lectures. The first was on the memory capacity of the human brain (10 to the 14th bits or something, at a rough estimate) – the lecture itself wasn’t really delivered well. The second one was tonnes better and was on RSA encryption. This was really good, and although the guy who was giving the lecture went through the theory heaps fast, I managed to get the general idea. He stuck the lecture up on the net here, if you’re insterested in RSA encryption (RSA being the initials of the people who invented it).

The lecturer looked pretty young (late twentyish), actually (the first lecture was given by the stereotypical eccentic, rapidly aging professor)… but it appears he’s got a PhD and university medal. I was thinking, like, crap this guy’s a genius, when I saw that…

And there’s more… I just managed to pull up a copy of his c.v. from his page and this came up …

1987 – 1988 : HSC at Knox Grammar School
HSC result 493 (ranked 4th in NSW)

Whoa. Did I say genius? Hah – my age estimation was almost spot on… HSC in 1988 makes him 27-28 this year. Suck that Chernih – 493!!! How does 475 compare to 493???

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19
Jul 98
Sun

Holidays

End tomorrow. It gets closer.

Damn keyboard

I spent a couple hours with the old keyboard, cleaning it out. I unscrewed the back panel and lo and behold – flooded with orange stuff. First time I saw the innards of a keyboard too. Anyway, I think we’re going to send the new keyboard back and get a refund :).

18
Jul 98
Sat

Big Crap

It had to happen sooner or later. I spilt orange juice on my keyboard yesterday afternoon, and last night, while I was sending ICQ messages, it decided to chuck a psycho (and so did I at that point). I cleaned it up this morning (removed the keys etc), and it doesn’t smell like oranges anymore, but the arrow keys don’t work and the zero doesn’t either. Some juice must’ve hit the circuit board. Anyway I went out and bought myself another el cheapo keyboard and I’m trying to get used to the new keyboard layout and the feel of it. I keep hitting “\” instead of the backspace. I liked my old ‘board better :).

9
Jul 98
Thu

No more Net

For the rest of next week I’m trying to refrain from Net usage, so I might not get the chance to upload the journal, but instead it will be updated locally and uploaded at the end of the week.

8
Jul 98
Wed

Preliminary Theological Certification Exam

PTC is just a fancy word for Christian Studies, but in this course they make you take an exam – it’s basically a correspondence course. Schoolwise, it doesn’t count for anything. Anyway I got word about my results in the mail today – 62% pass without studying. I don’t even think I read the textbook out of class. Who’s da man?! :) 62% worth of crapping on.

5
Jul 98
Sun

Night before last

Got half an hour of unbroken sleep on sat night/sunday morning. Went to a party. We got back at about 12:30 in the morning from a nice German restaurant and stayed awake from 1am till 7am we saw Argentina get beaten (damn) and Croatia beat Germany 3-1!!! I feel dead today.

28
Jun 98
Sun

Laserzone

Went there last Saturday, and that place rocks – I’m definitely going back there – maybe for a midnight to dawn session at the end of the year.

25
Jun 98
Thu

Holidays

Holidays start tomorrow, and I’m really gonna need them. They said the stress buildup is exponential, and that is 100% true. I can feel it building each day, and my parents are NOT bloody helping. Incessant nagging, is among one of the biggest problems. I mean, do I really have to be reminded I have an assessment due next week? Yeah – like I’m really gonna forget all about it. And I really hate it when they remind me to do some piece of work, and I’ve been thinking about it for the last week – and then telling me I don’t seem concerned about school work, when that’s all that has been on my mind for the last oh… 10 bloody months? And of course, there’s the line that they’re more stressed than me. Bullshit. I mean, if I off loaded all my stress on them, they’d hear no end of it.

Laughter is a great stress reliever – it’s really great, but the downside is, when you appear so happy, everyone thinks you’re not stressed. When this happens, it can only take a small comment like, “you’re not stressed, you don’t look stressed,” to set you off. Stuff them for the next 4 months I say.

Now that I’ve had my little stress relieving harangue :)… on to other things. Might be getting Mandate of Heaven this Saturday (finally!). Notice that my entries are getting shorter and are becoming a weekly event.

  10:24pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
13
Jun 98
Sat

Work work work

8 Weeks to Trials. August 10 = Exams.

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30
May 98
Sat

Seventeen!

Woohoo, it’s my Birthday! Now I’ve got to go and write a 1500 word English essay. <grumble>.

29
May 98
Fri

Birthday

It’s tomorrow. Note to myself to update my ICQ info :). The red packets are starting to come in (Chinese “gifts” – red envelopes filled with money – instead of presents).

New TV & Amplifier

Yeah! A 82cm screen! Finally… all the other TVs in the house are over 10 years old – now I can enjoy a big screen :)

16
May 98
Sat

Relatives from Singapore over

Relos from S’pore are here… that means less time still for this journal :)

  10:36pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Arrrrrgh

There’s a lot of stuff going on at school. On Wednesday I got back home at 6.30pm, Thursday at 6.30pm, Friday at 11pm and today at 5pm! “Normally” (when I’ve no activities on after school, which is only two days of the week) I get back at 4.30-5.00pm on weekdays, and before noon on Saturdays. Today was the CAS (a group of schools) Athletics Meet. Rained all day, but we came 3rd from 6th, really good considering some of the positions we’ve obtained in the past few years. Right now, my voice is almost gone (still), and my feet hurt :).

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5
May 98
Tue

Welcome to May

Finally! Exams are over. Sorta stuffed up the last one (maths) and physics, so I’m not too happy about that… anyway I’m gonna do a write up on StarCraft later now that I’ve got one whole week freeeeee!

  7:11pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
27
Apr 98
Mon

4-Unit Maths Exam

$#!+“. Would’ve been the first thought to cross my mind when I saw the paper (as was for everyone else). People who passed this exam would be doing really really well. I didn’t even finish one question out of 8 off completely. What a complete disaster… for everyone that is. Everyone wants to kill Mr Browne (the maths teacher) now. What slack sadisitic man. I think someone heard him say about the exams when they were being collected at the end, “Aren’t I nasty?” (with a mocking grin – which we could just make out between his facial hair), yeah and that’d be right. That test was HARD. Way tougher than HSC standard.

26
Apr 98
Sun

English Exam

A pretty standard English exam – reading & writing sections, a Topic Area question, Diving for Pearls essay and a Bruce Dawe poetry essay. Questions weren’t tough, but I saw the 2U-Related paper, and it was quite tough… Just as well I’m not doing it anymore :).

Exams

As you can see, I haven’t made an entry in a while, and that’s because I’ve been cramming. The big week starts tomorrow, ending Monday week. I’ve got 7 exams within that period, kicking off with English tomorrow. If I get the time, I’ll write something about them.

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14
Apr 98
Tue

Study

I’m bored. ICQ me to alleviate my boredom. Yes I’m studying for my half-yearlies… Yeah I’d even be happy to talk with you about whatever subjects I’m studying :). Gotta get Starcraft quick. That’ll alleviate the boredom ;).

10
Apr 98
Fri

“Holidays”

On holidays now, or at least I have been since Wednesday. Went to Yum Cha for lunch today in the city. Although the restaurant holds 800 people, we still had to wait two bloody hours to get in… what a waste of time. It was raining when we went down, but on the way back it was absolutely pissing down with rain. Lotsa mini-floods around the city too. It was funny, there was a section of the road where the water was flooding onto the footpath, and there are all these shopkeepers nervously staring at the water lapping at their welcome mats :). Also there was where two out of three lanes were basically flooded to a depth of 20-30cm, so cars were converging from three lanes into one lane and driving up onto the divider in the middle of the road to try and keep out of the deep water. Then this guy in a 4-wheel drive just plows through the water without hopping on the curb and he’s got this big smile on his face. Can’t blame him though – a 4-wheel drive would’ve been useful in those conditions.

6
Apr 98
Mon

Where did Autumn go?

34 degrees Celcius (there’s no such thing as Centigrade I think) a few days ago! El Niño must’ve done it :) (that squiggle on the n is called a tilde – pronounced “til-der”. So say that when you’re giving out URLs, not “that little squiggly thing”, or “that space eel” as I’ve heard it called.)

  7:16pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

National Party

Let’s just say… I doing something for them, and I’m meeting one of their guys tomorrow at the State Parliament. Funny … I feel more nervous about the Oratory I have to go to afterwards than this meeting with a politician. Impromptu speeches. <shudder>. :)

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BOOM!

Just like that. Dad turned on the computer and it blew. I was in my room at the time, but I still heard the small explosion. Yeah the computer blew a fuse yesterday, but luckily we got it fixed so it’s back home working again today. :)

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I’m still here…

I just have been too busy. Couple things. Regarding that Getright stat below, I realised that if I was using a cable modem, and say I was downloading all that stuff over 12 months, I’d be a fair few gigabytes over the limit. $2451 in excess (not to mention the $65 a month for the first 100Mb), plus other stuff like general web browsing and game playing… Maybe Cable isn’t such a good idea. Second thing, I gotta move March stuff to the archive, but I can’t be bothered right now.
[If you’re wondering “What GetRight stat?”, I moved it to the March Archive here. – 7:15 pm]

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25
Mar 98
Wed

Blood

Finally got around to writing an entry. Donated some blood yesterday. Got some free food and stickers (oh wow) for my trouble. Painful? Only when the needle goes in and when it comes out. And also when they prick your finger to test if “you’ve got enough blood” (nobody told me about getting your finger pricked beforehand).

19
Mar 98
Thu

More Athletics

Cherns you bastard :). I’ve got this friend, and basically we spend every lesson bagging each other about how good we are at things. Yes, getting bagged out for being good instead of crap :) Anyway, he used to be in the swimming team (but isn’t anymore by choice), and I used to be in the athletics team (but I aren’t, again by choice). So basically, he’s really good swimmer, and I’m a good athlete (but not as good an athlete as he is a swimmer, although he’ll say it the other way around :). Every class we’ll pay each other out about how fast each of us can swim/run. Unfortunately, he got the upper hand today. I broke the school 50m record all the way back in Year 3, 1989 – 8.21s I think. There’s a misprint in the school homework diary which meant that I’d been gipped of my record (ie: I wasn’t listed), but Chernih brought back the records listing from the primary school competition held last Tueday. And sure enough, my record still stood. So for the whole bloody day he’s showing everyone, making a big fuss about how I’ve held a record for 9-10 years and so on. Luckily he doesn’t know I was age champion the same year (it’s unlikely he’ll be reading this page, so that’s why I mentioned it), or I’d be in an even worse position. And my comeback about, “I’ll see you swimming in the Olympics” is sorta useless when he has actual physical evidence with him. Grrr.

  10:35pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Athletics Carnival

Ouch. I knew I was asking for it. My second toe on my right foot is pretty much shredded. Anyway, today I had my last ever school athletics carnival. They held it at the place that’s going to be used for the Sydney 2000 Olympics Warm-Up Track, so it was one of those rough red rubbery surfaces. I ran the 200m (non-c’ships) and the 100m championships. Now I run barefooted as I don’t have spikes (never saw the need to shell out $70-100 for something you’re gonna use so little). The 200m was sort of alright. I came first, but since I hadn’t run since last year, I was really buggered. In addition to this, running barefoot is a killer on these surfaces, and in the space of around 25 seconds (I didn’t get my time), one of my toes had already developed a fairly large blister. The 100, was much much worse. I had pre-qualified for the championship event from last year (I didn’t even know until about 1 week beforehand), and unlike the rest of the guys, I had done absolutely no training. I hadn’t even run a 100m since last year. Worse still, they all had spikes, and I was, like, the only one without spikes. Yeah – a little el cheapo Asian kid running in the c’ships? Worse yet, although I’m in Year 12, I’m only 16, so running in the Under 17 event meant that everyone else was a year below. I was gonna get kicked for sure.

It turned out that I came 6th out of 8th which is in my mind pretty good, seeing the no training, no spikes and cut up toe. As soon as I came out of the blocks, I felt the blister split open. Rip. Not a nice feeling, so I sort of grimaced and kept running. I think I ran 12 point something seconds (again I didn’t bother to get the time). The winning time was a friggin 11.11s or something – a school record. Fast? Bloody lightning! I inspected my injury and a whole chunk of skin had ripped off, not completely, but a three-quarter circle patch. Painful and really inconvenient. I’m gonna be hobbling around school tomorrow :). Never again barefoot like that. It’s alright if you’re only running one race, but two? Nope. Apparently, someone else got all his toes cut up worse than mine by running barefoot, so I really can’t complain too much.

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16
Mar 98
Mon

New Car

The new car’s coming in this Saturday. Woohoo! I’ve decided to add a car odometer reading on the left column, just so you can see the mileage click up. We travel further in a fortnight than some do in a whole year :). Click on more info for past readings, and perhaps a graph if I get the time… The full page should be up by the time I upload this, including stats like kilometres a day, the story behind why it’s rising like that and so on.

  6:43pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
4
Mar 98
Wed

Stereograms

You know those really weird pictures that are just a load of coloured dots? The ones where you have to look at them funnily and then you’re supposed to see a 3D image come out? Well after five years, I finally managed to get one to work! I know you’re meant to focus your eyes so that you’re staring beyond the picture, and there are a few ways of doing this. However, the one I was looking at was framed, and there was light reflecting off the glass, and you could see what was in the room. So I ignored the picture itself, and looked at the reflection of a desk in the room. Five minutes later POP, I noticed an eagle sort of extrude outwards. Three seconds later, it was gone, but I saw it! I saw it! No – stereograms are not a scam (as one of my friends think) – just keep staring.

  10:15pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
26
Feb 98
Thu

More Work…

Not much goin’ on except lots of work from school. I stuffed one of my maths assessments (the 4-Unit one), so I guess I got to work harder :). I’ve come across a lot of cool links over the last week or so, and when I get the time I’ll enter them in.

  11:00pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
23
Feb 98
Mon

Contracted the Flu

Yeah it’s pretty mild, but it’s still a damn nuisance. Oh yeah, and I finally got around to playing Quake 2’s CTF (Capture the Flag) mod. It’s legendary. Go download and play it.

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22
Feb 98
Sun

English Again

Remember Alec and the glass? He really must be pissed. During our performance of our scenes (which ironically was one of the best performances), he was using the glass full of paint again. When he was arranging imaginary books on an imaginary bookshelf, he kicked over the glass which he had put by his feet. Hahah, it went all over one of his shoes and over the stage. Glen came along and chucked a rag on it (which later turned out to be someone’s t-shirt) and the performance went on.

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Been ridiculously busy but anyway…

We bought a new car yesterday! It’s a Lexus, and it’s come at a good time. If you don’t know the story behind where I live and where school is, listen up. I live about 50km from school (which equates to a 50 minute to 1 hour 20 minute drive, one-way, depending on traffic conditions). Everyday I get driven (yeah yeah lucky bastard aren’t I? Don’t think I haven’t been told that a milllion times :). Anyway, this is the tenth and final year of Mum’s driving marathon. Our last car (the one we just traded in) was a Mazda 626, and in just under 5 years (4 years and 10 months), it has done … guess how many kms … No not 100,000. Nope, not 150,000. Not even 200,000. 250,000? Getting close. 260,000 kilometres. You’d think the car would be pretty much shot with that mileage, but it’s still in relatively excellent condition (it has started every time, except once when someone didn’t shut the door and ran the battery down overnight). We had a Honda Civic before that and it managed to make it to 300,000 kilometres (305,000 if I remember correctly) in about the same amount of time. I’ve got a photo of the Mazda’s odo just after it hit 200,000. So yes, in about 9 years, mum and I have travelled well over 1 million kilometres between us in two cars (how many times is that around the world?).

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13
Feb 98
Fri

More studying…

Sigh.

Debating

Haha. First debating afternoon this year. Guess what the topic was for the practice debate?
“That we should support Bill Clinton”, to which was appended, “not regarding anything to do with Lewinsky“. That’s when everyone groaned. Five seconds later and it was “That we should support Bill Clinton”. Fullstop. No restrictions. Unfortunately, we got the affirmative, so we took up the Iraq issue and not the Lewinsky one. Still, Iraq is controversial enough.

  7:40pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
12
Feb 98
Thu

English

What a day. We’re doing mini-performances in English of scenes from Penetr– uh, oops, umthat’s another story … Educating Rita. We were split up into groups, each group having a number of scenes allocated to them. The task was to perform two different interpretations of the same scenes. So today we were basically working on it in our separate groups at the Latham Theatre (small theatre-type hall), trying to work out how we were going to act our scenes out. Well Alec was playing the role of Frank and he was just stuffing around. Now Frank’s meant to be drunk, so Alec goes off into one of the rooms backstage and comes back with a glass of yellow stuff. “What the hell is that?” He’d found a glass, and some paint, mixed the paint with water and filled the glass. “It’s my drink” he said. Yeah I suppose he could’ve gotten high on it by sniffing the fumes (haha then he’d really be drunk and he’d act in character much better :). Anyway he empties out the glass. No one was in the mood to do anything that day, I was talking with the rest of the group while Alec lurched about on stage (like he really was drunk, although I don’t think he was intentionally acting drunk … maybe the paint fumes got to him). One minute he’s playing with the phone on the wall, and the next he drags out a broken table from backstage (dunno why), all the time with the glass in his hand.  Then craaaash. Alec dropped the glass, and somehow, although he was pretty far back stage, the glass shattered all the way to the front edge of the stage – about 5 metres.

Funnily enough, we managed to bluff our way out when the teacher came, and Alec didn’t get busted. “It’s part of our performance sir, it’ll wake the audience up”.

  8:40pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Busy Busy Busy

Told you I would not be able to write every day once the workload picks up. I’ve got a 3 and 4 unit maths assessment next week. That’s bad… And the gaps in entries will get larger…

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9
Feb 98
Mon

Swimming

Boring. You don’t want to hear about it. Swam in two races, but for the rest of the day, nothing.

Nothing Much…

Swimming carnival at school tomorrow. We’re actually swimming in the pool that will be used for the Sydney Olympics. I dunno how the school managed to hire it… We booked the 50m pool and the diving pool, so I don’t know where the people who train will go to train. Nothing much happening todayt, except that I’m getting heaps of work from school. So I’m going to bed now.

  10:56pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
6
Feb 98
Fri

Canteen Prices

Well, they must have thought that $2 to $2.30 wasn’t enough. Because all food that was $2.30 is now $2.50. They sure know how to turn in a profit. Monopoly indeed.

  11:14pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

School Stuff

Firstly, they I was on the way to school yesterday, and there was this traffic jam on the highway. It seems that a small green car(?) had crashed (it didn’t look like a car anymore :), and the back was totally compacted up against the front seats. People were slowing down to take a look :) which resulted in a 15-20 minute delay in reaching school.
Secondly, the prospect of “hiring” the school computer room for a landay is a little brighter, a friend, “Loki” (well that’s his Quake nick) had loaded Quake 2 on some computers (with the teacher’s consent). Very good indeed. Now I just have to borrow a copy from a friend (as well as GTA, WC:Prophecy, etc.)…
Thirdly, I decided a few days ago that I’m gonna redesign my school web site‘s drab front page. So who made the “drab” frontpage? Me. Don’t laugh. It loads under 10 seconds, which is good :) But that’ll change ;)

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1
Feb 98
Sun

First Day o’ the Month

Yes it’s February. Only 10 months to go… :). Not much today. Brainstorming designs for new site.

  11:12pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
29
Jan 98
Thu

Second Day Back – More school stuff

Well it was too good to last. No homework yesterday, but I get hit with a load o’ work today. One economics multiple choice assessment next week, two maths assessments in a fortnight, and a physics one sometime. There’ll probably by time gaps in this journal cos I’m busy. So what am I doing this weekend? 720+ multiple choice questions. Uggh.

Hah – the Educating Rita excursion permission note was handed out today. Late March is the date.

Bloody hell. Canteen prices rose again. Australia’s underlying inflation rate is 1.4% (Dec 96 – Dec 97), but prices rose 10-15%. $2 stuff rose to $2.30.

28
Jan 98
Wed

First Day Back At School

Sheesh. Nothing has changed. Not much anyway. The new marsh is … well … not as charismatic as Marshall Sweeney. I guess we just gotta get to know him better. He kept saying “Keep Quiet! How many times do we have to tell you!”. The thing is it is the first day back, assembly hadn’t even started, and no one had already told us to keep quiet. It’s alright to tell us to shut up, but he kept adding “how many times…”.

The school switched over to IBMs!! They finally saw the light! Woohoo! 26 P-166 MMXs! At least I can see where some of our fees are going. Hmmm – maybe after I finish School (ie, the end of this year) I can sorta hire the room for a day or two, get a few people along, install some games and have a massive lan gaming day. Probably won’t happen. The school won’t want games on the machines, will they, even though we’d delete them afterwards. Besides, the lan runs on NT and NT doesn’t support some games :(.

The car park development was halted over the holidays. Too hot for the workers to work or something. Some union thing. Since the computing department moved to the maths department, the maths department moved to a row of prefab classrooms stuck on top of the underground carparks. At least they have air-conditioning. The thing is that they are all so close together.
Our 4-unit class easily makes the most noise.  We have a habit of breaking into “clapping frenzies” – especially when someone enters the room. What happens is someone starts clapping and soon the class (only 14 of us though) starts full-on yelling, cheering and clapping (much to the confusion of the guy who walks in, and when we stop, the moment the person opens his mouth to say something, we start clapping again). Click here to listen to a relatively small frenzy. Today? 4 clapping sprees, and many laughing epidemics prompted the room across the corridor to stare at us. A whole host of bewildered (and annoyed?) faces looking at us pissing ourselves with laughter.

One person noticed my new glasses. Only one. Incredible. Well I guess they do look similar. So how did I lose my old ones? Well for the hols I was up at the Gold Coast with a few friends. One of the theme parks we went to was Wet ‘n’ Wild – the water park full of slides n all that. Anyway, I normally take my glasses off for rides (even though I’m pretty much lost without em). However they got this new ride called Calypso Beach. What it is is this sort of circular moat of water. The water has a current powerful enough to drag a tube (which you plunk your butt into) around and around. Some sort of relaxation ride. So I think, “tame”, right? I would like to see where I’m going for once, so I decide that I’ll wear my glasses. Anyway my friend, Kevin, decides to have a race. There’s this bridge and we race over one lap. He beats me, but I want a rematch. He agrees but this time its over two laps. Calypso is damn crowded, so we have to weave our way through all the people in tubes. I lead, but Kev catches up with me. Now there’s this little offshoot which runs off into an artificial beach. See the diagram. The yellow bit’s the beach, the blue arrow is the current direction and the back lines are walls. When he catches up with me, I give him a shove into the beach junction, and he gets stuck. So he gets out of the tube and tries to push it back into the main river, but there are so many people trying to get into the beach that he gives up. He was wearing sunnies, and that, combined with the look of frustration on his face reminded me of one of those bad guys in Bond movies where they get outsmarted by Bond again (no – I’m not comparing myself to Bond, but it was a brilliant tactical move :). Its this face staring at me amongst a sea of laughing faces. Hahaha. Once he makes it out of the beach area, I’m miles ahead. He jumps out of the tube again (which was not allowed for the race) and starts moving towards me. Looked like he was going to try to tip my tube over in revenge. So I sort of panic, and try to jump out of the tube. Crap did I look like an unco. I flipped straight over, face first into the water. My first worry was that everyone’d be looking at me (“Hey look at that dumb Asian kid” :), but that wasn’t the case. The second worry was that I felt my glasses come off while under the water. They floated straight off my face and bang. The current took them. Wet ‘n’ Wild wasn’t much of a help, they said, “maybe tomorrow, our cleaner should pick them up and we’ll call you”. But they never did (yes, we gave them the phone number). So 5,000 people have trampled over my glasses in the meantime. Sooner or later the lenses will crack, someone will step on them, cut their foot, sue the crap out of WnW and I won’t get a cent :P.

This morning, early morning…

Couldn’t get to sleep so I decided to read on of the English text. Educating Rita (I think drama is in italics) looked pretty thin, so I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. Took 1 1/2 hours. Finished it about 1.40am. And whaddaya know – it’s the next text we’re doing in class :) In fact, we have to bring it in tomorrow and some time in Feb we’re gonna watch a live production of it. Which reminds me – I gotta make sure that the Dawe poetry assessment due tomorrow is in my bag.



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