uni

Anything related to uni.

Summer time is here

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It’s just too bad the weather is all over the place.

Tim is back today for a while. Laura is also back, for who knows how long? Probably until she finds another man to chase overseas. Even Shakey is returning. At least I’m leaving. My excitement is slowly building up inside.

I haven’t been out into town for a few weeks. I probably will soon. The boys opened the new summer hostel and I’d like to check it out.

Marika has to go to Tartu this week to do her final uni presentation. I’m sure it will all go well, judging from the stress levels she’s generating. Unfortunately this week there has been a big blow-up in the news about Estonian university standards being on the decline. Now all the officials have their back up and will probably crack down on all the poor students as a result.

I still think uni is a scam industry. At least I had HECS, delaying my debt and keeping it interest-free. I haven’t paid much attention to the newer system in Australia but it’ll probably continue to get worse and worse a la the American system and progress into a serious problem.

I hope a new style of tertiary education becomes prevalent in the future as the current system, to me, just seems to be a rip off that hands out too many qualifications, thus inflating education levels. For example: it’s not that hard to get a bachelors these days, all you really have to do is keep turning up. Pass criteria is generally so basic and weak that you would essentially have to not submit any work (or do it completely wrong) in order to fail. Because bachelors are now ubiquitous, lots of people feel the need to go on to get a masters “for an edge”. Of course, this works out great for universities as they get another tuition fee out of the student.

Now, I’ve got nothing against general education levels rising and people pursuing higher and higher degrees. I just think the criteria to accomplish this should be more string while boasting about what a high percentage of students pass their courses.

Anyway. I’ve been making good pancakes and eating a lot of peanuts.

FINALLY.

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6

Sorry I haven’t updated in so long. I haven’t even really been using my PC at all. My keyboard got broken a few weeks back and I’m unsure if it was my fault or someone else’s. Somehow the keyboard port on the back of my PC got fucked up, too, so old school keyboards don’t work in it at all. Now I’m using my dad’s Logitech one which fortunately has USB, meaning I can type!

I graduated today. Huzzah. $75 for the gown and the rest only to be returned after 2 hours use. Con artists. Grr. I’m now officially a graduate! Whee!

The long weekend was good and Anzac day was quiet. I didn’t get up to too much. I can’t really be fucked backtracking over the last few weeks. Whatever’s next.

Wind.

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16

It’s windy tonight. Well, it was.

I’m bored, tired, mildly inebriated (thanks Margaret River cabernet sauvignon MR02 cleanskin) and lonely. I just found out palmy is staying at his parent’s place tonight, so I have the place to myself. That just makes me feel more bored.

Today I was meant to write a lot of emails and deposit a cheque. At least I bought washing powder. Now I just have to go to the effort of putting my clothes in the dryer.

My main achievement was having a shower. The runner up was meeting up with Winesoc people for dinner up the road (hence the wine). I ate a beef panang. It was tasty.

I hate being tired but wholly awake and bored. I feel like I should be doing something. Something important. That something is probably sleeping. I don’t think eating all these Natural Confectionary Company lollies is helping me approach slumber. Oh well.

I really wish I had a jaffle iron. It’d give me an excuse to buy cheese. It’d give me an excuse to eat more toasted bread, too.

Here’s my prediction: I’m about to find a song that makes me look cool to display as my current music; pick a current mood that sounds vaguely accurate; post this entry; sip more wine; stand up and put my clothes in the dryer; walk downstairs and eat more lollies (I placed them there tactically); sit around for a bit on my PC again and then finally, perhaps, watch a movie on it.

Wow.

Woot.

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13

I’m going to have to do a spot of Christmas shopping this week. God damn it. On top of that, my beard’s back and it’s a little itchy. Life is hard.

This week has been pretty fun. My Finnish-friendly Newtown tour guide abilities have shot through the roof and I even found a few shops myself that I didn’t know existed in the area. I guess that’ll help with the shopping. I’m sure we’ve magically watched about 300 hours of television and movies throughout the week. Somehow we managed to make it out on the town on Thursday and Saturday nights, too. I was expecting them both to be able to drink considerably more but at least rapid inebriation means you save money on alcohol.

Today I have to get my Amelie DVD back from a uni friend. I exchanged it for Fight Club, since I’d never watched it from start to finish properly before. It was only about 2 months ago, giving me just enough time to scrape in a viewing. She’s going to be near Broadway getting enrolled into a religious order. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? She gets to wear a scapula and probably learns a secret handshake. I think it may also entitle her to discounts at various retail outlets. Personally, I’d prefer a customer loyalty card but whatever.

Ross got back on Thursday night. I was going to pick him up from the airport but I was already drinking in Newtown when he landed. He got home via the miracle of public transport and seemed to survive, so I didn’t feel so bad. I made up for it last night when I walked home from the Cross (again) with tofu (again). That’s at least the third time I’ve achieved that. Each occurrence makes me feel just a little bit more like I’m a man. Eventually I’ll have the courage to do it without wearing a skirt and holding hands with tofu the whole way back for warmth.

Lately I’ve lost my appetite. There’s no particular reason for it that I can think of. I just have. This is good because I’m trying to spare some cash. I only ever feel slightly hungry but never enough to make me really want to chow down, so I’m getting by very easily on just one meal a day or so. These last few days that one meal has been somewhat dodgy and heavy-sitting in my stomach, so maybe that’s why I’m coping so well. I would give it all up for a good savoury crepe. I’ve been craving one for months but I never find myself in a food court at the right time in order to get one and we all know that the only places you can get crepes are from food courts in shopping centres.

The Istanbul on King kebab shop has me confused. They make quality kebabs but their falafels are poor. This totally destroys my otherwise consistently correct theory that you can gauge the calibre of a kebab shop based on the strength of their falafels. To fudge my results, I’m going to write that experience off as an outlier and assume it was just a bad batch and never buy a falafel from there again.

Warudo.

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25

Well, last week was certainly a busy one.

I went to that Mantech thingy. It was a recruitment company assessing me, after all. I had to do some weird 10 question written quiz to see what I knew. It was written for experienced workers but the guy said the client was looking for either “a graduate” or someone “with about 8 years experience”. It’s nice to know they really narrowed down the field. Anyway, I couldn’t answer most of the questions since they were basically experience-specific, but I did what I could. I haven’t heard back, but oh well. I don’t really care.

The same day I went to visit Ross and his Finnish friends Krista and Heli. Ross mentioned earlier that they might need a place to stay in the following week, so I said they could crash here. I also caught up with his neighbour Greg (another guy I went to school with) and Kerry, Ross’ wing chun instructor or something. Nice guy. Turns out he was doing the same major project course as I was this semester at Sydney. He recognised the group name “RailTech”. I felt like a C grade celebrity. Funky.

So, yeah, I saw Corpse Bride (or is it The Corpse Bride?) on Tuesday afternoon with Ross and the girls. I quite liked that movie, actually. Some of the songs at the start bugged me, but that’s normal for musical scenes in film for me. Whatever. After that Ross managed to talk me into attending his dance class. Now I know I officially can’t dance. I can sort of pop, though. Awesome? You tell me.

Continuing on, Wednesday included working then dropping by Ross’ again after work to say farewell before he left for Finland on Thursday afternoon. Somehow I agreed to let Andrew come around to the flat afterwards with his PC so we could work on a website for a friend of his who’s in a band. Electric Lady, they’re called. 2 points to anyone who can guess where that came from.

The site is sort of coming together. palmy’s done the pretty web page design stuff and I’ve been working on the backend database (although the design keeps changing). I’m going to have to whack out some more PHP goodness to act as an interface, too. I’m sure only about 2 people reading this understand/care about this paragraph, so I’ll stop now.

Thursday involved meeting up with Emmeline again when she came around on a break from work at “The Entertainment Quarter” (or Fox Studios if you will). I managed to convince both Em and Andrew that the chips at Jesters are supreme. I wish Jesters used an apostrophe. It looks stupid. Tools.

Friday was a boring old Friday. Andrew left when I had to go to work, without having showered once. Slick. Work was uneventful, as usual. I usually buy a couple of bananas on my dinner break from the local supermarket and I’ve decided to start a ritual. It’s only a primitive one but it pleases me so perhaps it pleases the banana gods, too. Basically I just eat a banana on my way back out through the car park and then dump the empty skin in the same spot as always. I’m getting a nice little pile of banana skins at various stages of decomposition. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to something, so it’s clearly “all good”. I made a little shrine with a banana skin on an abandoned chair near a bus stop once. It remained for a while until it disappeared along with the chair. :(

Saturday was pretty cool. Leola brought in brownies at work, so I munched on a couple. I have no idea if they were homemade or not but it didn’t matter. They had my required levels of chewiness and crunchiness and therefore were found to be satisfactory. Brownies are serious business.

Another friend, Johnny (or del or Johnny Hero as I like to call him [which has actually stuck]) invited me around to his place earlier in the week as he was going to have a mini LAN (or larn). I just rocked up for an hour to catch up with him and some other buddies as I really didn’t feel like dragging my PC around with me for half the weekend. I think I made the right decision, as they all looked very sweaty and expended after their big night out clubbing on Friday. Another small victory for me.

I went out on Saturday night with Lloyd, Frank and Byrne. Lloydie wanted to start somewhere around the casino, so we did. After 2 drinks we left. Nice. We cabbed it back to King street and spent a bit of time at the Marly and in Kelly’s then shuffled back up for what I like to call the “Istanbul on King experience” for some premium kebabs. Unfortunately I managed to get some barbecue sauce on my shirt in the 10 seconds that I wasn’t concentrating for the entire time I was eating it. Fortunately it wasn’t too big a spillage. I’m sure Napisan will come to my rescue, otherwise mum will have to.

It should be recorded that Lloyd actually stayed out with us the whole time and didn’t soft out and go home. Then again, he’d already planned to crash here so I guess he didn’t have much choice as to when he could go to bed. We stayed all up for about 2 hours after getting back. Most of this time was spent watching Frank reading through the SuicideGirls website. That sounds a lot dodgier than it was, I promise.

The only real highlight of Sunday was that we won netball, 20-14 I think. Woo! I was all pumped up on energy that afternoon. I’m not sure if it was due to chance or the high amount of kilojoules I’d eaten an hour or so earlier at Hungry Jack’s, but I was ready to run all night! Instead I only played 3 quarters. Oh well.

On Sunday night I found out Krista and Heli wanted to stay down here on Monday. That meant we had to frantically clean up (well, Scott did) all the shit that was lying around. The place hasn’t looked this good since we moved in, basically. We went to pick them up on Monday night and they made us the richest, most fattening chocolate cake you could ever imagine as a thank you. It’s basically milk, flour, cream, butter and two blocks of hazlenut and dairy milk chocolate all churned together. Man, it tastes awesome. I’m not sure if my body could handle another mouthful, though.

I ran up to the Marly again last night while the girls were baking to meet up with Benecke and Frank and their significant others the small celebration of praising Benecke for finishing his exams for the year. Somehow I managed to down about 3 schooners in about 50 minutes and steal two swizzle sticks before scooting back down to the flat in the rain. It was quite a new experience to enter the front door and actually be able to smell something had been cooking. Especially when that smell involves a chocolate cake.

I need to shave my neck. Hair sucks. Stupid itchiness.

P.S. if you made it this far, I pity you for not having anything better to do.

Interview?

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I got a phone call this morning which woke me up (10am). It was in response to one of the job applications I’d put in (to a place called Mantech, naturally). Tomorrow I’m meant to be going in for some kind of interview/skills test. It should be interesting.

This predicament finally gave me a reason to bother walking up to uni to pick up my transcript, for the low-low price of $11. I was never really that aware of what my marks had been like over the years. Geez first and second year look average. Lots of Ps. Fortunately my marks rocketed up for third year. I found it amusing that the three subjects that I got discontinued fails for when I deferred have been my top marked subjects the second time around. Woot.

Just being outside (for once :p) also let me duck in to my new favourite tacky barber shop. After a few minutes and $12 expenditure I now sport another short and sleek head of hair. Now I just need to get my ears pinned back and I’ll be well on my way to presentability.

Some funny old woman joined me at my table for lunch in Jesters. I still get all gooey inside just eating there. I’m having a love affair with their chips. Anyway, this woman was one of those old, talkative types. I really didn’t feel there was much to talk about in regards to the economic success of a pie shop and could barely hear her anyway over the din inside the shop, so I just made a bored attempt at small talk until she shut up and let me continue reading the free music review magazine I’d swiped from the counter as I munched through my food.

“Small” looks funny. Don’t you think? Now that I think about it, “talk” does, too. Oh the wonder of English!

Resume.

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Well, I finally wrote one. I think it looks pretty. Like a fairy.

So I applied for some job that someone found for me. It certainly sounds sexy. Who would have though that there’s a grad job going out there for $50k/year? Hopefully no one except me. It certainly sucks having to write a cover letter.

Oh yeah. I finished uni. Hurrah. Shame all I did afterwards was sit around playing WoW and feeling lonely. The baked beans I had for dinner didn’t really provide a whole lot of comfort, either.

Now that I don’t have any academic responsibilities I suppose I’m meant to feel like a free man. Yeah, whatever.

I think it’s time I got a haircut. I should visit that odd little man up the road and have him make me look stylish for only $12. Maybe later.

Fuck, I really don’t want to go to work tonight.

WINMAEN.

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This is the journal of one of the members of the University of Sydney’s top information systems project team for 2005.

Sup Accenture say we’re elite to the tune of $1000.

BOOYAH.

Consumer.

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I bought a man bag. Well it’s more a unisex bag. I think. I don’t know. Crumpler’s bags sure as hell didn’t cut it.

Do you like it?That’s the colour I picked, too. It’s from Manhattan Portage but I bought it from Karmaloop with an online coupon, so I saved about 13% of the overall price, shipping included. Not so bad.

I looked up the Australian Converse site, but the pricks don’t have their products section working until December. Great marketing strategy there. Unfortunately, the US site doesn’t ship internationally, so I guess I’m going to have to check out some more shops in Sydney if I’m ever going to replace these poor red shoes.

I’m not even sure what style to get. Somebody help me decide!

High or low?

I currently own a low-cut pair. I quite like them. I still have a niggling yearning for the old school high cut ones, though. The other problem seems to be that you can’t get them in size 12 anywhere. :(

How can it be this hard?

In non-commercial news: I’ve been subpoenaed! Who would have thunk it? I’m not actually sure if I’m allowed to disclose any details. I haven’t seen the letter yet. Mum just rang me earlier today while I was browsing through a book shop on my way to get Thai for lunch today. I’ll have to check it out after work on Friday.

Uni news: My group made it in to the second round of presentations. Now we just have to impress the folks from Accenture and we’ll win $1000 each! Even though I’m over it I’ll still try for some cash.

Finally, I made some original content for my site in the guise of some horribly written game reviews and I also cleaned up the site a wee bit.

P.S. my highlight for today was buying a bottle of Jim Beam. I might take up alcoholism for a hobby, since I’m quite bored.

Whack.

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Computers don’t like me. How ironic. I think this one that I’ve had for about 18 months has been burning up my video cards on purpose. Maybe it’s a sign to stop playing games. It seems to be working. Bah.

Well, I finished my final semester of uni (for my bachelor’s at least) on Friday. There was no fanfare or celebration. I simply went home and got ready for work. Huzzah! Now I just have one exam to go and that’ll be that.

Saturday was spent working, then dinner and a movie with Lloyd and Eri. We saw Wolf Creek. Creepy and scary at first, hammy horror movie at the end. It certainly sticks to the Australian tradition of dropping off towards the end. It’s still worth seeing, though. I’d say it’s one of the better Australian releases in a while.

Sunday meant a sweaty sleep in on the couch because I’m too lazy to put my other bedsheets on. I cleaned the downstairs floor of my apartment and tidied up my room and everything, I just couldn’t be stuffed making the bed. Whatever.

After bitching about my PC being crap for a few hours I caught up with the gang at the HHH for about 50 minutes, chowed down an overpriced steak sandwich and then hit the netball courts to play a full game, only to lose 31-19 after our opponents again relied solely on 2 point shots to get ahead. We must be the only team in the comp without a range shooter. If only we could do some trades and deals. We need a draft!

Today is Munday. That’s meant to stand for mundane and Monday. I just made it up. The rest of you may use it if you like. I’m doing the washing. Yep. Pretty exciting news today.

I believe I’m going to a Melbourne Cup party tomorrow. It should be fun. Scott will be out at Randwick to have a punt. Well, more like take a few quizzes and exams for that air traffic control gig. Still, I bet he swings by for a flutter.