dear all, i would just like to share my absolute delight with you all today. for some background info on todays post please read the following about the jeep wave. (for those interested, my car rates around 27 points on average, it will probably go up to around 42 points by the end of the weekend then drop back down by the end of next week) now, i have noticed that in australia, the jeep wave is pretty much extinct. this is sad, and often makes me look like a dickhead because i do wave (when in a good mood), and the person in the other jeep tries to avoid eye contact with me, the crazy woman in the passing car.
today however, as i was driving home from uni i was cruising down north rd, crossing golf rd. waiting at the lights coming the opposite way (waiting for the lights to turn green) was a pretty red wrangler, i glanced over as i usually do when i see a jeep, and i was caught by total surprise. the driver waved at me. i was in total awe that i forgot to wave back which is hideously embarassing on my behalf and i feel ashamed. i was just in so much shock. the jeep was a member of the melbourne jeep owners club, which i have been thinking of joining myself, so i looked it up on their website and here is my new 3rd favourite jeep ever. (1st being mine, 2nd being the one i saw in gembrook a few weeks back up andersons tk.)
those that know my mother, would be familiar with that fact that since i have left highschool she has changed. i believe it's to do with having large sums of disposable income at her disposal due to not having to pay hefty private school fees. whether the change is for the better, i am still unsure of.
late 2005 saw her going to the gym on a regular basis. in 2006 she went on a solo mission to japan for 3 weeks. walking, jogging and yoga have been regular for my mum for an unknown amount of time. and earlier this year she joined the "bayside bushwalking club." the latter has been the most disturbing for me as i cannot see my mum climbing up mountains in a single bound. alas, she has invested in a macpac tent, a gas stove with stainless steel pots, some snazzy sleepingbag plus various other ridiculously expensive items of camping paraphernalia.
this is all fine, i'm getting used to it all. my mum goes away hiking and i go away 4wding or partying. my dad sits at home and twiddles his thumbs... its the way my family is learning to operate.
however... the other day i found a note on our front porch from a courier. it said that he came, no one was home, please call up and arrange a time to pick up the parcel for my mother. very suspicious, as my mother doesn't normally receive parcels. i asked her that night what it was all on about and she told me it was none of my business. anyway, as it turns out, the note on the front porch was only informing my mother that 1 of 2 parcels has arrived. in the first parcel was iWork for her mac (no big deal...) and... AN IPOD NANO ARM BAND!!! one guess as to what was in the second parcel...
my mother has bought herself an iPod. an iPod nano to be precise.
this disturbes me to great lengths. i don't even have an mp3 player. it doesn't upset me, nor does it make me jealous. im just uneasy with the fact that my mum has entered the 21st century.
uni is ultimately, sucky. well, thats a lie, i do enjoy it lots... just some of the weird (... "'i' before 'e' except after 'c' or if you're 'weird'"...) people monash gets to educate us students are a bit... uhhh... pathetic. the horrendous overlapping of subject material is fairly poor too. i'm doing three IT subjects this semester, one of which, "decision support system fundamentals," should just be scrapped as it is a complete waste of time. i'm learning the exact same material in "project management" and ummm... the other one i do... "spreadsheet modeling and something or other" (ok... i looked it up... i was way off - it's called "computer models for decision making" - i really should learn the names of my subjects, at least before the start of my exams when i have to write them on the cover sheet.) as i was saying though, the faculty should really go over their course structure as it's a complete waste of my time going to two tutorials which cover exactly the same material. enough ranting how shit monash is...
now i'll rant about how shit my car is/was/is not. for a while now my car has been making this horrible gross screeching sound at (one would think) almost randomly. it would screech sometimes when i turned it on, when it was cold outside, when it was warm outside, when the car was warm, when the car was cold, if i turned the heating on, when i turned the heating off, when i turned the air-con on, when i turned the air-con off, when i turned the steering wheel a little bit, when i had the wheel in full lock, when i took off, when i slowed down and also when i changed gears. fairly random one would think. i thought and i though how all these things could make a screeching noise. i knew it had to be something to do with the timing belt because of the noise it would make when i first turned the car on in the morning... but the connection between the air-con and the steering totally confused me. so i went to my mate who all of a sudden seems to know everything about cars, and he's like, "it has to be your timing belt" - this confused me a little because i still didn't understand how that could affect the steering and the heating/cooling systems. so jon asked me to think about the innards of my car and exactly what the timing belt was connected to. all of a sudden it clicked, and i felt like the biggest idiot ever for not working it out myself. the timing belt also runs around the power steering thingy and the air-con thingy. woo! so we went out to my car and tightened the belt a bit, and so far i haven't heard any screeching noises since. i'll keep y'all updated on the screeching.
i think last weekend was the most embarassing the screeching was, because jon and myself went up to the bunyip state forest (up around gembrook) to do take part in some 4x4 action. we went in my car, because at the current moment jons vehicle is not entirely whole. so we had one 4wd, which is a bit silly but i think jons intentions were to meet randoms up there and do some driving with them. and thats exactly what we did. we found a quaint little camping spot... which was nice and secluded, except for the 10 or so (i couldn't count... their numbers kept changing) drunken men that occupied half the camping site. im thinking to myself "great, drunkards... im going to be mutilated and raped during my sleep." but we went over and started talking to an insanely drunk (its about 4pm) guy called luke. that was the start of basically one of my best weekends in a while. these guys were hilarious. we played drinking games that night with them and i had a few too many, but i was alright... kinda... - i think i won the games though. the next morning we went for a drive with two of them in their dual cab hilux. they were brothers from down frankston way i think. the hot brother rolled (his ugly brothers) hilux the day before which was pretty amusing. anyway, we drove around a bit, did a few cool little tracks and got to one which looked impossible to drive up, so we found the top of it eventually by going the long way around and went down it. we'd had words from some other 4wders that the track was fun, except for one bend, which was really sharp because there was a tree stump in the way. the jeep got through the bend no worries (well, i scraped my diffs on a tree root that was invisible from the way we came) but the hilux went a gay way, and got stuck. dickheads. so we drove down the rest of the track and back around the long way to the top, and tried to pull them out backwards. no luck. we radioed the guys back at camp and one of them came to try to pull them out. no luck once more. so we pushed them out forwards, making our own track through the bush and almost rolling the hilux again. ill post photos maybe when i get them off jon. later on in the day, another of the guys got stuck whilst we were going down a track, so i yanked them out. (jeep for president) then we found this awesome mud patch, which was the size of a football field, so we did doughnuts and cool stuff in the mud and got the car horrendously dirty. then the brothers' hilux' clutch burnt out in the middle of the mud patch. wost place ever to get stuck. i thought they'd just be stuck there forever, because i couldnt see the jeep pulling it out due to it was stuck in the middle of a massive mud patch. but it did. (jeep for president)
then we went home. and the next day i couldnt drive to work on account of i couldnt see out of any of my windows and i would have died. jon picked me up from the station and drove me home... only to find that my dad washed my car. i almost cried. i didnt even get a good photo of it muddy.
im currently 69% of my way through with an anti virus software download. up until now, I haven't had an anti virus tool on my computer, but i thought it was time that i should do a full scan... just in case. i logged onto choice and had a look at the anti virus softwares they test ran. as it turns out, one of them was free. (woo!)
fingers crossed i'm all clean.
these past two weeks have been weird. i started my second semester of my second year of uni, which isn't a big deal, but all my friends are on work placements at the moment so it's quite a lonely place. i've made a couple of friends, but i really do miss the other kids. even the annoying ones who i could always count on to make me laugh or keep me entertained.
work has been weird too. i think my supervisor likes me. i dont know why. other than that, its been pretty boring. i'm considering going back to browns for weekend work. i really need the $$$. speaking of people liking me, im near positive that i have a lesbian after me too. she's pretty hot too, but i don't think i can go there. its complicated. i guess it also doesn't help that i dont swing that way. v.unfortunate for her.
james and i broke up two weeks ago too. i guess thats made me pretty down. as in... very down. but i really only have myself to blame for that one. although he agrees that theres a lot that is his fault too. just in the heat of break-up battle things get said that shouldnt. its all nasty. well... its not... me and james are still good mates, which is pretty awesome.
on the home front, i think i might install ubuntu on my home PC. it's currently running xubuntu, but i really want sudoku, and xubuntu doesn't come with sudoku. its a pretty outdated version of xubuntu anyway, so i might do a full upgrade. i'm thinking of also upgrading my windows PC to vista. i'll probably need extra ram. hopefully the processor will be ok, but if that needs upgrading, then i wont bother. far too hard.
oh wait, sweet! haha. the vista hardware requirements are actually pretty low. why is there a random gap here?
Vista Capable
Processor
800MHz
Memory
512MB
Graphics
DirectX 9 Capable
Graphics Mem
-
HDD Capacity
20GB
HDD Free Space
15GB
Other
DVD Drive
back to harry p. spoiler incase you haven't read it yet:
the goldberg family photo has been updated. right on time too. i was beginning to wonder how that clan was going.
i really like nics jumper. im quite the fan. (but sebastian will always be my favourite.) susys haircut really suits her face. v.modern. she was quite a babe back in the day, she's most def brought sexyback post-retirement.
as i can finally see my last exam in the not too distant future (tomorrow) i have decided it's well and truely time that i do my usual mid-exam blog post. in previous exam periods there have been close to an average of 32982398 posts. i'm unsure of whats different this time. maybe too many distractions. maybe i'm just getting lazier by the day. the latter wouldn't surprise me actually: this morning i woke up at 9.30am and didn't move until 45 minutes later. i just sat there, in bed that entire time - too lazy to get up (or too cold) and too lazy to go back to sleep (or too cold.)
it snowed in queensland the other day. i dont get it. melbourne (and tasmania... but i cant speak for them... cos i dont know how much snow they get) is disgustingly close to antarctica, especially when compared to queensland, yet it hasn't snowed in melbourne in my lifetime. that is so unfair. i was talking to aaron s last night who was appauled that i'd never been to the snow. although, now thinking of it... i have seen snow, because my canberra host family took me up to see the snow on that montain thing that looms of canberra.
i cant wait for birri. me and the gheys, plus james and others who i have forgotten, are going down to pollys farm next week for some chill out time. it should be good fun. it's only for 2 nights, but it will still be nice. i'm thinking of going down to lorne-ish area after that and meeting up with jon + maybe others to attempt to scale this hill/wall in our vee-hee-cals. it's a competition to see who can do it with the most style. i will win. i said the winner wins a 1kg bag of m&ms... but i might change the prize to something less detrimental on the size of my gut.
i'd also just like to say that tomorrows exam is very silly. it is on the following programming language thingys:
CSS
JavaScript
JScript
XHTML
DHTML
XML
ASP
ASP.net
SQL
DBI
ADO
the last two i have never heard of in my life and that scares me. hopefully i'll be sweet on most of them. i think i'm most worried about DHTML, on account of i'm not entirely sure of its exact purpose.
DHTML is the art of making HTML pages dynamic! DHTML is a combination of technologies used to create dynamic and interactive Web sites. To most people DHTML means a combination of HTML, Style Sheets and JavaScript.
thats lame.
ok, it's 11am now. i might go and get my book and do some study. or maybe i'll have a nice warm shower.
on tuesday, jon picked me up after lunch (in his new car) and we drove out past richmond, out past alphington, past coburg, kingsbury, preston and lalor until we got to epping. for those that are wondering, epping is FAR FAR AWAY. once there, we found 696 high street, which a website told me was the address of CustomLine motors. it clearly wasn't. the young men there kindly pointed me in the direction of customline motors and greased jon off lots. once at customline motors we checked out my car who had been admitted to hospital and was all fixed and ready to be discharged (after the $3200 doctors fee had been paid)
YEY! car was back.
on the drive home, i noticed that the car had a lovely grunt about it which made me feel proud to be a jeep owner. however, i also noticed it was idling a little too low. (around 500rpms.) not such a problem, as i thought it was just because the sensors were a little wet and it was a new motor, and there was a bit of water in the fuel tank still. once i got home (after getting severely lost) i noticed i couldn't get the key out of the ignition. (i also noticed this at the petrol station, but it came out after a few attempts then) as it turns out my gear shifty thingy isn't in the right spot. (it never was, but now its more not in the right spot) so it wasnt going into park properly. no biggie.
then later that night i needed to put the car inside the gates... i drove up the road so i could do a 3 point turn... and on moving from reverse to drive on the 2nd point, the car stalled. how embarassing. it also happened to be right outside my hardcore 4wd/dirt bike neighbours, who just weeks earlier had told me how they think wranglers are the most capable 4WDs on the market.
so, the stalling of an automatic car was a bit odd. but i didn't think too much of it, as it was still recovering after a motor transplant and all.
then the next day i had to do a few odd jobs around the place. i stalled 8 times driving to church street. now, this is just a 4 minute drive (make it 8, because finding parks in church is hell hard) the concern-o-meter was rising. on my trip to westinghouse, i stalled another 3 or 4 times. one almost killed me. so i decided i'd drive him like a manual. so since wednesday i've been so pedantic, but i've learnt to control the car so well. keeping the revs up, especially when changing from drive, to 1 or 2 or reverse.
so, i figured driving around in this manor probably wasn't so safe, so I downloaded a workshop manual for the wrangler and read it through... kinda. it didn't really tell me anything, except on how to change the globes, which i needed to do cos i got some rad narva plus 50's the other day. the rest of the manual was far too confusing. bloody americans.
so today after my economics exam (fail btw.) jon picked me up and we went back to his to pick my car up (i left it there before my exam) took it for a spin back to my house to pick up the manual and globes, then went back to his for some fun times with nuts and bolts and tiny tiny tiny screws. i fitted the new globes (which are so awesome) and we also emptied the lamps, which happened to be full of water and broken glass. then i showed jon what i thought had to be fixed in order to fix my stalling problem. he disagreed and told me theres another way. but it's my car... so we did it my way. anyway, we knew what had to be fixed, but we didn't know how. so we undid all the surrounding bolts and sussed out the thingy that had to be fixed. once worked out, we did all the bolts back up and hey presto. car was fixed. i'm a freakin mechanical genius.
the end.
oh ps. when we took it for a test spin, we went down to caulfield park where there was this RAD pile of tanbark. so we put it in 4L and drove up it. it was so steep that we might have accidentally bent the exhaust, and the stuff that was floating around in the back of the tray hit the back windscreen.
last night i dreamt about pastries. there were apple danishes, and chocolate croissants plus escargot's and the old fashioned croissants with jam. i really really need a car so i can go pastry shopping.
well, i got a quote on fixing Jose for about $4000.00 NO THANKYOU! however, i was almost about to fork over the money when... i was talking to jon who was at work (jon works with me... well, he used to. he's gone off to greener pastures now.) and he told tommy (another IT dude at work) about the quote. tommys like, "get fucked, i'll call my brother/cousin/relation/thing." relation of tommy gives me a quote yesterday of $2900 THANKYOU TOMMY! (and jon.) so thats a saving of either:
a new snorkel, fitted professionally plus money left over for painting the front of the jeep where i accidentally ran into the petrol station and scraped some paint off the plastic bit.
uni books for 2.5 semesters
a computer with:
Dual Core Processor (1.8ghz/core)
1Gb RAM
400Gb HDD
128Mb Graphics
DVD-RW
19" Widescreen Monitor
Cordless Mouse
Cordless Keyboard
Windows Vista (Home Basic)
Food for my family for 15 weeks
Food for a starving 3rd world country family for a lifetime. plus goats and stuff to spare so they can have their local king around for dinner. or queen. whatevs.
MS Word '07 (and the entire Office '07 suit) can blog to blogger. I'm so amazed.
It fixes up all my spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and general stupidness (according to word, "stupidness" isn't a word.) and everything.
I just type it all into Word, and press the "publish" button, and hey presto! I've got myself a blog post published.
Ok, back to cleaning my room.
Ps. The reason I found this out was because mum and I were working out flights for our trip in June, and I needed to send the notes I made from OneNote (best program. Ever.) to her.
today as i was relaxing outside my house waiting for my mum to come home so she could let me in the front door, i got attacked by my crazy romanian neighbour. she works down at the beanery in church street with camilla, and i hear countless stories from camilla about how if camilla doesn't scrub the tables hard enough then no boy will marry her. i've never ever gotten the husband talk from my neighbour, as i was sure i was still considered to be a 10 year old child. alas, i was sat down, with the bright lamp in my eyes, the interrogation began. fifteen minutes later, and my entire life plan sorted out i was out of there (a tiny bit fatter.) my life plan according to a crazy romanian woman:
find a nice boy
he has to be nice because:
i have long eyelashes
i am "very beautiful"
i am "smart"
i come from a "good" family
he must also be "lovely"
stay at home with my parents until i get married
all good girls must stay home to help out with everything
once they move out they have to look after their husband
once married i should have lots of babies. especially boys
boys are important as they bring in the money
girls are almost as important as they are beautiful
i have to stay with my husband forever
i think this means that divorce is out of the picture
as is marrying a woman
or not getting married at all
id also like to add that my crazy romanian neighbour thinks that i am too skinny. in other news today i played pokemon until midday, then amy called me up and we went on a sexxxy date down to church street.
also, last weekend i went 4WDing and managed to kill Jose. i don't have any pictures of the death as yet. but i do have a few others from the weekend:
the convoy.
Jose's new colour
check out how high the mud flies
my bedroom was the blue one
changing room
at the present moment he is being revived over in avondale heights. (near keilor. (near the airport... kinda. (FAR!))) this is due to the fact that i can't afford to tow him to brighton (approx $450) i'm pretty sure the crankshaft is broken. i could be wrong. anyway, it means $$$ to fix. and thats bad. the good thing is, im forced to get a snorkel now (reason why its broken = i didnt have a snorkel) which i've been putting off for a while. i was kinda bummed by the weekend though. because sure, it was fun, but we didn't really do any fun trails. we just did muddy trails. the jeep is awesome at climbing those hills and finding its feet, but all it really did this weekend was get muddy. but it was pretty fun. also, for all those worried about the length of jons hair, yes he has cut his hair and all is back to normal.
also, school is crap. death to damminda. and to microeconomics.
i just made myself the most scrumptious dinner/snack ever. here is the recipe:
sex de la spicy et cheesy
ingredients
easy mac - original flavour
sweet chilli sauce
water
method
make easy mac as per the instructions on the back, but add an extra 50mL to water requirement. upon finishing the easy mac instruction, bypass the "enjoy" step and instead, add a big dollop of sweet chilli sauce and mix well. now return to he "enoy" step. enjoy.
i would take a photo of the finished product, but it was so yummy, that i ate it all before i could take a photo. now i might go off and make another helping.
ps. i started my new job today. the department took me out for lunch and it was fun and i made my own computer and i met everyone and i sat through 4 hours worth of "induction" which consists of 2 scary people giving boring talks and 3 highly amusing videos about OH&S and Equal Opportunity and Sexual Harassment and the likes of things like that. the videos were not intended to be humerous, but one can't help but laugh at people falling off step ladders and slicing themselves open with knives. especially when the said people are awesome 80's actors with awesome 80's mo's.
today has been awesome. mum woke me up at 8am just as she was leaving the house to tell me we are gonna have turkish food tonight, which is a mega bonus, because turkish is good. then she went on to say that dad had already left for work. i could have jumped for joy at that moment, but i didn't on account of i was paralised from the eyeballs down. i didn't even hear mum open or shut the door as she was leaving because my eyeballs then became paraplegic and i was asleep again. at 9ish, i got a call from westinghouse rail asking me for my official academic record.
side note: i have been "offered" (read: handballed) a job in the IT dept of westinghouse rail systems australia to replace one of their "IT specialists" (lolocopter) and all i have to do now is pass a piss test and sign the contract, and resign from browns and then i'm officially no longer a baker of distinction. woot!
so i kinda freaked out here, because i don't think i have an official academic record, and technically i don't even think i have passed my first year of uni because i failed FIT2001, so now i'm 1 subject down. and the subject i am doing to atch up with, i'm failing in. (we had our first test the other week and i failed by half a mark. douche.) so i sent the HR lady my unofficial record, and that seems to have done the trick, they all seem happy. so i'm happy.
then after some more sleep, i continued on with my FIT2013 assignment which is due today. the first 2 questions i'd done, but on the third question, it just wasn't working for me (it was all codig javascript poo) - then i realised that i'd placed a variable in the wrong spot and there was a syntax error (seriously) on the variable code too. gosh im an idiot. so now it works. and i'll try to upload them on here... but im not sure if blogger accepts javascript. we'll find out.
... ... ...
ok it clearly did not work. i published it and my blog basically died. here are some screen shots of what my program was supposed to look like:
and there is another, which does stuff, but it is too much effort to screen shot it all. anyway, i am incredibly proud of these programs, because i did them all by myself. the only help i got was just on layout tips, but no one actually told me stuff that would go to my programs directly. so i am way proud.
after i submitted them, i slept some more, then got woken by my phone again. this time it was greg. he wanted to know if he could borrow my student card for carpooling at monash for the day. so like an hour later, jon and greg appeared on my doorstep. one could easily have mistaken them for being nice strapping young lads, as they were all dressed up in business shirts and pants. they almost looked good looking. but then they spoke, and i realised it was jon and greg. actually, hey could have been mormons. brandon flowers from the killers is a mormon. wouldn't it be cool if he rocked up on your doorstep asking you about god? i'd probably take a photo of his chin.
after that i think i slept some more. since the last bit of napping i did some myspace stalking, blogging and eating.
today has been awesome. also, my cat is EXTREMELY fet.
speaking of fet, i might go down the street to get money out for amy, and maybe go into browns for some food. i better get as much free food as possible now before i quit.
right now i'm listening to POD (crazy lecturer guy whome i have never seen, but he makes a mean podcast) about something or other. the above picture is the second course in my lunch today. i think it proves how poor i have become as a uni student who owns a fuel guzzling jeep. the above in tuna chunks in springwater with a sweet and sour marinade. aka. can of tuna with a dollop of sweet and sour sauce mashed in.
crap. i tuned out of the podcast. poo.
now, i know this is kind of a plug for microsoft, but it's for a good cause. i figure Bill Gates has enough money, and he does give it to charity, but he should give more. so i'm forcing him to give more. pity the charities aren't in my top 10 of most important charities around. but i mean, beggers cant be choosers. that really doesn't fit in this context.
ok. as it turns out, the photo is shit. i did it whilst trying to salvage the car roof, and it was a quick photo. and it doesn't show much. after we moved the car roof (hardtop) out of the way, i took a photo of the destruction our humble abode has faced in the past 3 days. not only did our roof fall down cos it rotted through due to rain and shit. but one of our trees fell down from lack of water. it was a green tree, and looked healthy, but just the drought eventually made the limbs snap. and now half of our front garden is tree. (it was a big tree) so here is an annotated photo.