Satisfy your inner geek
and get yourself a brand-spanking new Xbox 360 :)
Apparently the
launch party for Xbox in Australia will feature the three main things that get geeks and nerds alike to leave their PC tonight:
1. free food and drink (anything free will get me moving)
2. giant outdoor screens (imagine playing games on these gargantuan screens!)
3. dancing girls (ok this won't do much for me..)
Even if you don't want to get an Xbox, you really should get a gaming console if you haven't got one already! (At least an emulator even if you don't want to spend $$$ ....)
You're not a geek if you can't say that you've completed classics such as Resident Evil, Tomb Raider (1, 2, and 3) and played Warcraft 3 or WOW at least once! For the stressed and burnt out geek in you, try sniper-shooting civilians and gang members in GTA3. Going postal in the safety of your own home and console is therapeutic ... at least that's what I keep telling my parents ;)
Get rich quick!
Read an article on how the ASX recovered from its low of less than 3000 points in March 2003 to its high several days ago of 5000 points. It's take about 2 years for its bull run. Now it seems like we might start to have a bear market.
Was talking to some people and the general feeling I've heard is that the market is slowing down. It's not helped by some shares which had stellar performances over the past year, only to see a good percentage of that growth reverse in a couple of months. A prime example is Macquarie Bank. Only in December, it was trading at around AUD $68, 69, even 70 on a good day. Now it's hanging around the high 50s, low 60s mark. A difference of about $10... if only I'd sold mine in December hehe. What has changed in Macquarie's business model? Not much. Sentiment towards the company has changed. No longer is it the darling, daring Aussie company making millions in fees. Somehow its business model has become unsustainable and investors have started dumping the stock since December for this very reason. Only time will tell whether this is true.
Telstra's another example. Around August, September 2005, the buzz was about Telstra 3, the total privatisation of this telecom company. Many colleagues of mine bought a bucket of Telstra shares, anticipating a rise in the market price when T3 is approved by the government. This, however, has not come to pass as yet. The share price was previously hovering around the 3.80, 3.90 mark, and it did break the 4.00 mark for a while. It has now plummeted back down to 3.68, possibly nearing the 3.50, 3.40 price it went down to last time.
I didn't get into the sharemarket the last time it dipped. Laziness and study kinda prevented me from really looking into it seriously. But now, the need to get rich quick is pushing me to consider other money-making (or losing) channels.
How would you react
if someone at work asked whether you and a certain other person were *shudder* an item?
Most people can easily answer when they are not asked at work, or when said person is someone that they do not work with. It's easier to brush someone off when you know that you won't have to deal with them in any capacity later.
But if it happened at work, or it involved a work colleague, how differently do people react? It's harder to gauge this reaction. Most would say it depends on who the certain other colleague is and the context of the inquirer. It would direct your reaction to one of three possibilities:
- the I'm-shocked-yet-oh-so-flattered-you-thought-we-were reaction. This has been known to appear when the target colleague is the desirable type.
- the huh?? response. This is the middle of the road, stitting on the fence reaction where you just need to sound out a confused grunt and it saves you from further embarrassment.
- finally my personal favorite: the what-have-you-been-smoking?!-I-have-great-taste response. It's worked well on some people and deflects any embarrassment thru humour.
Any one of the above are useful in deflecting this question. I personally tend to go for #3, using #2 only for those times where I'm a little too shocked (read: horrified).
Information overload
How people keep up with the news and all the blogs they subscribe to is beyond me.
Bloglines is screaming at me to read all 800 of my unread items... and that's only from 30 feeds that I neglected reading for 3 days. It forces me to click on an entire feed and skimread bits up to a certain point.
People are able to cope with it though. So maybe it's just I need to be more efficient with the things that I do on a daily basis. No more late nights and long hours at work, especially after reading up on the
myth that staying late = commitment (and no, I'm not having an affair of any sort at work, thank you very much).
You know you're an IT geek when...
You read the words 'cruise control', and the first thing that came to your mind is 'continuous integration' ahhaa.
A friend sent thru an email, subject: Cruise Control. Nothing to do with IT, it was actually talking about how you should never have cruise control on when you're driving in the rain. It can cause your car to suddenly accelerate when the tires lose contact with the pavement.
Freedom! Part 2
I've been told that in my previous "Freedom!" post, I managed to conveniently forget to mention another aspect of my freedom - freedom from the oppression, the subjugation, the tyranny known as "the boyfriend" ;)
Well, truth be told he's not such a tyrant. I think I'm experiencing Stockholm-Syndrome-withdrawal symptoms now that he's gone. I've lost my one and only chauffeur, financial backer, joke-tester, therapist (read: listens to my whinging all day long), and movie buddy. I can probably go without four of those five things, one I absolutely cannot live without. You can guess which one hahahaa.
The good thing is I now have heaps of time.... to do absolutely nothing hahaa. I am reading books again, watching TV (the Foxtel is getting a lot of mileage), going out with family, catching up or organising catchups with friends that I haven't seen for yonks, and starting to call other people on the phone. It's amazing how narrowly focused you can be when you have to work, study, and maintain a relationship all at once. Mind you, it's not that I didn't have fun back when I was studying. It was just that I had to sacrifice sleep in order to have that same amount of fun.
Now that I've managed to kill or suspend two of those three responsibilities, life suddenly is so much more carefree, so much more enjoyable and so much more fun! It's a delicate balance between devoting time to the relationship and time for yourself. But, that's a topic for another post!
Fitness comes first
It's been a week since my last post. In that time I went to the gym twice (yay me!) and also went swimming at Fitness First St Leonards. I did some laps around their pool, I think I managed 30. But it was so small, it looked like it was 25m or so. Definitely not the Olympic-size 50m pools.
I did feel a little like Thorpe, swimming laps back and forth, beating the competition (read: little old ladies) in the "slow" lane right next to my "leisure" lane ahahha. I'll going to make this a regular weekend thing. I've forgotten how much I loved swimming. I did look a little rusty but I'm sure my Thorpedo skills will come back to me one day. In the meantime I've set myself a goal: graduate from the leisure lane into the slow lane. And then from the slow to the medium. I don't think I could ever go to the fast lane. Those guys are animals! They do that tumbling turn when they get to the end. I never learned how to do that but I guess there's a first time for everything.
Tax accountants miscalculating tax?!
What do you do when your tax accountant company makes a mistake when they lodge their own taxes?
The worst nightmare ever has just come true for
H&R Block Tax Accountants in the US. They made a big boo-boo in filing their income taxes when they
understated their tax liabilities by a cool $32 million. Not only is it a huge public relations disaster, but also it may well floor the sales and promotion of their TaxCut tax calculation software ("accuracy guarantee"). Their competitors should experience increased sales after this fiasco.
It should be interesting to see how they deal with this issue, and how will they regain people's trust again....
