Fwd: Testing 1, 2, 3

Testing to see if I can blog from sending an email, how is this working?

New Job

In my new job I am about to accept on Monday, I will be employed as an "Associate". That is a very ambiguous name for "guy that does the stuff no one really wants to do."

I guess we'll see what it is really like in 2 to 4 weeks time!

Did I mention I have a PS3 now?

So yeah, if I updated my 365 blog you'd see that I bought a 40" Samssung M8 LCD TV and a PS3, I got the MGS4 bundle pack the day after it came out (I wanted the GTA4 but it was all sold out). So yeah, a PS3 is far cooler than what I thought it would be, with the new firmware updates you can stream images/music/video from a Vista machine, which means you don't have to load everything up on the PS3 before playing it, awesome. It works great for TV programs and the like, probably will not work for a blu ray rip or something that high quality, it also doesn't do all codecs, like H264 or whatever the hell it is, which is bad cause all the NBA rips are done like that these days, but I'll live.

And yeah, with the Play TV on its way, the PS3 is gonna do everything I want.

OH yeah, it's nice to have digital TV, abc2 saves me from bordem on Sunday more times than not!

Oh yeah, MGS4 is pretty decent, I finished it last Monday, I want to play through it again to see if I can beat it with just pure sneak and handguns, Metal Gear Online blows, it is so laggy, and the automatching thing takes forever. Maybe I just need to level up more for it to get better....

Bank Myths #1: The more credit you have, the easier it is to get.

So I remember when I was younger and I use to believe that getting a credit card with a big limit was the way to go, then once you had a big card with a big limit you could go to another bank and ask for a card with a big limit cause the bank down the road just gave you a card with a big limit so why shouldn't they? Don't they want you as a customer?

Well it seems in reality, if your personal income only allows for you to have 5k of credit from a bank, and you have 4k from one bank, if you don't lie on your application form, the other bank probably won't even give you a credit card, or they *might* give you 1k. Interesting, then if you were to get a loan, they credit often can eat into what you can borrow anywhere from a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio. So if you have a 10k limit they will lend you 10 to 20k less etc.

So what bought up this post? I had a letter from my bank the other day offering to double my limit, interesting, but they also want to charge me more fees if I accept. However on the letter it also has an easy option to lower your limit, which I think is excellent and a very responsible thing to do, I've never seen my other bank do that (I only bank with 2 banks.)

Twitter Revisted

So now I signed up for twitter, properly. I couldn't remember my old twitter u/p from when I signed up last year so I'm alllll new. I don't get it really, neither does astro, its like facebook statuses for mobile phones and webzzz. You could just do this in tumblr or blogger if you wanted to set it up that way. Still I think I'll probably use it while I'm frolicking around town now.

And you can't randomly comment on twitter, I like the random good natured comments I get on blogs which happens about once every 2 years on my blog.

"Our Money"

I don't know if I've blogged about this before, but the concept of "our money" in terms of people in relationships disturbs and complexes me. That whole thing of pooling all the money you've got together as a couple into one big pool that all expenses come out of, I just don't get how you aren't setting yourself up for massive problems in the future with this sort of set up.

So many times I've heard at work and elsewhere about how some is in trouble, or is going to be in trouble with their respective partners because they have bought something for themselves or want to make a massive purchase out of the "our money" pool , and then everyone chimes in with their stories about misfortunes with the "our money" and a lot of them seem to be big sticky sore points with a lot of people.

People are shocked when I tell them how long I've been together with astro and how we don't have an "our money" system. A concensus is that if you are together for around 2 to 3 years you must adhere to this system, what tha? It is weird you know cause astro and I never ever fight about money, sure we (as in me) might tease the other about spending our last bit of cash on stupah, but we have never got to the point of "I can't believe you spent $300+ on a handbag/computer part, how are we going to eat and pay rent now?" kind of situation. I think we work it pretty well, we split all costs, if someone wants to buy a present for the other there is no expectation that anything is ever coming back the other way, if we go out to dinner and one person pays we either take stock and return the favour in the near future or we just forget it, actually when it comes to dinners that aren't a special occasion and it is really expensive, we always sort each other out at a later day, if it is something like $60 total than its no biggie, that is the cost of having fun in a relationship.

If we are going to make a giant purchase together, either one person pays for it all or we go halves, this has changed slightly as we have gotten older, and we pretty much go halves in everything furniture/appliance wise, and if the other person isn't into that much than no biggie, we just don't get it, or we pay for it ourselves, none of this guilting each other into getting something, or making promises of buying Y in the future if we buy X now, or acting like a big baby until the other one can't stand it anymore and buys you the gift, what kind of relationship is that?

I think I can understand the our money thing a bit better once people are married, I mean you are suppose to be together forever right? So pooling your money then for a house or new car or whatever sort of makes sense, but unless you are comfortable contributing all your earnings into a pool for the other to spend at their will, you are always going to hold resentment.

I think the our money thing seems to hit major problems when one person earns a lot more money than the other, yet the lessor earner spends just as much of that hard earned on stuff for them personally. Like a friend at work, she earns good money, her boyfriend is a forklift driver, they do the "our money" thing but he is always wanting to buy things for himself, music equipment, a mountain bike, expensive camera equipment, stuff that is only for himself. They don't have a lot of spare cash after there massive rent fork out (they pay $550 a week) and good time lifestyle they have, so its a massive issue for them. She ended up letting him get the push bike, which he used for about 4 months, was gathering dust for another 3 months, and then he lent it to his friend to have, which she sees as probably never getting it back now. But instead of letting it go she'll buy clothes, other little knick knacks, and if he ever complains she'll always point back to that bike (one of many examples) and justify her purchases that way, tit for tat is not exactly a great way of handling a couples personal finances is it?

I think I might come back and write more on this one, there are steps you can take to overcome these problems, just depends how far down the rabbit hole you have gone with this one.

Remember the 90s?

Trying to log onto efnet to look for something, remember when you were a teenager and you use to wake up and be excited to log onto the internet through our dialup modem and then on to the big wide world of IRC? It seemed like this never ending swam of information and possibilities, all through the power of text in windows. Ahh the 90s what a time to be alive.

Bill Gates quits Microsoft - not really, he is still going to be there one day a week to work on projects. I don't get everyones doomy outlook on Microsoft, I guess they've been doing it for the last 6 or 7 years in that respect. Sure there shares are getting hammered and sure the Xbox and Zune haven't exactly made them lots of cash (although the Xbox is doing alright these days), but this is a company that at the core of its business (productivity software) will never be threatened by recession, or commodity prices putting them out of business, they have billion and billions of dollars in the bank, they recently bought back billons of dollars worth of shares, are everyone is still going to run windows products for the next 10 years (well in the corporate sector anyway), when the bear market bottoms out you could make worse purchases.

But still buying tech stocks is always risky, its like banking on my shitbox car to do a 500+ km drive, by all means it looks like it should make it easy, but something unforseen always happens along the way that turns it into a flaming heap.

You'd think after writing blogs for literally half our lives we'd be bored of it by now. Or figured out why we do it, I have no idea why I feel compelled to write on the internet to only a handful of people that might still read this. Maybe it is just habit now? Maybe I just feel compelled to write? On the Internet? Like how people use a mouse with their right hand 'cause that is what they have always done?

Anyway, job stuff, got my offer Friday COB, it was what I was expecting, nothing exciting, better than what I have now though so that is good. So Monday I gotta tell me boss I really do want to leave and no amount of parading senior people into meeting rooms to get them to tell me to stay is not going to change my mind. Unless you feel like giving me a massive 50%+ raise, then I'd stay... This whole thing really isn't about money anyway, it is about throwing myself into something I have no experience in and seeing if I sink or swim, I am interested in seeing how this whole area of the business works. Supposedly it is the big money making area, I currently reside in an area where we basically beg for money to do projects every year, we'd probably get funding for about 25% of the things we'd like to do, and then after about 6 months about 5 to 10% of that money gets taken back due to "tightening of belts" so stupid. Like for instance, we get allocated yearly money October, for things like training and the sorts, I remember that in December, only 2 ish months after the funding came out, management were saying to "use it now while we have it" I thought they were saying to use it before someone else in your team uses it, what that meant is "use it now before someone above us takes it back" 6 months into the year all the funding for training is not suspended, due "tightening of belts" bloody hell.

Yeah so this new area is not suppose to be like that, they directly make a lot of money for the business, so it you need cash to do something you get it, you blow that cash, only have something 80% done and instead of getting canned, YOU GET MORE MONEY TO FINISH IT, what a novel idea. We'll see if it is really like that though.

Another good thing is that I'll be working in the new fancy building over the other side of town, and instead of having to waddle my arse down there a few times a week to do stuff I'll just be there. Which is good and bad cause you can always make a detour for SNACKS and looking at stuff, but it also sucks when its hot as hell and you turn up to a meeting looking like you just had sex with a dump truck full of extremely unstable water balloons.

I am actually pretty nervous at starting a job where I have no aces up my sleeve, I will know shit going into this, which means I'll have to work my arse off just to do the normal stuff that everyone else can do in 5 minutes, I see many early mornings and late nights doing "stuff", which depresses me but in some sort of sick way sort of excites me.

I have no idea what the hell I am going to do with myself when I turn 30, I remember when I was 16 I thought I'd be dead, in jail, or be a rich barstard by the time I turned 30. I am none of those things, although I think a 16 year old me would be freaked out but happy if he met me, I've come a long way, I never imagined that I'd be doing what I am doing now, hell I never even thought I could get myself a job or even get into TAFE at 16.

I hope when I get to 30 I don't do I lot of looking behind me, at other 20 somethings and being worried about being much stupider than the next generation, its funny at my work, I only know one other person who is my age, everyone else is either at least 3 years younger or 3 years older than me. It is like everyone born on the cusp of Gen X & Y decided that that work for big companies is for chumps and did something else, maybe they are onto something....

So I am in the midst of getting a new job within the place I'm working at, I am probably jinxing the whole deal by blogging about it but whatev. I'm moving out of the 'online' area and moving right into a job that has more to do with what I studied at uni, and less to do with what I already know IT wise. It is a scary move, purely because I've never done a job like this before, well in this area, a job is a job, this isn't strictly technical or requires a lot of specialist skills, but knowing what I know and having studying this stuff at uni means I should be able to pick it all up pretty quickly.

Everything is still up in the air, I'm waiting for a 'formal offer' which our internal recruiter that I'm dealing with is 100% coming, the annoying thing about this all is that it is work protocol to have to tell your boss that you have another role lined up before you actually have the job. On top of that you have to find out when you can leave, which is always ASAP in the other people's minds. So I've been having difficult conversations with my bosses the last 2 days trying to tell them that yes, I am actually keen to go, no it isn't their fault, no there is nothing you can do to make me stay (unless you give me a TON of cash or something very interesting to work on, but that just doesn't happen in the area I'm in at the moment) and yes, it is really what I want. This is all a hard act to swallow when I'm not actually sure if this is really going to be for me, I've never done it before, so how can I possibly know?

Anyway my boss(es) are taking their sweet time to give me a date for when I can leave, which sucks cause it means I can't get my offer until they do, hell I might not even take it if there is something in it that is serverely disadvantaging, its driving me crazy! I just want to have it all over and done with.

Applying for this job was a bit of a pain in the arse too, it sort of found me through a work friend of mine that works in that general area, I went and had a coffee with the people just to suss it out, it seemed interesting, but I was unsure I wanted to take the plunge and I can assure you I came off looking like I didn't know what I wanted too. So I left that and organised to talk to some more people in that area that do a similar job to what I'll be doing, they sort of sold me on it a bit more, then I was strongly urged to apply by the recruiter who was being a proxy for one of the first ladies I met, anyway, after slacking off on doing that I get it inm they immediately set up an interview time, I do a STAR behavourial type interview with some other people, I was stressing hard about it, but because of all my grad interview experiences that do all that same sort of stuff, I did well, it just sort of comes automatically for me now, I can just turn it on at those type of interviews, probably the best lesson I learnt from doing all that grad stuff!

Anyway, then I had to do a second interview with the head honcho and the other senior woman who i happen to meet way back in the second interview, it was pretty much "get to know me" interview, with a few curly questions, no biggie, still stressy though. And now I am here.

Ok time to end this rambly crap cause the last two weeks have just tired the hell out of me!

I need to blog moar.