Lessons learnt

So Friday was my last day at my old job, as I've mentioned before I'm moving on to a new business area as of Monday. Out with the consumer Internet projects and in with the institutional banking, I'm not really nervous like I thought I would be with a new job, I think maybe in the morning I will be. I had my farewell drinks on Friday night and I was surprised at the turn out, I had about 30 people there at the height of it all, they weren't all work "mates" a lot were just people that I worked with, but it is nice that they went to the effort to come out. I recieved much advice and questioning about my future direction, people kept tell me I am moving into an area of the corporation where "all the money is", I don't think I'll be seeing any of that for myself anytime soon, but my old work collegues seem to think I'm getting some massive payrise, which I can tell you I'm not, it pretty much a straight transfer.

It is funny you know, because about every 3rd person was tell me that the area I am going to is where the money is, yet they had no idea that they happen to be the rated No. 1 in the Australian sector for what they do, that is actually why I want to go here, I want to see what has made them the best in the business. I want to be around people that actually feel motivated to do things better, instead of being around the nay sayers and "lifers" that just come to work every day to get a pay check and couldn't give two shits if things change.

Anyway, I was going to write a whole lot more about what I've learnt over the last 18 months in my current work and what I have discovered is a good way with dealing with quitting your job, and how to manage peoples expectations, but I'll save that for another time.

Wish me luck that things are going to turn out decent for me here, cause if they don't.... *shakes fist*

Here, have some Greenland

Hell I wouldn't mind going here and trying Polar Bear either.

More Icelandic love

More articles to read on Iceland, I really really want to go there. I'd love to study something over there I think. But first a holiday is in order.

How will I ever decide between doing that or getting enough money to do something like travelling around the Antarctic? Oh boy, I really want to do something like that one day, I need some big cash dollars from somewhere for that though.

5 tweets in blog form

1. Soulseek might be crap these days, but it still pulls out the odd rarity when you sure as hell can't find it on the regular internets.

2. I plan to start doing this on Monday, I am pretty sure I can only do about 5 proper pushups tops at the moment.

3. I am both please and apprehensive that next week is my last week in my current job. Then it is on to the non internets world.

4. Hybrid Soundsystem_01 Disc 1 is really decent for ambient movie soundscape lovers, disc 2 is sadly really crap for everything.

5. Is glad that I am through week 1 of the Couch to 5km program with astro. Time to do it all again in a new city!

Remember when we cared about the internet?

Reading a little article about how <a
href="http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1553218">slashdot
came about</a> (about to read the other parts if I can find them,
while I wait for I.T to fix stuff for me), it got me all nostalgic
about those heady times when I was at the end/out of high school and I
really loved the internet and all things computer related. Reading
this article made me also realise that this guy who created slashdot
is not much older than myself, then I started to feel annoyed that I
never got off my arse and did something back then that I would have
found cool. I guess when I was just finished high school I thought I
was already too late! All this Internet stuff was booming! Amazon,
MP3.com, Ebay, Yahoo, I thought these juggernauts had everything
covered, I thought everyone else had everything covered, even when I
started working for MP3 aye yoo I felt that the company I was in was
too late getting in the game (years later I realised I was right and
wrong there...) but hell, when I look back on it now I feel like the
internet was still like a small child.

I guess my whole point is that I should stop thinking it is too late
to try something, not that I really have anything now that I want to
try, which sucks and something I attribute to getting old and not
exercising that "inventor" side of the brain.

Ok rambly drawn out blog (I've been writing this word by word over 4
hours :/ ) over.

New NY law: show me the calories.

I just saw this (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25464987/) and while I
think that having a law that requires shops to show the calories that
are in foods is a step in the right direction, but personally I'd
rather they have to list out what ingedients are in their foods and
how much. I would figure that would be more benefitical to all and
easier for the people who make the food to do this than have to
calculate a calorie count (which is probably very uneven item to
item). I think I'd be far more turned off eating something bad for me
that showed how much sugar/salt/fat i'm inducing instead of calories.

Debt slavery folks...

This country is in big trouble with housing isn't it? I mean we are looking down the barrel of some interesting times in a few years (maybe 2 years) if the current economic climate continues to take place. People are holding on for rates to stop rising, but a key indicator the RBA is using currently to decide if to raise rates is inflation, food, petrol, and all that other junk we use to live our daily lives is going to keep going up, seriously, it is going through a long over due correction, who would have thought that we should be paying a fair price for the crap we dig and scrape off the ground?
My thoughts aside, inflation, it sucks, this country is in big trouble with its expansive policy setting of the last government. We have these things called "houses" that we live in, we have been sold to us by the powers that be that the "Aussie dream" is to own our own home. So then everyone got one, way back when, and then they had a great economic run for a long time and then got greedy and though "lets buy a bunch of houses, hell we only need to live in one, maybe have a second for a holiday home, but fuck that lets leverage ourselves to the eyeballs and get as many as we can con our locale money lenders into letting us buy".
So then people did, and the government changed the policy on everyone to let this happen even easier, slashing capital gains tax and giving us negative gearing options, those arseholes. They were selling it to us like it would make it easier for "the battlers" to get in and buy a house, but when you look at those policies, they are really only there to help multiple property owners (MPO), and these MPO's are dippy old people that have basically become slum lords because they buy shitful properties in inner city locations, but are too lazy and ignorant to develop them, so they rent it out at highly inflated prices and get rewarded for losing or making money on these properties, but will be at a servere financial disadvantage if they sell them, because everything is geared towards allowing people to buy investment properties, but penalising them to sell, what's the fucking point?
So now rents have risen, battlers are losing their homes because they can't afford shit, wealthy boomers are holding on to all their houses because there is no point selling it unless the prices are booming through the roof So now we are all going to sit around clutching our nads, with no houses to buy and rising rents, because in this climate no one wants to invest in housing because it costs a bomb and is a nightmare to organise, buy pre existing houses for massively inflated prices in a market that is declining in value, or sell houses and lose money, even the government is dragging their feet on building massive developments because quite frankly, no government in this country has ever made a good decision on public housing.

Why don't we wake up to ourselves and do something about these rent increases? Hell even a place like Dubai is capping rents, yes that's right, of all places, fucking Dubai is capping rents! Even European countries have sense when it comes to rental properties, they've been capping rents for, well forever, and have this little thing of valuing rental properties of $ / square metreage instead of Australia's $ / Wow factor + water front views.

I don't even know where I was going with this, so instead of editting it or deleting it, I'm just going to publish at and go lie in the bed where it is warm. Night.

Other things on imdb that excite me

Rendezvous with Rama
Ender's Game
Avatar
Battle Angel

Ones that interest me, I wonder how they'll turn out:

Star Trek
Terminator Salvation
Fantastic Voyage


Ahhh, recycled stories, don't you just love them?

Dollhouse

I am vaguely interested in seeing Joss Whedon new Sci-Fi show Dollhouse. Although as much as this guy has created some much loved shows, I've never been a edge-of-my-seat-my-see-the-next-episode fan, Maybe he'll prove me wrong.

And speaking of Eliza Dushku, whatever happened to that show Tru Calling? It was totally decent and had Jason Priestley as a main character, that is television gold right there!

You think our governments bad...

Take a look how the Italian government has bailed out their national airline over the years. My favourite part of the article: Italy has injected about 3 billion euros into Alitalia in the past decade.

John Howard was good for something, he just let Ansett crash and burn after the small assistance they got over their lifetime. Sure it was hard for a couple of years and a lot of people lost their jobs/money, but this country now has more competition and cheaper flights than ever and a lot (although not all) of those people did find other employment.

Can't let go of those ideas...

I can't believe Michael Robertson who's brainchild was the original
big music website MP3.com, is trying to get his "music locker" idea
off the ground again. He basically ruined the relationships he had
with the major record labels the first time around (8 or 9 years ago)
when he just went and ripped 1000s of signed artist CDs and placed
them online, then through the magic of software and the internets, if
you put a legitimate CD in your computer drive it would unlock those
albums for you inside your MP3.com account to download or stream (I
can't remember if you had to pay for that service.... I think it was
free for the limited amount of days it was online). As you can
probably guess, this system is pretty open to rorting, and so the
litigation came down like a ton of bricks, the the dot com crash
happened, and it pretty much sank MP3.com as a viable commercial
entity.

And now he is doing it all over again at MP3tunes.com, guess what?
Litigation reigns supreme all over again. EMI are pissed off at him
(and it is probably just because it is M.R that they are chasing it).

Sometimes you just have to let an idea die or approach it a completely
different way to get it off the ground. I assume he just thought it
was market timing, the world and record labels weren't ready for such
a forward thinking idea (that was badly implemented), and record
labels don't want this idea spun to them by a black sheep still
closely associated with the words illegal, music, MP3, Napster,
AudioGalaxy etc. No matter how unfounded that is.

You can't "like everything"

People when it comes to music, saying that you "like everything" is a
cop out answer. Liking everything = loving nothing. I don't believe a
person can be really passionate about ALL music. Pick some fucken
music and be proud to say you love it. If you give me that "like
everything" answer I'm hardly going to keep a music conversation going
with you. Even if you love something I'm not that interested in
personally, at least I will admire your enthusiasm for it.