Oh. My. God. Slowest day in history. Why is today so slow?
I finish early today. Excel is killing my brain right now. One of my formulas (formulae?) isn’t working, and I don’t know why. Waaaaah! 
May 082007
I’ve been reading up on the “Boiling Frog” analogy. I first came across this in high school, when the book “The Gathering” by Isobelle Carmody was part of the year 9 curriculum. I can’t remember what they’re trying to explain with the analogy. Recently I remembered it in an odd, slightly nostalgic moment, and decided to do some research because I thought there could be an interesting story behind it, and a possible debunking. So, I have found that it is a very common analogy, only recently debunked by experiments, but the argument goes that these most recent experiments heat the water at a much faster rate than that of the original experiments.
But anyway, it made me wonder at the common usage of this analogy. You could end up disproving your own point by using it. Am I making any sense whatsoever? My brain isn’t calibrated for this kind of information downloading. Well, not at the moment anyway. Come back in a couple of days and I might be more coherent. I guess what I mean is that if you use an analogy based on a scientific theory, and that is later contested or disproven, then wouldn’t the gravity of your original point be undermined somewhat? Instead of meaning “Be careful of complacency, small changes over a long period of time can have more disastrous effects than you might initially be able to comprehend”, it might become, “I don’t do my own research, can you tell?”. I still haven’t really conveyed what I had in mind. Chk chk chk.
Zomg did anyone else see the multitudes of people on platform 5 & 6 at Central Station this afternoon? Looks like Queensland Rail are improving their service! They had announcements going over the loudspeaker saying “Due to overcrowding please remain on the concourse”. This would mean nothing to me if I were one of those people being overcrowding. I’d be all, “Concourse? what concourse? do we use that word here?” I wonder what was going on. I’m surprised people didn’t look more fed up than they did. And then the 5:36 Elimbah express arrived early, at 5:26, and then they updated the time of departure to 5:28. So what about all those people who live at Elimbah (God forbid – where even is that?) which must be a fair way out because it’s an express train, who were counting on the train leaving at 5:36 because it ties in with their start and finish times, are going to miss their train because it went eight minutes early! I’d be pretty ticked off if it happened to me, and I only get off at Wilston!
But speaking of afternoon trains, how did nighttime start at 5pm all of a sudden? It’s not nice walking home in the dark! I’ll be glad when it’s colder and I get to feel cold and wear warm clothes. It was so humid today.
I want to know everything there is to know in the world. Actually, it’s mainly just the useless things I want to know. I really wanted to learn Latin so when Noelle and I sing Sub Tuum on a drunken walk from the Valley to the City, I actually know what I’m saying. This is why I ask so many questions. It’s not just a generation-y thing. Why why why? I want to know why about everything. I find almost everything fascinating. But I know I have to curb this habit of asking questions, some people don’t like it. It can be considered impolite to question people, especially those older than you. When I’m old too it will no longer matter. I’ll be able to ask as many questions as I like.
I’ve been watching Dilbert lately. The funniest episode so far was the very last one where Dilbert has been impregnated by a cow/alien/robot/hillbilly, and throughout the pregnancy he took on all these feminine traits. He was mouthing off about something or other with Asok and Wally and Loud Howard, and when they offered solutions he said “Why are you doing this? I don’t want solutions!” which is so true. Men always offer solutions to women when women complain about things, but what women really want is just sympathy. That’s difficult for men, they like to solve things. They think that a woman telling him her problem is an invitation to offer a solution to it. Women then get frustrated because they just want the man to listen and make alternately sympathetic and reassuring noises.
My opinoin on this entire issue from a female perspective is this: Your female friends are the best ones to tell your problems to. They can empathise and will give you the response you want/need (most of the time). Of course you are free to share your issues with the man in your life, but it’s not fair to get mad at him for trying to fix the problem.
And to guys… well… you can offer us solutions, but we’re not always going to appreciate them.
I agree with many aspects of the suffragette movement, and I’m grateful for what they achieved through their hard work and suffering, but I also think that there is a point at which it becomes too political when it should be scientific. For one thing, the whole “I can do anything you can do” is not necessarily true. The differences in brain structure between men and women are what causes men to be, generally, better at solving spatial problems – men can focus extremely well on one task, which leads to the conclusion that men can only do one thing at a time. That might be true, but most of the time they do it well. Due to having more connections between the left and right sides of the brain than men do, women are able to multi-task and empathise – it becomes harder to separate the emotional from the physical, which is why women will often say “I feel…” when referring to situations, whereas men will concentrate on the facts (as they see them). These extra connections between right & left cerebral hemispheres are also responsible for the difficulty that women have in reading maps, or from telling their left from right. (I have extreme difficulty telling left from right. When asked directions, I can point in the direction I need to go, but can’t tell you whether that direction is left or right.)
I guess that this should be evidence enough that I am fascinated also by the physical/mental/emotional differences between males and females. In humans, anyway. It would be interesting to study gender roles in other species and compare them. I want to go to Uni!
I’ve been watching Lost most of the afternoon. Right now, an episode with Desmond as the focus character has started. This is awesome because Desmond is probably my favourite at the moment. I love his accent, and he has the power to see into the future randomly. But then there is this side-story running throughout that is like the “Final Destination” movies so far (it might develop into something more impressive, but for now it’s not all that amazing) whereby Desmond sees Charlie dying in various ways and accordingly prevents his death. Plus i just realised why Desmond calls everyone “brother”. I was wondering about that.
The people next door are having arguments again. They yell really loudly, and because I went down to put the garbage out (good timing!) I could hear quite a lot of what they said, but I still couldn’t understand what they were arguing about. Mum thinks it is the 15 year old boy who lives there that was yelling. He apparently plays “that stupid game” in his backyard (which is how mum described it) which Rosie elaborated upon by saying, “yeah, I know what you’re talking about, he has a stick and waves it around like Star Wars, and runs up and down the yard and does noises and stuff.” Lol!
Noelle and I had our picnic at Roma Street Parklands today. As you can see, the grass really is greener… over there. There’s one big expanse of grass which has dried up and died, but the rest is still alive and well. Noelle and I had wheat-free bread (super dense but yum) with cream cheese, tomato, lettuce, jarlsberg and also some chicken from a chicken salad that we got from McDonalds at Roma St station, seeing as there were no real shops open today (Noelle said, “Those labour day sales adds were misleading! They’re the reason I thought shops would be open today.”) We also had some watermelon and some rice crackers, and pineapple juice. It was a lovely picnic. Dumb ibis.
One bad experience of the day was public transport. Brisbane Public Transport SUCKS! Allow me to explain: Noelle’s bus came fifteen minutes late, so when it arrived, another one arrived at the same time. Once Noelle had arrived in the City, we walked down to Central Station. After viewing the timetable tvs, we found a Roma Street Train would be leaving Platform 5 in approx. four minutes – plenty of time to get down to the platform and get on the train, right? Well, in any other universe but this one apparently. None of the escalators providing access to platforms 5 & 6 were going down – they were all set to go up. So, not a big problem, we hurried down the stairs. We struggled through a throng of people exiting the train we wanted to board, and just as we got to the yellow line, the doors closed – right in the face of some foreign guy who shrieked and jumped backwards. With over two minutes until the departure time scheduled on the screen, the train pulled away from the platform at the signal whistle from a QR employee. We spoke to this person, who became defensive and indignant. It wasn’t her fault she blew the whistle, apparently. She can’t control the train timetables. She doesn’t have to take this. I said to her, “You are a representative of Queensland Rail – in fact, the only one that I can see this minute. You are the person we’re speaking to about it.” Noelle said “You blew the whistle for the train to go!” But apparently this logic was too obvious for her, and she walked away from the discussion muttering under her breath.
Queensland Rail could benefit from some customer service training for their staff.
Whenever mum calls out to me, no matter what she’s saying, it makes me feel like I’m in trouble for something. This is especially true if she’s calling up from downstairs. She says “Hey Cass…” but the tone is like a warning sound, and I respond warily with “yeah….?” slowly. It’s either going to be a random question about something-or-other which I won’t know the answer to straight away anyway, or I’m going to be berrated for not wiping the bench down properly or something.
Well, I’m tired and have a headache. I’m going to go to sleep so that I’m at my best for work tomorrow, and so that I don’t seem “not myself”. Who am I if I’m not me? Someone less likeable perhaps… Sorry everyone! Here are some pictures to make up for it:
On Sunday morning after my birthday party the night before, Chris, Rosie, Noelle, Dad and I went to yum cha in the valley. When we went to pay, Chris realised he needed to get cash out to pay for his share. There is an ATM just near the counter, so he went over to get money out while I paid for the meal. Afterwards, as we were walking down to Chris’ car, he said, “You know that noise of when you run a stick along a fence? Imagine that noise coming out of an Asian man’s ass while you’re standing at the ATM.”
I loled and said, “What do you mean?”
Chris said, “When I was getting money out of the ATM, I heard that noise and thought, ‘I don’t remember there being a fence in here’. Then I turned around and there was an Asian man standing behind me farting, and he just looked around.”
Another amusing Chris anecdote:
Me: If you were an animal, I think you would be a doe.
Chris: Fuck off! I hate birds!
I would qualify his remark but I think that would take away the humour.
Before I had my own website, I used to visit a site where people would submit disturbing search requests that had shown up in their log files, and daydream of a time when I, too, had my own disturbing search requests to submit to this site. I had forgotten about this ambition of mine until a few days ago, when I was looking at my site stats. I am now the proud enabler of various odd searches…
harblz - this one is obvious. But I really need to fix the broken links on my harblz pages. I’m in the process of sending them all over to istoletheinternets
brentality – I have previously written about Brentality in a post after I had been tricked by Captain Jim and X C into believing that there were various levels and rites of passage for the emo/scene crowd. It was a pretty good lie though.
acid rain evil – Well, acid rain is evil, wouldn’t you agree? Or maybe you’re more of the scientific mindset and you’ll say, “acid rain does not have a moral proclivity”. To this I would say “For sooth! Are the factories which spew poisonous chemicals into the air not aware of what they are doing? Has not a fair amount of the population seen ‘An Inconvenient Truth’? Fie! Ye scoundrels, ye scum!” etc.
disturbing apple – It’s ok, apples disturb me too. Especially when they’re on Tool film clips
mario kart ds logo – Though I would hope that my site is used as more than just a Nintendo graphic repository, you’ll take what you can get.
todd blankenship gay - Sorry, I’m not privy to Todd Blankenship’s sexual preference. Perhaps you could ask Jack Handey?
formula computation for carpark charges - So my site was one of the best resources for this? Sounds seriously interesting.
i’m not afraid of nichols park – So someone else isn’t afraid of Nichols Park? I wouldn’t know for sure if I’m not, because I’ve never been there, but I have to trust Sufjan Steven’s opinion on the matter because these are lyrics from one of his songs, and if you write a song about something that means you’re really feelin’ it.
lauren and nathan worth - They are priceless.
maybe it’s the beer talking marge but you got a butt that won’t - quit? is that what you were going to say? Yeah, I know, they’ve got these big chewy pretzels here that are mmfhp dpff … Five dollars? Get outta here…
Wooo I’m tired. Noelle and I are having a picnic in Roma St. Parklands tomorrow. I wonder if it’ll be packed… we’re both broke so it’s going to be a surprise picnic! I went grocery shopping today (hence why I am broke) so I should have a few interesting additions. Perhaps some raw diced lamb? Or maybe a sachet of powdered soy milk? I like being creative in things, it makes me feel like I’m on Jericho and we have to ration our food out. But I’m not going to go all mental over salt, because I don’t even like it. Jees.
I found a couple of old emails from work (not current work, a previous job). There were these boys (I think they were brothers… maybe even twins!) who we used to see walking around, and one of them we called Clark Kent, because we thought he looked like Clark Kent. So anyway, this is our conversation after he walked past….
Me: You know one of those clark kent boys always wears the same stripey jumper? I think you may be onto something – he could actually be superman, because doesn’t superman always wear the same clothes?
Melinda:mmm, you are right… maybe one of us should jmump from a great height and see if he saves us!
Me: Yes, because if you ddie then you won’t know that you hadn’t been saved, and if you are saved then whoopdedo! Superman exists!
Melinda: I am not talking about jumping from the 20th floor, I just mean off my desk!!!
Me: There could be one of those holes in the floor just where you jump (you know those hole that are scattered all over the place?*) and when you land on it, it crumbles and you fall through to the R dept**, then there’s another hole directly under that and you fall through to whatever is underneath R dept, and someone says to R dept, “Can we have Melinda?” and they say, “yep, we’ve got her, but we have to fill out the R forms first” and so you wait, and after a few hours you check with them again and they say “Oh actually, we’ve sent her back to Arbiters***”. So then we have to order you from Arbiters, and this all could have been averted had superman existed!
* We worked in an old building. The floor was in urgent need of repair, and little dents started appearing in the carpet. I’m not sure how this happened. But complaints were made because people would trip over them, especially in high heels, so it became kind of a big deal.
** R Department is another department downstairs from ours.
*** Arbiters is the external storage company we used. Note that this is not the actual name of the storage company. Also, note that this was a daily occurence – we would request something from that department, they would say that yes, they had what we were requesting, and that it would be available to us once they had finished their paperwork. Then you’d check back with them later in the day and it turned out they’d sent the thing you wanted offsite, to our external storage company, which wasted another two days time in getting it back to us. I love workplace efficiency.
My 2nd and 3rd fingers of my right hand (counting from left-right, not including the thumb as one of the fingers) are painful to type with, because I cut them on the lid of a plastic box this afternoon. I don’t know how I manage to do these things, I really don’t.
That email from work reminded me how much I miss the guys I used to work with… Calum has gone down to Melbourne but I’m in pretty regular contact with him, so it’s ok. Melinda I got emails from last week, and I have to email her back so hopefully I have a bit of time to breathe this week at work and not too tired when I get home, and Ben… I haven’t heard from him in ages, not since a couple of weeks after I left work. I miss Benyamin. I get the feeling he may have already left on his overseas trip, and in that case he’ll probably be in much higher spirits than he was when I last spoke to him… The place we were working tended to suck the happiness and life out of people.
Anyway, I’ll see if I can post some pictures from this picnic we’re having tomorrow. If I feel like writing, or whatever. Whatever dude! Tewtally!
I had a dream about work night before last. Then last night, I had a dream about people from work, but not in a work situation. I dreamt that there was a bomb out in the ocean. It looked sort of like a box, with a computer keyboard attached. In order to stop the bomb, the “2″ key on the numerical keypad of the keyboard had to be pressed, only the devious person who set the bomb also removed the “2″ key.
We were all standing in a big area with lots of covered stalls, like a market, but every table had different types of keyboards on it. I found a “2″ key, and took it from the keyboard, but then realised that because it was an ergonomic keyboard, and the keyboard of the bomb was just a normal old beige one, it wouldn’t fit. Everyone then started searching for a suitable keyboard to steal the key from. I finally found one that was similar, and stole the “2″ key, and some other keys as well (I have no idea why). Someone came up to me and told me to put the keys into a basket so that we could keep them afloat and swim out to the bomb, so I put all keys except the “2″ key in there. I said that it would be safer if I just held it myself.
We then ran down to the dock, and were searching for a place to dive in where there weren’t any rocks. As I was running up and down the dock, I saw a dead body lying on the ground. It had slashes all over it’s body where blood oozed out. I said “I can’t dive in here. I’m going further up.” I found a spot without rocks and jumped into the water, careful not to go too deep in case there were rocks i couldn’t see, or I had misjudged the depth. When I was in the water, I realised that there were lots of people who had been slashed just like the dead body on the dock, and they were all Sudanese refugees, all floating in the water around me. I saw a boat just beside the dock where the refugees were going and a man there would slash patterns onto their chests and abdomens as they tried to get on the boat.
Then I woke up.
I thought I’d write that down to remember it. I have a bad memory, but for some reason if I write something down, I will be more likely to remember it.
This week has been a tough week, especially with Tim being away. Work was busy with end-of-month, plus now learning Payroll and Super. It’s good that it’s a long weekend, because I really need the rest. I need to do a spring clean of my room, and do some laundry, and move the boxes out of the spare room that I put there with all these good intentions of going through them to figure out what I had and what I needed for when I eventually move out. It sounded like a relaxing Sunday afternoon task, something that I wouldn’t need to think a lot about, but then I got distracted by something and so it never got done.
I’m really good at procrastinating. I have all these grand plans of rearranging my room, putting away in boxes downstairs all the things I no longer use, the books I know I won’t read, and untangling all the cords under the computer desk and beside my bed. I hope that this does happen, but already this morning I’ve procrastinated by deciding that right now is the best time for me to write a blog (it’s been hard to get in the mood to write lately. I go with the flow, baby!), and also that I have to make a cool “spring clean” playlist in WMP that i can listen to while I clean. I really do need a playlist, it’s easier to keep going with cleaning if I am listening to awesome music.
I think I’ll also pause during the clean to read old notes kept in my “things to remember!” shoebox, and by looking through the photographs from our trip overseas, maybe finish off putting them in their photo album just because I think, “If i was really cleaning up, then EVERYTHING should be in order and finished”. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have the time. These are things that are good to do to keep me occupied, because looking through photos of our overseas trip makes me feel happy (but also nostalgic). I also need to write up the conglomerate of my diary from the trip. I’ve been meaning to do that for ages, but its such a big job :S.
I also need to update the graphic memes on istoletheinternets, and create a decent design for the site. I’m not a graphic designer, which makes it difficult, but Nathan did make me a banner to put up which I might try to use the design from for the header. Or something.
It’s good having Tim as part of my life, even though I miss him terribly. He’s in Scotland at the moment, and sent me this photo of a view from a hill a few days ago. He’s going to visit Loch Ness. Last week, Japanese scientists explaced… placed explosive detonators at the bottom of Lake Loch Ness to blow Nessie out of the water. Sir Cort Godfrey of the Nessie Alliance summoned the help of Scotland’s local wizards to cast a protective spell over the lake and its local residents and all those who seek for the peaceful existence of our underwater ally. Lol. But seriously, Tim is such a generous, thoughtful, funny (either deliberately or accidentally) person. I hope he’s having an awesome time, but I can’t wait until he gets back.
Nathan is one of the smartest people I know. For real, and I work with a lot of doctors (though not the medical kind).
Plus, I find these Cyanide and Happiness comics amusing. Check them out.
