Wow, that was a great, if busy, weekend. Friday night was the Garbage concert - which was awesome, as is Shirley Manson. They did a lot of their older stuff, which really rocked. Hard. My ears stopped ringing on Monday. 
Saturday, we helped Mal and Elspeth move into their new place (conveniently just across the street from Trang and I). This was a surprisingly large amount of physical labour. Still, it’s all exercise. Then Saturday night, we went out to Summer Hill to watch the Tigers beat St George with Trang’s family. Watching sports with them is a lot of fun, as they tend to the rowdy, which I am not good at. Had an awesome Guiness and Steak pie as well.
Sunday morning was wushu, as always, but being the last training before the end of term, it was a bit quiet and I left early. Which was of course so that I could make it to lunch at Trang’s parent’s place, and have Trang’s mum’s Pho. Which is really, really good. Bummer was, one of the hoses from the water-cycling system decided to break as I was driving out there. Luckily, it was only a few minutes away from Trang’s parents, so I managed to limp back after having run out of water. Turns out that someone had done a dodgy fix a while ago on that particular pipe, and left it in place. Which is kinda odd, as a replacement pipe was only 8 bucks at Super Cheap Autos… Anyway, all fixed and better than before now.
Got a busy long weekend coming up as well, with LAN party action, multiple movies to see, and a Grand Final to watch. Should be great! In preparation, I’ve bought a new video card, which is very exciting. (more…)
Well, I won bronze in the Single Short weapon division of the Australian and Oceania Wushu Competition, for my two-handed sword form. Yay me!
The school did very well, with a whole heap of medals. Overall it was a great day, notwithstanding a few hiccups that were dealt with pretty well by Simon, William, and Sifu.
I’m really happy with how both my forms went, actually. I didn’t do well in terms of score with Xing Yi, but I didn’t really expect to, as the specific style of Xing Yi is quite rare and thus hard to judge if I’m doing it right. I was really happy with my sword form, and the division was really close - I actually got the same score as the guy who got second, but came third on averages, and the guy who got first was only 0.02 away.
Wooo!
Let’s all give a big hoorah to John Howard for collectively bumfucking us as communications consumers. This whole Telstra thing is just a joke. Good old PM John has had it in his head the entire time he’s been in office that we don’t need State-owned utilities, and that competition and deregulation will give us a sleeker, competitive communications system.
What we have in practice is Telstra doing exactly the things you would expect a good capitalist company to do when it procures a monopoly - fight for it tooth and nail, then screw over the low-value, high-maintenance customers in favour of the high value ones. I honestly cannot see how regulation is supposed to ensure that Telstra, as a private company, wastes its shareholder’s money in supporting a non-profit activity.
I think that’s really what this comes down to. John Howard seems to be of the opinion that he can regulate Telstra to be altruistic and maintain universal service in spite of the fact that it goes against the basic nature of a private, for profit company. If you want to guarantee something universally to every citizen, whatever it is should be paid for jointly by every citizen.
This is one of the major reasons for having a government in the first place. By arguing for the privatisation of all public utilities, John Howard is basically arguing that Government should be replaced by the courts and legal system, maybe with a small group making new laws, chosen by whoever can pay the most. And so there shall be consumer goods for all, until such time as we fuck up the environment and run out of resources and civilisation degenerates into a post-apocalyptic mess where we kill politicians and eat them for their valuable fat content.
Had a fantastic holiday with Trang’s family this last week. Diving on the Great Barrier Reef was the awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. It was heaps of fun hanging with Trang’s family for a week - though they’re very different to my family, they’re a great bunch of people. We did a heap of other touristy stuff while we were there, like riding cablecar skyrails, visiting rainforests, and in my case, being hungover on the day we were spending six hours driving. Which actually was kind of a bummer. But, all round, it was a great time. If only there hadn’t been that hiccup at the end… but things seem to be turning out reasonably okay with that too.
Wushu competition is really, really soon. Scarily so. I’m finding that I clicked on a couple of fundamental things about the sword, and so it’s a bit easier than it was. Hopefully I can pull everything together in time.
