Why? Why not?

That last post was quite cryptic, I suppose, so I better explain a bit.

Since the post about Supernova, I have:
- handed in my resignation at my old job
- helped with a major rollout there
- handed over as much as possible
- had some serious family stuff happen
- had a birthday
- started a new job

It’s been a crazy time. And it’s not even Christmas yet!

On the plus side, because I have a wonderful girlfriend and generous friends and family, I got a PSP for my birthday! And, in what will become more and more important once the weather starts getting cold again, a Wallabies jersey. They just need to get to the stage where I’m not ashamed to wear it.

New job is in Manly, at the International College of Management, Sydney. It’s also IT sysadmin/support stuff.

Can’t make this one too long, got to work. More later.

So much shit going down at the moment that I don’t know where to begin. So I won’t. I’ll post more about everything later.

I had a great time at Supanova on Sunday, and at dinner afterward. My cosplay was pretty well received in general. Oh, and Richard Taylor, the HEAD OF WETA (for those heretics among you who know not, the company that did the props, costumes etc. for Lord of the Rings), told me he liked it and SIGNED MY SWORD. That was possibly one of the best prop-geek moments of my life. I’ll take some pictures sometime. You’ll note that I am kinda calm about this now – I really wasn’t on Sunday.

Con itself was cool – I guess Supanova’s biggest advantage is that they have enough successful multi-fandom cons under their belts now to be able to pull the big names. Having celebrity panels, seminars and so on really does give you more things to do. I would have loved to go to Richard Taylor’s Narnia panel, but it was on at the same time as the cosplay, and at the same time as the Neville-from-Harry-Potter panel. That’s what you want from a con – to have people run off their feet trying to see all the cool stuff.

I got photographed a fair bit, and interviewed twice, which was cool too. And I only accidentally whacked one person with the sword.

Dinner was at the Lowenbrau, in the Rocks. I’ve heard about it, but never been there before. The entertainment was great, and the litre of beer meant I really enjoyed it. To everyone who came, thanks for making the evening a great one.

All-in-all, a great con. I’m definitely glad that my last cosplay got some props from someone I respect as much as the WETA guys.

All that said, it’ll be nice to have a bit of a break from being quite so geeky – it’s been a lot of weekends in a row, and I’d like to put some time and attention into other areas of my life.

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. Read 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.

So, much has happened since I posted last. I’ve discovered I’m not getting as much tax back as I thought, so no new PC. Which is bad. But, Trang and I took my niece Phoebe to the Disney on Ice Princesses thing, which was good.

I’ve booked Trang and I a weekend away soon – which should be great! It’ll be nice to spend some time away.

About the London thing – it was really interesting to see the difference between England and America’s reactions to terrorism. Although 9/11 was on a much larger scale, it seems that England’s long experience with terrorism has prepared them well.

It’s funny how the word ‘terrorism’ has been so subverted by the events of the last few years. The association of the word with the Middle East is so very strong now. I have noticed with amusement how all of the acts of terrorism in Iraq have always been committed by ‘insurgents’. Never ‘terrorists’ or, heaven forbid, ‘rebels’. A good example of language being very carefully chosen, I would guess by someone in the US government or Army.

Forgive me my little Darth Vader moment there – but I seem to have managed to kill the 40G HD in my file server, which means I’ve lost my file archive – which among other things had patches and savegames dating back to ‘96 or so, and my graphics archive, which was about 3G of images, including all the photoshop work I’ve ever done. And I lost my whole collection of definitely-legally-obtained videos too, aside from what’s on my xbox.

On the plus side, it looks likely that I may have enough money soon to be able to buy a new PC, which means that my current PC can be retired to file server, and I’ll be making sure I have a DVD burner this time.

Went to see Jared Diamond speak on the weekend as part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Kind of wish I hadn’t already started reading his new book, as a lot of the material he covered is also in the book. That said, it was still a great lecture – he has quite a good speaking style. I’d highly recommend reading his book if you can.