Sunday of my Life

Quick rantiness to round-out my day, I think. Thanks to the help of a friend earlier in the week, I found seek.com.au’s Graduate/Entry-Level jobs section. This will, I am sure, be a big boon to my job-hunt; finally having somewhere that lists job specifically for my experience level.

Or, it would if people, you know, did this.

I have two complaints with it. Big ones. My usual job search restrictions on there are “Jobs, Graduate/Entry-level, in IT & T, located in Melbourne”. That’s all the restrictions I make. So, in the past few days of looking, I have come across:

35 jobs listed in Melbourne, located in Canberra. Now, when you limit your job-search to a specific city, it’s usually because, oh, you want jobs that are located there, you know? You don’t want jobs telling you “well, here’s a fantastic opportunity for you! You just have to pay your own way to move really far away from your life and start all over again! Hurrah!” And, what’s worse? They were all the same job, listed by the same company.

26 jobs listed that require 1, 2 or 3 years of experience. Hate to break it to you, guys, but that is not entry-level. Entry-level or Graduate jobs don’t require experience, simply because they’re designed for people who have to come in on the ground-floor and work their way up. We don’t have experience. We’ve never had jobs in this industry before. Why on earth do you think we’re looking in the entry-level section if we have experience? If you’ve got experience there’s bigger jobs for better pay to be had in the mainstream IT & T section.

Okay, that’s my quick rant all done and dusted. Admittedly if the jobs in the entry-level section were better chosen they wouldn’t be able to boast as many in there; but at least you’d know what’s in there is good to look at.

I’m disgusted, honestly. I’ve recieved what amounts to a chain letter from a few different sources today, and I am disgusted by its contents, and by the fact that the hate-mongering vitriol contained inside it is being passed off as ‘patriotism’. I’ll quote the whole email here, minus the headers and addresses, to protect the ignorant. I’ll also note that one of my good friends told me about recieving this same email today, and she replied straight to the person who sent it with what amounts to “Thankyou for proving your lack of validity to me, now fuck off, I never want to hear from you again.” I won’t do that, yet. I will not name names. Whomever sent this to me will know who they are. Please note, however, that if I ever recieve anything like this in my inbox again, then I will publically berate you.

!– PLEASE NOTE THAT THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS BLOCK QUOTE DO NOT REPRESENT THOSE OF THE AUTHOR OR ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH SOML. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. –!

Are we fighting a war on terror or aren’t we? Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores on September 11, 2001? Were people from all over the world, mostly Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across the Potomac from our nation’s capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania? Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning or crushing death that day, or didn’t they? Come out and fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in mosques.

I’ll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of
their suicide bombs.

I’ll care when the American media stops pretending that their First Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this:
I don’t care.

When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been humiliated in what amounts to a college hazing
incident, rest assured that I don’t care.

When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank that I don’t care.

When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran and a prayer mat, and fed “special” food that is paid for by my tax dollars,
is complaining that his holy book is being “mishandled,” you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don’t care.

And oh, by the way, I’ve noticed that sometimes it’s spelled “Koran” and other times “Quran.” Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and —-
you guessed it, I could not have said this any better myself!

If you agree with this view point, pass this on to all your e-mail friends. Sooner or later, it’ll get to the people responsible for this ridiculous behavior! If you don’t agree, then by all means hit the delete button. Should you choose the latter, then please don’t complain when more atrocities committed by radical Muslims happen here in our great country.

This one of the worst pieces of bullshit I have been spammed with, to date. Here’s a little analytical breakdown from me to you, whomever may have originally written this ‘opinion’.

1. America (and unfortunately Australia) are nominally fighting a war on terrorism. What is actually being done is anyone’s guess, as we do not actually get told. It was not brought to ‘our shores’ by Islamic people. Do you know why these people are called extremists? They do not represent the religion, the faith or ideals of Islam. Islam is a peaceful religion that believes in peace, friendship among peoples and love for all. Go read the Quoran before you label these terrorists as Islamic, despite what they may say of themselves. They do not represent Islam, nor does Islam support them. And Quoran brings me to my next point;
2. Quoran. Q. U. O. R. A. N. Not Koran, or Quran. Quoran.* One of the central books of the Islamic faith. Note I said one of. There are others. Before you go expounding opinions on the goodness or badness of a religion, I suggest you read that religion’s teachings and stories to actually get an informed opinion. Please also note that I have never read the Quoran, nor any of the other books of Islam. I’m also not expressing an opinion of the religion. Go figure.
3. “…when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana…” May I just say: Wrong. Damn. Religion. Nirvana is not a perfect state of being sought by adherents of Islam. That’s Hinduism (or Buddhism, or Taoism… one of them, I can’t remember). But not Islam.
4. I know the photos being blurry must make it easier for you. And how far away you are. But honestly. Think. Stop and damn well think. These people, no matter what they have done, or may be suspected of doing, or are being held on suspicion of on little or no evidence of; they are still human. They still deserve to be treated as human beings, not put through humiliating tortures for the amusement of others. Guys wanting to join a fraternity at college don’t deserve it. Prisoners at any of the US-run detention centres for suspected terrorists in the Middle East don’t deserve it. Grow some fucking decency.
5. Being fed special food? Special food? It’s a requirement of the Islamic religion that any meat they eat be ‘halal’. Wanna know what that means? Look it up. Google is your friend. This is not ’special food’. It’s simply food killed and prepared in a different way. You may as well protest over Jewish inmates in US prisons being given kosher food. And if his rights to practicing his religion (within reason, obviously. We’re not going to get into the whole ‘well what if his religion involved human sacrifice?’ debate. We’re just not) are not being respected, yes, he has every right to complain about it.
6. “When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because…” Yes. Thankyou for not mentioning if he moved or not. Or how much pain he was in. Pain is an important factor here. The human body hurts, and what does it do, without consulting the concious mind about? It moves. It tries to shift to a comfortable position and relieve the pain. I would like to see you, Mr. or Ms. Hate-Mongerer, avoid moving under similar circumstances. And, as I said, we don’t know if he moved as not, since you appear to have omitted that. Possibly he was just shot. I wouldn’t be surprised.
7. Finally, on the ‘brave marine’ point. Remember that, to someone, everyone is brave. It is this categorisation of ‘brave marine’ on the good-guys’ side, and ‘Iraqi Terrorist’ (and, as an aside: thankyou spreading that little bit more of country-based racist sputum on the minds of the three-dozen or so people you sent this email to. He’s an Iraqi! He must be a terrorist! Oh Noes!) on the bad-guys’ side that is part of the reason why war still rages today. Look at the people around you, wherever you may be. Then go outside and look at the people there. Take a train or a bus. Look at people. See something fundamentally the same about them? That’s right! They’re human beings! Where they came from, where they’re going, who they are, who they were; none of it matters. They’re human, just like you. What you expect as your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of whatever-the-fuck it is you call ‘justice’ are pretty much what they expect too. You would be shocked (shocked I tell you) to learn how much better people get on if only they treat each other with compassion, forgiveness, respect and common human decency.

That, for the most part, is pretty much what I have to say, except for one thing. This email asks me — if I agree with the opinion expressed therein — to pass it on so that it will eventually get to ‘the people responsible for this rediculous behaviour’, and there I agree. Pass this post on. You never know, it might one day get to the offices of George ‘Dubya’ Bush, Tony ‘<– I’m With Stupid’ Blair and John ‘Brown-Nose Extraordinaire’ Howard. Maybe they might get a glimmer of how rediculous this ‘war’ of theirs is. How it could have been avoided completely. How how much support they don’t have among their own people. Maybe.

I’m not holding my breath.

*No, it doesn’t bring me to that point, since someone kindly pointed out the error there. Oh well, we all make mistakes. Koran and Quran are perfectly acceptable.

Here’s an interesting concept for you to consider Dad:

• This house may belong to you, but;
• Not everything in this house belongs to you
• I don’t belong to you.
• My possessions don’t belong to you.
• More particularly the prescription for my medication doesn’t belong to you.
• If I leave it on the bench in order to remind myself to get it filled becuase I haven’t had a dose for 2 days this does not give you the right to:
• Move it
• Look at it
• ‘Put it away’
• Think about doing any of the above.
• ‘Forget’ what you’ve done with it afterwards.
• Make me do the addiction dance running around looking for it
• Give me the impetus I need to write this damn post.

It’s a simple fucking concept. If it’s not yours, you don’t touch it. If you can’t wrap your head around this concept, I wonder how you’ve managed to avoid being jailed for theft before now. I don’t belong to you. My possessions don’t belong to you.

Leave. Them. The. Fuck. Alone.

So, inm the midst of a flurry of Cisco CCNA Examinations. Fun they are. Real fun. Cisco are very, very misleading in their exams. Everything must be read very carefully and you must spend every moment aware, hunting for the inconsistancies, the little tricks in thier questions. The questions hidden inside questions. The questions whose answers consist of nothing but 128 character binary strings, three of which only have 1 character differences between them. Fun, no?

So I did the exam for Module 7: Distance-Vector Routing Protocols today. Pass mark was 70%. I scored 57.4%

I was duped, I tells ya! Duped! They played me for a fool in a number of questions. Unfortunately I have no idea which questions they were because Cisco won’t actually tell you what you got right and what you didn’t. They do give you feedback on the things you have to read up on to get things right next time (if the exam is exactly the same next time, which it never is. Each exam has a question pool and is randomly drawn from that every time). I think even this feedback is misleading. There’s things listed here, like IGRP Metrics, that weren’t even on the exam. I get the feeling you’d be told you needed to read up on certain areas even if you got 100%. They nver want you to think that you could know everything they teach you.

Misleading exams. I hate them and the people who design them.

I quite realise that recycling things by giving them to someone else to use again has its place, and its time. I just wish so much of that time and place was not in my time or at my place. Things are forever ending up with me that are hand-me-downs. Through out my life many pairs of shoes were ones that others had outgrown, clothes from my Aunts that their children had outgrown. My bed was a hand-me-down, as was my chest-of-drawers. Our lounge-suite, the old, crappy, cracked green vinyl one that was skin-glue on a hot summer’s day was a hand-me-down from my Aunt Susan. So the latest in the string of hand-me-downs that characterise my life: the chair I shall henceforth be using at my computer.

My previous chair was old. Very old. It was sweat-stained and it smelled terrible. We did our best over the years to clean it, but it just did not want to be cleaned. So we got a new one. I just got finished assembling it when I am informed that this, in fact, is going to be my father’s new chair, and I’ll have his old one. Oh joy, thought I, another blood hand-me-down. What do I look like? A good repository for everyone’s no-longer-wanted junk? I don’t ask for any of this stuff; it’s simply given to me, and I should be grateful for it. Should I? I suppose with some things, things I need, yes, I should be. But not this time. No way in hell, this time. Why should I be gateful that the chair I a) picked; b) partially paid for (admittedly not much, but some, enough to give me a say, at least); and c) assembled, will now be given to someone else, and I’ll end up with their rubbish. Again.

**Lé sigh**

No point in arguing it, becuase I won’t win. I never do. So I will simply silently rebel and shift the chairs around at every opportunity.

Anger

It’s a useless emotion, really. It doesn’t gain us anything, but costs us a lot. We feel it at any number of moments, for any number of reasons, and in the end the results are the same. We are left empty by it, abandoned by the burning fires of its passion. We feel it, it becomes us, a part of who we are, and then it passes. Occasionally it doesn’t, however, and we are changed, but the change is never for the good. In the end anger changes us all, if we let it rage unchecked, and we become something none of us would like to admit is inside of us. The raging beast, ready to do anything to sate the lust of anger.

Why, you may ask (and quite rightly so), am I prattling on at you like this tonight? Becuase not all that long ago a friend of mine pointed my own anger out to me, and had pointed out to me any number of times in the past how useless such anger is. Only tonight did I actually realise how right she is. Those who know me know I have three sisters. The one just above me, Erin, I am closest to. She, and my mother, are what I compare people I meet to, becuase to me they are the epitome of all that is right. The eldest of them is Monica, simultaneously one of the most mature and carefree people I know. I don’t see as much of Monica these days as I’d like to, she lives interstate now and it’s been nearly 12 months since I last saw her.

In between these two is Peta. Peta has the capacity to be both mature and childish, as the mood takes her. She’s both generous and selfish. All things considered she’s a good person, good to her friends. But she seems to lack one thing: a sense of familial ownership. She’s very good with knowing what’s hers, and with people outside the family very good with knowing what’s not hers. When it comes to family members although, to her everything is owned in common… sort of. She knows two things, it seems. Mine and Yours, and to her everything owned by a family member is Mine. This tends to get up my nose, so it does. Tonight she took over my computer becuase she wanted to go music surfing and try and find a swag-or-so of Christmas Carols. Normally I wouldn’t mind, that’s why she has an account on my computer. But she didn’t ask me, she just logged me off, closing down what I was working on (my resumé… I count that to be fairly important) and failing to save it, then logging herself in and refusing to let me back on here for 4 hours. That got me angry, and as I sat there and brooded something prodded me in the back of the brain.

Damn… it said to me You’re being silly, boy! It’s a computer, and it will still be there once she goes home again. Build a bridge why don’t you!

And it was right. It pains me to admit it, even to myself, but I was being silly about it. So I let her do what she was doing, and complete it and go home, and I was polite and brotherly to her. I don’t know if anyone else will look at it this way, but to me I feel like I’ve managed to take another step forward, and perhaps now things look a little brighter to me.

OK, so after 12 weeks of chemotherapy, then coming home for a day or so, then going back in for more, then staying with my aunt for a while, we’ve just finally seen the toll all of this has taken on my grandmother. I nearly didn’t recognise her. The skin is hanging off her body, paper-thin and nearly translucent. Her flesh is sallow, there are huge bag under her eyes and she trembles constantly. When I saw her, I was afraid simply to give her a hug, afraid that I’d break her. It broke my dad’s heart to see her like that; as annoying and nosey as she can be, she is still his mother for Christ’s sake. And on top of this all, my aunt (who brought her back here for the day) really gave me the urge to smack her one for her rude, tactless, complaining comments. Pauline, let me try and spell this out for you in nice big, bold, italicised capital letters for you and hope maybe you’ll get the picture:

SHE HAS JUST FINISHED A TOTAL OF 16 WEEKS OF CHEMOTHERAPY. I THINK SHE HAS THE RIGHT NOT TO FEEL WELL AND TO MAKE THAT FACT KNOWN. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

And yes, I know I can be criticised for swearing about it, but I honestly don’t give a fuck. It’s either I do it on here or I do it to her face while I’m tossing her worthless arse out of my house.

OK, so this post is a little on a friend, a little bit on music and alot of a rant. At least, I think it will be. It’s very late right now, but I want to get these thoughts down out of my head before I close these world-weary eyes and try to forget my life in sleep’s sweet oblivion.

Had Filmmaker Extraordinaire’s 21st Party tonight. Me there for moral support, Agent FareEvader providing music. Good music, in my opinion. The Agent knows what he’s about, knows what appeals to different crowds and how to mix it up very well. Best spinner I’ve heard in sometime. ‘Twas not to be for this crowd though. Agent pulled every trick out of his bag, but no one was buying. Such a diverse crowd, with such diverse tastes in music. It’s a daunting prospect to any seasoned vinyl-spinner to face a crowd such as this. Normally at least something can be accomplished, but not so this time.

Yes, I’m well aware that you can’t make an audience enjoy themselves. But really, this gig was hellish. At any given moment of the night we were told these things, usually in this order:

“The music is too loud.”

“The music is too quiet.”

“We want you to play [Insert Random Song Not on Advertised Playlist Here]”

“This music isn’t the right sort, we want something we can dance to.”

Aha! That is what we had been trying to get to all night long. Very well, what kind of music would you like to dance to?

“Heavy Metal.”

Errrrr…. riiiiiight. Well, we don’t have any heavy metal in the mix tonight (don’t have it in the mix ever. Full stop. Underline. Circle in red ink. Go over with a fluro-yellow high-lighter. Underline several more time. Reproduce on… well… you get the picture). We do however have this large selection of other styles, is there something there that interests you?

“Sure, play ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica”

*sigh*

We’ll see what we can do.

Over and over and over. Again and again and again. Meanwhile one increasingly drunken guest continually comes up and tells us to turn it up with an upward-spiraling motion of his hand (one of the basics of becoming a DJ is, of course, learning to read drunken sign-langauge, didn’t you know?). Meanwhile the party’s organisers are telling us to turn it down. Then we’re told to turn it up again, and are assured that this has been confirmed with the party’s organisers. Then the party’s organisers want to know why we turned it back up after they asked us to turn it down.

About this time I began to have one of those oh-so-lovely manic moments my anti-depressants give me.

So, retreating to the bathroom after a while of uncontrollable hand motions and face-rubbing, as well as some fierce biting of my knuckles (I think I told you all about this already. It’s a nervous habit I have whenever something has me frustrated in some way. It does serve to calm me somewhat. The pain brings me back a little closer to focus). Well, after managing to bite deep enough into one of them to break the skin and draw some blood I thought maybe I’d better go away from everyone before I made a scene. Spent a while running my hands under cold water to relieve their ache. Brought out some truly spectacular bruises. Lucky me. It was a great spisode, I can tell you. Eyes darting all over the place, hands doing what they pleased, never ceasing thier movements. Body trembling with energy, and my mind totally incapable of rational thought. Almost like having a panic-attack, without the panic.

I just had an attack
Really though, the party itself wasn’t too bad. I did enjoy myself, to a certain degree, probably as much as I can in a large group of people I don’t know. Got to see GalaxyStar again, that was cool, I missed her like crazy. Must visit the Ponds of the Moonee more often. Endured Filmmaker’s friends making snide remarks behind my back, didn’t even thump any of them once, much as I wanted to. Realised that this post is increasingly sounding like one of those flat, emotionless list-of-thought posts, and really doesn’t care.

The Agent is one of my oldest friends, and I really do think he does wonderful work on his deck, it’s just a shame we didn’t have a more responsive audience tonight. I don’t think I can accurately portray exactly how frustrating that is in this simple medium of text on a screen, and it is 4:45 AM, so I think I’ll break this off there for now. Might write more on it later. We’ll see.

My hands hurt. Well, that’s my own fucking fault. Suck it up and live with it.

OK… one of my deep distates just grew deeper.

Spammers. Now, we’ve all heard of them and their activities. We all get emails from them (some of us have Beyesian spam filters, but that’s beside the point, we’re still getting the emails, we’re just not seeing them). How many times have you seen things like this floating around in your inbox?

Sex! Sex! Sex!
Get free viagra today!
Meet Christian singles today!

I know I see more of them than I probably should (blame Hotmail, they have a crap spam filtering system), but I just saw spam in a place that I really didn’t expect to see it, although I probably should have. In my comments for this blog. Some little bastard has been using me to try and advertise his online poker site. Well… *click*click*click*…that’s those comments deleted. I’ve had to introduce comment moderation on SOML now, so if you comment on one of my posts from hereon in they won’t show up straight away. I’ll have to approve them first. Blame the spammers if you want, I certainly know I do.

To all the spammers of the world, I have this to say:

Listen up and listen up good you link-whoring little pieces of trash. I do not want to know about your porn sites. I do not want to know about your viagra or other assorted drugs. I do not want to know about your Christian singles. I do not want to know about you. For all of me you could go and swallow large portions of your own anatomy. No one on the net is interested in what you’re trying to cram down our throats. We do not appreciate your efforts (not that any of you actually go to any effort, we all know you sit back playing with yourself looking at porn while in the background your robots are spidering pages looking for email addresses, spoofing anti-abuse tracers, IPs and origin addresses so you can avoid being caught). We all know why you do it. You lack the ambition to do anything worthwhile with your time. You would rather sit around letting your computer do your work for you, defiling innocent inboxes with your offers of cheap porn and free viagra. If you actually had any ambition you would be out there in the world actually doing something worthwhile with your life, something which is of benefit to yourself and those around you. You would not be sitting in the dark in front of your computer day after day, wasting your time, hoping for one hit out of a million spams. Some advice for all of you spammers. Grow up. Stop being a script kiddy. Get out there and do something worthwhile. And stop trying to spam my comments. Your posts will not get through anymore, so stop bothering.

OK… that was nice and cathartic. I feel better now. Thanks for listening.

Today, throughout Australia, ADSL and dialup internet users were unexpectedly disconnected at 9AM. It didn’t matter who you were, what ISP you were with or who your carrier was. If you were online, you went oflfine. If you were offline, you stayed that way.

‘How can this be?‘ I hear you cry. ‘Surely there must be enough carriers in Australia to guarantee best-path determination? How could all those ISPs have a fault all at the same time?‘

All this happened becuase in Australia there really is only one carrier. They own all the lines. They own all the exchanges. They own all the DSLAMs.

They are Telstra Hell$tra and they reign supreme, unfortunately.

Today Telstra experienced a failure in their internet exchange servers, or something not unlike that. That alone managed to take out half of Australia’s internet capabilities. Then in the course of fixing this they managed to knock the rest of the servers offline and take out the rest of Australia. Lovely… my connection died just in time for me to miss most of today’s Dragonhunt session. Telstra yet again manage to prove why they are a good example case for the strengthening of anti-trust laws.

Yes, technically what Telstra holds is a monopoly, and therefore illegal under Australian law, but we really have to look at two facts:

1. Telstra is owned by the government
2. Who, really, is going to pay the billions of dollars out to build hundreads of thousands of new exchanges and lay millions of kilometers of cable in order to break Telstra’s monopoly?

Number 1 is just a fact of life, and the answer to number 2 is: no one. At least, not as far as I can see.

This post started off as a rant, but I’ve just realised I really don’t have the energy, time or inclination to rant right now, so I’m just going to let this one go and trawl news sites for something blogworthy.