|
|
August 31st, 2006 18:28
I have been scrubbing my blue eyebrows since that last post. While a bunch of the blue has gone, a bunch of it still remains. I merging more towards normalhood, but there’s still a long way to go…
Zaubi came home and said that in the future I will be required to get him to sign a release form before altering my appearance in any way!!!
I followed the directions. Indeed, I put on much less than they said, and left it on much shorter than they said. I do not understand why my eyebrows are blue!!
Perhaps if I pluck my eyebrows to kind of thing them out that will make them less noticeable…???
Trouble.
August 31st, 2006 17:37
Oh, disaster of disasters.
I have just dyed my eyebrows a deep and vibrant blue.
I can’t go to work tomorrow looking like this.
August 30th, 2006 11:13
Once again during my morning tea break I find it necessary to blog in order to take my mind away from the tedium of JavaScript tax calculators.
Points of interest:
1) Have $5000 AUD? You can have a brand-new spider species named after you!
2) Some weirdo has been stabbing people during lunch hour at the Myer Centre, a nearby shopping plaza where I sometimes do food shopping or get tasty eats during lunch.
3) [Last is Best]
To my great amusement, the Australian government provides a National Public Toilet Map website. You can:
a) find public toilets by latitude/longitude
b) plan car trips so that convenient toilet stops are included
c) find toilets in your area
d) click around the interactive map to find toilets
e) suggest a toilet
f) contact the Toilet Map Helpline (how busy could they be??)
You can even register and log on to save “My Toilet Map”, which allows you to save your favorite toilet locations!
Key phrases from the website:
– Use our Trip Planner to identify toilet stops for a journey.
– Register for My Toilet Map to save your trips, favourite destinations and public toilets.
– Subscribe to our newsletter for quarterly updates on the National Public Toilet Map project, including new toilets.
The website, which is quite nicely put together, is sponsored by the National Continence Management Strategy.
This is definitely one of the funnier things I’ve seen in a while. It has added great brightness to my day.
August 29th, 2006 12:41
We had a great weekend, incidentally. Saturday we went surfskiing at Currumbin with 3 of Zaubi’s work compatriots — L. the German (he brought his new longboard), A. the American (he was sick so just lay there in the sun — everyone is still putrid with disease) and N. the Persian (he brought a boogie board). It was great fun: the sun was shining, the water was warm (the breeze wasn’t) and we bought wetsuits at lunchtime so we could stay in for hours.
We finally have achieved being able to go forward through the waves without falling off, and we can even catch waves now, although all too often the bigger ones end up turning the back of the boat so we go broadside and fall off.
The water was rife with bright blue bell-shaped jellyfish, but no one seemed to be worried about them, and when Zaubi brushed one by mistake, it didn’t sting.
At one point a big wave knocked us off and our surfski was ripped away by the current (there is a massive rip at Currumbin). Zaubi tried to swim after it but to no avail — he was too hampered by his paddle. With huge effort I and my paddle made it to shore (with help from N. and his boogie board), ran down the beach a *long ways* and then waded in and grabbed the surfski when it was finally released by the rip and started drifing in to shore. Poor Zaubi was still way out, floundering along with his paddle.
L. saw a shark-shaped creature while he was surfing — a dark body in the water with fin sticking up — but others saw it too and didn’t seem to mind it, so he ignored it as well. Someone later said that it was likely a dolphin — they like to surf on the waves.
It is true, however, the the Gold Coast waters are often very populated with sharks, particularly at Tallebudgera (where we went Sunday), particularly in the river mouths, which of course is exactly where we go to launch our surf ski.
Of course, we look a lot less like a seal/tasty shark treat on our surf ski than the surfers do on their boards — we are larger and have big plastic paddles, rather than just flipper like hands and feet sticking off to paddle with. Still, sharks can also often be territorial an give boats a good bump (given our instability that would be bad) and so it makes me slightly nervous.
Sunday after church we zoomed down to do it again. That wasn’t as good, was a bit more frustrating as the waves were harder to catch, but we still got some good rides — and other entertaining things occurred, such as going forward over waves so tall that Zaubi literally slid off the back of the boat!
August 29th, 2006 12:31
I am taking this brief respite during my 10 minute paid morning tea break to write LJ. Work is dull. Veyr dull indeed. I am touching up all the titchy things that I missed when I transferred all the stuff over — as such, I have just spent a couple hours redoing help files and terms definitions — which means opening tens, doznens, scores, of pages which individually each have one definition on them so that I can copy the definition and consolidate into one page of drop-downs.
I think I want to massacre the person who orginally designed this site. How many pages do you NEED? Does each one-liner definiton really NEED a WHOLE PAGE??????
I desperately miss Harvard Med and PHP and hyperfl0w.
And to add insult to injury, I just poured cream-gone-bad into my tea.
August 25th, 2006 13:49
I am at work, which I should probably describe someday, albeit in a locked entry perhaps. I am sitting here twiddling my thumbs while Dreamweaver takes its time uploading the 10,000,000 documents I have just updated to the development server.
I hate Dreamweaver, but have to admit it can be rather useful when doing hundreds of site-wide query replaces.
Well, I have bascially finished the task I was set to do — that is, I have completely ported over Queensland Office of State Revenue’s old website to its new look and feel. My contract is for 13 weeks — I finished the porting over in onyl 2.5, or 3 if you count the half week I spent making the horrid JavaScript calculators more functional.
I hate JavaScript.
So, now, I get to entertain myself for the next 10 weeks by looking at all the stuff and making it prettier, and adding fancy wishlist items like I know not what. And presumably fixing things when the suits complain… which they probably will do!
The most annoying part of the whole thing is I can’t change any content. Well, frankly, I’ve been changing some staringly awful things on the sly, but since the content writers have to change the content, and then get it okayed through about 15 levels of red tape (ick! corporate) I am not supposed to be changing *anything* lest some big cheese get his panties in a wedge over it.
Ah, well. The new site looks a lot better than the current one, but I’m awfully dubious about how some of the info is organized… hopefully the big cheese will see just how much some of the content sucks. If I were this governmetn I’d be pretty embarassed about the state of some of the stuff on there. it’s less than useless.
——————————-
So I biked to and from work all this week. It’s a sight better than taking the bus — I actually look forward to the half hour bike trip each way. In the evening, when I leave, I pedal along the river and it smells of the sea — the Brisbane river is a tidal river, after all, and that is one of the few times I get that sea scent I miss so much, living inland.
The weather is warming up so we aren’t frozen blocks each night anymore. It’s a nice change. I’m looking forward to another Brisbane summer…
August 25th, 2006 7:26
I haven’t had the heart to write much lately.
My poor Viacimo is truly gone. What’s more, my mother’s other cat, Wolfie, disappeared a week after Viaci did and has also not come back. She, who had four happy cats less than a year ago, now has only one. All have disappeared suddenly and unexpectedly, never to return.
Goodbye, my friend, my Viacimo!
August 18th, 2006 22:06
Grief is a funny thing.
It has nothing to do with the physical heart, and yet the physical manifestation so often affects that very area… like a great beast is crushing ones chest.
August 15th, 2006 20:32
Tomorrow is a public holiday! Even though it’s Wednesday. Actually, to my amusement, it’s a Brisbane holiday. City holiday. I dind’t even know such a thing existed, but it does, and tomorrow nobody has to go to work.
The holiday is because of Ekka, a kind of… pseudo country fair? I don’t know. Anyway, all normal Brisbanites (apparently) avoid it, because they are all under the impression that you will get dealthy ill if you go there. Well, that may be, but then again, I could get deathly ill in my very cubicle, surrounded as I am am with coughing sneezing hacking wheezing people! We figured that it may be deathly dangerous, and expensive, and terrible, but we have to go, because we’ve never been.
I’m boring today. Nothing else to say.
No news on the Viacimo front. More than two weeks now.
August 14th, 2006 17:21
For some inexplicable reason, yesterday I broke out in hives. They are somewhat gone today but not really.
AS far as I know I didn’t eat or do anything out of the ordinary. I haven’t changed my detergent or touched any weird plants.
I’m really sick of the stupid skin problems I’ve been having since moving to this country.
|
