Every day should contain a little bit of Bill Hicks’ wisdom:

Not all drugs are good, now. Okay? Some of ‘em are great. Just gotta know your way around ‘em, that’s all. Yeah, I’ve had good times on drugs. I’ve had bad times on drugs too. I mean shit, look at this haircut. There are dangers. One time me and three friends dropped acid… drove around in my Dad’s car, he’s got one of those talking cars, we’re tripping, the car goes “the door is ajar”. We pulled over… thought about that for 12 hours. “How can a door be a jar?” - “Shit, I don’t know but I see it, I see it. Why would they put a jar on a car man?”

I’m proud of every moment in my life, alright? Think some of y’all have tripped here before perhaps, yeah? I used to love tripping, man. There’s always one guy when you’re tripping who wants you to do something to enhance the trip. You know what I’m talking about. “You’re tripping? Oh duuude, you gotta play miniature golf.” [Bill hangs onto the table] Ha ha Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking, man. I’m just sitting over here watching the pyramids be built by UFOs right now, but get me to that fucking golf course. I’m watching Jesus flying around on a unicorn, but I bet that little miniature golf would be just the thing to make this trip… peak. So you guys can use your legs, huh? No, it’s just that I’m turning into a fish right now and, er… how ’bout I meet you there later? Thanks, I’m pretty fucking high right now. Thank you. You know.

You just gotta be careful, I don’t know what you gotta be, fuck it. We got pulled over tripping on acid one night, pulled over by the cops. Don’t recommend it. Cops don’t appreciate fish driving around. They frown on that. Long night, man. Cops were tapping on this window. We’re staring at him in this mirror. “How tall are you?” “A liddle cop, look at him!” “How does he drive that big fucking car?” “Urr, there could be thousands of them, shit!” “What are we gonna do?” “Let’s put him in the jar.” Made perfect sense at that moment. Put him in a jar, poke some holes in the lid, leave him by the road. “You’ll never get us copper. Haha.” “We’ll send some little firemen to let you out.” “Hey I bet they know where the miniature golf course is!” “Boo! Haha.. fuck it, they scared us.” “Son d’you wanna stand up please?” “I just found the driver.” “We don’t need a driver, we’re playing miniature golf.” True story. Now, later, when I was released [laughter]… I mean spiritually… Oh God. “I need to see some ID.” “I’m me, he’s him, you’re you.” “Put your hands against the car please.” “Which one. The UFO, the unicorn or your cruiser?”

I wanted to start posting more photos along with written posts - so I’ll start with these two.

This is our local cat resident (one of them). She officially belongs to Melissa.

This is the mysterious neighbour cat who kept visiting, but has now stopped coming round. Perhaps we’re a bad influence.

Now, let me get back to eating my 2-minute chicken-flavoured noodles which I tracked and killed outside, earlier this morning.

I’m beginning to really dislike the end of poker games - more often than not you end up with two people holding the majority of the chips, and any pair hand is quite possibly good enough to beat your opponent’s hand. This makes for quite frustrating play, with large amounts being wagered carelessly, just to get it over with. Gavin and I ended up in that situation on Saturday; we decided to declare a token winner based on the next hand, and he nailed it with a King high.

I also discovered on Saturday that silver tequila is actually quite smooth, provided you are having it with lemons/oranges plus salt/sugar (let’s not detail the more exotic combinations, for now).

I have more to tell about my experience with the before mentioned company from hell - I have some form of inside man who is keeping me updated - I will post separately about it at a later stage, but for now let’s just say that I am pretty much being blamed internally for anything that goes wrong, despite the fact it has been repeatedly proven to have nothing to do with me. Last I heard, I had broken a website I had never even worked on. My powers are increasing.

I had my JET interview on Thursday morning, along with an English proficiency test. I went into the interview first, although originally I was meant to do the test before, but there seemed to be some kind of mix up with times. The interview was quite nerve-wracking; they asked questions I wasn’t really expecting, things like how would I explain apartheid to a class of children who have very little exposure to South Africa. Also, how would I deal with ill-disciplined kids, and other related things (give them a black-eye is not the correct answer, sorry Nick).

The test was fairly simple, mostly picking the right word to use, and the sentence that is incorrectly structured. The other people really complained about it, but it seemed fine to me. Oh well.

On Friday I ate at Fujiyama in Sea Point - they boast an authentic Japanese menu, right down to the size of dishes and order that you receive them. I had yakitori and chicken katsu-don, both which were delicious. I also received a cup of really rich miso soup, but I hadn’t ordered it, so I guess it was part of the meal. For pre-appetisers, they gave us pickled daikon (I think), which really seemed to work in taking the edge off your hunger, and cleansing your palette. Outside there seemed to be a big arrest going on, outside the 7-11 - cops were running around and lights were flashing.

On the way through, the lane that leads onto the freeway (next to the waterfront entrance) was completely closed off by cones and police cars. There were also tow-trucks and a fire-engine, so there was either a big accident or some kind of police incident. I hope everyone involved is ok…

After wandering around Sea Point for a bit, a reconnaisance mission was made into Adult World, which is surprisingly not-dodgy. The shopkeeper had plenty to say, and even the bouncer guy was having a laugh at something or other.

No time to proof-read this, I will later - off for a bike ride with Gavin, the weather is pretty nice for it. Tonight I’m heading out for some poker, possibly followed by a mission, but we’ll see.

It’s one of those days when I can’t string a coherent anything together. I was trying to mock-up a site design in Inkscape and it turned into the most dreadfully awful hack job… sigh. I slept pretty well, so I don’t think I’m tired, maybe I can blame it on biorhythms or whatever the hell those things are called.

I think the time has come to format my Windows partition - it’s only hanging around so that I can play Warcraft III online, and I think I’m over that for now. The pleasure/effort ratio has fallen to below acceptable levels mostly due to the other players. Watching your base get demolished by the opposing team whilst your 3 team-mates fight over items at the fountain is pretty stress-inducing, especially when you’re playing a mage or similar non-tank hero. So the hard-drive will be converted into an extra storage/backup drive, with the possibility of installing Ubuntu on it at a later stage. I don’t quite feel like getting rid of Gentoo at the moment, it’s mostly configured to do everything I need.

Web Expose has managed to cover 6 months of hosting with revenue generated from Adsense, which is to say, that it isn’t really pulling in many clicks. It’s nice to have a technical weblog to post tutorials and the like on, but at this level it’s really optimistic to think that it’ll bring in much money. In any case, the sort of readers reading it most likely have Adblock installed, hiding the Adsense ads. Additionally, Google’s targeted ads seem way off in relation to the content of my articles. I’m seeing things like the Sharp Zaurus advertised on AJAX posts…

That was quite an effort to write, I am really struggling to think straight today.

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of things that have been irritating me lately, but unfortunately something big came up that made me forget all of them. Well that and the passage of time generally lets me calm down a bit and start ignoring whatever it was that was annoying me.

I quit from a certain company in December, and have since been helping out with a couple hours of work every week, with emergency changes and such. On Tuesday, I was informed that a certain bug “was back” and that I basically should have fixed it properly first time. Ok, let’s do the time warp… 2 or 3 weeks earlier I was sitting in the office holding a piece of paper with the bug written on it; now when I say written I really mean “random words pertaining to feature written haphazardly down in pen”. Asking for clarification from the 3 other people who knew about it (project leader, client who saw the bug, and team manager), not a single one of them can reproduce it in front of me, nor can any remember how it occurred the first place. Now, ever since I got defeated by Lord Doomevil in 2005, I have lost my ESP (that is, telepathic) powers and hence cannot solve problems which I have never seen and have supposedly vanished. Notwithstanding any of this, I am currently very busy and have to be quite careful with my time, so I requested that my regular contract hourly rate be paid… it isn’t even outrageous, it’s quite reasonable; it just happened to be a lot more than I was currently receiving. Cue the “you have to understand about commitment” conversation - sure, commitment… commitment to a project I left in December, commitment to being made to feel that I “owe” the company my time, commitment to sarcastic comments about how precious my time is. Naturally I sent off a very polite, formal letter indicating my inability to continue working on the project - polite and formal, because that’s how you do business, anything casual looks like you don’t really mean it.

The email I received back was nothing short of childish; we’re talking threats about crossing people in the same industry, about the trail of destruction I left (for the record, it’s pretty hard to leave a trail of destruction in what can best be described as code I could’ve written when I was 15; any changes I made were instantly constructive) and how I need to travel to learn about how to conduct myself in a full-time situation. Thank you very much, perhaps I do need to learn how to bang a keyboard when frustrated, how to mouth off clients the second I hang up the phone, and most importantly, how to hit my LCD monitor when I have irreversibly destroyed code that was once working. Never mind all of that though, the job I entered into in November was in fact a 1 month (that’s a single month) contract, which was then upgraded to a 1 week notice/6 month contract because everyone understood that I wasn’t a permanent employee, and might be traveling overseas relatively soon. I really fail to see the bit where I signed up to be responsible for any code I wrote forevermore.

All of this smack talk was left out’ve my emails, don’t worry - I honestly am not bothered by the whole situation, they have some very polite emails from me voicing my displeasure, and that is how I feel. The complete disregard for a friendly relationship, the laying of blame, the whole thing makes it abundantly clear that the company is no longer worth any of my time. A simple polite word would’ve laid this entire thing to rest, the money doesn’t bother me (it’s only money) - I could have happily fixed the bug in 15 minutes and still be on good terms with them, but it seems it was not meant to be.

Re-reading the above, let me just clear up that the disappearing bug was actually observable on Tuesday, it was just the bit about how I should’ve fixed it the first time that irritated me. I was also blamed for the site’s sluggish performance, despite not being in charge of the server, nor being the one who chose which libraries and backend to use (apparently moo.fx was a bad choice, you know, that whole 3kb of cacheable javascript code really broke the server’s back).

Be careful who you work for, being a young contract IT worker seems to instantly paint a big “abuse me” target on your back.