kekekeke and such

The whole ^_^ phase is crazy.

Yes, it looks like an Asian. So do a whole bunch of other things. But then, so does this.

Shamelessly ripped from Sam's blog

Dingaleedoo

According to at least one person, this effort in arsehole prevention/rollback hasn't completely worked out. Yes, its possibly about me, and yes, I'm a self-centred bastard. But somewhat suprisingly, I'm not particularly proud about it.

I realise that in these kind of situations, no amount of justification is going to fix it, because nothing beats loyalty to others more than self centred bastardism. Nor do I expect anything good to come of it. So my move is a pass, and I obviously don't play chess very well.

Did I ever mention I was lazy coward? Or maybe I'm naieve in thinking that life is meant to be simple. Maybe its not, but at least forgive me for the attempt at making it so.

Please note: This is not attempt to win votes. I'm only running for a seat in parliament next term.
Shrinks from the scathing comments which will surely ensue.

What I learned in the last hour

Apparently Windows XP doesn't actually need a hard drive to be set up in the BIOS to be able to read it. Oh what a waste of time last night was :(

Be like the water...

Yes, its true. I have no warm blood...

Or so goes the analogy. I'm not very emotional. Sometimes its like I'm totally ignoring the thing thats going on. It makes me a little bit inhuman. So when people are bawling their eyes out or getting all excited about their next big trip to disneyland, I just kind of sit there with the 'meh' expression sitting plainly on my face.

Frankly, most of the time my view is too practical. Perhaps its the cynical view I have on life. Things are there, then they go away. Everything is just temporary, and by the time you get used to it, its time for things to move along. So theres no real point getting all excited or sentimental about anything. Even plans you make for next week can fall apart the day before.

The same applies to people in life. We all know they're not going to be there forever. I'm not saying that we should keep our distance from each other so that when the inevitable happens, we won't feel as hurt. I'm saying that life is precious enough not to spend time dwelling on what was or could have been. Learn from your mistakes, and move on.

This isn't meant to be a self help guide on how to deal with grief. Its only a liquid perspective on life. Theres way too much crap out there for you to be able to control enough to control every aspect of your own life.

Seats

It seems that I don't really stop talking about public transport, and that I always have something to gripe about. I'm not even going to bother to try and defend that point of view, probably because its true.

But this time its not even about the transport system itself, its about some of the people who use it. Its about those people who seem to think that their bag is more important than another person. These people get on the train/tram/bus, walk to an empty or nearly empty row, and sit their fat asses down on one seat, and dump their bag on another. I've got nothing against this when the bus isn't full, but when other people have to make an effort to find an empty seat, perhaps they could take the initiative to remove their bag.

Its actually quite annoying when some people do this during trips where it is quite obvious the vehichle is going to fill up. This includes rides INTO the CBD before 9am (and usually a bit after) and rides into the suburbs after 4:30pm. When you get on a bus, you pay for your seat (or in recent months, a place to stand). If you really want another seat, buy another ticket for your precious bag.

The whole thing also applies to fat people. Yes, so you're bigger than other people, but if you take up two seats, let two people sit, and you can stand. It helps you lose weight if anything. Think about all those calories you'll burn straining to keep yourself in an upright position the whole way home. Its not going to replace the gym, but its a good warmup before you get there. (Bad karma warning - don't laugh at this, its not bad karma if its the truth.)

On the flip side of the coin, we should be asking why others don't ask them to move their bag. If they're an Asian, they'll probably understand. Public transport is even more crowded where they came from. If they're not, just ask them to move their bag then sit really close to them afterwards. It will help with their social anxiety problems.

So you see, theres a silver lining to this. Just make the most if it.

Budget Roundup

Normally you don't really expect the spending to go up in government budgets unless something is wrong. That could be because its an election year or due to other things like a struggling economy. But the Australian treasurer seems to have come up with a economy stimulating budget without the need for it. Though its probably a good thing to spend all that cash lying around.

This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it means things are a lot better for us. Theres the oppurtunity for more jobs, and the tax cuts mean we have more money to spend on things, or at least to help us with the cost of petrol guzzling cars.

I'm happy with it.

Time to waste another hour of my life

Perhaps I should just do today's sodoku. Its probably a much more fulfilling and intellectually stimulating thing than anything else in the lecture.

I think today's topic is UNIX. I wonder what else I've been working on in computer science for the last 4 years. They finally get around to it in IS.

Assesment Centres

One down - two to go... so far.

You know, sometimes I think it would be so much easier if you could just go somewhere and beg them to give you a job, and you'd get one based on your personal merits and how those merits would make you perform on the job. Then I realised thats what the whole selection process is trying to do.

Its not always successful though. Somehow, theres always duds who get through. In fact, the correlation between how well someone performs in an interview situation and their performance on the job is only about 0.14. If you use a structured interview, this jumps up to something like 0.2. Assesment centres aren't that much better. Its something like 0.4. If you correlate the performance on the job and their cognitive ability, it would be about 0.6. Thats quite a big difference, which makes me wonder why they even bother with interviews. I guess sometimes its just so that people don't think you're completely ugly - and therefore could perform better on the job. Fair enough. We don't want an office full of ugly people after all. Thats it, I'm not getting hired.

For the job application writer

Since the whole university graduation thing is coming up quite soon, there has been quite a lot of time spent doing applications for jobs. Most of these applications have questions tacked onto them, and you have to answer them to finish your application. Now, most of these questions are quite irrelevant to the topic at hand i.e. how you're suitable for the job. They ask you the about a whole scenario - what was the situation, what did you do, and what was the outcome, for a whole bunch of things. For example, "Describe a time when you used teamwork..." etc. The whole idea is that your past behaviour is probably a fairly good indication of your future behaviour. However this relies on the idea that the person being asked the questions doesn't lie. A fairly far fetched assumption in an interview environment where they're not really going to know if you do.

So what caught me out the other day while I was doing one of these applications was this question: "Why are you suitable for ?" Then I realised - I'm not. There is no way I'm really quite suitable for a company which designs and builds large physical structures from the ground up. I have no idea whats involved, there is little that attracts me to something of that nature, and the whole idea is kind of well... unsuitable.

I guess this is a lesson to the people who actually write these applications. Perhaps they should put in more of these questions because they're hard, they'll weed out the people who aren't suitable, and its another question to add to the application.