Broken mirrors, broken minds

Now that I'm officially unemployed and not just another uni student, obviously I've been looking for work. A psyc assessment firm recently advertised a temp position involving admin and light assessment work for a suitable psyc student/graduate. Since I'm suitable for nothing in particular, this job was as good as any, and I need a filler between now and Canberra.

My résumé was sufficiently plumped with exaggerated work history to get me past the screening to some online testing - a verbal reasoning test and an Excel test. I found the verbal test unusually difficult. With the Excel test, I didn't know what the hell I was doing so I just looked through the menus until I found a word that matched what the instruction asked for.

Anyway, I had an interview today. It seemed to go okay. I was given my results and was sufficiently chuffed. I performed at the 100%ile (!) for graduates on the verbal test and the 95%ile on the Excel test (though I don't know the comparison group for the latter).

I'm supposed to find out by Wednesday of next week. Here's hoping.

My dad had another heart attack on Thursday but he didn't tell anyone. On Friday he went to see his GP and he went to hospital in an ambulance. My sister and I went down as soon as we found out on Friday. He was not in good condition. He was hooked up to a drip, a pulse monitor and a blood pressure monitor and had an oxygen mask.

At 1.30am Saturday, Hallowe'en, the phone rang. It was the hospital. A hospital does not call you at 1.30 in the morning to say 'everything is fine.' Dad's blood pressure was through the roof and he had fluid on his lungs. We trundled back to the coronary care unit. I was terrified. We waited while we watched his blood pressure, mercifully, drop. We left early in the morning.

On Sunday, the new addition to my brother's family, Anie Maree (yes, the spelling is what they chose) was christened. My dad was not able to make it obviously, but after the christening and reception, we took her to the hospital so my dad could hold her. Here she is.

I dreamt that David Bowie was on Sale of the Century, and he couldn't answer a question about Labyrinth whilst one of his fellow contestants did. The audience laughed as he got up and pretended he was so ashamed and angry at himself that he was going to storm off set.

Bowie could be forgiven for not knowing the answer though, as in the dream, I didn't know the answer until the other contestant answered correctly, and then I remembered.

Specifically, the question was 'how are Sarah's thoughts conveyed to the audience in her final confrontation with Jareth'? I didn't know the answer. And then the contestant said 'they are newspaper headlines shown on screen', and I remembered that he was right. In the scene where Sarah is falling through space, there are newspapers floating around her where the headlines are her thoughts at that point in time. I remember thinking 'how could I forget this image from the film'?

Of course, that doesn't happen in the real Labyrinth but now I think I should do a fan cut and CG them in there.

Australian customers will have to stump up almost double the US price for some versions of Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system that arrived in Australian stores yesterday.
 

The company cited taxes, freight costs and currency fluctuations as key reasons that the retail price for full and upgrade versions of its software were substantially higher than in the US.

The most basic version of the software will cost $199 to upgrade here compared with $US119 ($129) in the US, but, at the top end of the range, Australian customers must pay $429 to upgrade to the Ultimate version, almost double the $US219.99 ($238) price tag.

"Retailers operate with much tighter margins in the US than Australia. That is a fact. Taxes in this market are very different to Australia. That is a fact. We are a large country and we need to freight products from overseas and that is a fact. These things do affect pricing in this market," McLean said.
 

This is nearly the exact same set of excuses Apple gave for gouging Australians. And this is my response:

Ah, the good old holy trinity of excuses for Australians being gouged - 'taxes', freight costs, and 'currency fluctuations'.

It beggars belief software companies think they are fooling anybody. The Australian GST would add, at most, 10% to the cost of a product. Freight cost is a laughable excuse, unless we are to believe the discs are manufactured in the US and cost hundreds of dollars each to ship to Australia.

Both freight costs and currency fluctuations are complete hogwash, otherwise Microsoft would not go to extraordinary lengths to prevent paid-for downloads by Australians from the US, in US dollars. Even if Windows 7 were shipped from Amazon at the standard DVD parcel rate - something in the order of $10 -  this would not explain hundreds of dollars difference.

I wonder how it is these spokespeople sleep at night? Then I realise they sleep on a pile of money, exsanguinated from Australians.

That's what it's come to. Seven years of on-again, off-again, part-time and time-off delays and avoidance. The thesis does not conform to anthing like what it's supposed to. It's about 23k words when the max was supposed to be 10k. I already left out half of the analyses I intended from the first study. Some of the sentences might not make sense and I'm certain the reference list is incomplete.

I'm not going to get first class honours. My WAM is enough (84.5 which they, I assume, will round up to 85) but the thesis isn't polished enough for an HD. I'll deal with it.

I've still got things to do - some marking for my tutorial groups and a final placement report for my practicum requirements. But the albatross is off my neck.