Monday, September 27, 2010

sub-culture

I find myself obfuscated by certain realisations in the past few days. Little did I know that tattoo subculture was so pervasive. It's like every second person displays it as one might whip out their Iphone in a casual setting, or Macbook in a lecture theatre. This was at a sit-down birthday party though. When did this happen? Why is everyone getting them? Why is the guy who is admitting to having a fake one telling me that he's getting a real one in two weeks? And, woah, that guy doesn't have much bare skin left on that arm thing. hrrm
If this is indeed a growing trend, there certainly is money in it and quite some potential. Perhaps business-minded readers might like to comment on the prospects of a chain of stores with these kind of services.
Before this I thought the next biggest realisation was the amount of preparation required for a job interview. Typing out all answers, trying to think out random ones, etc. hah
Anyway, I've been cycling a bit more and cars are annoying. One stopped perpendicular to traffic flow on Canterbury Road in Box Hill. Just as I'm trying to power up this hill, I find a lady in a convertible reversing out due to some problems in parking. There's another person trying to turn into the driveway coming down the hill and someone trying to get out of the driveway.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

bloody technology

Yes... it's that time of the year. Spamming all of your favourite organisations for work (and also some not so favourable ones). I think it's great how some companies have web-based systems that can take in your CV and churn out the details into the appropriate text boxes in the application process. At least for the details part, but not employment history, it's been pretty accurate. Fantastic.
The part I don't understand is why academic results need to be entered manually. If they're smart enough to rip heterogeneous data out of a CV then surely they can deal with fairly homogeneous data from a spreadsheet.
Of course you're thinking something annoying must've happened otherwise he wouldn't be ranting like this. Well, the page decided to refresh just as I was about 70% done with it. It returned with empty cells.
This wouldn't have happened in an email or snail mail application.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

generosity

I paid for seven five-cent postage stamps and three ten-cent postage stamps using coins at the Monash University post office. To my surprise, the lady walks away from the counter. I thought she wasn't pleased at the coinage. Instead I get a free small envelope to house the postage stamps. Bargain.
These are, of course, to top up the unfranked fifty and fifty-five stamps that still keep coming in.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

musings


Figure 1: Tank with a party hat

Well, that's not quite what I wanted. So I researched the matter a bit further and have come to the conclusion that my graphics memory may be faulty. Apart from the strange objects, this particular computer seems to have trouble resuming from S3 - suspend to RAM. It seems plausible that if the graphics memory is stuffed then the stored information is too corrupt to resume from.

Another thing is the Tablet PC... I should investigate whether that sideport memory is a bit stuffed too. I have been getting BSODs on that though so it might be the GPU instead.