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[McTaggart]

Ok so Hannah was kind enough to tell me that there is a bookshop in our area that is hiring. I'm popping in tomorrow to hand in my CV and hand-written cover letter (I guess they want to check out my hand writing). Hopefully this goes well?

Eep. People still look at your handwriting? Mine is 100% awful. If everyone did that I would never get a job.

Actually my handwriting has been something that I've been meaning to work on. It would be neat to be able to communicate.

[jmrz]

selling someone their first home for $250,000

oh god that makes me so depressed. I have been looking at places for sale or just sold around here (because I hate myself and like making myself feel poor?) and a tiny studio/ 1 bedroom apartment goes for $370 000 easy. Houses are all basically $1 mil or more, and anything I would want to get (nice place, 2 bedroom and doesn't need much work done) is probably more around $500 000 for apartments, not even taking into account the strata costs. That is half a million dollars right there! For an apartment! Then I think about how my parents' house cost $170 000 and it is 3 bedrooms and a study, and that I am never going to be able to afford to buy that kind of house in the part of Sydney I would want to live. Ever.

booooo

Yeah, Newcastle is a lot different, and yes, Sydney is ridiculously expensive. However, having said that - I have family who've bought in Sydney and they seem to be doing okay. I think to me, looking at houses all day at work and walking around with cheques for people's house deposits, I sit there and think "huh, this is a cheque for $50,000." not "OMG THIS IS SO MUCH MONEY OMG AGH". I guess it's just different when you've worked in the industry for so long, nothing surprises me anymore.

Buying a house is one of the biggest things most people will do, it's a hell of a lot of money, and it's awesome when people come in to pick up the keys to their first home. First home buyers are adorable - a lot of them go and camp out in their new house and celebrate. I want that one day, so save save save it is.

[öde]

I was woken up by meowing today! A cat had jumped to my balcony from an upstairs flat and got itself stuck, so I let it in and took it upstairs.



I don't seem to have normal ways to start the day anymore.

[snalin]

The problem with living in a country that has a state religion is that for no goddamn reason everything shuts down fifty days after Easter. This is called Pentecost and I am so angry at it, fuck you Pentecost. I was going out tonight! With a lady! And now I have no idea where to take her or what to do! Serious Pony Discussion, what do I do

Well, uh, the cinema is open today, isn't it? Me and my friends are going there, so that's an option. What kind of places are closed, anyways?

Or have you moved to like Israel while I wasn't looking?

[Jimmy the Squid]

Well, it might not be the handwriting they're interested in - rather, a handwritten cover letter basically assures them that you really want the job, that you aren't just tossing out a million bajillion CV's and cover letters where the names of the companies are switched out. I can't imagine why they would want to actually see your handwriting! Unless you'd be required to write on blackboards and such with offers of the day, but I can't imagine that that would be a deciding factor.

I hope this is it because my cover letter (with the name of the company's swapped out ) is one page typed and one and a half when hand-written. I just copied out what I'd already typed up.

[Lunchbox]

This afternoon my boyfriend came over saying that he fell off his bike today and hurt his wrist. Fast forward to seven hours later and I've been in the ER waiting room for five hours waiting for a plaster to get put on his fractured wrist. Waiting rooms are boring. I have read every magazine in here. I know all about oprah's personal dramas and poor sandra bullocks husband cheated in her with some stripper with face tattoos and that angelina is a terrible mother.
An hour ago a dozen drunk kids stumbled in because their mate cut himself or something? They're really noisy and eating lots of chips and chocolate except for one girl who has gone outside to vom a few times. It's all in all a pretty exciting saturday night!
Oh and we went to I think six house viewings today and only one was worth applying for? Countdown till we have to leave this house: 18 days.

[tania]

vom

what does this word mean?

[David_Dovey]

Think about it

[Gemmwah]

that girl had been on the lash and then she just CHUNDERED EVERYWHERE.

[jhocking]

I will also jump on the bandwagon of house/apartment hunting. So far everywhere we have been has not looked worth the price.

Admittedly I don't know what your price range is, but in Chicago work with apartmentpeople.com. matt recommended them to me when I first moved here, and between us my fiancee and I have used them three times to find awesome apartments. Also, all three agents we've worked with have been amazing characters (eg. the last guy was a total stoner who appeared to be high while at work) so that's a plus too. This last time we were actually working with a couple agencies simultaneously and this guy was showing us the best stuff by far.

Also:

We put in applications ($35 fee each!  the highest I've ever seen)

Holy shit, I hope to hell Melbourne real estate agents never cotton onto the idea of charging people for the privelege of applying for a house.

New York wasn't so bad as charging for applications, but the realtor's fees were killers. I'm still a little amazed that apartment finder services in Chicago don't charge you, they charge the landlords.

[tania]

Think about it

oooohhhh.

[Inlander]

Also known, in a great example of mid-to-late-20th-century Australian venacular, as "the technicolour yawn".

[Dimmukane]

Also jumping in on the apartment hunt, I finally have a job that pays enough for me to move out.  I can actually afford to live on my own, but I already sort of have a roommate lined up (she's going to be transferred soon, but they haven't told her where yet), so if that works out I'll have more money to work on my interior decorating skills with.  I'm hoping it does work out though, because there's a place nearby that is a ridiculously good value and in a really convenient location.

[David_Dovey]

Mixing is hard!

[Barmymoo]

Gemm you are my favourite at this moment.

Maybe the reason they want to see handwriting is for that weird thing where they analyse your writing and give you a score? Which never seems like a very good way of doing things, considering we're taught to write in a specific style at school, or at least I was.

Guys, I am achy and smelly and sweaty and ugh because I just went rowing. I tried to roller blade there because I was in a hurry but fell over twice and now have a bloodied knee. I'm not very good at rowing and it was so hot but I'm glad I went. It feels like I achieved something!

Time for a quick shower before Doctor Who

[Slick]

blogblog,
I went from having no plans this weekend (it is a long weekend, I am quite broke) to driving to an old friend's cottage (an old ranger station) 90km away to spend the night and I will be biking back tomorrow. Excellent.

Mixing is hard!

Man it is! I remember mastering my discs and it took forever to get something we wanted. We would make a master and burn it and drive around listening to it and then go back and redo things and we probably spent more ore equal amounts of time mixing as recording.
Then again you are like a pro at this or something? Also I assume that is what you are talking about?

[David_Dovey]

That is what I am talking about! The singer lady I am working with has hipped me to this fucking amazing competition, so, seeing as both of us turn into puddles of goo at mere mention of Frank Turner, we decided it'd be super cool to get one or more of our tracks in for this, but the deadline is the end of this month. So I'm kind of under the pump to kick out some finished mixes within the next week. Luckily we had a fantastic recording session last weekend and now have seven of the eleven tracks completely finished (including an extremely fun live cover of "Indictment" by Jawbreaker), and two more very nearly done, barring a few extra group vocal parts and such.

Really it's just the first one that's going to be hard and after that I should be able to copy+paste a great deal of the settings over to each song and just do minor tweaks from there.

Also I just got a whole bunch of new plug-ins (the complete Waves package and the complete Sony-Oxford bundle, for you gear nerds out there) off the back of a truck by entirely legitimate means so I'm pretty unfamiliar with a lot of what I am using so that is making it a bit more time-consuming. Also I'm mixing at home in the living room so the listening environment isn't exactly acoustically ideal... Hopefully when I bounce this track down and take it to somewhere with better speakers it doesn't sound like ass. I'm kinda worried I've pulled too much bass out of it, for one thing.

[Jace]

My girlfriend's best friend hates me because she thinks I am a terrible boyfriend, so when they got in a fight over me last night, and my girlfriend was crying, I called her and made her feel better. And was going to walk over to her house (about 15 min away) to give her a hug just to make her feel better, but she talked me out of it. These are things a terrible boyfriend does.

In other news: I'm moving in with people I work with soonish. $450/month unless we get another roommate then it drops to around $350 a month. That is an entirely reasonable price for a place to live, although most of the white people I talk to tell me I'm gonna get shot by the middle-eastern people who live there. I don't really think that the neighborhood can be that bad. I mean its not gonna be like where I live now, but it certainly can't be so bad that people get shot on a daily basis.

[pwhodges]

the listening environment isn't exactly acoustically ideal... Hopefully when I bounce this track down and take it to somewhere with better speakers it doesn't sound like ass.

This matters,  and can cause serious trouble.   If you can't get it sorted for whatever reason, a really useful thing is to have a couple of reference recordings that you are very familiar with the sound of in good acoustics, and maybe elsewhere, which you can play in your compromised acoustic as a comparison.

[october1983]

Entering the last 36-hours of a 7 day long exam and I am fucking sick of it. What the hell kind of method of assessment is a seven day exam?

[Christophe]

Think of it as an extreme final!

[McTaggart]

So in my time at uni I've studied general relativity (albeit not in too much depth) and black holes. I've looked at huge ones at the centres of active galaxies that drive massive jets of matter. I've looked at the shape of the space around them and how it goes asymptotic and how there are regions around it's center of mass where space becomes infinitely long and where turning around and going the other way is tantamount to turning backwards in time. I've studied quantum mechanics. I've looked at things where the behaviour of a system is determined by a mathematical concept that doesn't have a physical interpretation on it's own. Situations where measuring one thing makes other immeasurable. I understand a lot of it. I am completely comfortable with all of these things. I've been getting bored of this sort of thing as it becomes everyday stuff.

So anyway along comes something else to blow my mind. It was between two chapters in a book. One chapter ends and the next chapter begins and it politely doesn't mention the stuff it missed out in between.

You have stars, right. They start as clouds of hydrogen and then they collapse under gravity until they' hot and dense enough that the hydrogen all fuses together into helium and then into heavier elements.
It's a great big long chain that comes to an end at iron. After that, if the thing is heavy enough that it breaks up into other elements and through a bunch of processes a lot of it turns into neutrons. Neutrons are fermions and no two of them can be in the same state at the same time. It's the Pauli exclusion principle and is what holds a neutron star up against gravity. The Pauli exclusion principle is pretty much an axiom. Entire hugely successful theories rely on assuming it's true. It has to be true else all sorts of shit would be how it isn't.

Anyway if you get a big enough neutron star it's ``self gravity overcomes the degeneracy pressure and collapses into a black hole''. This stumped me. It requires that either:
a) Something happens to make the neutrons into things that are bosons (so it doesn't need to satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle).
b) Something happens to the space it happens in which makes it not have to satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle.
c) Both a and b, sort of.
d) the Pauli exclusion principle isn't correct enough.

It makes sense that the thing that makes me go "I wonder" again is the intersection of the things  I am ok with. It also makes sense that it's an area where our understanding as a whole is a bit of a mess. I should be concentrating on other things right now but god dammit I want to know.

[David_Dovey]

Yes yes of course

[squawk]

I just want my brother to wake up so we can go get that fuckin Mario Galaxy Fuckin 2!!
Three days left of high school ever!
Graduation in nine days!
I am still in love

[pwhodges]

The Pauli exclusion principle is pretty much an axiom. Entire hugely successful theories rely on assuming it's true. It has to be true else all sorts of shit would be how it isn't.

Up to a point.  This article talks about the limits beyond which it doesn't hold, e.g. for electrons (the Chandrasekhar limit) and neutrons (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit).  This Google search found lots of good stuff.

[Slick]

It is fairly not-that-difficult to hold up 20km/h on a bike for a while. I woke up this morning in New Brunswick, got dropped off at the bridge, and now I am back in Charlottetown. 70k is very doable if you are stubborn. I am not in great shape but I am persistent and that's all you really need (also lots of water and candy bars).

[Slick]

ahhhhg fuck stairs ahhhgg fuckkkk legs ahhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrr ahhhhhhhh

[Slick]

I am fine as long as I do not try and climb or descend stairs.

[Yayniall]

We've run out of bog roll so I took some kitchen roll up to the bathroom.
Housemate came home and put the kitchen roll away in the cupboard downstairs.
All of this at 11pm.
Women are mad.

[tania]

why did i eat that

maybe it will be okay, maybe i'll die

[Eris]

I just had a house inspection! We spent most of yesterday cleaning and organising stuff (read: hiding our junk) so that the place looked nice when the guy came around this morning. The inspection took maybe 5 minutes. But at least the place looks nice! And he said he would talk to the people he needed to to get us another security card thinger, so we don't need to dick about with the keys any more!

Now I get to do laundry until it comes out my ears. Oh, and go into the cold to go do my banking. I will have no money this week, which makes me so sad. I like money!



Tania, did you eat a fly?

[tania]

i ate mcdonalds for the first time in years because i forgot lunch and a coworker offered to pick something up for me since she was going there. at the risk of sounding melodramatic i seriously feel like i have been poisoned. body is currently on hour 6 of doing literally everything in its power to remind me never to eat at mcdonalds ever again.

[Jace]

mcdonalds is terrible

You guys have some seriously weak digestive systems, honestly.

Blog thread, I went to my girlfriend's softball game today, they lost 16-13, and I got a bit sunburnt, but it was still super fun.

[Slick]

If you stop eating McDonald's your body will be unaccustomed to it. Like trying to eat steak dinner after being vegetarian for a year.

[sean]

mcdonalds is terrible

You guys have some seriously weak digestive systems, honestly.

you know, im pretty sure being unable to digest mcdonalds is a good thing actually.

[tania]

yeah i really do not eat fast food at all anymore, my diet pretty much consists of fruit and oatmeal and sandwiches. despite the fact that my body is now in ruins i am pretty proud of it for resisting the way it did, it shows i have been making some good progress with my eating regime. except when i binge on ice cream because i am lonely and i hate my job but hey, nobody's perfect.
go go team health!

[Lunchbox]

I have eaten from this chicken fast food place every day for lunch the past week.
I feel morally bad about it and sad that it is unhealthy for me but it is TASTY and FAST and RIGHT NEARBY.

[Alex C]

I think you guys are underestimating how often McDonald's screws up everyone, even many of its regular costumers.

[sean]

hence why i avoid it like the plauge it is.

[E. Spaceman]

I ate mcdonalds' here after maybe 3-4 years of not eating any. It was awesome, the Teriyaki big mac is reccomended. I went there again a few weeks afterwards and it was also awesome. If it were any closer (3 train stations  away/90 mins cycling) i would eat there more often.

[Lines]

yeah i really do not eat fast food at all anymore, my diet pretty much consists of fruit and oatmeal and sandwiches. despite the fact that my body is now in ruins i am pretty proud of it for resisting the way it did, it shows i have been making some good progress with my eating regime. except when i binge on ice cream because i am lonely and i hate my job but hey, nobody's perfect.
go go team health!

I am pretty sure a pint of ice cream is better than a meal from McDonalds. A gallon probably is, too.

[Zingoleb]

I eat a ton of fast food because oftentimes I don't have a choice, someone decides to buy me a burger. Even ON a regular diet of fast food the shit makes you feel sick.

[Barmymoo]

On a totally different note, my first exam is today and I'm about to soak my knee in some salty water.

They're not connected.

[StaedlerMars]

I had a burger the other day after six months of mostly vegetarianism and I felt sick. It was tasty, but my stomach couldn't handle it.

I have a job interview in two hours. I am packing my bag to go do Barcelona instead of preparing.

[glyphic]

I have had fast food one time in a year. It affected me so strongly that I shan't make the same mistake again!

Although Mondays are Chipotle day. If I had more money, every day would be Chipotle day.


Saw a live recreation of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense on Saturday. It blew me away. They did everything in their power to recreate it faithfully. Same outfits, same dance moves, same GIANT SUIT. I was totally impressed.

It was awesome.

The venue was a huge art gallery on Cherokee street, where I had never been. The neighborhood looked sketchy, but I think it was mostly because I came from the wrong side of town. Went a different way home and found several music stores and now I want to go back during the day sometime.

[Barmymoo]

Burger King, Pizza Hut and Chipotle are three places I get cravings for ever so often. Sometimes Subway. But there isn't a Burger King here, Pizza Hut is miles away and you don't go there alone anyway, Chipotle doesn't exist on this continent and Subway is a rip off. Good way to avoid junk food: make it really logisitically difficult to buy it.

[E. Spaceman]

It is better than Del Taco. Though this is like saying that having 9 fingers amputated is better than all ten.

[glyphic]

Arguing about food preference is akin to arguing about favorite colors.

I'll let it slide, Sam. This time.

[Zingoleb]

Still, fuck white bread so hard.

Blaggy,

My father stole my eyeliner this morning to write down phone numbers before realizing that this isn't like a normal pencil.

[look out! Ninjas!]

I scabbed a few pieces of popcorn chicken off a mate a little while ago. It was the first KFC I had eaten since I started high school. It reminded me why I hadn't eaten KFC for seven years.
And I haven't eaten a Subway sandwich since I did a trial shift there a few years back. Largely because they seemed willing to hire me, but also because of how much of a blatant lie their "fresh" claims are.