The Dialectizer
Just when you think that you've seen it all, the internet surprises you yet again by throwing up something completely different. "The Dialectizer gets you to type in a web-address, choose the dialect you want to view the site in, and then makes the appropriate changes to the website. For example, when this site is viewed in 'Jive' it makes very interesting reading. I vaguely recall something similar in a chat client I used to use, but it must be a pretty stylish piece of software that can make such changes. It certainly had both Nats and myself crying with laughter after a bit of a read.

It seems as though the internet community has come out with a very anti-war opinion in the past few days. As it begins to appear that everything is not going 'quite to plan', the realisation that the US shouldn't have even got this far has begun to set in. About a week ago I sitll had the opinion that the US was doing the right thing, just in the wrong way. But now it seems as though the Iraqis, even if they hate Saddam, hate the idea of being told what to do even worse. There haven't been any 'weapons of mass destruction' found, or anything that links Saddam to al-Qaeda. As a result, many of the reasons given to justify the war are not even bothered with anymore - and it's become blatantly obvious the only reason the US are in Iraq is to secure the oilfields there, as well as to possibly cause a series of 'regime changes' throughout the Middle East to further secure their position.

Picture the Iraqi airforce bombing the hell out of Washington DC, in the aim of liberating the US from their evil leader George W. Bush..... funny isn't it? But is it really that different from what's happening in Baghdad?

TGIF
Yay it's Friday - another week seems to disappear off the face of the earth. I'm not really sure if it's a good thing that time is going so quickly. On the one hand, each week means another pay-day and as my financial position is slowly shifting from critical to stable, each pay-day is dearly welcomed. On the other hand, for Nats it means that her deadlines get closer and closer, although she has made some pretty decent dents in her workload, writing her first essay. It's scary to think that she's on holiday in a couple of weeks, which means that she's halfway through the first semester. Reminds me of my first year at uni, when I just couldn't believe how quickly time was going - it seemed that we were only really just getting started when in fact I was halway through the semester.

It poured down in Auckland all of today, which made work pretty quiet for most of the time. I don't really know if this was a good thing, it probably was as I have been pretty tired this week and it was nice not to be rushed off my feet for once. Work is tolerable at the moment, there seem to be a few more staff on for once which is a good thing, although the fact that we haven't got wasted this week means that they'll probably cut back on the staff numbers for next week because the labour was too high. You can never win with McDonald's. It should be the school holidays pretty soon, which means that the store is going to be much busier than normal, as all the kiddies come into the city for various reasons, and want Maccas for lunch.

My life feels pretty good at the moment, I am trying to keep things as stress-free as possible, and although it's depressing that I'm still working at Maccas, getting treated like shit and paid shit all, at least it's a relatively stress-free job. I look forward to the weekends, and dread Mondays. But at least once I walk out of the doors from work I can just forget about it all until the next day - something that is just never possible at university as there's always an essay that needs working on, or an exam to study for. I don't miss that bit of university, although sometimes I do miss the intellectual stimulation. But helping Nats with her university homework is challenging I suppose, and is keeping my academic side occupied.

Net Addict
Work again today... 7-3 for the past three days in fact. At the end of today I was really tired. After not getting enough sleep last night, and having a really full-on week with Nats' university everything seemed to get just a little bit too much, and I needed to have a break. I feel a bit better now, not quite so 'half-asleep'. At least tomorrow is Friday, which means that the weekend' not too far away. In some respects it has been a short week, as I didn't have work on Monday so Tuesday felt like a Monday and today sort of feels like a Wednesday.

I've been using the net quite a lot lately, finding all sorts of weird stuff along with my usual diet of blogs, cricket information and updates on music charts and box office takings. Yesterday, for example, I was bored so started to find all sort of weird information about the busiest McDonald's restaurants in the world. Apparentely the McDonald's in Moscow, which opened in 1990, is still the busiest store in the world serving approximately 30,000 customers every day! This figure is quite incredible, as the store I work at, (which is one of the busier stores in Auckland) probably serves about 2000-3000 people in a day. Trying to imagine what it would be like if the place was ten times as busy boggles the mind. I found a photo of the inside of this store, which has 27 cash registers and about a thousand employees.

All this stuff that I'm looking at is really different to what I use to check out when I spent zillions of hours on the net back in 2000 and 2001. I guess that was mainly because I was normally in chat, or creating avatars for cheetachat. I guess that things have changed, as have I. I also never used the favourites function of my browser, whereas now I use it religiously and feel lost whnever I'm on another computer which obviously doesn't have my list. Strange how things change....

Back to Uni - Deja Vu
I'm back at university, although only for the day as I have a day off work, and a few things to do up here. I went to one of Nats' geography lectures, which was kind of interesting although they were studying the one thing I have spent a lot of the last six months on - namely migration patterns - so it was slightly repetitive. But it's kinda cool being back up here, I feel like a student which is better than feeling like a McDonald's worker. And it also feels like another day off, now I only have four days of work until next weekend.

I read a hell of a lot of blogs last night, trying to find interesting new ones to add to my blogrolling list. It's amazing the variety of blogs out there, from all over the world and talking about all sorts of stuff. Some of them are really good, well designed and always seem to spout the most interesting of things - sometimes I think that it would be cool if I ever thought up of stuff like that to say. To take a little interesting bit of my life and develop it into something special.

I think that I'm getting used to waking up at 5:45am now - when the alarm goes off sure I feel tired and wouldn't mind just ignoring it and going back to sleep for another hour, but it sure isn't as bad as it used to be. When Nats first started working at 6:30am in the middle of last year, it was like hell waking up in the dead of night to walk to the bus-stop and go to work. Things got better when Nats' grandmother started driving us to work, but it was the middle of winter and pitch black outside when you awoke. Even after waking early almost every day for the second half of last year, it still felt bad if you had a short break from it and then had to go back to the early wake-up calls. I think that the hardest time was just after we came back from our Christmas holiday. But funnily enough, just as we're beginning to head into winter it seems a lot easier than before. Maybe my body's just used to it after almost a year? Maybe that can never happen, after 13 years of waking up at around 7:20am (for school) is my body clock forever set to think that any earlier is not right? After all, starting work early in the morning means that you can do an eight hour shift and still have some of the afternoon left once you're finished, and that has got to be a good thing.

Ice Skating
My thumb is feeling a little better now. It's been over a week since I tried to chop it off, and although there's still a rather nasty spot underneath the fingernail, the swelling has gone down and the bruising isn't quite so bad. It still feels really odd when I push or prod it, and hurts when I bang it. But if I can avoid any more beating myself up, things should be good. I've got tomorrow off work, which should be a good chance to catch up on a few things I need to sort out, and have a nice relaxing three day weekend.

I went ice-skating yesterday, with Nats and her sister. It was pretty cool (literally and laterally), as there's something about ice-skating which can be really relaxing, gliding over the ice with a minimum or effort. I'm getting a little bit better, although it's difficult to really make any improvements when I only go skating about once a year. I know that in the future we should choose to go at night, or during the day between Monday and Friday - because there were about 10 million little kids on the ice trying to get in your way all the time. In between dodging kids, and trying to avoid any large chunks taken out of the ice, it was still fun - and I only fell over once. And that wasn't even my fault.

What makes a good blog? I guess that's a rather important question which I should ask myself from time to time. In the past I've written many times that the main purpose of this site is to act as some sort of time capsule which I can look back on some day in the future and know what I was doing at a particular time in my life. Yet, I also obviously want to write well in this page, to make it interesting reading not only for myself in the future, but also for the people who do come to this site. There have been times in the past when the quality of my entries has been pretty crap, times when they've got better and times when there just haven't been any. So.... back to my original question, what makes a good blog? And am I realy trying to make a good blog out of this page, or can I just not be bothered? Well.... there are many different types of blogs out there, some which focus upon politics, some which don't really have a focus, there are local ones and ones from the other side of the world. Really, in my opinion a good blog is a little bit of everything - it talks about the person's life, it talks about what's happening in the world, it talks about what the writer is thinking, talks about their beliefs, their opinions and their interests. It should be well written, but shouldn't be too complicated in the language used. It should be regularly updated, but not too often (you'd have to live online to keep up with Instapundit). Maybe getting all of these aspects right is a bit impossible, and maybe if it was achieved the resulting blog would be pretty crap. But that's what I think a good blog should contain.... although if Not So Soft can do it, then maybe it is possible.

The Iraq War
So.... the war has begun. I guess that all we can really hope for now is that it's as short as possible, as few people die and possible, and that it all ends up how the most optimistic planners think that it will. It's sad that things have come to this...

Work today was slightly better than yesterday, probably because I was cooking and not serving customers. It's less tiring being at the back, not so much walking constantly and more of a chance to relax. Especially when you're not on show all the time, and can hide a little bit behind all the machines - and act like yourself a little bit more than is possible on front counter. There's a possible job opportunity for me as a shift manager at Downtown Starbucks - which may be interesting. I guess it would be a step up in the world, although something very different which I'm not sure that I'm too keen on. Although work is driving me insane at the moment, it's something that I know and sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. So who knows, all these possible job opportunities have been mentioned many times in the past and nothing has come from it, maybe this is just another one of those or maybe it's something different.

Nats has finished three weeks of university, which has been stressful, intersesting and a whole heap of work. Maths assignment number two has been handed out, and it looks rather challenging and a lot of work.

Information Junkie
I know that we're going through strange times when I'm regularly checking newspaper websites in Britain, the U.S. and Australia. One of the beauties of the internet is that I don't have to live in any of the aforementioned countries to get an idea about what's 'going on' there. It's all at my fingertips (literally).

I can't believe that it's Wednesday already. This week has gone by really, really quickly - as Saturday night really doesn't seem like that long ago. Work was really chaotic today, we sort of had enough people (which translates to we didn't, but as that's always the case it could have been worse) working, but the shift manager was so "fucking useless" (in the words of another manager working), that the place was an absolute shambles. I am absoutely convinced that I could do a better job, I organised the breaks on front counter, I made sure that everyone did the stock-up and cleaning after it quietened down once lunch rush was over, and I was the one who complained about the lobby being a mess repeatedly until the manager was forced to do something about it. Sure, running a shift is a challenge, but the guy today did nothing after writing the line-up at 9am this morning - and I'm not exaggerating.

Australia beat Sri Lanka in the semi-finals of the world cup last night, which is a bit of a bummer as it would have been nice to see the Aussies finally lose. As the other semi-final is India vs. Kenya, it's pretty obvious that we're going to end up with a India - Australia final. And I really can't see India beating Australia - who'll win another trophy. Snore. Surely there's something wrong with the format of the tournament when South Africa, West Indies, Pakistan and England don't make it past the first round - and Kenya make it to the semi-finals. Although Kenya aren't the worst team in the world, I would back any of the mentioned teams to beat them 9 times out of 10.

An Inevitability?
So war in Iraq now looks inevitable. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has completely disregarded the wishes of the United Nations, most of the world's public opinion, and international law to set out on a personal crusade. My own opinion on this matter is rather obvious, and complex. But I think that it's very similar to that of Robin Cooke, who resigned from the British government yesterday. While it's obvious Saddam Hussein is a pretty nasty guy, that doesn't really justify what the U.S. and it's "allies" have embarked upon. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few days, with British MPs resigning left, right and centre I wouldn't be surprised if British troops were forced to withdraw from the conflict altogether. The Spanish public seems to be against war just as much as the French - which means that their government's policy is completely out of line with public opinion, which could lead to a similar situation as the one happening in Britain. In Australia, I also wouldn't be surprised if anti-war protests both within parliament and in the streets continue on a much grander scale than before. It will be very interesting to see what happens, although at the same time it's very sad and frustrating that diplomacy has been abandoned when it actually seemed to be making some impact.

A couple of anti-war protestors in Australia today made their opinion public in the most ingenious way I have seen for a long time. They got arrested, but I think that they really got their point across - and it's really just a fantastic stunt. How come nobody saw what they were doing??

Monday Bloody Monday
Monday, and back to bloody work again. Fortunately today was one of the best days at work I've had for ages - it was pretty quiet so we weren't rushed off our feet all day, and I did a little bit of everything today which meant that I didn't get particularly bored doing one thing. In the morning I was running the front counter, which was more interesting than just serving customers. I thought that I did a pretty good job too, the dining area was really clean and I got out all the breaks in good time. Then after 10:30 when we switched over to regular menu, I did a mixture of everything up until 4pm when I finished.

As you may have noticed, the tag board has gone from the left hand side of the page. It was slowing down the page way too much, as you could tell by looking at what was actually loading every time you came to this page - it was always some tag board gif or another. So now you can still comment, using the comments button below my text, and hopefully the page will load faster for everyone. I've been trying out a couple of new looks for my site - fiddling around with colours in Frontpage. But I think that if I am going to revamp this page I may as well go the whole hog and start with a completely different template. In the past couple of weeks I've learned quite a bit about Frontpage, and web-design in general so I may get around to changing stuff around. But for now, hopefully this design is satisfactory.

Nats finished her Maths assignment, after staying up half the night. Bloody sucks when university stuff keeps you up until all hours of the morning - I remember writing an essay between 9pm and 3 am in the morning once because I had work all weekend and had to have it done by Monday. Sucks, bloody sucks I tell you!

Mathematics
I had a pretty relaxing weekend, a couple of really late nights and a lot of Maths. Nats has her first Maths assignment due tomorrow, and it has proven to be one of those things that goes on and on and on. I don't seem to be able to explain things very well, so it gets a bit stressful when you can't do something or just don't get it. I do understand how she feels, as I've lost count over the years how many times Maths reduced me to tears - there's always that sense of sheer helplessness when you just don't get it. Sometimes that's followed by elation when it finally clicks, but before then you just get into a state where nothing makes sense and it's all very depressing.

We went out last night, and it was actually a pretty cool night. We went to about 4 different bars, and got rather drunk in the process finally settling at the Degree Bar, which was good because it played good music, had a great atmosphere, and was showing the cricket. I think that I got pretty drunk by the end of the night, as I had about 8 or 9 drinks all up. We left at about 3am (it would have been 4am, but daylight savings ended which meaned that the clocks went back an hour), before going to Burger King for a feed and coming home.

It was quite funny at Burger King, because when I was lining up the person serving asked me what I would like to order, and naturally I walked up to her and explained what I wanted. However, behind me was a rather drunk woman who took offence to the fact that I had "pushed in" and started yelling at me. I was a bit drunk to really give a shit, so I explained to her that the counter person had asked me what I wanted and did it really matter if she had to wait another minute? But then she kept on blabbering so I just ignored her and finished off my order. Later on, when I had taken the food back to Nats, the woman walked past with her friends, and pointed out to them that I was the guy who had pushed in front of her. I didn't really give a damn, and thought the whole situation was extremely amusing - so I gave her a friendly wave as she continued to give me the evils.

It's back to work tomorrow, the third week of Nats being at university and me working fulltime. Hopefully I'm just about to get ahead of my immediate debts, and once this week's pay comes in I might actually have a little bit of money which I don't have to immediately hand off to someone else. It's actually been quite nice lately, not having the stresses of looming essays and assignments, as well as knowing that once I leave work I can just leave it there. Most of my stress now is about Nats' university, helping her through her Maths assignments and worrying about her looming essays and assignments. It's all proving to be rather full-on, probably even more so than stage one university, where you can do subjects that you're actually interested in rather than stuff like Maths and English.

The Unwanted Thumb
Yay it is Friday! I'm now two weeks into this 'working fulltime' thing. I guess that it's not going too badly, things at work seem to be picking up at last - management is slowly sorting their shit out and the store is running a little bit better. It has also been much busier lately, especially in the last three days (Monday and Tuesday were quiet because of all the rain). Hopefully if the busyness continues, I'll get good hours (they're not bad at the moment, although 7am starts are a bit of pain) which means MONEY. And as my money situation seems to always be critical, it might be nice to actually have a bit of a buffer in the bank, so that I'm not praying for pay day all the time.

I tried to chop off my thumb today at work. Well not deliberately, but when I was sharpening the grill scrapers and spatulas I slammed a big piece of metal into my thumb, crushing it against another big piece of metal. So now my left thumbnail has a big purple splotch underneath it, while the thumb is really swollen. It hurt like hell, and I think it put me into a little bit of shock as all the blood left my head and I felt as though I was going to faint at one stage. Since then I've realised how much I use my left thumb (even for the bloody spacebar!), and it's being a right pain in the ass.

Me and Nats have quite a few parties this weekend, with a friend's 18th and one of Nats' workmates' 20th. In New Zealand the legal drinking age is 18, so once the clock hits midnight on Saturday night (he turns 18 on Sunday) we're going to hit the bars and get smashed!

I need to stop typing, thumb is hurting... Go New Zealand in the cricket tonight!

Was There Life Before Internet?
The phones have been out here for a day, only having just returned this afternoon. Apparentely some water got into the phone cables during the massive storm over the last couple of days, and knocked out phones for about four or five streets around where I live. It kinda sucked, no internet and no ability to make outgoing calls - I suppose at least Telecom diverted our incoming calls to Nats' cellphone which made things a little bit better.

I've finished my Mum's website, and it looks pretty cool. There are a few things that I need to sort out, as apparentely the font I created the site using isn't very common so therefore looks strange and has capital letters in all sorts of funny places - but that's easily fixed. It was all very interesting, as neither Nats or myself had ever used FTP to upload sites, as we're too poor to afford a proper domain name and web-hoster. But it was educational, and I figure that I could probably switch my site over to a proper web-hoster at some stage in the future if I got enough money. Slight problem that I'd have to change about 10 million links and image sources (like one for every single flashing circle at the start of this entry). But maybe it's something that I can consider in the future, as it would mean the end of my bandwidth problems and would also mean that I'd have a cool domain name - like jarbury.com maybe?

Otherwise, the last three days have been pretty normal. Work isn't too bad, I'm getting 8 hours a day which is good. Nats is getting into university a little bit more, her course seems rather full-on as she has quite a few essays, tests and assignments coming up soon. Will be interesting. I don't know if I'll be able to stick with Maccas fulltime for the whole year, I'm sure it'll drive me insane eventually.

A Settled Pattern?
Life seems to be on the up at the moment, I've finished with all the stress of university, which means that I'm focusing on keeping my life as stress-free as possible. Money is a worry, but money's always a worry and if I just keep thinking about how much I owe everybody I'll never get anywhere. What I need to go is to get through work, to work as many hours as possible so that I might finally be able to get ahead of everything, hopefully make it at least slightly tolerable - and just enjoy the rest of my life.

Maybe this new found optimism is overdue, in fact things have been better for quite a few months. But now my life is starting to settle into a new pattern, I've just about finished my scholarship project, Nats is settling into university, and I seem to have a little bit more time to relax and do what I please with. Waking up at 11am on a Sunday, and spending the day in bed or on the computer has an amazingly soothing effect on the mind and the body. On Friday I was completely sick of work, and everything that came with it, but now I'm ready to go again. However, they have pissed me off big time by calling early in the morning twice to ask if I can work. I mean if I have said that I'm not available to work on a Saturday do you really think that I'm going to work when called at 5:45am in the morning? Hell I had only gone to sleep about 3 hours earlier. And then again this morning someone else called, true it was a little later, but because it had happened twice I really bit the head off the manager who called - telling him that he had woken everyone in the house up (very true) and that the early morning calling needs to stop. So tomorrow I'm going to make sure that this doesn't happen again - I'm really sure that managers aren't meant to call home phones between 9pm and 8am to ask people to work, so calling before 7am twice is totally unacceptable.

Good to see that New Zealand won the cricket again. It seems that we've got the hardest job in the cup, having to win again and again while other teams get through even though they lose game after game. But at least we're playing good cricket, and look just as likely as anyone at being able to beat Australia - the favourites.

Relaxation
A nice relaxing Saturday, spending most of my time playing cricket on the computer, or finishing off my mum's website. Lots of fiddling around in Photoshop and Frontpage to get everything looking nice and pretty. But I've got there eventually, which is one less thing that I need to worry about doing, now I've just got to figure out how to get it all published and working on the net, and undoubtably I'll have to fix all the links which will be a mess, and the image sources as well.... why can't web design be simple?

As I'm actually getting through everything that needs to be done, I've got a bit more time to concentrate on stuff which I've pretty much ignored for the past year. At the end of 2001 I really got stuck into learning some javascript, which went into the numerous redesigns of my webpage around then. Over the past year I've made a few adjustments, added more and more links as well as changing some of the pages around - but there really hasn't been anything new. I've got plans to create an 'about me' page, although when you actually get to the stage of writing about yourself your mind goes a complete blank. And I want to play around a bit with the javascript on this page, maybe get a couple of new things going, or sort out some of the ongoing problems - such as that little yellow exclamation mark which seems to be referring to a problem in the Angelfire part of the code. But anyway, maybe it's about time for my page to get a bit of a refit, some new colours and a bit of long overdue maintenance on some of the not-so-regularly updated pages.

I've also been playing around a little bit in Bryce, creating some more 3D backgrounds, which I will upload soon. One of them took forever to render, but has come out pretty cool so when I have the chance they shall be uploaded. Once I've trawled through the masses of Bryce tutorials there are on the net, and applied some of them to create even more interesting pictures, there may be another influx of backgrounds.

Waiting...
Yay the week has finished. It's been a really long and tiring week for everyone here - me as I've worked quite a few hours and the store has been pretty darn busy, and especially for Nats who has managed to get through her first week at university. There are still millions of things to sort out, life seems to be in that "we can't really get stuck into it because we're waiting for stuff to come through" stage. I can't finish off my mum's website because the printers aren't giving us the photos for it; Nats can't access stuff at university because they screwed up her enrolment; and I can't figure out what my fulltime hours are going to exactly be, because I'm waiting for my lecturer to help finish off my research assignment. So everything's in a little bit of limbo at the moment.

Spent the evening watching four hours of Third Watch and Alias, a rather tiring if highly enjoyable and interesting way to spend the evening. Just after four hours it's really nice to turn off the TV and rest the eyes for a while, at least long enough to connect to the net and update my site... what is it about screens?

I have a bit more peace of mind now, as I have finished and handed in the part of my assignment which the Science Faculty wanted. Basically a shortened version of what I might submit to a journal for publishing, this exercise was made way easier by the fact that I had already written most of the long version so all I needed to do was copy and paste important bits. However, the problem when you do that is always what to leave out, you add this bit and then realise that you need to also include this other paragraph or it won't make sense. And then it doesn't link together, and before you know it you've put together 2,500 words in a supposed mini-report. Oh well, I hope they enjoy reading it, and at least now I don't have a deadline for when anything is due. So for the first time in ages I don't have the feeling that I really should be doing something else, and there's not upcoming dates approaching. Now I just have money, work and everything else to worry about. It doesn't really end does it?

Change... at last!
The last few days have been pretty insane, I've worked eight hour shifts for three days in a row (finally getting some decent hours), while Nats has started university and seems to be getting through it pretty well. Our lives have changed lots since last week, although there is some sort of pattern as I've caught exactly the same bus going into the city each three mornings.

My last three days have been based around work, and things seem to have been getting worse every day. Monday was really busy, although we had good quality staff on which made things OK, it was still rather hectic and we could have done with some more people - but you get used to not having enough staff on after a while and you just realise that you've got to grin and bear it. Yesterday was quite a bit quieter, which was a good thing in some respects as we weren't rushed off our feet, but then in the afternoon the managers felt that it would a good idea to let everyone go home early as it had been quiet - and of course then it gets busy. As for today, we got completely smashed the whole day. When I arrived at about quarter to eight there were only two people serving, and about 20 customers. Then it just seemed to be the same all the way through, one person had called in sick which meant that we were always struggling. We worked ultra-hard not to lose the breakfast (which would have been a total disaster), before hoping that we'd have decent reinforcements for the lunch rush. But then both the 11 o'clock starter and the 12 o'clock starter didn't show up - leaving us really really short. Then we kept on running out of stock, the fry scoop disappeared and it was general mayhem for the entire day. The whole store seems to be in complete mayhem and chaos at the moment, the new managers have stuffed up the stock orders ever since they took over a month ago - the whole McDonalds distribution centre has run out of some stock meaning that every store is run down on everything. I just got really, really angry at everything for a while, before realising that it's not really my problem. Who cares if we run out of tray mats or fry bags? I'm not the store manager - it's not my problem. I'm just going to follow procedures and do my job properly. So I did that, and eventually felt a little bit better about things.

I suppose the one good thing about McDonald's is that once a year they pay for us to go to the Rainbow's End theme park. We went last night, as it had been postponed since the week before. It was pretty good, I wore my contact lenses on the roller-coaster for the first time so that I could enjoy it fully (I used to have to take my glasses off meaning everything was a big blur). It was pretty spectacular and the night was fun, although waking up this morning after less than 6 hours of sleep did not leave me feeling that great.

Don't Leave Me Summer....
Man summer is over already, having officially ended yesterday. This kind of sucks, as it means that cold dark mornings are coming soon, having to wear bulky jackets around, as well as numb fingers. Auckland doesn't even get the excitment of snow, or anything like that. We just get cold, damp and dark days. Goodbye blue sky, see you again in 6 months. Maybe I am overstating the fact, as it is only the beginning of March, a month which quite often has more settled weather than December. It just feels like this summer has gone by really quickly, especially when compared to summer last year, which seemed to last forever. Maybe it's because summer last year was defined as separate from everything else: I was working at a store I hadn't worked at before summer, and stopped working at once university went back. It was also a great time of change, while this summer has been one of consolidation and improvement. While November doesn't seem that long ago, university does. My last exam feels like a really really long time ago, and my current life seems to have been going on like it is for ages. I know that once university starts again for Nats, and once I really get stuck into working fulltime everything will begin to go faster. It always has that habit - have you ever gone "I can't believe that I've been back from my holiday for a month, heck my holiday wasn't even a month long and it seemed like way longer than this"? I certainly have, and I think it's a good thing, as the longer we seem to be on holiday the better.

It looks as though the America's Cup is going to be on its way to Switzerland in the not-so-distant future, as Alinghi now lead 4-0. Frustratingly, Team New Zealand's boat broke yet again - meaning that we've only really had one decent race in the entire regatta. It's all incredibly disappointing as chances are that we'll now be humiliated 5-0. It all seemed so promising, with all the technical advances and everyone saying that we'd have a fast boat. Yeah well the boat might be fast, but that doesn't really help if you can't even make it to the finish.

I normally try to keep politics out of this page, but as I've been reading a lot of political stuff about the Iraq crisis lately, I figure that I should add in my opinion, and possibly add comment on what's going to happen in the next few weeks. It seems as though the US wants war, whether or not the UN goes along with it. The repercussions of this could be quite staggering for the international community. There are a lot of unanswered questions which would arise: Who would join the US on this mission against the will of the UN? How would the other members feel about this? What kind of split would this cause among the security council? Is this going to be the end of the UN? What's going to happen to the Middle East, let alone the rest of the world? I certainly hope that the UN does not vote for any resolution, it seems that although Saddam is a pretty nasty piece of works and has wrought destruction against his own people, the US really have no right to demand that he disarms and hands over power. Surely if Iraq asked the US to disarm they would be laughed at - so why are things any different just because the US has incredible military strength? It seems as though Bush and his warmongering buddies are being rather hypocritical - maybe it's about time people began to put everything into perspective and adopt a different apprach. Wouldn't it make more sense to help the Iraqi people get rid of Saddam themselves? If he really is as unpopular as everyone seems to think he is, then with a little bit of help he might be deposed. It happened to Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia, so it could happen again.

Assignment ... well... at least somewhat finished
I've finished my assignment, well at least the first part of it - which should hopefully be the biggest and longest part of it. I woke up reasonably early this morning so that I could finish it off before work, I should have done it all on Wednesday but I was writing crap for a while and figured that if I kept on writing I would actually be doing more harm than good.

Lots of things are going to change next week - I'll be working quite a bit more than I am currently, while Nats starts university. I don't really know how things are going to go, it'll probably be a little bit strange at first and next week might be rather difficult, but on the other hand it is very exciting.

Work seems to be settling into a pattern at long last, although it still seems like management really don't give a crap about us and only really care about profit levels. But at least they're giving me some OK hours for next week, so maybe I will hold off on any possible move to Starbucks, or any other possible places.

Productive... OMG
Yesterday turned out to be a pretty productive day, as I managed to write about 3000 words for my research assignment. This means that I will finish writing it tomorrow, giving me enough time to hand it in to the lecturer so that he can give me some help before classes are back next week. I am pretty pleased with how it's turned out so far, although I am sure that I'll need to do a fair amount of editing so that it makes proper sense and so that I don't end up repeating myself over and over again.

It rained today, which was a pain in the ass because our Rainbow's End excursion got postponed until next week. I suppose that's a good thing, because it would have been pretty stink to go all the way out there and have the night ruined because of bad weather. Hopefully next Tuesday will be a nice and clear evening so that we can have a really good time.

I got a supply of contact lenses for the next six months today. Over the past two and a half months since I first got my lenses I probably haven't worn them as much as I should. At least now I've sorted out putting them in and taking them out, so that only sometimes I have a few problems with my left eye because my eyelash seems to get caught between the lense and my eyeball - which hurts like hell - and I have to take the lense out and put it in again, which seems to fix everything. I realised that if Nats is working early in the morning then it makes sense to take my contacts to her work then put them on there, rather than having to get up really early and putting them in when I'm half asleep. So hopefully over the next few months I'll be wearing my lenses most of the time, and just my glasses on lazy Sundays or once I've worn my contacts for the maximum 12 hours.

The Work/Sleep Dilemma
I got called into work today, it's always a dilemma when work calls and asks if you want to work today. On the one hand your mind is telling you that you really neeed the money, you have like $20 in your account and heaps of bills coming up soon. So common sense tells you that any extra hours that are available should be snapped up. But on the other hand it's 11am on a Sunday morning, you've only just woken up after staying up until 3am the night before. You're pretty tired and really feel like a nice relaxing day in bed... so what do you do? I chose to work, and it does make me feel a bit better about myself in hindsight, although it wasn't the best way to spend my day and undoubtedly it would have been nicer to spend the day at home. But I will thank myself for working when I get paid on Tuesday, and hopefully that little bit extra money will help things.

Next week is the last week before university goes back, this also means that I really need to just about finish my research project by the end of the week. After that I'll have about 2 weeks to write my report on the report, which I need to give to the Science faculty to prove that I haven't just wasted the $4000 they gave me, and I've actually done some work for it. Hopefully that shouldn't take too long, and will consist of a whole heap of copying and pasting from my main report. Unfortunately I really need to write the main report, as so far I'm about 300 words into something I suspect will be about 5,000-7,000 words long. So it's all in front of me.

Tuesday is going to be an interesting day. Nats has her orientation during the day - which will hopefully mean that she find out a bit more about her course, figures out when and where her lectures are so that we can plan things a bit more than has been possible. Then we head out to Rainbow's End - a theme park in Auckland - for the one decent thing that McDondald's does each year. Once a year Maccas feels a little bit sorry for all the people who have slaved away for the past year and decides to hire out Rainbow's End for the evening. It's always pretty cool, free entry to go on as many rides as you can in the four hours it's open for. It can be chance to catch up with people from old stores you used to work at, or just to enjoy the fact that you'd normally have to pay about $35 for entry. I'm looking forward to it, especially now as I have contact lenses and will actually be able to see what's going on when I'm on the roller coaster (previously I've had to take my glasses off which has meant the world's a bit of a blur).