Heh, not like that you sicko. Yesterday, after many restless seconds of waiting, dreaming, scrimping and careful consideration, I finally lashed out and bought myself an MP3 player. Yes, I am that wanker you see on the train with the earphones and the stupid remote control dangling from the cord listening to that ridiculous boom-tss music.

In my view, this is the classiest MP3 player ever. It provides a spacious 256MB (around 65 songs-worth) and includes an FM radio and voice recorder, as well as an MMC slot for memory expansion (too bad the MMC cards costs more than the actual player). It also came with a weirdly stiff plastic wrist strap and crappy set of budphones which has the aforementioned (very plastic) remote on the cord.

And what would you expect pay for this masterpiece? $400? Nowhere near. $200? Cheaper. $3.95? Now you’re just being stupid. No, this entire package – the player, crappy wrist strap and budphones for only $48!

Unfortunately, it has the effect of making you look vaguely menacing to all of the other patrons on the train (damn hoodlums and their MP3 players), as well as turning you into more of a target for mugging (hah! joke’s on them) and assult. It also makes you less friendly. People who I may once have stopped to have a chat with (for example someone who I saw today who I went to school with and haven’t spoken to since), pale into insignificance. No way I’m taking out my earphones to listen to your shit, buddy.

I am soo cool.

This is an actual business card.

I laughed.

Yes, that’s right. Fantasy indeed. And no, I’m not talking about the sexual type (although that type is good, too). I’m referring to the fantasy genre of books.

A few weeks ago, Peter C (olilolo.com-group-outlier) lent me the book Magician by Raymond E. Feist. Now, most of the rest of the olilolo.com gang has been extolling the vertues of this genre and author for years, but having been burnt by Tolkien (shudder), I shunned their suggestion. To Doyle and Stu, I offer my sincerest apologies. I was wrong – this series is awesome and the genre isn’t shit by default. I suppose it’s just hard to do well.

So far, I’ve read the first book (Magician), almost finished the second (Silverthorn), and have the third book (can’t remember the name) ready to go. It’s good, too, cause there’s still 12-or-so(!) books left in the series. They definately provide a relaxing escape from the humdrum of public transport and stinky public transport patrons. I recommend them to anyone. DON’T LEAVE IT TOO LATE!!

In other yet-to-be-blogged news, I moved back to Brisbane a month or so ago to be with the gang and my family, and have a new retail-type job in the city. I’ve been there several weeks now and I’m liking it so far. Don’t know yet whether it’ll be a long-term thing or what. I guess we’ll see.

And when I say crazy, I mean absolutely fucking nuts. No indicators, travelling at high speeds and cutting across in front of you for no reason, going 70km/h in a 60 zone while being 3 metres from your back bumper.

This one time, I was quietly going along at the speed limit (70, if I recall correctly) and this car pulls out from behind me, speeds round me, cuts in front of me (without using any indicators), abruptly breaks and turns into a driveway. WTF?!? Why!?

Another time, I was being tailgated by a city bus at 80km/h.

The friend who I’m staying with works for an insurance company as the person who fills in and files the claim when you have an accident (she says that she generally only takes Melbourne calls) and she told me some shockers.

Today, she filed a claim for a woman in her late 70s, who was pushed into an intersection and who narrowly avoided being cleaned up by a bus, by a truck who 1. didn’t noticed that the car ahead of him in his lane was stopped, 2. didn’t notice the stop light the car was stopped at, and 3. didn’t attempt to brake at all. What the fuck was he doing? Was he in the back of the truck smoking copious quantities of marijuana and cackling maniacally? Jesus.

Apparantly, Victorians have the highest rate of car-pedestrian accidents in the country. By far. With the way these freaks drive, this does not surprise me one bit.

Anyway, must go now. Sliders (that old-school 90s b-grade sci-fi series) is on Foxtel! w007

Do you like pointless, often personally-directed debate? I DO!!!

I created a new forum today expressly for this purpose. I think it should be pretty self-explanatory. Read the topic and what comments people have already posted. Then, express your own opinion, or just shoot down someone else’s!

Check out the forum here.

This period’s topic is: Self-harm laws.

There’s an excellent movie shop called Alpha Video not too far from our house, and since weekly DVDs are $1.95 to hire(!), I decided to indulge. We (my Korean housemate Jae-Son and I) hired several DVDs, of which I have seen two – JSA, a Korean movie about soldiers on the DMZ between North- and South Korea, and XXX (which I hadn’t seen until this week).

JSA was quite good. I enjoy movies about stuff like war, Korea, Hitler, Russia, Nazis, Communists, etc. so that automatically increases its appeal for me, regardless of whether the movie is crap or not. So, maybe for you it’d be a terrible movie. It wasn’t a real “bang bang shoot-em-up” sort of movie, but I don’t mind that either. Yeah, as I said, quite good. On a scale of 1000 to 300 tuna tins, I’d give it 573 tuna tins.

XXX was fucken awesome. I don’t generally go for stupid Hollywood movies, which XXX could be classified as, but this had definate flair. Just a sidenote: maybe the reason I liked this movie is that it had evil Eastern-European characters. It might also be because Vin Diesel isn’t bad at all to watch. I’m kinda spewing that I didn’t see it at the cinema. This one I’d rate as 253 1/2 whales out of a Japanese whaling ship.

That ends my half-arsed movie review.

This week, Doyle started setting up an online shop (just the default one that comes with our webhost, so I promptly deleted it and installed a different one, much to Doyle’s disdain), so I’ve been having fun playing with that. As it’s not quite ready for production yet, no, I’m not going to post the link for it (although unless you’re a complete fuckhead you should be able to figure out the URL without much problem). But expect to be able to buy miscellaneous shit from us in the near future.

While browsing somethingawful.com, I came across a link to this site. I sincerely suggest that you take a look. Oh, the hilarity!

One other thing – why do most of the blog-post titles refer to the author in the third person? Isn’t that kinda lame? I seriously don’t get it. It’s obvious from the author and the category who wrote it, so why do we need the author in the title as well? That’s just an observation- I still intend referring to myself in the third person. I think that it was originally Doyle’s fault. Good one man.

Hello to all. I’ve decided that, yet again, I am being left out of the blog-fest of loving that is blog.olilolo.com and that I wish to rectify this situation.

Well, question: what’s new? Answer: not much. After spending a few days of downloading, my computer is now fully ready and configured for Internet use and, surprisingly, it’s reasonably fast. Well, not to load Internet pages, but it doesn’t take ages to start programs. Also, I found an MSN client for Linux! W007! My god, the Internet is cool.

We were short a house-mate for a little while (our old housemate, Leslie, moved to Sydney awhile back), but we now have a new house-mate, whose name is Jaeseon. Consequently, I have resolved to learn a little bit of… (wait for it…) Korean! Not necessarily how to speak it, or understand it, just how to pronounce and write the words. And no, that’s not nearly as crazy as it seems, as the Korean alphabet is entirely phonetic (it’s said how it’s spelt unlike, for example, Chinese and English). This will have the net effect of making me more attractive and lovable to possible Korean mates, as well as making me weirder and more hermit-like to all of my non-Korean friends. Everybody wins!

BTW, good to see that, after vehemently swearing that he’d rather die than write a blog post, Ben has actually written something. That took a lot less time than I thought it would.

Well, as you may have guessed, Internet connection was a little slower in coming than I’d hoped. I got home on Monday after work to find things just as they had been. When I rang Telstra, they simply denied all knowledge that the line was meant to be connected on Monday at all, and let me know that it should be ready on Wednesday. *sigh*
Well, it is now Wednesday and as you may have noticed from the title, Telstra did in fact come good on its promise and I NOW HAVE INTERNET. Yes, it’s crappy dial-up internet and yes, it’s really, really slow, but it’s INTERNET!
Anyhow, I’m currently installing an OS from the internet (which I expect to take literally days) and posting this from a text browser. w007.
Have fun to everyone who’s going to watch the State of Origin tonight. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that there’s going to be television coverage in SA, but I’ll attempt to follow it on radio. Either that or I’ll just listen to music instead.