I'm moving.

For good.

It's been a good run here on Live Spaces. I've made many friends. Don't worry I won't be doing anything as silly as deleting this blog or anything (I'll still need this account to comment on all you lovely people's blogs) but I have gone and uprooted to Blogger.

Thankyou to all who spent the time reading my blog here on Live Spaces, but to be honest, the network has gotten unbelievably slow and I know it's not just my slow internet connection. Also I don't like how little you can change here. Many sad faces for Live Spaces. I hope the Live Network doesn't close down completely, though, because there is a lot of work that I've done here that I'm incredibly proud of.

Please follow me to The (new!) Fillet Skillet. I've set it up so anyone can comment there so you don't even need a Blogger account if you don't want one!

Grand opening is today so don't be shy! Add my new blog to your RSS readers!

Rohan

Happy Australia Day to all you Aussies and non-Aussies alike. All over the world today, in every country, there will be all sorts of drunken people yelling "Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" and other forms or eloquent Australian patriotism.

I find it interesting wishing people a happy Australia Day on the internet, because I know that the vast majority of people on here aren't actually Australian. Still, the Americans can get away with wishing everyone a 'Happy Thanksgiving', even though as far as I know, the only place that holiday is applicable to is the United States.

This afternoon (or 'this arvo' as I'm supposed to say on such a day as this) I'm going to go to a movie with friends. It's not a very 'Aussie' thing to do. Really we're supposed to be going out four-wheel-driving with beer and women. But hey, it snuck up on us and we didn't even organise a barbecue. I know the lambassador would be very upset with us. I don't think I'm even going to eat lamb today.

I do, however, look like a bogan - so there's that. I'm wearing black fisherman's pants and a shirt about two sizes too big for me. I also mowed the lawn this morning and my hair is like a birdsnest. Oh I assume I'll pretty myself up before I go out. It's a wet weekend this weekend (no water restrictions) so I can have as many showers as I please.

Thank you Gold Coast City Council.

So it looks like with all my holiday merrymaking and the post-moving runaround-ing that I've been doing I totally forgot to tell you guys about an interview that I did for another blog.

Introducing In The Air and it's author Matthew, who is a boy whose age I have presently forgotten (which I'm sure, if he finds out about this, he'll be fairly distressed about it). Rest assured that his age is somewhat younger than the average blogger. It brings the mean age down from about 14 to about 10, if you understand maths-talking.

Or should that be median age? It's been, like, four years since I did that stuff in Year 11. (WOA! Four years!?! That's nearly five years ago!)

But enough about that. The entire POINT of this entry was so I could tell you about an interview I did with said Matthew. I answer questions about favourite meats and Perth and my old job that I did for ARDS back in the day last year.

Find it IN THE CAPITAL LETTERS.

More on the car once I can find someone to take my photo while I'm draped across the bonnet - pouting sexily.

Rohan

In my previous post I told you I would keep you updated and I didn't. You know why? It's not because I was too busy or anything. It was because I failed at finding a car that day and I didn't want to tell you until I actually had come back with results. Anyway, today I successfully bought a car, so here I am. Yay me!

Introducing Dihatsu Pyzar. This car is a 1999 5-door wagon coloured silver for that extra sheeny-shinyness. I'll have a photo of it soon, so you can see what the car looks like.

BUT I HAVE THIS PROBLEM... all the people in my family (apart from Mum and Dad, I don't know why) name their cars. My uncle's car is Spook, my cousin's car was Lucy, my sister's car was Tiefie (sp?). But the question remains...

What to call the Pyzar?

Esme was an awesome name for my old Festiva, because it was an old lady's name for an old lady's car (it used to be my grandmother's). But Esme is also a fairly common name, so people were familiar with it and got used to it quickly. My cousins are the ones who usually bestow the cars with names, but they are living in England now. I guess a picture would help with the naming so maybe I'll ask you again then.

But for now, I'll bid you farewell. I have other news, but it belongs in a separate post.

I BOUGHT A CAR! FINALLY I BOUGHT A CAR!

So the move went without a hitch, but there was no internet for Christmas/New Years, and even when I tried to update the Live network was malfunctioning and I couldn't do it. Also now that I am back home, I am re-experiencing the slowest... ever... broadband... connection............. ever. I've made a YouTube video but I can't actually upload it it's that slow. I also can't really watch any videos because they take so long to download. I should go and find out if the public library got that wireless connection they said they would get just before I left. It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't because, hey, that's the Gold Coast. Economy bigger than the state of Tasmania and they do all sorts of bizarre things.

I experienced an uninterrupted three days of Christmas in '07, which is the perfect length of time in my opinion. It was the first time in years I wasn't working on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day. I also met my friend Peri, the first friend I made on the internet. I played Munchkin with him and a group of his friends, most of whom also have blogs somewhere out there in the Live network. It was a really good night.

New Years was also pretty cool. I did it in Canberra with my brother and a few friends of his. We saw the fireworks in Canberra and it was brilliant. In the end I was really glad we didn't drive to Sydney to do celebrations. It turns out one out of every 20 people in Australia were all crowded around Sydney Harbour looking at the sky. Too crowded for me.

So as I said, the move out of Darwin went smoother than I could have hoped. I even snuck in a Christmas party hours before I got on the plane to leave. Good times. My move into the Gold Coast is also going very well, except for my endless search for a new car which is rapidly making me lose the will to live. Do you know how unusable the used car websites are? They are very unusable. Very very. In the mean time I can use my Mum's car because she doesn't need it until the end of this month.

I updated my resume yesterday. Working at Dymocks has made me sound very proficient and capable. I hope I'm as good as I make myself out to be. Applying for jobs tomorrow. I want to work in that games store, because whenever I go in there they are so helpful. I want to be as helpful as that.

Already gone to see two movies with some of my Coast friends. I haven't caught up with Rick yet though. I'm told he's in the country (he travels a lot) so I should snag him before his uni starts with the studying.

I also just finished reading The Diary of a Young Girl (or as it's more commonly known, The Diary of Anne Frank). It's a good book, and not just because it is a first-person view of the suffering the Holocaust caused. Anne has a very clear, intelligent voice and she goes through a lot of very normal teenage things even though she is stuck in an attic. She articulates them very well, although there are a surprising number of "nobody understands me's" in there. All in all a pretty good book and I think you should read it if you haven't already. Ends on a bit of a downer though, poor girl.

Ta

It irks me when people say that they are 'behind' on YouTube or their blogs. It makes it sound as if it's a chore they just have to get through or their universe will collapse and all will not be well with the world.

I, however, am BEHIND. I'm out of the loop during a crucial holiday period when people are networking as if their lives depend on it. I want in and I can't have it. Think of all that fun going on online and I'm not getting any of it. *pouts*

I'm moving again. Now we all know how much moving just sucks so I won't dwell on it for long except for the fact I have the added bonus fun of having to figure out exactly how much my stuff weighs. I have figured it out, and the answer is 60 kilos, not including hand luggage, which sucks considering the baggage limit for JetStar is 20 kilos.

Solution? Purchase an extra 20 kilos of excess baggage on my flight ($80) and send another 20 kilos of stuff I don't need right away by bus to the Gold Coast ($60). Joy joy joy.

Wanna hear an awesomecool story?

Stressing about stuff never works out. What the hell was I going to do with Esme? That car was becoming a pain in my... posterior. It was going to cost over $800 to send it by truck back from whence it came. It worked out that if I sold it for a reasonable amount in Darwin, I could buy another car on the Gold Coast for not too much extra, plus I wouldn't have to go through the rigmaroll of re-registering it in that gloriously all-too sunny state of Queensland.

Only problem is, I'm an indecisive person. For a while I figured selling it would be too much hassle, so I was going to keep Esme and ship it after all. Then I flipped and flopped and flipped and flopped until I finally decided with about a week left in the city that selling it was the best option. I stuck an add in the paper which appeared yesterday (Wednesday) and all day I got not one call : (

I figured, 'well that's that' and resigned myself to the fact that I would have to ship the car after all and that my mind had been made up for me. But I'd been praying and other people had been too, and right at the end of the day I got a frantic phone-call from one of the mechanics around town who wanted to buy my car for his wife (I think it was a Christmas present). This morning we negotiated a price that I was happy with, considering that one or two things needed fixing. Done and done. Just like that.

One ad on one day in one paper and I got one call from one guy who turned out to be exactly the right guy I needed to call me.

You could say I'm a bit excited.

But yes. Heartwarming to say the least. I should compile it into a book called "Chicken Soup for the Soul That's Moving House Across the Country". However, I think a better title would be something along the lines of "Moving. Cheer up."

(Written while sitting on a plane. I actually explain this in the thing but I just wanted to be crystal. I've also left out most people's names when I talk about them, just for the sake of not talking about new friends on the internet without them knowing about it.)

I'm on a plane to Darwin and my iPod has resolutely given up the ghost at a very inconvienient time. I would sleep, but the immense difficulty the lady across the isle is having finding semi-comfort is evidence enough that such an excersise is futile. So instead of reading or coughing up money for drinks I have asked the steward for pen and paper. I'm trying to write small becasue I only have one A4 sheet. I would write on the airsickness bag, but someone has put used chewing gum in it. Lovely.

I needed the pen and paper because when my mind is left on its own it begins thinking things that another part of my mind wishes it could record. It's a bit self-important really, but if people didn't write down what they think, the world would be much worse off. Or better off, depending on how you look at it.

I was actually thinking about my trip in Melbourne and how much I enjoyed it and how utterly strange it is to meet internet people who spend their free time being odd in online videos, only to find that in real life they are very much like me. That is to say, they are normal, with similar passions and senses of humour. They might not ACTUALLY be normal, but they pass for normal in my universe, so it's all good really. I mean, it wasn't as if there were a hundred Rohans walking around chatting to one another using exagerated and unneccisary hand gestures.

*** was quite softly spoken really. He used short sentences. He kind of waited for someone else to engage him as if he would be an intrusion otherwise, or as if he was a bit embarrased at being so easily recognisable. *** was really outgoing, striking up conversations all over the place. I followed him around, limpet-like, because he broke the ice with other people so well. One guy I thought was just brilliant was ***** who after I said hello went on to drive a very enjoyable conversation about this and that. He's added me on Messenger too, so I'm looking forward to shooting the breeze with him digitally.

I've noticed that all these people are male and have one-sylable names. Tom, Rob, Steve, Lou, Nick, Matt, John, Sean. My exotically two-sylable name puts me in league with Andrew and Cory, but ev en we can't reach the dizzying heights of Damien.

There were a few girls there, but they had all seemed to have planned multiple things for the day (typical lack of focus :-p) and they all swanned in and out going to jobs or concerts or friends places, which made them very difficult to track down and actually talk to. I only really talked to three girls the whole day. One of them was Lani. Oh and her mum. Make that four girls. Not that I have been, but there are better places to look for girls than YouTube (although it worked for Nate) but I enjoy it all the same. You make good mates there to be honest. Nice people. Great day.

(Ed. Can you imagine?

Person: "So how did you two meet?"
Us: "... on... YouTube"
Person: "Oh")

No more paper left. now what am I going to do? I should have bought one of those notebooks today.

Aaaaah! What can I say about this day? I could just say "it was a pretty awesome day" and that would give you a general idea that it was a positive experience, even though getting to Melbourne nearly killed me. The flight down was delayed and redirected and all sorts of things. In the end what should have taken up four hours of my life instead took up eight. I was flying Jetstar too so I got no food (on Jetstar you have to pay so your airfare is cheaper, but I'm not paying for any crappy airline food).

Anyway, I got to Melbourne having had no sleep whatsoever the previous night but in the end had such a good time I stayed up until about four the next morning. For a bit we were all just kind of milling around interviewing each other. I wasn't really. I was running around with Azukar getting something to eat and conning other people to come with us. Then we all kind of gravitated into our own little groups and had chats over beers or coffees, depending on your age and preference for that kind of thing.

To be honest though, it wasn't particularly what we did that made the day such a blast, but the people we saw. Sure, going out to the afterparty at a local bar was heaps fun (and laughing at the two Americans who came and thought I wouldn't get in, being 19). There's a real sense here that I can't do this justice putting only my thoughts into words. One of the organisers, seanbedlam, has already done a stellar job at particularising his thoughts on the day. I'm gonna steal from him for a bit. K? (Caution, he swears! No! Not swearing! Noooooo! Okay, okay. So on the balance of swears, it's a pretty bad swear. But I'm still leaving it in so I can corrupt the children.)


And that's really the crux of the matter. These weren't just people who you say a quick 'hi' to and move on with your life. They weren't the computer nerds that people might expect to see at a YouTube gathering. Everyone had real, vibrant personality, and not only that, everyone was very open and talkative. I'm not what you would call a big name on YouTube, even in the Australian community there. Nobody cared about subscriber numbers and we all got on like a house on fire full of scurity cameras. I made some good friends there that day and I think I'm addicted.

There are whispers that there may be another gathering mid-year 2008 in Sydney, although it's all still up in the air. Based on the resounding success of Melbourne I'm inclined to set some finances aside so I can go to that too. Too much fun was had to miss out on it all happening again. Really truely.

Here is my favourite video of the day so far. It's by HalfScottishGuy, who I hung out with most of the day (although I don't feature in this video much). What little footage I took will be going up on Friday or so. I forgot to bring my video transfer cable with me.

  

The prancing man wasn't from YouTube. I don't know where he sprung from.

Excuse me? Can anyone tell me what happened to the oh-so-stable Liberal/National Coalition? Just a week ago they were telling us they were the ones to trust because they were so stable but now look what's happened!

People are resigning and retiring all over the place. I with Peter Costello just took the job of Leader of the Opposition. Then the only problem would be who would lead the Nationals. I'll tell you what, the Coalition had better sort themselves out soon or we'll be back to having a country with no credible opposition. I just went through almost 11 years of that. I don't want to go through it again even if it is Labor who's in power this time.

Also, who won the senate? Did we figure that out yet?

*researches*

Ohhh. Interesting. The Greens now have 5 Seats. Bob Brown will be pleased. It looks like neither Labor nor the Liberals can control the Senate on their own. It looks like it's up to the Greens (and to a lesser extent the lone Family First senator and the lone independent) to tell the Government what to do. This has the potential to be messy, but it means that the Senate will actually perform its function this time around - a house of review - rather than just being a great big Liberal Party rubber stamp.

Also it's occurred to me that there may be some confusion as to what I mean by Liberal. I understand that in America this term refers to someone from the left of the political spectrum. In Australia it's the name of the not-quite-as-right-wing-as-the-Republicans-but-almost party. It's like in this sentence "The Vietnamese government is becoming increasingly liberal in it's economic policy." It means Vietnam is moving from a left-wing, communist style economy to an open(er) free-market, less government control model (which is a right-wing ideology). That is what Liberal means in Australia. (Alright Hendi, now tell me I'm wrong).

Sorry about this post. Next time I won't talk about politics. I promise. I'm going to Melbourne next weekend, so maybe I'll be able to talk about that.

Australia is set to begin importing barrels of ear-wax harvested from little Cantonese speaking children in China after Labor trounced the Coalition in the Federal election held yesterday. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd is reported to be very pleased. In his first prime ministerial press conference Mr Rudd said he was "very straight up and down" about things and encouraged all Australians to be the same, whatever that means.

At the previous Australian federal election with Mark Latham at the helm, Labor lost in a big way - 27 seats behind the Liberal/National Coalition. This time around it looks like Labor will be the proud owner of 86 seats (give or take a few, counting in some seats is not yet over) out of our 150 seat parliament. The Coalition looks to hold 62 seats (and two seats are held by independents).

When looking at the election, I was most interested in three seats. I'll explain each one.

Solomon

The seat of Darwin/Palmerston usually goes to the party that will go on to win the election. It was also considered by the Labor Party to be one of the 16 seats they needed to gain in order to form government. It also doesn't hurt that it is the electorate I currently reside in (and voted in). Even though counting hasn't finished yet, it looks like Labor will pick up this seat, continuing Darwin's record of electing to Solomon who Australia elects to run the nation.

McPherson

It looks like my long-running grudge against the Liberal member for McPherson will continue. Margaret May (or more accurately, the plebs who work for her) refused to give me an important interview when I was doing a journalism assignment for uni so I resolved never to vote for her. As it turns out I never got the opportunity to not vote for her because the Northern Territory government got on my case about enrolling to vote as a Territorian, rather than me sticking with my old address. The irony is that after voting in the seat of Solomon, I'm going to up and leave for McPherson in a month's time anyway. Technically (although not legally) it would have been better and more accurate for me to have voted as a resident of McPherson, because I'll actually be spending the next three years living here. Margaret has held onto the seat of McPherson.

Bennelong

The (now ex-)Prime Minister's seat. The thing is the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition need to get voted in the same, plain old way every other minister does. If they don't win their seat, they can't sit in parliament. After a redrafting of the electorates, Bennelong went from being a Liberal Party safehouse to suddenly becoming a marginal seat. John chose to stay in Bennelong rather than move to a safer seat which indicates to me that he was actually in the mood to retire sooner rather than later. Bennelong was also considered one of the 16 seats Labor needed to win to form government. John Howard lost the seat of Bennelong to former ABC TV presenter Maxine Mckew - but it was a close one. John Howard is only the second Australian Prime Minister ever to get voted out of his own electorate.

On the topic of Liberal Leadership, Peter Costello has - surprisingly - turned down the job! I'm gobsmacked to say the least, because Peter was always the one who was saying things about wanting to take over from John. Now it looks like Malcolm Turnbull wants to lead. Who would have guessed?!

So Australia went with Labor for the first time in 11 years. I can only just remember when John Howard became Prime Minister back in the day, and I cannot remember when Paul Keating took over from whoever it was who had the job before him. I'm totally unused to seeing a different face associated with the words "Prime Minister" so this whole 'Liberal Party not running the country' thing is a wee bit strange to me. Think of that, 11 years of conservative government at an end. I suppose now my biggest message to Labor is this:

"WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT SCREW THIS UP"

I'm technically a swinging voter, so I'll have no qualms stabbing you in the back and supporting whoever it is who ends up with Liberal leadership. If everything my Liberal supporting friends are predicting is comes true I'll do it you know.

Apparently it was Thanksgiving yesterday. Or today.

The news is all over YouTube. This is almost as big as that video of Kevin Rudd eating his ear-wax. What was that? Seven? Ten years ago? That guy is going to ruin our country if he gets in when we all go to vote tomorrow. He'll eat up the ear-wax of our economy. He may also partake of the ear-wax of the unions.

Like, Oh Em Gee.

Oh yeah, speaking of the election, don't forget to vote whatever you do. You'll get a fine if you don't. But you already knew that didn't you?

Australia: the land of the not-quite-as-free because we are made to vote by the government we may or may not vote against. Actually I like this system - it's ironic.

Isn't that what everybody says after typing "A and P" over and over again for two and a half hours straight?

I was shortening filenames so they would burn to a backup DVD properly. I may have carpel tunnel already.

In other news it is so hot today my air conditioning isn't working properly to cool my office down. I have it set to 24 degrees but the room temperature has been sitting at 29 for the past two hours. I can actually feel the heat radiating through the glass in the windows. Somehow I don't think it helps that I'm drinking hot tea, but I had to make some to cheer me up about my crippled hands.

Also, for goodness' sake do NOT tell me there was an easier way to do the file names. I'm aware that theoretically I could have done it some other way but I just didn't know how straight away and couldn't be bothered the annoyance of figuring out how different programs could have done it. I was only changing a small part of a file name, not the whole thing because there is a unique code attached to each file that I needed to keep, and that tends to confuse robots.

So there!

In other, other news I just want to go home so I can watch the remaining two episodes o' Heroes season two that are sitting on my laptop. I watched one this morning before I went to work and I think it was the worst decision I've ever made. I can't sit still because I'm squirming at the Heroes so much. Unfortunately when I go home I can't even watch it straight away because I have to cook dinner and then I have to play netball until about 9:00. It looks like I'm not going to be watching much Heroes until I go to bed tonight. Knowing me I won't be able to help myself and I'll watch both episodes straight after one another and stay up far too late.

It's ok though, it's late night shopping tomorrow night and I don't start work at the bookstore until the afternoon, so sleeping in is almost guaranteed.

The 'f' button on my keyboard at work is intermittently failing. Guess where.

There was another hermit crab downstairs the day before yesterday.

I think I am getting overrun by them.

Help me!

In my usual, non-blog related correspondence I have with friends I made in so-called 'real-life' without the use of an internet connection I wrote the following email to my friend Anna. As I was typing it I realised it's a pretty good condensation (is that word used correctly?) of my latest news and what I'm doing here and there over the holidays. Considering it doesn't reveal too much about Anna's life I think she'll be ok if I use it on my blog too. Here is the entire thing copy-pasted out of Gmail.

Hey Anna,

Updates updates updates. Hmm. I don't think that if you go the the Fillet Skillet you'll find much in the way of news, you'll probably just find a lot of my gasbagging and being silly, so here's my update.

Yesterday I was on the phone to Griffith so I can enroll in my courses for next semester. My time at uni at Charles Darwin University has all finished now, so now my big project is getting ready to move and all that entails! I'm doing some pretty cool subjects next year. I'll have lots of writing and film making to do!

I'm spending Christmas in Adelaide this year. I'm flying out of Darwin at something like two in the morning on the 23rd of December. I'm expecting the airport to be hell at both ends of my journey. For New Year's I think I'm going to Canberra, but I'm not 100% on that. My parents are driving out to whoop-whoop to visit some people for a few days and I don't think it'll be very interesting. Perhaps I should just fly to the Gold Coast in time for the first? I don't know. The plan was to be with my brother over New Year's but he's working on the first, so he might not be doing anything after all. Nothing has been set in stone yet though. Expect me back on the Coast around the 5th of Jan.

Before that I'm going for a holiday from my working holiday! On the first of December I'm flying out of Darwin to go to Melbourne for what I call a 'new media conference' but it's really a YouTube meet-up/party thing. I'm spending a couple of days there and will be re-exploring the city because I haven't been there since... maybe 2000? Anyway, it should be fun.

Speaking of balls and formals and things (I hope yours went well. Send me pictures. Stat! Also did you go with anyone? Was he good looking? *wink wink*) I have a masquerade ball on this Saturday. I'm wearing a red mask to it and Jeshua is wearing a little black one like they have on The Incredibles. The ball is an end-of-year thing for the Charles Darwin University Christians group and it looks like it'll be pretty good. We're having proper catering and everything.

It sucks about the HA 8 (which, phonetically, is pronounced "hate" did you know?) I had a similar thing happen to me when I did Modern History. I just couldn't push myself into VHA territory no matter what I did. Still, I'm sure your OP will be good, and you can always transfer degrees later on.

The SU Schoolies camp sounds fun. I was going to do one of those when I finished Year 12 but I went to visit my sister in America instead.

(What an essay that turned out to be!)

See you!

Rohan

I'm used to wildlife invading my personal space. In Darwin it's a bit of a given because the Cane Toad hasn't gotten this far yet to kill all the animals (although next year...)

I often get crawlies wandering around our living space. I don't like the cockroaches, but I guess you could say I'm used to them and they're an easy thing to kill. Still, I had the randomest thing ever happen to me a few nights ago. Ever. In my entire life.

It was something like one in the morning. I had stayed up late to watch a movie and I had just had a shower. I opened the door to the laundry which you need to walk through to get to the downstairs living room. Everything was normal. I slid open the door to the living room and flicked on the light.

I saw a hermit crab. A hermit crab of all things (!) crawling across the tiles towards my friend's room. I was dumbfounded. How on Earth did a hermit crab make it all the way from the beach, across the entire city and into our house? But that's not the random bit.

As the crab was crawling across the floor it passed a pile of books that were sitting there. I was still shocked at the presence of the crab and was following it with my eyes. A green tree from then jumped out of the pile of books and tried to eat the crab. The crab was almost as big as the frog and it was in an old spiky shell. The crab nipped the frog on the face with a pincer and promptly curled up into its shell.

I was astounded that this took place at the very moment I was making my way to bed. I stood there wondering at the frog and the crab for a good five minutes. During this time the crab obviously thought it was safe to uncurl. The frog tried to eat it again, got another nip on the face and the crab curled up into its shell. At this time I intervened and saved the little crab by scooting it out the back door. It crawled into the garden.

Then I spent an hour chasing the frog around the room while I tried to put it out the front door and into the garden. This was made all the more difficult because I have an aversion to picking up frogs with my hands. I don't know why, I think it's just that I'm not used to them enough. I like them normally.

All I can say is that it was the strangest combination of animals I have ever seen battling it out in the most unexpected place ever.

So just a month ago I made a video thanking my first fifty subscribers. Since then they've been increasing exponentially - today I just hit 141.

I believe this is for two-and-a-half reasons.

Reason 1 and 1.5
I'm now going to the YouTube gathering in Melbourne. As such, my videos have gone up on the AsOneMelbourne page giving them quite a lot of exposure to a lot of Australian YouTubers. They subscribed, their friends subscribed, and now I'm a fully-blown member of YouTube Australia - well integrated into a community I previously had trouble finding.

Also, the YouTube Australia page opened a few weeks ago. This hasn't impacted my channel directly seeing as I haven't been featured (not that getting featured on a local page gets you heaps of subscribers anyway) but it makes it easier for me to find them. When I subscribe they sometimes subscribe back, adding to my total.

Reason 2:
I participated in Mugglesam's collaboration video "The Largest Harry Potter Collab Ever". I've been inundated (that is, for someone with <1000 subscribers) with Harry Potter fans subscribing to my videos. It helped when I posted my bloopers as a video response two days ago. Here's the entire collaboration if you're interested:

 

So I'm in with the Australians and the Harry Potheads. It's pretty cool guys. It's pretty cool

In other news my exam went pretty good. There was one question that asked me to code a form and it was worth ten points and I've never coded a form in my life so I lost most of those I'd say. I made something up of course because it was compulsory to answer all the questions. Everything else I think I did all right on, but the majority of the marks come from paragraph answer questions and who knows what the lecturer will make of my answers!

She might be impressed, she might not. And that's all I have to say.

I've got an exam tomorrow. It's on XHTML. *sigh*

How did I do exams in high school? I find them so torturous now that I'm at uni.

It's kind of weird though, because I'm almost 100% that I've passed this subject anyway, because the exam is only worth 30% ('only') of my entire grade for the subject. I'd like to get better than a pass though, even though the biggest thing this subject has taught me is that I'm not a 'below the interface' kind of person. I could not write a line of code to save my life.

Ok, so that sounded fatalistic. I could write a line of code if in the unlikely event it would save my life. But under normal, non-life-threatening conditions I just do not have the patience to sit at a computer and wrestle with trying to get that box just *there* and then make sure it stays there even if you look at in in Internet Explorer 4.0 using a widescreen monitor. And to the people who are looking at the internet using IE 4.0 I ask you, what are you doing with a widescreen monitor? The least you could do is upgrade your browser.

Also, IE 6 is from the devil. Kill it. Kill it deader than all kinds of deceased. It is Hades itself.

The good news about all this talk of exams is that after tomorrow morning, I'm going to be uni-free. Awesome. That leaves me more time to write that novel I said I'd write in 30 days and make more YouTube videos and find a way of selling my car but still holding on to it until I need to go.

Also I'm gonna get right into this new trend called moving. It's awesome. It's where you ring up your boss, tell her that you will quit in a month's time and then find a job in another city and move there. It's all the rage. You've got to actually deal with how much stuff you own rather than just shoving it away in cupboards and stuff and then forgetting that you had it in the first place. Also you've got to pull all those dusty, dirty potentially cockroach infested sleeping bags/suitcases/stuff from under your bed and deal with them too.

This is going to be great. I feel like going out and drinking espresso from little shot glasses.

So now I can play Tetrisurrealism all I want. I got myself a DS Lite. Next piece: a bear.

What with a trade-in of my old, grey DS that looked like a 1980s spaceship, this didn't cost me very much at all. Now I've got myself a sexy black DS Lite. It looks like you could hop in and drive away, squealing car noises into the nicely centred microphone. It is, unfortunately, a fingerprint magnet, but that's a small price to pay for looking so bad-arse. My microfibre cleaning cloth helps too.

Does anyone else feel like a real dumbarse when the game you're playing requires you to call out into the mic to a character stuck behind a wall? I was sitting in the living room playing that new Zelda game they've got and it's all, "I don't think she can hear you!" So I called out "HELLOOO?" and everybody looked at me. Thank goodness I wasn't sitting on a bus or in a plane with strangers, they would have thought I was a real loony. It's bad enough when you have to blow up your balloons in Mario Cart and everybody thinks you're having a panic attack, but when they start thinking you've got multiple personality disorder things could get a bit weird.

Speaking of multiple personality disorder, I'm also just recently into that show Heroes in a big way. I'm only watching season one at the moment, which I'm well aware is old news - particularly for my American readers. But it's just brilliant, you know? It's like X-men but with less spandex and not so much of a good guy/bad guy divide. The characters have agendas and they are not necessarily good or bad. Sometimes the agendas come into alignment and sometimes they conflict. This means the story is very dynamic and unpredictable. A nice, refreshing change.

It's also raining a little bit just now. End of the buildup? I hope so.

(I just love, love Good Game, especially the Qtr Circle + A segment. I have no idea why. I'm a total n00b.)

I was standing at the counter, smiling absently, as you're supposed to do, when a man came up and plonked an Australian Concise Oxford English Dictionary in front of me. This dictionary looks about as concise as its title.

"Do you know what concise means?" he asked. His face looked genuinely inquisitive.
"Well," I said eying the tome that sat in front of me, "I think 'concise' might just be in comparison to the huge multi-volume dictionary from... their office." I didn't really know of the existence of such a thing, but it was likely - given the evidence.

I think it showed, because I could feel my face give that involuntary spasm that it does when I'm unsure of something or when I answer the phone. I decided to use hand gestures to cover it. Didn't work. I think he noticed. Bugger.
"Yes," the man said, "probably." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I cleared my throat. He picked up the book.

"Concise," he read, "adjective. Of writing, style, or a person. Brief but comprehensive in expression."

He closed the book and smiled a very cheeky grin.
"Now you know!" he exclaimed. Then he took the book back to the shelf. I didn't say anything, for he had just rocked my world with me still in it. I was feeling rather dizzy.