Why I like PDF

I've just finished my GPS report. It's a dinky little one, only 1744 words, it took me about four hours to write and format. But even in such a small report, I had three Word-defined sections. It was still damned annoying how Word kept changing the way I formatted the page numbering. "Stop it! What'd you do that for?! No, I said BREAK that link!" I was so relieved when I finally hit "Print to PDF". I like PDF because once it's there, no one, not even Mr Schizo Word can change it.

Of course, I had to print to PDF about five times because every time I checked it in Acrobat Reader, Word had somehow sneaked in a change between the time I checked the last page number and the time I moved the mouse ten centimetres to the 'Print' button.

Random Joan facts

The vision in one of her eyes is signficantly better than the other. When she got glasses for the first time, she kept looking around and marvelling that "Everything is in 3D!"

When she was twelve, she had neurosurgery to restore full movement in her right arm. In the three days that she was in hospital, she could not get past Level 1 in Mario Brothers on the NES.

She used to collect liquid egg timers. They're way cool.

She owns so many clothes that she has a summer wardrobe and winter wardrobe. It's an absolute pain to change them over. She is usually lazy and slow at it so in the first months of autumn and even into winter, she can still be found wearing t-shirts and skirts.

She owns shares in Pacific Hydro because they are way cool. She tried to apply for work there once or twice but being a minority shareholder does not guarantee you a job interview.

If she were to hate a cuisine, it would be Japanese. How do you justify charging that much money for cold, primarily vegetarian, raw food?

The fruit she ate today - banana for breakfast, two small apples for morning tea, a banana for lunch, half a custard apple after dinner, a mandarin and an orange while watching TV.

Last year, she spent $1823.45 on dancing.

In Prep, she received an award for being able to tie her shoelaces... even though she wore velcro-fastened sneakers.

Her family have four fish - Silver, Spot, Goldie and Frankie.

She has never watched a scary movie in her life because she is sure they will give her nightmares.

She once won a public speaking competition by speaking about public speaking.

Apparently, people don't like to do it. Speak in public, that is. She loves it, it makes her feel powerful, adored and funny. (Sssh, don't say anything to shatter her delusions...)

She used to be hyper-competitive until she met other competitive people, realised how uncool they were and is now placid and easy-going. So now she is way cool.

Reformed power monger

I am trying to ease myself out of leadership in the Dance Sport club. I think the hindrance is not so much other people's reliance on me, but my own self-stickybeakedness. Oh, there's one for the glossary!

It must be done, for the sake of my sanity.

The *BEEP* test

I went for a twenty minute jog today. It wasn't as painful as I expected (I got to use my dinky new MP3 player, 128 MB, very pathetic :) The catalyst for this spurt of physical activity is that I'm going 'skiing' (read: falling over then resigning myself to tobogganing and snowman making) soon and Damjan has told us all that we need to get fit. I'm not as fit as I used to be. I still can do an hour of high impact aerobics but that's a bit different to running and cycling for ten kilometres, right?

Back in my day, I was able to beat nearly all the girls at that damned beep test/shuttle run in Phys Ed at high school. God, I hated the *beep* test. I loved PE, even the sit ups and rope climbing but the beep test ruined my whole PE year. It wasn't so much the running; it was the turning around every time you hit a line. My joints hurted *whimper*

I saw Damjan's taekwondo grading and that scared the bejabbers out of me. He was doing sprints and push ups and sit ups voluntarily. For fun. Oh, the pain! But there's no denying he is much fitter than me and will probably get his money's worth when we go skiing. So, I'm trying to get fit again...

In unrelated news, we've had a hiccup in organising our dinner dance for Dance Sport. It's the big formal ball we have in September. We realised we didn't include the costs of drinks and have to negotiate a new dinner package with the caterers. Bah, who needs alcohol to have fun. Maybe we can serve apple cider and milkshakes all night. I would be ecstatic! Mmm... milkshake.

Pop, lock and bo-dy roll!

My hip hop kiddies are so excited about the new routine I've choreographed for them. By 'kiddies', I mean people between 16 and 25 years old. Not really kid-like in the traditional sense of the word, but hey, everyone I teach is a 'kiddy' in my vocabulary.

This new routine is much harder than the other two they've learned so far. I've upped the ante. Raised the stakes. Set the bar higher. I've really had no choice. All the other hip hop teachers were doing cool, intricate routines and my class was getting 'routine envy'.

I've had difficulty balancing what Don has taught me at teacher training and what the other teachers are advocating. Don says, "They're beginners. You can't rush them or they'll feel inadequate. Teach to the lowest level so no one feels ignored." Makes sense, right? But what happens when all the other classes are speeding ahead and looking funky and the clever people in my class are bored? So I'm doing a hard routine but hopefully teaching it slowly enough that everyone can keep up. I think it's worked so far (for the one lesson I've taught it!) because people seem thrilled.

I'm quite excited about the routine myself. I didn't think I had it in me to be choreographically innovative. I haven't yet developed my own hip hop style but luckily, I have a knack of picking out other people's. My beginners routines were decidedly "Liz" style, lots of body movement and direction changes. Now, I'm doing a "Kathleen" - on the spot, body isolations, fast hand movements. I'd like to do a "Deb" one day but there's a lot of popping and locking. Hmm, hard!

*pop* *lock* *b-o-d-y r-o-l-l* !

Bimbo biomed friend

I've got fifteen minutes until my friend Gurpreet comes over and we go for our three-monthly coffee. Gurpreet is one my best friends from high school. She's a dynamo of energy, gushing and girliness. Sometimes it's tiring being around her but mostly, it's fun. We don't get to see each other much anymore, even though we're at the same uni but we make the time to go out for coffee and cake every couple of months and catch up on life.

She's quite an odd combination. She's Indian and acts like a bimbo but it's all an act. She's very clever and will deny it, even when you're standing in front of her in the biomedical lab as she does her honours project, wearing a lab coat. Dumb biomedical researcher? Hmm...!

She is very flirty and has had her share of secret affairs, yet she will obediently marry the man her parents will suggest in the next few years. She comes from a culture of arranged marriages. I'd be kicking and screaming, would even elope rather than endure an arranged marriage but Gurpreet is well-adjusted to the idea.

Oh, and she has hair like Rapunzal! She's never had a haircut in her life for religious reasons. For me, that's a fantastic conversation starter.

It's funny how we find every culture but our own, exotic. Chinese food, *yawn*. Chinese horoscopes, *yawn*. Chinese folktales, *yawn*. Serbian music? Cool!

WINK ;)

Trees don't cry

My heart wrenches when I see on the news footage of the South Korean contractor in Iraq begging for his life - "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" Poor, poor man. A few days ago, I watched a Current Affair piece (quality journalism, of course) about families under the strain of raising autistic children. I felt so bad that we as a society weren't supporting them.

Every day in our newspapers and on TV we hear of people fighting, dying, struggling. I've become quite blase about it, I suppose. I say, "Oh, that's terrible," and forget about it half an hour later. But when I am able to put faces and personal stories to the statistics... It's not a nice feeling.

When I was in grade four, I remember trying to catalogue all the problems in the world in the expectation that solving the world's problems would simply be a matter of checking things off my list. I sat down and thought really hard. "Right. So there's poverty. The Environment. Homelessness. Drugs. Unemployment. War. Hunger. Health." Then I was satisfied and forgot about it.

As the years went on, I added more issues to my mental list and at some point, I realised that it couldn't all be solved and that these problems were all tangled up in each other like a mass of vines in the Amazon jungle. We could start at one corner of the tangle and try to unravel it bit by bit but I had been hoping that we could get a flamethrower and burn the whole lot away.

In all my time at school, I must have considered career options in every university faculty except medicine. I never wanted to be a doctor, didn't even bother with the UMAT (although, if it were free I would have done it for fun). I wanted to "help people" (the way that idealistic young'uns want to "help people"... it now sounds as inane as a Miss Universe beauty pageant response) but I didn't want to deal with human pain.

That's why I chose to do environmental engineering. Trees don't cry. Passions don't run as hot when dealing with plants rather than humans, right? But as an enviro, I could still save the world. My mental justification was that making an environmental difference would last longer than helping individual people (a simplistic and wrong premise, I know).

To some extent, I was correct. I don't know of anyone who cries over the loss of an ecosystem as they would over a loved one. But passions do run hot. There is plenty of anger and frustration in the environmental movement. But anger I can manage. Pain, I'm not so sure.

I sound like one of those teenage diaries that try to be deep and meaningful. Ugh.

People are people are people

I've arrived at uni early (8:30 AM) because I was meant to meet a friend for a group project. She hasn't showed up and it's almost 9:30 AM. I reckon it's because she sent me a text message to cancel/reschedule and I never saw it because I lost my phone. Grr, I could have been sleeping!

So I occupied myself by reading old magazines from the early 1980s. They were on a table marked "Free to a good home!". Heck, the last thing I need is clutter at home. But the magazines are good for occupying me while I wait. I'm quite bemused that the social issues being discussed in 1984 (pornography, declining university standards, American domination of Australian media) are exactly the same as in 2004. It's a bit disheartening because it suggests we haven't progressed very much. On the other hand, it's also reassuring because I am reminded that people are people are people. Every generation goes through the same issues...and survives. Nothing suggests that we won't do the same.*



*Past performance is not an indication of future performance. See your financial advisor for personal advice.

I lost my phone

I lost my phone. I used to lose things all the time and it made me feel bad. It's like that Emily Rodda book, if you've ever read it. 'Finders Keepers' is about things that would get lost through invisible holes from our world to an adjoining world. Whenver I lost things, it's all the more annoying/distressing because I can imagine it sitting there in a corner this very instant, calling, "Joan! I'm here! I'm here!"

Anyway, I was sick of losing things so I made a resolution to always look after my posessions. I hadn't lost anything signficant since I made that resolution in August last year. Now my phone is gone. Worst case scenario: someone pocketed it while I was at Crown Casino on Saturday morning. Those gamblers, desperate enough to steal a phone worth less than AUD$80. Best case scenario: It's at home and I will find it...or someone picked it up at Crown and handed it to Lost Property. Yes, that would do me nicely.

BOO HOO. BOOOOO HOOOOO.

How I discovered blogging

Jason asked me how I discovered blogging. I said, "That's actually an interesting story!" and proceeded to tell it. Jason listened carefully then commented, "Joan, that really wasn't very interesting at all." I was crushed.

Here's the story anyway, so suffer.

I get these little obsessions, which usually last just a few weeks. Last week it was Apple computers. A few months ago, it was accordions. I love accordion music. I wanted to learn how to play it and being the good modern day girl that I am, I decided to research it on the internet. So I tapped 'accordion' (or possibly 'accordian') into Google....and stumbled on the weird, eloquent world of the Accordion Guy. He's a computer programmer in Canada and I was reading the most fantastic, Hollywood-like blog entry about his fiasco with Goth Girl. It's the best blog entry I've ever read. Accordian Guy's blog was nominated for the 2004 Bloggies. I clicked the Bloggies link and it lead this wide-eyed voyuerism virgin to a world where anyone could stand on their soapbox and be heard by other people...because amongst the millions of people who use the internet, surely one of them will be interested in your life!

I resisted making a blog for as long as I could because I suspected I would be writing in it every day. I've done twelve entries so far. Two weeks is almost up. Who knows, maybe this is just one of those two-week obsessions. I'll let you know in a few weeks... or if I don't, then I did.

:)

Something is rotten in the state of Australia

The Australian Prime Minister, the Hon. Jon Howard, has released a AU$500 million energy policy, "Securing Australia's Energy Future". The spiel was that it had a sustainability agenda with funding for renewable energy initiatives. I was "cautiously optimistic" but my hopes have been gutted. Gutted, I tells ya.

See this. There's "lots" of money for new renewable enegy technology but we already have plenty of it, and world-class energy efficiency measures to boot. What we need is some Government-prodding for people to take up these technologies already in existence...like a higher Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. 2% by 2010 is just a tad pathetic. At the pre-MRET growth rate for renewables, this target represents a real increase of about 0.5%.

Oh yeah, and this environmentally-responsible energy policy also includes a reduction in fuel taxes (yay! cheaper petrol!), diesel subsidies for farmers, fisheries and mining, a plan to pump carbon dioxide underground and did I mention that the chief scientist of this policy, Dr Robin Batterham, also sits on the Rio Tinto board? Rio Tinto is a coal mining company. As Marcellus said in Hamlet, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

Oooh, political rant. My first one! Don't worry, we shall return to normal programming very shortly :)

Angry Young Woman

"PDOP is too high" is currently my most hated expression. PDOP stands for Position Dilution of Precision. It's used in GPS to say that the satellites are arranged in a stupid way and the positions you will log are not accurate enough. I've got two assignments left to do this semester and one of them is dogged by PDOP.

One of my friends is trying to organise a movie night. It was all being done in a big friendly group e-mail. Everything was going along nicely - there was some discussion about where we should see the movie and have dinner. All of a sudden, another girl sent an e-mail accusing people of trying to hijack the process. She declared that her point of view was "end of story". When I read it, I was very taken aback. Why was she so angry? What prompted this outburst? No one else was half as passionate. Huh?

Worse still, the angry young woman sounded so self-righteous. Hello, you don't have a monopoly on being wounded/hated/matyred. I was offended.

Crazy coot.

Fire and stalkers

I've been feeling a little uneasy about the amount of personal information I put on this blog. I had provided enough info that if someone decided to stalk me, they could easily use my blog to locate me. Damo mentioned the same thing. So, I've just spent a few minutes wiping out the most direct personal links on this page. If you've got an old version cached, I hope you're not crazy.

I had a lovely day today (technically yesterday). We ate some good and bad food at the Good Food and Wine Show. Most memorably, I stood in front of a chilli display. There was a row of about ten chilli dips, ranging from mild to super hot. The last chilli in the row had a warning: "Under 18s cannot consume." That sounded like a challenge, if I ever heard one. So I grabbed a pappadum and spooned some chilli in my mouth. At first, I thought, "Not bad. I can handle this." But then the back of my throat started burning, my eyes watered, my face turned red. It was horrible, I could barely speak. Leonie swung into action, propelling me towards a yogurt stall and feeding me yogurt samples until the initial fire was cooled but I still suffered. I willingly forked over AU$1.50 for drinking yogurt. Skoll, skoll, skoll!

I guess I have limits!

My brother, the Blob

I have a high opinion of my younger brother. We're quite close, talk to teach other about issues and trivia, band together against my parents occasionally. I think he's smart and can go "places". But he is such a blob. He doesn't take the initiative and this is a real problem at his stage in life. He should be applying for job, developing his skills, doing any sort of extra-curricular or extra-workular activities to beef up his resume. He knows this. Yet he does nothing. He's going to rely on the strength of his very good marks at uni to get him a job. I dunno...these days, I don't think it's enough.

He had a job interview for a part-time IT role two weeks ago. He thought he "pwned" it (yeah, you know what that means! If not, see Romeo & Juliet). He didn't get a call back.

I said, "Call 'em! Call 'em!".

He just said morosely, "No. They don't want me."

"You have to ask! Show them your initiative! Ask for feedback!"

"No, it's all too hard." *swoon*

"Jason, I don't understand! You know it's important. You have to try. Stop being a blob!"

"Joan, I can't help it. I was born lazy. Not everyone is lucky like to you, to be born hard-working and full of initiative. It's harder for us lazy people...If only we could trade places for a week!"

Bah. I don't know, is that a legitimate comment? I immediately dismissed it as baloney but now that I think of it, some people are born more prone to addiction than others. Is it like me and hard exercise? I know I should jog regularly/do more aerobics/"Eat less fat, eat less salt, eat less sugar!". Is that my version of weakling-ness?

Hmm, this blog has allowed me to make up all sorts of words, like weakling-ness, extra-workular and wussily. It's laziness. Sentence structure, who needs it!

Afro Funk is an instructive lesson

Actually, that teacher training session was very useful and interesting! Don finally got on to the technique of teaching. We also did an short class with a guy who wanted to teach Afro Funk at the studio. It was essentially a teacher audition for him. The dance style was probably okay but the guy was a classic bad teacher. He spoke too softly, did not explain what he was doing, did not break the steps down, went too quickly, spoke to only one or two people. Don could not have designed a better prac to show us how far we've progressed as dance teachers!

LaTeX for Dummies

I think I might create a 'LaTeX for Dummies' document. I've just embarked on the journey. Damjan introduced me to the idea of typesetting software (as opposed to word processing). I put off my plunge into TeX but recently, I had to wrestle with the idiosyncrasies of Word while writing my final year project. It was seventy pages of mis-aligned Hell. EEEEEEE. So, I've downloaded LaTeX and will have a proper go at it after Tuesday (my first and final exam). It might be fun to blog it all.

I watched a bit of 'Big Brother' last night. Miriam, the gorgeous Latino transsexual just entered The House. I thought, "What fun! What irony!" but it ended up being a disappointment. No real dramas. People are ordinary.

Yesterday was quality time with Jason, my brother. We bonded over some vector calculus and Japanese anime. I think familial bonding time is so much worthwhile than exam study time, hmm? Don't you agree? :p

I'm going to Dizzy's tonight to listen to some jazz. I haven't been in a while. I wonder if it's easier to catch a train or drive? I guess, for the good of the environment, I should PT it.

Time to go to teacher training! Don is going to yak, yak, yak. He's a useful, knowledgeable person, knows an awful lot about teaching dance, but good golly, he waffles.

Everyone is Australian

Oh my whatsit! Everyone on mblog is from Australia!

This blog service makes me fail

This blog service [mblog] is powerful in many ways and so counter-intuitive in others. The support is non-existent. The basic functions don't work and I can't figure out how to change my timezone or manage the files I've uploaded. Why does clicking Help lead me to the Moveable Type manual when I can't even access the configuration menus for the program?

Oh, well. I guess you get what you've paid for ($0).

So, I might fail my next exam because I've spent too long fiddling with the blog. I'm a weak person like that. Oh, and maybe because I just went out for coffee twice in the last day when I should have been studying :)

Nah, I won't fail. I never fail, except for that one time in Year 11 when I got three out of twelve for the trigonometry quiz. I love trig now. Sine me up, baby.

Independence is a fine thing

I'm craving an Apple, the computer that is. I realise that I love cute shiny gadgetry and the 12-inch Powerbook is a cute, shiny gadget. Eeeek! There are far better ways to spend AU$4000...right?

I've spent the day studying for my Water Resource Management exam next Tuesday. I have to get the studying done now so I can play all Sunday. We're planning to go to the Good Food & Wine Show then hang out at home.

Sleepiness has dogged me all day. I've discovered that a bit of dancing is the best way to cure sleepiness. Jason and his friends are watching (an obviously pirated copy of) 'Dawn of the Dead'. They are alternately screaming and cowering behind the sofas. Mum is chuckling about how such big boys can act so wussily (I've invented a new adverb!).

For the first time, dad mentioned the possibility of his work being relocated to China. At first, I was blase about it but my mind is reminding me of how much I depend on my parents for food, advice, company, clothes and support. Independence is a fine thing but am I ready for it?

Relaxing at home with salsa

I had a lovely day. Mary came over and I learned her silver Cha Cha for the DMA competition for next next Sunday. Then Damjan came over, hooray! We had a "show-and-tell" for about an hour. I had about five items to show him - finance charts, corporate dress codes, statistical consulting services and other unrelated mish mash. He brought over vouchers for Glen Waverley, photos and my LOTR 3 CD. Yak, yak, yak.

We started 'Myst'. I've played before but this is Damjan's first proper go at it. He's very smart, putting the clues together quickly. Or maybe I was just dumb when I did it in grade 5. Hmmm...

I just spent an hour teaching Leonie some salsa dancing. She now knows nine moves! What an excellent teacher I am :) Which reminds me, I'd better get back to choreographing some hip hop for my Monday class.

My need for a soapbox

For the longest time (a few months at least), I tried to avoid creating a blog. I like my soapboxes well enough to know that a blog would take up ridiculous amounts of my time. But reading a friend's homepage inspired the urge in me to spread my word. Damn you, Daniel Yeow!

One of the dilemmas I grapple with is, "How will having a blog affect my diary writing?" I fear that after pouring out my soul in blog form, the diary will no longer be a primary outlet for angst. Then again, then again.

Damjan is coming over tomorrow! I haven't seen him for more than a week. I am most thrilled. Mary is coming over so we can work out a Cha Cha routine for the DMA competition. I hope I can be man enough for her :)