twoemu.com

Traveling around different parts of Asia & experiencing the effects of the internet filters that they have in place certainly makes me wonder how fucked up the internet filter will get to be in Australia. In China you can’t access Facebook, Twitter or Youtube, & Blog sites, whilst Vietnam doesn’t allow access to Facebook & Blog sites. I wonder what Australia’s Internet Filter will block access to in the future?

It’s funny that Australia is following in the footsteps of communist countries. What happens to freedom of speech & expression, when you try to mold people into what ‘is best for the country’ by sheltering people from what is deemed to be inappropriate? Speaking from personal experience, the more people are sheltered from things, the more curious they become.

As much as I love Australia, it seems that freedom of speech and expression is becoming more of a rarity & I am a rebel through & through, I don’t like anyone telling me what I can & can’t say - screw that!

I seem be “losing” a lot of things of late, although I suspect that some of the items had a little help out of my bag. The most recent I discovered today, my little book of address’s & names of people that we have met along the way - FUCK!!!! I didn’t have any other copies of that information, which is a real bugger.

So far a few things have gone missing…
Water Bottle
Bandana
Underwear (not just one pair either)
Small Soap Dish
Chinese Phrasebook
Pencil
Notebook with address’s

I am not the only one to have stuff go missing, though all that Geoff is admitting to losing is his hat, which is why he has a green felt one from Mongolia - featured heavily in our photos.

I am a bit bummed about the notepad with all the address’s in it. I really wish that I had copied the address’s out of my book. If you are one of those people that I have met along the way in our travels, can you please send me a message, so that I can get your contact details again? Thanks

I picked up my new camera for our travels today, it’s a Canon Powershot A2000IS - the range of camera (the point and shoot type) is a little limited when you want to have a camera that uses AA batteries, instead of the almost standard Lithium batteries that they all seem to take. Not much of a help with you are planning to travel to remote areas where recharging a battery is not necessarily going to be an option & I don’t feel like having to carry a useless piece of extra weight, waiting for a chance to recharge the batteries, getting increasing frustrated because I can’t use my camera for how ever long.

I really hate having to shop for things, because you invariably have to deal with sales people & they really shit me. Especially when they make comments like “Why would you not want Lithium?”, and then they don’t even listen to why you choose to have AA’s instead. The classic one I had the other day after I explained that I wanted a small point & shoot camera that would take AA’s & fit in my pocket, as I am more likely to use that than a big camera, the guy completely ignored me & said that I would have to go to the size of an SLR (despite giving him a model # of a camera that I was interested in), all because they didn’t have the camera I wanted & weren’t interested in even looking it up to see if they could get it in for me. He was quite pushy, so I had to say, No thanks, that would be wasting both your time & mine looking at something that I clearly have no intention of buying, strangely he still didn’t get it - not sure what else I could have said or done to make it even more evident, but hey, some people are just thick I guess.

So far the camera has been good to use. The camera seems to be a bit heavier than my other one, Canon Powershot A470, but not by very much. The screen is a bit bigger on the newer one, which is nice as well, other than that, I haven’t really used it. I bought 2 x 16GB SDHC Cards for it (maximum capacity is 32GB for the Canon Powershot A2000IS), so that I have some redundancy with it. I find it amusing that it comes with a 32MB card, I honestly don’t know why they even bother.

Selling stuff on ebay has been interesting to say the least. There are a few things that sold for the amount that we had hoped, some a little bit more & others much less than hoped. It’s been rather interesting trying to get people to arrive at specific times. even though the listing says that everything is in storage & that the time to collect is between 9-3pm on Saturdays, you still get people who want to collect through the week, or weeks later. Today we spent all day at the storage place, waiting for people to arrive at the times organised & most of them didn’t.

We did decide to go to a car boot sale to sell off some more stuff, seeing as this weekend has already been stuffed up waiting for people to collect their stuff, so hopefully that goes well & we get rid of a few more things.

My working week was going to finish as of this afternoon, but I received a job on Friday (which is great, coz I/ we need the money), so now I have tomorrow off, work Friday, then have Saturday & Sunday off (kinda). Saturday & Sunday will be spent selling more stuff off. We have listings on ebay that finish on Friday, so people will be picking up stuff on Saturday. Then we might be going to a car boot sale early Sunday morning, selling a few more things - then up to Brisbane to go a friends party & also do a little bit of work.

We have been fairly busy, the Easter long weekend, which we originally planned to go camping with Geoff’s dad for, was spent packing, sorting & listing things on ebay instead (& there is still a bit more to do). We are both fairly over it - been getting rid of a lot of things that we shouldn’t have as well, but such is life eh?

Tonight I have to do a bit more packing, cook some dinner & pick up Geoff from Touch Football, so much for me not having any late nights over the holidays. I have a regular job late Wednesday nights, so I was looking forward to a couple of weeks without having to do that, but it seems to be back-firing on me, which is a bit of a bummer.

Brea (the dog that our friends have at the place we are house-sitting) has me wrapped around her finger. She knows that I can’t stand her whining & will feed her. She must have been hungry, because she devoured the bones I gave her immediately, instead of burying them as she normally does. She then managed to convince me to feed her, her dinner (the one meal she gets a day) a couple of hours later. She makes this horrible noise like she is being hurt & seeing as the neighbours are so close I just had to feed her. She loves to have a pat & a play, but I can’t touch her, so feeding her is a challenge, but I get there. Brea is an outside dog, she is a big German Shepherd & has a lovely personality, so happy that she is an outside dog though. When we first started staying here I was taking antihistamine at least twice a day, but now I can sometimes get away with one or none - pretty awesome. I still can’t really be too close to her or play with her, but at least she can be around, not sure that I would want to be taking antihistamine everyday or nearly everyday like I have been for an extended period of time. I certainly don’t feel 100%, but I can cope.

Friggin real estate, a few weeks ago council came by to do some routine inspections on rental properties, & when they came through where we are, they wrote a letter to the owners telling them to fix it or else. Now the real estate has given us notice to move, so that they can do full renovations in the house (bullshit, so they can find someone who will just accept it as it is & not pull them up). For the longest time we just put up & it wasn’t until the guy from council came through & told us our rights that we realised that we could get things like the excessive amount of mould remedied. We have 2 months notice to move. To be honest it sounds like a perfect time to just piss off and do some travel, I HATE moving!!!

‘Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of your miserable existence’ - St. Benedict

HOLY SHIT!!! This is never ending. We decided this morning to sit down & finish setting up our internet banking with NAB, that sounds really easy, but it’s not!

With NAB you cannot transfer from one isaver to another isaver (sub account) without transferring the money to your main account & then out again …. WHY….? I cannot see how anyone would think that double handling is a good idea, not only is it a waste of my time, but it’s a waste of their computing resources too, obviously management there are a few bricks shy of a load.

You cannot set up Bpay from any of  your sub accounts either, it is a farce, so much for just chucking the money in there & letting it manage itself by setting up bill payments like we did with our other account, which is extremely useful when you are away and don’t have access to do banking. The only way around it is to setup another set of transaction accounts for each of the ones that we currently have setup, then setup regular transfers out from the higher savings accounts (isavers) to the actual accounts that you can transact from & transfer out from there, so now instead of having 11 accounts to manage, we will have 22 - what a farce!!!

Of course if the person that we spoke to when we opened the account had been honest with us at the time & told us that you couldn’t do any of those things, then we probably wouldn’t have bothered opening an account with them and perhaps tried somewhere else, so we are not terribly impressed that we were lied to.

Well, Australia Day has arrived again for another year. I almost dread Australia day, it seems to be a good excuse for people to become racist ass holes for a day, under the guise of it being Australian. Every time I see people with flags hanging off their car or people draped in the flag, especially around this time of year, the first thing that comes to my mind & Geoff’s too, is “RACIST”. Australia has become a very racist society and the last government certainly did their bit to encourage the racist behaviour that we have over here.

I am not a born and bred Aussie, but because I am from a western society I don’t seem to be on the receiving end of some of the racism that is prevalent in Australia. I am not talking about the “racism” that other countries perceive as racism, which really is not (the KFC ad or the Hey Hey it’s Saturday - both which were not intended to be racist). I am talking about the persecution that can only be defined as racism that is dealt out to people who come over to this country who do not deserve it, and only receive it because their skin colour is different to that of ours. There seems to be a lot of unrest with people who are from Asian countries. The amount of times that I have had to sit in a waiting room and listen to someone spouting off about the Bloody Asians taking over their jobs and the country, is actually quite disturbing. I am an Australian Citizen, but I am certainly not proud to confess that fact to anyone, because I am ashamed of the racism that occurs here.

Well, after setting up our new bank account, I think that I am nearing the end of having to inform everyone I work for of my new details. At first I started asking for the agency specific paperwork to update my banking details, which was taking ages for me to receive, so in the end I decided to send out a “form letter” of sorts with my new banking details on it, which seems to have worked for most agencies, which is great, then we can get rid of Suncorp - wohoo!!!

Today I have a NABS job, last one for the month, I anticipate. I had a good run there for a while, this month (including today) I have had 6 NABS jobs, last year I had a total of 13 NABS jobs, so I have almost reached 1/2 my quota in a few weeks. I quite enjoy NABS jobs, it’s a different vibe to the jobs that I do for QLD Health in the public system, which is refreshing, there doesn’t seem to be as much in-equality happening. Perhaps the fact that NABS is government funded and the Dr’s surgery’s etc don’t have to pay for an interpreter to be there helps too. You are facilitating the communication without anyone involved needing to put forward any additional effort, other than organising the interpreter to come, which is pretty cool when you think about it.