rainbowtatt

My cockroach friend is awake and attempting another escape. I can hear it thrashing about inside the coke can sat near our network router.

I’m too scared to touch the coke can in case it miraculously passes through the aluminum and goes for my throat.

…actually, I don’t know if Telstra’s commandeered a domain before, but hey, they have now.

In a post from the whitepage.com.au site that will probably vanish by the end of the week:

It’s with bitter disappointment that we announce to you the news of the recent WIPO (world governing body that determines the ownership of domain names) order to transfer WhitePage.com.au to Telstra Corporation Limited.

Now it’s not half obvious that whitepage.com.au is one ‘s’ away from whitepages.com.au (which has a shitty search engine, if you ask me. You didn’t? Well, too bad).

What grubby bastards Telstra are. Australia’s only local free blog provider gets royally told to fuck off and will probably decrease the chances of a similar service starting up for us down under. It’s not as though blog provision and an A-Z of names are competing industries, or that telstra was going to lose ONE MILLION DOLLARS (/Austin Powers) because of cyber-squatting.

While I signed up for a whitepage account, I did it more on principle and to support Aussies; a year ago I still had a relatively hack-free domain of my own. We gotta show the man that we aren’t gonna take their shit.

” Every Australian school will be eligible for a $20,000 grant to employ a chaplain – on condition the government is happy with its choice of spiritual guidance provider.” – Chaplain grant for all schools – Sydney Morning Herald

What a fucking joke. This grant is apparently available to government and public schools for application – Most private schools that are run by a religious congregation already have chaplains or spirtual leaders in their school communities. Offering them the chance for a grant to pay the bill will only increase their already healthy profit margin. Catholic schools, where fees are lower and government subsidised, have a spiritual and counselling guidance systems already in place, as well as details pastoral care policies. So why not just make this available to government schools?

Better yet, why not go for non-denominational, not-discriminatory-to-non-christians counsellors? When I was at school there was a culture of fear of seeing the counsellor, what makes John Howard think a spiritual guide will make difference? Why not spend some money on programs to make counsellors more accessible to kids?

Better yet, why not spend the money on improving the wages for Australian teachers, or – for something completely out there – the Australian medical system? Fuck knows we need it.

It’s not half obvious that he’s trying to improve his profile with the upcoming election…

Our entire ground floor has been gutted and rebuilt from the floorboards up. Today is the end of week 13.

Today we have realised that we can cook for the first time in our new kitchen, something we’ve been wet-dreaming about while we’ve been cooking food on a camping stove in the makeshift kitchen in the garage.

I say we, when really it’s Dan and his mum who do all the cooking in this house. I just watch with amazement and clean up the mess. I can’t cook to save my life.

They’re not the only ones who have a new toy to play with today, though. The kitchen sink is also in and ready for crazy washing up goodness. I’ve never been so excited about washing up before. I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon enough.

Tomorrow starts week 14 of renovations, and hopefully everything will be done by week 20.

Is there something wrong with NetVibes? Why am I constantly getting timeout errors? Their blog hasn’t been updated, so I dunno what the fuck is going on.

And BlogSpot sucks. All I want to do is add some blogger blogs to my Netvibes setup (provided the page actually fucking loads), but apparently RSS feeds are a paid feature on blogger accounts.

Screw you, BlogSpot, and kiss my arse. If WordPress.com can offer RSS feeds TO EVERY MEMBER OF THE SITE, why can’t you do it? Bastards.

Leftovers from my breakfast at Circle 8, Newtown yesterday.

Burnt bacon for hair Grilled tomato (so gross) for eyes Burnt toast for a mouth, complete with egg leftovers for drool.

While it looks like I didn’t like the breakfast, this place made awesome poached eggs. Not a whiff of vinegar in sight.

I’m not exactly a tidy person; on any given day there is usually at least 3 cans or bottles of coke on my desk at home.

Dan noticed cockroach antlers poking out of one coke can the other day, so he shoved a tissue in there to stop the horrid cockroach from climbing out and scaring the crap out of me (thanks, hunny).

Now, that was… 3 days ago? Every now and again you can hear the cockroach trying to break out of its sugar-and-caffeine-infested prison. How long do these bloody cockroaches live for? I want it to be dead before I take it down to the recycling bin for burial.

There is much panic amongst Stewart and Colbert fans with the mass-removal of clips from the awesome YouTube. And I’m one of them.

While I’ve been trying (emphasis on trying) to work on my OHS assignment, Daily Show and Colbert Report clips have been my constant companion. Thankfully, my videodownloader extension for Firefox has helped me archive my favourite clips of shows that I haven’t seen, mostly because I’m stuck in Australia.

I’m at a loss as to why Comedy Central has demanded that certain (not all) clips be removed from YouTube when Jon and especially Stephen have referred to their popularity on YouTube. Surely it’s good publicity, and like a misplaced blog I read this afternoon, it’s not like Comedy Central could release a DVD of full eps.

And besides, geeking out with my Genna over MSN with new Jon or “Colby” videos is about the funnest thing I’ve ever done on teh internets. I can’t let YouTube take my happiness away.

So I thought I was so cool adding ‘blog stats’ as a sidebar widget.

Except apparently it’s only telling me that I’ve had two whole visitors.

Way to make me feel loved, widget.

So I’ve had a couple of days getting settled in here after giving up on yayme.com.

I like it.

Obviously I’m a fan of the whole WordPress shindig, and while I wanted to be somewhere where I’m not in control of server passwords and installing security updates, I wasn’t willing to make my LiveJournal or MySpace as my main port of call.

I’ve fiddled with the various themes that are on offer, and while there aren’t any decent vibrant-coloured (ie bright pink) ones, I’ve finally found one that I can tweak to a point where I’m content.

Sometimes the server is a little slow to respond, but generally I’m completely happy with what I’ve seen so far.

And I know I’m a geek when I say I’m so relieved that I don’t have to upload patches, chmod directories or run update.php files. It gives me more time to watch Stephen Colbert. Swoon.