Agglomerated Insanity

2003-05-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

My graduation is just over a week away, which is kind of exciting as I'm finally going to be one of those people dressed up funny who I have seen every year that I've been at university. All those "one day I'll be doing that" thoughts are about to become a reality, and although it's a pretty weird tradition with all the clothes etc. it's the kind of thing that you're not exactly going to do too many times in your life so you may as well savour the moment. It also means that I finally get the degree that I've worked so hard for in paper, now we just need to figure out a place to put it...

2003-05-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a pretty long week so far for me, with work being the rather dominant feature in my life at the moment. It's been "get up at 7am, go to work, come home at about 6, eat, sleep then do it again" which has become slightly depressing, but at least tomorrow I have a later start so I'll have a chance to have at least a small sleep-in. Work has also been more interesting than usual, with my management training as well as the Crew Training development programme which I'm doing.

The other main thing that's happened this week is us buying our car, which is now nicely parked in the carport. We even got an alarm installed which is pretty cool - although it turns itself on after 30 seconds which can be slightly disconcerting at first. But at least it's finally sinking in that we actually have a car, although it probably won't really seem like much of a great thing until I've learned how to drive the darn thing!

2003-04-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

I had the weirdest dream last night, and I actually remember quite a bit of it for a change, normally they completely disappear the instant I wake up - but towards the end of my dream I must have realised that it was only a dream and that it would be good to remember so that I could tell Nats in the morning. But anyway, in my dream some computer hacker had put some virus in all the world's banking systems which meant that when you made an EFTPOS transaction the actual amount of money coming out of your account was way more than what you were actually paying. All over the news people were saying don't use your cards and hang onto your receipts, but I had just spent $100 on a refundable deposit with the people selling our car to us (actually did happen yesterday), and when I checked my account about $600 had come out of it in that transaction. There were also other transactions of over $125 when I hadn't actually spent anything. I remember feeling totally helpless and really sad - when you earn money at about $8 an hour after tax you don't want it disappearning on you. And then I couldn't find any of my reciepts so I had no way of proving that I hadn't actually spent that much once everything got sorted out. After a while my dream went a little hazy, I think that I came across the person who was reponsible for everything, and argued with him. Then I remember something about lifts in the university library (not the actual library lifts, but what the university is in my dreams) and thumping this guy over the head with something.

It was a pretty odd dream, details about my dreams are always a little scratcy and the things that I remember are usually how I was feeling, rather than any words which were spoken or details of things that I noticed. I know that I was really upest about what was going on in this dream, but perhaps slightly comforted that it wasn't only me who was getting screwed over. Oh.... and I also dreamed (later on I think), that Nats was driving over the Auckland Harbour Bridge and trying not to drive off the edges which for some reason were missing half the normal fences which stop people from driving off the bridge into the water. It's nice to be able to remember my dreams for once.

2003-04-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm really weird having two sites posting basically the same information, but when I first started my news page back in January 2001, I had never even heard of 'blogs', and had never ever heard of blogger. But I have realised that it's probably a whole heap easer using someting like blogger to publish my site - but to ever switch it over would be such an absolute mission (fixing all the links etc.), that maybe it's just easier and a bit more flexible if I kept my site as is. But then again, playing around with blogger will possibly provide me with another way to do things.

Maybe in the future I might develop separate identities for these two pages - like Doug who has his dream page and his real life page. While I can never remember my dreams well enough to do something like that, maybe next year when I return to university one of the pages could focus on my studies while the other talks about everything else that's going on in my life. For the time being, if I have reason to write two different posts then I might, but otherwise it might just be copying and pasting so that people who stumble across either this site or my other page can get a taste of Agglomerated Insanity.

2003-04-19T23:36:00.001-07:00

I was talking to one of the senior managers at work last night, and he said that my managers uniform had been ordered along with about three other people who were 'moving up', to become area or shift managers in the next couple of weeks. So it seem that finally I'm going to make that step up. In some ways for the first time ever, I really feel like I'm ready for it - although in the past I have done pretty well looking after parts of the shift while the manager has been on a break, or stuff like that. But now, I feel pretty confident that with a little training and help I could run a pretty good shift at work. There are quite a few things that I need to learn, including how to use the computer to print off certain sheets which are needed, as well as learning how to organise the cash at the end of my shift - but apart from those technical things I think that I'm ready. Also, feedback from other crew people and managers has been quite good, as they have generally said stuff like "I can understand you.... but the others??" Hopefully it's going to be a bit more of an intersting job, and a little bit more of a challenge.

2003-04-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

We've had another quiet day today, I felt incredibly sleepy this morning, after working last night and not going to sleep until 2:30am meant that I was pretty tired when awoken at 8am this morning. We've been looking after Nats' neice Sarah for the past week and a half, and while it's been cool in many ways she does have a habit of waking up pretty early in the morning. But I managed to sort of go back to sleep for a while, so I'm not too wasted now.

2003-04-19T23:35:00.000-07:00

As I seem to continuously be stating, this year seems to be disappearing awfully quickly. As winter is knocking on our door in the past couple of days (banging with a bloody huge sledge hammer to be a little more precise), it makes me realise that we're just about halfway through 2003 already - and even saying that we're in 2003 still seems a little odd. Maybe its simply because as the years pass by, each individual year is a smaller percentage of our lives, that makes time seem to go faster every year - or maybe it's some weird cosmic thing that I heard the other day, where our solar system is passing through a certain part of the Milky Way glaxy which has some strange stuff in it that makes time seem to go faster. Either way, New Years and Christmas certainly don't seem that long ago, although on the other hand it does seem like I've had my laptop for a while, and that only got delivered on Christmas Eve.

2003-04-19T06:45:00.001-07:00

It was Natalie's sister Grace's 5th birthday on Friday, which is always an important milestone in anyone's life, as in New Zealand you start school once you've turned 5. I don't actually remember my 5th birthday, whereas I have snippets of memories from both my 3rd and 4th birthdays. But anyway, it was a pretty big party with lots of pressies, especially when combined with all the Easter Eggs which were given out. I got called by work to come in about halfway through, which was slightly frustrating, but as I need the money I went to work from 4-11 and it was actually a really easy and cruisy shift that just flew by.

2003-04-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

You know those days when it absolutely pours down with rain? Well lucky me got stuck in a massive storm coming home from work tonight. Even on the bus I figured that it was raining a little bit heavier than normal, as the bus ploughed through puddle after puddle it seemed pretty cool at first - the cars next to us were spraying huge amounts of water to the side and it all looked pretty cool. Unfortunately I then remembered that on Saturday's the bus I have to catch ends up about 10 minutes walk from home, and not a 2 minutes walk like the other days of the week. Once I got off the bus, it wasn't really raining that heavily, so I though that I might get lucky and if I ran home quickly I might not get too wet - but boy was I wrong. 10 minutes later I resembled a drowned rat as I walked in the door, very thankful that I had grabbed my jacket in case it was cold when I finished work but still soaked nonetheless.

Storms have always interested me, I remember being at school when I must have been about six watching one of the biggest storms to ever hit New Zealand (cyclone Bola) outside. My parents must have told me that this storm was a little different, because I sitll remember how I noticed that it was so windy and so rainy. A couple of years later I remember watching a huge thunderstorm from the safety of the classroom, as my classmates played around on some prehistoric computer chess game (back in the days of green on black screens). Even these days it's always exciting to see cars splash through big puddles, or to watch how the little puddle in the back yard grows and grows into a giant lake. Maybe next time though, it would be better to see it all from the peace of a window, or maybe even from inside a car, then I wouldn't get quite so wet!

2003-04-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

Four day weekends are GOOD! Especially when you've been working 35 to 40 hours weeks for the past month and a half (yeah I know some of you will be saying "I've been doing that for years"). Yesterday we spent something like 13 hours on the internet, which was a little bit excessive perhaps, but isn't that what holidays are for? I am feeling very much like a fulltime worker lately, looking forward to Fridays because that's the end of the week, and then enjoying having long weekends because of public holidays. In the past, I've normally worked a bit here and there, sometimes on the weekend and sometimes during the week - and working pretty much between 7 and 5 Monday to Friday is rather new to me, although I had probably better get used to it!

2003-04-17T17:46:00.001-07:00

My birthday's in just over a week now - and I've kinda figured out what I'm going to do, with a few drinks on Saturday night and then going out for lunch with family and Nats on Sunday. It'll be nice, not quite the huge party that James had - but I'm not really the party person so that's maybe not a bad thing. It's only another year really, but I suppose that it's pretty cool having one birthday in particular which is a little more special than the others, going from being a 'child' to an 'adult'. Now how can I avoid having to drink copious amounts of beer???

2003-04-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

The down-side of it being the end of the week is that my body seems to realise that it doesn't have to walk around for eight hours a day for a little while, so decides it's the perfect time to hibernate. Hence, I end up really sleepy when I probably should be wanting to go out and enjoy myself. Oh well, I guess a good night's sleep will do me the world of good.

2003-04-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

As it's Good Friday tomorrow, today was the last day of the week for me and the start of a four day weekend. Yay! Cleverly I've managed to screw over the McDonald's public holiday policies (which really really suck), and I'll be getting paid for both Good Friday and Easter Monday even though I'll be at home sleeping. Unfortunately, not working tomorrow means that I'll get nothing for not working on ANZAC day next Friday - which is a bit of a bitch but oh well. At least for once I'll be getting the money I desever for public holidays rather than getting roped in to work and getting nothing extra for it, as has happened in previous years far too many times.

2003-04-17T03:38:00.000-07:00

I seem to have lost a little interest in writing here, although I may be spending more time on the net than I have for ages and ages. Blogshares accepted my blog, and it's slowly increasing in value, although the couple of people who did hold a rather large number of shares in my site recently sold, which brought down the share price a little. Apparentely the whole game is going to reset on May 1st, when it 'goes live' - any shares you own will no longer be worth anything and you'll only keep what money you have. Maybe with all the selling that's going to happen, it might be best to get out early before all the share prices crash. Damn I'm sounding like a real economist now.

2003-04-17T03:37:00.000-07:00

Work today was busy, school holidays making the place much much busier than normal. A lot of the people at work complain when it's really busy, because of the extra work and having to rush all the time. But I actually prefer it when things are busy, as long as we have enough people on, as time goes faster and it just seems the way that things are meant to be. The store I work at can get incredibly busy - during special occassions such as the Santa Parade once a year, and that's the way it just ought to be in some ways. When things are quiet, it can get pretty boring and all, so if we have enough staff on it's normally a good thing when we have a real busy lunch rush.

2003-04-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

It's going to be a pretty long night tonight, as I've agreed to do a pretty crazy 7pm-6am shift at work. Originally I wasn't meant to be working today, which was annoying as I wouldn't be eligible for my day-off-in-lieu for next Friday (Good Friday). However, late last week a shift became availabe, from 7pm-3am on Friday night. Now in the past I've looked at people doing this shift, and thought that it must be the worst one in the world to do - as you start off in the evening but don't finish until the middle of the bloody night. As I don't have a car, it's damn near impossible to get home at 3am so initially I passed it up, cursing the fact that it wasn't a different shift. But then I figured that if I could stay on until 6am and finish just before the first bus leaves the city it could be a possibility and I would be able to get extra pay for next Friday. At the moment, I'm not sure if I'm really going to regret this decision as I woke up at about 10am this morning and haven't slept since. I guess at about 4am you can ask me if it was a mistake. But it should be a pretty busy night tonight, as school and university finished for the term today and heaps of people will probably want to go out partying until all hours of the night, which means that time will hopefully go by pretty quickly.

2003-04-10T22:12:00.001-07:00

About a week after Nats goes back to university, I've got my graduation which is going to be pretty cool. I have to wear weird as gowns and stuff, but at least it'll be one day when you can look really silly and people won't laugh. And then I'll actually be given my degree, so officially I will be Joshua Arbury BA. After three years of hard work, it will be nice to finally get the qualification that I sought all that time.

2003-04-10T22:12:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy past few days, with Nats just finishing her last week of university before the holidays and me working quite a bit. University always has the habit of making heaps of essays due in the last week before holidays, so it has been pretty stressful lately getting them all done. At least now we can look forward to two reasonably relaxing weeks (although I'm still going to have work), leading up until my 21st on the 27th of April.

2003-04-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

My site has undergone a few changes in the past day, as you would have probably noticed. I started off only changing the links to a few folders, but then that didn't looks right by itself so I added the bit at the top of the page. Things might take a little longer to load up, but I don't really think that there's much I can do about it - but anyway if it doesn't take too long on my internet connection then it should be great for everyone else, as I can only normally connect at either 31.2 or 28.8 kbps.

2003-04-06T03:59:00.000-07:00

Nats and I changed the room around today, which is always an absolute mission. Fortunately this time it was only shifting the bed and a couple of dressers around, and not the computer desk which is stacked up to the roof with 'stuff'. Even then it probably took us the best part of 3-4 hours, including tidying the room in the first place so that we could actually get at everything. I remember when we last changed the room around, in about November last year, it took the whole day, and we were extremely exhausted by the end of the day. When you've got two people living in a bedroom, which also includes two computers, a TV, video, DVD player, scanner, stereo and god knows what else, there's always a problem or where to put everything. But I think this time we managed to somehow 'create space' by more efficiently using what we've already got. The room feels a bit bigger now, which is GOOD.

2003-04-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

Just updated the layout of my proper site, check it out! I don't really know why I created this blog, probably just to see how Blogger works and to figure out whether it would help get me a blog on Blogshares. I guess I'm sitting at about 0.5 out of two, as nothing has happened with Blogshares, and I had an impossible time trying to import my blogrolling list. Oh well, shit happens.

2003-04-05T05:49:00.000-08:00

It's incredible how time can just disappear when you're on the internet, and before you know it three hours have passed. Surely there is no other activity which consumes time so effortlessly, today I've done absolutely shit all: played around with my site, tried unsuccessfully) to get Blogshares working on my site and checked a few other things. And before I know it, we'd spent about 10 hours on the net! Maybe that's a good thing, it gives me a chance to give my feet a rest from the constant torture they endure during the week, and it gives me a chance to completely catch up on all the internet reading that I do. That's the only problem when you spend quite a lot of time on the net, you get yourself involved in so many things that to keep up with them all literally takes hours. I hope that everyone likes the few changes that I've made to the design of this page, there are probably some more to come but Frontpage is badly misbehaving and I'm starting to despise HTML tables. Very frustrating.

2003-04-04T19:07:00.000-08:00

Wearing contact lenses has a few advantages over glasses, and obviously a few more annoyances. The main annoynce, obviously, is putting the bloody things in and taking them out. When I first got my lenses this was a total mission, as I poked and prodded my eyes for about 20 minutes before they would finally go in - taking them out proved a little easier once I got past the squeamishness of it all. Nowadays, putting them in is pretty easy, although from time to time I think I trap an eyelash between the lense and my eye which bloody hurts! I guess some of the advantages are pretty obvious - I'm no longer "the guy with glasses", and it makes me look a little less nerdy. But some of the other advantages, which I like the most, are ones you wouldn't really think of. Contact lenses never get dirt on them, so you can see perfectly all the time without streaks right across your vision; they also don't fog up when I come out of the freezer at work, unlike my glasses. Furthermore, for activities which I would normally have to take my glasses off, such as roller-coaster rides or taking a spa at the gym, having contacts means that I can actually see. So I guess they're pretty cool little things, even if they bugged the hell out of me originally.

2003-04-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

I think that there are about four main types of blogs on the net. Obviously many transcend the rather general categorizing that I'll give you, but these types of themes certainly can be applied to most blogs. Firstly there's the internet whizz blog, an example probably being Chris Pirillo's site. These types of blogs generally talk about advances in some sorts of programming languages, or how their jobs are related to blogging etc. etc. Sometimes I find these interesting, but as I'm not really 'up with the play', a bit of the technical talk goes above my head (I'm still trying to figure out exactly what CSS does). Secondly, there's the news blogger. Instapundit is probably the most famous of these blogs, which are updated many, many times a day and contain comments on certain newspaper articles relating to what's going on in the world at the moment. I'm not really a great fan of this type of blog, as they are usually trying to push some opinion or update so damn frequently it's just impossible to keep up with the site as a whole without checking it every 30 minutes (which is probably the whole point, to keep you coming back). According to many, this is the real blog, commenting on news and real life events, and offering an alternative type of journalism. Thirdly, there's the journal blog, which might be where my site fits in. I don't really comment on news or computer stuff that frequently, but just tell tales about my life so that you all know (and I can recall) what I was up to during a certain stage of my life. Often these sites aren't particularly interesting to read, unless you know the person in real life and can gain further insight into how they think or how they're feeling than you would be able to by just talking to them. In some ways, this isn't really a true blog because it might not be talking about events, or offering opinions. However, as everyone lives in the real world (hopefully), their lives are always affected by what's going on around them, and you'll find that if something big happens,(like September 11th) everyone writes about it. In this way, even this type of blogger is commenting on the world, and offering their own opinion - which I think is one of the most important parts of blogging. The fourth blog-type is probably a mixture of the above, normally with some humour thrown in - with links to stuff that they thought was cool/funny. A site such as Blogjam seems to fit into this last category, because as well as linking to funny stuff, Fraser tells us tales about his life and comments on the news. I think that this type of blog is probably my favourite, as it offers variety from day-to-day, serves up some hilarious stories, and keeps you coming back for more.

2003-04-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've got a bit insane in the last week or two, adding millions and millions of blogs to my blogroll. Well, actually at the time I write this there's almost 100 so maybe I was slightly exaggerating. Some of the blogs listed are ones which I try to read every day and keep up to date with absolutely everything they say, others are occassional reads, while some I probably looked at once or twice, and just don't give a damn about anymore. I guess it's nice to have them all there, and it does give some of the people listed a chance to gather a few more hits. Unfortunately everyone on the net isn't as generous as I am when it comes to handing out links, but I think that the more we link to each other, the better this part of the net will become. So if you want me to link to you, just leave a comment with your website and I'll add you to my links list - just be nice and reciprocate. Please.

2003-04-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

As for me, I'm not really the party type. My idea of a nice 21st is spending some time with Nats and my family, having a nice dinner and then going out to a few bars in the city and having a good time while getting 'mildly' drunk. I don't really understand the whole idea of getting 'shit faced drunk', as I accidently (honest, I didn't know it would have that much of an effect) did once. It wasn't an enjoyable experience, spewing my guts out in a rather public location and not being able to control myself enough to even lift my head properly. And yet some people willingly do this as often as possible, maybe it's a sad sign that their lives are so miserable that they need to escape, or maybe they just never deliberately get so absolutely plastered it just happens.

2003-04-04T18:36:00.000-08:00

My 21st birthday is in less than a month. It's funny to think how old I'm getting, kinda scary in some ways but comforting in others. I remember when I was a little kid, going to the 21st birthdays of a couple of my cousins, having these massive parties with the whole extended family, then watching them get pissed off their faces and not really understanding the whole thing. All I really knew was that this was the 'big one'. If there was one birthday which was 'bigger' than all the others, your 21st was it. I guess this stems from the fact that a while ago it was the transitin from childhood to adulthood, which has now been legally changed to 18, but for some reason once you hit 21 you're 'really' an adult now. Maybe it's all just one big excuse to throw a big party and get totally pissed.

2003-04-04T18:23:00.000-08:00

This is basically a redirect to my actual website, which is here.