the year is sort of wrapping up and things are all feeling slightly muddled. The very last peice of work i have to do (theoretically) will be done by Monday, and from then all i have is 3 exams. it’s an odd feeling .. but one that i wrote about only lately .. but it’s not just uni that is leaving me with a funny uncertain feeling. a lot of other personal items and issues have started to skew and it’s leaving me with a very unsettling feeling. apart from that, this odd feeling of detachment and a passe attitude to areas of my life is also starting to crawl up. i’m guessing it must be something to do with having to make some life-changing decisions over the holidays…. decisions i haven’t really thought about yet, or thought about for at least 3-4 years. it’s almost like i wish i was a child again, and didn’t have to decide, wishing my decisions were made for me. i’m sure everyone use to whine and shout, but it was so much more simple back then wasn’t it ?

anyway.. have to mention how sad it is that michelle might have to close down echoica.net .. she’s been one of my biggest blog inspirations over the last year or so and i wish i was in the financial situation to be able to assist her in anyway .. i’m hoping things clear up soon michelle .. things wouldn’t be the same if you only had an LJ :(

also have to mention jina and john .. jina cos pink hair *is* cool ! .. and john, because well.. he’s a crazy australian-idol-fan .. and if i’m not going to congratulate him on that.. who will?

in passing..
i found my dream work environment.. (the Bionic Office)
i found a simple way to kill up to 3-4 hours in a day (grouphug)
and finally Goatee Style has found excellent reason to refine your vector art skills! ( rachael leigh cook interest anyone?)

.. so. Uni has been slamming me hard. But it’s funny, not in the hardness of work, or even in the quantity of it, but more just in the stress of it. Our year-long project is coming to it’s end, i’m just such a nervous wreck, worrying that the whole thing sucks .. it’s killing me! .. compiling these huge reports and making those crazy last minute changes. .. *ARGH!*

To add to all of this i had the most insane weekend (one which i will have to discuss in depth, but possibly i might have to do it in my LJ (who would have thought i’d go back to it hey ?) ) ..

..in a bizarre twist i’ve decided to take advantage of the cash in my wallet and the fact that movies are cheap on tuesday to go see Kill Bill with Vicki and hopefully some other people. .. so .. here’s to a night full of ultra-violence!

can anyone say “on fireeeee!” ..

i can’t believe the amount of uni work i’ve done today, i suppose it helps that most of it is PHP/HTML-esque stuff that i sorta enjoy doing anyway. but seriously, i thought there was a law against doing this much work on a sunday!..

Anyway, it feels like parts of this semester are coming to a close, which is great, but also sorta weird, because i’m not 100% of what happens next year? Usually i know exactly what is going to happen .. but for the first time in my life i’m uncertain, and have nothing planned.. i can get my degree, or i can try and think up an honours thesis and attempt to complete that next year, or i can try and work, or .. or.

It’s so open-ended. So far i’m leaning towards doing my honours, except i’m CLUELESS as to what i’m going to do my thesis on. A lot of people keep on telling me that i should go talk to the lecturer’s and that, but they are so fucking clueless you know? It’s hard i suppose for them, i mean, they want to help the student in picking something interesting to research, but they can’t just choose it for them, because chances are the student might not enjoy it. What’s worse is the 2 enquiries i’ve made, one with the honours coordinator, and one with the a lecturer who takes honours students, have both resulted in me being even *more* frustrated..

The good thing is, even if i do nothing next year, I still feel it’ll be good for me. Maybe i should put some time/effort into my music .. (though i must admit we’ve been having a string of bad-shows lately, chased-down by fairly average-to-shit rehersals.. so currently one of the last things i want to do is drum)

speaking of melange, even though i felt our last gig was fairly crap, because of the emptiness of the venue we proceeded to firstly play a song we’d only really written the week before (and hadn’t really rehersed) and secondly play not one, but two different radiohead covers (you, planet telex) (like the new song, we hadn’t really seriously ever rehersed these, so it was fairly ad-lib).. i mean, i did have a bit of fun, but .. just .. i don’t know.

maybe it was daev’s silly head-band he wore on stage.. who knows.

just a short note. I’m plugging this article ( Developers gripe about IE standards inaction ).. mainly in-light of following closely upon the trials & tribulations of jina’s site, azaliea-skye.net, and her recent comments on standards compliance and stuff. I haven’t had the time to digest this article in whole, but the gist of it strikes chords deep within, as i’ve always had the feeling that IE just sort of got to a point and then never proceeded. Of course, as a hypocrite i’ve never gotten around to using any other browser.

until now

Thanks go out to Daev for getting me onto Mozilla’s Firebird (also plugouts to his lil sis, whom i’m hosting -> Doms)

*sigh*..

as i mentioned before the lineup for Big Day Out was looking EXCELLENT.. but .. if you have a quick look at the site (and here) you’ll see that A Perfect Circle are no longer coming..

which has completely wrecked my day.

just a quickie, i should’ve been in the shower 5mins ago.

anyone who liked evil dead (I II III) should look out for this movie – Bubba Ho-Tep .. from what i’ve gathered from the preview, it’s got the wonderful Bruce Campbell in it playing Elvis, who’s stuck in an old-persons village, everyone believing he was an Elvis impersonator who went a bit nutty.. haha.. this movie looks REALLY classic in the From Dusk Till Dawn way.. hahaha.. i really can’t wait to see an old-decrepid elvis pulling some hard-ass kung-fu moves on a soul-sucking-demon!

oh.. and i know everyone out there would LOVE an Apple iPod .. so why don’t you just do what i’ve done.. get one cheap

-Nudge.

J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Blurb: Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.’ Harry Potter is due to start his fifth year at Hogwards School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He is desperate to get back to school and find out why his friends Ron and Hermione have been so secretive all summer. However, what Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down..

Why: Because i’ve read the previous 4

Thoughts: Most of this book i just couldn’t get over how freakin’ annoying harry is. All the way through to the end he’s a whiny lil bitch, and it wasn’t until afterwards when whinging to mum about how whiny harry is that she mentioned that she thought it was great. “I mean, how else do you portrey an adolescent?” .. hahah .. I mean she’s right, but it still can’t cause me to shake this feeling of death that constantly feeling towards the annoying-ness that is harry. On the up-side, i thought this book was one of the better ones, i didn’t quite understand why the novel had to be so much bigger than the previous ones, considering not-much more really happened. I did like the unrolling of voldemort-style events, though like every other book they are based upon a really boring/repetitive structure ie: harry doesn’t have fun @ his uncles place, harry has fun at uni, harry has fall-out with one of his 2 best mates, the mate who he hasn’t fallen out with somehow gets them through it all, harry doesn’t really do anything (cept whine), harry then comes to face the evil that is voldemort (always riiight at the end too), harry somehow doesn’t die.

It’s a sort of shame because obviously he can’t die in the next novel, but u know in all likliness he probably should. I mean, what is it it.. the 4th/5th time that harry has faced voldemort and not died (because like the really really stereotypical bad-guy, he has to do so much god-damn talking and explaining, filling in not only harry but the reader on all the plot-holes) .. so after 4-5 fuckups, the first thing you’d do the 6th time u see harry is fucking kill him. Now talking. No thinking. No pondering or explaining or laughing or trying to capture him. You’d fucking put a cap-in-his-fucking ass.

really, it’d be v cool if rowling did end the book after 6 instead of 7. But, as things are, you and i can predict the fact that she will finish them all. AND THEN (no shit) she’ll most likely continue to make some spin-off book (trying to chuck-a-tolkien).. already she has more money then i could imagine. Maybe she should start writing harrypotter in space.

god.. can u feel the bitterness

despite all of this, i still thought it was fairly interesting. Some bits (more than others) really kept me turning the pages, and now that i think about it it’s sort of odd that the most hated character of the book is umbridge (not voldemort) .. because rowling really knows how to write an annoying-as-shit character. Another theme that i really enjoyed (old x-files memories) was the conspiracy thing. The idea of knowing something terrible, but it being so terrible the gov’t won’t believe ya (sorta thing)

anyway..

Frederick Forsyth – The Negotiator

URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552134759/104-6329443-2627162

Blurb: The kidnapping of a young man on a country road in Oxfordshire is but the first brutal step in a ruthless plan to force the President of the United States out of office. If it succeeds, he will be psychologically and emotionally destroyed. Only one man can stop it – Quinn, the world’s foremost Negotiator, who must bargain for the life of an innocent man, unaware that ransom was never the kidnapper’s real objective…

Why: I needed something to read, and had previously enjoyed Forsyth’s novels so this was a no-brainer. (Even though the book turned out to be quite a large one to tackle)

Thoughts: Great book. Obviously it was sort of funny, being unable to sit properly in the context of the novel (the 80′s) .. with so much of the story revolving around how by this time (2003) most of the worlds oil production would be diminished. Anyway, this book starts off being very political (gameplaying) then ends up in the hands of Quinn, the trusty, intelligent, pseudo-supercharacter negotiator .. Then, just like in a Tarantino flick, the book goes upside down. From around the middle of the text, the plot takes a spin and all of a sudden is no longer a political, kidnapper-vs-law enforcement book, but a detective-novel. Sometimes i felt lost being dragged around the earth by Quinn but in the end the goodies win (yay).. so i suppose it wasn’t all in vain.

this entry is dedicated to minimilism and standards.

Jina’s new layout (@ azaliea-skye) is a living testament to the beauty that can be found in minimilism (and standards compliance).. I wasn’t going to post an entry today because i seriously have SO much work it makes me want to vomit when i think about it (huuuuge ass group report, huuuuuuge ass presentation for a DIFFERENT group). .. but atm jina doesn’t have a commenting system.. so this is my way of commenting on her site (weird no?) .. anyway.. yeh .. it’s great. And also what was thrilling was her shameless (*squishyhug*) plugging of me.. haha.. not only on her front page, but in her “cherished” page too! .. ahh.. her comments really gave me a boost .. the day doesn’t seem as long anymore.. u know?.. it’s good.

Angela’s new layout (@ silencia.net) is another one of the minimal school.. and i think she’s done it in a completely different-from-norm way (to rebel or not to rebel) .. in that she doesn’t actually have any graphics!.. haha.. but i think it’s wonderful (i mean.. it’s riiight up my alley of content-is-king) .. so great work to you too angela!

.. and then linked from Jess’ site (@ gracewithin.org) is a site called intensify.org .. ahh .. to think? 3 minimal layouts in a day! (i’m a happy boy indeed) .. Rachel’s site is really really great .. and it’s such a shame that i have all this uni work to do.. because all these great sites are really pushing my inspiration-buttons .. just i don’t have the time to fulfil their whims.

oh… and i’m not sure i mentioned it earlier but michelle has (had) a new layout too! (echoica.net).. naturally it’s a rockin’ .. but i’ve come to the conclusion that she’d have to try pretty fucking hard to make a layout that didn’t rock.