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 🙂

“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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

Oh my whatsit! Everyone on mblog is from Australia!

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.

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?

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.