Just the one monkey

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:13:07 GMT

numbish

trying hard to keep it together, or at least fall apart in some kind of controlled fashion.

hard to avoid panic at the moment - waiting for phone call of good news about 2nd interview.

not coping, but refusing to do anything about it just yet.

Fri, 01 May 2009 13:57:37 GMT

got made redundant on thursday

oh wait. that was yesterday.

spent today in shock. puttered about home. achieved very very little.

tried to tell some people. sick of talking about it already.

could be a very very good thing for me IF I get a job in the next two months. I get 2 month's notice PLUS 10 week's redundancy PLUS all my annual and sick leave. So that'll be good if it works out.

am coping as long as I have something to occupy myself with.

as soon as I stop typing this I'll have run out of things to occupy myself with.

probably was a mistake to watch the andy kaufman movie where he lives a make believe life then dies of cancer.

am incredibly hungry right now. wish i hadn't knocked back beth's offer to bring home mcdonalds.

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:43:38 GMT

Pleased to announce that I did a proper 77km ride on the weekend, on top of my weekly commute totalling 92km - bringing me up to 169km for that 6 day period.

Also pleased to announce that I'm going to Mt Arapiles for a climbing weekend - I think it was daylight savings weekend the last time I went... not to climb because my wrist is not healed enough yet, but to join in the spirit of the thing and anyway I'm the only one trained in setting up the ropes and shit.

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:38:40 GMT

pissed.

on a thursday night.

thank fuck i decided to learn how to make martinis.

and thank fuck beth didn't want hers.

This s such a nice feeling. Like I'm floaitig. Ok. so I won't feel like i'm floatig tomorrow morning. but fuck em.

At least i'm adult enough to leave that last one only 3/4 drunk.

ima eat the whatsitcalled? ollive. ima eat the olive.

enter enter. enter. that button doesn't work rith.

right

oh, yeah. pissed.

good times

gin i do not likve.

live\

like

i assume that martini = vodka.

gin takes me back to the time I went halvsies in a bottle of gin and _lemonade_ on a trip down to the each for Melbourne Uni Mountaineering Club. We brought the two bottles with us down to the beach (goddamit I'm pressin backspace a lot) and would take a swig from BOTH bottles in turns. Thinking it was _like_ gin and tonic. That was, fucking christ, 14 years ago. I will not do gin.

Interestingly, one of my best friends I met on that beach that night. I turned to her and said Hi my name's Brent. What's your name, want to be my friend? Turns out the answers were Anna and yes. We're going rockclimbing in a couple of weeks.

No gin.
No. never.

Vodka. now. yes. ok, there's been more than one vodka Experience. Involving Dan. And orange juice. And guitars. and stair cases. and upside down. but no kissing. no. that would be strange. no sex between me and dan, even though i'm convinced he's had the odd homoerotic experience whilst not, himself, being bisexual, but the then again what the fuck would i know i had to find out through dan about my own sister's (who I consider myself to be her most closest person) lifelong depression problems.

oh, yeah. and no. no gin.

work tomorrow. fun

pissed.

next time:grammar.

(oh, and nice night spent with beth. her. much less pissed than me. but nice night spent just getting drunk and havig a chat. she played bejewelled blitz on facebook on one pc, while i read from fmlife.com (fuck, those people have fucked lives) and drank martinis. Next time. Ice.)

goodnight. i love you.

Will capitalism fall?

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:04:51 GMT

Think about balancing a tennis racquet on the palm of your hand. It's not that hard to do - all that's required is to be aware of which direction the centre of gravity of the racquet is falling and move the palm of your hand towards, and past, that direction. And repeat.

If you keep that up then the racquet can be balanced for a long while. It can even appear to achieve what appears to be a state of equilibrium as you get really good at balancing it.

Think about if you turn the racquet upside down and hold the end of the handle between your thumb and forefinger. It's easier to balance now, isn't it? All you have to do is keep holding on. If you jerk your handle suddenly, the racquet moves, but it finds its own way back to equilibrium.

The point is the control system that's needed in the first case is a central data processing decision maker - and the system won't work without it. In the second case the only thing that's required for it to work properly is to leave it alone.

I believe that the basic tenements of capitalism - ownership and supply and demand - are so fundamental that they operate without centralisation. Socialism is like balancing a tennis racquet on the palm of your hand - it's impressive when it works, but without a central data processing decision maker it'll fall over.

I believe that the system of capitalism that we HAVE is fucked. It's over. The global credit crisis wasn't caused by the sub-prime loan scandal, it was caused by the idea that growth is permanent, that you can keep increasing the 'return' on an investment as long as you keep increasing the 'risk' with no upper limit on either return or risk. The sub-prime was just the first really public explosion of this myth, this globally held misunderstanding of what money really is.

There are going to be huge problems with capitalism in the coming years, as governments not only run out of money, but run out of credit. You're going to see America go to war over its (the Government's) inability to pay its interest, let alone bring down its debt. Who, exactly is it borrowing all these trillions from? They're gong to want their trillions back. And America doesn't, and won't, have trillions to give them.

People are going to turn to other forms of economy, as it becomes unreasonable to live in a suburb of empty houses people are going to move to the cities to eek out existences in slums. A new type of socialism will emerge as people will be forced to pool their resources and their assets to meet the minimum conditions of life.

But I don't believe that we'll see the end of Capitalism. We could certainly see the end of globalisation, of the internet, of the dollar, of the global financial, banking and stock market systems. But Capitalism isn't those things. Those are just the way we carry out capitalism.

Capitalism is where I have an apple tree, and I give someone some apples to pick the apples, take them to market and get them to swap them for a pig. I have something valuable I think others will want, others have valuable things that I want, let's have an agreement. That's capitalism.

I've been worrying for years that this rampant growth can't last - not just because of the impact it's having on the planet that it shouldn't last, but that it actually can't last. We can't keep building houses and making cities bigger - within a few hundred years Melbourne would bump into Sydney. That's nonsense. I've always thought that it would be disease that would cull the population, or more recently global warming might do the trick.

What I see now is that the new contender might be food wars. There's enough people now that we could start to see not just food riots from hungry mobs, but food-invasions from hungry armies. Countries invading for the purposes of claiming payment for unpaid trillions in debt, and to snatch food to feed their own populace.

Even then, capitalism would survive after the dust settled. You can take some things by force, but at the end of the day, and this has always been true, at the end of the day most things must be traded for.

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:50:55 GMT

shittest week at work this week.

Company has a cash flow problem. I have a killer product to release to production which will apparently save the company. Design problems. Which, once fixed, produce further problems. Which, once fixed, produce further problems.

And then two people got laid off because of Cash Flow Problem. One guy came in and said "Oh, I just realised. This is my 32nd anniversary working at this company." By midday that day he'd lost his job a couple of years from retirement.

The next day we finally got verbal signoff on the design. hooray. Lowercase hooray. No exclamation mark. I feel so guilty. I feel like I limped across the finishing line of the marathon 42 hours after they pulled all the bunting down.

My boss is telling me to look for work. Hard. He says he doesn't trust the place, that I shouldn't trust the place. He'll give me time off for interviews and stuff. I reckon at least 80% of the office workers are seriously looking for jobs, if not everyone.

And then, as if the week wasn't FUN (hooray) enough, a laptop got stolen last night. Some fucker has walked the full length of the factory to go in through the back door of the office building, then walked the full length of the office, put the National Sales Manager's laptop into its bag, taken the keyboard and mouse, and the power supply, and walked out without stealing anything else. Including the vastly more expensive personal laptop sitting right next to it.

And, unhappily, I was one of the last three to leave.

The owner did some detective work and thought she'd figured out that all the doors had been locked and that the laptop was therefore taken by one of the three last people to leave the office.

She sat me down in her office, along with the single remaining member of her senior management team, the Financial Controller, and explained the situation. She grilled me on which doors I'd closed, and opened. I'd gone to the toilet and left the factory door unlocked behind me, but Seth and Luke were in their office hard at work, so I left the door unlocked, as is the custom, went back to my half of the office, turned off all those lights, and locked my doors behind me.

I've been here for 6 years. I KNOW to lock before I leave if I'm last, and I KNOW to not lock if I'm not.

So she repeats over and over again what a serious CRIME this is, how it is clear that someone from within the building has taken the computer, and that they will be able to identify the thief by examining the fingerprints on the power board. Fine. Then she repeats to me what a CRIME it is. She repeats about the fingerprints. She threatens me with calling in the police. Because it's a CRIME. And there'll be fingerprints. Then she gives me a chance to confess, and I'll be able to just resign and slip away without them laying charges or getting the police involved. Because it's a CRIME. And if the PERSON who DID it COMES FORWARD and ADMITS it we won't lay CHARGES.

If you've got ANYTHING TO SAY, Brent, say it NOW. Because it's a CRIME.

You know what? The last dregs of good will I had for the company just evaporated. Pooof.

I didn't take the fucking laptop and I don't know who did. For all I know the daft old bugger just left it at home, or it got stolen from his car and he's too dipshit to admit it. What? She thinks I carried a stolen laptop home on my bike, past Luke and Seth, who vouch that I wasn't carrying a laptop bag, to see my children with my stolen laptop?!?

The thing is, I understand her situation. SOMEONE she has to trust has betrayed that trust. It's clearly someone who knows the office, who knows exactly which door to come through and when, who doesn't mind walking the full length of the factory, who doesn't mind being seen wandering through the office. And she's had theft before - the old warehouse forklift driver had been with us for 20 years and she fired him the day she found that he was coming in on the weekends and making off with thousands of dollars of recyclable scrap metal.

I understand that she has to get the police involved. That's fine.

There's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The right way is something like "Brent. We don't want to suggest that you're involved with this, but the fact is we have a situation here. A laptop was stolen by someone who had access to the building, and you were one of the last three to leave. We're going to have to ask the police to fingerprint the computer, and we're going to have to ask you to provide us with fingerprints. Also, I hate to say this, because I don't believe you're a thief, we do have to say this one more thing: we're going to give the culprit a chance to come clean so we can avoid calling the police."

She all but accused me of it. That's the wrong way.

Fuck her. And the horse she rode in on.

There is no WAY that I'm going to be here in 3 months time - unless the job market is really that dry. Last year I honestly stayed in part because I felt loyal. I really did have a job offer for more money at a better company, but I stayed because this place is close to my home which I value as a family man and because I had unfinished business here. They matched the money (kinda, depends how you look at the bonus situation, which is going poorly) and promised me training, which never eventuated.

Well I've still got unfinished business here, and I'd walk away from it today at this stage if I had the chance. I'd just down my tools and walk away, let her deal with the fucking mess. I'm supposed to give her 8 weeks notice, but frankly I'd be almost happy for her to keep my fucking sick leave money. It's company policy to pay out sick leave so I'd have about $4k of sick leave coming my way. At this stage if I got a job offer I'd start in 2 weeks. What I'd probably _really_ do, bravado aside, is tell the new employer of the condition and that I'd try to negotiate a shorter notice period. If she insisted on making my life hell I can't see that I'd be better off hanging around for that sick leave money rather than just moving the fuck on with my life.

I certainly couldn't see myself being a good employee for that period.

So that's where I am tonight. Stressed. Tired. Grumpy. Shouting at my kids when they don't deserve it. Completely unimpressed with my job. Hating the place. Avoiding people. Self destructive behaviour (ok, staying up late to play Halo on a work night isn't as bad as it gets... but still...). I honestly think that for the first time in my life my job is impacting on my general health and well being. It's reducing my self esteem. I feel insecure about my future, about my ability to provide for my family, about my skills as an engineer. I don't feel any job security.

It's clear that everyone knows the company, and the management, is in a tail-spin. Everyone knows that she's in way too deep, too much debt at the wrong time. Everyone knows she's had a string of just abysmal decisions, that she's taken her father's company and in 3 or 4 years wiped 50% of it's value and potential just in reputation and internal knowledge alone.

For instance, one of the products that I designed (a HUGE flop, spent about 2 years of my life on that, and it's sold about 15 units) was DOOMED to failure from the start. Too gimmicky. Too flimsy. Too unworkable. Too ridiculous. But they paid the patent holder $250,000 _upfront_ (it's a $20mill revenue company, so that's like 1/4 of a year's capital expenditure) plus promised him $1 per castor. This agreement was made BEFORE they'd designed the thing, BEFORE they'd tested it, and BEFORE they'd had any idea of what the cost would be. This was the family's first big spending decision after the patriarch died, and they fucked it up to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars, plus wasted engineering time, plus wasted tooling costs, plus wasted stockup costs. MY design now, my design was shit hot. My design actually worked. It was actually cheaper than anyone elses. Mine actually went together and functioned and passed all the tests because I'm fucking awesome. But that's not the point, they don't really need fucking awesome innovation - what they need is good solid investment in the stuff they're GOOD at.

The one product I've made that's been a good idea has been this industrial castor. It was just a castor. It was a big fat meaty castor that came in 4 sizes, three types, and a bomb going off wouldn't dint it. Fine. I can do that. I did that. Brilliant result. It's obvious, sorta, what to do. It's obvious what they wanted, why they wanted it, and why doing that would bring in money.

All this other stuff has just been flapping about spending money. Honestly, I'm the development engineer, if they could go back in time by 3 years and just lose the engineering department I almost think they'd be better off.

Ok. I've wasted enough of my unpaid life getting myself worked up over my paid life.

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:58:00 GMT

pished.

just wish I wasn't so much in charge on kidlers right now.

family bbq.

friends included.

red wine.

hooray!!

2 different beers with 'james' in the title, james boags and james squires.

more red wine!

hooray!

everyone gone.

oh. wait. beth's gone out for the night.

am pished right now.

nuts.

tali and ella are going to go play outside while I'm running the bath. I think they had hamburgers for dinner.

or fruit cups.

or just a glass of water for dinner.

or a piece of cheese.

duzznt matter. ima good dad.

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:52:47 GMT

How about I put a hole in your face? (pointing SLR at transgressors head) I'd go upstairs and sleep well tonight. Oh, yeah, you can count on that. We used to stack fucks like you 5 feet high in Korea and use them as sandbags.

Now.

Get off my lawn.

----

There ain't no-one who's ever done tough like Clint does tough. Man am I glad I saw Gran Turino. I love it. Right mix of violence and restraint, hate and love, life and death.

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:05:45 GMT

i still don't know what to write.

Getting drunk and emailing the literally sordid details is frankly not the answer.

Is everyone just unhappy in their own way?

----

I've figured out that there is a reason why I'm always fighting forest fires at work, and it's not because my project is a fucking disaster (which is it, but that's not the reason.) It's because if you do project work then you necessarily have 17 things on the go at any one point in time, and at any one point in time one or more of those things will be fucked up. That means that's what you concentrate on. So that means that, even if on the whole the thing is in control, you're constantly working on the stuff that's out of control trying to bring it back into control. That's why it seems like I spend my days and weeks flying madly, rudderless, in a stream of crisis management and last-minuteism.

Is everyone sad like that? Everyone's got 17 things on the go at any one time, and it's inevitable that one of those things will be going wrong so that's what you spend your time fixing so that's what you spend your energy worrying about so in effect you just spend your whole life on fucked up stuff - I guess that explains why it's possible to be sad living in a huge house with a family and relative comfort while there are reasonably happy people out there with half of the blessings I've got if they're lucky.

Let go of the bad and hang on to the good huh?

If I let go of the bad in my life all the good would vanish with it.

----

Sitting down watching telly tonight.

Kids went to bed early.

I bought her flowers on the way home from work.

She was wearing a nice dress.

"Why don't you come and sit with me?"
"I don't want to. I'm frightened."
"What do you mean frightened?"
"I'm not in the mood for all the touching and the groping."

That's what she thinks of it. All the Progress we made in the last two months doesn't mean anything does it. It was just a glitch. That's really what she thinks.

I had nothing to say to that, not even "Oh." The show finished. I went to bed early.

I know where this leads.

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:56:43 GMT

not sure what to write.

will wait until later in the week to make sure

top 20 words I have used in this blog

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:59:56 GMT

tali
beth
fuck
actually
kids
http
fucking
start
ella
someone
everyone
nice
usually
stuff
needs
working
maybe
shit
gets
today

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:35:24 GMT

My take on applying the time value of money in your private life is that you should also look at it the other way: making the decision to NOT spend money based on time.

For instance, driving home late in the afternoon when you're tired and don't want to cook but everyone's hungry... you COULD just take the family through the drivethrough for $30. Problem solved in 5 minutes. You get a crap meal, but you get it quickly.

OR, you could go home and put some sausages on a frypan, cut and steam some vegies, and be eating 30 minutes after you walk in the door. Again, a boring meal, but probably about $5-7.

So: is $25 worth 25 minutes of your life? I don't about you, but it would take me, after tax, about an hour and a half to earn that money. My time's worth more than that. I'm not going to waste an hour of my time at work, slaving away, time that I COULD have been spending doing ANYTHING else.

When the time it takes to EARN the money, is longer than the time that you SAVE by spending now, it's not worth it. You shouldn't go drivethrough: it's a waste of time.

Tax cuts on way - and higher rates

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:42:37 GMT

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/promised-tax-cuts-on-way/2008/02/14/1202760494710.html

Treasury estimates that Labor's tax cuts will pump $31 billion into consumers' pockets over the next three years, on top of $26 billion already in the pipeline from the Howard government's final tax cuts. Next year alone, the two tax cuts between them will raise household income by more than $15 billion.

What the FUCK?!??!

Pump money??

It's OUR FUCKING MONEY!!!

What you mean is "Labor's tax cuts will DRAIN TAXPAYERS LESS to the tue of $31 billion."

How do people keep forgetting this? The government doesn't OWN our money. This idea of tax on our income is a very new idea - and the fact that we get taxed doesn't change the fact that it's OUR FUCKING MONEY to start with.

War cost in 2009 put at $190bn

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:14:01 GMT

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/war-cost-in-2009-put-at-190bn/2008/02/07/1202234065083.html

I wonder how many water pumps you could install in 3rd world countries for $190,000,000,000??

Don't they have "For as little as a dollar a day, you could help bring one child out of poverty" ads? Wouldn't $190 billion feed the world's children...

I wonder if the US government would meet with success if they said: look - this whole war thing with you isn't working. How about we just stop fighting for a while and instead we'll pour money into your country to help you build hospitals and schools. Would that help us reduce this tension between us? It'd certainly be cheaper for _us_.

Let's play "Guess the State of Origin of These HeadLines"

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:02:28 GMT

5 are from melbourne, 5 sydney and 5 brisbane.

Woman stabs pilots in mid-air bomb drama
That'll teach you — student wins payout
Fury as councillors approve foreshore project
Diana inquest hears claims of Dodi's sticky sex dilemma
Arrests over teen found dead on street
Pilots stabbed in plane hijack bomb scare
Multi-million dollar fraud: Sydney man charged
Husband stabs wife, shoots himself
Woman mistakenly raised as a boy
Scullers refuse to race with Robbins if she's selected for Olympics
Wife's lover's genitals 'put in drawer'
Mayor victim of bestiality election smear
Prisoner 'disgusted' girlfriend was once a man
Whaling evidence 'emotional propaganda'
Choking weed threatens Brisbane's water supply

(hint, the first 5 are melbourne and the last 5 from brisbane)

Here's the beef: meat-eating days may be numbered

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:10:36 GMT

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/heres-the-beef-meateating-days-may-be-numbered/2008/02/03/1201973737372.html

"The world's total meat supply was 71 million tonnes in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tonnes. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050."

"A study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that one kilogram of beef was responsible for an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometres."

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:26:18 GMT

A man falls out of a skyscraper. After passing 100 floors he thinks to himself "So far, so good."

Oil passed USD$100 for the time ever today... these petrol rises haven't really impacted on my life hugely up to this stage. So far, so good.

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:19:01 GMT

ok.

I thought of a reason for why Bush might want to build a police state - it's kind of the same reason for why he would want to launch an illegal war to grab for oil, and the same reason why he would stoop to rigging an election in order to steal the presidency - the conspiracy theorists are starting to get to me... the short answer is that he really DOES know about global warming and knows that steps need to be taken to ensure that government can continue in a world falling apart.

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:57:25 GMT

Learn my arts,
Seek my way.

Learn as I learned,
Seek as I sought.

Learn what I never knew,
Find what I never found.

Envy me!
Aim at me!
Rival me!
Surpass me!

Leave me behind,
Never look back.

I was not your city,
Just a stretch of your road.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/the-litany-agai.html
Eliezer Yudkowsky

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:03:55 GMT

I should note that after I spent 15 secs 'fixing' the bike I then spent an hour and a half doing battle with the adjustment of the gears - including one or two nail-biting moments where I was conviced that the brake-cable was too frayed and useless ( managed to grab enough of the ends... but the next time that cable needs adjsting it'll have to be replaced).

bike update

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 01:43:13 GMT

Those of you following the 6 weeks saga of my bike chain repairs will be gratified to note that the final fix, the actual SRAM link, took fully 15 seconds to install from start to finish.

The long, cautionary, tale is that:

I snapped the chain climbing up the hill leading towards Pascoe Vale because I'm such a hard arse.

then i left the chain at my dad's house for a week

the next weekend i managed to find my way to store to buy a cheapie replacement link

the NEXT weekend I found a few spare minutes to (I DID write about this, didn't I??) to clean the chain and all the gears. It's always worth taking the chance to really give things a good clean and oil. Putting the bike back together I ruined one very delicate little part, an M5 thread on a 3mm thick aluminium piece.

The next week I brought a selection of 5mm screws home from work.

I installed them on the weekend and found them too long. I filed them down.

Then I rode to work and the bolt was hitting the spokes. Bad news. I took the bike home again and filed it down more. Later.

The next weekend I got the bolt to the right length and managed to ride the bike all the way to work - with the chain SLIPPING every time the chain went through the rear cluster. Nuts.

Reversed it and fiddled with it at work.

Rode home. No better.

Examined packet in more detail - turns out that the silly bint at the LBS had sold me a 5 - 6 speed link... dumb old idiot. I told her, literally, 4 times that I have a 9 speed chain. 9 speed. 9 speed. 9 speed. So she sold me a 5 speed one and told me it would work.

Next weekend the opportunity to go to a bike store did not eventuate. Went to the zoo instead. Went off doing exhausting time consuming energy sapping tedium which is what makes my life so rewarding on at least some level or other.

THIS weekend I managed to go for a drive and buy some stuff in a place which ended up being near a bike shop. Went in (actually, despite how much the dude smirked at me, CARRYING my rear wheel so he wouldn't misunderstand me.) bought a nice good quality link that says "9 speed" on the front. Paid for it. Went home. Put bike upside down. Put each half of link through holes in chain. Clicked it together. Pulled it tight. Done.

After all that NONSENSE, it took 15 seconds to fix my bike. I spent more time writing about it than doing it. After 6 weeks.

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:03:54 GMT

great start to the day... after finding out yesterday that my little adventure in welding, (which shorted out a safety circuit or two, no big deal right??) caused $15,000 in repairs to some testing equipment...

...I've just got back an email from a supplier:

Dear Brent,

Nice day to you!

I am a little surprised to receive your below email. Maybe you have sent it wrong! Hehe

And to my more surprise, when I opened the quotation, I found there was some mistakes in the quotation

1. P20 steel’s hardness never comes to 48-52Rc. The common P20 hardness is 28-32Rc., since the hardest P20’s hardness is 33-42Rc. HRc48-52 is for steel H13.

2. the cycles of mold life for P20 is usually for 300,000---500,000, not come to 1,000.000 cycles.

3. After our engineer analyzed your 3D drawing, we found the Mold Size is also designed wrong.

I pointed these mistakes just for your reference! Please don’t mind!

I can see from the quotation, that belongs to low level mold making. If you need our quotation, please kindly let me know. But please kindly be informed, our company focuses on media and high level mold making and plastic injection molding for European and USA market, we could supply molds in lower price but with high quality, good service and timely delivery, as this reason, we have won so many reliable customers in your market. And there we have rich experienced English-speaking Engineer to work with you! Plus my service, I believe our collaboration can satisfy you and your customer.

Now I am attaching some pictures of our top-banking equipments for your reference. Hope it can help you build more confidence on us. That would be better if you can visit our factory! Hehe

Best regards

Christine

ADA Mould Technology Co., Ltd.

Factory Address: No.132 WanAn Road, MaAnShan Industry, ShaJing Town, BaoAn District, ShenZhen 518104, China.

Tel: 0086-755-86182630

Fax: 0086-755-86182592

Email: Christine@ada-mould.com

Web: www.ada-mould.com

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:00:35 GMT

Tonight's climbing was a success - 3 18's, one of them a repeated on-site, but the other two were completed with several falls.

I feel that I'm climbing at my level.

My hands burn with tendonitis - hence the un-verbosity.

I love that feeling of relief you get at the top of a climb.

One one of them, the red one, I had a fair bit of difficulty navigating the bottom section. It involved some fairly strenuous underclinging to traverseout onto the face, then a desperate balancing scramble up the face of the arete. Then some more straightforward face climbing for the middle third. Then I reached the top section - the final gasp it seemed.

It took me five attempts to lunge out backwards with my left foot before I realised that I was NEVER going to reach that hold - but there was no other, so I found that if I reached FORWARDS with my left foot the hold was within reach. Wonderful. Pulled up on the hold, got over the feet and... nuts. The next two holds were great - but I was shit out of footholds. There was one crummy sloping left foot... my hands crimped the pinchers... my arms pulled as hard as they could... my leg shook with the effort of holding my weight... I looked up for the next hold... and it was about a meter away still. Nuts. "FALLING!!"

It took me five more shots on that move to work out that it simply wasn't going to happen. I had that moment where your stubbornness meets your sense of reality. 'This isn't going to happen is it?'

I sat there looking at the moves, knowing that there was no way I was going to cover that last meter. It was just too far.

But I kept going - I found a way to swap my feet, and got my right foot onto the sloper, and strained to stand on it... hey presto!! Success! I stood and made the ledge!

Hurrah.

Oh. Wait. There are no more hold. Just one tiny little left-hand crimp and a big step up to the right to navigate. My hand was nowhere near strong enough for that - and while I had a bounty of three footholds to choose for my left foot, that left foot was stuck firmly on the _wrong_ one. It took ten different attempts to get the sequence right to move my foot to the right hold, and in the end the move up and to the right was not that strenuous. A very satisfying final move.

I was very satisfied with the whole thing - particularly after I'd faced down my acknowledgment that I'd failed. It was a big lesson in overcoming doubt - in using my rationality to overcome the obstacle - thinking through ways, if not to solve the problem, but ways to make it more solvable. These things tend to work themselves out when you get the basics right.

What I love about all this is the chance to struggle with something of my own choosing. It's not a normal thing to do. It's a little paradigm shift that you can turn on and off. I don't love every minute of it, in fact there's usually a moment in each night when I think, quite sincerely, that this is a mistake, that I don't really want to be doing this. But I love that feeling you get at the top of a hard climb. Success.

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:48:44 GMT

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/T17/103106_world_stories.php#0

Three things of note:

The global grain supply has dropped from a long term average of 160 odd day to 57 days. That means that if the sun were blotted out today we'd all starve to death on the 27th of January. By itself that's not such a scary thing - it probably has more to do with lean economics than shortage - however for the past 7 years in a row we've eatn more than we've grown.

Secondly - about a third of the grain on the planet goes to feeding meat. It takes 17 calories of grain to provide a single calorie of meat. We are literally eating ourselves to death here. Want to know why there isn't enough food to go around? Why Africans starve to death while a few miles away there are thousands of hectares of edible grain grown for export into the meat industry? Let's discuss it over a hamburger.

Thirdly - ever heard of alternative fuels? You know - those Other Fuels that will save us from social collapse when everyone realises that there isn't enough oil to go around. No worries. We'll use ethanol. It's carbon neutral (carbon emitted from your exhaust exactly equals carbon soaked from the atmosphere in the first place) and it can be made from corn. Ok. Great. The corn that you'd use to fill an SUV a single time would feed an adult for a year. Now we're going to start driving ourselves to death.

suck a long way away

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:15:37 GMT

Sisters are the absolute worst.

Who else could possibly be that annoying? Why is it that you can always tell the brothers and sisters - there's just no semblance of maintaining politeness with each other any more and yet the communication is just so open and connected.

Mostly I think that I just say that because it's not really true. She's not annoying. Rather, the things that annoy me about her don't really bug me, and the things that do bug me I wouldn't put up with in any other person, but you can't just unsister someone so she gets away with it. Which is why, obviously, I pull the same stunts on her. Which makes it ok.

You know how when you go to the dentist and you know it's not really going to hurt that much - how waiting for it to start hurting is really the worst part?? I mean, no-one likes to have a needle shoved down the back of your throat and teeth ripped out... but it's not exactly like you faint from the pain or that you scream in agony for hours on end. I've stubbed my toe and had it hurt more than having teeth pulled out.

But you don't know that you're going to stub your toe - unless you're really really stoopid.

I'd write "I'm honestly not sure how I'm going to react." but I think that the truth is that I'm not sure WHEN I'm going to react. Some time when I'm alone. Some time when things are hard.

I don't know if I can compare it to last time. A year is such a short span of time these days. There's the internet now. Skype. Blogs. GTalk. We don't live across the hall from each other any more.

I think it's less that I want them to stay here with me than that I want to go there with them. One day I'll walk through those doors, until then I'll keep loving this city and being satisfied with the experiences that I'm having.

Basically what I've been doing is just pretending that she's not really going. That's easiest. I mean, who'd really go to Iceland anyway? Iceland? Come on. That's just... Nobody REALLY goes to Iceland do they?

So we were climbing the other night, and the woman we were climbing with, Marion, asked me at one point "Have you always been this competitive?" and I know that we always have been, but it hadn't really occurred to me that we'll always be. I feel good knowing that I'll always be better at guitar than her, I'm clinging to that one because it's just about my only win. I almost want to keep climbing next year so that when she comes back she'll be light years behind. And you know what? I think that's the way she likes it. I didn't realise that it was that obvious. I didn't realise, until just then, how obvious it is that we're siblings.

I think it would be a strange thing to say that I'll miss her. Such a little word. Such a big thing. Such a long way.

So I suppose that this post is to commemorate that Tania leaves us this Friday, to fuck off and do who knows what in Iceland for a year. I am glad that Lucien is going with her. They're very lucky to be with each other through this. I'm sure they'll have a good time.

I just deserve a post card or two. That's all I'm saying.

I guess we'll see how it pans out for me over the coming months. Christmas will be weird. So many new people, and yet so much fewer of us.

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=melbourne+australia+to+iceland&ie=UTF8