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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 31 August 2003 (Day View)

Wed 27 Aug | Thu 28 Aug | Fri 29 Aug | Sat 30 Aug |   Sun 31 Aug   Mon 1 Sep | Tue 2 Sep | Wed 3 Sep | Thu 4 Sep |

31.08.2003 – Sunday 31 August

• After my compulsory sleep-in, I showered and ran for the train – with about three minutes to get there. Collapsing onto the train, I relaxed until South Brisbane Station, where I walked down to the ferry terminal and waited, and waited... and waited. I run a tight schedule, which sounds better than saying I’m always unorganised and running late, so I would only have had ten minutes to jog from the West End ferry terminal to the ABC Music Centre, and the CityCat was over quarter of an hour late. I ran from the ferry terminal to the ABC Music Centre, but I was still about five minutes late and the doors were locked. I briefly contemplated firebombing the building, but realised I didn’t have a lighter or any petrol, so caught another CityCat to uni and a bus from there to Indooroopilly and watched a movie instead. I have learnt a lesson from all this – don’t go outside, don’t leave home, and don’t even bother with schedules when there’s any sort of public event on – Brisbane can’t handle them.

Indooroopilly

• I ate an overpriced but nice plate of nachos and spent $2.50 on a quarter of an hour of internet access at a net café near the cinemas at Indooroopilly, unfortunately having to leave some of my nachos as “Finding Nemo” was beginning and I still had to purchase my frozen coke. It mustn’t have been out for too long, as it was still showing in their large cinema. It is good; I really enjoyed it and do recommend it, although many people won’t like an animated Disney movie. After that, I watched “The Rage in Placid Lake”, an Australian movie which isn’t too bad either. This got me to thinking – here in Australia we have a mix of mainly American and Australian films, with a few other foreign films, although those are rare and usually limited to some of the smaller, more artistic cinemas. I wonder if, in America, they have smaller American films that play across America but no one outside America sees – I guess they would. Then I got to wondering, because almost invariably, the local Australian movies are better than the larger American ones, do they have better local movies that we don’t get to see, or do they all put up with the same crap that they export? What worries me is that enough people must presumably enjoy all the crud, as it is popular. On this same topic, Khan’s Kitchen – the Pakistani food place that served nice, cheap food is now gone and is going to be replaced with a Subway. I can’t believe it, or rather, I do sadly believe it. Indooroopilly eatery now consists of a donut place, a similar bakery place, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Hungry Jacks... In other words, there’s no longer any food sold at the Indooroopilly eatery, yet I’m assuming market demand is responsible for this. It worries me, but then again, Australia now has one of the highest incidences of obesity in the world – we’ve just recently overtaken the US, and we’re rapidly climbing the ladder in terms of numbers of unhealthy people. It is sad, but if people are going to be so stupid, I guess it is what they deserve.

Commas

• As part of our “Information Technology Project”, we’re being taught elementary English as applied to the IT world for four weeks. No one seems very happy about it, there’s a lot of complaining about being taught primary school English at a university where senior level English is a required entry prerequisite. However, be that as it may, we are being taught and we will be assessed on what we’ve learnt, and apparently, in the IT world, we need to write in short, concise sentences – avoiding all ambiguity and any clichés, whilst still maintaining an easily readable, grammatically correct presentation style; stringing thoughts together into long sentences is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing, and using too many commas, like I tend to do, is sure to be frowned upon – especially when it ends up in overlong, semi-ambiguous, cliché-ridden sentences which are hard to quickly, easily and efficiently browse, allowing our superiors to, without difficulty, extract whatever information they’re looking for. I might try to write short sentences for a few days. Nasty little short sentences with no more than one comma and two “ands” per sentence. What Microsoft Word and I term “fragments”. I don’t like them, but I hope that our English lecturer will. I find my thoughts are fragmented and I instinctively insert a comma when I come to a pause, but it isn’t a new topic. I use commas to string together different but related ideas as I go along. Using periods seems to break up the logical flow I’m trying to impart to my readers. Then again, it isn’t very logical so it doesn’t matter too much. I think I actually like writing. My writing may be a jumble of usually very boring things, but when I’m in the mood, I do quite enjoy it. I don’t believe there’s any good way of writing that previous sentence using only one comma without totally changing it. I’m just rambling on here, and not using commas sucks, so I should finish off.

Comment by AnonymousFool – Monday 1 September 2003, 4:07 PM

  I do believe you mean "cliché" as opposed to "clique". "Clique" is defined as: A small exclusive group of friends or associates; whereas "cliché" is defined as:A trite or overused expression or idea. Enjoy. ;)

Comment by Ned – Monday 1 September 2003, 7:15 PM

  Yes, you could be right. There’s a very good chance I did mean “cliché” rather than “clique”. I shall blame Word until I think of a better excuse or gather the courage to admit I made a mistake (which is highly doubtful, of course). I have replaced all instances of “clique” with “cliché”, so there’s probably somewhere with “cliché” that should be “clique” now, although seeing as I’ve never heard of “clique” before, there probably isn’t.

Comment by Clint Felmingham – Monday 1 September 2003, 8:46 PM

  Blatant attempt to increase google pagerank. I have no shame ;p.

Comment by Ned – Tuesday 2 September 2003, 2:19 AM

  That’s shameful :-)

Comment by anon – Saturday 23 June 2007, 1:59 PM

  It could be the fact that alot of food at cfs owned shopping centres contains ghb. the customers could be addicted to this and not the food!