Having whined about phone companies yesterday, I thought I'd whine about mortgage companies today. I am quite unhappy with my mortgage provider, Ratebusters. Since we took out the loan, they've increased our interest rate in excess of reserve bank increases, two or three more times than the major banks did the same. As a result, our interest rate ( Read more... )

Finally giving up on Vodafone's dreadful network, I am attempting to switch back to Telstra. On Saturday morning, I went into a Telstra shop and explained that I wanted to switch, transfer my Vodafone number, and get Visual Voicemail activated (even knowing that Telstra charge an extra $5/month for that). After explaining my data needs, I was ( Read more... )

Has everyone here heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? It's a site to which companies can post small jobs that require human intelligence, but not much of it, for very small amounts of money. A 500 word essay for a content farm might fetch USD 5, while identifying a picture, transcribing a short piece of audio, or drawing a box around an object in a ( Read more... )

homonculus and I are off to Europe for three weeks tomorrow. It's very exciting. I really need the break, too (but worry that overseas holidays, while enourmously fun, are rarely much of break in terms of relaxation).

http://www.tampabay.com/features/can-a-complete-novice-become-a-golf-pro-with-10000-hours-of-practice/1159357

Here's a rumination on happiness that I've been meaning to post for a while ( Read more... )

03/24/10 PHD comic: 'Marriage v. The Ph.D.'

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Just saw the film, "An Education". I could be wrong, but I think the moral was supposed to be: if you don't know Latin and can't see why you'd want to pepper your English conversation with French for no reason, you'll never do anything worthwhile.

Garrett has always been "Minister for the bits of the environment that no-one cares about". Suddenly, people care about the insulation scheme. So of course, it's no longer part of his portfolio. It's only fitting.

Have arrived safely back in Canberra. With the pneumonia, I keep wavering between thinking "poor little me, I'm sick" (which is true), and thinking that if I had got this with a cold instead of by itself, I would have just thought it was part of the cold and probably wouldn't have seen a doctor (which is also true). Have learnt a) to take coughs ( Read more... )