General

When it comes to beef, I was a “well done” person for a long time. I think this was mainly because “well done” is the easiest way to cook beef because all you have to do is throw it in the pan and take it out when it is smoking / burnt.

Strangely enough though, whenever I go out I always order medium / medium well because well done in restaurants tends to be charcoal.

This past week I’ve been fiddling with cooking my own beef to medium / medium well grade and I’m actually quite impressed with my efforts.

The beef definitely tastes better as well when it has some juices left in it. Not “sitting in a pool of blood” juices, but just enough to keep it moist and chewable.

Also, as I posted in a previous entry, marinating the beef in lemon and pepper before cooking is really nice. It seems like the beef doesn’t need to be marinating in the lemon for a long time, even popping it in and turning it around a few times before putting it in the pan gives it a nice taste.

I’ve had a strange craving for lemon since I got back to Rocky.

I marinated steak with lemon (which was really really nice), had squeezed lemon juice in water numerous times and just ate a lemon straight.

I’ve got no idea why.

Another year over, and a new one just beginning.

Will be a very busy year. I have much planned.

Resolutions to come later, I have a fair few things that I want to narrow down.

I spent christmas at home in Inverell again this year. Melanie went home to her parents in America.

I got to see my nephews in the flesh again, and it was a lot of fun. Little people are very cool and watching their mannerism’s and the way they view the world is enjoyable. I definitely need to make more time to see them this year, they grow up way too fast and they need to know who their Uncle Brett is.

Christmas was good, we had a small gathering at home with the usual food and laughs. I enjoy spending Christmas with family and friends.

My last living grand parent died recently. I was home at the time for xmas and got to see her a few days before.

It’s sad to say, but I don’t feel at all sad. The Grannie I like to remember died many years ago and I feel like I’ve done my mourning. I have fond memories of both her and Gramps which will stay with me forever.

Really makes me stand back and look at how I live my life. I hope I never become a bitter person. Life is too short to hold grudges and it seems like such a strain to be always fighting and bickering with people. I guess I made the decision a while ago that I wouldn’t have any part of it. Some people might take the wrong way, but I really don’t care.

When it comes down to it, it’s far to easy for people to stand back and make judgements without actually being there and knowing what really happens.

Hopefully Grannie has finally found real peace, she will be missed.

We get a lot of tele-marketer calls during the afternoon, usually between 5pm – 7pm. Usually I like to answer them to hear what kind of deals they are doing on whatever the heck it is that they are selling.

Anyway, today the phone rings and it was one of those annoying automated services where as soon as you answer you are put on hold. So I’m on hold for maybe 5 seconds when it switches me through to a really cool sounding guy who informs me that I have been selected to get a heavily discounted price on a stay at their resort.

So he continues on with his memorised sales pitch when I interrupt him with

>”I’m not interested”

He replies with

>”Is is because of the location?”

To which I reply

>”No, it’s because I was put on hold as soon as I answered the phone, which I find very rude”

He went silent for a bit, then told me that it wasn’t his fault. I told him I knew it wasn’t his fault but if he could pass the message on to his supervisor I would be grateful.

He then started talking about how he didn’t know it did that, and how he would have to have a word to his supervisor about it. I agreed then thanked him, he thanked me and we hung up.

So fun talking to tele-marketers!

Why don’t people use turning lanes?

The shopping centre close by here has a separate turning lane for cars to merge into then turn into the shopping centre. It’s meant to allow for traffic to continue to flow even if someone wishes to slow down and enter the shopping centre.

Everyday I see someone who refuses to use the lane, and instead, stay in the ‘through’ lane until the last minute then turn. why?.

I really don’t understand it. There is plenty of room in the turning lane for the car to enter and turn into the shopping centre. People seem to think they are driving semi-trailers and cannot turn that sharp.

I can understand delivery trucks and possibly large four wheel drives having trouble turning that sharp, but not small cars, which seem to the the usual suspects.

So, Why don’t people use the turning lane?

Cooked up a roast for tea tonight. Picked it from IGA earlier in the week. I’d never seen marinated ones at IGA before so thought I’d try it out.

Only realised after I got it home that it had no cooking instructions, so I had to kind of wing it. Turns out I went pretty well. Took about 2.5 hours to cook, and it was awesome.

Didn’t bother with baked veggies this time, it’s too hot here anyway, so I went with just a plain roast beef sandwich.

Also means I’ve got enough leftovers for the rest of the week!

yum!

So I’m slowly getting through my New Scientist magazines and have been meaning to post about interesting stuff. In the June 30 edition, there is a small write-up on the bottom of page 14 titled “You may want to yawn before reading this”.

It suggests that the reason why we yawn is to “boost blood flow and chill the brain”, which effectively increases attentiveness. This result was reached by conducting a study involving 44 college students who watched yawning sequences.

“Students were told to inhale and exhale in one of four ways: strictly orally; strictly nasally; orally while wearing a nose plug; or just breathe normally”.

Fifty percent of those told to breathe through their mouths yawned, while none of the people told to breathe through their nose yawned.

“Blood vessels in the nasal cavity send cool blood to the brain, so breathing through the nose or cooling the forehead cools the brain and eliminates the need to yawn”.

Brains work better when cool, so yawning is basically the bodies way of cooling the brain down.

Very cool.

So I haven’t blogged in a really long time. Been pretty busy working and what not.

Anyway, updates are coming soon… hopefully with photos and stuff.

So yeah, that’s it.

I finally replaced my ageing SonyEricsson mobile phone. Virgin Mobile were having a deal on a Nokia 6300 on a plan pretty much exactly the same to what I was already on so I decided to go ahead and get one. It arrived on Friday but only got to pick it up today.

I’m pretty happy with it so far. I’m glad I went with a Nokia phone, they have a great menu system which is far better then my old phone. It has all the fancy features including camera and stuff, but more importantly, it also supports bluetooth which is what I wanted in a new mobile.

I guess since I have the camera, I’ll try to use it to take pictures of stuff when I’m out and about. Might find something interesting that’s worth snapping.

I brought a [Rubik's Cube](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubiks_cube) the other day when Melanie and I were wandering around Big W. I remember having a Rubik’s Cube as a kid and somehow the stickers got pulled off it and moved around (No doubt the same thing that happens to all Rubik’s Cubes given to young kids). When I was younger I never did get around to actually learning how to solve it so I figured I’d give it a try again.

There are heaps of sites on the internet giving step by step guides to solving it, there is also heaps of actual video tutorials about it. The best one I’ve found though seems to the the [one](http://www.rubiks.com/lvl3/index_lvl3.cfm?lan=eng&lvl1=commun&lvl2=cbegam&lvl3=compet) on the official [Rubik's site](http://www.rubiks.com/). It’s done by a guy who was the first to ever solve a Rubik’s Cude in under 2 mins while blind folded, I figure he knows what he is doing.

So yeah, I haven’t actually used a full tutorial or video yet to solve it. I kind of figured out the first two rows by myself but it gets hard after that.

The only major problem I’ve had so far is if I take longer then a few days to solve it, the “Rubiks Cube fairy” (Melanie) will use her online solving tutorial to solve it because it doesn’t look ‘pretty’ when unsolved. This of course is slowing my progress in learning to solve it but also helping me learn to solve the first parts as I need to keep redoing them.

I remember also having other Rubiks puzzles as a kid including the [clock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Clock) and the [magic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Magic). I also remember a silver colour magic that I think had 4 rings, although I could be wrong.

On a related note, the [Rubiks Revolution](http://www.rubiksrevolution.com/) looks interesting.

I never realised before that “The Ode” that is recited during most ceremonies of remembrance is actually from a much larger poem called ["For The Fallen"](http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/customs/poems.htm#fallen) written by [Laurence Binyon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Binyon), an assistant keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum.

The 4 lines that are commonly recited are as follows:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

The [Australian War Memorial](http://www.awm.gov.au/) website has a heap of interesting information.

Working at the video conferencing section of the uni. It’s a lot of fun and really interesting. I spend the majority of my time working on php scripts to automate a lot of the manual processes that are used. The plan is to greatly reduce the amount of time needed to be spent doing mundane repetitive jobs. The jobs will still get done, but the process for doing them will be shortened.

I can really see a lot of ways to make things easier and I’m excited about being able to jump right in and go for it.

I’ll probably post more about work and stuff later, possibly even adding a new category, but I’ll get to that. (All my categories need a BIG cleanup).

NOTE: This should be back dated, but I’ve got no idea around what dates this happened. Oh well.

Who would have thought that safety deposit boxes would be so illogical. Melanie wanted to get a safety deposit box in order to keep some documents safe. Things like birth certificates and what not. Anyway, we go to the national to see about them because apparently you need to have an account at a bank before they will even offer you the possibility of getting a safety deposit box.

So we go in, and get served by probably the worst possible person to ask about safety deposit boxes. This became apparent when she laughed and told us that she had never done a safety deposit application before and was thinking about getting one for herself.

She fumbled her way through the application form, walking off every so often to ask someone else at the bank what a certain step meant or what to do next. After filling out the necessary forms, she tells us we can either have a safety deposit slip or a box. If we chose a box we would have to provide the actual box but for the slip the bank would provide it.

We chose slip, cause all Melanie had to put in it was some pieces of paper. The lady walks off and comes back with a slip designed to hold a folded up piece of paper. We ask if we could get a flat A4 / letter size slip and got told that they don’t have them. The folded paper size slip is the ‘standard’ size.

Is it just me or does this strike anyone else as odd? Why would people want a safety deposit slip for some pieces of paper and then want to fold the pieces of paper. Wouldn’t it seem logical that the paper they want to put away in a safety deposit box is likely something they don’t actually want bend / folded?

In the end we told the lady not to worry about it as we didn’t want to have to fold any pieces of paper we wanted to put away. We left the bank and came home where I rang some other banks and found out it was the same at all of them.

Wouldn’t an A4 size safety deposit slip make a heck of a lot more sense?

Well christmas has been and gone. Was a good one though. no doubt about it. A few close family members came around and had lunch at Mum and Dad’s place. It was actually raining, which was weird for this time of year in Australia, but it made the baked dinner go down even better.

Was Harrys first christmas and will definitely be one of the more memorable ones considering there were no dramas.

Overall a pretty casual christmas, really awesome.

Posting from my Wii. Internet channel was released today and it works pretty well.
Typing with the Wiimote is pretty slow though

I’m pleasantly surprised with the [Bank of America](http://www.bankofamerica.com/) telephone customer support. I’ve had a Bank of America account since being over in the US for my internship with [Apple](http://www.apple.com/). When I left, I decided to leave the account open in order for any last pay to go in and also for my US tax return to go in.

Recently, I tried accessing internet banking and found that my password was not accepted. I tried resetting it but kept getting ‘Unable to access your accounts at this time’ messages. In the end I bit the bullet and called up the internet banking support line.

I got a lady on the other end who was the most pleasant and helpful telephone based support person I have ever had. She was extremely helpful and friendly and assisted me in a happy manner. It actually sounded like she enjoyed her job! After verifying my details, she went ahead and found out that internet banking on my account had been disabled for some reason. She soon re-enabled it and everything was working again. I got off the phone feeling better than when I called, simply because of the way she interacted on the phone.

Jump ahead to today and I find that once again my internet banking accounts ‘cannot be accessed’. I have a feeling this time that I entered the username or password incorrectly but could not verify as I left all that information in Rockhampton. Since I also wanted to find out about closing the account, I decided to ring the support line again.

This time a guy answered and I was actually surprised to hear that he was even more helpful and friendly than the previous lady. He went out of his way to be extremely helpful and make things as easy as possible for me. When he had to put me on hold for a few mins, he would come back online every so often saying that he was still looking into it and wouldn’t be long. No recorded messages, no annoying ‘on hold’ music. He sorted everything out and answered all my questions. He even mentioned that if I was charged any fees during the transfer of my funds to simply mention his name and the fees would be waived.

It kind of says something about my experiences with telephone support in general when I get off calls like this feeling as though they are special and rare. Shouldn’t this type of service be standard for any business that offers support services?

I can’t remember any other telephone support calls I’ve had that even come close to the two I’ve received when calling Bank of America.

I’m back home again. Drove down earlier in the week and after staying a night at Dalby and taking care of some ‘tech support’ issues I was home around lunch time on Wednesday.

Things are coming together for xmas. Already been shopping with Mum to pick up some things.

My sisters come back sometime next week, Friday I think, so that should be good.

Christmas should be a lot of fun this year.

Been keeping busy since Melanie went back to America. Had to take care of some last minute xmas shopping which, at this time of year, is an absolute nightmare. Needless to say, I got it done as fast and painlessly as possible.

Looks like I’ll be heading back home early this week. At this stage I’m planning on heading off on Tuesday. Will be only going as far as Dalby on the first day to stop over and do some quick tech support. So I’ll probably be on the road to home on Wednesday morning. Dalby is only around 4 hours from home, so it will be a good short drive.

Haven’t read much lately, or worked on the latest coding ‘project’. I’m hoping to do some more work on it at home.

So yeah, pretty short update really. I’ve got a concise list of things to get done tomorrow which should be pretty easy to do, then I guess I will get into packing my clothes and stuff. I hate packing…