Things change, things stay the same, life gets better!

How things change...

It's been over a year now since I stopped this blogging experiment. In that time life has become very interesting, and all in a good way!

It's been a year now since I met the person who has since become my partner. After spending all of my 20's as a single man it's been quite an adventure to have someone else around so much. We are now living together and everything is great.

Having said that, relationships turn out to be a lot of work! Life may have been simpler as a single guy, but it wasn't as satisfying.

Anyway, this last year has been a adventure on a very personal level. It has involved some travel, and lots of relationship and family stuff. Now I'm thinking it's time to get this blog back on the road. Let's just see how it goes...

Signing back in - J.

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Turn off the phones!

It's been a really busy week, in all sorts of ways.

I've been snowed under at work this week, and so I'm very glad its now Saturday morning. Still, weeks like this are the fun ones - keeps me from getting bored at work, which is an increasing problem lately.


On the downside, weeks like this at work mean that I get almost nothing done outside of work. Try getting to the bank when you're working 10+ hours a day! It just doesn't happen. I have to say that bank hours are awful, and they need to make more of an effort to be available and open when people can actually get there. Bank business hours of 9am to 4pm are just incredibly inconvenient for anyone with an actual job to do...

Still, I guess they have no motivation to change, do they? They're making huge profits and there's not a whole lot of competition. And it's so inconvenient trying to change banks, moving accounts, loans, credit cards... once they've got you sucked in you're pretty much trapped and just have to put up with the crappy service.

Ok - that rant is over now...

This week also saw the beginning of the election campaign. Finally! The J-Ho finally called it, for November 24th. All that means is we've got six weeks (five, now) of electioneering, dirty politics, awful ads, and generally getting harrassed by our so-called leaders. Up until this week I was actually interested in the election - I want John Howard gone, and was getting really frustrated that he hadn't called it. Now I've lost interest - I just want to get to polling day, cast my vote, and hopefully get to watch John Howard concede defeat. Go Kevin! There are so many reasons to want the Liberals gone - just the fact that they're not really liberal in anyway is enough, though... I'll probably write a bit more about that later.

I'm just hanging on now for the election to be over. I just don't want to watch, becauswe it'd be too painful watching Kevin Rudd self-destruct. I really really really hope that doesn't happen, though. So I'll stick my head in the sand for the next few weeks, and hold my breath. It'll all be over soon, but I'm not sure I can face another three years of Howard and Friends. I'm just scared that he'll find some dirty little rabbit in a hat somewhere and pull off another win. That's a scary thought...

Anyway, back to my relaxing recovery weekend. I'm off for lunch with friends in the city today, then the movies tonight, and tomorrow - well, we'll see. If its a nice day it might be another trip to the beach for me!

Can't wait...

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Recovery is slow, unfortunately

Well, after being all proud of myself for not getting sick while overseas, what happens? That's right - I catch a cold! Dammit!


I spent all weekend in bed with a cold, and ended up taking Monday off work since I was feeling pretty bad. I dragged myself back to work yesterday, though.

It always seems to happen when I travel these days. Once I get off the plane, I get sick. I guess I'm just lucky I didn't get sick on the way over to Vietnam, so it could be worse. But each time I've travelled this year I've ended up catching a cold. Very frustrating, especially since I've got at least two more trips this year involving planes and airports. Ah well...

So I lay around all weekend feeling miserable. Very unexciting - although it did give me a chance to finish two books. The first was "First among Sequels" by Jasper Fforde and the other was the new Terry Pratchett book "Making Money". I was a little bit disappointed with the Fforde book - it started slowly, but it did get better. Of course, the Pratchett was excellent and made me feel much better.

Ah well - here's hoping I can kick the rest of this cold soon. It's supposed to be a hot and sunny weekend. I might wander off to the beach if it looks good!

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The road never ends... updated again!

On a related note - the people that brought you the map of visited countries now also bring you a map showing all the important places you've visited. Apparently I've been to 17 of the top 100 destinations! Cool!

Here's the map.



visited 17 destinations out of a beenda's top 100 destinations.
create your own map

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The road never ends... updated

Since I've now been to another three countries on my latest trip (Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia) I thought it was time to update this map. Here's the new version.

Create your own visited countries map

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Cyberslacking off

Yep - that's me! One of the 20% of workers who are cyberslacking. Gotta love that internet :)

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Self-inspection...?

I don't know why I get sucked into doing these personality tests. I guess it's a good way of killing some time, and I might just learn something. Or maybe it's just a way of working out what I already know...


I came across this one while browsing around Dogfight at Bankstown. Like I said, I was killing time, so went and did the test. And surprise, surprise, it told me I'm introverted. Well, duh! I think I'd already worked that bit out.

In other news, it told me that I'm a very rare type. Apparently, only 1% of the population fit this personality type. I don't know if that's true or not, but after reading through the rest of the description, they might be right. The description they've provided does actually feel quite a bit like me.

One thing they did mention was that INFJ types are better at expressing themselves on paper than in person. I've often thought that about myself - this blog being a case in point. Writing things down like this helps clarify my thoughts, as well as lets me express them - something I definitely have trouble doing in person (all that introversion again!) That actually can be a real problem, because it makes it hard to let people know what I'm thinking and feeling when I'm around them, making that special connection just so much harder than it should be. Anyway... something to work on, maybe.

Here's the full list of character traits for an INFJ personality:

creative, smart, focus on fantasy more than reality, attracted to sad things, fears doing the wrong thing, observer, avoidant, fears drawing attention to self, anxious, cautious, somewhat easily frightened, easily offended, private, easily hurt, socially uncomfortable, emotionally moody, does not like to be looked at, fearful, perfectionist, can sabotage self, can be wounded at the core, values solitude, guarded, does not like crowds, organized, second guesses self, more likely to support marijuana legalization, focuses on peoples hidden motives, prone to crying, not competitive, prone to feelings of loneliness, not spontaneous, prone to sadness, longs for a stabilizing relationship, fears rejection in relationships, frequently worried, can feel victimized, prone to intimidation, lower energy, strict with self

I recognise a bit of that - observer, yes; fears drawing attention to self, yes; cautious, yes; does not like crowds, yes; but what's with the "more likely to support marijuana legalisation"? When did that become a character trait?? Very weird.

Ok - so that's more than enough introspection for the day. I'm still reeling from a tough weekend - I don't need to spend more time thinking about myself right now. Will write more about that later, maybe...

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The road never ends...

This is a map of the countries I've been to over the last 10 years or so. There's a lot of red on this map, but that's because I've been to some large countries even if I haven't spent a whole lot of time in them (3 days in China - does that really count?)

Anyway - go create your own map at the link below.

Create your own visited countries map

And while you're there, they've got 7 rules for travelling!

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New Blog Formatting

The internet is a wonderful thing - there's someone out there who can tell you how to do almost anything these days... I've been looking into ways of breaking up longer posts so that only a summary shows at the top and you can click through to read the rest of the post if you're interested. And of course lots of people have already done that. I've used the code developed at Hackosphere to do this - thanks guys!

And this is just a quick demonstration of how it works. Looks good to me so far.

As I get a chance, I will be looking through the rest of the blog hacks on Hackosphere. There's bound to be lots of other interesting things to do on there.

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