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I. I've had a pretty rough week.

Thursday marked the last day I could spend in my previous unit, with Friday being the end of the 30 days notice period you receive when owners decide they like their place a lot more when they're paying the mortgage themselves. Apparently he got a new job in Sydney or something (moving from Queensland) although the timing of the notice - one day before my lease expired - makes me wonder if it's not a giant ruse just to relist the property or find some way to hike up the rent without having to deal with the "reasonable" clauses introduced at the start of the year.

(The "reasonable" clauses basically mean owners can't ramp up prices unnecessarily and they can't be dicks when it comes to building maintenance and tenants who want to add bits and pieces to the home, which is good. I think the agent said on a rent of 400pw the limit was about 20 or 30 dollars or so - but once the place is no longer occupied, if the property is relisted then he can just reset it to whatever he likes.)

I wish I knew just how much work goes into cleaning a place before I started on the weekend. When the agent came to do the inspections, she gave me and my former housemate a glowing seal of approval. When she visited the property this week, she was still fairly conciliatory - offered me a glowing character reference, as well as a rental reference - but then started fingering every nook and cranny for specks of dust like a sociopath on acid.

Did you know the amount of dust you can discover with your finger? Holy **** balls. I nearly lost my shit. What was worse was the amount of crap that gets wedged in between windows (I'd already started to work on my housemate's bedroom, but I hadn't paid any attention to the rest of the house, although those were a little bit better).

What was more frustrating was her bitching about the oven racks, only for her to produce photographs of what the place looked like before I moved in - which showed how dirty the oven racks were in the first place. Sigh.

I'm still being overly harsh when I think about it now, but that's only in response to how harsh she was. What bugs me was, knowing that it was the first time myself + my former roomie had moved out of home, why she didn't give us a greater indication of what was required when she did the inspections to begin with. She's been in the industry for 12 years (and I earn way, WAY more than she does, which surprised me) so it's not like the thought wouldn't have crossed her mind.

There's a certain nefarious quality to being an agent; I guess it's necessary when you need to just blindly put one person's interests above someone else's, regardless of what came before. I'm still getting a great reference out of it, which is fantastic, but the experience has been remarkably educational.

It's been personally destructive, though. I haven't slept more than three hours since Friday. I'm well and truly buggered.

II.
III. My new housemate is a massive turdburglar when it comes to the internet. The day before the TA retreat - also the day I was served notice on my previous place - we came to an understanding that a) I'm a gamer and b) I need the internet not only for entertainment, but also because it's a source of income for me.

So you can imagine my frustration when I woke up at 6pm today, after the resolution of all the bullshit that came with getting my bond back (which I will receive, in full, although I still have a question to ask over rent that was paid in advance), only to discover that I had 3000 ping.

And the condition of my connection remained that way until 9pm. I tried to load a video of someone comparing recoil in Counter-Strike 1.6 to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It was an eight minute video; I started loading it at 8.30, and by the time I had to leave the house at 9pm there was still three minutes left to play.

I don't really enjoy the prospect of explaining the fact that one of my jobs involves browsing YouTube for the public broadcaster. Who would buy that shit? I wouldn't, although the problem is that's the truth. The slightly more annoying thing is that, based on the conversion that Google gave me, my housemate somehow managed to download and upload over 4gb.

He's a professional photographer; RAW files can be fairly large. A 4.5 megapixel image shot at low RAW quality is usually 10-12mb. That's one file; if you're shooting at larger resolutions, say for production on massive posters and the like, I can imagine the file size would ramp up quite substantially.

So he's going to need to do some uploading. I understand that. Thankfully, he already understands the net is "broken" as it is (4000 downstream and 510 upstream sync speed less than 1km from the exchange = not good). He's accepted what I presented to him, at any rate, although there's always this fear that I have with internet noobs that they're happy to accept something that's broken as long as it "seems" all right for them.

Which is fine, in theory, except it's only fine for you, asshole, when you're chewing up all the goddamn bandwidth, and I'm not paying half the bill to only have internet access some days of the week.

This isn't a conversation I'm looking forward to having, and writing it down here is helping me to process the argument through my head, as well as initial responses, follow-up lines, counter-points and so on. I don't really want to be a stickler for this sort of thing; life shouldn't be a series of battles, and I don't need to be getting into more arguments (bad habit from growing up) but if this kind of shit happens on a regular basis, then I really need to find another house, and fast.

At least the next move will be easier -_-

IV.
Remember Bachelor Girl, the Aussie pop duo from the late 90s?

I was thinking about them the other day when listening to Born to Die, one of Lana Del Rey's singles. Bachelor Girl's first song, Buses and Trains, most people will know, or at least recognise after listening to for a while.

They kind of faded away after that, though. I was sitting in the living room at my parent's place listening to their second single on Video Hits and grabbed the attention of my dad; hey, watch this, that sort of thing.

He wasn't overly impressed; he complained that the lyrics just sounded like "droning", which was fair, because they were. That's what Lana Del Rey sounds like to me: constant, incessant droning, almost like someone trying to emulate the vibrations from an Amy Winehouse or say, Macy Gray, but doesn't have the depth or can't be bothered putting in the effort.

At least until it gets to the second phase of the chorus, where the song ramps up before falling off the cliff; the imagery suits the whole "Born to Die" motif nicely, anyway. I can't remember coming across a song that I hated quite so much, but it's really grown on me of late, even though I have no problem describing the vocals as well, meh.

Admittedly, they're not as bad as the effort put forward in this song, another which has grown on me, embarrassingly:


Look: it's the female version of Peter Garrett. For non-Australians/New Zealanders (so all you Sinagporean/Malay/Korean folk), this is what I'm getting at:


tl;dr: Female dances like she has autism.

V. It was nice to see Bob Carr, the former premier of New South Wales, get appointed to the Federal Cabinet this week, if only so I could turn on the news and hear someone speak in complete sentences that actually sound like they come from someone with a modicum of intelligence - or at the very least, someone who isn't afraid to mask their intelligence under a veil of platitudes and soundbites (like Tony Abbott, who sounds like the spokesperson for Explain It Like I'm Five even though he's a Rhodes Scholar).

Should things go tits up for the government, which is almost certain - although an awful lot can happen in 18 months - Carr will probably be the in line for the "third candidate" that always gets bandied about during leadership squabbles. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the off-chance that I have to cover Q&A at work where I feel like I might actually learn something from a candidate.

He's not the only one of course, although the other front-runner for that role has been manoeuvring around the not-so-insignificant nozzle that comes with losing your party's leadership.

When you get bored of hearing one-liners about boats, refugees, waste and want to actually read something that looks like policy - you know, that thing that taxpayers money is meant to help fund (even politicians that don't get elected receive a slice of our taxes as long as they get over five percent of the vote in their electorate) - you can do a lot worse than reading Malcolm Turnbull's blog.

His most recent post found its way to the front page of The Drum, that corner of the internet reserved on the public broadcaster's site for the various representatives of the political spectrum to go at each other with a two-by-four. It's not that interesting in itself - Terry McCrann is one of the better business journalists, and it's never good to see two centrists having a crack at each other, but it was worth noting because some of Turnbull's blog posts are, quite frankly, pretty damn good.

The first one that comes to mind was a transcript of a speech he gave last year to the Sydney University Law School titled "Reflections on WikiLeaks, Spycatcher and Freedom of the Press". While the whole speech is worth reading, the most interesting thing to I guess, normal people/not-freaks/non-fags or whatever, will be the section on Spycatcher, an autobiography of the former assistant director of the MI5, the counter-intelligence and security service of the United Kingdom.

Turnbull was a barrister back in those days, and he ended up landing the gig to fight suppression orders from the UK when Spycatcher was first published in Australia (which was also the first time the book had been published anywhere).

Britain has a piece of legislation called the Official Secrets Act that basically covers any piece of information relating to national security and gives the government the right to suppress it, as well as any discussion surrounding said information. In this case, that meant the government could issue gag orders to prevent the media from even talking about the publication of the book, but you can read all about that on Wikipedia.

In any case, the case basically boiled down to Britain trying to assert its legal status as the "motherland" over Australia; the High Court turned around and promptly told them to shove it, since it's not in Australia's interests to protect other government's secrets.

It's something that you might see come up again lately, especially after the revelation that the SAS 4 Squadron - basically Australia's super-secret commando unit whose existence isn't officially recognised by the military - have been bopping around Africa snooping for ASIS (Australia's intelligence agency for foreign matters; ASIO handles everything domestically, while the Defence Signals Directorate - DSD - is our equivalent of America's NSA).

Anyway, Turnbull's an interesting man to keep an eye on if only for the fact that he's one of the few people that will happily contribute and participate in a debate. He can look a bit smug at times when he does it, but after more than a decade of Costello, I don't think people really mind all that much.

Plus there's also the factor that the Coalition would win by the greatest landslide recorded by any Western government if he was leader, but that's another scenario that for now has passed its use-by-date.

VI.
Every now and again manga/anime will get mentioned in the chatbox, usually towards the end of the week. That's largely because the translated version of Shonen Jump, the manga mega-mag that has basically every major popular comic in Japan, starts appearing on the net late Wednesday right through to Friday on occasion. (A lot of the big anime shows are broadcast on Tuesday/Wednesday as well, like Naruto or Bleach.)

So every time that happens, it's basically an excuse for me to talk about Liar Game, one of the most underrated comics out there, although it's gotten a larger following than it once had. It basically revolves around Kanzaki Nao, a naive twit who receives a package at her home containing 100 million yen (so probably $2.50 AUD these days ).

Inside the box is a note saying that upon opening the package, Nao has become a participant in the Liar Game, an exercise in swindling, lying, cheating and all manners of the psychological dark arts. At heart it's just a really good cat-and-mouse manga (Death Note comes under the same category) but more attuned to fans of say, The Mole, if you can remember that TV show on Channel 7.


The story also revolves around a genius called Akiyama Shinichi, a former in-mate who was imprisoned for bankrupting a multi-level marketing scheme responsible for driving his mother to suicide. (That's a bit of a spoiler, but not a game-breaking one by any means.)

As the story develops, more characters and protagonists are introduced and the layers get deeper and deeper. If you can stand to read a comic and you enjoy that kind of puzzle-solving/clue baiting style of plot, then Liar Game should keep you going for a good week or so.

VII. I think I might get food poisoning from this Bangkok Chicken I'm eating. I'll let you know how I'm feeling tomorrow.

Rice tastes good, though. Also, apologies for the spiel on politics etc, but when you read as many papers as I do, it kind of comes with the territory.

VIII. Picture of Sienna Miller for good measure.