Man they actually went out and made a full length movie featuring our favourite crocodile hunter Steve teh man Erwin ! While I think he is pretty good in his tele series which goes on air every wednesday if i am not mistaken over my local tele channel I really doubt I could sit through his "geeeooorgeeouss" for 1 and 1/2 hours. Thanks but not thanks ...
We are still in the midst of trying to rent out our house. Sigh ! It's really hard. Our house is like somewhere in between the needs of the "kwai lou"s and the locals so that makes it even harder. This KL ( kwai lou ) sent me his requirements using email and I really had a good hard laugh over his requirements. Below is the exact excerpt from that email ... go on knock yourself out ... =)
The house seems to be intended for unfurnished rental, and we are
looking
for something not so 'bare'. Nevertheless, our list of upgrades that
would
need to be carried out is as follows:
1) Curtains for all windows (we choose pattern/colour).
2) Telephone line activation, with one jack downstairs and one
upstairs.
3) Television in living room (minimum 27" screen).
4) Astro satellite dish/receiver - one jack in living room and one
jack
upstairs in guest bedroom. We will pay the monthly rental.
5) Clothes washing machine and tumble dryer.
6) Automatic dishwasher near kitchen sink.
7) Hot water in all showers.
8) Landscaping in lawn areas (currently very bare/dull). This will be
a
significant cost to put right.
9) Aircons in all areas.
10) Refrigerator/freezer (large size).
11) Kitchen table and chairs (minimum 6).
12) Large desk in one guest bedroom upstairs.
13) Double bed in other guest bedroom.
14) Quality mattress in master bedroom.
15) Complete living room suite (comfortable sofa, chairs, coffee
table,
end tables, entertainment centre or cabinet to hold TV/stereo/VCD
etc.).
16) Combination convection/microwave oven.
I know this is a lot. We only have a very limited amount of
furniture/accessories with us now so without the addition of the above
items the house will be just too bare for us. We are currently staying
in
a condominium down the street so there is no rush to move in. Normally
we
would expect an increase in rent for such a large investment on only a
12
month lease, but as you are probably aware the rental market is very
competitive right now. Please review this request and let us know what
the
rental rate would be for a minimum 12 month lease. We would appreciate
a
response within 1 week if possible.
I am like thinking ... should I reply ... Dear potential house renter, I think you might have forgotten to include the items below which I feel should be included to make to make you stay in my house even more comfortable :
Jaccuzzi
A Bar
Home Theatre Entertainment system
A leased line
Yeah !! We will keep on dreaming ... you and me boyo !!
Dumb ARsE was talking about how they were going to have a meeting and this time he wanted again to go to bukit tinggi resort for the meeting with the same enthusiasm you would see on the face of a 3 year old when you tell him you are gonna let him loose in a supermarket candy with rm 50 in his pocket. He wasn't so much interested in what was going to be discussed during the meeting or how the meeting is going to effect our department or what kind of impact the meeting will have on his future. The only important thing to him was what kind of good time the trip will promise him. How the fuck did these people get so cheap ? Hey ! don't you guys have pride in what you do or want some kind of self improvement ??!!?? Discussing about the next location for meals seems to be the most mentally situmulating conversation that goes around here. I really hate bitching and I know I am begginning to sound like some 85 year old granpa who sits by himself and everybody avoids because I bitch at everything but it's something that really boggles my mind. When you try to encourage these people to rise above their own situations, to be a better or higher version of themselves now ... they will give you the tired old answer ... "What for ? Why want to learn something new ? I am just going to have more to do " Hello ! It's more than that. It's looking at yourself in the mirror everyday knowing that you are someone better than yesterday ... striving to improve .... in a word .. living.
I am like living in a bad episode of "Invasion of the body snatches" where all the people around me have been replaced by aliens. In the show once one was "body invaded" you see this like expressionless, spiritless look in their eyes and they walk around like zombies following orders from the hive. It's not very much different here. What ever happened to the passion in these people ? The goal of reaching a higher self ? Have they given up on themselves ? If day after day we get closer to going back to our maker then shouldn't we live each day like our last ? Try to learn and grasp as much knowledge as we can learn ?? Making sure each day when you go to bed you can answer the "Have I improved myself compared to yesterday ?" question satisfactorily before we go to bed ?
Just the other day I saw a frog in one of the pails I have outside my house used for gathering water. Our frogger friend was just lazying in the bucket havin' a nice easy time ... ( well I don't know ... maybe he was panicking but he sure looked like he was lepakking to me ) not realising that in a few more days he would just be a lifeless hump of flesh in that pail of water if he did not struggle to find a way out. Life is just like that. It gives us a false impression that we have got a lot of time left, that we will still have the energy or fire burning in us tomorrow... well wake up from that slumber frogger and froggettes .. wake up before it's too late !! The fact is you won't always be this energetic. You won't always be young. You have just got a short amount of time to make a difference Freaking work that project u have got on your mind but was too scared to take up till you fall flat on your face or till that project breaks which ever comes first ! Attack it with all the energy and passion you have and even if you most definitely will have made a difference. Youth is something too precious to let go !
I think that is the general feeling of the people in my housing area as well as others similar to it. We have absolutely no good way to get rid of our rubbish. So, most of the time teh bulk of our rubbish ( tree prunings, grass cuttings and just now even a few annual report from share companies ) are thrown on this empty piece of land in front of my house.In my heart in seriously believe that the people living in my area are not polluters and they would get rid of their rubbish the right way if they really had such an option rather than carelessly dumping all the the rubbish on that empty piece of land. We really have no other alternative but to throw it there. Lets see ... the local municpal council prohibits open burning, and refuses to throw any rubbish that they deem too big unless you pay them so what does that leave us. In this vein, I think most often that not it's not that people don't want to do the right thing, it's because doing the right thing often requires an investment of time, money or energy.
In our case, the right thing to do would be to hire a lorry to carry away the "bigger" chunks of rubbish that our local municipal council refuses to cater for. But the question here is, how many people in these trying times has that kind of resources ? The only person I have seen doing this right thing are our neighbours and they own a rock quarry ! I have a coined a term with my mom regarding our situation. "We don't have the resources to be righteous" I tell her. Discussing about this, I always get reminded of the time when one of my school mate's wife showed me this copy of a booklet printed by the consumer's accociation of Malaysia about those products which are used everyday that causes cancer. Everything from shaving cream to soap according to that booklet are cancer causing agents. A big portion of the stuff inside that booklet I use everyday in my house. "It helps to warn people of using these products so that they can be wiser and choose other alternative brands" she said enthusiastically. I found that the only thought running through my head at that moment was "Who can really afford the alternative". The "alternative" here usually means the same products which do the same thing but cost 3-4 times more because they don't cause cancer. It's fine for you average excutive earning 4-5 figure salaries every month to want to indulge in these products to pamper themselves but what of those earning less ? What about that general worker in my office ? What about her ? What happens to these people ? So, what you are ultimately trying to say is ... only the rich will be saved ? Only the rich can do the right thing ? Looking at what is going on around me now I guess that it's true ...
Hmmm wonder if creating a lot of packages covers every one of the apps in freshmeat should be my focus or trying to cover all the apps that are deemed "useful" or "popular" should be the focus ...Every app in my opinion has it's place and merits the creation of a spell ... I mean if it did not address some sort of pan of the programmer it would not have been created in the first place. The problem with these "indies" application is that although some of them might be really good but they might eventually be not in existance anymore as the authors run out of the means to support themselves and are forced to stop development on their project.. The applications that do not survive this evoluationary process will also render the spells reffering to it null and void. Managing spells is definitely not easy as you have to monitor them to see when new versions are coming out, some applications like have erratic bursts in their release and even popular sites like freshmeat can't be totally trusted ( Freshmeat depends on it's author to update the pages ). A friend and I are working on to create an application to help a package manager to check on updated packages... while managing my own stable of spells I begin to see what a tremendous effort pages like Distrowatch are. Distro not mines the data for nearly 200 linux distributions !! It's not surprising that the authors were reluctant to part with the tools that they use to mine the data with as I am pretty sure they must be customized by the author to fit their needs and not that easy to make ..While tools like curl and wget do fit some needs of this requirement they still lack in others. Some are pretty promising such as perl-webget but really a bitch to customize and it's like written in perl ... ugh !! The need is to create an application that will query addresses to find the list of packages and get the latest version comparing with the one that is on the system then write the new version on the text file containing the version of the spell ....
Let see what some one on the channel thinks ....
dufflebunk : Normaly they have a freshmeat entry. Just subscribe there to get updates.
platypus: dufflebunk: what about stuff that are not on freshie ?
platypus: dufflebunk: do you have any tools to automatically update spells when their annoucements come out in freshie ?
* Xenith pokes hgg
dufflebunk: I don't think so. There are tolls around that check for updates though.
platypus: dufflebunk: tolls ?
platypus: dufflebunk: what are tolls ?
dufflebunk: tolls? I have no idea... that should have been tools
