politics

Just a mis­cel­lany of things that I’ve been doing…

I’ve dis­covered Terra Polit­i­cus, an online game where you play a role in a fic­tional Aus­tralian fed­eral par­lia­ment. It’s part run by Daniel, and the attrac­tion is, I guess, that you can do stuff you can’t do in real life. In TP, I’m an annoy­ing journ­al­ist – it’s less com­mit­ment than being an MP and I can pop in and out and pontificate.

I spent an entire day listen­ing to little kids recite Chinese poetry, cour­tesy of Tommy, at the National Chinese Eistedd­fods… and I never want to hear another line again The non-​​native Man­darin ses­sions were far more bear­able, because at least I didn’t try to make sense of what they were say­ing. Funny thing – I ran into Josiah from IT, who happened to be a judge there…

I’ve also been going to people’s gradu­ations… funny see­ing every­one wear those funny hats. More ser­i­ously, it’s good to be there to con­grat­u­late them on com­plet­ing a major milestone.

Other than that, noth­ing much apart from the usual slog of uni work. Oh, and I upgraded my cousin’s laptop to Vista (the OS stuffed up and they didn’t have an XP CD). I evid­ently didn’t do my research before­hand, because a num­ber of their devices just didn’t work after the upgrade – driver prob­lems (but that’s because their hard­ware is a little on the old side). There were howls of protest from my uncle (who’s over­seas) because appar­ently “Vista’s crap” (para­phras­ing) but how would you know if you haven’t tried it? I think I made the right decision, because Vista helps with pro­tect­ing them from a prob­lem they’ve always had: mali­cious software.