Passing Curiosity: Posts tagged life

Resolution for 2007: no more books!

2007-01-04T00:00:00Z

One of my resolutions for 2007 is to beat my book buying habit. Too often I find myself buying a new book, reading the first few chapters, and abandoning it in favour of another new purchase. I have a deck of playing cards which I used a bookmarks and almost all of them are in books, some of which I began reading more than two years ago. I therefore resolve not to buy another book (excepting required textbooks) until I’ve finished those I already own. To start with, I’ve selected twelve shorter unread books:

Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Harry Brighouse, Justice
Alastair Hannay, On The Public
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Jonathan Mills (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power
Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
Chris George, The Book of Digital Photography
Karen Cheng, Designing Type
Gordon Rennie, David Bishop, Simon Jowett, Peter Evans & James Swallow, I Am the Law
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Stupid QANTAS

2005-06-27T00:00:00Z

I’ve been flying with Virgin Blue since they started and if I had any lingering doubts about returning to QANTAS, this past weekend has resolved them. The only problem that flying with Virgin Blue causes is that they only fly into Launceston, a two hour drive from home. To make it easier, I decided to fly QANTAS into Devenport instead. I will not be making the same mistake again.

I caught a taxi to the airport at 12:10 and checked in to find that my flight had been cancelled, but I’d be able to get the next flight after that and still make my connection. This was fine with me, it just meant I’d be spending the hour wait at Canberra instead of Melbourne. We landed in Melbourne at 14:25 (the time my next flight was supposed to start boarding) and I rushed to the departures screen to determine which gate my next flight departed from, only to find that it too had been cancelled.

I eventually found a customer service desk with staff and discovered that, yet again, I’d have to catch a later flight. In an attempt, I suppose, to make up for some of the inconvenience they gave me a voucher to get a meal. Melbourne airport is a particularly boring place, though the numerous and frequent announcements about delayed, rescheduled, redirected, reassigned and cancelled flights did keep me (and the throngs of other affected passengers) somewhat entertained.

At the end of the day, QANTAS got me to Devenport more than three and a half hours later than my itinerary (booked not three days previous) stated, thereby inconveniencing myself and my family and resolving any doubt in my mind as to whether I’d be returning to QANTAS.

At the other end of the spectrum, the QANTAS ground and cabin crew were pleasant and helpful. It’s a pity their logistics aren’t as good as their service.

An Interesting Experience

2005-02-01T00:00:00Z

It struck me today, that this year is going to be an interesting experience. This won’t be the first time I’ve lived in a student residence, but it will be the first time I’ve lived in a residence populated with adults instead of college kids (in Tasmania, where I was last resident in student accommodation, “college” is the last two years of high school, not University). I’m still of two minds about it.

Rooms at B&G are supposed to be quite small, but it is self catered (which is always a plus in my book), on campus and cheap enough for me to afford. All in all, the only thing that might suck is the other residents and the facilities such as the shared toilets, showers and kitchens. On the plus side, if I didn’t live in a Hall or College on campus, I would probably finish the year having met only the other Honours students and the lecturers at the Department of Computer Science.

All in all, I think this year is going to be an interesting experience. Only time will tell.