A few loosely-strung-together obser­va­tions about today:

• I need to build a caffiene tol­er­ance. Last night became 3am before I realised (but I did get lots done, so it’s not all bad)
• O-week-day sucked. Hardly any cor­po­rate types hand­ing out free crap this year. Not that I’m one of those acquis­i­tive types, oh no. :|
• Went to a UNSW Eng­lish lec­ture — just for kicks — and stuck my hand up to answer a ques­tion — again, just for kicks. It’s one thing to ran­domly rock up to lec­tures at another uni, and another thing alto­gether to actively par­take in them. Good times. It’s kinda like the agony that was ENGL1005 only with tacit acknowl­edge­ment that it is, in fact, well within the realm of lin­guis­tics. It was a cross-listed english/lingustics course-coded course, and they’re focus­ing on sys­temic func­tional lin­guis­tics instead of pure func­tional gram­mar — the NCELTR/Butt UFG text was sit­ting on the lecturer’s desk, but she didn’t men­tion it.
  Which is, in my mind, prob­a­bly more sen­si­ble. The lec­turer clearly delin­eated that there are, in fact, two dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines at work in that course which can serve to com­ple­ment each other, unlike in ENGL1005 at USyd where every­thing just got heaped into a mass grave and stu­dents were left to sort out the bones. The UNSW course is more like a well organ­ised, air-conditioned morgue. (I jest, though feel that more than any other sub­ject thus far, 1005 nearly killed me).
• UNSW have a nice relaxed library lawn at lunch. It’s like the front of the quad only more inti­mate & shady & with added live music… though that might just be them suck­ing in first-years in the open­ing weeks.
• I was not the only UNSW imposter today, which was at once strange, amus­ing, and scary.
• I am not a good song­writer and revel in shar­ing that gen­eral inep­ti­tude in an amus­ing way. It is fun hav­ing some­one around who can play the gui­tar well, even when they sing worse than you do.
• Word­Press 2.1’s front-page-as-page capa­bil­i­ties are abysmally over-rated. Or, at least, I abysmally over-rated them when the fea­ture was announced. There’s a rea­son it was a point-release addi­tion, methinks. I’m using a mix­ture of post-chronology and the usual hack­ery that I tend to get by with. I’m renounc­ing Semiologic’s front-page-plugin because it’s eas­ier to just hack it up in the tem­plates nicely. I get by.
• I am scared of designers.
• I feel increas­ingly like a designer as the days go by.
• Every­one is get­ting busi­ness cards printed at a thou­sand dif­fer­ent print shops. I am begin­ning to think the only thing that dif­fer­en­ti­ates them is turn­around time. Mine takes ten work­ing days. I need them in seven. *fin­gers crossed*
• I dis­like hav­ing to wait on peo­ple for things with loom­ing deadlines.
• I am look­ing for an excuse to com­plain about a cer­tain website’s host­ing so I can cam­paign to get it moved some­where I trust (and not in a conflict-of-interest type way, for I wouldn’t touch run­ning host­ing for it with a barge pole)/with a bet­ter track record of reliability
• I signed up for a Voice over IP ser­vice with DID with­out really know­ing why. Some­thing to do with redi­rec­tion and giv­ing a mobile a land­line num­ber with­out incur­ring ridicu­lous bills in these dark post-Orange days. And no, 3 have noth­ing to offer me.
• A cer­tain Pharaoh got very seri­ously pwned in the exo­dus of the Jew­ish nation from Egypt in the Bible. Every­one (yes, includ­ing the other peo­ple of the Egypt­ian nation) saw it com­ing, includ­ing him­self: “Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the LORD your God, and against you. Now there­fore, for­give my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the LORD your God only to remove this death from me.” So he [Moses] went out from Pharaoh and pleaded with the LORD.” — he pleads hastily, and begs to be for­given only this one time. I think this is like peo­ple pray­ing in extreme cir­cum­stances today — they don’t nec­es­sar­ily know any­thing about God, and just turn to him as a very last resort. But as soon as he’s for­given (in this case, he wanted to be for­given because locusts had just eaten every sin­gle plant in the entire coun­try, and “the land was dark­ened” there were so many of them) his heart is hard­ened and he refuses to release the peo­ple of Israel from slavery.
• I am feel­ing par­tic­u­larly un-on-top-of-things at the minute, and antic­i­pate this may get worse once uni starts up again. I’ve been work­ing stu­pidly lots this week to try and get in front but it’s like try­ing to climb out of quick­sand (hint: the best trick is not to move). Well, maybe not mov­ing would be a bad thing, but even so. I’m only doing 3 sub­jects and hop­ing that’ll be ben­e­fi­cial in bal­anc­ing var­i­ous commitments.
• I am too excited about free­lance things. They are the sub­sis­tence farm­ing of web & cre­ative employ­ment. And pour­ing every­thing into a job is the sub­sis­tence farm­ing of life… it’s never going to be quite enough. I am try­ing hard not to fall into that trap but can’t resist it by my will alone.
• My sleep­ing pat­terns need to be beaten back into sub­mis­sion. Last year I was more reg­u­lar in hol­i­days than any time uni was on, but this year I’ve been work­ing from home so that means I’m free to work caffiene-powered 13-hour days if the need should arise. Less of this would be more healthy.
• As would join­ing uni gym and eat­ing less pizza. I really have no idea where to start, though.
• I am going to bed 3 hours later than I had planned to.

*files under “everything”*