Blag

Hmmm. Been a while since I posted. Been an even longer time since I posted something personal, not an acid laced article on whatever got my goat at the time.

*Yawn* Exams are over, and now I have buttloads of free time until uni starts next year in February/March/whenever it is.

Things to do:

• Finish off that never ending amplifier project
• Finish ripping the 1m high stack of CDs to iTunes
• Repairing, tagging and sorting 40GB of MP3s
• Finally get a much delayed driver’s license -.-
• And also get a boat, gun and heavy machinery license, sometime in the next 2-3 years
• Proper part time job, not yet another under the table, cash-in-hand contract job
• Work on small business
• Rebuild the cupboards and closets
• Renovate the garage

Speaking of garage renovations, gotta start that today. To do list:

1. Set rodent and cockroach baits
2. Fumigate the garage with 1-3 insect control bombs
3. Throw out half the content of the garage
4. Bag/box remaining junk
5. Wearing a respirator, goggles and gloves, sweep out the garage
6. Vacuum up any remaining dust or dirt
7. Spray all surfaces with mould destroyer and clean with sugar soap
8. Re-bomb the garage
9. Air out for 2-3 days
10. Rip out old rotting shelves, and remove collapsed cupboard
11. Trip to Bunnings to buy a new lock, sealant and timber to patch the holes up
12. Rewire the garage with new mains cable, fusebox, fluoro batten, powerpoints and switches.
13. DONE!

And that will take the best part of 2-4 weeks, given the derelict state the garage is currently in. The building framework is structurally sound – the previous owner of our house (20 years ago) just happened to be an incompetent, lazy, un-intelligent handyman with about the same amount of common sense as a lump of dog shit, who consequently decided that he’d try his hand at internal furnishing and managed to make an arse of it.

Anyone else got their holidays planned out? The only other things I have planned is several 18ths/21s, a movie or two and a reunion.

Disclaimer: In this current climate of media hype, political correctness, and hysteria on the part of bored housewives with nothing better to do than whinge and annoy the f*** out of everyone, I shall hereby state that the title of this blag post makes reference to no particular religious god and if the reader feels compelled to, he/she can drink cyanide and die.

But myes, quite a good stash so far.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure

as they say

Found a set of 3-way Marantz speakers lying by the side of the road – fine specimens, albeit with a thin coating of grime and sawdust, but restorable otherwise. Ok, so they weighed about 16KG each, it was 38*C and I had to make 2 return trips over a hill to carry them back to my house (perhaps I worked off the fat gained from guzzling the can of coke afterwards?)

Brief listing of acquired good over the past 2-3 eyars -

• 12 sets of speakers
• 300 nails (strip mounted, for nail gun)
• But-load of radiata pine
• 40m of water pipe
• Storage cupboard
• 10m PVC conduit
• Hi-Fi
• Vinyl Turntable
• Boomboxes
• Circuit breakers
• Shelving bracket
• Sheet metal

Speaking of cheap shit, our neighbour’s couch has visited every median strip on the street to date. Scavengers keep taking it, finding out it’s a useless piece of crap, and forget which strip they picked it up from so they dump it on anyone’s doorstep.

Funnily enough, some poor person saw my old school bags lying there and thought that they could recycle/re-use them. Poor person is now the owner of 5 fungal colonies, and about 4KG of rotting biological matter.

+1 Symantec

Quite a few months ago, I got a free copy of Norton Internet Security 2009 complimentary of Symantec for beta testin NIS09 and Norton Safe Web Beta when it was released. Now that my 2008 license is running out, I decided to use the provided product key, and after a chat with an analyst, it turns out I got a 3-PC 1 year license worth ~ $98 free. I thought it would have been a 90 day license, or 1 computer only, but who am I to complain? I like free goods… *big grin*

Speaking of which, time for some shameless plugging, just because I feel obliged to. I must confess though, I completely forgot about my free product key and spent quite a while shopping around for the cheapest places. And here’s what I found -

You can get Norton Internet Security or Norton 360 v2.0 dirt cheap by:

• $79 for NIS09 or $96 for N360v2 at Big W, which is $20 below the average competitor store’s retail price (valid till 14 Jan 09)
• Buy any retail pack of 2PC + SNR, 3PC or 5PC license of NIS09 or N360v2 and get $20, $30 or $40 cash back (depending on product)
• Buy online at the Symantec store and get an instant discount of ~$10 on some products
• Buy from any online computer stores, which normally sell Symantec products way below the RRP (sorry, no cash back though )

Haha, am I starting to sound like a salesman yet?

Nathan Rees (Premier of NSW) has finally given in and reinstated the student free travel scheme. About bloody time too! The government can afford $1000+ payouts to people for financial help during the economic crisis, yet it couldn’t afford the $90 per student to subsidise a years worth of travel without some persuasion from the public.