Archive for September 10th, 2005

City Ads (News) Editorial

You may recall that a few weeks ago I gave City News the title of “Worst Newspaper In The Country” and that part of my criticism related to their anonymous editorial “by some anonymous person calling themselves “The Whip”, who…provides a fairly generic semi-relevant rubbishing of the news.”

I picked up City News when it arrived today and had a flick through, and was suprised to find an editorial by somebody with a name, Catherine Lumby to be precise. I decided that it would be worthwhile having a read of this new editorial, and was sadly disappointed.

I was expecting something with some relevance to the current world situation, instead I found myself enduring her writing an essay about her view of the definition of sexual harrassment, and then found that the entire thing had just been lifted from Crikey.com.au.

It reminded me to some extent of those columns you tend to see near the editorial and letters to the editor in a real newspaper, except that those tend to have some relevance to the news in the paper. At least those aren’t lifted from a website.

Perhaps City News would be better off calling it a “column” rather than an “editorial” as the term “editorial” in a newspaper indicates that the column is written by one of the editors and is related to the news. A “column” on the other hand is an opinion peice that doesn’t necessarily relate to anything, but usually relates to the news.

I suppose City News could just call it “Crikey Corner”.

If you want to read Ms. Lumby’s ramblings, it is currently available on the City News website and probably more permanantly on crikey.com.au.

Samuel

September 10th, 2005 at 10:35pm

The Week In Review

I’ll admit it, things have been a bit slow here over the last week or so, which is entirely my fault and due to my lack of remembering to write anything.

I’m going to rectify that now by writing another one of my lengthy stories.

Let’s start with Monday, where I had one of my trademark alarm clock accidents, which saw me wake up at around midday. This could be considered to be a bad thing as I missed a couple classes, but I have reached the point where I have completed enough classes to receive a year 12 certificate and it therefore doesn’t really matter if I am absent to the extent that I don’t receive a grade for current classes. It would be nice to get a grade, but it isn’t overly important in the scheme of things.

Waking up around midday wasn’t exactly a bad thing though, as it allowed me to hear an ad on the radio while preparing my breakfast/lunch. This wasn’t just any ad, it was an ad for a current job vacancy at 2CC (They are looking for a breakfast panel operator) and it got me thinking about applying. My brain wasn’t quite in gear at the time, and I forgot that I had done enough to gain a year 12 certificate, and as such I decided that I wouldn’t be able to apply for the 2CC job. As time went on, I continued thinking about it, and realised that I had done enough to gain a year 12 certificate, and then decided that I should consider applying, and make appropriate enquiries at my college to ensure that I was able to get a year 12 certificate. These enquiries showed that a minor error had been made with some of my classes, and I would need to have those errors rectified, which I have arranged to have done.

By 3PM I was certain that I wanted to apply for the 2CC job, and sent an email. This email was a bit of a rambling mess, but I sent it anyway.

Tuesday rolled around, and on this occasion I was awake at the correct time. Tuesday was to be the day for a meeting between myself (in my Trainee IT Administrator role with the college), one of my co-workers, and two bosses over an incident that had occured the previous Thursday (and mentioned here on friday). The first thing I did on Tuesday after arriving at the college was to get myself a cup of coffee, as I suspected some political deviance would be handy during the meeting, and a good amount of coffee in the bloodstream would enable that to occur more freely. I enjoyed my coffee and had a class at 10am, this class is, as far as I can recall, the last time I saw my 1GB flash drive. The class usually takes place before and after recess, but due to some extra assessment activity for some students, and the teacher having to visit the dentist, the class continued through recess and then finished just after recess. One possible explanation is that I left my flash drive conected to the computer I was using by accident…I hope this is the case as I don’t know where else it might be.

At the conclusion of the class (approximately 11:15am) I went down to Dickson and had another coffee. The walk to and from Dickson was good, and in fact was quite refreshing.

Midday arrived, and I went to my maths class, which was mostly uneventful. I did, however, inform the teacher that I had a meeting to attend after lunch and would therefore not be in the continuation of the maths class after lunch.

At lunch time I went to the Majura Cafe, which is a little cafe run by the college’s hospitality students once every week or two. In my entire time at Dickson College, this was the first time I had attended the Majura Cafe, and I was mostly impressed, especially at their coffee making ability. I will have a full review soon.

At the conclusion of my lunch consumption (approx 1:30pm) I went to the arranged meeting with my co-worker which we agreed to have before the big meeting so that we could discuss what had occured and how to best explain it.

We had our meeting, and just before 2pm we went downstairs to the waiting room outside the location of the big meeting. As per the prediction I made at about 1:45, the other people involved in the meeting were ten minutes late, and it got under way at 2:10pm. The meeting did seem to be a little bit firey in some places, although the “meeting before the meeting” helped with that, as did (in my opinion) a tactical placement of an announcement by myself, of my “possible other employment”. I think it was quite clear from the meeting that they really can’t afford to lose employees, and the outcomes of the meeting (which were virtually none) really show that. My memory of the meeting indicates that there was a general change of approach by the bosses after my little announcement.

After the meeting I had another coffee before going home.

On wednesday my morning bus was late, actually, it wasn’t late, it didn’t arrive, it was the bus after it that was late…naturally this made me late for my first class, and the relief teacher was somewhat cranky about it. To be more precise, she was cranky about me being 15 minutes late for class, I explained the reasons to her, although this seemed to make her more cranky and she made an under-her-breath statement “Always the buses fault”. I was already cranky about the tardiness of my transport, and her being argumentative didn’ help things, I felt like screaming at her, but manged to contain myself to multiple mumblings.

After this class I had a couple spare hours which were used repairing my sanity.

One of the classes much later in the day was rather odd, the teacher who had been to the dentist on Tuesday had to go again, and there was a sign on the door saying that the class would take place in the library, so I went to the library and about half way through the class the teacher arrived and said we could all go home.

For some unknown reason I was tired on Thursday, and somehow managed to sleep through to 4pm, apparently while I was sleeping, utter IT chaos was taking place at the college, so sleeping and not having to deal with it was probably a good thing. None the less, I was faced with a dilemma that night, do I go to bed or not? I wasn’t feeling tired, which would be fairly obvious after 16 hours sleep and only a few hours awake, so I stayed up for the entire night, having a cup of coffee at about 1am on friday morning, and then forgetting to have any more. I decided to make a game of the situation and pretend that 4pm was 7am and then work out the time.

I arrived at my college early (which shouldn’t be a suprise) at about 8:40am (11:40pm imaginary time) and had a class. By this time I was starting to become paranoid about whether or not my job application email had reached it’s location and whether or not it was suitable, so I decided that I should send another, more formal, email after the class.

At the end of the class (10am/1am) I had two hours free, so I had a cup of coffee (which cured my partial tiredness) and then went and wrote a formalish email including a resume and sent it to the appropriate person.

After this I had another class (midday/3am), which just happened to be the same class I had (presumably) left my flash drive in. On this occasion the teacher did not need to visit the dentist, and the class proceeded as normal, however I hadn’t noticed that my flash drive was missing at this stage, and had no reason to reach for it, so it could very easily have been in that room and I wouldn’t have noticed.

By the end of that class (1pm/4am) I was feeling very hungry, so I went to civic as per usual for a Friday afternoon, ate my lunch and met my bus driver friend, who, being back at work, was once again driving his bus.

By the time I got home (approx 4pm/7am) I was starting to feel tired, and I had another coffee. Just before dinner (6pm/9am) the tiredness got the better of me and I had a little nap. I was also starting to feel the effects of hayfever. After dinner I had a shower and went to bed (8pm/11am).

The hayfever made it dificult to get a solid amount of sleep, as I was constantly waking up with a runny nose. I normally wouldn’t bring up such details, but I do on this occasion because I interpreted it in an interesting manner.

As you would probably know, when you are half asleep, a lot of things simply make sense, and your brain can be good at coming up with unusual and downright strange ideas. My brain did this exact thing, and whilst it dealt with the runny nose in the correct manner, it was thinking that letters (yes, alphabetical letters) from some newsroom were arriving and coming out of my nose. It made sense at the time, although I did eventually realise that “It’s not letters at all”.

This morning when I woke up (slightly later than expected due mostly to the breaks in my sleep by the runny nose and the fact that I needed a lot of sleep) I had breakfast and then proceeded with my day, which included my newsreading duties with Australian Independent Radio News. I was still suffering from hayfever during the day a little bit, but it does appear to have cleared up now.

Well, that pretty much sums up my week, although I may have some more specific details coming soon.

4 comments September 10th, 2005 at 09:07pm


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