It’s been a while since I had a chance to post, things have just been crazy lately.

So, when I left off I’d just gotten into uni. I found out about it on the 17th and then had to go enrol on the 22nd, pretty damned fast. The UTS enrolment process is excellent, however, and was nothing like the crap I’ve heard you have to go through at Sydney. All told I was in and out within about 45 minutes.

The subjects are basically set for the first year of my degree. There was only one elective and it was a no-brainer. A Business Strategy subject against some accounting/banking/finance crap. What did annoy me a bit is that while most spots on the timetable were open, there were a couple of good times that I missed out on. This is because even though I attended the first available enrolment session for non school leavers, all the school leavers had already been through and chosen their subjects. To me, it seems obvious that non school leavers are going to have more commitments around work, kids, etc than people just out of year 12. Anyway, not a big deal. There’s only one class that’s a real problem and I’ll have a crack at talking to the tutor to get into the better timeslot. Overall my first semester timetable is pretty good, 2 full days off. The only problem is that Monday is a pretty full day, meaning no time for work.

Which brings me to work. Unfortunately there’s really no other part time work within the business so at this point it looks like I’m sticking with my current role on a part time basis. I feel like I’ve wussed out a bit, but there are very few jobs out there that offer the level of flexibility that mine does while paying this kind of money. So for the time being it’s the lesser of two evils. Hopefully the fact that I’m in the office 50% less often will mean I hate it 50% less, which will mean it’s bearable. I hope.

Enrolment on Monday began a week of craziness. Clare and I had social crap on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. We’re normally not nearly that cool so it was kind of a shock to the system.

Monday night was Raw Comedy at the Comedy Club with Luke and Bonny. Was a great night overall but some of the comics were just goddamned woeful. Anyway, at $10 for a concession I highly recommend it as a night out.

Tuesday was pub trivia, nothing exciting. Wednesday we caught up with Maccy and his new girlfriend, Bec. (I tried Beck but it just looked like the musician. I’m sticking with Bec. Hopefully I don’t offend anyone) We hadn’t met Bec before so luckily she was lovely and a great night was had by all. Tapas, paella and sangria for the win.

Friday was, naturally, Australia day which entailed the now-traditional Cove Australia Day barbie which was bloody fantastic. Good times, good beers, good sausages, good friends and a swimming pool = excellent. Alex Z came along which was great since it was his birthday and we see each other entirely too infrequently. We had a great drunken chat in the swimming pool and made plans to go bushwalking on Sunday which unfortunately never eventuated, but have been rescheduled to this weekend.

The only downside of the evening was that Luke completely and utterly defiled my kitchen while trying to make cocktails. At one point he was using a coffee plunger as a strainer which entailed sticky cocktail juice being projected into every nook and cranny of the kitchen. Needless to say a couple hours of Saturday was spent cleaning up.

Saturday night was Michael Joseph’s farewell dinner at Genghis Khan in the city. I’m normally a big fan of The Khan, however I’ve never been to the city branch of it. Unfortunately it falls prey to the one thing that aggravates me most about restaurants. Too many tables and not enough staff. At one point we waited 45 minutes in the queue to get our food cooked because there was a packed restaurant at peak time with only one freaking chef actually cooking. There were two others working that night. One of them was ferrying bowls out to the buffet station and the other one appeared to be off having a smoke for most of the time. Note to all chefs working in busy restaurants. You have more important things to be doing than carting crockery around the place. That is what waiters are for. Consider yourselves notified.

We then moved on to James Squire bar which is an undiscovered gem for me. Not overcrowded, fairly laid back atmosphere and excellent, excellent beers. Obviously a bit pricier than your run-of-the-mill local pub, but not at all unreasonable for the quality of beer on offer and lower than the average in that neck of the woods.

Sunday I did very little since plans fell through. I did, however spend almost 4 fucking hours cooking bolognaise sauce. Our neighbours had a surplus of tomatoes during the week and were kind enough to bring us a bag. Lovely plump organically grown sauce tomatoes that smelled lush. Little did I know that it was actually a sentence to 4 hours of kitchen drudgery. 2 kilos of mince, 2 bulbs of garlic and a bunch of onions later, I have realised two things. 1) The PSP is an excellent thing to kill time in between stirring sauces. 2) I need a bigger saucepan for this kind of crap. I’m not writing up a recipe since it’s just bolognaise. Meat, garlic, onions, tomatoes, herbs, seasoning. Job done.

The upshot is that the sauce tasted great and I didn’t have to clean up any of the mess I made. That’s what Clares are for. Bonus.

Flogged the crap out of myself at the gym on Monday night as a punishment for being such a lazy prick lately. I’m still feeling the effects now.

And that brings us up to the present day. I’m looking up and there’s a whole hunka’ words. If you’ve read all this way you deserve a lollipop.

I have been offered a place in the Bachelor of Business course at UTS - Kuringai campus. It was the fourth down my preference list, but that’s still pretty damned good for someone that did what I did in my HSC year.

I figure the whole application must have ridden on my STAT score (98.9th percentile, awww yeah). So it’s not exactly surprising that I missed out on Sydney since they don’t even consider STAT. I had thought Macquarie was my best bet but they’re clearly a pack of arseholes. UTS - K’gai all the way.

I’m mainly pleased that I got straight into a business course rather than doing arts for 12 months then transferring internally. Some of the units I did in arts would have counted but this is going to mean a lot less wasted time. I may still look at transferring to Sydney next year or maybe to the UTS Ultimo campus, but I’m going to give K’gai a shot.

The other advantage of K’gai is that Clare’s sister got offered a palce there in the Primary Education course. So, I’ve already got a friend on campus. I’m one of the cool kids!

All that remains now is to figure out what the hell I’m doing for work. I’ve got to have a serious chat with my boss about finding me a part time role. I’ve been telling him it’s on the cards for the last 6 months, but now it’s really crunch time. I’d like to stay here to keep my industry experience current and keep my foot in the door, but I’ll go elsewhere if I have to. Whatever happens, I really don’t want to keep doing this role. Even on a part time basis.

I finally got around to modding my PSP to Dark Alex’s new 3.03OE Rev A firmware last night. I’d been putting it off since it looks like an absolute nightmare to do.

Thankfully, however, this is just due to the fragmented nature of all the information that’s out there. The guides suck, but the actual tools are excellent and the process was really simple. I downgraded from 2.0 to 1.5, then back up to the custom. Peice of piss.

The best bit is that I can now play game images from the memory stick instead of UMDs. Also, I can play emulated PS1 games. Added to that, I can play ROMs and run homebrew programs and all sorts of other great stuff.

It’s definitely a change from the state my PSP has been in for the last 6 months or so, sitting uncharged under a pile of crap on a shelf in my bedroom.

Also, 9pm tonight is 0-hour. I find out whether I’ve been offered a university placing in the first round of offers. I’m kind of freaked out, but staying cool about the whole thing.

The Winner 11 pressure washer by Kärcher. This thing is my new favourite toy.

I’ve been tossing up on getting one to wash the car for a while. With the water restrictions in Sydney at the moment you can’t use a hose to wash your car, just a bucket. Needless to say, this becomes a pain when rinsing off detergent etc. So, a rather elegant solution is to use a pressure washer instead. Even just hooked up to the mains these use a lot less water than a traditional hose. To satisfy the regulations, however, you need to hook it up to a bucket which then gravity feeds through a hose. It’s a pain, but it’s better than getting fined.

So anyway, I’d been looking at the Winner 11 in Bunnings for a while. It was only $99 which made me a bit dicey about it since I wasn’t sure if it was actually going to put out any decent pressure. I had a look around eBay and graysonline and ummed and ahhed for a while before eventually just buying one at the weekend.

It’s by no means wimpy. It’s freaking awesome. Not only did I wash the car, I also made a start on clearing the flaking paint off the wall around the pool and cleaned up some of the pavers too. It blows my mind how sophisticated and powerful this thing is for $99. I spent pretty much the whole afternoon playing with it.

In other news, I’m still sweating on finding out whether I got into uni or not. We previously thought that the results were released 9pm on Tuesday night. It’s now apparent that they’re actually available Wednesday night, prolonging the waiting a whole ‘nother 24 hours. Argh.

It’s kind of a bitch. Slept in late today and then went out and blitzed the crap out of a bunch of weeds in the back yard. I eventually had to stop since the bin got full but there’s a lot more work there. The entire thing is really badly overgrown with grass and this really agressive vine. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a bitch. It’s killed one tree out there and it’s now my aim to make sure it doesn’t kill any more.

In less boring news: Tony Hawk’s Project 8 looks really cool. It was what kept me up last night which led to my sleeping in this morning. As all the reviews say it’s much more stripped back than many of the recent titles have been. A lot of the extraneous crap of American Wasteland (which I still finished and really enjoyed) has been ditched. You can still jump off your board and go on foot but it’s not at all a focus of the game. All the funky parkour moves are gone.

The strange thing is that the physics engine seems to have taken a step backwards too. It performs fine when skating but sometimes just totally flips out when you bail. Weird screen spinning errors style flipping out. Also, when you mash keys to get up faster it now seems to sometimes forget that the bail ever happened and you’re just skating again in some arbitrarily chosen direction. I’m not sure if it’s going to annoy me long term, hope not.

Heading out to dinner tonight with Luke and Bon which will be fun. We’re hitting up a pizza resteraunt calls La Disfida which Bonny says is great. Clare has a feeling that we went there once while I was living in Five Dock, which is right near Haberfield. Unsurprisingly, I can’t remember at all. Maybe when I see the place it’ll job a memory.

Best of all, it’s BYO. BYO FTW.

Things I have learnt today:

1. I still hate my job
2. Chilli jam is completely awesome

I’ve also been learning php which is great. It’s something I’ve meant to do for ages since until yesterday my programming knowledge has consisted entirely of half forgotten and mostly stolen bits of mIRC scripting, excel’s version of VB and html. I’m by no means proficient in php yet but I’m getting my head around it, which is more than I’ve been able to say for anything else I’ve ever tried to learn (especially javascript, that was a bitch. I even bought a freaking book for that. Bought!).

Hopefully I’ll be able to put my newfound skills to use in getting a better job with Optus. I know exactly the one I’m aiming at, too, the only issue is that it’s filled right now. However, it’s filled by someone from Adelaide. Thus, it’s filled by a mentally retarded person. This gives me hope.

Thanks to the largesse of a friend dbe.cc is on new (free) hosting, and it beats the crap out of my old hosting, too. It’s a good thing.

I’m not going to bother moving anything over from the old site since a) it’s been nuked and b) there was bugger all there anyway.

In terms of news, spent the entirety of last night cooking which was kinda cool. The other day I got a craving for the sweet chilli jam that Sam had when he was living with me. Upon searching this hear innerweb I found a recipe, and also turned up one for sweet chilli sauce. I figured they both needed to be made.

The jam turned out really well, which is great since this was my first foray into jam making. The sweet chilli sauce seemed okay, but it’s not the sort of thing you can really sample on it’s own. I’ll need to make some fish cakes or something and try it then.

Peep the recipes in the pages section.