You are meant to read the title in the voice of the peon from Warcraft 3 / Frozen Throne. I’m all packed and about to head off.
When I land it will be around 6am local time on the 29th of July. So it’s like time travel. See you all next year. Of course I’ll still be putting stuff on Ultimatesigh when I can, and there’s facebook and ultimate sigh email.
I’ve finally had the time to post on here again. Been quite busy getting ready for Samoa. Just 14 days to go until I leave. I’ve resigned from CBA, got my PF&R which was a high rating and I hope to get a job back at CBA once I’m back potentially.
I’ve moved back to my parents as well, it is as cold as the freezer. I can constantly see my own breathe, and what’s more my fingers are cold despite being rugged up. I can look on the bright side of not having to be cold for much longer.
There’s yours truly at the farewell reception with the Samoan high commissioner a few weeks ago. Those are the people I will be spending the next 12 months with. It still hasn’t sunken fully in yet, that I’m about to leave for a full year. As I go through the process of disengaging things in my current life and minimising things for my stint in Samoa, the more real it feels.
As before, excited, anxious, stressed, and quite a few other emotions mixed in too.
I was in Canberra last week, braving the cold weather (I think it got down to negatives at night with wind chill). It was all for 5 days of training, bonding and learning for my departure to Samoa.
I learnt a lot. Samoan culture is quite interesting and I am more excited than ever to go. Some fears were allayed, some other worries cropped up but overall I think I will manage. There are worse ways to spend a year than sunny Apia with its tropical charms and island life.
In between meeting my new assignment buddies, learning, going out, and writing a letter to myself to be opened in a year, there were some near evacuations.
The hotel behind mine just caught on fire. There were camera men running down from various places trying to get footage, and prettier presenters walking slower down the to the scene to get themselves in front of the camera. It was actually quite exciting for a while there. Before I decided to take a nap. The Canberra weather has given me a cold.
This sigh is an ultimate mega super sigh to the extreme. My strata is already a whopping $495.95 per quarter, for a 1 bedroom apartment in a complex with nothing except a lift as an amenity. Now I have a notice that it will be increased by another $400 to $470 per quarter!!
This increase in strata will take my quarterly fees up to $900 – $970 for the next 5 years. The reason for this massive hike (almost doubling) is that the building needs to undergo extensive defect remediation. The builder, who is dodge to the extreme, has basically declared bankruptcy and cannot fund the repairs. Despite, of course, the building still being new enough to fall under “builders’ warranty”. Pretty frustrated at the good money down the drain. It is time to sigh.
There’s this automated word cloud generator that uses the frequency of words appearing in your document and generates a picture with the size of the words in proportion to how often the word was used.
So I decided to feed it the top posts of Ultimates Sigh’s RSS.
Looks like the most used word on the recent posts is “Pretty”, although “Sigh” does rank up there but not as much as you would think. It’s a pretty interesting way of quickly displaying what a document or page is talking about. 😛
So I’ve officially moved onto Just Host for all my hosting services. No longer is Ultimate Sigh sitting on my PC. This should be good in terms of better uptime and availability.
One thing I have sacrificed though, is the discontinuation of the Sigh Chat service. Rest assured though, those chat logs have been saved for posterity. This was due mainly to the lack of interest and dare I say it, pretty unreliable service resulting from a combo of corporate firewalls and my own server being a bit precious.
In its place is the new and improved Sigh Forums now with fixed layout and colours for easy reading. And of course the much delayed Ultimate Sigh Email Addresses.
So if you want to get yourname@ultimatesigh.com addresses, head over to this forum topic and leave your preferred username. I’ll give you your personal address pronto. Of course alternatively, you can just leave your username preference as a comment.
For those already with an @ultimatesigh.com address, I’m sure you know by now to access it via google here: https://www.google.com/a/ultimatesigh.com.
A new Ultimate Sigh begins now!
Over the coming few weeks, I’ll be migrating the Ultimate Sigh to a new host. Most likely Just Host. So during the migration there may be outages while I port all the files and setup over. Hopefully everything will transition nicely without too much messing around on my part.
Why am I moving the site off onto an external host? Well that’s because I will be moving to……………..
Samoa* for a year.
*Well pending visa approval and pre-departure approval, but there’s an agreement in place now.
How come Samoa?
I hear people ask when I tell them about Samoa. Well it’s simple really. I figure this is pretty much the last chance in my life to do something a bit risky and adventurous. I still have time after I return to progress in my career, and I don’t really have any responsibilities or dependents right now. If I don’t do it now, I will probably just find a higher paying job and stay in Sydney, settle down, that type of thing. That’s not bad. Life is pretty cruisey here. But I know I will regret it if I don’t set off this one last time to experience something completely different and to go work and stay overseas for a while. So in short, if I don’t go overseas now for a career break type of thing, I never will.
Here’s to less sighs, and more awesomeness hence forth.
Ultimate sigh will be back on the 1st of May. Again going on holidays means I ‘ll be shutting down my server tonight. I ‘ll try to put a redirect onto ymanmeander while it’s down so you can still enjoy sighing from years gone by.
This post is a long time coming. But I just haven’t had the time to write about it.
Last month I made a return to Fort St, for a friendly kickabout. It’s the first time I’ve been there in 10+ years. God that makes me sound old. As you can see, a lot of the old school grounds look pretty much the same as before, just with more construction stuff around.
The quad
The “New” Kilgour area
The field itself is still as crap as ever. I almost twisted my ankle on the first run since I had forgotten all about the many potholes that lie underneath the overgrown unmowed lawn. The ball would bop up strangely and randomly. Ahhh…brings a tear to the eye.
We ended up playing on the old sandy tennis courts, where strangely there was a thin piece of almost undetectable string in the middle of the court serving, presumably, as the net. So we had to play on the top court instead. The walls are higher but the grounds are just as dodgey, the grass just as messy, and Leondios and a few other teachers are still there.
It was the best of the times, it was the worst of times…In short: the school still looks shitty, but it still brings back good memories. And the students there are still just as awesomely funny. On one of the new high fences I saw the words “Pedestrians area” crossed out and made to read “Pedos area”. Classic.
