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‘Rants’ Category

  1. Earthquakes, please. Give Christchurch a fucking break

    June 13, 2011 by Stephanie

    Now, even more so, I’m glad that I am leaving Christchurch for a week at the end of the month (30 June to 5 July in Sydney, Australia and 5 July to 7 July in Auckland, New Zealand). Today, Christchurch was hit by two big earthquakes: a 5.5 quake at 1pm and a 6.0 at 2.20pm.

    For both of them, I was upstairs at work. For the first one, I was in the laundry, talking to the staff member in there and the two of us stood under the door frame until the shaking stopped. At this time, the mall’s fire alarm went off but my workplace’s fire alarm didn’t. So those of us in the staffroom on our breaks stayed in there, eating our lunch or whatever until we got the notification that we were evacuating. Even now, I can’t remember precisely how long we were outside for but we went back inside to help clean up but because I was on my lunch break, I was allowed to go back up to the staffroom to finish off my lunch. I went back downstairs to the checkouts, making sure I had my jacket and bag with me and was given a small job to do. Once I had finished that, a lot of the checkout staff were hanging around, talking about it while I was refreshing the Geonet site and also checking Twitter on my cellphone to get updates. We were then told to go upstairs and have a cup of coffee or tea (caramel hot chocolate in my case) which a lot of us did. So we were up there, sitting around the tables up there when the 6.0 quake hit.

    We initially didn’t move but when the intensity of the quake increased, all six of us at the table I was sitting at got underneath it and we were holding onto each other until the shaking had stopped. We then got out from under the table, grabbed our stuff and we were all saying “Fuck this, we’re out of here.” Which we were. The entire shopping mall where the supermarket I work is located is closed until tomorrow at the earliest.

    Where I am in Christchurch, again we haven’t lost power, phone lines or water, although we are being told to conserve water because pressure is once again low.

    Is it 30 June yet?

    Edited: Both quakes have since been upgraded! The 5.5 quake was upgraded to 5.7 and the 6.0 was upgraded to 6.3, the same magnitude as the February 22 quake.

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  2. What not to say to those of us in Christchurch right now…

    March 13, 2011 by Stephanie

    Courtesy of my inconsiderate, brash, impolite, thoughtless, unthinking cousin: forget about the quacke [sic] in chch japans was bigger

    He posted that comment on my Facebook (I copied and pasted it word for work – you can see that he doesn’t use capital letters or any form of punctuation. Although he is also known to use ALL CAPS and Capitalise The First Letter Of Every Word Regardless Of Whether It’s A Noun Or Not) last night and I had to read it about three times to make sure I’d read it right – that he was telling me to forget about the quake in Christchurch because the one in Japan was bigger.

    He is not the one who has been living in a city that has been having earthquakes for the last six months. He isn’t the one who’s had to put up with broken sleep for a lot of those six months. He isn’t the one who jumps every time there’s a boom, thinking that it’s another quake. He isn’t the one that is looking at light fixtures and anything not really nailed down to see if they’re moving because of a quake. He isn’t the one who is still boiling all drinking water on the off chance the city’s water supply is contaminated. He isn’t the one who still feels somewhat guilty because we haven’t lost power, water, or phone lines in the two big quakes.

    Am I being harsh on him by referring to him as inconsiderate, brash, impolite, thoughtless, unthinking? Perhaps I am but to me, posting that comment on my Facebook where my friends can see it (my profile is set to friends only) was inconsiderate of him. He should be lucky that I’m not where he is at the moment because he would be getting a serious bitch slapping!

    FYI: the cousin that posted that comment on my Facebook is 33

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  3. I know it’s summer but…

    January 3, 2011 by Stephanie

    it doesn’t have to be so friggin hot, thank you very much! Today has been one of those days where I’ve been in the comfort of air conditioning at work and the minute I step into the carpark, I can feel the heat. The minute I get out of the carpark (for the record, I’ve hated walking through the carpark since the 4 September quake but unless I have a desire to walk from one end of the mall to the other in order to get to work during the day, I have no choice) it hit me. Of course, it didn’t help that my work uniform is black and my work shirt is made of polyester which is horrible in 32°C-33°C 89.6°F-91.4°F) temperatures.

    My home town does get hot in summer but this is a different kind of heat altogether. Having to literally peel yourself off furniture in order to get up and do anything is not cool. I was literally sweating buckets and resorted to having not a cold but not a hot shower in order to cool down, which worked for a while until I started feeling the heat again.

    At least I won’t have to put up with this so much when I’m in Australia in June/July!

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  4. A couple of things

    October 13, 2010 by Stephanie

    Commenting: Due to the influx of spam comments on the blog (the spam counters weren’t that high a couple of weeks ago), I have now turned registration on, which means that in order to comment on any of my blog posts from here on in, you will need to register and be logged in. Bear in mind that this is my blog and I can delete you for whatever reason at any time.

    Contacting me: I have removed the blog’s “Contact Me” page because of all the “promote your website” spam that was being sent through it. How do I know it was being sent through that? I checked the headers and the site’s referals. And the IPs all point to New Delhi, India as the point of origin. Yep, the home of the (dik)shittastic XIX Commonwealth Games. Whether it’s legitimately from New Delhi or not, I’m not too sure but regardless, I’M NOT FUCKING INTERESTED IN MARKETING MY WEBSITE SO FUCK OFF. Will I bring back that page? I don’t know as yet. If it means not getting “promote your website” spam through it, it’s all good. I might have to put in a lot of captcha measures. Who knows?

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  5. Dammit

    June 11, 2010 by Stephanie

    Guess who has a kind of dead laptop?

    That’s right.

    Me.

    At the moment, I’m on my flatmate’s Mac checking everything I check every day. I can’t afford to either get my laptop seen to or get a new one so this will have to do. But one thins is for sure. I want to rescue stuff off the hard drive this time!

    Stupid piece of shit Dell.

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  6. Protected: “What am I doing here?”

    May 19, 2010 by Stephanie

    This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:


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  7. XP SP 1 to XP SP 2 to XP SP 1

    May 7, 2010 by Stephanie

    Oh, what Windows XP service pack dramas I’ve experienced on my laptop since I moved to Christchurch!

    Ever since my laptop got a new hard drive in August 2007 (the previous one having died rather unexpectantly 18 months earlier), it hadn’t been connected to the internet – consequently, it didn’t have an anti-virus program, an anti-spyware program, an anti-malware program, it had a 2.x.x.x version of Firefox (that I transferred from my portable hard drive) and was really only used to play The Sims 2.

    When I got to Christchurch, my flatmate set up the wireless internet connection so I could use it and download and install anti-virus program, an anti-spyware program, an anti-malware program as well as upgrade Firefox to the most recent version. This went reasonably well. The downloads were quick and the installation went relatively smoothly. Except when it came to iTunes and I realised then that I had to upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Automatic updates, you see.

    So I did that, not really thinking anything of it, and saw that the previously green bars at the start were blue so I knew that it had worked. This was when the drama started.

    Surfing the internet
    SP1: Could surf as soon as the desktop showed up.
    SP2: Had to wait at least three minutes for the wireless connection thing to show up in the taskbar, at least three minutes for it to find our network, then at least another three minutes for Firefox to actually load then about another three minutes before I could really do anything.

    CPU usage
    SP1: didn’t really know what it was because I didn’t have Task Manager open frequently but I would say that it was very low.
    SP2: As soon as I opened Task Manager, it would hit 100% and would stay there most of the time the laptop was running.

    Overall system performance
    SP1: Everything ran smoothly. Nothing took forever and a day to load.
    SP2: Nothing ran smoothly. Everything took forever and a day to load.

    So, I went surfing on my flatmate’s Mac to see what I could do in order to try and rectify the problems I was having. I found this page which said the following:

    After you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) or upgrade to Windows XP with SP2, you experience slow computer performance. For example, you experience the following symptoms:

    * If you browse the Internet, the performance is slow.
    * If you try to download newsgroup e-mail messages, some or all of the messages are not downloaded.
    * There is excessive hard disk activity.
    * Overall system performance is very slow.

    Then it went on to list some possible causes (what I did is italicised):

    This issue occurs if one of the following conditions is true:

    * You have spyware or malware running on the computer. Ran both anti-spyware and anti-malware programs – nothing was found
    * You have viruses that are running on the computer. Did a full system check which took nearly five hours and nothing was found
    * You do not have sufficient free space on the hard disk. The hard drive is 80GB – I had at least 42GB free
    * You do not have sufficient random access memory (RAM) installed on the computer. The laptop initially came installed with 256MB RAM – upgraded to 512MB which didn’t really help that much
    * You have corrupted or outdated drivers. Nothing was showing up in Device Manager as being corrupted so that was ruled out
    * You have too many files in the Recycle Bin or temporary folders. Temporary folders and the recycle bin were both emptied

    None of those helped at all so a couple of days ago, I found a page that explained how to uninstall XP SP2. It took forever but my laptop is back to its old self. I know that downgrading wasn’t the best thing to do security wise but seeing that I’m currently looking for a new job, I obviously can’t afford to get a new laptop but I do have my eye on one in particular.

    Why my laptop couldn’t handle XP SP2, I don’t think I’ll ever know.

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  8. XP dramas

    May 7, 2010 by Stephanie

    I’ll be making a rather lengthy post about the dramas of Windows XP Service Pack 2 very soon. It will be somewhat lengthy but at least I can type fast so it won’t take me too long, heh!

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  9. Desperate times call for desperate measures

    February 17, 2010 by Stephanie

    Most definitely for me these days.

    I guess that with the recession some would argue that we are still in, I should be thankful that I do have a job, albeit part time. I am thankful but then again, I’m not.

    I’ve worked for the same employer for coming up five years. I started working there when I was studying, primarily because the weekends were the only time that I was available due to my studies. During the Christmas/New Year holidays, I would get more hours because of full time staff having their holidays.

    I elected not to go back to study in 2008, primarily because I couldn’t fathom the idea of sitting through a second year paper for the third year in a row! This means that my work was my only source of income and still is. Last year before Christmas, I was shafted into the store’s Christmas Shop from the department I had been in for several months in favour of a student which I wasn’t happy about. Actually, said student did say that they felt bad about it.

    Anyway, my hours have never been consistant, which means my wages have never been consistant. I have to literally budget every week. There have been times where all I’ve eaten over a week is seven packets of 2-minute noodles (one a day and they don’t really fill you up) because that was all I could afford to buy. Since Christmas, I’ve gone from having two or three days during the week as well as the weekends down to Monday then the weekend and now, I’m down to just the weekend. A full day on Saturday and four hours on Sunday. 10 1/2 hours basically. It’s not enough for me to live on, with my board, my credit card payments and my current Student Loan repayment obligation that I am paying off. Although that 10 1/2 hours is more than what I am currently rostered on for next week – which is a big fat ZERO!

    I have had several people from work tell me that I should get a full time job elsewhere because there’s nothing for me where I am and I won’t get any further either. Believe me, I’ve thought that for a very long time.

    I’ve gotten to the stage where I will be going to WINZ (our Social Security department) to apply for the unemployment benefit, as they have said that I will qualify for some form of financial assistance because of my income. That reminds me that I need to finish my online application too! As it stands at the moment, because of when I first contacted them about it, they will owe me money but I don’t know how much and when it will show up in my bank account. I’ve had to skip all of my bill and automatic payments that would normally come out of my account tonight to next week and that was $8 in total for four.

    That means that until the money shows up, I have less than $5 to see me through until next week. I am not happy about it. I haven’t yet told my mother about the lack of hours for next week, let alone the fact that I can’t pay my board this week and I know that when I do, she will literally hit the roof and would more than likely speak to the person who does my roster.

    The one thing I am really looking forward to is getting my holiday and alternate leave paid out when I leave as it’s nearly $2,000 before tax!

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  10. 09.09.09

    September 9, 2009 by Stephanie

    I’m not going to wait until 09:09:09 to post this although if  I did, it would read 09.09.09 09:09:09! The next date like that I’m looking forward to will be 11.11.11 because that’s my mother’s birthday (well, 11.11 is!) and it’s on a Friday so she’ll be happy, haha!

    My financial situation is crap at the moment, to be honest. I’m lucky if I get 10 hours a week at work at the moment. Take into account that this is my only source of income and you can see why I’m literally living on 2 minute noodles each week! Although I do have a few more hours this week but the following week, I’m back to only working the weekend and even then, for 4.5 hours on the Saturday and 5 on the Sunday (although this is technically 4.5 hours because of my lunch break). That’s what I did last weekend so I wasn’t expecting to get more than $80 in my bank account but I ended up with more. I’m not complaining. At the moment I’m not.

    I wonder if they know at work that I’m struggling. I honestly would get more money on the dole (unemployment benefit) . How much longer can I put up with this? I really don’t know.

    I really don’t know.

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