Personal

Sometimes I post things that are kind of personal, so I make sure to put them in this category. If there is a password on any of these posts, then the password will be my date of birth, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you know me reasonably well, then you should know that (or just ask me and I’ll tell you).

Notice Periods and Resigning

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll tell you about what a ‘notice period’ means to you if you are planning on resigning. I recently found this out (yes, personally), and I can tell you that it doesn’t leave the nicest taste in your mouth, so be careful.

Situation: You are employed in one position in a company where your contract details a 1 month (4 week) notice period. You have been offered a job at a different company, but they require you to start in 3 weeks (from now, which makes it 1 week short of your notice period).

Options: At this point, your options would be something like;

  1. Resign from your current position and tell them you are leaving in 3 weeks (see below for consequences)
  2. Negotiate with your potential employer to start later (hopefully)
  3. Decline from the job and stay where you are

Now, assuming that you want the job, and that you have already discussed the start date and the 3-week start is required, that basically leaves you with the first option (not much of an option is it?). So – what happens with that 4 week notice period on your contract if you leave 1 week short of it?

In this situation, some people will attempt to apply for leave for the final week of their notice period, which will mean that they won’t actually have to go to work, but they’d get paid as if they had (accrued annual leave and the relevant authorities permitting). If this is not an option, which in some companies it won’t be, you will find that you are lopped into a situation where you will be financially penalised for not giving full notice.

When calculating your final payouts after resignation, everything your employer owes you is added up into a ‘kitty’ of sorts. This might include accrued annual leave, final salary since your last pay date, owed company expenses etc. In the case that you leave before the end of your notice period, this kitty is reduced by the amount of salary that you would have otherwise earned if you had stayed. So in our example, that kitty would be reduced by a full week’s salary before you got your final payment.

Think about whether or not you can afford to take that hit – it can hurt at the end, and will leave a pretty bad taste in your mouth, unless where you are going really makes up for it!

Why MP3s Are A Good Thing

I have (had) a relatively small collection of CDs, to be honest, I’m more likely to obtain copies of CDs from friends than I am to buy them. This is not because I’m a cheapskate or because I’m a pirate (mateys), it’s mostly because I don’t like most music enough to warrant buying it, but I like a lot of music enough to listen to it.

There are times (like when I get gift certificates) that I do purchase CDs though, and through these times, and just along the way, I’d collected about 30-40 CDs that I would call “worth listening to regularly” — so I did, in a CD stacker and a CD wallet which were in my car.

My car got broken into.

My CD stacker got stolen.

My CD wallet got stolen.

Therefore, all of my CDs got stolen in one foul swoop, and I was tuneless… without tunes. MP3s saved the day. Since I always left those CDs in my stacker and wallet in my car, I never got a chance to listen to them anywhere else. Since I almost exclusively listen to MP3s on my laptop and Nomad, somewhere along the line I had luckily gotten around to ripping most of those CDs to MP3 and saving them to my hard drive, which now lives in an external, portable USB drive enclosure. Thanks to the ability to back up my music to MP3, I now can retain copies (and even burn a new CD if I want) of the music that I legitimately purchased, where otherwise I’d have to go and buy it again (which would be difficult because some of the disks were quite obscure). Yey MP3s!

I Got a PGP Encryption Key

Following is my new public key for PGP encryption. You can use this to encrypt messages you wish to send me. I will also link it from the ‘About‘ section of this site.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>

mQGiBD9tD4ARBADM7uwtfDMuF+EJeL9DEmVUltKFivX2igbPhSWdoQAqvOoEUKhg
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An Art Gallery I’d Like To See

For some reason, it came upon me the other day that we don’t see the “animal” side of people captured very often. We see beauty, we see sorrow, we see passion, we see ‘humanity’ — what I want to see in an art gallery of some kind, is the animal, rage-filled, violent side of people.

I think these ideas sprang from a discussion about how porn in a gallery suddenly becomes art, but what I want here, is a collection of painted, drawn, sculptured and constructed representations of people which portray violence, rippling muscles, massive exertion, bulging eyes; you know what I mean. I think it would make an interesting gallery, and I’m sure all the art boffins out there would come up with all sorts of interpretations about the way that humans deal with their emotions, about the ‘beast within’, things like that.

Call me crazy, but I think it’d sell. Perhaps it could be called ‘The Beast Within’ or ‘Devolution’ or something similarly catchy, reflecting the animalistic side of human nature which would be on display.

The End Is Nigh

Drawing to a close of the study period, the next 2 are lined up already (NET23 and NET26) and all that’s left of this period is 2 assignments – a mishmash of revised and rewritten arguments for REA11, and a 2000 word essay for NET12.

I will be very glad to see these 2 first units done, and hopefully I’ll be able to see a lot more units fly by like these ones. My only other hope will be that now that I’ve done a couple, I’ll figure out how to balance the rest of my life a bit better with study and work, since my personal life got a bit neglected in the last 3 months due to too much work and study, which makes Beau a dull boy 😛

Beau’s Amazing Stew

This is the recipe which I ended up inventing when I wanted to try out my great new pot, a ScanPan Dutch Oven. I wanted to cook some sort of soup/stew concoction, and this is what I ended up with;

Ingredients:

  • 400g Oyster Blade Steak
  • 400g Diced Steak
  • 1 Can Green Beans
  • 1 Can Baby/Julienne Carrots
  • 1 Can Peas and Corn
  • 250g Pasta Shells
  • 1 Large Brown Onion
  • 3 Rashers Bacon
  • 4 Corgettes
  • 4 Sticks Celery
  • 2 Medium Potatos
  • 1L Liquid Beef Stock
  • Cummin
  • Bouquet Garni
  • Tobasco Sauce
  • Soy Sauce

Preparation:

Boil water and cook Pasta Shells as normal, with some salt to hold in the flavour. Don’t throw out the water – it will go in the stew. It is a good idea to start the water heating, then start everything else, it should finish at about the right time like this.

Slice up the onion, dice the Oyster Blade Steak and combine both with the Diced Steak and some oil in the bottom of the pot. Cook on high heat until the meat is starting to brown, but not too much. Add the bacon, sliced into strips, and cook quickly. Once cooked, pour in the Liquid Beef Stock and add the potatos, cut into smallish cubes. Bring to the boil, then simmer for a few minutes.

Add Beans, Carrots, Peas and Corn, including their liquid to the pot, continue to cook. Add the pasta into the pot, including its water (if there is too much, drain a little off as required). Also add in sliced Corgettes and Celery. Add sauce and herbs to taste, then simmer for approximately 30 minutes.

That’s it! A lot has gone in, but you should now have the equivalent of about 8 meals worth of stew, and it tastes great!

Quote of the Day

Quoting myself now… how sad. I wrote this in an email to DV, and I thought it summed up my opinion of some assignments at University nicely;

[Some assignments are just] an exercise in stringing together references into a roughly coherent text which conforms to their required format.

No Teeth != No Pain

Well, I am now minus 4 wisdom teeth, but it hasn’t meant that the pain they were causing has gone away, indeed – it hurts a lot more right now than it did before. The only good thing is that I know in a couple days it won’t hurt any more, and then I’ll be firmly on the road to my mouth sorting itself out.

I had all 4 teeth pulled under local anaesthetic, so I got to see the whole thing going on. I also got to feel and hear some of what was going on, so that was interesting. I was actually a little surprised, because there was more pushing (down towards my gums) than there was pulling (as in tugging on the teeth). I don’t know exactly why, but I am guessing that it’s from the dentist cutting back my gums to get a clean shot at the teeth. Wondering what 4 wisdom teeth look like? That’s them down there!

4 little wisdom teeth

Too Much Wisdom

As measured in teeth anyway, apparently. I was at the dentist today and she tells me I am going to need to get all 4 of my wisdom teeth taken out. I was given 3 options as far as the actual surgical procedure goes;

  1. General anaesthetic – go to a hospital for the operation, pretty expensive
  2. IV Anaesthetic – apparently they can have an anaesthetist come to their surgery thing and dope me up, it’s somewhere between general and local
  3. Local only – they just stick a needle in me at their local surgery and rip the things out (hopefully!) – cheapest, but highest potential for great pain.

So what’s the verdict people? Anyone else out there had their wisdom teeth taken out? What sort of anaesthetic did you have? Would you reccommend it? I’m all ears, and need to make a decision soon, so please throw me your ideas 🙂