This is an unplanned post. Unplanned, because if I’d scheduled it, I wouldn’t have found the time.
I have in my possession dozens of drafts of half-completed or unrefined posts. About dream weddings. About 20-year-old Taylor’s tawny and white port wine.
About getting tested for diabetes and HIV. About Korea and the Phillippines, a snowy mountain and sailing at sunset.
About books. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood. And the infamous Madame Bovary.
But they’ll have to wait.
In April I started working again. A few months later I started looking at the possibility of sitting for a certification exam, which would provide more specialized tuition in areas that interested me. I found a couple, did my research and settled on one.
It’s a monster called the CFA. It consists of three levels; Level I exams are held in June and December, Level II and III only in June. The average charterholder takes four years to complete the exams, and no wonder: the Level I pass rate in December 2009 was 34% (!!!), 42% in June 2010. It is, to quote a number of disgruntled ex-candidates, harder than the GMATs, harder than any exam you’ve taken in your life.
My plan was this: study the recommended 6 months, take a semester off in March to focus solely on the CFA material and sit for the paper in June 2011. Then OUA dropped a bombshell announcing that Monash would no longer be offering undergraduate units with them after the end of 2011, which triggered a brief, mad scramble to regroup my shattered plans.
The upshot of all this is I’m now working full time, doing one degree subject, studying for a deferred exam paper AND the CFA Level I. I’ve just bought a financial calculator. The only button I can use with confidence is the one which says On/Off.
I’m nearly halfway through my assignments for the semester, aiming to finish by this Sunday. I think I can fit in the recommended 300 hours of CFA study if I stick to a rigorous schedule of 3 hours a day on weekdays and 7 hours a day on weekends. It helps that I’ve covered some of the material quite recently in my coursework.
To give me a headstart on getting behind schedule I’m looking at possibly an extra 3-5 hours of overtime per day next week. Our team is helping absorb a bulk order of reports from the compre team; they’re more complex than what we do and we’ve never done them before. I’m happy because I’d previously requested to work on these reports; the timing is a little off right now, but que sera sera. To complain smacks of ungratefulness.
Best get a move on with my night. Goodbye world; I’ll see you after December 5.
I’m attempting to bring this blog into the 21st century by updating it with plugins, a horrible task if one is indecisive. The sheer variety available is quite astounding.
One type in particular keeps catching my eye: those extolling greater connectivity. Where else can you find me? one app asks before listing some of the most popular platforms available today: Facebook, Friendster, digg, Flickr, Orkut, etc.
I’ll not kid myself – I’m tempted to jump on the bandwagon and embrace the kind of accessibility they’re dangling in front of my nose. (Basic internet marketing: the more people know who you are and how they can reach you, the better.) But a greater part of me isn’t so happy.
I am by nature a wary sort of person. I’ve struggled with this in the eleven blogs I’ve had in the past eight years – where to draw the line between being truthful and overexposing myself? In person I’m about as likely to divulge a gruesome tidbit of my sex life just for the shock value as tell you about my day, but the difference, you see, is that I know who I’m speaking to. I simply don’t like the idea of some stranger knowing more about me than I know about them.
Once upon a time I used to track through cyberspace members of online groups I subscribed to, just for fun. I learnt their real names, siblings’ names, birthdays, personal descriptions, hopes, dreams and issues. With just a bit of determination and no complex computer skills – I was about thirteen then – all this information was available. When you think about it, that’s quite unnerving.
(While time and internet privacy campaigns appear to have wised up my generation, kids growing up with the Net seem even more blase about sharing their personal details than we were. Coupled with their tendency to camwhore incessantly and speak to/add everyone who drops by their blogs/social networking apps in order to look more popular, it’s a breeding ground for disaster.)
Made even more cautious by the results of my trawlings, I lurked for years under a whole host of personas, email addresses and websites. It took five years before I would even reveal my real hair color to online friends. I never really grew out of it.
Now, facing me: the option of providing randoms a link to my Facebook, the repository of my friends, pictures, personal references to my life.
It’s a massive step. Probably not one I’ll be taking anytime soon, either, although of course with a bit of determination it’s easy enough to find out who I am.
As a member of the yuppie-twenties still clinging desperately to my hipness and youth, I’d like to claim an affinity to Twitter the way so many of my online media-savvy friends do.
Alas, unlike an orgasm, I can’t fake it.
Twitter, I used to think in horror as I waded daily through an avalanche of 140-character tweets, is the propagation and validation of mental diarrhea.
On one end of the literary scale you have books: great masterpieces of critical thinking and solid, carefully expounded stances, which take years to write. (Some of them, anyway. Twi-shite, er, Twilight, not included.)
On the other end: Twitter, which broadcasts to the world every insignificant piece of drivel that passes through your brain at the speed your fingers can type.
What Twitter, with its speed-of-type broadcasting ability, is unequivocally good for is spreading news. Or gossip. The line between the two is naturally rather thin.
Said line grows dangerously so when posters no longer even have to take five minutes to produce a reasonably researched blog post, hopefully reinforced by a couple of factual links and a picture. Just re-tweet it, bub.
Thankfully the main yardstick for a news tweet’s believability is a credible source: a link to a credible article.
And those, fortunately, don’t come with 140-character limits.
A lot of the stuff on motifake is trashy crap, therefore but it wasn’t too hard to find something that tickled my funny bone.
Creationists? Evolutionists? Boom! Problem solved, too.
Yeah, we’ve all been there. But this one’s included just because the little guy’s misery looks so darn cute.
But how often do people really have anything relevant to say to each other anyway?
I don’t know if lobsters can feel pain, but I’m morally opposed to boiling anything alive. It seems a good general stance to take.
That said, heaven tastes like lobsters smothered in garlic butter sauce and wreathed in crustacean screams.
Finding a new Wordpress template is such a pain in the arse.
Not because of lack of variety – there are thousands out there on Google.
Not because I favor only a particular look – I appreciate minimalism, adore complicated, bandwidth-intense graphics, have a soft spot for grunge.
I’m just picky. Each layout must adhere to a list of guidelines I’ve built over the years:
Layouts should have ample space for text without the reader having to scroll down multiple times to finish a post. The two-column layout most often fits this criteria and the next, with some tweaking to expand the writable space.
There should be space for links on the same page. Not necessarily tag clouds and calendars and the whole hoopla, but at least categories and a list of links out. The important things users might click.
My posts contain a lot of text. Text is easier to read on a white background, even though I have a secret fetish for their black or dark counterparts. Backgrounds must therefore be white or very light.
I have a strange dislike for Times New Roman used for headers. I think it makes things look very unprofessional, rather childish. I’m not averse to the occasional use of Arial, but strongly prefer Verdana. It’s very neat.
I have a soft spot for user-configurable layouts. Readers can pick their preferred background image? Brilliant. Something to keep them at my page when the mundane details of my life bore them.
I really hate it when the header graphic takes up most of my screen when I load the page. I immediately dismiss the layout from consideration. The picture is not the focus of this blog. My writing is. Attention! Attention! Attention! Me, me, me!
![[365] 120](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3614/3562258478_c127673e52_m.jpg "[365] 120")
