My goddamn hayfever is driving me bloody insane. Aargh! 
My nose is redder than Rudolph's, and my eyes are so red it looks like I haven't slept for days. I swear when I asked the Melbourne Central Connex guy where the toilet was, he thought I was on a drug-induced bender. Didn't help that I was a bit fidgety from a sugar high...
Anyway, I can't sleep so I thought I'd ramble here - deal with it.
Ok, hmm... first off, I dropped by the Monash engineering faculty this morning, to talk to a course advisor. The course advisor was conveniently 'not in her office', even though she had stated that she was available. I've just about had it with Monash right now. The course advisor didn't respond to my earlier emails; the general eng course advisor passed the buck to the aforementioned course advisor, and was never heard from again. Reception was pretty useless too - I had to coax them to get an email address, because apparently appointments are unnecessary; yeh right.
It's not just them either - the IT faculty is just as bad. The general enquiries email address gets you no reply. Then when you get a direct email address from reception, the person is reluctant to meet with you, preferring to answer my questions with crappy generic responses over email. Ask in any detail and you'll get no reply. Oh, and if you ask them in person, they act all nice and interested, ask you to drop them an email, and then you'll never hear from them again. WTF! If you hate email, then don't fucking advertise it!
It's probably because I'm not an international student or full-fee student, and given HECS places are in such demand, they know they can fill the spot and get the money regardless. Stupid economics.
The eng course advisor eventually replied when I sent them another email today, and we're apparently on for tomorrow - so fingers crossed.
In the arvo I dropped Chaddy to see the Honda ASIMO robot. Man that thing is short - makes me feel tall, and that doesn't happen very often. Alright show - filled with lame jokes and marketing spiels, but the kids seemed to enjoy it (except the one who was chosen to go on stage, but another kid jumped up at got on stage before him). Seeing the robot move is pretty cool though; it can even hold a tray pretty still while walking. It needs some work to make it look right however; its knee joints are always in bent, regardless of whether its standing or moving.
Below's a crappy camera phone shot of the free show - there are plenty of ASIMO videos on youtube anyway.
The main reason I dropped by though was because some friends were working at the merchandise stand. Ended up annoying them for a while, debating about how shoddy public transport is, and whether hybrid/hydrogen cars are actually better for the environment overall (e.g. battery impact, feasibility of hydrogen production, the energy required, and the source of that energy).
So of course, I ended up late-ish to my next thing to do, which was check out the launch party for Xero, a Mac and PC computer store that opened at 106 Elgin St, Carlton. And that's when the hayfever kicked in - as soon as I got to the train station my nose started playing up and drove me absolutely nuts. I had everything - itchy eyes, runny nose, sneezes. The fact that I also discovered a minor incident I had with a carpark pillar a few weeks back actually damaged my car more than I thought didn't help either - stupid bloody pillars!
Oh, and my hair looked like shit too because it's in that stage between short and long, where you can't do anything with it, and just have to hope for the best. Some days it looks good, but others, it just looks crap, and there's bugger all that you can do, apart from using the whole tub of hair stuff, and spending hours doing it... only to decide later to ruin it by changing jumpers.
By the time I had tram-ed it into Carlton (I actually managed to find it!), my nose, eyes and brain had entered full-on hayfever mode. I couldn't think straight anymore, which isn't very helpful when you're meeting people. Anyway, the party went well, Cam did his presentation and we got to look at all the cool new stuff. Wish I was a bit more switched on though - I fumbled through so many conversations, I'm not sure if I made any sense at all... ah well, hopefully no harm done. Good luck to Jonathan and the team there!
It did remind me that I still need to work on my social/networking skills. I still feel somewhat uncomfortable, even talking to people I had met a few times before. The hayfever didn't help, but the conversation just didn't flow, felt awkward. And I have a shocking memory, so I struggle to match faces and names, not to mention I have a bad habit of not addressing people by their name, so they wouldn't know I remember them anyway. I don't pay enough attention remembering what people do or are doing, so I've got nothing to followup on the next time I meet them. Oh, and I have a habit of either not talking at all, only talking about myself, or just pummeling them with questions, like an interrogation. My mind freezes and I can't think on the spot when I'm talking to people sometimes. Ah well, I made a list of things to remember, so hopefully it'll be better next time round.
After that I caught up with mates and went and saw Rogue Assassin, starring Jet Li and Jason Statham. Unless your idea of a good action movie is a kill-filled one with fake blood flowing everywhere in some fairly ordinary actions scenes, backed by a crappy storyline, plus a 30 second snippet of a naked chick for good measure, then go see it. Otherwise, avoid it. The worse bit is, Jet Li's crappy English meant I missed the ending punchline, and now I've got not bloody clue why he killed that guy in the end! Just great, bloody great. The directors were clearly aware though, because he only says probably 100 words max in the whole film. It might be hard, but Jackie Chan did it, and so did all your asian co-stars, so stop being a slacker and work on your English!
Oh and why are goddamn frozen coke machines always out of bloody order! Surely someone by now would've worked out why and fixed the damn thing. It's just crushed ice made of coke flavouring, which is mostly water anyway - can't be that hard people!
Alright, I think that's enough crap for the day/night. My nose is still bloody playing up, even though I've been inside, away from the invisible but damn annoying allergens for hours now...grrrr! Got no bloody idea how I'm gonna sleep, but clearly staying up blogging isn't helping. AARGH!