Mollymawk and penguins

I've just been to the bird hospital with my parents, dropping off a mollymawk and also photographing two little blue penguins (which aren't actually blue)
Here are the pictures. I hope you enjoy!

Critter.

My father has just been photographing the weta which we found in a roll of old carpet which we are using for mulch.
I am now starting a Chinese language blog at http://jeremy-list.drivehq.com/zh. I haven't been learning that long, so I'll be looking up a lot of words in the dictionary. However, I won't just be using google translate because I don't trust its ability to construct Chinese grammar correctly. This blog will be up shortly.

The best nostalgia.

Yesterday I visited my old horse Petros and gave him a biscuit. He's a good friend that I won't be forgetting anytime soon even though I sold him a few years ago when I started university. We were even in a movie together.

A look into my crystal ball: What I predict 2009 will for the world

1: A few countries will put sanctions on Israel. This will really annoy zionists, who will probably try to have sanctions put on every country that puts sanctions on Israel.
2: Someone will tell John Key the correct date for Chinese New Year. (nb: Chinese new year starts on Tuesday, but that didn't stop our prime minister breaking his arm at a Chinese new year party last night)
3: Petrol prices will go up again in spite of the depression which is currently keeping the price low.
4: Those people that want the singularity (I think they're called transhumanists) will get very excited about one of my projects and offer me funding.
5: The economic situation will get worse, in part because of measures people are taking to stop it getting worse.
6: There will be more anarchist communes.
7: The ice sheet over the arctic circle will disappear.
8: There will be a revolution in Zimbabwe. Many people on both sides will lose their lives.

Adventures with my boot sector and the government.

Hi everyone, Right now I'm back from my little adventure into the land of boot-sector erasing. The "Create usb startup" tool that comes with ubuntu unfortunately doesn't recognise my usb hard disk. Even more unfortunately, when I used the installer on the CD to install onto my usb hard drive, it erased the boot sector on my internal hard drive to make sure my computer would start up from the usb one. I was fortunately able to fix it without reinstalling the whole system (which would wipe my wireless card driver and prevent my computer from connecting to the internet and therefore downloading a new one, which wouldn't be that bad anyway since I'm going back to my parents' tonight).
Anyway, this whole adventure is in fact so that I can work on my programming projects at my parents' house without filling my father's hard drive with stuff that I need and he doesn't. The reason I'm going back to my parents' house after less than a day is that the real reason I came here was to pick up my mail, I'm staying with them until Studylink stops demanding I change their nappies every day and starts paying me. In other words, I'm staying with them until I can leave without starving.
It turns out that WINZ is actually the cause of my Studylink problem. Back in October I went to a compulsory meeting with them. I gave my name to the receptionist on arrival, gave them a heap of information, and I wrote my name on another register before I left. Apparently this is called non-attendance. I'm having a meeting with another office on Tuesday to sort it all out.
My next blog entry, should you choose to read it, will contain my predictions for what this year will hold. Anyone who reads that post is welcome to laugh at me next year about all the points where I was wrong.

The new year

Well, I think I've already posted enough about last year, so this post will mostly be about my hopes and dreams for 2009.
First off, I've almost sorted out my university enrollment. Classes start in just over a month, and I'm really looking forward to them. This year I'll be doing 8 papers. I can't remember exactly what they are, but 2 are Chinese, 4 0r 5 are computer related (I remember in the second semester I'm down as doing a 3rd year computer science paper - introduction to artificial intelligence - can't wait!). And 1 or 2 chemistry papers.
I also plan to resurrect my stalled business idea and start building a few computers for a bit of extra cash so I can visit my girlfriend in China over the Easter break.
There's also a software project I've kind-of started already. Really advanced stuff, I'll be drawing on the foundation of two different peoples' PhD projects, working their ideas together as well as possible, and adding a few of my own touches. I've figured out about 60% of a plan for how it's going to work, and I'll figure out the rest once I've done a bit of coding for it.