Secondly, I have decided to start writing what I call “lessons”. They are numbered lessons, but they’re not in any order at all. While I’m certainly not an expert, I’m very happy with how I live my life and my own view on how to live life happily. Most of the lessons I think will just be common sense to most people, but perhaps not.

A combination of things triggered me to start this. For one I think generally so many people seem to lack what I consider common sense: they’re going through life miserable, they make bad decisions daily, they focus on the wrong things. Another thing that to be honest completely confuses me, are certain people that seem intelligent, yet they are very religious. My problem with this is that I’m not religious in the slightest. Looking at christianity specifically, what they base their beliefs on, the virgin birth of jesus, that jesus is the son of god, and was resurrected from the dead, not to mention the other great number of fictional stories in the bible. How anyone with half a brain can believe any of this when there are so many more logical explanations is beyond me.

One thing sort of useful that christianity teaches are the 10 commandments. I say sort of useful because the first half are rubbish, but the second half are common sense things. Don’t murder, don’t steal, etc. My lessons will be what I believe to be common sense, basically how I think everyone should I think. I’m not commanding anyone to follow these, I merely hope that at least 1 person benefits from reading at least 1 lesson.

There was an incident that highlighted this to me tonight, my father was riding his bicycle home from work and crossing a busy road using a dedicated bike crossing. The traffic lights had gone red, and my dad started cycling across. A lady in her SUV came roaring through the red light, not slowing at all, this is a 70kph zone, and collected the front wheel on my dad’s bike. The impact knocked him off his bike in the middle of the road. He fell backwards, hard on to his back, smashing the light on the rear of his helmet to pieces, and grazing his hand and arm. The lady pulled over up the road, got out, and checked HER CAR. No sympathy for the poor cyclist who she could easily have killed if he had just been slightly further across the road. No, she’s more concerned about her car, and in fact waits by her car, until my dad limps up the road to get her details.

I’m not big on human relations… I see little point in small talk unless it’s genuinely interesting, I don’t believe in helping the poor, I have a low amount of people I genuinely call friends because I so easily lose respect for ways they think or things they do. But if I injured another person, it would certainly concern me to check that they’re okay and help them out.

If you injure another person, whether you’re at fault or not, check that they’re alright, help them out.

- Lighten the mood (Part 1)!
- Blah blah blah (Part 2)
- More reason to exist than hospitals? What?
- Just won’t happen…. in a hurry (Yep that’s government)
- Talks a bit like Brad, i.e. smart but talks a lot of crap.

The end.

So instead I’m going to refer to it as ‘refreshing my goals’. I always have goals I want to achieve, but sometimes I go a bit off track. The new year is a chance to re-assess where I’m at, are my goals still relevant, are they what I want, how close am I to achieving them, what do I need to do to achieve them.

I have two major goals at the moment. The first is to manage my money better, by doing a few different things, I’m not going to go into any detail right now. The second is to get back into a regular gym routine, and build some muscle, which I started last week and enjoying. So far it’s a pretty good start to the new year!

I spent the entire trip watching Fred. First he crawls to the right of the dash, and then to the left side, and then flies on to the windscreen and walks up it, then back down on to the dash and just chills there for a while. A bit later he decides to come back over to my side and sit directly in front of me looking at me, and then goes for another windscreen walk before finding a place to sit on the dash again.

Once we get into the inner city, he decides to check out the view, just buzzes over to the passenger doortrim, and sits on the top gazing out the window – just like a dog hanging it’s head out the window. But a bit further down little lonsdale he spots his destination, melbourne central. He jumps from the window and happily buzzed inside. He didn’t mention what he was doing, but my guess is shopping at general pants and then grabbing some starbucks.

I for once went to bed at a reasonable time last night and had a good sleep, so this morning coffee was more just a want rather than a NEED. I actually feel awake instead of half asleep! And the weather today is just awesome, it’s a nice spring day, not hot, just a nice warmth. My muscles are slightly achy and tight from going to gym yesterday.. but it’s a good feeling. The warm weather also seems to make me eat better.. instead of craving something hot like a toasted sandwich, I feel more like eating things like sushi and juice. The weather also let me cruise into work with the sunroof open, windows down, and the new muse album blaring (which i’m going to have to review shortly). And the morning at work has been really productive, I wrote two seperate datafixes for a database I support. I don’t usually write sql datafixes, so it was pretty awarding to finish one which turned out to be reasonably complex.

Going back to juice… I tried a juice today made by ‘emma and tom’s juice’. It was this funky green colour, and made out of all natural ingredients. Thought I would give it a shot, tasting fairly good actually. But halfway through drinking it I read over the ingredients and read that it contains…. STINGING NETTLE ??? WTF emma and tom? why are you putting stinging nettle’s in your juice. Maybe my great feeling today is really just because the stinging nettle is numbing my brain. Thanks Emma and Tom!

I ended up seeing these guys play in Melbourne on Sunday night.. and what can I say there were awesome!

The gig started off with Mariachi El Bronx.. which unfortunately I got to the gig late and only saw the last couple songs. What was most amazing is just how completely different Mariachi El Bronx are to The Bronx. From what I can tell from the two songs I saw it was just a pretty calm, fun sorta feeling to Mariachi El Bronx.

The second band to play were a Melbourne band called Ouch My Face. This band was .. well.. they were quite weird. They are fronted by a short, skinny, tiny, emo looking chick.. who sings/screams and plays lead guitar, a guy twice the size of her playing bass, and another crazy looking guy on the drums. I’m not too sure how to describe their music, experimental rock with screamo singing? I don’t know. Interesting band anyway!

After those guys played I went for a walk, it was reasonably warm for a melbourne night, so I bought a can of monster and wandered the slightly creepy city streets before heading back to Billboard (the venue).

Not long after I got back The Bronx were out.. and wholly crap! Like I said earlier the difference between Mariachi El Bronx and The Bronx is just crazy. It just felt like there was so much energy straight up, and man is this band full of energy. The singer was often crowd surfing, and at one stage singing standing from a small table in the middle of the crowd (short video I took on my phone below). He was also encouraging everyone to mosh, and jump off tables, etc. Also saw some kid getting dragged out by security, kicking and screaming halfway through the gig! haha. Anyway they put on a great performance, definitely up in one of the best gigs I’ve been too!

But my brother bought me these zombie chews lollies the other day.  While it was a nice thought, and they do look pretty cool.. they taste like absolute shit!  But to give Sweetmans some credit, they probably do taste bad enough that they’re something zombies would enjoy chewing on.

Take an unbearably sweet taste that makes your teeth feel like they’re rotting when you bite it, and blend it with an extremely sour taste that makes you feel like you’re biting into a chewy sour lemon, and you’ve got Zombie Chews!  Big thumbs down from me!

Zombie Chews

But I completely disagree.. with the huge amount of different ways to communicate with people.. mainly i use windows live messenger, facebook, and good old mirc.  I’m actually much more social sitting at home on my computer than I probably am going out somewhere.  And not only that you can be much more comfortable, listen to the music you want to, you can choose how social you want to be, or who you want to be social with.

So ummm yes, the internet is social!