What is wrong with today?

Well, apart from my hayfever, not much I'm happy to report.

So, you know how I was banging on about writing an article for The Escapist? Well it's up right here now, and it's the lead story. Yippie-kay-yay Motherlickers! Apart from being featured on one of the more respected games journalism sites, I'm getting paid in yankee green which these days is worth quite a bit more than the aussie dollar.

Apart from playing "Where's my money?" by Busta Rhymes over and over again to celebrate my windfall, I also had somewhat of a successful interview with JB Hi-Fi to get a part time job there. It's all part of the grand plan for my future, and I was able to pimp out the fact I had written for several games sites to demonstrate my product knowledge in the area which is always a bonus.

What else struck me though, is how my cover letter was recieved. Now, these days every single job has about 60 applicants for it so I always try to make my cover letter stand out a bit by cracking a few jokes (my standard 'James is dashing, witty, intelligent and overwhelmingly humble' line got a chuckle). The interviewer actually took more notice of my application because my writing skills made my application stand out.

Just goes to show you; if you can write, you've always got a shot.

Today was also a great day because my new voice recorder and telephone pickup came in the mail. The quality is a heck of a lot better than my old voice recorder and now I have the ability to record telephone conversations which is an absolutely bonus. How often have you missed something somebody has said because you were busy writing down what they had just said? Yeah, that's why a telephone pickup is really valuable. It just allows you to really concentrate on the interview without having to worry about transcribing the interview. I heartily reccommend getting a telephone pickup mic to any up and coming journalist.

The big bits of news on the home front was the revelation the Krudd ws pushing back the implementation of an ETS by a year, and the subsequent revelation it would take six years for the budget to get back into surplus. Oh, apparently raising the target for reduction to 25 per cent from 20 per cent is supposed to offset the delay of the ETS.

Ha!

Again, it doesn't matter if the government is Labor or Liberal, it seems the environment is going to have to take one for the team once again. I appreciate the Krudd government is facing some unparralelled financial constraints, but this was an opportunity to set an agenda for the next ten years.

If the government pushed ahead with an ETS, it would've shown the people of Australia that the government was actually serious about the environment. Now, it seems money has trumped the needs of the world.

Oh well, at least he's putting a cap on the number of public servants. Now, there will only be 99,000. Meanwhile, the temprature guage keeps on creeping up.