A Day in the Life of a Post-Grad Student

A day in the life of a post-grad student:

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08.30 AM: Morning alarm (turn off alarm, laying on the bed for 10 more minutes before taking shower, this is the plan)
09.30 AM: Wake-up and realize it is already 30 minutes late (this is the actual)
10.00 AM: Breakfast, check world news
11.00 AM: Arrive at the univ., turn on computer, check emails part 1
12.00 PM: Morning coffee, socializing and building network until...
01.30 PM: Lunch
02.30 PM: Afternoon nap
04.00 PM: Check emails part 2, browsing football forums
05.00 PM: Doing research
06.00 PM: Happy hour
07.30 PM: Dinner
08.30 PM: Check emails part 3
09.30 PM: Making phone calls back home
10.30 PM: Writing for blogs, browsing, check emails part 4, until...
12.30 AM: Call it a day and take a rest, preparing for another hard day at school
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Aussie Guy Looking for Asian Girlfriend

It is possibly a joke, but then it claims that the request is "genuine".

A bloke, perhaps a Monash University ex-student, has tried to advertise himself by displaying a piece of paper with handwriting on the announcement board in one faculty.

The ad is attached below:


Presumably he is desperately seeking for an Asian girlfriend, but then it could be that someone is trying to make a fool of the bloke. Although the advertisement is real, I just cannot believe someone would actually do this, seeking a girlfriend by displaying an ad like this.

I don't believe if a girl would actually be interested to contact the person at all. Nevertheless, it is quite funny :)

Farewell, Dr. Mohamed Haneef...

Farewell, Dr. Mohamed Haneef, from the land of 'fair go', namely Australia, the land where everyone has equivalent rights, the land of dream, the land where the future is bright, Adios! See you around when we see you...(meaning: we most likely will not see you again, ever).

The first 10 words in the paragraph above were taken from The Sunday Age, published in Melbourne today (29th of July, 2007). It was the headline of the newspaper, covering the most recent debacle of Australian politics, where cousin of cousin of cousin of British terror suspects was mistakenly accused of helping his cousin of cousin of cousin to plan the bomb attack to Glasgow Airport.

Dr. Haneef, who has working visa as a health worker in Queensland, came to Australia on the basis of his needed skill, but because of his SIM card found in the apartment of the terror suspects, he was prosecuted in Australia.

The initial accusation was his SIM card found in a burnt car, the car that exploded in Glasgow, was used as an "evidence" of his involvement in the attack. But later it was found that the SIM card was actually seen in the apartment of his "cousins". His visa was canceled and not re-instated although it is now admitted by the Australian government that there's no basis to prosecute him (well not yet, this is what the government said).

"This is a political game.", said Jason Koutsoukis of The Age.

Indeed! It is a nasty game. And a disgraceful one, too!

Lycos Gives 3 GB for FREE

Lycos - http://www.lycos.com give away 3GB of mailbox size for each of its free email address. On top of that, they allow you to attach anything as big as 20 MB. However, if your account is not active for 30 days, they will delete everything you have in the account, all of them except your username, and you cannot receive an email either!

Some major webmail providers fight each other nowdays. Yahoo7! (Yahoo!'s Australian portal) gives UNLIMITED mailbox size, while LIVE (Hotmail) give away 2 GB.

This trend obviously was started by GMail with its 1GB mailbox and then increasingly bigger until now becomes 2.8GB.

From my personal point of view, I still prefer to use GMail, because it is definitely faster and it collects every emails with the same subject under one heading only. Very useful because it is easier to follow discussions within the same subject. Kudos to Google!

(Apparently) Free SMS

I was sent an email by a friend, telling about FREE SMS service by a website called SMSCity. Coincidently, I was looking for free SMS providers so that I can save some bucks by sending text messages over the internet, instead of using my mobil all the time. It costs me AU$0.35 to send an international text message, and I can send 20-30 messages a day, which will cost me hell lot of money. In Indonesia, it costs only Rp 350/text message, which is like AU$0.05 or five cents. Yes five cents only!

Back to SMSCity...I registered straigthaway and got my 20 credits for FREE. Then I started playing around the Send SMS page. The price of 1 international SMS costs 8 credits, which means I can send less than 3 SMSes with the my first 20 credits. The FREE SMS section itself can only be active during "Happy Hour" and for me in Australia, my happy hour is 6 PM - 7 PM everyday.

During the "Happy Hour", only 1 sms can be sent everyday and the funny thing is, if I wanted to send the 2nd one, I have to do it at 8 AM in the next morning. It is funny in my opinion because it is nearly impossible for someone to send the SMS exactly at 8 hour 00 minute 00 second. Beside that 8 AM is a time when someone is preparing to go to his/her office/school/university. Or perhaps they are not awake yet. I haven't really tried how it works, because I am not awake around this hour.

SMSCity provides a reasonable service for people who expect some freebies, obviously there are no free lunch these days, so a service like this one is good enough for me. And they allow me to buy cheap package for sending SMS as well, certainly cheaper than my mobile provider's price.

Scientific Commons

A search-able website listing many millions of Master and Ph.D theses from around the world has been established by a university in Switzerland. This website is called Scientific Commons and its address is:

http://www.scientificcommons.org


Scientific Commons is a project owned by the University of St. Gallen with repositories located in universities in 50 countries (871 repositories as of today). It uses Open Access Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to retrieve the theses. The ScientificCommons website basically indexes the theses and the authors only and it provides a link directly to related repository for anyone who wants to download the files.

The project is aimed to provide freely accessible scientific knowledge to the world through internet connection, which is a noble idea that has to be supported by all of us.

Guide to Pre-Paid Plans in Australia

Google helped me found this guide about available pre-paid plans in Australia. This is very useful and worth reading for those who want to live and get a pre-paid plan for their mobile in Australia. Here is the link:

http://www.bill-busters.com.au/prepaid.html