Students + Money = Tough Times.

This is probably a topic I would love a lecture about, actually make that a unit. (There really should be units providing guides on "How to Survive at Uni") I'm probably the last person in the world who should be giving financial advice. For example, Currently I just received a very small pay check for last weeks work, I have been given no work shifts this week, and I will not be paid for next weeks work until the week after. So it is safe to say that by then my funds would have well and truly dried up. Do I do anything differently? No. Today, as usual, I went to the ANZ ATM and took out $20 for lunch. I won't spend that $20 solely on food, but it's no longer in the bank... it's in my wallet. The last place money wants to be is in my wallet, because it won't stay there long.
For the benefit of you ,and myself, I've knocked up a list of the things we could do during our daily routine at University to save a bit of cash. (Also, my mums a financial advisor so I may of received a little help...)

• Pack lunch - I cannot stress to you enough how much money you will save by bringing lunch. I usually pack my lunch for the first half of the semester and succumb to buying lunch in the second half. Do not give into temptation!
• Use a pencil case - Pencil Case's ensure that our pens and pencils have a home. When we are finished with our pens and pencils, they return to their home. If they don't go home, they are lost... forever. Think now of all the pens you've 'misplaced' in the past year. Yeah, and how many have you bought? That's what I thought. We're more likely to lose a pen than use it until it runs out of ink. Therefore, buying a pencil case is good for the economy. (Well, you're economy at least).
• Use Public Transport - It's good for your wallet and the environment! Plus, Murdoch is so close to the train station it's not funny. Seriously. On that note, if you don't have a smartrider - get one! We're entitled to student fees and sometimes I even score a free day! I have no idea how it works, I just know its worth it.
• Don't carry lose change - Keep it in a piggy bank. It's way too easy to walk past the vending machine and buy that block of handsome looking chocolate... so delicately wrapped by cadbury... just begging to be eaten... No!
• Get a job - You may hate the idea, and it's a little bit of extra stress on top of study, but its well worth eliminating the stress that will come with being broke.
• If you live out of home, shop wisely - This one's from mum. She recommends buying the specials and all those '2 for 1' deals. She also thinks you should 'make a budget and stick to it' - like that will ever happen, but you can at least try =]

While I was writing this my friend just came back from the printer in the library. "Jess! Someones fallen asleep". I asked her to take a photo for my blog - she said that would be weird. I agree. But as you can see, the semester has definitely taken its toll.

On that note, I best get back to study! Good luck with exams!

New Timetable webpage.

Huzzah!

Murdoch are indeed brilliant - and I think sometimes they can read our minds.

Check out their latest invention which helps compile a timetable for all your units. I don't know about you, but every semester I always plan to make a coloured time table so I always remember my class times. It never happens, but now! I might just have a fancy timetable =]

http://timetables.murdoch.edu.au/teaching/

Lost.

If you stopped watching 'Lost' after the second season because it just got way to confusing, overly complicated, and just down right annoying, then check out the video below.

Its everything you need to know about 'Lost' in 8 minutes and 15 seconds. The Finale for the season, as in the end forever and ever, airs in the US and pretty much the rest of the world tonight.

But Australians have to wait. It airs here on Wednesday at 8:30. Which is tomorrow, so yay!

Watch the catch up vid and I guarantee you'll need to watch the finale. Yes, after revealing every secret and cliff-hanger for the season they still manage to keep you watching with this video summary of 6 seasons. Magical.

On the bright side...

This news is soooooooooooo blog worthy.

The Strokes are coming to Perth!!!

http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/news/local/23809/On-The-Bright-Side-festival-lineup.htm

They will be joined by:

What an awesome line-up! This new festival has been deemed as the alternative of Splendour in the Grass for us Westies. Hence the name 'On the Bright Side'. Here it is used in a sentence: So you can't go to Splendour in the Grass and see an array of fine acts, but On the Bright Side you get to see the Strokes!

See you there!

Procrasta-eating.

My friend Steff has just coined the term' procrasta-eating'. I was procrastinating with a friend on-line today and we were talking about how much food we had eaten just so we could not study while we ate. I ate more food today then I have eaten all week. I even ate when I wasn't hungry, just because it was something to do. Even as we speak I am thinking of making myself an ice cream before I continue to finish my assignment.

Read what she has to say here: http://steffwantssugar.blogspot.com/2010/05/bedom-procrasta-eating.html

Do you procrasta-eat?

Show and Tell: Destination 'Procrastination Island'.

I don't understand how one person can be so unproductive. I discovered my brothers electric guitar tonight. I was involved in learning a bunch of new songs by Grizzly Bear, The Kooks and Vampire Weekend for about 2 hours. 2 hours I could have spent working on my 2000word assignment due this week (I really hope my tut doesn't read this as I kind of need an extension, if they do... then I worked very hard tonight on that assignment due Friday that I need to hand in Wednesday!). Playing the electric guitar is soooo much easier than an acoustic, my god is it easy. I didn't really notice until I put down the electric and picked up the acoustic again. I've only ever played acoustic so I'm kind of used to it. But the difference is exactly like playing a keyboard and then playing a piano. You need to bang the keys on a piano way harder than a keyboard.

I'm a little ashamed to admit the levels of procrastination I stooped to after this, but I will share with you tonight - only because it's 12:45 and I'm past caring for the day. After following someone on twitter I decided to see if I could find their facebook profile. I won't disclose names just in case there are real stalkers out there, I say real because I'm a fake stalker who will just find the profile and be like *meh* now what. Anyway, he's a singer in a band and a facebook search of his name will only return fake fan groups - typical I know. Well... I found the profile. Totally private, totally untraceable, and you can't even add them. Which is everything I would have expected. I don't even know why I cared so much, it's not like I wanted access to personal photos or anything. That's always seemed weird to me. I guess I just wanted to see if I could achieve the impossible. Just another example that nothing is impossible thanks to the interwebz.

Speaking of the impossible, have I mentioned I'm working on a campaign to get Kevin Rudd re-elected? Yeah... maybe that's the reason why I haven't started the assignment yet. I must admit I was a supporter of Kevin Rudd back in 07. But these days? What a joke, the only time I saw him a little bit human was when Kerry O'Brien asked him the hard questions and he got a widdle bit angwy. I just don't see the point of having a PM who wants to impress the world more than his own country. That being said I'm not 100% sure I could vote liberal. Sure Tony Abbott's an Iron Man and can rock a pair of speedos, but do I want a Prime Minister who could double as a pin-up boy? (I am joking by the way, that was totally sarcastic.... seriously ;) ) Then again Malcolm Turnbull did reply to a letter my dad sent him, which shows he actually cares which is a nice change.

So as I write I'm chilling in the lounge room watching some TV. I'm half way through writing a sentence when my brother walks upto me and says "Omg!!! Jess!!! Siren!! Theres a Siren!!" "Huh?! What!? Spider!?" "Shh... don't move just listen" "WHAT!? *gets ready to jump from seat*". Apparently there was a siren... a siren! Why the hell would he get excited about a siren? It sounded like the fridge was making a weird noise to me - not a stoopid siren. I told him that if it's not War of the Worlds dramatic then he's not to distract me again. Terrible...

Before I sign off for the night I do want to mention a slight improvement to the world today. Twitter has altered the algorithm that discovers the top trending topics of the day. This means that Justin Bieber will no longer be the singly most popular twitter subject every single freaking day of the week. There is one issue though... his fans are like super mutants of those who obsess over the Jonas Brothers. So nice try twitter but looking at the trending topics at the moment [to the Right] you've had little effect...

One Week To Go...

It is true that the end of semester is very hectic. I am suffering bitter disappointment this week at the fact that I must hand in an assignment 2 days before its due date. It's not just a little assignment either - it's the biggest assignment of the semester. Stupidly, however, I have devoted my time to a group assignment - which I deemed to be more important.

The group assignment is due tomorrow, and I'm pretty much ready to roll with that. Then on Tuesday I have a test for a unit I have attended about 5/13 lectures for. I do have a good excuse though, my lecturer just sums up the weeks readings in the lectures. It seems a little pointless to go if I'm not learning anything new. But I do have to study for Tuesdays' test, because I've gotten a bit behind on my readings. Terrible, terrible time management on my behalf. Then it will be Wednesday. I have already anticipated a break down for that day. I'm working a 13 hour shift on Thursday, which means I will leave home at 7:45 and won't get home until 9:30 - if I'm lucky. So I will be knackered by Thursday night and the last thing I want to do is finish an assignment. Then it's off to Sunset Events on Friday for my final day as an Intern, and after that I'm off to the Murdoch end of semester party at the Tav. I've never been to one of these before so I'm quite looking forward to it. But nevertheless this means I need to hand in my assignment on Wednesday night which includes a 2000 word report and at least three written tactics for a media kit(i.e a media release or feature story). I hope all of you are a bit further ahead in your work then me - I just never learn.

In other news, however, Murdoch had a 'No Cars on Campus Day'. What an awesome idea! I wasn't affected at all unfortunately as I don't attend uni on Thursdays and even if I did it would be on public transport anyway. Apparently it actually worked, though, and people left their cars at home. There was a little stall outside the library all week letting students know how they can travel to uni without their car. It would be interesting to see if anyone leaves their car at home in the future and follows their new public transport regime on a daily basis.

In other news, I went to Groovin' the Moo yesterday. But I didn't just go to Groovin' the Moo, I worked at Groovin' the Moo. Not only did I work there, but I worked on the artist desk... with a triple A pass. Yeah... it was pretty cool. Unfortunately, all the artists were really cool so there was no divatude to combat. Which meant my day was pretty boring, and cold. So I ended up going for a wonder around the festival grounds and meeting up with a few friends. We had a little boogy to Grinspoon and Empire of the Sun, before Vampire Weekend came on. I didn't take many photos yesterday but I took a few of Vampire Weekend. There a few highlights yesterday that will leave me fairly happy for a while (despite my disappointment at missing Vampire Weekend at Metro City tonight, Gah!). Here's a list of what made my day and what access to the backstage area is really like:

• Exchanging a simple 'Hi' with Lisa Mitchell's drummer. He is by far my favourite drummer - he just dresses so well all the time...

• Empire of the Sun. If you didn't see their set - you missed out big time! Luke Steele is one musical genius and he sure knows how to impress. By the way - those dancers? Freaking awesome!

• Watching the first three songs of Vampire Weekends set from the photo pit. It was a little awkward with the crowd right behind us... but totally awesome!! We then went to the back of the crowd and danced the night away to the rest of their set. Dancing to A-punk live was absolutely amazing!

• Almost walking into Daniel Johns while looking for my friend - I was about 30cms away from looking like the biggest douche ever. He's about a foot or two taller than me so I doubt he would have noticed... but still... it would have been awkward.

• Having Ezra walk past and actually look at me instead of ignoring us - I can now die happy after a single eye exchange.

• The after party. I walk in and the first thing I see is Daniel Johns tearing up the dance floor. Free drinks for all and bumping elbows with a bunch of amazing musicians. By far the best party I've been to in a while.

• One last thing - surviving the ride home. Driving alone down a country highway that has beware of Kangaroo signs every kilometre, just a bit nerve racking. But I made it, without falling asleep at the wheel.

Let's hope this final week goes according to plan and I don't fail anything. *fingers crossed*

Good luck everyone!

Jess.

Show and Tell: New and Improved Edition!

I suppose I should also name this a 'Mothers Day' edition as well, seeing as today is indeed mothers day. So Happy Mothers Day mum! I bought her a dressing gown (which she asked for), candles (that smell like Bondi beach, mmm), bracelets (so she can stop stealing mine!), and headbands (because mine keep going missing...). I also attempted to make her pancakes for breakfast but the mix dad bought wasn't very good so I ended up ducking down to McDonald's. They gave me a free Sunday Times! I was well impressed. I hope you're all spoiling your mothers today! She really does deserve it :)

This edition is aptly named the 'New and Improved Edition'. Why? Well I'm bringing in a couple of new changes this week inspired by my boredom at uni last week. The first is called 'Murdoch look-a-likes', the second 'Creepy Things That Steff Says'. I think both of these titles are fairly self explanatory, so I won't bore with details!

Here's your daily laugh! Words can't really explain this video... I must admit I laughed pretty hard the first time I watched it, then when I watched it again I was just confused. Check it out below:

Murdoch Look-A-Likes #1

This title was inspired by an incident the other day when I saw someone who looked EXACTLY like Bernard Fanning. Make no mistake, I do not joke about these things and am usually pretty spot on. So believe me when I say that Bernard Fanning's long lost twin is roaming the halls of Murdoch University. Hopefully next time I will have a camera on me, but that would be kind of weird... not to mention stalkerish... yeah not such a good idea.

I must give mention to the Dockers fantastic performance this season. I have been a long time supporter of Fremantle since I was little. I used to say I barracked for both the Eagles and the Dockers except for when they played each other, then I would cheer on the Dockers. Nowadays I only care for the Dockers, and I'm very very proud of the boys. Last night was the most intense final quarter I've ever watched. I was jumping and yelling at the TV, screaming 'YES!' so loud I could have woken the neighbours each time they scored a goal. I also made the mistake of saying that 'Pav is my fav' in front of my dad. He now refers to him (Matthew Pavlich) as my pin-up boy. I suppose there are worse things...

I would love to take this time to exclaim my hatred for the misuse of the English language. And I don't just mean grammatical errors, that I can handle... to an extent. But what I am mainly pointing to is people who use txt language and then simplify it again. Worse than this is the fact that they are using a computer keyboard!!! How does one right so bad when all the letters are layed out in front of them?! It's not that hard to type one extra letter, and they're all placed in such a way that it makes it convenient for the user to spell words correctly. And some words have the exact amount of letters as the proper spelling. For example; 'Gewd' *shivers* and 'Good'. Would it not be easier to spell it 'Good' that way you're only using three keys and not four. I could go on forever, but I won't. Except for this last example, the other day someone wrote 'Sea' to me as in I 'See' you. I would have accepted this as a typo, despite the fact the 'a' is neither in the word nor close to 'e' on a keyboard, but they were talking to me 'lyk dis'.

Creepy Things Steff Says #1
This section is inspired by my friend Stephanie Chong. We met during second semester of our first year at Murdoch and have hung out between classes ever since. You may have noticed her mentioned a few times before as she helped me out a lot with the blogging competition. Well, the other day it came to my attention that she likes to say creepy things... alot. You know the things that you're meant to keep in you're head? Yeah, those things. So to kick things off here is one of her creepiest statements of late.

"I'm going to hang outside his house once he turns 18" - In relation to me saying that liking Nick Jonas was a little weird.

Check out her blog and tune into her latest adventure where she 'Blogs Every Day of May': http://steffwantssugar.blogspot.com/

And that is all folks, talk soon :)

Jess.

Boredom Busters!

There's only 2 weeks left of the semester and we're all hard at work trying to complete those last minute assignments. Well we all know what happens when we're working hard at the computer - we ultimately succumb to the brilliant power of the internet. There are literally a hundred other things I could be doing right now that would be mightily more productive than scouring my bookmarks for cool sites I've collected.

I've just stumbled upon this new site called 'http://www.stumbleupon.com'. You tell the site what kind of things your interested in and it surfs the internet for you! It works in the same way that 'http://www.boredbutton.com/' does. The first site 'Stumble Upon' found for me was an online game. Online games are deadly addictive for me so I forced myself to click the 'stumble' button to get away from that page. Currently I'm searching through a bunch of music orientated wallpapers, I think I've found my monthly background!

If you're looking for a way to procrastinate (*cough* I mean take a break from you're studies) then look no further, here's a little collection of sites I've discovered so far:

Tumblr.com: Here's a link to my tumblr (http://jessiqwa.tumblr.com) to give you an idea of what the sites about. Think if twitter became a blog.

Maths all over again: Missed out on basic mathematics in school or just can't remember anything since you've left? Check out Steven Strogatz regular updates on the New York Times blogs to go back to basics and beyond (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/steven-strogatz/).

Ted: This site is an awesome way to gain different perspectives of the world through speeches and talks. Remember when you're school hired that motivational speaker to come talk to you about how life gets better after high school? Well that speech would have been featured on Ted.

Tetris Remastered: Old school tetris gets modernised with this little online game. It's basically the same tetris you've played for the last 20 years except with a little twist. Check it out here: http://firstpersontetris.com/. Also, how good is the music!?

Google Goodness: Until a week ago I had no idea the wonderful and magical things Google could do. It was like opening up a whole new world. not only that, but there are sites designed around manipulating google. First we haves Google backwards - http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/index.cgi. Next, we have a site that combats that one facebook friend who refuses to use Google and instead just asks their friends to do it for them. Well next time you see that status update hit them back with this http://lmgtfy.com/ (Let Me Google That For You). Oh and Google doesn't implode if you Google Google, disappointing I know.

Virtual Sand: I once stayed on this site until I had filled the page with sand, which is actually kind of sad now that I think about it... (http://thisissand.com/).

Dr. Horrible: For lovers of Neil Patrick Harris you will love this. (http://www.drhorrible.com/)

Go Away: Inappropriate laughs guaranteed. (http://27bslash6.com/index.html)

That should be enough to last the next two weeks! I will leave with one final page about Perth (http://www.wordonthestreet.com.au/) and that should do it. :)

Jess.

P.S Oh and before you go *whispers* google secret #367 - type 'Sexy Snape' into google and press 'I'm Feeling Lucky', you will not regret this.

It twas the field of creams.

Dear oh dear... what a day. Today I mingled with some of the worlds best DJ's, watched the derby live, walked at least a total of 10kms, and still made it home in time for the Logies.

Today I worked backstage at Creamfields as apart of my internship. It was a truly rewarding experience. I helped man the Artist Registration desk, which is where all artists pass through when they arrive on the site. I didn't really know what to expect of the artists on the line-up as I've only really heard of Bloody Beetroots, MSTRKRFT and LMFAO. Well... without going into details let me just put it out there that all artists at Creamfields this year were exponentially awesome! And I'm going to leave it at that. Except for one more thing - "I'm in Miami Bitch" live, went off!

Sitting at the artist desk things can get a little slow when there aren't too many artists arriving. This lead us to seek out other things to do such as listen to In the Pines, read the West Australian 10 billion times, and watch the AFL live on the computer. How did we watch it live on the computer? Well... the AFL have set-up this awesome application on their webpage that mimics the game online. It shows a field with dots and lines representing players and the game play. I don't mean to plug AFL here, but seriously... this is one pretty awesome widget.

I want to include in this post a little word of advice to current Murdoch students; check your email account. Today I checked mine for the first time this semester and I had over 30 e-mails about things such as exam timetables, guild elections, and LMS downtimes. It would have been handy to know these things when they were relevant. I also discovered an e-mail explaining the new Murdoch Encounters campaign in great depth. This is something I've been pondering over for a while. Turns out the fun things outside the library are a part of Murdoch's new branding campaign. I kind of guessed this after seeing a couple of TV ads about Murdoch encounters last week. If you're still a little confused about the whole thing check out the Murdoch site here to grab some more info: http://brand2010.murdoch.edu.au/?cid=bc_sa0001. On this note I would like to say that I feel like Murdoch is everywhere. You can't go anywhere these days as a Murdoch student without seeing Murdoch branded somewhere - I'm mostly referring to music festivals here. The thing is, isn't a little weird to have you're University as a part of both your social life (off campus) and your working life? Just a thought, I'll let you ponder that further.

I hope all is well with everyone. Only 3 weeks left till the end of semester! It's gone so fast. Let's hope next semester goes as fast as this ;)

Jess.