Benjamin Hourigan

Absence

News Flash: I haven’t been posting much lately. Duh. I’m due to submit my PhD thesis on August 17, and I’m about halfway through editing chapter 4 of 8. Sorry, too, to all my friends who haven’t heard much from me recently.

Server Downtime

In response to my server downtime woes, I eventually got a conciliatory email from WorldSuperHost, who had evidently read my post which said I wouldn’t recommend them. They gave me some free days of hosting, but the site and my email access still drops out every now and again. Mind you, it is extraordinarily cheap…

Death to landlines

In a much worse example of customer service, my landline has been dead for the past three days, and has only just been fixed. This was all a result of me switching over to Ozemail’s broadband2 for both my ADSL and phone services. I thought Ozemail gave me the worst customer service ever already, but their poor efforts were finally trumped when I called Telstra to report a line fault. I’d already called Ozemail, and they said that my service hadn’t come over to them yet. When I called Telstra, they said it had, and the phone operator gave me what could only be called the “talk to the hand” script. He even told me that it was against the law for him to tell me anything about my service, but when asked, couldn’t tell me what law that was. No law at all, I suspect, but Telstra’s awful customer service policies.

日本

About an hour ago, I got a call from AACE’s ITR division, telling me that they’d like to offer me the position I applied for teaching English in Japan at one of NOVA’s language schools. NOVA’s language schools. Unlike when I was offered a position on the JET program in July 2003, about 9 months after applying, this time I’ll actually be going. No word on what city yet, though I’m excited no matter where I go. Thanks to everyone at AACE for being totally unlike the JET interviewers and actually having a clue about how to select employees: your interview process was challenging, enjoyable, and meaningful.

Come September, I’m out of here!

Ecto

I’m trying out Ecto to post entries to my blog now. So far, I’m loving it. It’s payware, which I usually don’t go for, but sometimes you just have to pay for good tools. Part of the reason I wasn’t posting much was that Wordpress’s web interface just really isn’t up to scratch, and makes things like posting graphics much too hard.

Today GameGal posted a “Hall of Shame”　featuring E3 Booth babes in skimpy outfits, which prompted me to post the following comment on Joystiq:

I just wish that people (men and women both) would stop spouting tired feminist rubbish and doing things like making “halls of shame”　that make it seem like some terrible crime is being committed every time a guy looks desirously at a woman, or every time a woman puts on a bikini. That’s just biology. And there’s nobody being oppressed here, either, which seems to be the implication any time anyone objects to the “objectification”　of women. Every one of those booth-babes, I’m pretty sure, made a choice that they’d enter into a contract with an employer to put on a costume and prance around E3 in exchange for a fee. So long as they’re not being forced, GameGal, you ought not to have a problem with it. Unless of course you like prohibiting people from making their own choices…

Of course the “evidence of me turning into a cunt”　aspect is tongue in cheek. I personally don’t think my remarks are remotely cuntish. People’s sex should not be a big consideration in how we treat them, or how we think of the way they should be treated. And overall, the most important thing is that people be able to make their own choices. What, GameGal, do you propose we do if the existence of E3 booth babes is so shameful: ban them? Granted, booth babes (in their role, not in their persons) don’t really have a lot to offer the videogames industry, but what are you going to do about it? And who, honestly, do you expect to care, except for university educated feminists (female and male alike) who’ve spent several years being indoctrinated by lecturers and tutors at university who think that 90% of everything is a plot to oppress somebody?