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The new financial year has kicked off, again.

It’s always difficult having July 1st mid-week. Earlier this week was the struggle of finishing off the fin year and trying to make the overall year sales target (which I missed, just). And after that was over, Wednesday kicks in and everything’s all new again.

Wednesday was tough – two of account managers at work were made redundant. Not a happy mood in the office at all. The restructure of people in general has meant that I am only working with 8 acct managers this year, and not 14. Huge bonus for me. But overall, targets are set to go up, and I’m impatiently waiting to find out what they are next week.

Today was all about the sales incentive plan – all the ins and outs on how we get paid commission, what the rules and changes are, etc. And it was also the day when the customer portfolios were announced. Good in some respects, cos some customers came up from what we call “mass market” to be account managed, so there’s lots of opportunity to start selling to them. But it sucks cos some bigger customers moved up, and annoyingly, two of them I had big data networks on the table for. And now I’ve got 30 days to close that sale, otherwise I don’t get paid for it.

But I did enjoy a sleep in and slow start to today, which my new manager wanted us to do. And tomorrow is an outdoor BBQ, meeting, fun type day for all the account managers. That starts at 10:30, and I’ll head there briefly before heading into the city for a farewell lunch for my previous manager.

And then next week will start to pick up, I’m sure.

Why do 2DayFM feel the need to speed up songs that they play?

I know there may be multiple answers to that, and without working within the station, we may only be able to guess: to make the songs more “listenable”, to make them fit a certain timeframe… others?

What makes me very annoyed is essentially their arrogance – what right do they think they have to alter an artist’s song just to meet their own criteria?

“Oh, this song is about 24 seconds too long… we’ll need to increase the BPM by about 2 or so to make it fit then.”

No! A musician or band has slaved over that song for days, hours, weeks, months! And 2DayFM reckon they know better?! Ultimately, I guess, in the name of more listeners, and thus, more money. People may argue that it’s such a minor speed increase that you don’t notice it (and I’ve heard it said that the speed increases are so minor, and so to most, just subliminal, but make you want to listen more, or something like that).

But it’s still a speed increase. Anyone who has listened to the song a few times as it was intended to be played should be able to notice it. I certainly did this evening when I heard it yet again. (I’ve heard it the very few times I’ve listened to 2DayFM, which worries me that it happens with nearly every second song.)

I guess for 2DayFM being a radio station isn’t about playing music anymore; it’s solely about making money and doing whatever is required to make that happen… no matter what.

You, 2DayFM, are arrogant, heartless, money-hungry scabs.

Having one of those days where I kinda just want it to be over.

It’s the end of the fin year today, and that means the last day to try and make my yearly sales target. Although we have monthly targets that are important, from a yearly review point of view, making 100% or more of your overall year target (the sum of each monthly target) is very important.

As of right now, I’m so close. But realistically, to make the required gap in just one day, or 5 hours, is a big ask. And I just can’t see it happening, and I’m running out of sales opportunities to try and get closed to make it.

Very frustrating to be so close.

And change kicks in tomorrow… my manager, who I’ve worked for for about 3 and a half of the 5 years I’ve worked at Telstra, moves onto a new role tomorrow, and I get a new boss. She’s fine to work for, and we get on well… but it’s still change.

I think I’m just in one of those moods where I just want it all to be over and get back to a “normal” work day. Knowing that a 3 day Blue Moutains holiday with my wife is only a week away doesn’t help.

I’m sporting this icky cold that isn’t crap enough to keep me bed-bound, but is bad enough to be very, very annoying and cause me to sniffle and sneeze most of the day. At least it’s finally decided to be a cold today – yesterday I was just feeling generally bleh, like my body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be sick or not. That was on top of some severe fatigue… but thankfully, that seems to have passed.

The way your body handles virus’ is sometimes totally weird.

The end of the financial year is coming, and it really can’t come soon enough. Sales have been so unpredictable this month, and a couple of days ago, I’d pretty much lost all hope of even getting to 70% of my target (and I needed to hit this month’s target in order to make my overall fin year target). But quite a few little sales have fallen, and I reckon there’s still hope… but it’ll be close. Very annoying not knowing that any big sales will fall to get me over the line, and just relying on lots of little ones. But we’ll just see how the next 3 days of the month go.

Dad came over this morning, bright and early at 8:30. We enjoyed a nice plunger coffee together while wandering around outside the house talking about various things that would be good to fix or change… And I enjoyed pointing out all the oddities of this house to him. One thing we did discover (which I hadn’t noticed before now) is the gigantic oil tank on the side of the house (the opposite side to the carport). After putting 2 and 2 together, I worked out that it was the tank for what must’ve been an old oil heater that was in the lounge room. (Looking closely on the lounge wall, you can see a patched up square on the floor, plus an unused “chimney” of sorts on the outside wall.) Very interesting! But also exceedingly annoying because it’s still half full of oil, and it really should be drained before it rusts through and starts leaking.

Anyway, we got started on installing the TV antenna – for some reason, this house never appears to have had one! The cable has had to run down the outside of the front wall, but having found some leftover paint in the shed for the house colour, I’ll just paint over it to blend it in. We also talked about and worked on some of the side lighting of the house where our outdoor setting is. For some reason, the cheapo Bunnings light that I bought had died a couple of weeks ago – but it somehow resurrected itself when Dad was here. Annoying. So we wired that up better than I had, and put some of those nice “cool-white” energy saver lamps in all the outdoor lights. I love the light those bulbs create.

The main light that I bought that sits over the BBQ and table is still just running on an extension cord and to a powerpoint, so we worked out a plan of attack for sometime in the very near future to install a second light, and then connect both of them up to a switch on the side of the carport for an ultimate outdoor lighting set up :)

Happy boy I am.

And all done with time to spare before the V8s begin in the NT this afternoon. Ahhh.

Work is tough at the moment. After a few months of some solid results, I had to have some decent sales in June to finish off the fin year hitting my overall target (yes, monthly targets are important, but for my yearly review, hitting the year target is most important).

Things started off this month quite promising – a big network opportunity for a mining company to link their Sydney office to their mine, and then link both back to a head office in Beijing. Huge stuff. But as the month has gone on, that deal has taken longer to come together, and the chances of getting a signature this month are slim – not just cos the customer isn’t keen, but pricing and contracts for something like this take longer than usual, as you’d imagine.

And the usual simple ADSL connections and data cards that usually just flow through from different customers to make up a large chunk of my sales numbers each month are just seeming a bit slow. And there’s been a couple of other reasonable sized sales that have just faded away in the last fortnight. All in all, quite frustrating.

But I wrote the numbers that I needed (with 8 working days in the month left) up on my whiteboard at my desk tonight before I left the office. It’s a fairly huge gap… but I ain’t giving up. And as soon as I make up that H2 number, some serious commission kicks in thanks to an incentive they gave us in January for this half of the year. So that looks promising as well.

We’ll see how things pan out.

In other news… I still have bandit.fm credit thanks to Commbank, and so with Chase That Feeling in my head, and really loving that song, I bought the Hilltop Hoods’ new album. I’ve appreciated a couple of their songs before now – always loving their sampling and strong beats – and so thought it was about time I gave a whole album a go. Listening to bits of it now, but going to give it a proper listen tomorrow morning.

Had a pretty huge weekend. And one that involved very little handyman work finally!

Although, Saturday was pretty busy with house stuff. We had Debbie’s friends and their partners coming over in the evening, so I spent the morning and part of the arvo cleaning the house up properly for pretty much the first time. And I’ve loved walking into the lounge room everytime since – it looks so clean and awesome! Everything has its place and is put away.

I did do a bit of handyman work though – I bought a $10 outdoor light from Bunnings to hang overlooking the table and BBQ. I screwed it up into the carport, and then ran a cord across to the shed where there’s a powerpoint. All looked fine. I turned the light on at dusk, and then noticed about 20 minutes later that it was off. Confused, I headed out to work out what was going on. Essentially – the light is dead. And there’s a smell of burning around the light. Not cool. Could be the light… but given that the power running over to the shed doesn’t actually have any earth (not really an issue, cos it’s just powering lights), I reckon there’s a chance the powerpoint might’ve been wired badly.

But Saturday night was great. It was the first time we had a proper formal gathering of people at our place. We BBQd some meat, people brought salads, and Shell Keith brought awesome brownies. And then we played some Spicks & Specks board game too.

And then Sunday rolled around, and Sam and Lachie arrived at our place for a fun Blue Mountains adventure! We picked up Debbie from her milkshake date with Grant, and we headed up to Leura for some lunch. We wandered around Leura for a while – no one else really cared where we ate, but for some reason, I was really picky yesterday. Eventually we sat down at the Post Cafe. Had a really nice club sandwich that arrived very, very quickly, which was impressive considering how busy they were. We went for a wander in the Leura Lolly Shop, and then went for some driving around the back of Katoomba. And then it was time to head back to Sydney.

Can’t wait to head back up there in a few weeks. I won an auction over at travelauctions.com.au about 6 weeks ago for 3 nights’ accomodation up in Blackheath for only $250. But in the moving of houses, I misplaced the voucher! But just got an email back from the company with a reissued voucher – they’re a good bunch.

Guess it’s that time of a Monday when I should start doing some work. There’s a lot that needs to get done if I’m going to make my overall financial year target – it’s not out of reach, but it’s gonna be hard.

I only got up super early to listen to a keynote live once – that was the announcement of the iPhone 3G. Brilliant. The rest, I’ve just read about in the morning.

The WWDC keynote a few days ago turned out to be quite awesome – new iPhone, iPhone 3.0 software update, new MacBook Pros, Safari 4 out of beta, and Snow Leopard announced. I may be totally wrong, but I reckon that’s one of the biggest keynote presentations ever. I wouldn’t call myself an Apple blogger… but being a lover of all things Apple, I thought I might share some thoughts on the exciting things…

iPhone 3G S
I’m not overly excited about it. Yeah, it’s got a better camera, and yeah it’s got 7.2Mbps download speed. But it still has 384kbps upload speed (will HSUPA [1.9Mbps upload] arrive next release?). The processor is supposedly better, but I’m not all that fussed by the current one. I might just hang out another 12 months – the odds are in my favour that there’ll be another new iPhone around June/July 2010, and my contract would be up then!

iPhone 3.0 software
This one is awesome. Been looking forward to it since details were leaked a few months ago. Tethering is cool; but for me, it’s only cool because it’s so very easy on a Mac. Copy Paste is the greatest! Landscape keyboard is awesome – but I think we’ve all gotten used to living without it. And the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” and remote wipe are very cool as well (there’s a good demo of it here). And free too. Huzzah!

New MacBook Pros
Always happens – you buy a new Mac, and a better one is just around the corner. That doesn’t bother me so much (although the better battery does a little), because it is always bound to happen with Apple. What’s annoying is that in the US they’re cheaper. So by the time they get here, they may be cheaper as well! Oh well.

Safari 4 non-beta
Pretty happy about this – the cosmetic changes are cool. And it just is so, so fast. And hopefully all the little bugs (like the one where you can’t pin all the windows of the “Top Sites” section) are now gone.

Snow Leopard announced
This one definitely rivals the 3.0 iPhone software as my favourite bit! And only $US29 to upgrade makes it even sweeter. Apple published a cool list of features on their site. Some of my most looked forward to: faster wake up and shutdown times, Quicktime X, Mail.app improvements (and Exchange support built in is brilliant to kick Microsoft a bit harder), and the fact that it takes up 6GB less of space is cool too.

I am liking that Apple is taking bigger steps to becoming better. It’s sad that they have to be so hugely far ahead of all their competitors as far as technology goes to even be noticed… and even then, people don’t think they’re any good.

And they just seem to do these things so easily, and churn out even better products every year. Love it.

This evening I headed off to church, knowing that it was going to be the start of a new DVD based series. Kinda went in with almost no pre-conceptions, which was good. And it was the start of something pretty cool I reckon – the content was good, but I’ll get to that in a second. James used it as a chance to remark that sometimes church is just a consumer product – we sit there and listen, and don’t have much involvement usually. So this week was a chance to change that, and for us to watch some DVD clips, chat with the people we were sitting with, and then share some ideas with everyone.

And in a few weeks, a vision of mine will hopefully see reality, where we have “church” by still spending some time singing and stuff, but then sitting round some tables and listening to a talk of some description (if it’s going to be happening in a few weeks, it’ll presumably be DVD clips), and then spending time chatting – perhaps about the “sermon”, perhaps about your week, perhaps about other stuff that revolves around God, perhaps not. The whole idea was to have that post-church chatting time as a sort-of part of the service, to encourage that fellowship. The idea gained life in a kind of selfish way: I learn best by talking with others, and often really struggle to take away something from listening to a sermon for 30-40 minutes. But I would hope that others would be able to gain something from it too. And it will be very exciting to see a vision come to life.

As for this week and the content, it was all based around consumerism. It was a DVD series called The Trouble With Paris (and it has a website here). Excitedly, it was an Australian made and produced series! This first episode got us thinking about hyper-reality, and how we live in this false sense of reality. It also talked briefly about the emotion behind our purchase of products, and a bold statement that advertising has almost become an unspoken religion. Very true though.

There was absolutely nothing to bring it all back to God in this week’s series. A little annoying, I thought. But I am very keen to see this series through and be a part of it right through the 4 weeks.

I’m very aware of my consumerism. In reality, I have a lot of money, and I really like spending it. I know that I really have to keep myself in check about the reasons of why I buy things – the emotion behind it, or the appearance. And the reason I want to keep myself in check is that I have made the decision to make God #1 in my life, and I don’t want to let my consumerism take over – I don’t want to live my life for the things I buy, or the car I drive, or the house I own (no matter how awesome my house and street are!).

So I’m very much looking forward to being further challenged about my consumer life and living it as a follower of Jesus.

Last night was a good time of hanging out with bible study people. Ben was round in the late arvo to put a bunch of wood, heat beads and metho into the spit roast and get a decent fire going, and then after a little while, the spinning meat went on to cook.

We took it off about 2 and a half hours later, being sure that the two chickens and kilo or so of lamb would be done. The lamb was great; the chickens were barely even warm. So strange. But I guess the coals just weren’t hot enough. Still, after some discecting of the chickens and some quick grilling on the BBQ, we had a bit of a laugh and enjoyed some good meats, along with some awesome other foods.

But I swear that even now, 24 hours later, I can still smell the smoke from the spit on me. It’s awesome, don’t get me wrong… but I just wonder if I’m crazy or not.

Tomorrow marks 3 weeks of being a Westleigh resident – woo! And hopefully on the weekend, we’ll celebrate by going out to Mulgrave to a furniture warehouse to buy a gorgeous 8 seater dining table and new coffee table; both in the same stain of wood. The dining table will live in our back room, turning that into a nice formal dining area. And I will be excited about a coffee table with drawers under it to stash all the junk in meaning that the top will stay clean! That’s the theory anyway.

And sometime soon I’ll need to get the outdoor setting down off the grass – it’s been in two straight weeks of rain, so I think it’s had enough now. I just need to wait for it to dry completely so I can clean it and then oil it. That will be a fun weekend of work!

Someone said to me a little while ago, “you don’t have weekends anymore – you just have time away from the office to maintain your house.”

It’s been two weeks since we moved in. We met one of our next-door neighbours within a few days after her cute little Jack Russell Terrier decided to come visiting. But the other side neighbours are on a bit of an angle, and are actually on the next street, so it’s hard to see them if we both happen to be out the front at the same time.

But yesterday, as I searched for any garden taps in our yard (as it turns out, there is only two, and both live right down the front – annoying!), I saw our neighbour out the front, and waved, and went over to say hi. He’s a pretty tops guy who definitely loves to chat. He’s probably in his 50s or 60s, but the cool thing was that he was one of the first people in the street, and so knows a whole lot of history about our street!

He explained that our steet (and the few surrounding) were the first part of Westleigh that was built in the early 70s. He pointed out some houses that still had the original owners in them, and could even show me the houses in the street that were built by certain architects/builders. Very cool. I found out that we’re only the third owners of our house, which is super cool, and that it seems we’re starting the next generation of families in the street, as most of the original owners were like him who brought up their kids in the street, and they’ve now moved on and out of the area.

It was pretty awesome just chatting with him (and his wife later on) for a good hour or so about the street and how friendly and quiet it was. And just hearing about all the different families. And even finding a couple of small world stories too.

I know my friends are getting sick of hearing it, but I really do love our street and our new house :)

I’ve pretty much had enough of Optus’ iPhone coverage. Each has their own opinion I guess, but in my mind, the coverage is crap, and it definitely isn’t getting any better.

The only reason I went with Optus when the iPhone came out was because Telstra’s data plans were still ridiculously expensive in my opinion ($29/80MB at the time), and I couldn’t justify spending that much on my personal mobile. And I just thought, ‘well, their coverage can’t be that bad, can it?’ The answer was yes, it can be that bad. The CBD is especially hopeless.

And now that Telstra has better data pricing ($29/300MB or $10 for 150MB), I would be keen to go there with my iPhone, and take advantage of distinctly better coverage.

So I’ve started the process of getting out of my contract. Don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I’m giving it a go based on my amount of complaints about coverage and usability that I’ve got noted on my account in their systems. I spoke to some people at Optus, and the lady was actually really nice and upfront. Basically there was nothing she could do about waiving my contract termination fee, and she just suggested I write to their Customer Relations Group who would look into it. But warned me that it can take up to a month for them to reply.

I was fine with that, wrote them a letter, and have waited. It was mid-April when I wrote.

So now I’ve started to wonder where my reply is. I called Optus today to check, and the lady put me on hold, and then came back and said that her manager said it was actually a minimum of 14 weeks before I should expect a reply.

14 weeks?! They expect people to think it’s reasonable for them to take nearly 4 months to respond to a simple complaint letter? That is utterly ridiculous!

Even more annoying, if you want to escalate something to the Telecommunications Ombudsman, they won’t really be willing to look into your case until you’ve got documented attempts to resolve the complaint within your telecommunications provider… which you have to wait 14 weeks for.

Pathetic.

Let’s be clear: this is all personal opinion and frustration about my mobile provider. And my goodness, they suck on so many levels.

I do love parliament and the sledging that goes on:

“Last week, Clare Werbeloff shot to international fame after she went to extraordinary lengths to get herself in front of the camera … to get that few minutes of fame,” [Anthony Albanese] said.

“But unfortunately when you look for the substance it wasn’t there … just like the leader of the opposition.” [smh]

And this morning, Merrick & Rosso were talking about sledging in sport. And I thought this one was a beauty:

Mark Waugh: “Look who it is! Mate, what are you doing out here? There’s no way you’re good enough to play for England.”

James Ormond [little known English cricketer]: “Maybe not, but at least I’m the best player in my family.”

So Saturday morning things got a bit exciting – Grant rang me from Hervey Norman in Belrose letting me know that the Rock Band Instrument Pack was on sale for $150. It had the drums and guitar and mic! It’s different to Guitar Hero that I wanted the drums for… but just different songs, and slightly different game.

Debbie was ok with me buying it, and so during the afternoon we headed out to Belrose for me to pick it up. And later on in the afternoon, I unpacked the box. And as I unpacked things, I realised that I was yet to find the game disc. And once the box was emptied, there was no game disc anywhere. And it was at this point that I noticed the label on the front of the box saying “Game Disc Not Included.”

Whoops.

I did some hunting around game shops in Hornsby, but was hearing from all of them that the game had been discontinued for Wii. Not the instruments, just the game. [Further research tonight has shown that that's probably because Rock Band 2 is due out here soon.]

But eBay comes to the rescue… and I picked it up there for $22! Should have it in my hands ready to make use of my new drum kit on Wednesday. And then I’ll be able to enjoy more songs. And convince Debbie that I want to buy Rock Band 2, and Rock Band Unplugged, and all the other Rock Band titles. :)

Glad to see I haven’t lost my teenage gamer nerdiness.

Another weekend has arrived. The second weekend in our new place… and enough is unpacked that there’s all little jobs here and there to do around the house.

Our awesome wooden outdoor setting needed to be assembled. It needs to be soaked with water so it can ‘bleed’, and then be oiled. So I thought seeing as there was a lot of rain, let’s let nature do it. So this morning in a break between showers, I got out there and assembled the four chairs. And then then sun came out. Super annoying. BOM says there should be a shower or two today – I just how those 2 showers haven’t already been this morning… that would suck.

We’re heading off to Ikea shortly to find a small set of drawers to live in our built-in wardrobe. Don’t know what it is with us, but our places don’t have drawers! In Normanhurst, there was none in the kitchen. In Westleigh, none in the bedrooms.

And apparently, there’s a full band version of Rock Band for the Wii out at Hervey Norman Belrose for just $149. Wonder if Debbie will let me get it…