Tom Cruise is even less popular than Saddam Hussein.
 
The Mission Impossible star was voted the person people would least like to go camping overnight with in a recent poll.
 
The actor took a massive 41 per cent of the vote in the survey, conducted by Stuff magazine, ahead of the Iraqi dictator.

I like Oprah. I don't like Tom Cruise. But I did get a laugh out of this movie.

I just took this pregnancy test and it seems I'm pregnant, I'm going to have a green eyed baby boy with black hair, and the father of the child is Bill Clinton. Amazing what they can do on the net these days, isn't it?

I'm going to have to put a CAPCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) on my mailforms. I keep getting automated spam for all kinds of complete crap. I've started banning IP addresses (because my mailform tells me the precise IP address the mail came from, making it easy to do), but I can't keep doing that indefinitely.

It's ticking me off, it really is.

And it's not even that my mail isn't filtered, because it certainly is. It's that when I see the header from a mailform I instantly recognize it and, previously, I was able to know what it was about AND that it wasn't spam. Now I can tell it's spam (because they're idiots and make it obvious even before I've opened the message), but it's caught in my spam trap or something and I have to retrieve it. These idiot moron sleaze bastards are robbing me of my most precious commodity, time. They're also stealing something I can't really afford to lose, and that's patience (I've got precious little of that and I need it, dammit).

So, I hereby put a curse on anyone and everyone who sends spam through any of my mailforms. May the annoyance and irritation that you willfully inflict on others return to you threefold. So be it.

ACK. There are only two entries on this thing at the moment (well, before this is posted). That means I've been neglecting my weblog.

Okay, well, I haven't had much to say, I suppose. I've been busy, busy, busy trying to kick my business into a higher gear, and it was a long holiday weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday are both public holidays in Australia), and then uhm... I dunno. Time just keeps slipping away from me.

I tend to be somewhat... obsessive. Not in the true psychiatric sense of it, but in the "concentrating very hard to the exclusion of other stuff" sense. I've been putting a tremendous amount of thought and concentration and time and effort into the whole selling thing, hanging around on the PowerSeller bulletin board and learning, learning, learning.

One of the things I learned is that while 99.5% of people you deal with are going to be fine, that one in a five hundred is a complete nutjob. I have therefore acquired a P.O. box in the General Post Office in the heart of Melbourne (this is so that people can't guess my suburb), and Andrew, who convieniently works in the CBD (well, it's convienient for this, anyway, it's actualy not that convienient as it's about an hour's commute each way), goes around and picks up the mail (we pay extra for an email notification system that tells you when they're new mail there for you).

It seems that this particular P.O. box previously belonged to the owner of a night club called "The Kittycat Club". We looked it up, and it's a night club with an early 60s theme. Looks interesting, but I'm annoyed with getting their mail all the time. I mean, I don't even drink beer, let alone want to buy it, and one of the people who keep sending us mail there is a major beer company.

The other thing I've done is get myself an extra phone. It's a mobile phone with a pre-paid SIM card. The current charge is good for 60 days, and after that I can top it up with more hours, and I intend to do so with time that won't expire for a full year (because I don't expect to be using it that often). The phone sits in my desk drawer, and gets turned on during business hours and turned OFF the rest of the time.

What, you may wonder, is that for? Well, you're required to have valid contact information on eBay, especially if you're a seller. Unfortunately, anyone can request your details, and I don't want just anyone to have my home phone number (I guard that jealously! We're not listed and I like it that way, although we still get telemarketing calls, grrr). So the second mobile phone is so that customers can contact me if they need to and so can eBay, but so that I can turn it OFF during non-business hours and I'm not handing out my phone number (my personal mobile or my home phone) to random people. Happy to talk to customers if it's required, but only on MY terms, thank you very much.

I've also gone ahead and gotten an RBN (Registered Business Name). I've had the ABN (Australian Business Number) for some time now and it's been sufficient for the stuff I've needed to do, but I want to get a business bank account, and to do that I need the RBN. I put Andrew's name on it as well as mine, so he can sign contracts and do business stuff as needed (he does a fair bit of stuff behind the scenes, actually; he's MUCH more patient with some things than I am, and much better at negotiation).

So, that's where I am, basically. At the moment, I'm working up as many listings as I think will be good for Mother's Day sales, although I would have expected to have more Mother's Day type things going already. I'm told reliably that around Mother's Day the perfume selling goes wild, and I'm pretty well stocked up in anticipation of that, but they're sure taking their time about it. Haven't had a perfume sale in weeks.

Then again, I got a lot of last minute Valentine's Day sales, too, so who knows...

The 2006 Stupidest FanFic Writer Award Gets Retired Early

I've mentioned that I love the Weird Al Yankovic spoof of "I Want It That Way", which is "eBay". If you haven't heard it, here's your chance, and you can see it with some amusing and entertaining videos, as well!

In no particularly order...

eBay Song 1 (goofy but entertaining)
eBay Song 2 (anime style, fairly dark)
eBay Song 3 (nearly unbelievable)
eBay Song 4 (where'd they GET all that stuff?!)

The U.S. administration is stepping up plans for a possible air strike on Iran, despite publicly pushing for a diplomatic solution to a dispute over its nuclear ambitions, according to a report by influential investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.
 
Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

This collection of words is fascinating reading. Lots of pages, but lots of interesting stuff to read!

Nobody actually tagged me. I just felt like doing it.

Where Was I One Year Ago?

Living the same place I am now, out four days a week for play group, early intervention, and two kids in pre-school (on different days).

Where Was I Five Years Ago?

Living in the city (okay, technically, in one of the inner suburbs, but still REALLY close to the heart of the city of Melbourne), trying to conceive (made Miranda within a few weeks). Andrew was working for home for an American company, and therefore sharing my office, which I found.... uncomfortable (I love him, but I don't love sharing an office with him).

Where Was I Ten Years Ago?

Teetering on the edge of sanity, floundering through a complete breakdown. Seriously, desperately, profoundly unhappy. Not sane, very, very unstable and very, very unwell. (Ended up in the psych ward at the end of the year, in fact.)