Current Mood: Just fine

Hm. Let’s start off with a news flash:

Not that much news value, I know. And I’m going to prove to you just how far my addiction takes me: while doing all the stuff I had to do this week, I kept a notepad file open where I’d jot down, um, notes about topics I wanted to blog about.

Every single time I finish a blog post, as soon as I click ‘publish’, (1) something else pops up in my mind I’d wanted to mention, and (2) I find a typo, but let’s not go there! This is the unedited contents of the mentioned notepad file:

- wages in Gozo
- no more newspapers!
- no more users on forum!!
- sorry Darryn!!!
- sorry Antonio!!!
- Blogroll must be brought up-to-date…
- Inked-In!!

Now, here’s my mammoth post for today – don’t expect any tomorrow, though!!

Wages in Gozo

That’s a no-brainer, really, but I honestly believe that someone ought to point it out to the rest of the world every now and then. A little over two years ago, a Gozitan company was on the look-out for staff. I overheard someone who’s familiar with the management, say that they were flabbergasted why any staff, once they were trained, would leave the company. Well, I’m very tickled to explain it to them: If you pay peanuts and get coconuts, you should consider raising those peanuts before that coconut falls off the palmtree! (*groan* I really don’t know how I came up with this analogy, I apologise!)

I don’t want to compromise the guy who was on the receiving end, by revealing who that peanut company is, not least because sadly it is the norm in Gozo to be paid a pittance in wages – in this particular case the gross hourly wage was exactly Lm 1.49 (€ 3.47) for highly qualified work, after 2 years working for the company! (The minimum wage by law is Lm 1.45/€ 3.38). This is particularly painful in view of ministers boasting how much money our qualified youths are making nowadays. Ouch!

Newsprint

A while ago I had started buying the Times on a regular basis again. The main reason being that in our God-forsaken village you can’t get a paper on a whim but must order it in advance.

I’m under no illusion that I’ll be the rain forest’s saviour, but seeing my kitchen, living room, bedroom and study drowning in assorted newsprint, I’ve decided – once again! – not to give a damn about articles that might not be found on the Times’ website. Especially in view of the repetitive contents that makes me yawn on a regular basis. Just how many articles about Caravaggio’s art can a normal human being stomach??

Registered users – no thank you!

Now, be honest: how many of you have been counting the days until I’d give up on this harebrained idea of mine? Well, you can stop now. I’ll leave the forum there, just for the fun of it, but you won’t be able to register (anyone can still post though!). It all started off very innocently, people registered using more or less realistic names or nicks. As time passed, they became more imaginative, in the sense that they didn’t actually leave it to imagination what they were after or offering, respectively.

At least clicking “delete all selected users” did give me some much-needed satisfaction after all the frustration these a**holes caused me, and subsequently disabling the option of giving people the possibility to register was lovely icing on the cake.
:pitch:

Sorry Darryn!

Darryn has had this awesome idea of an e-zine for Malta (named The Story Line) and had asked me if I’d felt like participating. I said yes, because I really liked to do that. Then things got a little hectic for me, and it was a non-starter on my part. But if you love blogging, have some time to spare, and would like to contribute something Malta-related, please do drop Darryn a line here!

Sorry Antonio!

Now, about this one I’m particularly angry with myself… Antonio had sent me the announcement of this activity well in advance, with the result that first I kept postponing a post about it, until – it finally slipped out of my mind altogether. The event took place yesterday and Friday. Bummer!

Blog Roll

One of these days I’ll give a thorough overhaul to my side bar and blog roll. Many of the links lead to more or less abandoned sites, while many others that ought to be there… well, they aren’t.

Coming to think of it, I also urgently need to streamline my bloglines feeds and throw out those that I hardly ever read at all. At last count, there are 90 (!) feeds and this morning I just clicked frantically on many of those with at least 5 new posts, without really reading them. So much stress for nothing!!

Inked-In

Last but not least – and I promise, I’ll leave you in peace after that – if you are a writer, musician or artist of any kind, consider joining this great new social network, Inked-In! It’s a sort of MySpace but without all the crap that comes with the latter. It’s a great place with – so far – great people! :)
And now it’s time for you to breathe a huge sigh of relief: I’m signing off! Have a great Sunday. And Monday. :)

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Sabine's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.