MONOLOGUE

Gosh I'm so lazy and now we even have a new Prime Minister of Australia. I feel sorry for K Rudd being back-stabbed by the power brokers and his party.  Nevertheless I don't think the policy choices made by Labor Party as a whole is of any good anyway... Few more years before next election, let's see what will happen.

Australian Liberal Party just got a new leader, because its previous leader Mr. Malcolm Turnbull was agreeing with Rudd government's idea on Carbon Emission Trading Scheme.  Apparently that's a big deal with the Liberals. On the other head, NSW's Labor Party kicked out Mr. Nathan Rees and elected new NSW leader Ms. Kristina Keneally. Although they aren't related, but I find it funny both party has things like this happening at the same time. Tomorrow we're going to have a by-election, and I'm going to vote.  My wife is going to vote in Australia for the first time as well, may be interesting.  Australian election campaign is never "noisy" like Taiwan's, and that is good.

Recently (well one incident not that recent), I had to called into my banks.  One is HSBC for my visa card and one is Westpac for my business account. I must admit, I had better experience with Westpac than HSBC. I contacted both banks for different reasons with different circumstances and mood.  Therefore it is correct to say that I'm biased a bit since the start.  Nevertheless, my experience was that the call centre staff from Westpac are more courteous and speaking softer, making me feel much relaxed and better mood when talking to them, even though it's relating to some account fees I may be paying .  I definitely like to give more of my business to them in the future. Good job to Westapc's Call Centre staff.

And we Face Life.

AGE, TIME, SCAR, LIFE.

I am currently using Pentax K100D.  I will switch to Pentax K-7 when I have the money saved up. I have always thought Pentax won't put out a 135 Full Frame DSLR when they have released a bunch of new DA lens.  When the news of 645D is in development, this made me feel the days of having a Pentax 135FFDSLR will be even further in the future. Why?  Hoya owns Pentax now.  Hoya doesn't want to lose more money (it already lost some last year as we can see from the financial statements). K-7 being it's top of the line DSLR now is it's first try to get more market share back for Pentax Brand.  Every other camera body can be lower model because they will more or less base on the cost down version of K-7/K20D.  Cheaper to develop and when they get onto the market they can sell cheaper and maintain the market share. 645D on the other hand is a very different story. There is NO other major (Canon,Nikon) Japanese camera manufacturer makes such large format digital ca...

Read an interesting news article today about a call by Labor MP Kelvin Thomson that Australia should reduce its intake of migrants so that each migration applicant would be able to go through a much thorough security checks.  According to the article, Mr. Thomson claims that would reduce the chances of letting terrorists successfully coming to Australia. It sounds logical.  Is it going to hold up if we ever going to do what Mr. Thomson says?  I do not know.  However, if my memory serves me right, recently, the terrorists who had been the culprit of London Bomb Attack in 2005 , out of four, three of them were born and raised in the United Kingdom.  Were the security checks done upon their parents/grandparents/ancestors able to find out they were going to bomb London if the checks were 1000 times more thorough?  I doubt it. Link to the reduction of migrant to Australia?  Well I just think Australia has always been a migrant country and should remain t...