I know the temperament on my lenses. They produce different sharpness, colour contrast and bokeh. My favourite lens is still the 28mm f/2.8 AIS manual focusing Nikon I bought from B&H second hand while I was in NYC. The colours are vivid and always contrasty. Get your focus right and you have very sharp images.

* * *

Food for thought. The sharper one’s knife, the lesser the chance one will cut oneself. I bought a stone block a couple of weeks ago from the local Asian groceries to sharpen my cutting knife. Heh, as much as I ogle at the precision steel from the Japanese and German knife makers, I’m quite happy with a $10 cleaver (or el cheapo chef’s knife from the supermarket), a $2.50 stone slab and another $10 sharpening rod. The rod to keep a knife’s edge sharp, the block when it’s pretty blunt to get the edge shaped proper again.

I used to have cutting accidents occasionally when I am cutting without common sense. I’ve always wanted the stone sharpener and now I can run my knife through tomatoes without effort, as well as slice other harder vegetables quickly without them sliding off the board. The added precision from slicing stuff with a sharp knife has produced less kitchen accidents. Heh.

* * *

Work is picking up slightly. So many people to meet, so many ways of doing things. An accounting background is necessary to understand why different accounts are setup, the debits and credits and how they are applied, all these little items that make sense of it all. Not quite the start I expected, but at least I’m comfortable in my own skin when resolving problems, which is good.

* * *

The economy is puzzling. Asset prices (stocks, property, the AUD) can either go up or down and there’s plenty of argument for it to go either way. My Macroeconomics lecturer in Uni mentioned that if you pick up a newspaper, you’d be able to find two conflicting pieces of news on the same page. At times like this it seems terribly true. Stock prices look cheap at the moment, based on the sound financial management of local companies, so you think people would start snapping them up, spurring demand, and driving the prices up again. They also think that they could probably buy it cheaper given the current distrust of the market and are holding out for it to drop further.

Heh, my previous job piqued my interest in financial markets, so I’m always keen to understand why things are unfolding as they are. My new role in the health industry has given me insight into the demographics of Melbourne, and it is an entirely different subject that fascinates me on a different level.

I sometimes wonder as to the modern world, where there are so many procedures and systems in place to govern the rules on how things work. I wonder how did it start and how it evolved into something so archaic and over sized as it has become (the health care system). Lots of questions, little answers.

November is nearly here, last chance to finish my syllabus, do the practice questions and hopefully pass my exam. Heh. Really want to get that out of the way.