Westpac has introduced an option for account holders to no longer receive their statements via mail, it’ll alternatively be available online. I was waiting for this moment! How I wish all these paper bills and statements be made available online, sorting and filing these papers do give me headache every month.
Maybe in the future there’ll be a e-wallet kind of thing where all the providers send you their statements/bills to your e-wallet account. And it will also provide a summary on things like how much you spent on mobile, gas, electricity per month, year or any period of time, makes budgetting so much easier. To push it even further when you shop, the docket will also be available online, thus you can also track you spending on shopping! Hm hm.

Just came back from Grad Conf, the general feeling that I got from people is “it’s not enough! too short, too many unanswered questions”, I regret for not coming to MYC this year, would learn heaps more for sure..

Redemption and Mercy Seat were the two main topics that we discussed during the seminar.It’s interesting that in Romans 3, “atonement” which is translated to expiation (RSV) and propitiation (ESV) in its original language is actually “mercy seat”, Grimmo argued that it’s better to be translated that way (mercy seat) because it will encourage us to look at OT background of mercy seat.. My thought was, hmm I thought in one of the MYCs it was argued that propitiation is the better term for atonement (and thus pushing the argument for having ESV) and now apparently mercy seat is even better!.. oh well. Lots of big words were used (ie expiation, propiation) i hope the newcomers in pelita will cope this year MYC. Grimmo rounded up the conference by sharing with us his thoughts about the cross, he warned us that he hasn’t fully structured his talk (it’s still work in progress). We learned about 3 views on what actually happened on the cross (one of them is Penal Substitionary Atonement, another big words..) but Grimmo’s talk was more on the Classical view.

The major encouragement for me came from the Men at Work elective led by Ken Simpson. We spent like 1.5 hours hearing from each other on how we live differently as christians at the workplace. It’s encouraging to hear that these CBS grads do (and strugle to) stay as christians and have the hearts to live as christians and share their faith with workmates. We discussed about: 1. Why do we need to tell our workmates about the gospel? 2. What makes it hard for us to do so? 3. What are the things that will be helpful for us to do so?

At the end of the day, I’m glad that I did come to grad conf, learnt few things altho not sure whether there are aby direct applications from the knowledge learned, got encouraged by ppl who are there. Worth coming for sure, but I’d say if you can go to MYC you’ll get the whole cake not just the icing 😛

Whoa. what a day, I dont like Monday.. work was a bit hectic, rushing last minutes.. then rushing to North Sydney, for an interview with Sandstone Technology, which went quite ok.. but not too confident in the prospect of getting the position.. nThen rushing again to Obor meeting.nCan’t bring myself to watch the recorded 24.. maybe tomorrow.

I’m quite skeptic that Chang will be protected by Australia govn, as I dont think Australia would want to risk its relationship (economically esp) with China.. as someone said on TV, everybody today wants to be a friend of China. Having said so, it’s no secret that China is very heavy handed in its way dealing with threats. I’d hope one day, the communist regime will be thrown away. As for Chang, I pity him, but if I were him, I’d runaway without making a public a
ouncement of his defecting. He’s got a wife and a cute daughter, pity them, well at least I think Ausssie govnt should protect them.

COMP9031 I learned:n- Handling/parsing and using XML in Javan- socket programming, multisocket programmingn- Servlets and JSP, web programming for different browsersn- J2ME, writing midlets to access servletsn- JINI -> self study .. argh!n- RMI -> not quite mastering it yet. n- Minor GUI programming using Swing. n- JXTA, JXME for P2P programming, JXTA is a protocol, not confined to Java.n- JMSn- Java security-> JAAS, JCE