The House with the Amazingly Excellent Fridge

I only just found a house in time for uni! I’m in with two brothers in the north eastern side of the city, with roughly a 30 minute trip to uni. (Hopefully I can get my bike fixed so I can ride it on what is apparently a 20 minute trip. I completely destroyed the front brakes early last year when trying to move them from one bike to another.)

I’d been searching on the student housing services database in early February, and rang up about 15 different places. (I’d been hoping to find someone I’d know or a friend of someone I know.) Half of them were already taken and a few others I couldn’t get onto. I made four appointments to see rooms to stay in. The first was nice and easy, met up at 8:45, had a good look round. The two guys there seemed friendly enough and the cleaning system seemed organized enough to cause any trouble. The next person didn’t turn up where we were supposed to meet, and I realized that this was the only place I’d forgotten to write down their phone number. Just after that, someone from high school called me up because they were searching for a third person for their house, I agreed to this, even though it was more in the south west, rather than the northern side I was hoping for. They did have a house, apparently, but for some strange reason this fell through. (haven’t actually asked why this happened.) But after a bit of discussion I decided I’d rather just look on the north side on my own. I was just got onto the people for the place I’m staying in now just on time. They were a loose friend’s brother, which I was glad it was not just a complete random!

Moving into the house was a little crazy as well. The landlord lives in NSW, so I had to transfer money into his bank account. Getting back onto the guy who was already living in the house proved much more difficult though. Couldn’t get onto him Thursday or Friday, and since I was hoping to move my stuff in there on Saturday I was a bit worried. Luckily I finally got him Saturday morning, so I was able to come later that evening so I could make a second trip the next day.

So far I’ve had trouble with the hot water, so I’ve had to have a few cold showers. With this system you need to turn the water up enough so that the heater will actually heat the water. I’ve only just figured it out, since my house mates were saying to turn it up slowly. It’s obvious I must be used to having the tap on slower than them. Our fridge is also about 20 degrees Celsius! I don’t even want to describe what the milk smelt like – gives me nightmares!

I just also bought myself a second hand laptop from Graysonline.com.au. Only problem is the system can’t seem to detect the wireless network card on itself. Been installing a few drivers that I’ve been advised on from tech support, and some other updater programs which would work better at home with an Internet connection that is fairly unrestricted. I’m still thinking there’s something wrong with it as I can’t find anything that looks like a wireless card in the device manager of my computer. Luckily the laptop is refurbished and came with a 3 month warranty, but it will still be an inconvience for a few weeks, considering I got it for uni! If you do buy from the site just make sure you read about their delivery method by courier, as it’s preferable if you are at your delivery address during all business hours.

And finally, it’s that time of the year again – text book buying and selling time. I got a second hand book for probability for $65, advertised on TextBookExchange.com.au. All my readers and lecture notes were naturally new, but my books for History and Philosophy of Mathematics I decided to buy new, figuring a subject that was run once with a tiny class a few years ago would have left little second hand books around, which was shown on Text Book Exchange. For my other books I’ll just borrow from the libraries, since they each suggest a range of books, and buy if I feel the need for having one at home. I’ve already found someone to sell my maths books to, and still looking for someone to buy my ancient physics books and become the 5th owner. I’ll just keep slashing the price until it sells.

What I am wondering though is why Text Book Exchange is so hard to use at the University? Have the university put a cookie filter so students can’t log in? Surely this is going just a bit too far in their ‘IT facilities can’t be used for financial gain’? I sort of find it hard to believe. But I also don’t see why that site should be strange when at university and fine everywhere else. Something must be going on! This is simply a matter of students trying to reduce their immediate education costs at a time when they often don’t have heaps of spare cash just lying around. This has made some first years I know of even feel that the university would disapprove of simply using their university e-mail just to get in contact with someone advertising a text book. Has the university really gone out of their way just to block people looking to buy second hand text books on the Internet? Or is this just a coincidental glitch with the system?

Now to find myself a job so I can save up a little and not worrying about every little single thing that I buy…