danny’s space

What does $700 buy you these days? Adobe CS3 Master Collection student edition that can’t be activated. And what happens if you try to activate via telephone and stay on the line after the computer voice with an English accent tells you that you’ll be transferred to a customer service representative because your activation was unsuccessful? Yes, you get transferred to India, home to all the customer service representatives in the world.

I spoke with someone named “Jade” (obviously not her real name) who couldn’t help much and had to “escalate” this issue and gave me a reference number. In fact, she insisted that my serial number didn’t need activating, until I finally convinced her that I was looking at an activation screen. Nothing happened for a while, and I called back and spoke to “Gracie” who more helpfully informed me that many CS3 Master Collections were experiencing this problem, and told me to use the 30-day activation grace period until Adobe figures things out.

Not the worst experience with Indian call centres I must say. The time when I had to ring HP support (transferred to India) was relatively pleasant as well.

Hopefully Adobe pulls its fingers out from where the sun don’t shine and fixes this issue before the grace period expires and many users are left with a 25gb lead weight on the hard disks. You’d expect more from a company that sells this kind of software to professionals.

Was talking to Sara a few days ago about Christian hypocrites (for some reason…) and we came to the interesting conclusion that to be a Christian necessitates being a hypocrite. Let me explain.

People who know Christians are often put off by the hypocritical nature of their friends. My dad turned away from Christianity when he was a teenager because of the hypocrisy he saw in his ‘Christian’ friends. For a Christian, being tagged as a hypocrite usually means talking the talk but not walking the walk - professing faith in Jesus but acting no different from the world.

But the current proposition says that Christians are necessarily hypocrites, to some extent at least. Hypocrites need something to be hypocritical about - for example, Christian beliefs and a resultant ‘expected way of life’. The problem for Christians is that we aspire to an (in this life) unattainable standard, who is Jesus Christ himself. So no matter how much ‘good’ we do in our lives, at some level we will be hypocrites because we do not, and indeed cannot, wholly walk the life of Jesus who we proclaim.

Non-Christians don’t have this problem. They don’t have this standard to compare to, and therefore can’t technically be described as hypocritical in this sense. Of course, if they have their own values to adhere to and don’t adhere to them, then the hypocrite label would necessarily apply.

So perhaps being a Christian means being a hypocrite. We just have to make sure that even though we know we can’t attain perfection this side of the second coming, we don’t become complacent and become like the world.

I wonder if there are differing levels of fobbiness. There are those who blatantly refuse to assimilate into Australian society, those who assimilate some aspects, and those who look foreign and may even sound a bit foreign but totally embrace Aussie culture. Surely they can’t all be defined under one umbrella of ‘FOB’. A friend and I were talking about this (of all things…) and we reckon there are FOBs (fresh off the boat) and OFOBs (one foot on boat). FOBs assimilate to varying degrees, but OFOBs refuse to, hanging onto their parent culture for dear life, choosing to talk their native tongue, hang exclusively around fellow OFOBs, and turn people around them into FOBs. While I recognise the importance of parent culture (albeit not as much as some), and that people feel more comfortable around similar kinds (I’m more comfortable around Asians and am given the freak-out by ocker Aussies sporting wife beaters, hairy limbs and beer breath), I think when in Rome, do as the Romans. As much as you can bear. And if you can’t bear it at all, don’t be offended when people label you as a FOB, or indeed an OFOB. Yes, according to Wikipedia, there are non-offensive ways to use this classification.

When is fruit not a fruit? When it’s an apple.

After watching Border Security a few days ago (painful though it is - the pace is slower than Grey’s Anatomy) I thought the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service was actually doing Australia some good.

But after trying to legitimately import some biological material from the US, AQIS is more of a disservice than a service. Protecting what matters my butt. If I had tried to import the material illegally, it would have made it through fine. But no, I had to go the legal path, and declare everything. And just because there isn’t a word perfect match between “Arabidopsis clones” and “Genetic material” (scientists out there would understand that they are the same thing), my import permit was rejected and my parcel is scheduled to be destroyed tomorrow.

Great. Now my research will be further delayed, trying to communicate with the sender in the US to convince them to write the correct thing on the packing slip so that AQIS doesn’t chuck a spaz and reject the import of apples when the import permit allows all fruits. Some knowledge would come in handy, instead of “duhhhh, I tink dis isn’t same same”.