Since today is the 29th of February, this is an opportunity for me to submit a post to rant on how silly our calendar systems can be. Most people on planet earth follow the Gregorian calendar, which I am not sure how and why it became an international standard. I find it extremely stupid that we have to add an additional day to a so-called leap year just to balance the days of the years.

Being a Chinese, I thought the older Chinese calendar systems were superior than the newer Gregorian calendar. However, a lot of feng shui masters disagree on the exact date of every year’s Chinese New Year, because some believe we should follow the Chinese Solar Calendar while others follow the Chinese Lunar Calendar.

The Chinese New Year is often referred to as the Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival. The problem I face with these 2 Chinese calendar systems is I can be considered to be born in the year of the Dog if I follow the Chinese Lunar Calendar or the year of the Rooster if I follow the Chinese Solar Calendar. This is because the spring season did not arrive when I was born according to the Chinese Lunar Calendar, which meant that it was not officially a new year yet. As a result, I feel out of sync with time and I can’t really tell people what animal sign I belong to unless I clarify which calendar you are referring to.

Last year, I discovered a superior calendar system - A calendar I believe should have been the current international standard rather than the Gregorian system. That calendar is the Mayan calendar and it is amazingly simple and perfectly organized.

There are 13 months in a year, 28 days in a month, 4 weeks per month, 7 days in a week and 1 day of renewal to celebrate the new year. The new year starts on 26th July on our Gregorian calendar. With a calendar like this, we won’t have nonsense like leap years and uneven months. Everything would be orderly and predictable and we won’t be out of sync with time.

I also found this free Dreamspeall Mayan Calendar software. It is really nice to look at and it displays all these mystical looking Mayan symbols and tells you what they mean.

This is how it looks like on my Windows machine:

Another thing that really bugs me is daylight saving. Fortunately, we don’t use it in Singapore. However, some states in the USA and Australia do and this is another way we become out of sync with time and out of sync with reality. We have to “lie to ourselves” to make believe it is a certain time when we know it isn’t true. It is not like the problems with the date isn’t enough and we have to screw up the hours of the day as well.

I believe my life would be much more organized if I didn’t have to use the Gregorian calendar. Maybe the world would be a better place if we use the 13-month calendar. However, I doubt this will happen any time soon as it would be a very radical change.

Tagged As: 29th of February, Chinese calendar, Chinese Lunar Calendar, Chinese Solar Calendar, Gregorian calendar, leap years, Mayan Calendar

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I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3 Beta 3. It is slightly faster than the version 2.0.x. I like it very much but I wish they could do the “font smoothing” effect like Internet Explorer 7 does. That would make the fonts look nicer and more readable.

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I submitted my skills assessment application to the Australian Computer Society in mid January. It should take about 4-6 days to reach Sydney, Australia by air mail but they received it and opened up my package at the end of January.

It seems like I missed out on 1 step - I forgot to certify true copies of my reference letters. I do not remember it was a requirement but maybe I overlooked it while I was reading the instructions. Any way, I had to visit a lawyer to get it certified and I mailed them back to the Australian Computer Society last week. They just acknowledged to me via email that they have received the documents.

This is kind of funny because I sent in a copied reference letter and an original reference letter. It seems like they do not accept the original reference letter. Very inflexible indeed. My skills assessment application should take about 12 weeks. I am hoping that it will be done by the end of April 2008 or earlier because the Australian visa application will take about 7 months.

A couple of days ago, the Australian government announced that they will be adding 6000 more visas for skilled workers. That is great news for me because I will have a higher chance of getting one of these visas!

Tagged As: Australia Migration, Australian Computer Society, certified true copies, reference letter, skilled migration, skills assessment, visa

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