Self disabling guilt

G'day. I finally twigged as to why I'm so much more capable when away from home (or at least I'm finally putting it down, I guess I've really known it somewhere in the back of my head for years): When I'm at home I am to some degree dependent on my mum for support (less so if she's not around but it's still the case while I live in her house). I feel guilty about being dependent on my mum, but justify this by the fact that I'm sick. Because being sick supports my justification for being dependent on my mum, I subconsciously make myself sicker than I would be if I was living away from home & completely independent.

It's not moving to Melbourne or Crescent Head that I need to do, it's being independent & moving away from home. While I have known this for years I haven't been able to figure out how to do it because Sydney is so expensive I would need to be working to move out, hence the thoughts of moving cities, first to Crescent Head & then to Melbourne, which would only work if I was working which I am healthy enough to do when I'm not at home, although moving to another city banking on the fact that being independent will enable me to find the health I need to work while cutting myself off from almost my entire network of support (replacing hundreds of friends with just a handful) is taking a big risk. All's I need to do is to work one day a week here in Sydney & I can move out of home. I calculated this while moving to a friend's place in September 2000, when I was working part time as a volunteer in my church office & managed to keep this up into January 2001 before the deficit in my income forced me to move back home & my health immediately collapsed. Ironically this was just about the time I felt my run of health had lasted long enough for me to look for some part time work.

Although things are more expensive now, the pension has gone up slightly & I have my part time income from Brackets & Jam, which means I would only need to work 1 day a week to move out of home. This is the correct order to do things in without risking my falling down & having a relapse of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: (1) find 1 day a week paid work, which I could do now & is sustainable long term; (2) move out of home into the Eastern suburbs where almost all my friends live & I have a tremendous support network; (3) after this my health should pick up enough to finish off my upgrade to a B.Min. at Tabor, work a couple or a few days per week, &/or move to Melbourne, however I would be doing those things from a position of strength instead of just hoping things worked out & that I didn't fall flat on my face.

In Other News:

I just completed a child protection course which was very interesting & gives me a few ideas for things we need to implement as part of Beranghi, although I did it because of helping out with Sunday School. I'll also need it to take up teaching Scripture in school, which is another project I am undertaking.

I just completed the first part of the Basic Course in Prayer Ministry at Elijah House again, doing the sound for them. I did a training day on the PA at church as part of being the volunteer in charge of sound recordings at the church & I am now quite handy with it. One of my projects is to get trained on the desk at the Redfern Community Centre. I've inadvertently gone on my way to being a sound engineer.

I'm putting together a CD of all the songs I've written which I can still remember & calling it "Unripe Fruit," which will be descriptive. I've got about 9 songs, 5 of which are relatively new & 4 of which appeared on a tape I did with 12 of my songs on it that got lost years ago, so about 8 songs I've written have been lost to antiquity. Oh well, they weren't my best songs or I'd have been playing them.

Between all this & getting efficient enough to do a really decent job as Brackets & Jam's administrator I'd better be getting healthier or I won't be able to manage it all anyway.

Blessings,
Joe :-)

A grumble, avoiding phishers & incompetence

grumble

After I got back from my friend's funeral in Bowen (not Mackay which was where I was going to visit him while he was alive), I came back & found my computer wasn't working. Because it was pouring rain that week & I don't have a car it wasn't until the next week I could put it in at the shop, which turned out to be a blown motherboard & CPU which required me to re-install Windows XP once I had them replaced which all took another week, then I found my original install disk has become corrupted & it won't install 2 dlls I need to connect to the internet, so I'm using a computer I bought for a friend who then changed their mind & using floppy disks to swap the information back & forth. It's a bit of a pain when dealing with new email on this computer, old email on my main computer & files on both computers.

Also my phone wasn't ringing & I never got the calls when people rang & the voicemail service hasn't been 100% reliable; & my mobile phone would never divert to my voicemail service so when it was off (most of the time), out of area, or when I didn't answer no one could get through; & when it does ring it's so quiet I often miss it. When I did ring people I went for a couple of weeks of getting busy signals or ringing when people weren't home about 90% of the time, so I was feeling a bit isolated for a while at a time when I was a bit depressed over the death of my friend.

Phishing:

I verge on the paranoid when it comes to email. Recently I did a survey on Microsoft's web site to see if I could spot phishers & although I got all the fakes I also picked several genuine emails as being phishers because they had links to click in the email. I always use the bookmark in my web browser which is originally done by typing in the internet address or I type the internet address or I use the eBay toolbar for eBay for any account that involves money. It's good to find out from your bank, ISP & other places where your details are entered what protocols they use for contacting you so if you ever get an email purportedly from one that doesn't fit their protocol you know it's a fake. Be a bit wary even if they do fit the protocol though.

Some fakes are easier to spot, for example something supposed to come from eBay that has something between eBay & the top level identifier, eg. ebay.accounts.com.au (fake - the domain is 'accounts.com.au') instead of accounts.ebay.com.au, but some are really tricky & use invisible characters so the address looks like it is the right on in the email but really the link takes you to a phishing site. Some don't even spell check their fakes & they are obvious. Basically if it's real they should be able to tell you all your details & if they want you to tell them your details it's probably phishing. Be especially wary of anything that doesn't use your name. Generally I find real sites email me something that shows they know who I am such as a list of personal details & the last 3 digits of my account number or something.

Phisher's do variations of emails for every bank there is. It's such a worry to hear that my BankSomewhereI'veNeverHeardOf account is overdrawn & I need to re-enter details by clicking on this link that has the wrong country internet code on the beginning (the right hand side before the first slash) of it by an email sent to an address that only spammers ever use (my Club Mac email address), not. They also do letters from your ISP saying stuff like "Due to an enormous amount of SPAM being sent from your account in the last month your account has been temporarily disabled. Click here to reset it."

I've taken to using full headers & the internet ('whois' search of APNIC etc.) to find the ISPs of those sending them & reporting them.

Basically it's a good idea never to click on anything in an email unless you know it's OK, i.e. your trusted friend is recommending something like http://gutenberg.net.au/, which is a site that has just about all out of copywrite books that've been entered on a computer available & doesn't want your details (personal or financial), or you've just entered your email address on a web site you trust & you get an email from them asking you to click on a link to confirm your email address just after seeing web a page saying they were going to do this.

Incompetence & a grandiose opinion of oneself:

I often said what we think we know about stuff is inversely proportional to what we actually do know (I've even said "You can tell Jenny knows more about YYY than I do because I'm more confident of my ability in that area" which probably sounded sarcastic at the time but wasn't) & now it's been proven.

Check out "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Vol 77, No. 6, pp 1121-1134.

Perhaps this quote sums it all up:

As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (p. 3).

Makes me feel a little better about not feeling so confident about myself.

Blessings,
Joe :-)