By the way, thank you to those who have recently submitted their website for a review. I’ll begin reviewing again tomorrow. Please continue to submit—a queue of twenty six is nothing to me. I’ve had it much higher in the past.

Let’s get the pointless, not to mention boring picture details outta the way:

1. Taken today…yes, today! No, not over a year ago like the majority of my other pics! Fresh orange goodness from the Fujifilm Finepix. (OMG, accidental alliteration! Hot!) We spent the afternoon in Wanganui, a city about an hours’ drive away from where I live. (Louise {good friend and visitor to PSGR, who lives in Wanganui} if you’re ever in the outdoor bit next to the winter gardens, check out “PSGR” smeared onto the window. I noticed other people had written their names at the bottom of the windows, and since my name would take forever and a day to write, I wrote PSGR instead.)

2. Umm..not sure if I can remember. I think I took this at the Napier Botanical Gardens, last year of course. It’s loud. The flower, I mean—and don’t even think about asking me what type of flower it is, as if I’d know! Really though, who would?

3. Christchurch Botanical Gardens, 2007. Man, I’m an official Botanical Gardens Skank Hoe, whoring myself around botanical gardens nationwide. I think I’ve been to them all! Hope I haven’t caught any Florally Transmitted Diseases. (FTD.) You guys heard of Floraphilia? This particular disease is extremely prevalent in New Zealand, with amateur photographers among those most susceptible. Symptoms include: Hot pink glittery urine that smells of strawberries, pollen leaking out of ears after reproduction activities, and nipples that seem to be a magnet for bees. Okay, okay, I’ll stop now. Please be aware that there is no FTD known as floraphilia. I am a dirty liar and I’ve been making it all up. LIES! LIES!

Umm wtf…I’m hearing drumrolls right now, and I have no idea where they’re coming from. I know my mum is watching a Guns N Roses DVD, but the sound seems to be coming from within. One moment please while I attempt to channel mysterious sounds:

*starts humming, chanting, and swaying from side to side. Wipes drool that accidentally leaks from mouth in the process*

…and first prize, for the lamest Saturday Snaps title ever goes to…Rhiannon of PSGR, for Outrageously Orange! WooOOoo, do I win prize money or a medal? Oh…a medal. That blows—was hoping for some cash, I need a new Macbook! Chyeah…the brand spanking new Macbooks are *apparently* going to be announced on October 14^th. Super thin ala Macbook Air, LCD backlit display, aluminium casing = heaven. I crave de portability of a laptop in a meejor wey, mon. And no, I won’t tell you the story of what happened to my iBook, even though I’ve only told you eight times already so I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt to squeeze it in again.

But I won’t. Yay for you!

PS—James read my blog about ♥ Jinnah. ♥. Cried tears of laughter, rolled around on the couch clutching his stomach, blah blah blah. Jealous……..

So, if you want a review, submit asap!

Okay, I’ve officially lost the plot. What small, paltry amount of credibility I had left has now gone completely. With that said, I might as well confess that I’ve just laid eyes on a historical hottie: ♥ Muhammed Ali Jinnah ♥ Mmmm! Woof woof, etc. Sadly the chap passed away when my Nan was um, nine years old, but so what! *Swoons anyway*

Ch-ch-check out this stunner:

In fifth form history we studied India, with a focus on Gandhi, Indian politics, ties and tensions with the British Empire and the formation of the nation of Pakistan in 1947. I first laid eyes upon this father ‘o a nation in my history textbook, and I immediately blurted out “Wow, he’s hott!” to the entire class. Seemed to result in major amusement, and as a joke the teacher photocopied an A4 size image of him and stuck it on the wall next to my desk. SCORE! My history teacher rocked. I remember the day I accidentally (and oh so repeatedly) booted her in the backside with a door. I was late to class that afternoon, and when I went to open the classroom door it simply wouldn’t open…something was in the way! So I kept trying to get the damn thing open, trying with all my might. Turned out the teacher had been trying to set up the overhead projector which was near the door, and I’d been booting her in the ass with the door, since her big bum was in the way. Sir Mix-A-Lot would have been proud of me, but Miss Scott wasn’t best pleased. A few members of the class were actually crying with laughter. No more than ten minutes later and she tripped over my school bag which I’d dumped in the middle of the aisle, and she fell flat on her face. I swear I heard her mutter “you little shit”. Pretty much put an end to my three year reign as teachers pet—dammit!

So yeah. Jinnah be hawt. Hope I haven’t scared any of you away.

*echoes*

Hello?!?! HELLO, ARE YOU GUISE THEAR? WEAR HAV U GAWN?

Omg.

PS—Explanation of mood: I’ve recently discovered coffee. I’ve dissed and bashed coffee for years, but that was because I’d been having sugar in it. Take the sickly sweet sugar away and you’ve got the drink from heaven! Black coffee, no sugar, and a tiny bit of milk. Normally anyone reading this would be weirded out right now, but I’ve already scared everyone away via admitting a crush on a historical dude. Dang.

The phone I bought off Trade Me still hasn’t arrived—no surprise there. The guy I bought it off is pretty much a kid, and judging from his lack of coherency and overdose of chat speak displayed on his member profile, I’m guessing he’s not the brightest tool in the shed. Therefore I’ve decided to take advantage of his idiocy by threatening him with legal action should he fail to refund me the $105.00 I paid into his bank account for the phone that he didn’t send. Obviously in the grand scheme of things $105.00 is peanuts and seeking legal advice would sooo not be worth it. I imagine the only thing I could really do would be to file a claim with the Disputes Tribunal but again, it probably wouldn’t be practical because it’s only $105.00. I’m confident he’s dumb as bricks so I’m sure he’ll take my threats seriously, I don’t think he’s smart enough to realise that there’s actually not a hell of a lot I can do. I don’t have to go to my families’ solicitors to know that. He’d just tell what I already know—that it’s not worth it, and that I made the purchase at my own risk in the first place. And I realise that, but even so I find it hard to accept that someone can rip me off and get off scott free. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t work that way, and the mongrel should be held accountable.

Here’s what I emailed to him:

I purchased the Sharp GX 30i phone off you on Wednesday 24^th September and paid the following day, charging me $5 for postage which means, for that price, you sent it via courier or parcel post, both which come with tracking codes. No details whatsoever were provided to me and as of Monday 6^th October I still have not received the phone. Pretty obvious you never sent it in the first place, the fact that you refuse to reply to any emails only adds to the suspicion that you were out to rip someone off from the very beginning. Charging $5.00 for postage means, if you were an honest trader, you would have used a courier or parcel post. It does not cost $5.00 to post something via standard post.

You have until Wednesday 15^th October to either complete the deal or deposit a full refund into the following bank, details provided underneath. Failure to do so will result in legal action being sought from my solicitor, (name removed).

A load of bullshit, right? You betcha. But I’m hoping said bullshit will do the trick in getting him to refund me. If I wasn’t as clued up as I am and I received an email like the one above, I know I’d freak out and refund them asap.

I bought yet another phone last night, since it’s clear I won’t be getting the no doubt non-existent Sharp GX 30i. This time I bought a Sharp GX 30, which is the same as the i apart from the fact that the i has extended bluetooth capabilities. I love Bluetoothing pics and mp3s onto phones via my computer, but you cannot do this on the GX 30. Sometime I’ll look into buying a data cable for it instead, should do the trick. There is no phone I’d rather have—I love the Sharp GX series. The phones are getting on a bit in years..about four years old I think…yet even now many aspects of the phone are superior to the phones currently in stores. The camera, ample internal memory plus additional memory card, disco lights, colour rich displays, blah blah blah. In an act of desperation on Saturday I went into Noel Leeming to see what kind of phones they had, and they were all butt ugly apart from a few Samsung phones. Not sure of the model, but they were the sliding ones for $199. God, what’s with Noel Leeming salespeople? They are so fucking pushy. Remember the ad campaign they had last year with that awful Erin “Ego” Brockovich, going on about how Noel Leeming is so damn great because the salespeople AREN’T pushy? What a joke. We were in the store for FIVE MINUTES—no longer than that, and we were approached by three different sales guys, each rattling off their spiel verbatim: “Hey guys, do you need any help?” No thanks, we’re just looking. “No worries, well if you need any help just sing out”. By the time the third guy came up I ended up saying “No…we’ve already been asked twice in the last few minutes so there’s no need to ask again”. Man, you should have seen his face. Love it how people assume I’m a frail, passive wimp because of my size. But it wasn’t as if I was getting smart, I was simply telling him the score. I’m sure people say much worse, like “NO!!! JUST FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE YOU PUSHY CUNT!”. Obviously I would have preferred to say this too but there’s no need to go overboard unless it’s totally warranted. (If he’d been the tenth person to ask me in the space of five minutes I might have lost my temper.)

Noel Leeming employees must get paid absolute shit, they’re so desperate and persistant when it comes to annoying people who simply want to browse. I’ve never noticed this desperation at other applicance stores like Bond and Bond or Dick Smith Electronics. I love Dick! The Dick here in Palmerston North is kind of on the small side, but a massive Dick Smith Powerhouse is going to be opening here soon. The bigger the Dick the better. Whenever I’m in Wellington I love to go into Dick and have a browse and a fiddle around. The store is so massive and s…s…satisfying.

I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK I LOVE DICK

(….Smith Electronics.)

That’s it for now—with any luck I’ll be back in the near future with the final review I have to do before submissions open again! Seriously can’t wait for that.

1) Fletcher Bay, Coromandel. I’ve whored this picture out so many times that it’s not funny! (March 2007)

2) Coromandel again—random forest area near an area called Driving Creek. (March 2007)

3) Sunset on the beach in Gisborne. Taken December 2007.

I’ll be getting the final review done within the next few days. I would have got it done sooner but I’ve kind of been upset about something and I haven’t felt like reviewing. Sorry about that, I will get it done shortly. Basically I bought a phone off Trade Me (NZ auction site) on Wednesday September 24^th. My Motorola RAZR v3 had been on the blink for ages so a few weeks ago I decided to buy a near-new Sharp GX 30i off Trade Me. I paid for it the next day, and still haven’t received it. Since then my Motorola RAZR has gone completely bust, but when this happened I was all “Hmm that’s okay, I’m expecting a new phone in the mail any day now”. How silly of me to even dare to be optimistic. I’m not usually this way inclined, I usually prepare myself for bullshit because when it eventually happens I won’t be disappointed.

At the moment I’m using my old Sharp GX 30 but I can’t fucking use it for calls. I can’t hear the person on the other end of the line, although they can apparently hear me. And yes, I’ve fiddled with all the settings. I paid $100 for the 30i and it’s been over a week now and I haven’t received it. The seller lives in Upper Hutt—a rough area in Greater Wellington—and that is only two hours south of where I live. He won’t reply to my angry and abusive emails and now I don’t know what to do. I reported him to Trade Me but TM are famous for not giving a shit, and all they’ve done is send me an automated message saying they’ve contacted him and that I should continue to keep contacting him myself.

I’ve looked up his details in the Wellington phone book and if I don’t receive a refund or a valid explanation I feel I have no choice but to travel down there and confront him on his doorstep. I don’t see why he should get away with this. I’ve been ripped off, I have a phone I can’t even fucking talk on, and it’s just not fucking on. Every damn day I look out for the postman and every day I’m disappointed. It doesn’t take over a week for something to arrive. Fast post / courier is overnight, standard post is 2-3 days.

Anyway, have a good weekend everyone. Take care

1. How old are you?
2. Where are you from?
3. How did you first come across PSGR? How long have you been visiting for?
4. What do you enjoy the most about it?

Don’t be shy!

It would be impossible for me to comment on each and every review, so I’ll just pick the first book I’ve read to get a sense of your style. That book happens to be The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I agree, the writing style bothered me too. At least it did at first…before I grew to love it. If I’d reviewed the book myself, I would have compared Death’s description of the colors to 300 also. Well, technically I hadn’t seen 300 when I read the book, but when I saw the movie my mind flashed back to the book. I could finally really picture it. I was unable to hold back my tears throughout the book. If I remember correctly I was very emotional at the time I read it, and I alternated between laughing and crying through the whole book. Read more?

Hi by the way. I’m back from wild and windy Wellington after a successful dental appointment. Now all of my teeth are shipshape—no more toothaches for me, yay. I’m sick though, which sucks. I woke up with a sore throat on Monday morning and I’ve been feeling like shit ever since.

So, my piece of shit Motorola RAZR V3 finally broke. I say finally because it was only a matter of time…the phone is purely all about the looks—pretty on the outside and oh so crappy on the inside. I don’t consider myself a particularly fast texter yet I would finish typing the words/letters much sooner than they would show up on the screen. And no, it was not a memory issue—since the “memory is low” notice would come up after my inbox had….wooOOoo….25 messages in it, I’d routinely go about clearing it, along with my outbox.

Then the small screen at the front started to go blank, so I actually had to open the phone to see if I had any new texts or to check what the time was. Oh yeah, and a random buzzing noise permanently resonated out of the earpiece, regardless of whether I was on a call or not. Kind of like a kettle whistling.

This has been happening for months now, and then finally today the damn thing packed up all together. The main screen kept freezing and randomly turning off. I turned the damn thing off and left it for a while but when I went to turn it on again the same thing happened more or less, apart from the fact that I was able to read the texts that had come through, but when I went to reply to them the phone would freeze after the third letter that I’d typed. So I thought “Fuck It” and snapped the phone in half (on purpose.) Was surprised how easy it was to do so.

I do have another phone—a Sharp GX 30, but the battery has had it and I’ve lost the backing to the phone, so the battery keeps falling out when I use it because there’s no cover to properly hold it in. It’s a pity because the Sharp GX 30 is a damn good phone, and an absolute contrast to the Motorola RAZR in terms of features. Colour rich LCD, non-intrusive text messaging alerts (with the RAZR, the envelope would cut in front of whatever it was you were doing, ie if you were typing out a text and you receive a message from someone else, you’d have to cancel out of it to get back to what it was you were typing), superior camera, ample internal memory plus room for a memory card (The RAZR’s memory is non-expandable) …really, the Sharp GX30 is the best phone I’ve ever had. Just wish I had the backing for it…

Anyway, feeling like utter shit so I’ll go now. On with the reviews tomorrow, I guess……

I’ll be away tomorrow (Monday) as I’m going to the dentists again in Wellington. Back on Tuesday so I’ll carry on with the reviews then. If I haven’t completed them all by this upcoming Friday I’m seriously considering opening up submissions anyway…this has gone on for far too long.

Back soon!

PS: I hate to exclude everyone else, but hey Kiwis! I am officially scared of the Big Save Furniture chick. Psycho much? She looks like one of the dolls from Saw!

(Translation: I can’t think of any good points. Oh well. On with teh show!)

I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who visits and enjoys PSGR. Some of you guys have been daily visitors since the early Petshopgirl.TK days—people who were barely in high school who are now studying at university. How time flies. As the site owner I’ll never understand why you continue to visit time and time again, and I’ll never understand why you seem to enjoy it the way you do. It’s different for me. I write the reviews, I write the articles and then I publish them, and that’s that. I have never re-read a single review of mine, nor any articles.

I’m not making out that “OMGZ every1 loves me!!1one.” I know that is not true. It’s only natural that some people are opposed to my online persona, my honesty, and maybe even the fact that my site has…omg…six validation errors at the W3C site. If you don’t like me then that’s fine, I don’t set out to make friends or have some major desire to be liked by all. This is a message for those who enjoy PSGR. You make this site what it is. I do it all for you. If no one visited, if no one gave a damn, I wouldn’t bother. You give me a reason to keep going, when sometimes I feel like giving up and abandoning this online life of mine. I see you guys as friends—friends I might not know so well, but friends nonetheless. Leaving PSGR would seem like abandoning a friend, and that’s not something I’m prepared to do. I’m not saying I’ll be reviewing forever, I know that I won’t be. But PSGR will always be around in one way or another.

So I want to say thank you. You have made PSGR into something I can (finally) be proud of. You give me the motivation to keep trying, you give me the drive to improve myself, constantly. Without you, I wouldn’t bother with any of it. There’s no point in creating something that no one enjoys.

Thank you for giving a damn.

PS—Haha, I should indulge in alcohol more often. I might even come across as a pleasant person in reviews! Heaven forbid….*considers becoming teetotal*

1) taken last Saturday in Feilding, a town nearby. If anyone has heard of the band “Evermore”, Feilding is their home town. True to form, I can’t remember the breed—I’m guessing some form of parakeet.

2) Common ass seagull taken at Sumner Beach, Christchurch.

3) Common sparrow, Rotorua.

We originally had big plans for today. We were going to take a drive to Napier and go to Valentines for dinner. Turns out that the joint’s closed due to fire. I’m gutted…much like the interior of the restaurant from all accounts! Besides, the weather is absolute shit today—chilly and drizzly. Typical spring!

Have a good weekend.

Anyway, the Mac Classic II eventually conked out in late 1997 just before I turned 13, and I was without a computer until 2000 when we purchased an iMac Blueberry. I was allowed to have it in my room, and I’d ’sneak online’ late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. Good times. It stayed strong until early 2006 when it eventually became too slow to use. I tried turning it on a few months ago but it made a sizzling noise o_0

A few months later I got my current computer, the iBook. I’ve whored it out many a time so I won’t bother including yet another picture. It used to be my pride and joy you know…until I ruined everything by spilling tea on the keyboard. The computer itself still works fine, although it’s obviously not as portable anymore what with my having to use an external keyboard because the internal one is fucked. Portability is something I crave in a notebook. The ability to use it wherever I please, which is now hindered as I’d have to lug around a keyboard.

Aaand…with any luck by the end of this year I’ll have one of the brand new Macbooks that are coming out shortly. Mmm! A girl can dream can’t she? Let me reach for that non-existent rainbow, dammit!

1. You know, like Amanda from iMandy.Net who hates the nickname Mandy yet chose to register and pay for the name iMandy. Ah, Mandy Mandy Mandy, forever bringing the lulz. Failing to capitalise I’s when appropriate, bragging about getting ‘cought shoptheifting’…you’d expect more from a 24 year old wouldn’t you? I guess I shouldn’t be picking on her though…perhaps it isn’t her fault that she has the mental capacity of a flea, although she did drop out of school in 8^th grade and fail homeschooling twice. I’m grateful to her though; if it hadn’t been for her moaning about Hurricane Katrina victims, my Webmasters Behaving Badly series would never have come about! For those who weren’t around at the time, Amanda unleashed a massive bitchfest on Hurricane Katrina victims, angry because they had received much needed funds and was pissed that there was nothing left over for herself, as according to her she was more deserving than them. Or some shit.

Please e-mail me with your postal address and I’ll be sure to send your prize asap.

Stay tuned for PSGR Competition #2, which will get under way in a few weeks time.