man, here's some stuff. idek.

[littlealex]

1) australia has no government! woo! first hung parliament in seventy years and PERSONALLY i blame the fact that everyone is getting too middle of the road. they can blame campaign advertising and mismanagement until they're blue in the face but honestly, labor and liberal were too close on a lot of things that there was very little setting them

Comments

[pithetaphish]

hey put me onto "a specialist" who then told me which survey i needed to fill in that would tell me whether i'm an australian resident for tax purposes

Could I ask what it is? I made the mistake of writing, and got a bunch of utterly useless print-outs from the website in reply. I don't think the ATO has any flipping idea whether most of us qualify or not and don't want to deal with the headaches (I believe that's why the previous 90-days-abroad rule was put in place). Argh.

[littlealex]

haha sure - here it is! i emailed them at first (that was freaking hard enough!) but got the same bullshit answer. the only useful thing was an overseas number to call.

i'm pretty sure you're not an australian for tax purposes, but some of the questions are difficult to answer when you're in a "who knows where i'll be next year" mindframe.

[pithetaphish]

Thank you!

Apparently, I'm either not, or the survey is 'not detailed enough' to be able to tell me. Meh. If anyone from the Tax Office ever bothers to ask, I plan on telling them I've emigrated XD

[littlealex]

That's what I'm doing too. But I'm also going to get tax things from the government here, just in case. And also because I like keeping records, lol

[bluelemon]

well of course Ep1 of W13 was 90mins, its really Ep1 and Ep2 in a single episode :)

[littlealex]

i figured that out when i couldn't find an episode two ;)

[reverseorder]

10) speaking of japanese, anyone know a good japanese textbook/workbook that is a) cheap, b) available at non-exorbitant prices, and c) buyable online? or giveable for my upcoming birthday? lol.

Late to the party, but if you have a bit of Japanese under your belt (know your kana and really basic sentence patterns) then Japanese For Everyone is brilliant. I avoided it for ages because of the daggy title, but it condenses the equivalent of Genki I & II and/or Minna No Nihongo I & II (the two most popular beginner to intermediate series) into one book, and only costs $US20. As a bonus, it's not aimed at schoolkids, so you get less of those entirely useless dialogues about textbooks and majors and part time jobs ; )

[littlealex]

awesome, thank you! i was hoping someone would answer this one ;)

[reverseorder]

No worries :) I'm a compulsive Japanese textbook buyer - if it's out there, I probably have it know it :D

頑張ってね~☆

[littlealex]

I tried to read some of it on Amazon but it was boring. The reviews were fairly negative so I wanted to get a bit more info off you: 1) is it as out-dated as they say? Apparently there's some dialogue talking about how to connect an international call via an operator? 2) someone said there's more kanji work in Genki? I... I really love my kanji, having learned Chinese first, so it would be amazing for me (unlike every other student of Japanese ever, probably) to have a book that dives into kanji as early as possible.

ありがとう！