Saturday, March 11, 2006

Survival of the fittest

So last Sunday I joined up to the university's gym. A few weeks ago I had some medical issues, and the advice the doctor gave me was to improve my general fitness. Since then I've started taking walks around the university, a distance of about 4 or so kilometers. One of my housemates is also wanting to get fitter, and was planning joining up, and so encouraged me to do the same. So I joined up. And I've gone to use some of the exercise machines most days since then. Most days I've just done 20 minutes on an exercise bike, but on Thursday there were no spare bikes so I used an elliptical walking machine. That was a lot more strenuous then the bike.

I've also been applying for a few jobs. One of them had me do some online test about what I thought good management was. Given that it was for a graduate entry position and not a management one I'm not quite sure why they were asking the questions they did. Perhaps they're looking for people who accept what they think is bad management. But there were two things about the online testing that got to me. First, the recruitment company, which was itself acting on behalf of the company actually looking for a new employee, got another company to do the testing. The other thing is the terms of use for the testing site were rather onerous, and the privacy policy can be summarized as: we won't give out your name, address and date of birth. Although they termed it as personally identifying information. They also demanded perpetual rights to use your responses in any media they saw fit. It was very much one sided. I did consider sending an email to the recruitment company saying I wasn't comfortable with the terms, but in the end decided to go ahead with it, mainly because I didn't think they'd be very receptive to this and the fact that apart from a few personal details, all of it was answers to their questions. But if I get any further with the recruitment process, I'll bring it up with them.

A few days ago I tried to put together a few thoughts on the role of government in modern society and what I thought were effective ways to moderate the powers and responsibilities of government, but I got bogged down in how to start the whole thing and what points I wanted to make. I shall make another attempt later on, and hopefully actually get something down in type.

End post
writing time: 2 hours 30 minutes
time since last post: 7 days
Current media: The Combat Information Center

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