the corner office

There's a crap McCain's ad on telly at the moment, when the dof kids ask their dof grandmothers what they used to do in the old days. "We cooked" says bullet #1. "Did you tell them what we used to do?" asks bullet #2 as she walks into the room. "Yes, we cooked." "We cooked." "What did you do for fun?" "We baked."

I fear when I'm old I'll telling my grandkids "we worked", 'cause that's all I'm doing day in and day bloody out at the moment. On the 1st, month-end seems a lifetime away. By the 18th, it's looming a little too close for deadline comfort. So I'm in hermit-mode at home for a few days to get things done. It's the closest I come to getting into the coding 'zone' these days.

For now, Zone is being temporarily shelved so I can get showered and off to Woolies. The best thing about staying at home is the midday sprint round the corner for lunch and goodies.

This is turning out to be another fabulously rainy weekend. I went into gym this morning - I'm growing quite enamoured of the Roodepoort Virgin Active - a lot quieter than the others around us. Spent the afternoon getting some work done, then R & I went into Rosebank for dinner with AT who's up in Joburg on business. Always a hoot meeting up with him. P&L didn't join us on account of today being their 10th anniversary (of going out). After dinner, we popped into Exclusive Books which as usual has bugger all of interest to me.

I expected the same from CD Wherehouse, but actually came out with a few new CDs. First, shock bloody horror, they had a copy of the Oneida/Liars 'Atheists, Reconsider' compilation. Oneida cover a few Liars songs, and Liars return the favour. Fine album. I cleaned out the last two Meteors albums CDW had: 'Psycho Down' and 'Psychobilly', the last of which is released on "I Used To F*** People Like You In Prison" Records. I can imagine a new warning label being legislated by the Decency Police: "Parental Advisory. Explicit Record Company". Yeah. Also picked up the 25th anniversary edition of Deep Purple's 'Fireball'.

It kind of grates: I have almost all the Deep Purple albums up to Who Do We Think We Are. Now they've all been re-released, remastered and dollied up with unreleased and alternative tracks, new liner notes, the lot. Many bands end up doing this. Now, if you're a completist, it's pretty much a given you're going to shell out just to get those extra bonus tracks. And once you've done that you're going to consider getting the boxed bloody sets with even more unreleased material. Considering how the record companies would like to limit what we're entitled to do with the CDs we cough up for, I think the reasonable flipside is that one should be able to trade in older versions of albums when they re-release 'em with new stuff. (Update: the 25th anniversary of Fireball was 1996, which tells you how long ago I built up my Deep Purple collection. So perhaps I'm just talking nonsense. It took me 8 years to notice the new edition. Then again, now that I know the other albums also have extra goodies, I want 'em all)

On another note, as we were driving home, we got a message from P, saying that her and L are now engaged. Congratulations!

Rule 1 of waking up in life: don't believe everything you're told.
Rule 2 of waking up in life: don't disbelieve everything you're disinclined to believe.

SABC3 just showed JFK. I remember the big hoo-ha when it first came out waaaay back when. I think it's safe to say that just about everyone I know, subsequent to that movie, believes there's some sort of conspiracy around John F Kennedy's murder. Unlike 1991, this time around I was able to hop onto the Internet, type the words 'Jim Garrison' into a search engine, and see a great deal of pro and con discussion and 'evidence'. The movie loses some of its appeal when you realise there's a great deal of material which vilifies Garrison and debunks many of the movie's theories and disputes many of the purported facts. All of a sudden, you're not quite sure what to think.

Of course, you're watching a movie that's precisely about how powerful the US government is and the extent to which it will pander to vested interests (can you spell Iraq?). The movie went to great lengths to show just how much effort went into discrediting Jim Garrison.

So was he the megalomaniac twat some sites portray him as, or was he the upright bloke that Oliver Stone presented? More broadly, does every discredited bit of conspiracy 'evidence' mean that there is no evidence of a conspiracy at all? To what extent do ridiculous fabrications simply serve to muddy the real evidence? How much 'evidence' from both sides can you trust? Reality and truth are rather tenuous concepts and heavily susceptible to overt and subconscious agendas. To what extent are we manipulated to believe what people want us to believe, to what extent do we simply like the idea of things being more suspicious than they are at face value?

Problem is, unless you have a great deal of time to research and personally verify facts, it hardly seems safe to hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Which is hardly fun, but there you go.

Just hopped onto my medical aid's web site to check up on a few things, and was prompted to update my personal details. My first reaction was to grumble, but needless to say, my home address and phone numbers were outdated, from where we lived (note to Sandy: I didn't say stayed :) in 2000. Since then we've moved twice.

It's quite odd seeing my old street address and phone number - especially because CMac asked me about an old phone number yesterday, and I realised that I couldn't even remember what my old phone numbers were. Strangely, I can remember our phone numbers from when I was a child (perhaps because in those days our phone numbers were 4 digits long?). However, in more recent years, it seems like I have space for a single variable, $HOME_PHONE, and as soon as I plop a new value into that variable, the old one gets forgotten.

Forgot to note that I had a lucky haul on Thursday - Look & Listen Cresta had a copy of Calexico - Even My Sure Things Fall Through. It's getting solid rotation in the car right now.

First heard of 'em at the fine epitonic.com. What must it be like living in the USA (or the UK/Europe) where you see a few cool CDs, clickety click and a day later they're in your CD rack? Here, it's weeks of waiting, crummy exchange rates, dodgy postal service and ever more savvy customs officials making it possible that your purchase ends up costing twice as much as when you started. Man, ZA really cramps my style. Grumble moan moan grumble.

Myself, Ronwen, P and L went through to Pretoria last night, to check out Zeplins. It's been around for a couple of years, but it was the first time Ronwen & I had been. It's basically an alternative music nightclub emporium type effort: 5 dancefloors in a huge old building in the Pretoria city centre. One goff (rather kak, modern goth that is), one Industrial/EBM, one Metal, one mainstream alternative and one retro, playing everything from older alternative stuff to 80s pop to 70s stadium rock (even the occasional 60s tune).

Cool place. Fair share of freaks, oddballs and losers - I've realised I'm getting a little old and cynical: some of the people really needed more hugs from their moms when they were kids, but by and large a decently-sized crowd of people, relatively pretension free, getting their groove on. The variety of dancefloors and music and people kept things a lot more interesting than being stuck in a poky club with one genre of music the whole night, and the size meant we could easily move around the building and find seats wherever we were. Nice.

The coolest thing about the club is that they sell Coke (of the mineral variety) in 340 ml cans, which rocks. It's the first time I've seen a nightclub do that, usually it's just wussified 200ml cans which contain two swigs or more often, just poured into a glass with sludgy ice, which is usually overpriced and a PITA to lug a glass around. Cans are way better. Being the DD for the night, one appreciates these things.

Now, if it wasn't such a long bloody drive home, it might even be worth going there more often. We stopped in at Bimbos on the way home for the traditional goat burgers, and I finally crashed after 4.

Rainy weekend in Joburg, so today's a struggle between chilling out and doing nothing, and house-cleaning since P&L are coming around tomorrow morning at 5 to watch the Grand Prix with Ronwen. I'll be waking up at a more human time, to join 'em for breakfast.

So ole Charlize Theron (it's pronounced Terrawn, dammit) won her Oscar and became the first South African to do so. Of course, half of the country is lank chuffed and the other half is rather cynical when it comes to Charlize and her fake American accent. Ekse. Some critics attributed the Oscar to the weight gain and uglification as much as any acting prowess: she probably had plenty of inspiration from some of the rof tannies she grew up with in Benoni.

But still. It must a really cool thing for her. She's got the Oscar, and that's no mean feat for someone who could've ended up another wish-I-was-a-star poppie in an East Rand town. So I say hats off to her.

(and LoTR: 11 Oscars. Good heavens!)

You gotta admit, it's a lot more fun than writing Leave Application databases. Via CMac.

I've always regarded games developers as high priests. I remember a couple of years back a mate of mine worked at an ISP, and in some cruddy, underfurnished offices next door, were a bunch of young programmers working on a Diablo-like computer game. They showed us a work-in-progress version and the graphics, gaming engine etc seemed a world away from the arb VBA macros I was coming to grips with at the time. I don't think the game was ever released; there isn't much of a local game-producing industry to speak of (enough players, though). I think those blokes were probably as much inspiration as any to me. The atmosphere, the vibe, the hell-for-leather coding stints, doing stuff mere mortals could only dream of doing.

Doing Graphics Programming at University this year, and I'm determined to pay extra-special attention to it...

I think I'm all done on the politics front, but I replied to a post at Ben Langhinrichs' site, and I decided to store it here as well.

Ronwen's a few years younger than I am, and we were chatting this evening about something and she made the point that even in those few years, her youth was completely different to mine in terms of our experiences. I matriculated at a whites-only school. (I was the head boy, and caused a stink by telling one of my teachers that I'd rather vote for a communist ANC than for a pro-capitalist Conservative Party, because at least a political system in which the ANC could participate wasn't evil, but that's another story). The town I grew up in was whites-only, and for a large part of my childhood one did not see black people after dark because of curfews. My mom invited a black work colleague around one afternoon for tea, and it was a Big Thing because interracial social interaction was something that just didn't happen. Nelson Mandela was only released from prison in my last year of school, and when the event was televised, it was the first time anyone in South Africa had been allowed to see his face in decades (until he was released from jail, almost nobody knew what the most iconic anti-apartheid figure looked like). When Ronwen matriculated 5 years later, we'd had our first democratic elections, she was in an integrated school, and the idea of having a black family live next door to you wasn't foreign at all.

Normally I, like most South Africans, try not to dwell on the past, and I don't want to be known as the dude who talks about apartheid all the time. But when we have children one day (and it's unlikely they will grow up as South Africans), it might be hard to explain to them what it was like being a kid in the 80's in South Africa. Were all the people we grew up with horrible monsters? Were our parents and grandparents all evil ogres for living in this society and doing nothing about it, perhaps even supporting it? Perhaps one of the hardest things to come to terms with is just how easy it is for otherwise kind and caring human beings to develop very warped ideas about what is right and wrong.

Anyhow, this is what I wrote at Ben's site:

Out-and-out villification is one thing - and people often see that for what it is, but it's the subtle, supposedly-reasoned arguments that I was referring to.

When we were in school, we were never explicitly taught to hate black people - in many respects there was no official sentiment that non-Whites were inferior in any way (although the environment was such that out-and-out supremacists didn't have to worry about what they said).

We were taught that we needed apartheid (which means 'separateness') because whites were a minority and it was the best solution to 'protect our Christian, Western way of life', that we were all just too different to integrate naturally, that if the black majority were allowed to come into power we'd become an atheist, communist country. Sure, the rest of the world didn't like what we were doing, but they didn't understand our situation which was precarious and 'special', and besides, the first-world things we brought to Africa was in everyone's best interests, it's not like anyone was starving, were they? Most black people live lives better than our neighbours, so what if they can't vote or enjoy the same rights we can? They have their homelands where they can do what they want, and live however they like, why can't they just let us do the same?

Those sorts of sentiments, with a healthy dose of fear given what had happened to many ex-colonies in Africa in the 60s and 70s, was all that was needed for many otherwise-decent people to think that apartheid was either perfectly reasonable, or at the least, a necessary (not-really) evil.

Except that it was evil. To this day, it's a sensitive issue. I think many South Africans take perverse comfort in seeing what happens in the rest of the world, simpy because it reassures us that we weren't the only ones capable of such wrong-doing. Thankfully, for us at least, it's part of the past. 2004 is the 10th anniversary of South Africa's democracy. Things aren't always hunky-dory, but at least, 10 years later, I don't have to be ashamed to say I'm a South African.

Regular politics-free programming will continue shortly.

Water balloons in zero gravity.

Cleaning that lot up in space could be a serious mission.

(via Bill Buchan)