the corner office

Oh man. Abiola Lapite's post on Barbapapa smacked me with a nostalgia stick the size of a barge pole. It's perhaps more pronounced because I still can't properly put Barbapapa into a childhood when-where context, but taking a squizz at some of the images at this site brings back a flood of memories.

... which surprisingly still ranks more highly at Google than the official Barbapapa home page.

Entertaining delusions of grandeur is a highly underrated pursuit. I just followed a link from Gauteng Blog, to a character I'd never heard of - His Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico:

At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself the Emperor of These United States. - September 17, 1859

Emperor Norton released a number of proclamations, covering everything from the abolition of the Republican and Democratic parties, to the banning the word 'Frisco. Why not, I say...

Plundering another link from GP - the Joshua A Norton wikipedia page.

There are some lessons to draw from this. For one, life's far more bearable if you don't take it too seriously. Also, don't gamble your entire personal fortune on rice.

There's nothing like a greasy Wimpy dagwood for breakfast. Up at sparrow fart again to take Ronwen through to the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria where she's doing a fossil preparation workshop today. Now to get back to work...

I also noticed for the first time that after all the talk and PR, the city of Pretoria has finally been renamed to Tshwane. Ch-ch-ch-changes...

This should be an interesting sight... thanks to cellular network operator MTN, the roof of Sandton city is changing colour for a month:

In celebrating its 10th year of operation, MTN will light the top of Sandton City y'ello. The prism that sits on the top of Sandton City is currently green, and this will be the first time in Sandton City's 30 year life span that an external organisation will be branding the Sandton City sky scraper. From 10 June until 10 July, Sandton's most famous landmark will be y'ello and visible from when the sun sets.

(Thanks to P for the link)

On the speed freak note, did any other Sefricans see the Special Assignment documentary on tik (Crystal Meth) junkies on the Cape Flats last night? I get cynical whenever the whole drugs are bad, mmmmkay, thing comes on TV. Any semblance of objectivity is so lost in hyperbole and prejudice and sensationalism ("nowadays youse can find out how to make all vis stuff on ve Internet"), that it's no wonder that kids don't believe any of it, and end up doing stupid things because of it.

I mean, it's obvious that the stuff ain't good for you, and it's caused huge social problems, but they have the forensic chemistry copper preaching from on high about how evilly awful and dangerous the stuff is, and only in passing do they mention that it's virtually the same drug that's freely available in nearly every diet pill and flu medication in the country. Now, admittedly, not many people sit around smoking their Advil-CS tablets, but when mom's speeding off her noggin because she's trying to shed a few kilos, or has the sniffles, and then gets all righteous because her kid's turned into a brain-dead tik-tik fiend, you have to know that the issues are not as cut and dried as people would like to believe.

The Kauai cafeteria thingamidoo at the Randburg Virgin Active has a scratch-card promo competition. No holidays at a Generic Game Reserve for me, instead I won me a free Booster. Being a staunch Energade/Powerade post-gym tippler, these new-fangled concoctions are all foreign to me. Boosters are fancy-schmancy 3-buck supplements you can get mixed into a fruit juice or smoothie. There are quite a few types of Boosters, some far more dodgy-looking than others. 'Cause I'm a real live-on-the-edge kinda guy, I figured I'd try an L-Glutamine booster, which is basically a pure amino acid supplement to boost muscle recovery and my immune system, doll.

Freshly squeezed orange juice + pure amino acids = Blehhhh.

Lesson learned. I wasn't expecting much, but a free coupon is a free coupon, dammit. Maybe it's just me... but the way I see it, these supplements are there to basically bring you as close as possible to being a speed freak, but without the legal issues, the rotting teeth, internal organ failures and impotence.

Aaaanyhoooo. At least I didn't get a coupon for a wheat grass shake. 'Cause man, I still have a tough time coming to terms with seeing live, green, growing grass in a punnet, chilling next to the sarmies and muffins in the refrigerator. What gets me, is that every now and then, you'll see that some of this grass has been trimmed, which tells me that people actually drink the stuff. Have any of my few intrepid readers tried it? Is there any corner of this planet where this self-abuse in the interests of clean plumbing is considered a delicacy?

Heh. Heh. Admittedly, it's around 34 years old, but you get a sense of just how far things have come... a Warner Bros radio advert for the debut album of those hip cats from Aston, the funky section of tough Birming-ham, England:

Warner Brothers, aware as always, offers you a music as gentle as an open wound...

At least WB chilledthefsckout by the time Paranoid was released.

On the subject of graphics cards, an interview with Unreal guru Tim Sweeney:

Well, we are aiming at the kind of PC that we think will be mainstream in 2006. We will also be able to scale it down. Basically DirectX 9 cards will be minimum spec, so any DirectX 9 shipping today will be capable of running our game, but probably at reduced detail. If you only have a 256 meg video card you will be running the game one step down, whereas if you have a video card with a gig of memory then you'll be able to see the game at full detail.

That much memory on a graphics card within 2 years? That's frightening. Absolutely crazy.

(via Abiola Lapite)

Finally. I am again the pumping lemma zen master and all non-context-free grammars tremble before me. Or something.

Next: Graphics Programming. I've been looking forward to this assignment all week but given how late I am, there's not much time to really savour it. Mad rush to figure things out, sling together something half-decent looking and hand it in.

As for my Gentoo box... drat. It has a GeForce4 MX onboard GPU, and my efforts to get the nVidia drivers to work with 3D rendering have been resoundingly unsuccessful. There's a Linux app called glxgears which is supposed to give one an indication of the performance of one's graphics card. I can't even run it without freezing up the machine completely. When the study dust settles, I'll see if I can move across my XP box's Radeon.

Right now though, it's needed for my attempts at building an all-singing, all-dancing 3D African Village. I could cry. Last year we had the option of taking one of two tracks for our graphics assignments: the 'scientific' track, doing visualisations of things like Brownian motion blahdy blah, or the 'cultural' track, building a 3D African village. This year they've scrapped the scientific track, and everyone has to do the African village. Fat lot of good it does me; guess which track yours truly decided to follow last year.

That took a bit longer than expected, but Advanced Programming put to bed. Hope they mark it.

I love C++ for one simple reason: seeing and using the -> operator, a la:

mgr->activate()

I don't know why, but I get my jollies, that's for sure. Perhaps it just makes me feel all hardcore.

Now on to Computer Theory and pumping lemons and whatnot. Then I can get to my graphics assignment, which is going to be the real back-breaker.

But right now I might play with Gentoo for a bit :-)