the corner office

Gauteng blog reflects on how the kidnapping and eventual murder of Leigh Matthews became something of a media sensation. It seems everyone hopped onto the bandwagon, even the ANC.

On the one hand, we should perhaps take a long hard look at ourselves and ask why it is that this story in particular got so much attention when murder and other violent crimes are so commonplace in South Africa and often go virtually unnoticed. On the other hand, it's a pity that the sensationalisation of the story cheapens the sadness of the whole affair, the suffering Matthews must have gone through and the terrible loss her family has to endure.

Sad truth is that in a year's time, I doubt most of us will even remember this poor girl's name.

Ah yes. Cherryflava ranks the All Gold '36' ad as his current favourite. Mine too.

What amazed me is this: a bunch of friends were around here a few weeks back, and I started doing the thirty-sixshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sound, and people were cracking up. I didn't realise it was that hard to make the sound - but it seems some poor souls can't do it. Well, I can't do most normal whistling sounds for shit, and I could never twitch my ears or squint my eyes at will or anything, so perhaps I've found my niche.

Ergh. The same thing happened last year, and it's happening this year. I seem to have a real mental block when it comes to Formal Logic. It's not that the subject is too difficult, but it does require focus, and mental effort. For whatever reason, and more than any of my other subjects, I just can't get into it.

I think a big part of it is that, knowing that my assignments are so late, my natural inclination is to want to rush through the work as quickly as possible, to get the assignments done. The problem is that the subject matter is such that it needs to slowly seep through one's synapses, in order to make sense. You have to digest each sentence before continuing with the next, or run the risk of getting completely lost. In the end, the conflict between the pressure of having to get work done, and the frustration that comes from not taking it slow and steady, means that I end up procrastinating and avoiding the work, more than anything else.

Back to work...

Wasn't there a Monty Python sketch with the judges wearing skimpy stuff under their robes? This judge was a whole lot worse:

Visitors to Thompson's Creek County courtroom reported hearing a "swooshing" sound coming from the bench, a noise the court reporter said "sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up."

That's all I'm going to quote, lest the search engines start freaking out.

(Via Bob Obringer)

Andrew Pollack has an interesting and spot-on analysis of what email has come to mean in the average knowledge worker's life - The end of the e-mail centered workday:

The speed and ease with which we dash off quick comments to one another in the workplace; quote text from previous parts of the conversation as if it were courtroom evidence to make our points; copy other coworkers to strengthen our case; or use the implied threat made by copying someone’s boss to gain leverage or faster service has turned e-mail into a hostile, negative, pressure filled environment that cannot be ignored for a moment lest our fortunes be decided without our presence. E-mail has become the meeting we cannot miss and the threat we cannot ignore. Worse -- our misstatements, heated responses, and half considered ideas become permanent parts of our workplace selves and are passed around and brought back to us both in and out of context like unresolved barbs from an old lover’s quarrel. A friend of mine back in the 1980’s –perhaps one of the first friends I’d met on-line – once said prophetically “Ours is a medium in which our thoughts are shared in an instant and live on for an eternity.”

So true. Well worth reading his entire post. Check it out.

Today (well, the 9th) is tax return deadline day in South Africa. For the first time in years, my return is ready to go in on time (well, 1 day late, but we've been given until tomorrow to hand 'em in, so it's still "on time"). Is it just me, or has there been a much more concerted PR campaign encouraging people to get their returns done this year? Billboards, updated websites, roadshows, the whole shebang. I'm sure in the past, the tax return deadline just slipped by with most people not really noticing. Perhaps I just wasn't noticing.

The accountant in me gets a bit of a kick out of filling out the forms and drawing up schedules and cross-referencing everything. Don't tell anyone.

A couple of weeks ago a number of South African bloggers were approached about an article which finally made its way to the Cape Times (subscribers only, so no link). A couple of folks have expressed their disapproval of the article, entitled "Wired or just weird, it seems South African blogs are not for your ordinary Joe."

The lads at Commentary have posted a scan of the article. It's pretty short, and honestly, I don't think it says much beyond reflecting the wider South African reality: compared to other countries, there are a smaller proportion of South Africans on the Net. Does it matter whether local blogs are quirky or not? No - if we're willing to self-publish, we're by definition unconventional, in ZA at least. What's more, I think that any blogging community tends to be more a closed circle than anything else. ZA bloggers, Domino bloggers, Java bloggers, political pundits - it's all the same. Your average blogger is writing for other bloggers, a few blog-savvy readers, friends and family, and search engines.

Mainstream appeal? For the vast, vast majority of us, none, ever. End of story.

Went to see the visa people today. Theoretically, getting my HSMP visa shouldn't be a problem, but the entire process is pretty daunting. Paperwork, proving everything, explaining everything, so that an overworked civil servant in the UK can decide at first glance whether I'm a legit case or not.

Ronwen's advice is always the same - "how do you eat an elephant?", and right on target (the answer is "one bite at a time"). Right now I'm trying to catch up mountains of overdue assignments and studies and personal paperwork and whatnot, and then we'll be getting the application ready.

Being a natural worryer, I'll be uneasy until that damned visa is approved or declined, and that will take around four months, at least. I have enough stuff to do in the meantime, but still.

On Wednesday I'll have been unemployed for 3 weeks. I haven't written a line of LotusScript in those three weeks, and if I said I'm missing it, I'd be lying. This is probably the longest work-free break I've had in oh, about 5 years? I'm not in real holiday mode yet, because I've still got a mountain of assignments to get through, but my aim is to become one of those nerdy everything-done-a-week-in-advance type students I've always secretly envied. One of the benefits of getting there will be to wake up some days, and decide "sod this, I'm doing bugger-all today but lie on the couch and sleep."

This is a bit late, but Ronwen and I got engaged on Friday morning. Yes, morning is not a common time to pop the question to yer beloved. Yes, most people wait for some stability in their lives before doing something like this. We're different :-)

A quick note on our holiday.

We spent a few days in the 'Berg. After taking care of some resignation-related admin matters on Wednesday, myself and Ronwen set off south towards the Drakensberg. We took the 'back route', which included going down Oliviershoek Pass and going past the Sterkfontein Dam. Absolutely beautiful sites. The last stretch of the journey was in the dark, but we got to the holiday cottage in time for a quick dinner with M & B (Ronwen's brother, and sister-in-law) and young K. Since I'd had an hour or two's sleep the night before, I was soon lights out in front of the fire.

Woke up the next morning to look out of our bedroom window and realised just what the cottage looked over: a couple of Drakensberg mountains in all their glory. Mountains like Cathkin Peak, Champagne Castle, the Monk's Cowl. Beautiful.

A few notes on the cottage we stayed at. A short stretch up the road from Champagne Castle Hotel, this log cabin (actually, two cabins, one built a while after the other) looks out over Champagne Valley and the mountains. As Ronwen said, you couldn't get much closer to the mountains without sleeping in a tent. The cottage's name is Pumula (Zulu for 'rest', I believe). It's also referred to as Verster's Cottage. At first I thought this was simply because it belonged to a Dr Verster and thought little of it. However, we found a small, limited-edition booklet containing a retrospective written by the good Dr Ryno Verster, and I spent an afternoon battling through the doctor's Afrikaans writing. I learned that it's called Verster's cottage because this remarkable man not only owned it, but built it. Literally. In his mid-forties (the doctor was born in 1897), he discovered the Champagne Valley area and fell in love with it, and spent every holiday and long weekend hiking through the mountains. He documented many of his recollections of his experiences in the mountains and with the local people, and how things had changed over the years. Years later he was able to buy the piece of property, upon which Pumula is now situated. He planted a small forest of pine trees, and hit on the idea of building his 'dream cottage' on the property. In his 60s or so, he started planning out the house (with no other examples to go by, he designed the house and roofing by building a small model). Slowly but surely, he started construction. With the help of a local Zulu worker, he spent 7-odd years building the cottage, painstakingly preparing and treating logs from his plantation, stacking and unstacking and shuffling and hoisting them as he tried to build the walls, sometimes going so slowly and having to retry so many different combinations of logs to get a proper 'fit', that an entire day's work resulted in only two or three logs being laid down.

A few things about this story moved me. First was the fact that Dr Verster's love affair with the area only happened so much later in his life. For someone who's just getting into his thirties and still bemoaning the fact that his twenties are over, it was a wake-up call for me. At my age, the idea of me only stumbling onto something so life-changing and fulfilling, only in another decade or two's time, is incomprehensible. It gave me a sense of what it might mean to say one has had a full life. 90 years on this planet is a long time, if you use it wisely.

Also, it completely changed my perception of the building we were staying in and just how much we take for granted. When we arrived, I thought 'nice, rustic', and by the end I found myself in love with the place and its nuances (often documented and explained by the doctor). It gave me a completely new appreciation for things we'd have thought little of. For example, parts of the floor were incredibly uneven - apparently because they were done by the doctor's Zulu helper, who was (in the doctor's translated words), "going through one of his heaviest drinking patches at the time."

The doctor passed away in 1990, at the age of 93. The cottage is still owned by his family, and rented out to others whenever the Verster family aren't using it. A guestbook contains entries of visitors as far back as 1986. Included in the guestbook are write-ups by Ronwen and her family, from the 80s. That's history for you.

We did two hikes in the Monk's Cowl nature reserve. On Friday we hiked towards (without reaching) the Sphinx (a rocky outcrop in the area looking like the uh, you guessed it) and back. On Saturday we spent two hours schlepping to the Sterkspruit Falls. By the end, I was well and truly hiked out. Beautiful scenery, though.

Apart from that, the week and weekend was spent chilling out, spending time with Ronwen's family (her folks joined us over the weekend as well), and destressing. The whole resignation thing put a damper on things to an extent, but hey - what better place to sit and think about things than in front of a fire on a cold winter night, knowing that mountains that have been around since time immemorial are just outside your window, reminding you that in the greater scheme of things, some things are far more important than others.