the corner office

Way cool link via codestore. My only gripe is that while they've managed to get 2 Afrikaans accents, and even a Zulu accent, there aren't any English-speaking South African accents. I considered offering my mellifluous voice, but the recording requirements seemed a little onerous. Eh well...

3 days, and going strong. After a weekend being busy and active, I found spending a day back at the computer was rather difficult, with lots of those almost-instinctive reach-for-the-roots type moments, and then the fleeting panic when I realised there were none. The habit is hard to break. When I've really had a craving, the spray does help. I've tried not to rely too much on the spray, and toughed it out as much as possible.

I stumbled across a site somewhere that mentioned that my numb pinkie and ring finger might be a RSI problem. Jeez, I hope it's just a nudged nerve in my elbow, which it feels like, and not something more serious.

Other than that, I had a cross-equator chat to Sandy tonight, our new bookshelves are delivered and in place (luxury! whole empty shelves!), and I finally got the last of my junk out of the boxes from the move. All of this is spread across the landing, much to Ronwen's annoyance. It'll be cleared shortly, and some of it will sniff have to go. I can't see that I'll ever need to use a car tuning kit (strobe light and all) ever again.

Yesterday didn't go too badly; far better than I expected. Quit spray tastes awful, but perhaps that's the point. It can best be described as 'Peppermint, with a really sif aftertaste.' That's probably the nicotine, and I think that goes a long way to re-inforce the anti-cigarette sentiment. It certainly helped the craving here & there, and the most important thing is not a single puff was had! As I write this, it's now nearly 36 hours since my last ciggie.

I was ratty as hell, though, as was Ronwen, but since we knew why we were ratty, the occasional little snarly sessions weren't too serious :-)

I got some home DIY going, in the form of building one of the crappy bookshelf kits I bought a while back. Needless to say, my first attempt wasn't successful, (kak wood that was warped, and splintered too often, kak workmanship with guider holes out of place) and rather ill-timed to co-incide with the first round of 'I wanna smoke' thoughts dive-bombing me. I soon admitted defeat, and Ronwen & I headed out to town a little later -- I invested in 2 extra pre-built bookshelves from Mistrys. When I got home, I decided to give the DIY bookshelf another bash, and managed to get it knocked together. Ugly but it'll do... I have an additional DIY bookshelf that I'm going to build as well, today. Net effect - I'm adding two extra bookshelves to our flat this weekend, and another two are arriving in the week! Where to put 'em, I'm not sure, but you can never have too many bookshelves, I say...

In town, I bought Lou Gerstner's 'Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?'. Rather an interesting read thus far.

Finally, we went out to dinner with L and A, since A's up from Durbs. Tried Cranks, a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant in Rosebank that everyone raves about. Well, I can now say I've tried Thai food, which is all I have to say about that.

I seriously expected to have this website live by now. If that had been the case, then it's pretty definite that I wouldn't be posting this. I'd quietly wait until I'd tried or failed, and then perhaps announce it in passing. Since it isn't, I may as well just talk about it. If I fail, I'll just go through and delete all of these posts.

An hour ago, I smoked the last cigarette in the flat. There are no more. Nothing to tempt me, unless I break down completely and go buy a pack. I'm hoping not to do that. I have my Quit antismoking sprays, and I'm hoping it'll work. Not because of the nicotine DT's, but because supposedly the Quit sprays are suitably strong that if you break down and smoke while using the stuff, you could end up sick as a dog with nicotine poisoning. That may or may not be true, but that's the disincentive that I'm praying will help me when I've failed a number of times before.

So yep, I'm trying to stop smoking. As a smoker for 9 years, I've heard it all, been through it all. I know it's disgusting, I know it's killing me, I know my lungs will never be the same. I'm not naive, just stupid for ever starting, especially after being vehemently anti smoking in my younger years.

That makes no difference.

I stumbled across Mark Pilgrim's addiction essay a while back, and more pertinently, this one. Tobacco addiction is hellishly insiduous, it's addiction, meme and social statement all in one. If you're a smoker, you're part of a special club of people, you're like the old movie stars dragging on a fag on a rainy street corner. You're one of the rebels sneaking a smoke as an act of defiance against the establishment, especially as it becomes more and more politically incorrect. You're a grown-up doing a grown-up thing. The chemical effects are virtually irrelevant at first - it's the social/mental effects. Much like alcohol - your first couple of drinks taste awful, much like your first couple of roots make you cough like crazy. But once the taste is acquired, you're 'initiated'. You've bought into the all-too-human delusion that glorifies the self-destructive bent in all of us. As Ronwen said earlier, when I asked her (since she's giving up with me) - why we smoke, she said 'because it's hedonistic, it's nihilistic, it's cool!'

Yes it is. To a smoker's mind, it's a really cool thing to do. And when you're hooked, non-smokers just don't get it. They never will. Smoking rocks, plain and simple.

But dying of lung cancer isn't cool. Nor emphysema. Nor being disfigured because of throat or mouth cancer, or any of the other cancers smoking encourages. Suffering from poor health and all the things that smoking does to fuck up your body, isn't cool. Waking up every morning with a grotty throat isn't cool. Raucous laughter that degrades into a coughing fit isn't cool. Battling to breathe isn't cool. Being completely hooked to the point of having to structure one's life around availability of cigarettes isn't cool. Reeking of cigarette smoke isn't cool. Not noticing that you reek isn't cool.

And so, finally, the battle between common sense and self-destructive hedonism is afoot. The ashtrays have been removed. It's weird not to see an ashtray in front of my monitor. I see an empty cigarette pack and lighter on my desk; the lighters wil get packed away with the candles, and the empty ciggie pack is going into the dustbin. I'm trying to stop smoking, and already my mind is rebelling, but I've had enough. I can't guarantee I'll succeed, but I hope to hell I do and I'm going to do my damnedest, no matter how much my body or mind complains. Tomorrow is my first day, and here's holding thumbs.

I've been using Mozilla on and off for quite some time now. In the past few months, I've used it pretty much exclusively for web browsing, except for Internet banking, since the South African banking industry by and large is still in an IE-only world (Two banks were laid low by MSBlaster this week. I say nothing).

Anyway, anti MS-centric-bank rants aside, I think Mozilla is a fine piece of software. One thing that irritates me, is how the pundits diss the Mozilla team and Netscape prior, for letting IE win the browser wars, while they doodled around with bug-management software and got all 'virtuous' by rewriting the rendering engine from scratch. The business heads seem to think this was a travesty and squandered opportunity. Even Jamie Zawinsky got fed up and left.

I think it's bunk. If anything, it was the commercially-driven browser war that has left us with the piece of sh*t known as Internet Explorer, and the much-loved but utterly unstable and crappy Netscape Navigator versions pre-Gecko. To my mind, a bunch of people who sat down and said 'let's do this right' have come up with the goods, and may yet prove that the past few years were but a single battle in the browser wars.

And if it isn't, who cares? Yes, it's a pity that I can't use Mozilla for my Internet banking, but then I couldn't with Netscape 4 years ago either, when NN still had some browser share. But nowadays I have a tool that I like. It's stable, it's standards-compliant, and it appears to be without any other agenda but providing a useful, powerful and reliable browsing experience.

The fact that more and more techies these days talk about moving back to Mozilla, must be very gratifying for the people who took their time and did things right, despite a lot of criticism. More power to them.

For the past few days I've had intermittent hassles connecting to various web sites. Read errors, 'document not found' errors and the like. At first I thought it might be traffic hassles with MSBlaster, or even a result of the NY power failures, or sun spots or something. But things just kept getting worse, until I could browse virtually nothing. Local connections seemed OK.

Frustrating and annoying. Is it my ISDN card finally going titsup? My gateway unhealthy (Red Hat 8.0 not what I'd call a confidence-inspiring version of Linux). A wider connectivity issue in South Africa? Of course, calling MWEB support is an option, but in my experience, you'll first speak to someone who knows less about networking than you do, but who'll keep you trying to explain the problem for 10 minutes before they realise they're out of their depth, and put you through to someone who has a clue, and might be able to help you, but as soon as they ask what you're connecting with and you say 'Linux', they say 'sorry, we don't support it' and end the call before you can try to reason with them. So I generally avoid them.

Nonetheless, in frustration, I dug up an old text document with a list of alternative dialup numbers to MWEB (no longer supported, if you believe their spam mails and support staff), and tried dialling up with one of those. And wooo, I'm back online.

I'm upgrading to ADSL soon, and then bye-bye MWEB and the mass-market crap ISP that it is.

Woop! Woop! Just got my new Samsung monitor up and running. My previous 17" is now hooked to Ronwen's machine. The new monitor is like getting a new pair of glasses (or so I'm told, my 'puter goggles have lasted me 6 years and still do the trick). My old monitor's colours weren't too hot, and seeing my site through the new colours was a bit of a shock... the blue is a little too bright for my liking. I think I'm going to need to look at the colour wheel and pick a slightly darker blue.

I should have known better - I learned this lesson way back at Lotus, when I built a number of coloured views on my Thinkpad laptop of the time. They looked nice and demure and professional on the laptop LED display, as soon as we previewed them on a CRT monitor, we realised they were gawdy to the max. Lesson is, always check out your colours on at least one other monitor, and at the least, both LED and CRT displays.

Whew, I speled it right! ;-)

Ronwen dragged me off to a commemorative lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand tonight. It was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Louis Leakey's birth, given by his son Dr Richard Leakey and Prof Philip Tobias. Prior to tonight, I'd had no idea of who the Leakeys are, this isn't quite my sphere of interest. Prof Tobias had presented a television series recently on the origins of man, and he had been one of a colleague's lecturers at varsity. If it weren't for that, I probably won't have known who he was, notwithstanding the fact that he's a rather preeminent figure in the world of paleoanthropology. And a thoroughly eccentric old fellow to boot.

Richard Leakey's speech was a hoot and a really touching recollection of his father. Prof Tobias, I think, is one of those people whose age and accomplishments mean that if he decides to overrun his allotted time by an hour, then by golly, he will. In fact, prior to the beginning of proceedings, a few American academics sitting behind us were placing bets on how badly he'd overrun the time slot :-) His recollections of his times with Louis Leaky were interesting, if a little drawn out at times. I think we lose touch with what it must have been like 60 years ago, traipsing the East African plains in clunked out old trucks, discovering evidence to support theories about our origins that were still heavily disputed at the time (and probably still disputed by some).

A really interesting evening. Sometimes my girlfriend does broaden my horizons :-)

The other interesting aspect, is that Wits is my alma mater. I was there from 1991 - 1994. (I got my BCom in '93, we won't talk about '94 though :-) It's been a good many years since I set foot on campus, and it was quite a trip down memory lane. The old lecture halls, the buildings. A lot has changed, but many things have stayed the same. Yeah, a LOT of things have changed. Back then, the 'Internet' was something the senior BSc students had access to, and the rest of us hadn't even heard of it (unless you heard some student bragging about chatting to people in other countries, and you didn't quite know whether to believe them). Guys with the meanest computers were driving 486's, and if you sat in a lecture hall there wouldn't be cell phones ringing. What's a cell phone? Oh, and of course, for the first 3 years of my varsity career, I could vote, but the dude sitting next to me in lectures couldn't if his skin was black. Each year I'd have to send in a form saying that I was studying to avoid getting conscripted into the army, to defend Volk en Vaderland. We've come a long way... thankfully.

I finally nailed my Artificial Intelligence. Got back about 10 minutes ago from driving through to Linden to drop it off. Now we pray that the lecturers still accept it... it's about a week late and only a week before credits cut-off for exam admission.

There's something rather desolate about driving through the city at 2h30 in the morning... it's been a while. Back in my uh, youth, I was no stranger to doing a lot of driving in the wee hours of the morning, these days that happens a lot less. I decided to take an old Alien Sex Fiend CD along for the drive, and that took me waaay back as well... some of the tracks put me right back into the digs in Yeoville as a young twentysomething. An entire lifetime and lifestyle ago, it feels like.

Anyway, back to the important stuff, namely my last assignment handed in. A breather! I've taken quite a bit of time off to get through this final batch of assignments, and now that it's done, I'm seriously relieved. I can contemplate some freedom before exam studying starts in earnest. So the next month will comprise:

• spending time with Ronwen, who's led a semi-single life (even more so) for the past 2 months
• sort out the chaos that is our flat
• catch up with work, and actually be able to focus on it properly
• rejoin the gym
• catch up with friends, most of whom I almost never see these days
• get this blog live

In short, as hectic as I am now.

Well, I thought this section of AI was a lot like Formal Logic. Sure, the symbols are the same. But it gets progressively more esoteric. Progressively more painful. And time runs out for submission deadlines... ouch. Battling through resolution by refutation, and far too many squiggly symbols that are a pain to remember. So now I try to run through the steps to convert a sentence to clauses, and my head explodes in a flurry of upside-down A's.

*splat*