the corner office

KDE 3.3 comes with a wallpaper image called seaofconero.jpg (192k).

There are plenty of really amazing images of nature out there, but this one in particular brings to my mind a sense of vastness and peace that makes me want to get in boat, plant myself somewhere out in that sea and do absolutely bugger-all but mooch around that coastline for about a decade.

I discovered that Conero is part of the Italian Riviera. Not being too well travelled, I wonder whether Riviera is just a code-word for "too expensive." Well, even if it's a day trip, I think I've found m'self another place I want to visit before I die.

(Updated to link directly to the KDE CVS file. Also, for an insane number of wallpapers and whatnot, kde-look.org is the place to go.)

... a shiny new domain name!

www.thecorneroffice.org

It's actually been in the works for ages, so it's really just a fortunate coincidence that the domain came online this morning, but hey. I probably should have waited until all the redirection rules and other gnarly things were done before announcing this, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to tie it into the anniversary :-)

Needless to say, colinp.dominodeveloper.net will still work just fine, but I'm well chuffed that my site can now start developing a clearer and less hosting-dependent identity.

Update 2019: my blog's moved to colinpretorius.org so I've disabled the links, but I've kept this for interest. The colinp.dominodeveloper.net link hasn't worked in many, many, many years.

Hey ho, it's my blogging anniversary today! I started "blogging" privately back in June 2003, but I didn't go public until October last year. This is my 490th post since then, which makes me fairly profilic (that's a charitable way of putting it).

Now's as good a time as any to reflect on my blogging experience. When I started blogging, I had a few objectives:

1. I wanted to keep a personal diary/history of my life. I'd kept a written diary on and off over the years, and these days I type faster than I write.
2. I was interested in the concept of keeping a diary online, and in public. An experiment in a new social phenomenon, you could say.
3. I wanted a soapbox whence I could foist my opinions onto the world.
4. I wanted to participate in an online community - in particular, the Notes/Domino community.
5. I wanted to use my blog to share technical content and help others.

I knew that this was broader in ambit than most blogs, and I knew this lack of focus would cost me readers. I resolved from the beginning that I wouldn't try to build a readership. That's a safe approach, since it's hard to become disillusioned or disappointed if it then comes to pass that nobody actually reads your blog!

There's another side to that, too. It may sound funny, even pretentious, but in many ways I feel that I'm writing for the future, too. Certainly, for me to look back in years and decades to come and remind myself of who I was (this is usually a good thing, for a host of reasons). I also know that I've always been curious about my parents' and grandparents' and great-grandparents' lives, and if I'm lucky enough to have sprogs and grandsprogs and great-grandsprogs of my own, then perhaps one or more them will be curious about me. They could just as easily not give a toss, but if they do, then this now-narcissistic endeavour is ultimately for them. Objectives (1) - (3) are for future as much as current readers.

So, have I succeeded in meeting my objectives? Well, I haven't been particularly meticulous in my diary-keeping. That may be influenced by an awareness that I do have a readership who'd get really bored if I did, but it also has to do with the fact that I just couldn't be arsed. Between that which I do blog, and my commentary and observations on various issues, I think I paint an OK picture of what my life is like. I can't complain. Objective achieved.

(In fact, I learned within days of going live with my blog, that the "day in the life" aspect wasn't just for the future, but right now, too. My sister, for example, lives in another hemisphere, and got a chance to share in my life in a way that had never happened via the usual email and phone calls. That, hands down, is the most serendipitous result of my blogging.)

As time passed, I've become fairly outspoken on various political and social and religious issues. I suspect I've offended, annoyed, insulted and chased away more readers because of this than for any other reason. I've often wondered whether I should leave the politics out of it - I'm not arrogant enough to believe that my opinions have caused anyone to re-examine theirs. But still, to the extent that I want my blog to be representative of who I am and what matters to me, I'll keep doing it. So in the soapbox stakes, objective accomplished and then some.

In terms of participation in the Notes/Domino community, it's been a resounding success. A more decent bunch of techies and geeks, I could not imagine. I've been fortunate to be able to interact with some really intelligent and clued-up people, and hopefully some of it has rubbed off on me ;-). Learning, networking, interacting: objective accomplished.

(I should also say that I was surprised to end up as part of the South African blogging community - the political, the technical, and the plain interesting. I hadn't given that much thought when I started out - least of all because back in mid-2003 there were very, very few South African blogs out there. But that's changing, and again, I get to rub virtual shoulders with and plunder content from some very cool fellow Sefricans).

The one area where I haven't achieved what I set out to do, though, is sharing technical content. I had no plans to become a "technical resource" in the way that some blogs are, but I wanted to share what I could. I've dropped a few technical tidbits and I've seen Google serve these to the masses, but on the whole, I had intended to share more code, publish more technical content, and in general, give more back. What can I say? Something to focus on in the next year, perhaps. I've realised that it takes a lot of work and effort, far more than it takes to fire off a quick opinionated blog post. I have far, far more admiration for those who do make that effort, 'cause it's hard. Respect.

The main thing I've learned from a year of blogging is that it isn't about publishing into a vacuum. Despite my comments about not chasing readers, I'm lucky enough to have built a fairly (OK, very) small readership, split between Notes/Domino bloggers, fellow South African bloggers, and friends and family. But that's good enough for me. It keeps it personal. My motives for blogging might be selfish, but whenever I write, I'm very aware that what I write is being read by an audience who for whatever reasons, find my blog interesting enough to follow, and for that I'm grateful.

So in a nutshell, dear audience, thanks for your time!

Sadly, a friend of Ronwen's lost her mom last week and is back in South Africa for the funeral and to take care of family stuff, so Ronwen's gone down to Durbs to see her. So I'm alone in Joburg for a week.

Thus far my solitude has produced a fair amount of on-going spring-cleaning and a concerted study effort. Will I maintain my uber-diligence for a whole 7 days? We'll have to see :-)

...I'd probably be able to go buy myself an ice cream or something.

With my ADSL being capped for international bandwidth, it makes sense to go absolutely apeshit with local bandwidth before the clock strikes midnight on the 30th and the local + international counter gets reset. Internet Solutions' ftp site has a local Gentoo mirror (amongst other things), so now's the time.

Having learned my lesson, I'm backing up the source files as I go along. To this end, I realised that rsync is far simpler and more powerful than I had always thought. Digging through the man page, I realised that you don't need to set up and run an rsync server or daemon to sync files between machines: as long as the rsync client is installed on both, you can piggy-back everything through something like ssh and the clients on both end are invoked as needed to do their magic. So with about as much fuss as a command-line copy, I was able to push a backup of my /usr/portage/ directory to a back-up server, and mirror the files onto another hard drive on this machine.

Neat!

Final social bash before exams, P & L joined us for movies on Sunday. We watched Underworld. Not bad, but the whole vampire chic thing is a little tiring for an old ex-subcultural type like me. Having said that, the whole shades-of-Matrix PVC look does still have some mileage, I guess. The ending was seriously tired though - why not just come right out and say "hey, watch this space for a sequel!"

Well, as they say in the vernacular, that's 3 gigs in sy moer in, and we'll be stuck with virtually no international bandwidth until month-end (although I haven't noticed the slowdown, yet). I truly do hate Telkom.

No mess, no fuss. I swapped out my monitor with nary a hassle. This monitor's better than the previous (which had a slightly asymmetric warp), but this one still "bows" ever, ever so slightly (as did the previous monitor). So my only conclusion is that this is how these CRTs are designed, and that's what you get for going with "Real Flat" as opposed to dinkum flat.

It's hardly noticeable (Ronwen didn't at first). So is it worth pursuing? Probably not. Tomorrow's a public holiday here, and if I'm still unhappy by Saturday, I'll phone the suppliers and see what they think. Most T's & C's don't allow for refunds on opened goods, so short of real benevolence on their part I don't see that as an option. Besides, the only other monitor in this price range and spec level is a mid-level LG, and since LG and Philips have merged their CRT operations, that wouldn't do me much good either :-/

*sigh*

I cheated a little with my online purchase. I finally decided to go with a Philips 109B55, and I decided to zip through to Kyalami to pick it up in person, rather than have it delivered. So it ended up not being an online purchase after all.

Mixed feelings. It's big, it's beautiful, it's got a bright, crisp display, and it's a million times better-looking than my old Sahara monitor. There's just one small problem: the display looks a little concave on the horizontal axes, and I can't adjust it away. It's not badly warped, but just enough for it to be noticeable and to bother me. So I'll be phoning back tomorrow to see about replacing it. I hope that it's just this monitor, and not a general problem with these models. I also hope I don't have to fight and scream and be given a "that's not a warranty issue" runaround, and I hope I don't have to go through a rigmarole to get it swapped or sorted.

We'll have to see. Bugger.

It's time to invest in a new monitor, and this (shock! horror!) will be my first major online purchase of something that can drop on the floor and break.

To date my monitors have always been relatively cheapo models, but this time around I'm aiming for a (fairly) well-spec'ed 19". I figured that since I spend the majority of my life staring at the damned thing, I may as well not skimp. I'm waiting for some feedback from one or two local online stores, but it's a trade-off between a Philips and an LG.

Online shopping for computer hardware in ZA is not without frustration. Who to buy from is the first question. Doing some Googling over .za tech forums, a few names crop up, and those are the folks I've been looking at. No probs there. It's when you hit their sites that the frustration really sets in. The two main gripes I have are (1) poorly labelled/identified products and (2) limited product ranges.

Problem one is vaguely named and labeled products. "LG 19" Flatron monitor". Not good enough, chaps; that covers a host of models, so it's impossible to Google for product reviews and manufacturer spec sheets. I've now mailed two sites asking them to clarify what product it is they're actually selling. That's plain inexcusable, even if they do acknowledge the problem in their FAQ (as one site does.)

The second problem is mainly a symptom of our small local market. Ideally you'd like to line up 4 or 5 retailers and see who charges what for a given make and model, but right now, that ain't happening. Some sites sell only one or two brands, and everybody's carrying only a small subset of the models actually available. This is especially so for the slightly more pricey stuff. And do those subsets match those of other suppliers, or even the subsets listed on each manufacturer's South African site? Noooo. Sheesh!

Having said that, the upsides of this smaller market is that reputation and customer service matters and at least some of these guys know it. To their credit, both sites that I've mailed requesting product clarifications have generated a reply from a human being almost immediately, and both after hours. So their hearts are in the right place, just the execution is shaky.

The only other gripe I have is warranty/returns policies. All sites have 'em to varying degrees of detail, but none of the sites spell things out clearly enough for a paranoid newbie shopper like me. I want to know the procedure, the caveats, the requirements. The last thing I want to do is lay out 2 grand on a monitor that flakes out and only then find out that I'll have to pack the thing up and ship it to Cape Town at my own expense and wait 2 months before the problem gets sorted.

So that's my advice to local retailers. Make it easy to identify and compare products, and anticipate every concern and worry that a potential customer may have. For every person who fires off an email trying to clarify something, another 5 don't bother, or move on to another site. The more people you keep at your site, and the more hassle-free you make things, the more sales you make, the faster your market grows. Not to mention that the less time you spend answering emails, the more time you can devote to growing your business. With higher volumes and profits, comes larger and more diverse product lines. Business Economics 101. Herendethelesson.

Aaaanyway. Hopefully I'll be able to make a decision on what monitor to buy, by tomorrow. When I've done that I'll throw up some links with my impressions of each site.