the corner office

We said goodbye to my sister and brother in law this morning, they're off to Durban for the next week and a half. They arrived safe and sound on Thursday - and it's been an absolute blast having them with us for the past few days. They've been out and about quite a bit, catching up with friends, and going to a family friend of ours' wedding, so they left us enough time to get some studying done. I'm afraid to say I didn't use that time too wisely, so I'll be cramming now for this week's exams.

We learned some sad news this morning. Our neighbours are planning on selling their flat and moving, which means that Tupac and her two puppies (now full-grown) will be moving too. Our overseas plans meant that parting ways with the mutts was an inevitability, but it's still a little heart-breaking to consider that the parting might happen sooner than we expected.

On the exams front, Ronwen's been acing her exams, too. Talk about enterprising: apart from having been way more diligent than I've been the whole year through, her exam strategy also includes phoning up the lecturers for each subject and asking them whether there are any sections of the syllabus she should "focus" on. And without fail they tell her! Well, I suppose if you don't ask, you'll never know...

Undertook an emergency spring-clean of our spare bedroom, previously known as the impenetrable chamber of junk and shock! horror! it's all done and tidy. Why? Because my sister and her hubby are somewhere in airplane over Africa at the mo, on their way to ZA for a visit. Yay!

Some of the junk is going to be making its way to Cash Converters, if they'll have the stuff. More purging: finally getting rid of the old Fitness Flyer (I know...), my not-quite-working guitar amps, and an old Sony sound system that broke about 7 years ago. Life would've been a lot easier if I'd done this last week before Ronwen's Golf went byebye, but there you go. I'm hoping my sis&bro-in-law's rental car is a hatchback, else the Fitness Flyer will be staying with us for a while longer. That ain't fitting in the Volvo, that's for sure.

PS I thought I'd see if SABC have developed a clue and decided to air the final US presidential debate, but nope. All My Children it is. To bed I go.

My lack of Portuguese-speaking friends was never a cause for concern for me before, but I sure could use one right now. I'm trying to get hold of 2 rather obscure albums by an obscure and now-defunct Brazilian band and well, dammit, I've realised that if you don't speak Portuguese, then Brazil isn't that accessible. Googling for album names has turned up two possible outfits I could endeavour to transact with - one rare CD and DVD shop (actually, Google-translated: "Hall & Landlord of CDs and DVDs. In the ESCALPO voce finds all the styles of cds: national, mattered, rare and it are of catalogue (7,000 headings)") in Salvador in Brazil's Bahia province, and one a Japanese rockabilly mail-order company from god-knows-where.

Neither exactly inspiring. Getting in touch with the Brazilian company seems most sensible, but I'm not quite sure whether it's socially acceptable to mail someone with an opener like "Hi, do you speak English? And do you accept credit cards? If not, then nevermind." How insane would I sound to these guys if I threw that sentence at Babelfish or the Google translator and mailed it off to them?

I might just try it anyway, but a more established online outfit would really be a lot easier. There's no Amazon in Brazil. The irony...

Better than I was expecting, the chapters I thought they'd focus on, they did. I'll be surprised if I didn't pass, utterly shocked if I got a decent mark though.

Now for a tense week of Operating Systems and Graphics Programming. Pfee!

Now how's that for a novel concept? Instead of having to memorise a thousand facts and regurgitate them at will, you instead get an exam which is quite doable if you understand the concepts and know where to find the answers and put them together. It was my first open-book exam and it went quite well, give or take a lousy section or two.

It was interesting to see what people brought with them. Your have your standard or garden variety student (like me) who had the textbook and their study notes and the various tutorial letters, and then there were those inclined to go the extra mile, and bring all manner of thick and imposing books as well, either because they're showing off, they can afford it, they're far too paraat or because they just plain need to. I'm sure I saw one woman with "CORBA for Dummies."

Unlike todays enlightened exam, tomorrow's exam will mostly be regurgitation of facts, lists and knowing exact turns of phrases used in the textbook. Back to the grind...

Well, just an hour to go before the start of the Great Exams of 2004. I hate this feeling of knowing that I'm not as ready as I should be and I promised myself that this year would be a whole lot different, but there you go. It's not like I have any excuses either, but I've been enjoying being on holiday for so long that my "full-time student" ruse cast me less in the role of the super-diligent student I was in the early years of my first degree, and more as the lazy-ass slacker of the later years of my first degree.

I'm consoling myself with something I said to a friend of mine a few minutes ago - unlike a decade ago with Degree The First, a second degree as a grown-up means that if you bugger up you don't have to worry about your parents getting upset with you. That's supposed to remove the jitters, but it's not working. I'm not sure which is worse - other people's expectations or my own. That blasted work ethic thing again.

Phew. Anyway. It's time to gooi on my takkies, go buy some Super-C's and an Energade and do this thing. Once more, into the breach...

Bastards. Ronwen's car got stolen this afternoon. From right in front of our front door, while we were both at home. The thieves knocked the complex's security gate off its hinges and shunted it open while two of them hotwired the car. Our neighbour heard the noise and caught them red-handed. They raced the car in Reverse down the driveway, out the gate, and sped off with him sprinting after them.

The Flying Squad and the regular police were here in minutes (kudos to them), got the details and shunted off to look for Ronwen's car (and the getaway car the thieves arrived in - our neighbour managed to get the license number), but no luck. We found out afterwards that the Flying Squad came because the moron who answered the phone when Ronwen called, and who seemed to have a tough time with English, and completely cocked up the car descriptions, thought it was an armed robbery in progress. So the Flying Squad wouldn't have bothered otherwise. Yay.

When we spoke to the on-duty officers who opened the case a little later, they were surprised and mentioned that they'd chased a Jetta (same as the getaway car) half an hour after Ronwen's car had been stolen, just as they'd come on shift. They were following up on the car (why, I don't know) when the people in the Jetta realised the police were behind them and raced away. The cops gave chase, couldn't keep up in their police van, and had to give up. Hello!??!?!?!?!?!

So, not only did these cops not know that the officers they'd just taken over from AND the Flying Squad had been looking for a Jetta driven by known car thieves, but when they see suspicious people who then proceed to RACE away from them, they have to let it slide. Surely every policeman in the vicinity should have been put on alert for Ronwen's car and this Jetta?

I know the answer, sadly. Underresourced, undertrained, understaffed, and disorganised. The police try, but they're not properly equipped. It's a royal mess.

The title of this post is the quip the Police Inspector made as a tension-breaker after he'd opened a case for Ronwen. Naturally, we all laughed. That's what South Africans do.

That's not the worst of it. The hooter went off when they hotwired the car, and I thought it was someone in the complex driveway playing silly buggers. I was elbow-deep in dishes and ignored it. As I mentioned, our neighbour had thought the same thing but went outside to crap on whoever was doing it and caught the thieves reversing down the driveway, and went sprinting after them hurling obscenities. If these bastards didn't reckon they could get away, they could easily have opened fire on him. That apparently happened to two teenagers in Northcliff last week. Both were shot, one of them died. Had I opened our front door on the thieves, would it have saved the car or would they have shot me? When you hear something suspicious, do you investigate or do you lock your doors and pray nothing happens to you?

I mentioned this to the cops and their response was "they'd kill you. Let them take what they want, rather walk away with your life."

Well, they should know. *sigh*

In past years my exam distraction of choice used to be computer games, this year it's bloggery. I'm not sure that's an improvement. I haven't had much personal to report because the only things I'm doing right now are studying, tinkering with Gentoo (Windows? Wassat?), and getting sucked into the black hole.

But either way, my exams start on Monday and I'm not looking forward to them. As always, I haven't been too diligent, but more diligent than if I wasn't as diligent as I've been. Monday is Advanced Programming, which boils down to "how well do you understand the CORBA API?" It's an open-book exam, which is a first for me, and something of a relief. Tuesday it's Advanced Systems Analysis and Development, which is basically "how well do you understand UML?" Not inherently difficult, except that it's about as much fun as plucking nostril hairs, and Ali Bahrami's tome has some seriously dense theory, and memorising swathes of the stuff is plain soul destroying.

After that the next two are Operating Systems and Computer Graphics the next Monday and Tuesday. Those are going to be horrible, but then it's an exam a week until mid-November, and it should be fairly plain sailing through all of them.

And unless I fsck up royally, I'll then have my BSc. I'm not holding out for great marks; I haven't done enough work for that, but I'm not even going to feel guilty about it. As long as I get through everything without too much stress, I'll be happy.

Word Soup is back:

Thank god. Arnold finally outlawed Necrophelia in California. As a politician it must be nice to have majority issues to rally around. I don't imagine there's many pro-necrophelia groups out there to contend with.

"That Arnold, he gets things done."

The article in question has this line:

Prosecutors didn't have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that," Ochoa said on Friday.

I didn't register the second sentence, at first. *shudder*

I have to share this: Julian Robichaux on rogue eyebrow hairs.

Now I'll admit, one very unexpected thing that's happened to me as I've gotten older is that I've managed to grow a couple of "rogue" eyebrow hairs. Normally your eyebrows, eyelashes, arm hairs, etc. grow to a certain pre-determined length and then stop growing. For some reason, a couple of years ago I noticed that one of the hairs on one of my eyebrows decided to ignore nature and just keep on keeping on. By the time I caught wind of this scheme, the hair in question was almost the length of the brow itself, although it was hiding quite cleverly within the other hairs, all tucked away and weaved in there. A few times I tried trimming it, but it would always grow back. Eventually I started plucking it out, at which point another hair temporarily took its place, and then the original hair grew back, and then I had two mutant eyebrow hairs to deal with.

The subject matter's quite topical in the Miller-Pretorius household...