the corner office

I spent the weekend studying so I didn't get to do too much fun stuff for my birthday. Ronwen made a fuss of me all day and cooked up a storm on Saturday night. I need to have birthdays more often :-)

Today was my Formal Logic exam. The first exam in ages in which I wrote the paper feeling fairly confident about the entire thing. Perhaps it was just a result of being completely sleep-deprived and I actually buggered everything up, but I hope not. I'm chuffed that I finally grokked it. I've had a huge mental block about the subject. I just couldn't get going, battled to get into it. The reason, I think, is that it's a lot like other Maths subjects: you need to let things percolate. Cramming doesn't work like some other subjects where you can rely on real-world experience or waffling, because with subjects like Logic it's only with practice and letting the concepts bounce around inside your noggin that you get anywhere. So I'm glad that for this exam, things finally fell into place. (Again, hopefully). And may I never write another Logic exam again.

Two exams left. Going to be a busy week.

Yay! A new month, and the bandwidth floodgates open.

Quick catch-up: wrote Systems Analysis and Design exam on Wednesday - not bad. Wednesday afternoon saw my sister and bro in law arriving from Durban. They spent a few days with us and flew back to the UK last night. As always, absolutely great to have them visiting. We spent a ton of time watching the first two series of Teachers - a British drama series about, yep, teachers. They left the DVDs for us to watch the rest, coolness. We also spent a ton of time talking shit, arbing and mucking about.

On Friday morning we went to the Lion Park near Muldersdrift, got to play with the lion cubs, toured the game reserve and got real close to heaps of lions and hyenas in the breeding camps. The highlight was the lion cubs, though. They keep a number of cubs in an enclosed area, and if you can find any cubs not completely belligerent and pissed off at having their naps disturbed, you can pet 'em. I got to play with one boisterous young cub which tried to chomp various items of my clothing and left me with a nice scratch on my arm as a trophy. Well worth it though. It's something to realise that these cute little buggers will grow up into creatures that could rip one's head off without even thinking about it. Even as cubs their paws are HUGE and seeing them bare and retract their claws is quite sobering. What an experience though. As always, Ronwen suggests these cool things, I'm lazy and disinterested but once we get to do them, I'm chuffed as can be that we did :-)

Bandwidth back... the blogging world beckons. Taking a look at Bloglines, I have far, far too many unread blog entries to catch up on. I'll save my attention for the local and Domino stuff... the political blogs seem, well, redundant. What happened this week? More death and destruction in Iraq, back and forthing over missing explosives (I'm a bit sceptical about the notion that the Iraqis had motive or occasion to pack and move 380 TONS of explosives from a known, sealed munitions dump during a time when they couldn't spit or talk dirty on their cell phones to their wives without US spy satellites and spooks noticing them, because, y'know, everybody was trying their best to find nice photies and evidence for Colin Powell to show to the UN Security Council), and the OBL video. Yoohoo, remember me? I'm the mofo who killed thousands of innocent civilians and turned your country upside down, just wanna say thanks for picking on Saddam instead...

One day to go to the US presidential election. Endorsements galore. Polls up and down. Will anything big happen in the next 24 hours? I hope not. Please choose wisely, America.

Local politics... uber trade union COSATU's fact-finding team gets itself kicked out of Zimbabwe and as intended, drops a great steaming turdpile of embarassment on Thabo Mbeki's "quiet diplomacy" doorstep. Brilliant. Also, evidence in the Shaik corruption trial suggests that Jacob Zuma is as crooked as they come. What political fall-out will there be? I suspect that the credibility of our democracy depends on it. Finally, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel presented his medium-term budget speech and everybody loves him and he renews our faith in our government where jokers like Mbeki and Zuma don't. Clone him and put him in every government position. Manuel for president and everything else!

On the geek front, I'm temporarily back in Windows. My attempts at upgrading my Gentoo system from the stable series to the 'experimental' series have been a little, uh, unsuccessful. First I couldn't boot, and once that was sorted, I still ended up with a broken X installation and couldn't get past the command line. The Gentoo community tend to come up with fixes pretty quickly, but without bandwidth to research problems, it's heavy going. Getting things back up and running will be a job for tomorrow.

It's approaching month-end and our ADSL quota is all but spent. This is a good thing, because once a month, for a few days, I'm forced to remove myself from the blogging world and the news sites and the goings-on and y'know, have a life. My productivity goes through the roof for those few days, and each month I promise myself that even when the bandwidth comes back I'll rein in the info ingestion and spend more time doing other things.

Famous last words. I'm still in uh, holiday mode, and at least partly by design I spend more time reading up on current affairs and arb stuff these days than I do reading up on technical content. I'm just being a layabout: it's the equivalent of vegging out in front of CNN or Sky News or BBC World all day, really. Except that at least political blogs are way less vapid. Usually. And it beats the hell out of watching infomercials and soap operas. Usually.

But hey, it's my holiday/student life and I'm enjoying it. Soon exams will be over and I'll have to think about becoming a productive member of society again. But in the meantime, it's back to studying and doing fun things that don't involve intercontinental telecommunications. It might be a few days before thee blog gets replicated up again, so for now, bye!

Via Andrew Sullivan, a BBC article about the less glamorous side of archaeology:

Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century.

The stone room is in a newly-unearthed annex to Luther's house in Wittenberg.

Luther is quoted as saying he was "in cloaca", or in the sewer, when he was inspired to argue that salvation is granted because of faith, not deeds.

The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat.

Hehe. Some might write it off as childish humour but oh man, it fits perfectly (or not, as the case may be). Puuuuush. Straaaaaaain. Gasp. Puuuuuuush. Straaaaaaaain. Light-headed, elevated blood pressure, lack of oxygen, next thing you're having a religious experience.

But this is the zinger for me:

Luther left a candid catalogue of his battle with constipation but despite this wealth of information, certain key details remain obscure - such as what the great reformer may have used in place of toilet paper.

"We still don't know what was used for wiping in those days," says Dr Treu. The paper of the time, he says, would have been too expensive and critically, "too stiff" for the purpose.

We don't know what people used before someone invented bogroll? The mind boggles.

I just noticed an obscure Google search hitting my blog:

humor of the 1830 s

Yeah, those were the days...

SABC3 is showing Demolition Man tomorrow night. Again. Between the SABC and eTV, that damned movie must have been shown at least TEN times in the past few years. It must be the most repeated movie on South African television. Even more than Leon Schuster movies. That's how bad it is. It wasn't a bad movie, but it's reached the point where I bloody hate it.

We really must remember to schedule Thursday night dinners earlier. CSI is on at half past eight, and it's not a dinner-friendly TV. Especially episodes about body farms.

In a fit of boredom, I'm googling the names of people I went to school with. Next to nada. One old school friend has a good number of hits 'cause she's a gay rights activist, another shares a name with a pr0n star (not the same person, I don't think), and the rest are almost entirely unknown to the Internet. Admittedly a number of the women are probably married and changed names, but I don't imagine they're any different to the others.

On that note, I just googled my own name and realised that my own home page doesn't feature on the first page. Travesty! Top spot is held by a photographer namesake, and while my name dominates the remainder of the links, they're links on other blogs and web sites more popular than mine. I know why: apart from the 'who' page, this blog doesn't mention me by name. I need to work that into these pages somehow. Subtly, of course.

COLIN PRETORIUS, dammit!

I did a quick emerge sync and I'm going to have to pull down over 300 megs to get my system upgraded. OK, admittedly that's mainly 70 megs for an updated version of xorg-x11, and 210 megs for the latest version of OpenOffice!

That's madness. If I actually liked OpenOffice, I might be less resentful.

I'm wondering if I shouldn't take this opportunity to move my system from Gentoo's stable package line (x86) to its unstable (~x86) line. Living on the edge, risk-taking hip-with-the-times dude and all that. Problem is, that would involve 600 megs of downloading, and enough compiling to make my little Athlon gulp in fear. Perhaps month-end. I'll save my bandwidth for other things for now.

The really cool thing is that I've finally proven to myself that I can live mainly, if not solely in Linux. There are a number of tweaks I need to make it really homely, and I'm not sure if the Notes client will behave once I start doing more serious development with it... but I've not used Windows in anger for nearly 3 weeks, and that's a first for me.

As expected, Computer Graphics was a disaster. Coding stuff was fine, the theory wasn't. I can't gripe, I should've put more effort into it. *sigh*

This is interesting: the BBC has a list of 101 words in 101 years, listing when words first became common. Some, thankfully, didn't have much staying power (1909's tiddly-om-pom-pom, for example), and it's hard to imagine that people once lived without terms like sacred cow (1910), sex (in a copulative sense, 1929), dunk (1937) and pissed off (1943).

One technical term struck me as odd: the use of the word "applet" is dated to 1990. Java only arrived much later, but true enough, from Dictionary.com:

Merriam Webster "Collegiate Edition" gives a 1990 definition: a short application program especially for performing a simple specific task.

I can't remember whether I'd ever heard the term prior to Java, but there you go.

I certainly haven't been deserving of the exam papers I've been getting, and my luck is going to run out eventually. In the meantime, lucky me: of the zillion things I could have been asked in today's paper, the exam (mostly) asked things I happened to know the answers to.

Time for a quick nap, and then it's a mad cram for Graphics Programming.