the corner office

Just in case I hadn't come to fully appreciate how powerful a medium blogs can be, I got a mail from my sister this morning. She's been in the UK for a good many years now, and to cut a long story short, she mentioned how for the first time in ages, she got to see more of the day-to-day side of me that doesn't really come across in emails and phone calls. If I had any doubts about using this blog as a personal page as well as a purely 'technical' one, I'm now convinced.

On a side note, she took me to task for my summer post:

... your onset of summer posting. How dare you mention such things. We're in our winter woolies over here. There is no justice in this world.

Well Sis, I have one thing to say: you get to have White Christmases, so there!

In my world, there is but a single measurement for the onset of summer: when I can start going to work in shorts again? Today was that day. It means that unless a serious cold front rolls in, or I have business meetings (with people who don't know me that well ;-), I will live in my trusty baggies until around May next year when it's time for chinos and jeans again. Did I mention that I love working in a small company? :-)

I've published all my blog entries up to the beginning of September, and I've got a month to go. If anyone's been so kind as to subscribe to my RSS feeds, I'm sorry for overloading you!

Some of these posts are probably a lot more personal than most people have on their sites, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I feel it's important to include them. Going through them again wasn't exactly pleasant, but a month later, it's at least easier to re-read them. Life goes on...

My blog went live on the 3rd, which (I remembered later) was an unpleasant one-month anniversary, but my business partner's funeral also marks the last day I smoked. (Update: I mixed up my dates. Mo passed away 2003.09.02, not the 3rd). I'd given up 2 weeks prior, but the funeral days saw me break down. It's now 5 weeks exactly that I've not smoked. While I miss smoking in many ways, I do feel I've kicked the habit for good, and I don't regret it.

My original stop-smoking posts never mentioned what finally gave me the nudge to stop smoking. One of my neighbours, whom I'd never really spoken to, was working on our electric gate one day as I was leaving for work. As we spoke, I realised why it was he'd never said anything to me the once or twice I'd actually seen him around - half of his neck was horribly scarred and he spoke with a horrendous croak that made him almost impossible to understand. I had no idea why his neck was scarred, but my immediate reaction was 'throat cancer'. I drove through the gates, stopped at the pharmacy around the corner and bought nicotine-replacement sprays.

The man's name was Ashley, and he passed away last week. I found out this weekend that he had throat cancer and emphysema. So yeah. It's 35 days and counting...

I plopped my blog down onto the WWW 2 days ago. I haven't told anyone about it yet, and instead of actively promoting my site (yeah right), I've been tweaking and retweaking much of what's already there, steadfastly avoiding taking the final plunge and announcing myself to the world.

I have a zillion posts from the last 3 months to push live, and I'm going to start doing that tomorrow. But knowing that I'm "out there", has me jittery about adding new posts, since now there's no turning back if I publish an utterly crap entry. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to win a popularity contest. Indifference on average with the occasional reader suits me fine. It's outright and unequivocal rejection that I fear the most.

What if people get tired of my waffle and saying unflattering things about me everywhere? What if my opinions are so unpopular I get dead frogs in the mail? What if I post technical things and everybody thinks I'm an idiot who shouldn't be allowed near computers? What if my blog goes down like a Verisign marketing stunt, and the Net rises en masse and starts patching DNS servers to spare the world from my feeble blogging attempts?? What if, what if, what if?

I hope this doesn't turn into writer's block or anything. It's one thing to sling posts into a private journal, another to open oneself up to public scrutiny, and the ever-present risk of sheer, crushing, unforgiving, cold embarassment and rejection by one's peers. All of a sudden I have a lot of respect for my koff fellow bloggers.

As with most ventures in life, the same old good advice probably applies... just be yourself, treat others with respect, wear clean underwear at all times... but with the exception of the underwear thing, the other advice is never really comforting...

On second thoughts, I'm already rambling on as usual... I'm sure I'll be OK :-)

Ok, screw it. There are probably a few dozen features missing or broken, a few dozen security holes and completely unprofessional loose ends floating around, but now is as good a time to go live as ever. So woohoo! My blog is live.

So verily, Hello World! You don't know I'm here yet, but hey, I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

I've been 'blogging' privately for over 3 months now, while I tweaked this database into shape. So the blog will grow in both directions - into the future and into the past. It's been a rather eventful few months, with personal tragedy and life-changing experience far beyond what I thought I'd be ever be blogging about. I've recorded this, and dozens and dozens of less profound entries in my blog and I think they're important to include in the 'live' blog, as a reminder of what's gone on in my life. I'll be going through these, and with a touch of editing and "oh wait, the world can read these now" censorship, I'll be publishing these posts as I go along.

Ronwen and I went to Sandton after work, for a date, ek se. That involved scoffing down take-aways in the Food Hall, (where I burned my palate with an overly-hot St Elmo's pizza which is still hurting - my palate, not the pizza) - and then (this is the real highlight of the post, not my St Elmo's experience) - we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean.

Now... Ronwen was bugging me to go see this. We haven't been to movies in months, and if anyone had said that our fast would be broken with a pirate movie, I'd have told 'em to take a long walk on a short plank, so to speak. For whatever reason, the whole pirate movie thing never really floated my boat after the age of 10. Scurvy, sif people with vrot teeth and limbs being hacked off is not my idea of fun, in the greater scheme of celluloid entertainment. That Geena Davis flick from a coupla years ago did nothing but reinforce my disinterest in all things swashbuckling.

Having said that, I shall gladly eat my words, for verily, the movie is brilliant. Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow makes the movie. A slightly camp, sun-addled pirate who clearly is a bit more in charge of things than he ever lets on (or not, you never quite know) - is brilliant. "But... why's the rum gone?" Geoffrey Rush is his inimical brilliant self. A number of comedic side parts add to the movie, including that weedy bloke from the Office as a pirate with a wooden eye. Classic! The CGI monstahs were a tad cheesy, but passable. The jury's still out on Orlando Bloom, though. He seems like a nice bloke and you want to enjoy whatever role he plays, but to my mind he just does that whole earnest thing a bit too, uh, earnestly. In Lord of the Rings he got away with it, since as Legolas you could expect an Elf who's lived for a zillion years and knows what a meany Sauron is to take things a little seriously. In this movie, I'm not sure if it worked. Perhaps I just have him typecast with pointy ears, now.

(As an aside, I feel the same thing happened with Hugo Weaving as Elrond in Lord of the Rings, although the Matrix had him pegged first. Ronwen and I have a joke going in that every time we see Elrond in LoTR, we say 'Welcome to Rivendell, Missstrrrr Andrrrsssson'.)

Anway. As Ronwen has expressed undying fondness for Mr Bloom, I shan't feel guilty for venturing forth and expressing my deep admiration of the gifts and talents of Ms Keira Knightley..

In short, a fine, fun movie.

I had often wondered what was wrong with my local web server taking so long to serve pages from my downloaded version of the w3.org HTML spec.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-REC">

Now I know why... this is hardcoded into every page of the spec. Those of us with modems who aren't connected 24/7 download the html for a reason.

The neighbours are out and they left their dog Tupac outside. So at about 11 we had the tell-tale scratching and jumping against the door - it seems she's planning to spend the night with us. Tupac's in and out of our duplex all the time, but it's always a big thrill for us when the dog decides to sleep over!

Well.. it was... until the last time, when Tupac chewed up Ronwen's cell-phone charger, one of her handbags, and one of her shoes. Tupac was somewhat Mongrel Non Grata after that. Be that as it may, this time round we're feeling a little safer, because this time Tupac brought her new favourite toy.

What's the best chewy toy to give to young dogs to keep 'em pre-occupied and away from the expensive stuff? Sure, you can buy fake bones, and all manner of mass-produced toys, but Mother Nature has something even better, and a lot cheaper, and far more resilient. I'm not sure if any other countries do this, but in good ole ZA, a trend kicked in a few years ago, and yep, you guessed it if you read the title, we give hooves to our dogs. Verily, our neighbours have acquired a hoof for Tupac. I have no idea what species of creature offered its hoof for this Greater Good, but Tupac is sitting next to my desk and contentedly chewing away on a hoof.

Lovely.

I applied for Telkom ADSL today. It's been nearly a year since Telkom released their ADSL service and it's near miraculous that I haven't rushed out and upgraded yet. ISDN beats the pants off analog, but I still had to contend with monster phone bills, slow download speeds, and MWEB's incompetence.

The biggest downer about the ADSL thing, is that Telkom have a 3GB cap on monthly traffic. Even though Ronwen & I moved to Northcliff (with an enabled exchange) from Robindale (whose exchange wasn't enabled) a good 8 months ago, the cap (and laziness) has been the main reason I've been hesitant to rush out and get upgraded -- my work replication could blow 3 gigs in a few days. Most of us laboured under the misapprehension (and I'm sure Telkom didn't mind) that once you'd blown your 3 gigs, your bandwidth was throttled silly, and that was that.

Glad to find out recently, though, that while local and international traffic both count towards the cap, it's only international bandwidth that gets throttled. And that basically boils down to all the naughty folks being lumped onto a separate international link. Local connectivity isn't throttled, and you still get to take your chances that the 'alternative' international link isn't too busy.

Well, I figure that the average, ridiculously slow speeds I'm getting from MWEB can't be any worse.

Telkom's pricing is another thing, of course. ADSL rental is about R680, and another R70-odd is added to that for line rental. Then add about R220 ISP subs. That's well over US $100 for an ADSL connection. Which may or may not be a lot in international terms, but in Big Mac Index terms it's ridiculous. Oh, and let's not forget that this is for a dynamic IP, so you can't use your ADSL line for hosting unless you rely on one of the dyndns workarounds that are cropping up.

Why has Telkom done this? Firstly, the pricing is so high because as a monopoly they can. Diginet, Telkom's hitherto 'leased line' technology is so expensive that ADSL is still relatively cheap in comparison to it. Second, Telkom ADSL is crippled to protect the corporate Diginet market. I'll be paying 800 bucks a month for 512/256K ADSL bandwidth, while your average business is paying around R1500 to Telkom per 64k of Diginet connectivity, with at least R3500 ISP charges on top of that.

Man's propensity for allowing him/herself to be shafted is amazing.

Ray Ozzie must have felt a twinge of nostalgia... Lotus Notes to the rescue.