I regret never getting around to copying some Top Gear episodes onto VHS for my grandfather.

He would have loved it.

If I had a chance to do one more thing for him I think that would probably be it.

This evening we looked at rings.

Close your mouth, it's unbecoming. Yes, I'd find it hard to believe too.

I've been, and continue to be, heavily involved in our current run of interviews. It's challenging but a lot of fun. We see a wide range of candidates, both in terms of what they've been exposed to as well as stength. The ROR is not particularly high unfortunately. There just aren't a lot of good candidates out there. Or so it appears anyway.

I really enjoy interviewing. Perhaps too much, I have a tendency to get a bit carried away. There's a certain degree of skill in walking someone through a solution so you can see how they think without giving away crucial pieces. Finding that balance is very difficult. Throw in second language English speakers and a whole host of potential miscommunications and it only gets more interesting.

I have a range of pet questions. Usually they offer a range of opportunities for dealing with candidates of differing skill levels, or they tie together in some way, allowing me to bring the interview full circle from time to time. This gives the candidate a chance to apply something they learned earlier, illustrating whether or not they really understood it the first time around.

Today was family day. In the Unofficial Dutiful Blood Relatives sense rather than the Official South African Public Holiday sense. Which was rather unfortunately timed to coincide with probably the best riding weather we've had (on a weekend) in some time. Andy rather kindly obliged by agreeing to a short evening ride, which only served to reinforce what nutters we have on our public roads. Beware:

• German Luxury Engineering braking repeatedly, to the extent that it's hard to distinguish their break lights from their tail lights.
• Urban Assault Vehicles driven by people who seem to think bikers are merely one more test for their suspension.
• Bicycles that just know they can make the gap between you and the car in front of you.

Family day is slightly inaccurate, as it included a stop at some friends who have just had their second child and moved into a new place (new in the sense that I hadn't seen it yet). That was followed by lunch with Claire's sister who is expecting their first child (hang on, I'm starting to see a trend here, perhaps today was a string of subtle hints). Oliver (only 5 months old and already he has a name) is due in December. Choosing a name was a bit of a challenge because their surname (Niss) lends itself somewhat to abuse. For example, Patrick, Peter and Paul are all out. As are Adam, Andrew and Alexander. Oliver is reasonable safe (the best I can do is 'is Ollie Niss which is probably not going to scar the kid for life).

Lunch was followed by a surprise visit to my grandmother. Surprise being a key requirement lest she try to feed us too. She had a lock she wanted me to look at. It was sticking and she'd struggled to get it unlocked the first time, and having managed to then return it to a locked state. It's the first time I've taken a door lock entirely to pieces. It was quite a revelation to see how it actually fits together. It's rather ingenious and if you're bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon I recommend it. It's one of those everyday things we take for granted but (I suspect) very few people have actually given much time to thinking about its construction. Especially given that it has to be cheap to make, relatively long-lived and sturdy enough to deter reasonably determined thieves. I'm more of a software guy than a hardware guy so I'm always intrigued to see how engineers get the working world to do things their way.

Reminds me of a display we saw In Montreal at one of the museums: it demonstrated how a simple rotating gear can be made to do any number of interesting things with an appropriately shaped piece of metal.

Eish, bit of a blind one. Horner's out from the States for the week so we met at his folks' place for breakfast and to watch the SA-NZ game (the latter being the primary reason Horner granted us the audience).

Later this afternoon I took the bike round to Gary's place to catch up with them and watch the Province-Bulls game. Rugby at Gary's was a bit of a tradition before Horner went over to the US to finish his degree. Somehow I picked up the wrong end of the story at breakfast this morning. When I showed up at Gary's it turned out that the two of them were going to watch the game live. My fault for not calling to confirm. All the more embarrassing because his family was there and very kindly suggested that I stay and watch the match regardless. Without carefully screening my response I replied something to the effect of "I'm not really here for the rugby so much as the company."

Needless to say, everyone pointed out what I'd implied :-P

We have a local magazine program called Top Billing. At least I think that's what you'd call it. Like any good magazine program it's also backed by an actual magazine. I can't imagine it's worth the paper it's printed on.

It's basically a load of tripe, but this evening I noticed they've taken it to a new level. Their next show will include a segment covering the shooting of the next issue's cover.

Pretty soon they won't need any actual content. The show can report on the previous issue of the magazine which can discuss upcoming segments on the show about topics covered in the magazine which ... you get the idea.

Bah.

Lifted shamelessly from http://www.ijusthadarectalexamonline.com.

Marketing explained by analogy:

• You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and say, "I'm fantastic in bed."
  -- That's Direct Marketing.
• You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome guy. One of your friends goes up to him and pointing at you says, "She's fantastic in bed."
  -- That's Advertising.
• You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed."
  -- That's Telemarketing.
• You're at a party and see a handsome guy. You get up and straighten your dress. You walk up to him and pour him a drink. You say, "May I," and reach up to straighten his tie brushing your breast lightly against his arm, and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed."
  -- That's Public Relations.
• You're at a party and see a handsome guy. He walks up to you and says, "I hear you're fantastic in bed."
  -- That's Brand Recognition.
• You're at a party and see a handsome guy. You talk him into going home with your friend.
  -- That's a Sales Rep.
• Your friend can't satisfy him so he calls you.
  -- That's Tech Support.
• You're on your way to a party when you realize that there could be handsome men in all these houses you're passing. So you climb onto the roof of one situated toward the center and shout at the top of your lungs, "I'm fantastic in bed!"
  -- That's SPAM

This isn't going to be a particularly deep insight. I just remembered an amusing quip by the brother of the bride in North Hatley: if you ever feel the urge to mess with a Racoon's head, feed him a sugar cube.

(Racoon's are fairly pedantic about washing their food before they eat it...)

It's been well over a month since I last had the pleasure of dancing with the devil that is the open road (as viewed from the seat of a two-wheeled machine of death).

Mandy and I prayed to the weather gods all week in the hope that today would be rain-free. This morning, at about 8am, the sky looked miserable, but it cleared up spectacularly by 10am. So at around midday, having executed a backup breakfast plan I had already committed to, we headed out in the general direction of Cape Agulhas (this being the original plan). We never quite made it there, largely because progress along the coast road via Kleinmond was quite slow. Slow largely because I insisted on stopping periodically to take pictures. Too often I've been along that route on spectacular days without my camera, and I've sworn that one day I'd try to capture it. I don't think a camera can do it justice, but I tried.

I really enjoyed the ride. I felt more comfortable on the bike than I remember feeling on any other ride to date. It may have been due, at least in part, to my new riding gear. I've augmented my helmet and jacket with decent riding boots and armoured overpants. But I don't think that was the biggest contributor. It certainly wasn't as if I was suddenly okay with the idea of coming off, I just felt more comfortable. It fits with my theory that your brain can internalize skills with time alone (although I still think practice is invaluable).

Kleinmond was bitterly cold for some reason, but that didn't stop me from opening her up a little. The road wasn't long enough to accomodate more than 210 km/h, but that was plenty fast enough thank you uncle bob. We stopped in Hermanus for a large cup of coffee and a bite to eat. By this stage the coffee was most welcome. Both of us needed a little bit of thawing.

We timed it a little poorly though. On the return leg (via Sir Lowry's pass) the sun was starting to set, so it sat squarely at eye level pretty much all the way home. And the wind had started to pick up. Of all the elements to encounter on a bike, wind is the worst. Even rain doesn't come close. Fortunately by this stage I'd stopped to give my visor a proper cleaning. There were stages on the trip out when visibility was almost non-existent. It's amazing just how effective a motorbike helmet is at picking up flying critters.

And then to make sure the trip was complete, we encountered the obligatory lunatic Golf driver on the way back, doing his (or her) best to kill both of us on separate occasions. I just don't get it. Even BMW drivers seem to back down, as if they accept that their vehicle was designed to a completely different set of specifications to those of a bike. But Golf drivers, they are truly something else.

Every now and then I need to be reminded just how much I enjoy this. It seems crazy to have spent so much on a single "toy". But it really is worth it. Don't ask me to try and explain it. Get on a bike and find out. Failing that, find someone who owns a bike and get them talking about riding it.

Failing that, just take my word for it.

In general I've done my best to avoid turning this blog into a chronicle of the idiocy which runs rampant both at home and abroad. But sometimes, I despair. To whit, two examples from a single news broadcast this evening:

1. The local independent broadcaster (eTV - the one intent on pimping drugs during every commercial break) proudly announced that they had blocked an unconstitutional attempt at censorship by the government. The government had requested a preview of a taped broadcast eTV was going to air regarding a suspect in a currently ongoing trial. All they asked for was a chance to see it in case it jeopardised the fairness of the trial. They didn't ask for the chance to suppress it (if they'd disagreed with what they saw perhaps they would have asked for it to be censored, but at this point all they've asked is to see it). eTV seems to feel this is censorship. Perhaps they should spend some of their ill-gotten gains on a dictionary?
2. An unregistered creche in a local township caught fire and burned to the ground claiming the life of a 6 month old baby within. The response from the government body responsible for these things is to audit all registered creches. How is that going to make a difference?

Engage!

In an earlier post I mentioned Michael Crichton's State Of Fear as a suggested read. I would still recommend it, if only to get people thinking a little more critically about the "facts" we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

However, for a balanced view, I would also recommend reading this, and in particular this.

The photos have been on this server for a while, I just never got around to linking to them. Consider it done.

When I'm next inspired I'll put up some of the other photos from the trip.

No, not me. A friend. But it only just occurred to me the significance of the title of their photo album from the trip.

I spent some time (far too much in fact) today producing a favicon for this page. It was mostly because it's something I have no experience with and since I had only a rough idea of how it's done I wanted to give it a try.

And I was bored. But that, as they say, is another story altogether.

Anyway, having nary a creative bone in my body I leant on the trusted source of all wisdom and knowledge and stumbled across a piece of woodwork illustrated here. It's aptly titled Vessel for Imperfect Musings and it appeals even without such an appropriate name.

My favicon is a much reduced version of this. 256 pixels is not much to work with but it's the best I (or more accurately, Paint Shop Pro) can do.

Home indeed. Home and already I'm feeling restless. No doubt tomorrow's inbox, waiting patiently for me at the office, will eat into that for a day or two. But no more than that: I don't subscribe to the "No mail left behind" inbox management strategy.

Nothing momentous appears to have happened while we've been away. Admittedly, if anything significant did happen then I'm sure we would have heard about it (the global village and all that). But I find that I always expect the Universe to have altered in some fundamental way when I get back from a holiday. So far everything seems normal.

Only one new bike acquisition: one of the guys in the office has bought himself a brand spanking new ZXR10R, complete with a ridiculously expensive helmet and full racing leathers. He hasn't biked for many (many) years. He's already talking about attending track days (which I don't mind admitting scared the pants off of me). If he doesn't take it easy he may become an unfortunate statistic. A mutual colleague expressed concern (in the form of "I'm staying away from him on the road") in response to this sudden acquisition. Frankly, said colleague is easily the most frightening biker I've ever been out on the road with.

I must admit I've been a bit anxious about coming back, and it's been largely work related. I'm not really chomping at the bit to go back to work. A part of me is quite glad to hear from Andy (who fetched us from the airport) that things have ticked along nicely without me. It frees me up a bit to consider my situation. This dovetails nicely with the space (and more important, distance) this break has given me to think about the next few years and where I want to be. Fortunately I have a short week ahead of me. However, I think there will be enough admin queued up to eat up a substantial portion of the weekend.

is now most definitely out of the bag. No turning back now.

Damn. I should have had a look around earlier. It just never occurred to me until we spent a night at Norma's. We're back at Oscar's place (where we've spent most of our time in Londonium) and there are four strong signals within range, of which two are open.

Must ... fight ... addiction ...

Actually, that's not really true. I have to admit, I've avoided any of my usual haunts (apart from mail and blog) when I have been online for the past month. It's been good to be disconnected for a while and I've been trying to savour it as far as possible. I spend so much of my time plugged in at home that it's good to be forced to disconnect from time to time.

This break has been really good. It's funny how much resistance I have to taking a break. Note to self: remember this.

But, I'm ready to go home. As much fun as this has been, and as good as it's been to see old friends and make new ones, it really is time to leave. I think we'll take today easy, we have no commitments and no desire to do any further walking. The only challenge that remains for us today is fitting all of our crap into our suitcases. I have no desire to repeat the herculean effort that was involved in dragging 29 kilos of unrepentent suitcase from Heathrow to Hampstead. Towards the end of that jaunt the fingers on my right hand were beginning to exhibit signs of paralysis.

Tomorrow we'll catch up briefly with the Brits we met in North Hatley and then we'll make our way to the airport. Then I'll struggle to get comfortable, fail to sleep, have seen (or have no desire to see) the inflight movie (which, given our luck so far, will be shown on a single central screen 25 rows down from us, behind an excitable infant) and generally get the "most" out of the 11 hour flight back to Jhb, where we have a layover before connecting to CT.

At least I can look forward to a short week at the office. Small mercies.

Having successfully pirated a nearby wifi signal so I can check my mail I thought I'd lament for a bit.

This blasted racing visor is giving me a headache. I managed, finally, to find two suppliers, both within the UK but far (far) away doing mail order.

So I order and find out the following day that they have no stock. So I order from the other supplier, having now delayed the delivery to the point where the worst case delivery time they claim (5 days) means I'll pick it up pretty much on the way to the airport. Of course today I received a note via one of the guys in our local office (point of contact for delivery) that someone phoned last week because they don't have any black visors in stock. Only silver, gold or blue (all mirrored). So not only am I now in a race to get this thing delivered before we fly on Tuesday, but I will also have to try to choose a mirrored shade that doesn't make me look like a pimp on wheels.

Anyway, I'm balanced precariously out of a window on the second floor (of the 5 signals available only this one was unprotected and it's not the greatest signal) so I'm going to end this here, before someone has to try to differentiate between bits of my innards and bits of my laptop.

Michael Crichton doesn't top my reading list, but his books occasionally provide an hour or two of light entertainment. Having run out of books and trying desperately to contain my credit card, I cast about for a book in the house we're staying in.

State Of Fear doesn't really raise his bar in any way, but it certainly raises a number of interesting questions. If you think you have a handle on global warming then I recommend it. Even if you come away unconvinced, at least challenge yourself to an alternative point of view.

Spending time in Montreal has me thinking about immersively learning a new language. This has always appealed, probably because it seems like the lazy way to learn a language. Just uproot your life, relocate to a country that speaks the desired language, and let time do its thing. This is particularly appealing to me because, frankly (francophonely?) I'm horrible when it comes to languages.

But more specifically, I've been thinking about the mechanics of learning a language. It strikes me that, at the core, there might be some similarities to statistical language translation (Google is playing with this currently). In a nutshell, this approach to machine translation avoids the "big dictionary of words" + "grammar rule book" approach, and instead relies on human translators. Essentially you find as large a corpus of texts that have already been translated (Google is using the Bible and hundreds of UN documents) and try to match subsets (which may be phrases or words) in translations of the same document. The idea is that, with enough input text, eventually you end up with a big mapping between the two languages that can be used to perform automated translation. There are distinct advantages to this approach. An obvious one is that it tends to handle idiomatic expressions far better than the other approach.

I suspect learning a language has much in common with this. Every day we're exposed to at least two languages: our "mother tongue" and something I'm going to call the Universal Semantic Language (because this is my blog and I can make stuff up if I want to). As you encounter words, phrases, and expressions, you also tend to encounter something to suggest (or reinforce) their meaning. These examples go into a mental map which you use to translate "Do you feel lucky, Punk?" into an internal semantic mapping. This drives "understanding". A lookup operation consists of finding the best match (which, simplistically, probably means the longest match) and fetching the value associated with it. There's probably some form of error correction going on too. This explains (to me anyway) why it's possible to know that something is grammatically incorrect without knowing why: there's a very close match in your map but you're out by one word so it feels "wrong". This also suggests some very powerful hashing because it allows you to find close matches. That's suggestive, in turn, of something with the characteristics of a neural network.

When you learn a second language, you're doing the same thing. Initially, you're probably mapping expressions in the new language to expressions in your mother tongue. A lookup at this point is a two-step process: you fetch the entry in your mother tongue first, and then get the associated semantic entry. Eventually I suspect you reach a point where the mappings start to collapse and entries in the new language map directly onto the USL. This is essentially an optimization, because it removes a level of indirection. This would explain why people are able to think in some languages they've learned but not in others: in the case of the former, this optimization has been applied, the latter is still lagging behind.

It might also explain why it's easier to learn to read or understand a language, than it is to learn to speak it. If these structures behave like maps (hash tables) as we understand them, then perhaps a reverse lookup is much harder (more expensive)?

Don't get me wrong. I am under no illusions that it's this simple. But with all things, you need to start somewhere.

... embarks on an epic new struggle in an attempt to colonize the New World. Limited only by his
cunning (and battery life), will he best the forces awaiting him in darkest North America? Stay tuned.