Happy ITLAPD

It's been weeks (possibly months) since I took my bike out and today I was finally well enough, in the country and presented with decent weather and a willing riding partner.

We rode out to Ceres via Du Toit's Kloof and returned via Bain's Kloof. Nothing floods my system with adrenaline more effectively than Bain's Kloof. I think it's the combination of an uneven surface (the road seems designed explicitly to tackle the overpopulation process), the fact that you have to take it slowly (which means you're in a low gear and your throttle is more sensitive which, coupled with the previous issue makes for a challenging ride) or the fact that a significant portion of the ride is spent looking over sheer edges with nothing more than the occasional thoughtfully placed rock protecting you from a spectacular (but ultimately terminal) sudden change in potential energy.

Generally just a great ride.

The nice thing about a ride like this is that you are forced to focus on one thing: not dying (or some variation thereof).

I read an article recently which proffered an interesting technique for suppressing the urge to relieve yourself: think of sex. Apparently this is sufficiently distracting to buy you some time.

I buy that theory because riding is like that for me: while I'm on the bike anything that's been on my mind, or troubling me, or just generally consuming mental cycles disappears. It's just me and the road (and my riding partner, when I remember).

Wide awake and feeling like writing, but not a hell of a lot of interest to put down here. So I thought I'd dump a few random odds and ends that have occurred to me at various points.

I am amused to discover that I tend naturally towards adjusting my car radio's volume in increments that result in an even number. It feels odd to leave the volume on 17, for example. I'll either push it up to 18, or down to 16. Often I'll find myself thinking about something else, bouncing between two volume settings because neither is quite right. Eventually I'll snap out of it and mentally slap myself because the volume setting I want is the odd number between the two settings I'm unhappy with.

I think I make trouble for myself because I struggle with anything that seems like stasis. It's fine for a period and then there's an inflection point and change, any change, develops a certain allure. I have a good friend who, I suspect, struggles even more with this. Unfortunately, there's always that "Oh, fu..." moment when your feet leave the diving board.

I bounce between being narrowly focused on tiny meaningless (in the grand scheme of things) trivialities (like putting together a pure Ruby HMAC-SHA1 implementation for a set of tools I want to give to some customers) and wondering what the hell it's all about. I'm not religious, not by any stretch. I wouldn't call myself spiritual, I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. I believe we're all made up of the stuff of stars, and that in due course we return to that state, and that when that time comes that's it. Finito. The end. No "next". This used to bother me. A lot. But it doesn't really any more. There are things in Life that just are, and you either accept them or you grind to a halt. It does, however, make explaining things like "moral imperatives" tricky. I don't have a good one for that. But just because you can't explain everything (yet) doesn't make your position unsound. So don't, at this point, try to step in and tell me some ethereal being of light and pixie dust is the force behind that imperative. Frankly, evolution and societal dynamics are a lot more compelling even if they are fuzzy as hell.

Bit of a tangent there. I'll close that lid and open another box. What else is in here ...

I've become a little more wary of what I post here. I just don't have the knack of the "next generation" for total transparency. Or perhaps I fear that the people around me don't have the coping mechanisms. It's almost certainly a combination of the two. These things are never that simple. But it would be quite liberating to be able to just dump here without any concern about who might be reading it, or what they might think. I know a bunch of people who read this, people I work with, people I share a significant fraction of my genetic code with, people who's genetic lineage recently intersected with mine, and a smattering of random people I've collected along the way. I suspect the last group has grown ever so slightly too, given that I recently caved and added this site to my Facebook profile. At least, Google Analytics tells me there's been a bit of a "surge" in traffic recently. Yes, you're reading me, I'm watching you.

A couple of times I've given serious thought to starting a completely anonymous blog. Kinda like a "secret diary" so I can get in touch with my inner thirteen year old girl. An ex-colleague and I even discussed doing something like this just so we could discuss all the taboo topics that invariably come up between guys over a pool table in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe one day I'll get around to it.

This has dragged on for longer than I expected, and I should probably wrap it up before it gets any more out of hand.

To quote another good friend of mine, "Just ignore me. I'm rambling."

I real mishmash of lyrics floating around in my head at the moment, and since it seems I haven't posted lyrics for some time I thought I'd dump them all here and let you sort them out. Mostly it's just a case of snippets running through my mind (no doubt casting nervous looks about; my mind is probably a pretty scary place to spend any significant time).

"In another place, in another time, I'd be drivin trucks my dear" from Live.

Melbourne has surfaced a number of times recently.

Maroon 5 have made a reappearance recently.

Caught the aural equivalent of a whiff or two of Vertical Horizon earlier this evening which budded into an overgrown tangle of nostalgia. Funny how closely particular music always seems to be tied to a particular time, or set of events. What sets you off?

And the collection just wouldn't be complete without the ubiquitous Counting Crows (sleep certainly didn't come easily last night, and the chorus seems to resonate right now, I just haven't quite figured out why).

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Don't ask me why it appeals.

I have a small core of people I consider to be 'close' friends. These are the people I genuinely feel I can talk to about anything. They're also the people who put up with bullshit from me and don't have weird needs I'm expected to fulfill (or at least I don't feel strong pressure to fulfill those needs).

I say this because one of those people are back in town after an extended away period and I was reminded of these things today. This is good because some of the people who fall into this group have not just returned and it's easy to take them for granted.

I don't do small talk (the activity, not the language). This is less a result of not wanting to do it and more a result of being incredibly bad at it. If you're looking for small talk you'd be better served trying to chat up the nearest bookcase. I'm that talented.

So catching up with old friends is always a little challenging initially because everyone begins with small talk. It takes a little while to transition back onto real topics. I think this is just a form of inertia. So much of our daily interaction involves small talk that when you're faced with an opportunity to move past it it takes a little while before you realise what's in front of you.

But when you finally do it's such a relief to realise you can drop the masks, suspend the bullshit, and call a spade a spade.

I figured I've been absent on this forum for long enough that it was high time I stepped back in and gave a rough state of the nation. I really enjoy browsing back through my blog entries. It's a great way to take a nostalgic walk through recent history. Needless to say that's going to be tricker if I don't pick up the pace and bloody well write something down every now and then.

Highlights? Well, work is it's usually busy self. We've had a rough couple of weeks trying to pull together some features in parallel with certain, *ahem*, challenges (self-induced, as the best challenges always seem to be). I got promoted recently, which I suppose counts as a highlight. I'm still enjoying it although the trend away from being directly involved in the day to day technical work seems to be continuing.

It's weird. It's not like I haven't got opportunities to get directly involved in pretty much any of the work I want to. It's something Peter and I have talked about and we've made plans with the specific aim of giving me these opportunies. But the past few days are a great example of what generally happens. 10 programmers, left to their own devices, with the best of intentions, do *not* move in the same direction. And it's through no fault of theirs'. I think this kind of work is generally simply so focused that it's like wearing blinkers. And without explicitly stopping and taking a look around (hard to do when you're on a roll) it's easy to drift a little.

And for some reason I seem to end up trying to drag everyone back onto the path and in the right direction (although perhaps "chosen" is better than "right"). It's not a trend I can easily explain. It just is. Maybe everyone else just got tired of dragging?

The end result, though, tends to be a pretty fractured day. I'm not saying I mind, I'm just trying to figure out where I am. The perpetual search for meaning and fullfillment in life :-)

In other news, Gary and Bev got married recently. So they're falling like flies. Neil and Shona are up in November. Rory and Tarryn (ooh, I hope I've spelt that correctly) are up in January, and Mark and Sarah will follow sometime later next year (unless they've already set a date and I've forgotten, which is entirely possible).

And speaking of Neil, his bachelor's happens this weekend and I've just been informed of the evening's events. It seems they'll include Teazers, amongst other "pleasures".

We recently spent time up in Pretoria with my family-in-law. I really enjoy spending time with them. They're generally pretty chilled but provide me with no end of entertainment. We (or rather I) did have an additional reason for going up: to visit the The Headache Clinic.

I suffer from a lot of headaches. So much so that I feel something like Douglas Adam's Rain God, in that I have a wide range of different headaches that all feel different. So in a sense while other people get "a headache", I get "type 1 - starts as tension in my shoulder muscles and climbing my neck slowly" or "type 3 - starts in my right temple and moves in to camp out behind my right eye" (or variants on the other side of my head, and complete with sub-variants that sometimes include a metallic taste in my mouth).

So we figured we'd front the cash and give it a go. The results remain to be seen. It will be three months before I know if it's helped. In the interim we've tracked down a local physiotherapist who specialises in headaches and we're looking for someone who might do dry-needling (a Western take on acupuncture) or even acupuncture "proper".

In addition I'm trying to eat more healthily (not that we don't do this already, but I'm preferring healthier lunches over the stuff I used to eat) and trying to walk for 30 or 40 minutes as part of "lunch retrieval"). And in addition to that I'm trying to swim at least few times a week. The weird thing is that I definitely feel better for all this but it doesn't seem to have made a bit of difference on the headache front.

I think that about sums up the current state of affairs. Unfortunately my bike is conspiciously absent from all this. I haven't had chance to take it out for a few weeks now, what with a combination of travel, work and headaches (and a weird combo of a stomach bug and the flu that took me down last week). I hope to rectify this shortly, especially given some of the glorious days we've had of late.

Sort of.

Does this mean we can expect the A-Team? Airwolf? Street Hawk? I've heard rumours of a Magnum movie.

Hollywood revisits the 80s? Man, that would kick ass :-)

Yup, I'm never gonna be a fighter pilot.

What tickles your trigeminal nerve nucleus?

I find myself being quite honest with the person currently occupying the role of Boss in my working life (Boss in other spheres is an entirely different role).

This is interesting because it seems to be a trend. Bear with me, this may take a little explaining.

Sometime after I broke up with my girlfriend of many years I found myself in a new relationship (as an unstable molecule like myself tends to). After a short while I realised that I was treating the relationship is though it were many years old. I was being brutally honest in a way that is only possible with someone who's extremely familiar with your quirks and has obviously decided you're worth tolerating regardless. It took an effort to reset myself and undo habits formed over the previous few years.

So, swinging back to the boss front, at Mosaic I was particularly 'open' with both of the guys who ultimately decided whether I was still worth Mosaic's time and effort. Extremely open. Open to the point where it still surprises me that they put up with me for so long :-)

It strikes me that I might be a bit of a creature of habit. It's taken very little time for me to approach a similar level of 'openness' with my new Master of the Daylight Hours.

I'm not sure if this says something about me, or if I've just had a run of particularly tolerant overlords.

Why is it that when an artist covers another artist's song they'll happily go their own route with the melody or tune but seem disinclined to change the lyrics? And I'm not talking about the addition of spurious "yeah"'s or "oohooh"'s.

The web, and in particular resources like Google and Wikipedia, are marvelous things. I've lost track of the number of conversations I've been privvy to, or even a direct participant in, where something has come up that I know little (or even nothing; it happens) about.

With an Internet connection it usually isn't long before I sound (superficially anyway) like an expert in the field.

This does have a tendency to draw conversations out. Sometimes they span days. But that isn't always a bad thing. It gives you time to mull things over.

It's raining in Seattle. Not hard mind you, but sufficiently persistently so that I've come indoors for a bit. I stumbled onto Pike Place Market. But while markets like that are interesting they're almost certainly better visited with others, especially if you live in the area and can really take advantage of them.

It's weird how dead downtown Seattle is today. I guess over the weekend people flee to the hills. That or they're all indoors watching deeveedees on their aitchdeee teevees.

Traveling alone has it's pros and cons. I quite enjoy the freedom of being alone in a foreign city. Ever since my first organized school tour overseas where two of us would pair up (the buddy system was mandatory) until we were out of sight, at which point we'd go our own ways. We both just wanted to wander alone.

I've been trying to figure out why Seattle has made far less impact on me than say London. What's different about Seattle? That got me to thinking why my memories of London are so nostalgic. I long ago decided that I don't think I'm cut out for life in London. Melbourne currently tops my list of places I wouldn't mind returning to for an extended stay. But even Melbourne does't evoke such a strong sense of nostalgia.

I think part of it is the age of the city in question. London has had far longer to soak up the lives of the people living there. And it shows, in some intangible way. This goes some way towards explaining my reaction to Seattle (as an example), and perhaps even Melbourne. But I don't think that's all there is to it. Most of my travel has been work related. This means that most of it has been solo. And it's the trips that haven't been alone that I've enjoyed most. Bangkok with Shaun and Tony, Melbourne with Simon and Pete, and London with too many people to name.

So London has a lot of "personal history" attached to it. From my stay in the dead of Winter with Clare, to a weekend road trip through the South East of England with Gerhard. From Toga parties in Wimbledon and a crazy couple of weeks with Andrew, to the most recent trip to see Norma and Oscar. London is bound up with people and I suppose at the end of the day memories filled with the laughter of friends are the ones that really matter in the end.

Not much to report. Home alone, Mosaic, er I mean S1, having pulled the usual off-you-go-at-short-notice stunt. So at the moment Claire's in London shortly to hop over to Poland to present vaporwa ... er I mean conceptware to a potential customer.

So I'm figuring out new and marvelous things like which nobs make the top of the big white box in the food-room hot and how to open those metallic cylinders that contain edibles (I think they grow on trees).

Work is heating up what with us screaming towards an Optimistic Deadline^TM. And in all likelihood I'll be off to Seattle at some point in the immediate future (so immediate that there's a possibility I'll be off before Claire's back). This will afford me yet another opportunity to explain to other programmers how I think they should do their jobs. Ho ho ho, ain't Life a barrel of laughs.

On the personal growth and spiritual front I'm attempting to master Emacs. Master is a strong way of putting it. Perhaps attempting to not be mastered while using it is more correct. In case that turns out to be too easy I've also decided to take the Lisp plunge. I was going to say revisit Lisp but frankly, "everyone's" used Lisp at some point but the kind of tinkering you do at varsity really doesn't count. I'm taking the "pragmatic" route by playing with Common Lisp (as opposed to the "purist" route and writing deaf, dumb blind code completely shut off from the outside world). For the first time in a long while I'm really interested in a new language. I'm just not as blown away by Ruby as the rest of the world. Sure I can see some of the elegance people talk about (although not in the syntax, frankly I think it's pretty awful in many respects) but it just hasn't blown my skirt up. I don't feel a driving need to play with it the way I do Lisp. I think ultimately what made my mind up about Lisp was a comment about how Lisp really is one of the few languages that isn't derived from Algol. And it's because Algol was designed to drive a von Neumann machine whereas Lisp was derived from the Lambda calculus. So their roots are completely different which means a language like Lisp is a really good place to expect to find completely different ideas and ways of approaching problems. In some sense the former are too focused on the hardware of computation while the latter is much more centered on the software.

Which brings me to self-improvement activity number three which is to dust off my old maths textbooks and go through them again. Blow out some cobwebs, get some of the old vacuum tubes glowing again. Maybe even get into some areas I've never spent time in. We'll see. All of these are likely to be long term. I think if I push it too hard then I'll just get fed up and back off entirely. So baby steps.

On the Rox front, 0.6 is pending and work on Rox is likely to slow down a bit while I spend some time on a private project (as yet undecided) using Common Lisp. Of course the fact that we're actually using Rox at work will drive it forwards some (I suspect that's one of the reasons it's come so far) but beyond bug fixes and one or two minor features we're likely to need I don't see a whole lot more immediate work. I don't think it's by any means come to an end, it's just been niceed down a little.

So as I said in the beginning. Not a whole lot to report.

The forecast maximum temperature today is 40 degrees (celsius), with a discomfort index of 47. 47!

It was 32 degrees at 8am.

Throw in scheduled power outages and we're in for a day of excitement. Break out the ice packs. Oh wait, they all melted when the fridge went off.

A favourite Sushi venue has a generator.

If I owned a sk8tboard and wore baggy shorts around my ankles I'd throw in something like "Stylin'!"

What did South Africa have before candles?

Electricity.

Fear the Norris.

So how does one go about asking Google for the name of the triple-breasted whore from Eroticon VI in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

I suppose the only answer is carefully and out of visual range of anyone sensitive.

(It turns out her name was Eccentrica Gallumbits)

Every now and then this guy produces something astounding. He takes a simple phrase and cuts to the core of it with a simple drawing.

He's managed to illustrate that you really got to me, but despite that you have become a ghost, haunting the dark corners of quiet evenings.

One of the hardest lessons Life has forced upon me, time and again, is that every so often, no matter who you are, you have to choose one.

Just thinking of you makes me smile.

We had our end of year "function" today. An immense quantity of incredibly good food at the Cape Courtyard in Hout Bay. It's been a long time since I've been unable to move because of the amount of food in my stomach. Painfully so.

The guys I work with are a bit older than me, and as a result there was an excess of little people. I was saying to Riel that this is probably the first gathering where I felt obviously like one of the adults. I think it was probably because the kids matched the "grownups" in sheer numbers and I wasn't "at their table".

It's always interesting to watch other people's kids, especially if you know them (the other people, not their kids) reasonably well. It's amazing how quickly a child's parentage shows through. I'm also looking for evidence to corroborate my theory about adulthood: that it's largely a myth and everyone who might fall into this category is faking it hoping no-one else will notice.

Significant others met the "guys from the office" for the first time (for the most part) today and can finally put a face to the crazy nutter in the corner office.

It's been interesting watching this lot in particular because in many respects they're a bit further down a road I'm starting out on and that's not by chance: we're all doing much the same thing because we are similar in many respects. So in a way I view it as a possible window on me a few years from now.

Bit of an odd day. It's been a long week preparing for a demo (which I still don't know the results of dammit) in Seattle. As a result everyone is a bit tired and I slept in this morning (the immense quantity of Sushi ingested last night may have contributed to that).

The weather's a bit murky outside and I haven't felt inspired to do anything strenuous today. Instead I've spent the day arbing around. I've put in a little time on spot (if I told you your life would be forfeit). It's coming along slowly at the moment, mostly as a result of the past few weeks of madness, but also because I'm simultaneously trying to get up to speed with ANTLR.

I've also done a little reading. Against a dark background (Iain Banks) has been a pretty enjoyable read so far, which is surprising given how unimpressed I've been with other books by this author. To cement my reputation as a nerd I've gotten most of the way through the O'Reilly Learning the bash shell. We have a significant collection of O'Reilly books at the office (one of the perks of working for Amazon). This is candy-store territory for me and I've been chewing through them as quickly as time has allowed for. This one is aimed at a somewhat more novice breed of user but even so I've learned a few new tricks. The general programmability of shells is one of the things that I enjoy about a Unix environment. I also hadn't realised just how much Perl ripped off from Bourne Shell scripting.

And I hauled out a heap of old CDs with collections of MP3s on them. My last laptop slowly ran out of space (and Otto killed my desktop a few years back so I went without a personal machine for some time) and as a result my "online" MP3 collection has slowly been whittled down to the bare essentials. This prompted a bout of nostalgic listening ("crap, I'd forgotten all about that"). A lot of this music has followed me around for the past 5 years (and no doubt will follow me to my grave). It's weird how strong my associations between memories and music are (Ben mentioned something similar applies to him and smells). Just listening to a given song puts me right back in the moment most strongly associated with it. For fun, here's a list of weird musical associations I'm carrying around:

• No Need To Argue (the entire album) is Doom and Doom 2. I'd received the cassette (cassette!) as a birthday or Christmas gift , I forget which, and at the same time gotten hooked (or possibly rehooked) on Doom. There was just enough time between levels to flip the cassette over when it was done and so I must have listened to it a thousand times.
• Queen's Greatest Hits is Turbo Pascal. I think at the time (ooh, about 15 years ago) I was playing with a little text based racing game.
• 12 Inches Of Snow, as embarrassing as it may be to admit that it even featured in my chequered musical history, brings back memories of the Mandelbrot Set . I spent far too much time during high school generating fractals and trying to automate zooming in on "interesting" features after being introduced to fractals via FractInt and James Gleick's Chaos.
• One of the Billy Joel albums (I have no idea which one), featuring songs like Honesty, Piano Man and Just the way you are, will always remind me of a holiday with my mother in Sabie (in what used to be the Eastern Transvaal). She had the album with her and it featured often enough so that it's irrevocably associated with that holiday. I remember a three legged brown and white Jack Russell and his (four legged) black and white friend adopting us for the week we were there.
• Tracy Chapman's Why and Fast Car remind me of the house we lived in in Elise road in Randburg with Gerald, my Mother's boyfriend in the years leading up to her death.
.

It's a funny life.

Yup. Definitely a nerd. Soooooo nerdy it's unbelievable.

I've added a GeoURL link at the bottom of the sidebar. Unfortunately I don't have a GPS so I had to find someone else within 50km and then tweak the coordinates by hand using MapQuest until they were where I think this house is.

It's Sunday. I don't need a life.

In an attempt to make sure the Web really is as inter-connected as humanly possible, and so that loyal readers have even more sites to visit instead of doing any real work this week, here's a list of sites to waste some time on. Not all of these are original. Some are "rediscoveries" that are worth catching up with.

1. Phone Swarm
2. Exploding Dog
3. Pointless Waste Of Time
4. CockEyed
5. Unfit
6. BugBash
7. 10x10
8. SiSSYFiGHT 2000
9. justcurio.us
10. Jesus of the week
11. I Kiss you !!!!!!

Enjoy

Urg. I feel terrible. I finally got my act together and went for a proper massage yesterday. True to form (at least in Cape Town) it turns out I did Tai Chi briefly with her (we ran the "sports? university?" gauntlet until we figured out why we looked so familiar to each other).

I felt great afterwards. Today is a different story. She warned me to drink lots of water which I duly ignored (yesterday), apart from the token bottle when I got back to the office. Today I drank every millilitre I could fit in (and in the process burned a permanent track out to the bathrooms). I'm booked in for another appointment next week but if tomorrow isn't an improvement I may have to jump the gun.

In other news, Fommil (perhaps that will repay him) dropped me a note to point out that greenfi wasn't producing any significant hits on Google, so he linked to me under that pseudonym (jgreenfi was my unix login at varsity and it seems to have stuck). Google duly indexed his link (all praise Google) and now it seems that this page shows up as the first link if you search Google for greenfi.

Fame and fortune at last ;-)

All it took was a brief moment of inattention and a slip of the hand.

Yesterday I sat down for my bimonthly shearing. Without really thinking about it I handed the electric razor to my lovely assistant, forgetting that I had yet to attach the number 2 razor guard. Like me, she failed to perform a sanity check on said equipment and the next words I heard where along the lines of "Oh dear, is it supposed to take so much hair off?"

Erm. No. No, it's not.

Follow with some deft handiwork with the number 1 guard and, nore more than ever, I'm in touch with my inner cue ball.

But I think I know what's causing them and, hence, what I need to do to stop them. After much soul searching and heartfelt introspection, I think it's time to limit myself to no more than four virgins at a time.

It's sad but it takes a real man to admit to his limits.

Last night was pretty bad though. I was struggling to use my touchpad with any real degree of accuracy because my right hand was shaking. That's new. I gave up trying to sleep at around 3am and went to find some strong drugs which ushered me into the land of blissful sleep. Which means I'm awake, have had very little sleep, and am nestled in the bosom of drug-induced somnambulance.

We've started walking in one of the nearby forests on Sundays. The intention is to do this as regularly as possible, in an attempt to combat our sedentary lifestyles.

I enjoy these walks, but for an altogether odd reason. We live in a particularly spectacular part of the world, and walks like these give me a chance to take pictures that I hope make people like Sam jealous.

For some reason on this particular walk I was far more aware of the smells of the forest, and in particular the fynbos fighting its way through the invaders. Those smells take me back to the occasional mad scrambles up the mountains bordering Fish Hoek while I was at high school. A mountain, two male teenagers, a competitive spirit. All these add up to only one thing: exhaustion :-)

Just finished archiving the last 5 years so I can return the laptop I've lived on for most of recent history.

We are go.

Ever wondered where that CZ car's from? Wonder no more.

If I don't get bored I may keep this updated.

A real smorgasbord of topics today. Cast your mind back to English language at school. Hopefully someone, at some point, spent some time discussing various types of interesting language constructs (in some case errors is more appropriate) with you. If not, here's Google and a list of terms [tautology, malapropism, spoonerism, transferred epithet], knock yourself out.

An example of a tautology is "Personally, I prefer meatballs." since "personally" and "I" duplicate information in that sentence.

I've been trying to come up with a legitimate use of "personally" that isn't a tautology. The closest I've come is "I've never tried it, not personally."

Dictionary.com proffers the following:

1. I thanked them personally.
2. Personally, I don't mind.
3. I admire his skill but dislike him personally.
4. Don't take the disparaging remarks personally.

At first I thought the first example was a tautology, but I suppose it's possible to thank someone impersonally: via email, or a written note, or even by mailing them a dead squirrel. Actually, scratch that last one, they may not take it as intended.

Any other suggestions? (I realise you can't answer that here because I haven't enabled comments, consider this the ultimate rhetorical question.)

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...)

... 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.

... I'm on leave. For nearly a month too. Which means there's a reasonably good chance I'll get my leave days under 20 ;-)

Tomorrow we fly to London, and on Sunday on to Canada. Montreal to be specific. Hatley North to be more specific (the last anglophone bastion in french Canada). We'll be there for about two weeks before flying back to London to spend some time in the uck before heading home.

And I'm already experiencing connectivity withdrawal anxiety.

Sam tagged me to produce this list.

Name ten celebrities that you find attractive (in no particular order), then tag five of your friends.

1. Natalie Portman
2. Helena Bonham Carter (One I can't explain)
3. Julia Ormond
4. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
5. Monica Potter (Julia Roberts, but attractive)
6. Michelle Pfeiffer (ever since Ladyhawke)
7. Cate Blanchett
8. Nicole Kidman
9. Debra Messing
10. Meg Ryan (stick with the classics)

I considered, briefly, including The Corrs (three for the price of one!), and they've got the Irish thing going for them, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

I don't think I know enough people with blogs to tag who will be receptive to being tagged. The only person I can think of might be Mandy.

Newspaper consistently burns better than old bills and insurance policies.

I had a pie for lunch today.

This may not strike you as earth shattering. What if I were to add that it was 3 to 4 times the size of my head? I thought that might get your attention. Sadly, it just isn't true. However, it was 3 to 4 times the length of my left big toe. Which is probably pretty scary to watch if you're a big toe. Fortunately, neither one of my big toes has eyes so they're probably both living in ignorant bliss.

Since my eyeballs are about the same size, give or take a toenail or two, I'm not sure how they're holding up.

Don't you hate switching to a new toothbrush? Especially when the inevitable happens and simply replacing the "model" you had is impossible because technology has "moved on"? And then they insist on randomly selecting the size of the head and you either end up feeling like you're brushing your teeth with a matchstick or, alternatively (and my current predicament), like you're trying to fit a shoe into your mouth.

And what gives with the range? There must be teams of elves (or gnomes?) somewhere diligently working to come up with new and entertaining tooth cleansing mechanisms. Have you actually stopped recently and admired the sheer size of the range of toothbrushes on offer these days?

Interesting statistic (quoted without anything to back it up). Women attempt suicide 5 times more frequently than men, but men get it right more often than women.

What can we take away from this? If you need something done, give it to a man, even if the task is taking their own life.

*ducks*

I spent at least 30 seconds just now trying to rub a mark off my laptop screen.

Eventually I looked a little closer, only to discover it was an apostrophe I'd accidentally typed into my text editor.

Sometimes, the only sensible option is to call it a night.

Ah, Winter. Terrific if your partner is a Star Wars fan. I've picked up a bit of a head cold and as a result woke up this morning doing a serious Darth Vader impersonation.

Bit of a tender morning. I overindulged on a good bottle of red wine last night. I knew it would happen but everything is easier from the other side of a few glasses of wine, including screwing yourself over.

So that meant a headache-filled morning and, given my tendency to skip breakfast, come lunch time I was in a pretty sorry state. I always forget how much of a difference food can make in that state.

I spent a little time just watching the team today. I'm really starting to feel more dispensable as the days pass, which kind of sucks (bye bye job security) but suggests I'm doing a good job of making my team a little more self-reliant. I'm literally seeing improvement on a daily basis. Some of the guys still have a way to go yet, but the team as a whole is doing pretty well, especially given the lack of experience (on average) across the group.

I think a lot of it boils down to stretching people. I really feel the best way to learn, and by implication the best way to teach, is to just dive in and start trying to swim. If you have good people around who are willing and able to give you assistance when you really need it then your learning curve is significantly steeper than if you're spoonfed and are never forced to apply what you're learning.

This can be a painful process, and demands tolerance from other people who depend on the person or people learning, but I really think it's worth it in the long run. Unfortunately I don't think everyone we work with understands this, or is prepared to tolerate it. Frankly, that's their problem. If they're not prepared to take a longer term view of things then I'm not prepared to burn in the short term just to service their selfishness. In everything a balance you must find (to put words in Yoda's mouth).

But we're coming through the most difficult part of the learning curve and I'm starting to see the results. Most of the guys I've heaped responsibility onto have just about broken through the pile of dirt they're buried in and are about to take their first breaths of fresh air.

Of course, if I do too good a job, then I may well be out of a job ;-)

The older I get the less I believe that adults exist.

I keep waiting for some internal switch to trip and, boing, enlightenment. Or something along those lines.

Pretty random collection this evening. First, a pretty good paper discussing manifestations associated with the fact that Java is dynamically linked. A good read, especially if you ever plan to go anywhere near class loaders, or even just want a better understanding of Java.

Pretty frantic day, and the best is yet to come. Tomorrow is a solid wall of meetings of one sort or another from 9am through to 4:30pm. Not really my favourite way of spending a day. Especially not beta day.

Earlier this evening I watched confounded as a woman at the nearby Woolworths basically told off a parking attendent who tried to help her unpack her laden trolley into her car. Her argument was that he should have helped her from the door of the shop and that it was too late (implying he was only after the money; I know these particularly guys and they're actually generally pretty good about just helping for the sake of it). What I really don't understand is what she expected? Someone to push her trolley for her? The hard part, you abominable waste of genetic material, is unloading the contents of your trolley. People like that fuck me off.

Arrangements have been made for the 'transaction', but now it looks like it's set to piss down this weekend. Can't say I didn't see that coming.

Maybe I'm not the target market. Maybe I fall between two groups of people: those who are satisfied by three and a half crisps, and those who have an incredible tolerance for MSG-laden wafers of potatoesque delight.

The small bags are a waste of my time. If I inhale too deeply after opening the packet there's a reasonable chance of emptying it.

The large bags are too much. Half way through I'm either on the road to Chinese Restaurant Syndrome or, if they're perkily advertised as MSG free, deep in the throes of the placebo effect.

The only crowd who've got this right are the makers of Diddle Daddle, the best caramelized popcorn in the world (yes, I've tried every caramelized popcorn produced by the human race).

A moment of embarassment earlier (fortunately unobserved). Watching a gentlement escourt his (somewhat younger) inebbriated lady-friend over to their car, I was surprised to hear a cellphone ring that I recognized.

So what does bright-spark over here think? "Hey, someone else has the same phone as me!"

A few minutes later I realised that the sound was coming from my pocket.

*eep*

The woman who abides my presence in the house I own half of pointed out recently that we both seem to require an insanely high degree of stimulation (oy, you in back, out of the gutter).

To whit: I am currently:

1. Surfing the web
2. Writing this entry
3. Playing Colonization
4. Reading a book
5. Listening to music
6. Watching pointless television

And yet, still, there is dead space and I'm trying to figure out how to fill it.

I just looked up and realised how surreal this evening has become. I'm a few glasses of wine up on the rest of the world, Oprah is on TV (yes, sadly that's the best on offer and the latest Daily Show is only at 77%) and through all of this mental haze (which is more debilitating, a bottle of red wine or Oprah?) I'm slowly working my way through the predecessor to the Java 5.0 Pack200 file format specification (it's the best I can do without downloading the final JSR specification; that comes next).

I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. I was expecting some miraculous insight (reports range from a 10% to 55% reduction in JAR file size) but if it's anything like this then it seems to be a lot of cunning tricks all combined together to produce a reasonable improvement over the original file size). One aspect worries me: eager class loading. This was done away with in version 2.0 of the Java Language Specification (or maybe it was the JVM spec, I can't remember exactly) and it's handy not to have to have everything available to the class loader when you know something won't be required in a given environment. But eager class loading makes that impossible. I'm curious whether this particular optimization made it into the final implementation.

I've been told I should at least mention that I'm also getting a back massage as I write this ;-)

Picked up my new phone this morning. A Siemens CX65. Not the most advanced phone compared to what's on the market these days, but advanced enough for my needs (especially compared to my current CrappoMoto).

I spent an hour this morning waiting to get the phone. In that hour I was subjected to the most unbelievable FUD I've heard in a long time. These people think that because they're behind the sales counter at a cellular outlet, suddenly they're world experts on anything vaguely attached to the topic. They don't even have the grace to say "Hey, I don't know", they're more than happy to just make shit up.

First there was the girl who's trying to replace her stolen phone. During the course of this excruciatingly long process she remarked on how expensive phones are. She's seen all these cheap new phones in the classifieds. The sales rep explained that they're stolen phones (true enough). The girl's mother remarked quite acidly that perhaps the cellcos themselves are stealing phones to force people to buy new ones (the logic here is a bit daft, but hey, leave it be). In answer to this, the sales rep explained how it's not the cellcos, and that the people doing it make it hard for the cellcos because they steal expensive phones and sell for ridiculous prices, and how can the cellcos compete with this?

I'll tell you how. BLACKLIST THE FUCKING PHONES. Morons. That would shut it down very quickly. But they won't. You see, a stolen phone is a revenue stream for them. Someone has to buy a SIM, and air time, and accessories eventually. So why would they want to stop the phone from working?

Idiot number two was helping a gentlemen who wanted his upgrade and was discussing phone options. He asked, as an aside, if they had the concept of a SIM card with two numbers attached (presumably so he could share his phone with his wife without requiring they share a number or get two phones). The sales rep mentioned that others had asked for this, but that, no, that kind of SIM didn't exist. Instead of stopping there he tried to explain why. His theory started with "How would you design a network to handle this?" (huh?) followed by "Think about the billing system you'd need. How would the phone not get confused between the two numbers?"

WTF? Software doesn't get confused. Yes, bugs exist, but it doesn't get confused. And incoming calls include the number they're calling, while outgoing calls would be from a session on the phone (which usually requires a PIN which is associated with a SIM/number). Technically there's no magic here. Some UI changes and what amounts to two SIMs logically glued together. But that's about it. This guy was a moron. He tried to bring up dual slot phones but got the concept there wrong. The guy he was helping quickly moved on (I have to admit I jumped in here and pointed out the sales rep was a moron, albeit without using that phrase) and asked about phone options. These days they try, instead of giving you a cheaper monthly rate, to foist all sorts of shit onto you. The customer explained that if they had to give him something could it be something useful like a bluetooth headset. They could, but only on another phone which meant he would have to pay an additional R600. He wasn't keen so the sales rep offered him a DVD player. A DVD player? Pleasantly enough this guy wasn't taking any shit and pointed out that you could hardly fit a DVD player to your ear (I couldn't resist chipping in that it could certainly be done: you'd just need a fair bit of masking tape).

Customer number three wants a demo of this newfangled Vodafone 3G thingamajig. My word, the bullshit that spewed forth during this episode was something else. The sales rep assisting starts by pointing out that 3G has a theoretical limit of 2Mb/sec (it turns out he seems to be right on this) but then, without even pausing he mentions that "in the UK they're running it at 4Mb/sec". These strike me as somewhat contradictory statements. Perhaps local caching or advanced compression give the illusion of breaking the theoretical limit, but I suspect that wasn't what he was trying to imply.

So, if you're ever bored and want to go make fun of someone less intelligent than yourself, why not spend a morning with this lot.

Marte's 30th last night, at the old Firth Rd digs. Weird to be back there after all this time. I lived there for just over 3 years. It was like going home. Not much has changed.

Overindulged in the luminous blue punch and am regretting it now. It always seems like such a good idea at the time.

Pirates and prostitutes. Perkimon's sword was by far the most impressive. Essentially a large piece of pressed metal. It makes me wish we'd been attacked by an (inept) Ninja clan. But alas, 'twas not to be.

Nope, not a Java post.

Have you ever watched a praying mantis eat it's prey? It's like magic; as if the insect in it's grasp is simply being erased.

Can't be all that pleasant from the other point of view though.

We took the long weekend as an opportunity for a bit of a LOTR marathon. Just finished the last of the three extended versions. I saw the extended version of the first one some time back and have been itching to see the remaining two ever since.

And I'm certainly not disappointed. Wow. It really was done spectacularly well. I'm spent :-)

can nobody spell separate?

Ah, the warm, heavy-lidded glow of paracetamol. Nothing in the world like it.

Paul Graham has penned a pretty good range of essays. Some of his essays reveal him for who he truly is: an insecure, slightly deluded LISP hacker with an inferiority complex.

But others are well worth a read. I found this one particularly interesting. If you were one of the smarter kids at school and look back on your days of persec ... er, education less than enthusiastically, then you'll probably nod in agreement most of the way through.

This ruling is probably one of the most intelligent rulings I've seen come out of the US in a long, long time. Admittedly, my initial reaction to this issue was that it should (and would) be ruled on in favour of the bloggers. But it wasn't, and the judge who ruled that way makes a good enough argument to sway me.

He also managed to avoid turning it into some generalization that puts blogging, or any other form of personal expression at risk, and without (I believe) eating any further into anyone's right to privacy.

It's almost unbelievable.

I divide the world largely into two groups of people. I find it quite difficult to pin down what differentiates the two groups. So let's try a very hazy abstract example. That's sure to confuse the issue even more.

Often I find myself involved in 'polite conversation' with people where I switch into what I can only characterize as nodding-dog mode. You know those dogs you get for the back window of a car. The ones that nod every time you hit a bump and people find so adorable (Lord knows why). Well, during these conversations I feel a bit like that. And it's largely because we're exchanging polite pleasantries about inane things and I'm usually thinking "That statement is so fundamentally stupid that I actually don't think a single human lifetime is enough to explain what's wrong with it. And to add insult to injury I don't believe you'd understand what I was getting at if I tried."

It's not about intelligence. It's not about intricate technicalities. It's about a way of looking at the world. It's about realising that 99% of the time the world is so ludicrous it's not worth taking seriously. It's about realising that most of what we do is bullshit and that the really important things are so personal that if the other person doesn't get it instinctively then it's not worth attempting to go any further. It's about not taking anything seriously unless you've made a conscious decision to do so, knowing that it's silly to have taken that decision in the first place.

Sometimes I feel like there are only a few of us who realise that there's no such thing as "adults".

Some people seem so reluctant to hand off responsibility to other people.

I've spent the last few months deliberately handing off more and more responsibility to my team. There are lots of reasons behind this, some selfish (like not wanting to have to deal with things that don't interest me, and making sure I'm not indispensible in case I ever want to do something else) and some less so (nothing forces someone to grow like a good dollop of responsibility). The point is that, almost without exception, everyone has risen to the challenge.

I can't tell you how impressed I am with the kind of response I've seen.

I like sushi.

With that out of the way, Mandy sends me this link so I peruse it, like any good Internet junkie would. I can't help but feel frustrated. I mean, aren't we just rehashing the same old APIs? I've lost count of the number of "databinding" APIs I've seen in the last two weeks alone. They've got an API for working with tabular data stores, like SQL databases. Who doesn't? And their big news is an API for creating login screens?

In other news, I think I'm losing my vision in my right eye. I've almost constantly had a feeling in my right eye not unlike the feeling after you've just rolled out of bed: like you need to rub it to clear your vision. But "independent studies" (me closing one eye and then the other) haven't revealed any obvious differences between the resolution of the image presented to my brain by the two eyeballs. Bah, if you're going to fail just do it already. Then I can get on with things.

If you want to make me anxious, start talking about me taking leave. It sounds unbelievable, but there you have it. I'm not really sure why, I don't think it's anything like not feeling I can trust my colleagues to carry on without me. I don't really have any ideas here.

The thought of leave is a major stress point in my life. Which probably means I'm up defecation creek without a canoe mobilisation accessory.

I believe very much in positive action. Especially when it's not obvious what to do. You learn only by doing, and sometimes doing has to take a form remarkably like fumbling around in a dark room looking for the light switch.

Obviously this has it's limitations. If your name is Homer and you work in the control room for a nuclear power station then this approach may not be for you.

So I suppose appropriate positive action is more correct. But it doesn't make for quite as compelling a soundbite.

If something isn't working for you then you need to make a conscious decision to try something else (which in many instances equates to try something (full stop|period)). The risk you run is that you may end up somewhere worse than where you are now. But risk is a part of life and it's the price you pay for avoiding stagnation.

This can be a remarkably effective way of dealing with situations you have no natural talent for. For example, I look after a team of developers. I have strong doubts about whether or not this is something I have any natural talent for. Being able to write decent code does not imply anything about being able to assist other human beings (programmers are people too) in their quest for happiness. I suspect this is necessary to do my current job well.

This means that I'm frequently faced with a situation where something is bothering someone and (in the rare case where I can actually extract this much information from them) neither of us really has any idea what we might do to correct the situation. In these instances I defer to my trusty Positive-Action-omatic^TM. Usually there are a few things that you could try. Sometimes it takes a little brainstorming to see them, but I'm pretty sure they're always there. And there's only one way to determine whether or not they'll actually help: try them.

Does this work? Can I consider my approach a success? No idea. You'll have to ask my team.

Been nursing a headache for the past 24 hours (or somewhere in that region). It started yesterday morning in my shoulders and crept up into my head where it hid briefly behind my left eyeball. This morning it seems to have climbed down only to stand on my shoulders so it can reach up to wrap itself around my brain.

I think it's stress. We're supposed to go into beta come the end of this week. This is a project we've been working for just over a year now. Late Friday afternoon (isn't it always late Friday afternoon when these things happen?) I stumbled across something we've been doing wrong since day one. Well, wrong is a strong word. It works. It's worked all along, but it wasn't our intention to do it this way. We just got lucky.

In a nutshell it introduces an inconsistency into the release which grates. If it were just an application we could live with it and fix it in a later release. But it's a platform for other projects to build on (many of which are due for release a month or so after ours) so if we release like this we're stuck with it for the lifespan of this platform, which is likely to be in the region of 5 to 10 years. We may never get a chance to fix it.

So the question is do we fix it and introduce additional risk into the project at this late stage, and release a more consistent platform. Or do we write it off as too risky and force projects that depend on us to deal with the inconsistency?

And that, my friends, is the conundrum that I suspect is lodged in my skull as I write this.

Okay, far be it for me to be giving these guys any more visibility than they already steal for themselves, but I just can't pass up the opportunity to share this one with you.

This is the subject line of a piece of spam at the top of my inbox at the moment, one that got through Google's filters. I think the subject line explains why. Somewhere there's a Google spam filter scratching it's head going WTF?

sweating and sudden hoott weaves, sleep disorder? oxen

Oh, and continuing with the life altering theme I mentioned in a previous post, try this one:

This email must vary your biography!

Basically we're seeing natural selection in action here. I only ever see amusing or entertaining subject lines because everything else gets 'killed off' by the trials and tribulations of life as a piece of spam under Google's microscope (substitute your favourite webmail provider if you think Google is Satan incarnate).

Most of the time I do what I can to ignore spam, but every now and then an email arrives with a subject line that I can't help but admire, if only because it highlights what little grasp the author has on the English language (or reality, take your pick).

After one month my spam tally (at home) sits at 3,783. Throw in roughly 3,000 more at the office and my monthly total looks a little stupid. Perhaps it's time for some serious account rationalisation.

We went for a walk this evening and on the way home came across a cat attacking a dove that had clearly just left the nest (their cere is characteristic for a few weeks after they've left the nest).

We chased the cat off and picked the bird up. It seemed ok, if somewhat flustered, so we decided to bring it home and leave it in the garden to regain its composure and hopefully fly off when it was ready. It never did.

Just after we got home it gave one last flutter of its wings and died in my hands. It seems it was more badly hurt than I'd realised. Or perhaps it was just traumitised beyong its limits. It's been years since I had a bird die in my hands, but it's still an unpleasant thing to watch. The final departure of that spark that separates it from the inanimate things around us.

e.e. cummings said it best with the following poem:

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

Sometimes things try to be smarter than they actually are and just end up screwing it up.

I've been trying to figure out all evening why I couldn't access this server. Initially I thought it was just an IP change glitch. This box is hosted behind ADSL on a dynamic IP so the new IP needs to be pushed out to a DNS provider (thanks ZoneEdit). Sometimes there's a small delay. So I just assumed it was that. But when it hadn't sorted itself out after an hour I figured something else was wrong.

The IP handed out today smelt a bit odd. The last octet was 255, which (on a class C network anyway) is usually a broadcast address. So when I saw "smurf attack!!!" in my router's logs it finally dawned on me. The blasted thing thought that my ICMP traffic to this machine was a smurf attack and had blocked it. Furthermore, it turns out SMC routers by default block any traffic (any traffic, not just ICMP traffic) outbound to an IP with 255 for the last octet. This is just plain stupid. It will work only if the remote IP is on a class C network, and there's no way to determine that automatically. It's a good attempt, but even given that they should only bloody well be blocking ICMP traffic.

Sigh.

At least this model lets me switch this 'protection' off.

In other news, it doesn't look like I'll be doing much blogging from the office. Our network has slowly been degenerating over the past few weeks as we pile more and more shit onto it (the crowning glory is a sales management tool we use which basically just replicates the 'central' database over the wire to support a kind of disconnected-distributed-centralized-who-knows data model). Coupled with the fact that our traffic is piped up through London via BT, then over to New York, down to Atlanta, into our office there and only then does our request for james.cshons99.net (hosted no more than a few hundred kms from here) get considered and actually handled. Between our generally limited international bandwidth and the functionally pipette-like network connection we seem to have left at the office, and the 4 pages I need to get through simply to add an entry I don't really stand much of a chance.

Maybe its time for some procmail magic.

People are the best cure for nostalgia. They don't even have to be people I know.

One of the trips down memory lane this morning involved digging through the filesystem of this website. It's been around pretty much untouched for just over 5 years now. It's been through about 5 physical hosts, including 3 different operating systems. In each case the contents were moved pretty much wholesale, so it's had 5 years to gather odds and ends. This exercise got claustrophobic pretty quickly and I've been thinking about why that should be.

I suspect for most people sitting in front of a terminal window must be an essentially 2D experience. But for me, and I have a feeling this applies to many people I know, there's a very real 3D aspect to it. An SSH terminal window to a remote machine has depth. I experience it as being within something. That's just how my brain presents it to me. It's quite hard to explain, but it does provide some justification for the feeling of claustrophobia this morning, because a lot of my nostalgia today was grounded in these odds and ends I found on a box that is about 200km east(ish) of here.

I long ago decided that I don't really like being alone. Not physically anyway. But that's not to be confused with keeping to yourself.

It's one of the reasons I don't believe I would ever be happy working 'from home'. I tried it once, for a large part of my Honours year I worked at home for Andrew-suck-your-soul-out-through-your-eyeballs-Lobel. It's too quiet. And I suppose it gets lonely.

I like to have people around. Even if I'm not interacting with them. The background noise is its own kind of fellowship. Maybe it's the herd mentality.

I'm not even particularly sociable. I'm sufficiently capable when the need arises (or at least I believe this to be true). But it's not a stated preference of mine. I have a (fairly small) core group of people that I'm more than happy to spend time with, individually, or even in a group. This collective consists of a range of different people, and many of them I haven't actually seen for months or even, in some cases, years. And sometimes we don't speak or see each other for months at a time. But there's some sort of kinship that seems to have weathered the test of time. Most of us met during our studies at University. I think there's something about that crucible that forges certain types of bonds. I haven't added significantly to that core group in subsequent years.

I suspect that's as much a comment on me as it is on that period. I don't think I make close friends particularly easily. University (and I would imagine this goes for almost any tertiary institution that is not structured like school) throws groups of people together for hours and days and weeks on end who usually share fundamental commonalities. So these kinds of bonds are in some way inevitable. Initially I expected something similar to come from working life. The group I work with are in many respects similar to me.

But it hasn't happened. Not in the same way or to the same extent as University. Contrasting the two periods and looking at the differences suggests a few reasons. Chief among them is that for most people University still meant living at home, or perhap in a University residence. This has significantly fewer responsibilities than living in a digs with friends, or in your own place with a significant other. Your goals at work are also different. At University you're usually studying something you enjoy (or thought you'd enjoy). And there are periods in between the work spent with others. Skipping lectures to have coffee at the Purple Haze, or spending the entire morning in SciLab on IRC or playing with this newfangled email thing.

At the office there are always more priorities than you can fit into the day. Coffee or lunch with friends is still possible, and even happens from time to time, but there's an element missing (probably something along the lines of if-I-really-don't-feel-like-it-I-don't-have-to-go-back-anytime-soon). You get some of this living in digs with friends. Especially if it's a large digs. Smaller digs have a different character about them. Especially if there are only two of you. It's all to easy to fall into a routine where you go your separate ways and soon the digs is just a convient means of keeping rent down.

It seems to be how much leisure time you can spend as a group, coupled with circumstances contriving to get you together frequently. That seems to apply to University, and in general it's a good description of a large digs. Looking it all of this it appears that the next 'stage' in life that fulfills these requirements would be kids. Except that kids bring with them their own set of responsibilities, so I suspect it's only when they're largely old enough to look after themselves (or to move out) that this happens again.

This has been a little incoherent. I suppose what I'm kind of circling around is that I miss University. Or at least the period of time I associate with it. I'm not daft enough to believe it was a period of nirvana, but I think it brought together a group of people, under a set of circumstances, neither of which is going to be easy to repeat. And now we've to some degree gone our own separate ways, blown away by the winds of change if I can wax lyrical for a moment.

As I said. A day of remember-whens.

Had another small troop of people around for a potjie this evening. That's basically a stew cooked over an open fire in a large cast iron pot for my foreign audience (potjie literally means small pot).

Quite an experiment this one. I'm a meat and potatoes man, so a potjie with freshly ground cardamom seeds and a cinnamon stick is not an everyday occurrence. I also had to play with the measures because the recipe aimed for a smaller group than we had (as it turns out we only just had enough). I don't think it was executed particularly well, and to be honest I wasn't mad about the result, but our visitors seemed quite happy, and yet you insist it's the best one you've tasted to date.

I think the same thing happened with the last one. Again, I wasn't wild about it but you loved it. Quite odd.

But all in all a pleasant evening. Quite an amenable mix of people, in itself a pleasant surprise. Some groups you're just never sure how they're going to mix. You never know when you're going to get oil and water.

Along with many others we suffer under a common Capetonian scourge: the cockroach.

There's a curious behaviour I've yet to find a reasonable explanation for. I frequently come across cockroaches lying on their backs. Initially I assumed they were dead or dying but I very quickly discovered that they're in fact fully compos mentis (inasmuch as this can be applied to something with a brain that's probably only a few pixels in diameter).

If you disturb a cockroach in this state it will frantically immitate backstroke for a bit until it finally manages to flip itself right side up. At which point it will race off.

Initially I thought I was imagining it, or we had a rare sub-species of well trained circus cockroaches. But a quick search on Google (all hail Google; long live Google) seemed to hint that others had seen it too. There was some speculation as to the cause, but to be honest, not a hell of a lot of info exists (apparently). It's as if no one finds sunbathing cockroaches worth investigating.

A few theories were put forward:

• They're feigning death because they think I'm potential prey. This is a bit daft though, because most of their enemies would probably eat them dead or alive.
• They're warming their butts. The proponent of this theory didn't offer any reason why they'd need to warm their butts but hey, who are we to question?
• They're lording it over us because they know they've reached the pinnacle of evolution (after all, it's only cockroaches and scorpions that will survive the inevitable nuclear war we're gearing up for).

My money's on the latter theory. It also explains why I never see adults on their backs (admittedly, very few cockroaches make it to adulthood in our house): youngsters have always been the most likely segment to taunt the incumbent authorities.

Maybe they're mooning us at the same time and the butt-warming theory has been planted to make us look like fools.

Why does some fruit taste better in pieces? Is it just me? Take apples. On their own they're generally a pretty mediocre fruit. Occasionally you hit a rich vein of apples, crunchy, juicy, just the right sweetness, but most of the time they're almost tasteless, floury, small, an generally nothing to write home about.

But take even a mediocre apple and core and quarter it, and suddenly it's a whole different kettle of fish (apologies for mixing my food groups).

Or grapes. One of my favourite snacks is fruit salad and yoghurt. Grapes for a staple part of this particular diet. But only if they're sliced in half (tedious enough so that it limits my intake somewhat). Why? Hell knows.

If you're in Cape Town and looking for good quality, reasonably priced sushi, then I can definitely recommend Sushi Zone in Observatory, Cape Town (try the Rainbow Nation rolls).

I'm stuffed. I don't think I've ever managed to fit quite that much raw fish into my stomach in a single sitting.

I started logging referers (yes, that's how it's spelt, thank the HTTP spec for that; it will live with us forever).

I was interested in which search terms (if any) would point people this way. We had our first match this evening: TOGA LADS PICS and search.msn.co.uk sent someone this way. Actually, I can explain this one, but it's a little embarassing.