the corner office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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