the corner office

BillG strikes a pose.

I feel... unclean.

(via a local mailing list)

It's all interconnected, in a weird way. A week or two ago Ronwen was talking about how she'd love to visit the Groot (Great) Marico, a stark piece of land in the North West Transvaal. I was less than supportive of this idea. My recollections of the place are less than pleasant: I went to a veldschool in the Groot Marico.

Veldschool was a white-school institution in the old apartheid days (I have no idea if it still happens) where you'd spend a week or two at a "school" (think shitty hostel/school/dump) out in the wild, and apart from one or two of your teachers who came along, you'd be at the mercy of hardcore old geezers who'd decided that living in these places and dealing with snot-nosed school kids week in and week out was a great career choice, and they'd teach you about nature and bush lore and take you hiking and camping and expose you to all sorts of horrible stuff that was character building. And indoctrinate you into being good little Christian white supremacists (or at least, that's what it felt like).

I got to go to the Groot Marico veldschool twice: once on a leadership camp in Standard 6 and again for "proper" veldschool in Standard 8. I still have vivid memories of those experiences. One of the veldschool teachers was a bearded AWB-type bush ranger who lived in khaki shorts and had the personality of a storm trooper. Every morning and every evening we'd have to assemble on a dusty field and sing the last few verses of Die Stem (the old South African national anthem, which was referred to as "Die Stem" even when we sang the English version) while the South African flag was raised and lowered. Us wayward English-speaking kids were never big on anthems and stuff ("at thy will to live or perish" - yeah right), and I remember after one very half-hearted attempt at singing the anthem, this man freaking out at one of our teachers "your pupils might not love our country but by God I do and you can at least have the decency to respect that!" (you have to imagine that in a heavily guttural Afrikaans accent with full sturm und drang anger to get the full effect). There was another teacher with mean-ass sideburns who would teach us about the local fauna and flora (this old dude was a bird nutter, and promptly got the nickname "Alcatraz" - bird man - geddit?)

I also have recollections of forced-march hikes through dry, arid, eroded bushveld and clambering through dongas and being sent out to sleep on a rock covered koppie at some godforsaken base camp alongside a dry riverbed, after the veldschool teachers had done their best to convince us that the area was haunted. That, and obstacle courses in the middle of nowhere and grotty hostel food where the kitchen ladies would sit out behind the kitchens all day picking weavils from the rice spread out on a 100-year-old worn-away wooden table - and sand, sand and more frigging sand.

We did our Std 8 veld school with kids from Bryanston High School - Bryanston being a wealthy Joburg suburb. What a mix - us a crowd of awkward, small-town bumpkins whose worst vices were smoking and dreadfully uncouth slang, and them a bunch of rich kids telling us what drugs they'd done and how their parents were more messed up than they were. I'm exaggerating, but it was a real eye-opener. Speaking of smoking, on the first night the teachers declared a cigarette amnesty, allowing everyone to hand in their ciggies, with the understanding that if they didn't they'd be in real trouble if they got caught with smokes after that. Most kids handed in (most of) their contraband. By the end of the week, cigarettes were in short supply. The night before we were leaving, one bloke remembered that he'd stashed some cigarettes in the tubing of his backpack. He sold each cigarette for two bucks, which was probably what a whole pack cost in those days.

Veldschool sucked. And by association, I've always loathed the Groot Marico.

The Groot Marico is famous for two things, actually. The first is mampoer, South African moonshine, but the kind that dissolves paint on contact and hastens the onset of presenile dementia. The other thing the Groot Marico is famous for are the writings of Herman Charles Bosman, a South African author who told tales of a fictional Oom Schalk Lourens and the lives of the farmers in the area.

Reading recently about the outcry over racial profiling at the South African Blood Bank (a whole 'nother story), I dozed off a few nights ago thinking about one of Bosman's stories, about the white, sun-bleached bones of Boers and native Africans mixed together in the veld years after a skirmish - the gist being that our racial differences are all skin deep - and that got me thinking, again, about the Groot Marico.

Then earlier this evening, a link from Jo'blog (gotta stop linking to you guys!) to Mik en Druk, a new South African blog, which in turn had a post about the Groot Marico which linked to a brilliant story about the Internet and the Groot Marico circa 1999. The area still had a manual telephone exchange, which made connecting to the Internet rather difficult:

... accessing the Internet is not so easy when your telephone operates through a manual exchange. When Johan first considered putting his corner of the bushveld in cyber-space, he phoned the exchange for advice.

"I want to go on the Internet," he said.

"What's that?" said the operator.

Johan thought a while. "Like a fax machine, only through your computer." That satisfied the operator. The ladies in the Groot Marico telephone exchange pride themselves on their knowledge of fax machines.

The problem is that Johan can't get a line with a dialling tone unless the Marico gets an automatic exchange. The good news is Telkom has promised to provide one. The bad news is they promised it several years ago. They did once start constructing a building to house the exchange, but then they ran out of money.

To understand the difficulty of dialing up the Internet on a manual exchange, you must understand what it's like just to make an ordinary call. You pick up the phone, then you wait. Sometimes you wait for 20 minutes. Finally the operator answers and says: "Nommer asseblief?" (= "Number please?")

Johan used to get into his car and drive down to the exchange to ask someone to pick up his call. "Nowadays," he says, "I ring them with my cellphone and tell them to answer."

The story is a hoot, and that led me to read some of the other excellent pieces on the Groot Marico tourism site.

So now I'm hankering to revisit Herman Charles Bosman's works, and if Ronwen keeps pushing the issue, I might just give the Groot Marico another try.

I was reading through some documentation and I thought I'd go see if there really is a www.example.com.

Google goes local... www.google.co.za is up and running, using an English, Afrikaans, Sotho, Zulu or Xhosa (Xhousea??) interface.

I got myself caught in the Xhosa interface for a bit, while comparing some of the languages:

• Afrikaans: Besig om te soek deur 8,058,044,651 webbladsye
• Sotho: Fuputso ya maqephe a web a 8,058,044,651
• Zulu: Iyasesha amakhasi e-web angu-8,058,044,651
• Xhosa: Ikhangela 8,058,044,651 amaphepha e web

Neat. I hope Google News is headed our way too...

(Update: I've just been reading a thread on a local Linux mailing list where folks were complaining that when they go to google.com from a South African IP, they get redirected to google.co.za, and Ronwen's just grumbled about the same thing. If you don't want to be redirected, click on the 'Go to Google.com' link from the .co.za site, and you won't be redirected again.)

(Update 2: Sorry Rich..! :-)

A number of people were trapped on a roller coaster at Ratanga Junction in Cape Town for a number of hours, in gale force winds. Woohoo, you wanted an extreme experience, you got it. The roller coaster will be repaired after an "internal investigation," and as an act of "faith" (I'm sure they meant to say "confidence") management will take the first ride once it's re-opened.

Somehow I don't think that's going to convince patrons. I'm sure management all went for a ride on the roller coaster when it had its debut, ages back. Force management to take a ride on the roller coasters at the end of every day, in perpetuity, and I'm pretty sure those would be the most carefully and paranoidly maintained roller coasters on the planet.

Well, scrap everything I said yesterday. I went to Armstrongs today, and managed to get 6 out of the 9 books I needed, most at between half and a third of the prices at other booksellers. One of the books was a bit more expensive than Exclusives, so they dropped their own price to beat it, no questions asked. The tannie behind the counter was actually a bit shocked when I showed her my little price comparison spreadsheet. I could see her thinking "jeez, we could be cleaning up like everyone else!"

I have to go back to collect one other book which they have on order for me, and the remaining two aren't stocked by Armstrongs, so they'll have to come from one of the online retailers. Somewhat grudgingly, now.

I also popped into the post office this morning. The branch manager said they don't do the calculations themselves, but that she'd noticed that most people have to pay R25 (not sure how true that is). She gave me a number to phone, and after a couple of calls (don't mess with civil servants' tea breaks), I eventually spoke to a helpful bloke in the Customs department at the Joburg mail clearing centre (or some strange place), who says that books, CDs and DVDs are taxed as follows: a 10% ad valorem is added to the Rand-converted price to get to a customs value, and then they add 14% VAT to that. So in effect, if you order from Amazon et al and Customs get hold of your parcel, you'll end up giving another 25.4% of the Rand value to the government. Bastards.

The helpful bloke very pointedly and repeatedly mentioned that the ad valorem is to "protek ve local ekonomie." I didn't really want to enter into a debate about how exactly importing textbooks with no local equivalent into a country with a serious brain-drain problem was harming the local economy, but anyway. I think I can safely say this bloke was the first civil servant I've ever spoken to who ended off the call by cheerfully encouraging me to please give him a call whenever I had more questions. Bless him.

An event that marks this time of year for me is textbook-buying. It's always exciting because you add a pile of new books to your bookshelf, and the promise and anticipation of all that new and arcane knowledge has not yet turned to the dread that will supplant it, as the year drags on. The pressures of assignments and exams are still far away, and for now, you get to feel very intellectual while in fact you're doing little more than crack open pristine hard-cover books and thumb through them going "oooh lookee, nice pictures" and whatnot, and all is right with the world.

The downside, of course, is the cost. In years past I've always just tootled off to our local Armstrongs university bookdealers and bought m'books, and been done with it. This year, I thought I'd break with tradition and conventional wisdom, and take a gander at online booksellers too. I've spent the last hour or so trawling the usual haunts. I looked for books on Amazon, as well as the local booksellers: Exclusives, Kalahari and Loot. Traditional textbook dealers Juta have a website with online pricing (albeit a really shoddy search interface), while Armstrongs are well, about a decade behind the times.

The results weren't exactly what I'd expected. When it comes to common-or-garden-variety IT books, my limited experience has been that purely-online Kalahari is cheaper than clicks-and-mortar Exclusives Books. I have a few IT books on order with them and they beat Exclusives, hands-down. What's more, by the time I added shipping fees onto Amazon prices, Kalahari was even cheaper than Amazon (long live the strong Rand and weak dollar!) Not so when it comes to textbooks, it seems. Are Exclusives a little smarter when it comes to pricing, knowing these are prescribed books? It doesn't seem likely, but I can't help but wonder. For all but two of the nine books I was looking for, Exclusives was a good R100-R200 cheaper than Kalahari. The remaining two books were the same price. Juta was a joke - more expensive for all books but one, which they had for half price. Loot... well, they're also-rans in every category.

The clear winner for these less-popular books though, is Amazon. With cheap shipping, which has roughly the same delivery times that local shops offer, I can lop nearly a third off of my textbook bill. Even with expedited international courier which gets the books to me within days, I can still save over a grand on my books. The gamble though, is what happens if the Guvmint decides to pick on me and nail me for customs duties. Anecdotally, some people say they've paid next to nothing, others say they've been nailed badly. I can't risk "cheap" turning to "ouch" on this scale, so I think I need to go bug the people at the local post office and see if I can get a definitive answer on just how much it costs to import books into the country. That's going to be fun...

I had a mishap with a glass of Creme Soda yesterday, and my keyboard's a bit gunked up. Especially the qqqqqqqqqq, xxxxxxx and 444444444 keys. I'm not sure if it's worth opening up this keyboard to degunkify it - I've had this cheapo keyboard for over 2 years, and by now a couple of the keys' labels (like s, c, m and n) have completely worn away. If I didn't touchtype, I'd be lost. My left-shift key has an indentation worn into it, like a sandstone sharpening tool. The reason I haven't replaced it yet, is that I absolutely love the feel of this keyboard. I'm dreading having to find and break in a new one.

I also ran into a Firefox-unfriendly site today, for the first time in ages. I was buying a few books from Kalahari.net and their checkout page wouldn't let me proceed - very obviously some Javascript brain-deadness. On a whim, I went to Ronwen's machine, fired up IE and was able to get the order through. I'd do my civic duty and ask 'em politely to consider the IE-free masses, but they've yet to respond to my first "your page don't work" email to them, from last night. Shoddy customer service, but they're a fair bit cheaper and apart from this incident seem to be more on the ball than anyone else, so we endure.

Finally, I solved a really stupid font-rendering problem with Gnome that's been bugging me for ages. Firefox (which uses GTK2), wouldn't render text properly on certain websites - particularly some of the more common blog templates (a la Blogspot and the like). For certain pieces of text (like headings), only the first word of a line would be rendered, and the remaining words from that line would be missing. If you selected the text, then it'd display, but it'd erratically disappear again as the screen was redrawn. After ages of Googling and trawling the Gentoo forums, I isolated it as a problem relating to my particular Gnome configuration. In a nutshell: it was always a problem in Gnome, but it wouldn't happen in something like fluxbox, until I fired up the gnome-settings-daemon. The problem would then manifest until I killed the daemon and the gconfd daemon that got fired up as well (all these keywords for Google). After some more fiddling, I found out that changing Gnome's font rendering options in the 'Font' control panel fixed it. I'd been using "Monochrome," but switching to one of the other options made the problem go away. Far too obscure!

I came across these tips via linuxtoday.com. A Google search shows that these tips have been doing the rounds on a number of forums, and they both seem to emanate from this page at mozilla.org (which also has a heap of other config tips and tweaks).

There are two ways to make the changes:

1. type about:config into the address bar, which displays all settings and allows you to edit them.
2. quit Firefox, and edit user.js in your profile directory

To speed up browsing, using HTTP pipelining:

Modify the following settings:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

Caveat: not recommended unless you've got a broadband connection.

To speed up page rendering:

right-click anywhere and select New -> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives

... but heed the warning on the original Mozilla page about this not being a good idea for slower machines.

Ymmv, but so far I'm impressed!

I woke up this morning realising that it was the last day of 2004, and I still didn't have a 2005 Tolkein calendar. Ronwen and I made our way to Cresta, and of course, once I was the proud owner of said 2005 calendar (2005 is the 50th anniversary and features Tolkein's own artwork), Ronwen decided it was time for her to trawl the clothes shops. This always means I end up ambling around the music and book stores looking at the same old stuff I looked at the last time I was there. Bored out of my skull at Look & Listen, I took a look under 'R' in the DVD section, and lo! my favourite cult movie: Repo Man!

Ever since I first saw it in high school, I've loved the movie. It's been years since I last saw it on video, but I've had the soundtrack CD for ages. It seems it was finally released on DVD last year, and this is, quite literally, the first time I'd ever seen it in a local store. Needless to say, it is now mine, and after watching it again, it's as brilliant as I remember it - great soundtrack, totally off-the-wall story, bleak urban cityscapes, and a zillion memorable lines.

A nice way to spend the last day of 2004. I have to dash off and get ready for dinner with friends tonight, so I'll just wish all of you reading this a happy New Year and a very prosperous 2005. See you next year!