the corner office

My mom passed away 2 weeks ago on Monday, from a heart attack. She was only 55. Mercifully, it happened quickly and she didn't suffer. We went down to Durban immediately to be with the rest of our family, do all the arranging and all the things that needed doing. We had a small memorial gathering on the first weekend after she passed away, and an incredible number of people, some travelling from across the country, came to pay their respects. She was cremated and as she'd requested before, we laid her ashes to rest at a family farm outside Dundee, in KZN, this weekend. A beautiful place. We got back to Joburg a few days ago, and my sister and brother in law have just flown back to the UK.

Everyone's holding up quite well, but returning now to routine and a normalcy that'll never be the same, reality starts sinking in. I'm sure that anyone who's lost a loved one knows what it feels like. For me, it feels like there's this big hole inside of me and I haven't quite wrapped my mind around the fact that my mother's no longer with us. Time heals I know, but before the healing can start it also gives more occasion to be reminded of how much of a loss it is.

I don't have much more to say, really. Anyone who knew my mom knew she was a very special person. I was blessed to have had a mother like her, I was blessed to have had such a close and rewarding relationship with her, and I was blessed for everything she did for and gave to me and for everything she raised me to be. I miss her now, and I always will.

By the looks of things, there wus some drinkin', some strippin', and some fightin'. We couldn't make it to the Joburg part of the 2005 SA Blog Awards ceremony, but a hearty congrats to the winners and runners-up and to the Jo'blog lads for putting on what sounds like a super jorl.

Aquila has the pics.

A lot of people see the continued rise of the Christian Right in the USA as a worrying thing. But it's not all doom, gloom, fire and brimstone. It's also a great business opportunity.

For instance, if you're that way inclined, you can now buy His Essence™: a patent-pending, trademarked candle that smells like Jesus.

The story is told in this NBC slideshow. Psalm 45 says that when JC returns he'll be smelling of myrrh, aloes and cassia. So some aunty mixed up some oils to see what he'd smell like. Then got talking to a candlemaker. The next thing you know, they've flogged over 10,000 candles at $18 a pop, putting inventory in over 200 stores in more than 20 US states.

(Via The Agitator)

The CD ripping continues; I hit the K's this weekend. Ronwen has a couple of Kula Shaker CDs. I remember they were kinda famous in South Africa for about 2 weeks in the mid-90s. I've given the CDs a listen before and I quite enjoy them - big fat slabs of Gibson-laden (late update: except that Crispian Mills played a Strat, pfeh) Brit-rock with a lot of cool 60s psychedelic references and fairly decent melodies. The Eastern spirituality stuff gets a bit too shee-wow for my agnostic tastes at times, but still worth listening to.

Depressing, though, is doing a Google search for the band. Yes, you hit the official site, but it's been neglected for about 5 years. Dead links, a 404-ing forum. Clicking around a few of the top-scoring fan sites, is even more depressing, because they're pretty much the same, and most of them still sporting all the hot new web design trends circa 1997.

Ragging the sites isn't my intent though - everybody's sites looked that lousy in the 90s - the sad thing is that these sites were once lively, labours of love... and they just ended up being... forgotten. That always gets me. No "it's been real, but this is now Officially An Archive," no "the proprietor of this website got married/had kids/forgot the password/died in a freak boating accident" messages to mark the end of the owner's relationship with the site. Just frozen-in-time snapshots where the links and webring images and counters and widgets slowly decay and break. A bit like a town where everybody was given 5 minutes to pack up and move out, never to return. Eerie, no finality, and "why did they leave" and "what was this place once like, when it was alive?" questions hanging thick in the air.

For every dynamic, up-to-date corner of the web that we regularly frequent, there must be a dozen of these ghost towns... years old, long forgotten by everyone but the search engines and the occasional passer-by. In the real world we bulldoze our history and relics and sling up new office parks and drive-thru takeaway joints on top of them. On the web, our history sits forever on free site hosters, on tripods and geocities and angelfires, and lingers for years on ISP servers, each relic a few kilobytes in a long-unsubbed user directory amidst tens of thousands of other user directories, where sysadmins almost never bother to root them out and rm -rf them.

The popular web is pushing a decade old, and if it's like that now, what will it be like in another decade's time, I wonder? How many of these old Kula Shaker sites will still be serving up a page or two to bored web surfers in the year 2015?

I'm sure this happens to lots of people with a Windows background (or even people who live in 'modern' editors like Kate or gedit). Editing in vim, and instead of hitting Escape and :w to save the file, I hit Ctrl-S. Instead of saving the file, the vim session 'hangs' and won't respond to the usual keypresses. This happened to me once before and I must admit that the last time I manually killed the vim process. This time around Google was at hand, and now I know I'm not the only one who's had this problem :-)

Solution: it's not vim's fault, it's actually an xterm thing. In xterm, Ctrl-S is a kind of scroll lock and locks the console. Hitting Ctrl-Q gets things back to normal.

I've dragged my old Pentium MMX out of retirement, to use it as a muck-about-and-break test box. It had been running an obscenely old distro like RedHat 7.1 or something, so a fresh install was in order. I'd toyed with the idea of trying Debian or even FreeBSD, but took the least-effort route for now, and plopped Gentoo onto it as well.

Not for the faint-hearted or impatient, though. Probably in excess of 30 hours of compiling, just to get a base system up and running. The cool part of it though was no extra bandwidth needed. I set up my own PC as a local rsync server, and as a cacheing proxy for packages, so that the newly-installed machine relied entirely on my already-updated desktop PC for its syncing and source packages. Two useful articles at the Gentoo wiki to get it set up: HOWTO Local Rsync Server and HOWTO Download Cache for LAN-Http-Replicator. LAN-Http-Replicator is a really nifty utility. It's a simple daemon which acts as a proxy for any wget requests from other Gentoo machines on a LAN. By cacheing all downloaded package files, you never need to hit the Gentoo mirrors more than once per file, and it's a lot easier than exporting NFS shares and the like. It also has some functionality for reducing duplication of files on the host machine, identifying corrupt and redundant packages and so on. Way cool.

I always have a strange sense of nostalgia when I muck about with old machines. I'm revisiting a tired theme, but it still gets me that this old Pentium MMX was once my day-to-day machine, and with a whopping 64 megs of RAM, was more than capable of running all the programs and games I needed. There are obvious benefits to the advance of technology, increased speeds and capacities and functionality, and it's not like anyone would willingly choose to punish themselves with older, slower machines when newer, faster ones are available. Despite that, I can't help but get the feeling sometimes that it's all just a bit wasteful.

I got my first dose of comment spam today. I'd hoped that my home-rolled blog with its non-standard form fields would make me less of a target, but it only delayed the inevitable, I guess. Given that nearly 30 comments were posted within seconds, it must be automated, but I wonder how these people operate. Did some poor geezer in a cyber-sweatshop inspect my HTML source and manually map the fields, or do they use bots which apply a few heuristics to guess which fields are which? They must've done a GET to load the page, before POSTing the comments, because even a few hidden fields which I set for each page were faithfully sent back.

Some anti-spam measures quickly added to my blog template - lessee how that works out.

Some old tapes were leaked in which Bush implies that he's smoked doobie in the past. A bit of a censorship furore might be building because a few newspapers refused to print a cartoon mocking Bush's druggie past (via Russell Beattie).

I couldn't help but notice the name of the man who taped these conversations:

"Doug Wead"

So did Bush, apparently.

In my earlier blogging days I often mentioned our neighbours' dog, Tupac, and the pups she eventually littered. The gate between our neighbours' yard and ours has always been open, and we've been a home away from home for Tupac and Courage and Dre, the two pups who weren't given away. Sadly though, the neighbours have moved, emigrating to Switzerland, and we had to say g'bye to the dogs tonight. We've befriended neighbours' pets before, but we developed a real attachment to these three mutts. A bit heartwrenching to see them go. *sigh*

The budget's out, and no major shakes or surprises. Income taxes shuffle downward, (corporate tax down to a disappointing 29% from 30% and no let-up of STC), sin taxes up, and perks being tightened up a little.

Apart from the sin taxes, the only major changes for employees are the travel allowance changes, and the planned change to medical aid deductions.

There had been talk that travel allowance deductions would be severely curtailed; instead it seems that a gradual tightening up is happening instead to make them less "profitable," by increasing the amount of deemed private travel. Let's be honest - if you incur bona fide travel costs for your job, you could be keeping a log book and should get a fair shake, and for everyone else, the TA is really just a way to dodge tax or get a cash flow advantage. I'm all for simplification of deductions, so I don't think the changes are unfair, even if they do mean less in my pocket.

The change to medical aid deductions is interesting. Allowable deductions will go from the current 2/3 percentage deduction (regressive) to a flat deductible amount (progressive). If you're on a cheaper medical aid, you could save more, but if you're on a more expensive medical aid, it could hurt a little. The real question is how much the flat deduction will be, and whether the government will keep that deduction in line with annual medical inflation.

Sadly, no changes to forex control, but consensus is that nothing will happen until the forex amnesty process is finalised. This Moneyweb article reports that Trevor Manuel says he won't make any changes until people start bugging him about it. So, what's his email address again?