the corner office

Finished off book 6 on Sunday, and started on book 7. Did next to bugger-all else the whole weekend, which was wonderfully self-indulgent (as was the mountain of fudge we bought on Saturday evening ;-), but I'm starting to feel a bit guilty about the university assignment backlog.

The other cool thing I tinkered into a working state was moving one of my machine's hard drives to an external USB drive. We got the drive case (and a new monitor for Ronwen) from pcmall.co.za on Friday. I gather they're rather new (but the 'web' front-end for a longer-standing IT outfit), and was (pleasantly) surprised to get a rather warm reception when I popped in to collect the goodies from their offices. Decent prices and decent service; I can see myself doing some more shopping through them in future.

Oh, and polished off Book 5 of the WoT this evening. I'm a bit behind with varsity assignments, but Book 6 was sitting on the bookshelf looking so pitiful, saying 'start reading me... start reading me...'

Waaay back when I was a kid I remember watching - hmm, it must've been Three's Company, and there was a line where Jack was all heartbroken about someone lying to him or breaking up with him or something, and the line went something like "(s)he even said honest injun" and the other person went "oh, honest injun, that's low" and made sympathetic mortified sounds and cue canned laughter.

The problem was that back then it just sounded like "onnastinjin" and I never knew what the hell it meant. Easily two decades later, that phrase would still come back every now and then and bug me 'cause I had no idea what this 'onnastinjin' thing was supposed to be. Then a few minutes ago, with mp3s of some obscure and long-forgotten goth band that I've listened and re-listened to a zillion times over playing in the background, I sat up and caught a lyric 'blah blah honest indian (with emphasis) blah blah'. "Hey!" thoughts I as a few synapses fired, and after a quick google I found a discussion on the etymology and meaning of the phrase "Honest Injun."

My life is now complete.

It's been a hectic stretch at work, and I haven't had energy for much more than plonking on the couch in the evenings and reading. The stress is over now, and tomorrow I have a very welcome day off. I was pretty chuffed about getting back into a normal routine again, but I hardly feel too chipper after today's terror attacks in London.

Too close to home - worrying about family and friends (one of whom might have been on one of those trains if she hadn't had the day off) - a rush of phone calls and SMSs and emails, but so far nobody we know was involved. Thankfully for us, but less fortunate for many. Isn't it so sadly ironic that the most cosmopolitan, culturally mixed and probably tolerant cities - New York a few years ago, and London today (and I suspect Madrid wasn't very different) - bear the brunt of this madness?

Sheesh, am I losing interest in blogging or just too easily distracted? Well, I've just finished The Dragon Reborn, book 3 of the Wheel of Time. Another 5 on the bookshelf to get through, and if I'm not mistaken, another one or two that Ronwen hasn't bought yet. Still enjoying the series, even if things do drag on a little.

The other thing that's been keeping me busy has been working on a Java version of this blog. I started it ages ago, as a bit of a a Skool Me JSP thing, and a way to put theory to practice and blahdy blah. I've only really pottered around with bits and pieces, and that often boiled down to trying and retrying different things as they took my fancy, without getting any close to finishing it. I finally decided it was time to either shelve the damned thing or get it done. I'm rather keen to get a virtual server somewhere so that I can migrate my email away from my current ADSL ISP, and generally have some root-accessible space to play around with. It doesn't make sense to have that, and my blog's current DDN hosting, least of all since I've been meaning to redesign my blog anyway, and it just doesn't make sense to keep it as a Notes app when I'm using Notes for nothing other than posting to this blog - and schlepping with Wine just to do that, as it is.

I thought about using an off-the-shelf blog app, Java-based or otherwise, but I really do like the idea of having a home-rolled blog. So I decided to get stuck in and finish it off. It'll be a while yet, even if I don't lose interest, but I'm forcing myself to complete one feature or make a useful chunk of progress each time I work on it. So far so good.

We took a long weekend this weekend, and travelled down to Durbs for P and L's wedding. Great to share the day with them, and to catch up with some friends we haven't seen in far too long.

Other than that, I've been as lazy as hell. I've barely touched my PC at home in the past 2 weeks, instead I've been wrapped up in books and generally staying curled up on the couch and being as unproductive as I can. I started working my way through the Wheel of Time books - I'm on book 2 at the moment. Ronwen's been on at me for years to read them, and after a few false starts in the past, I finally got going. I've heard often enough that they get increasingly boring from book to book, but so far I'm enjoying the story. Considering how bloody cold Joburg's been the past day or two, I think I'll stay ensconced on the couch for a little longer.

The little shopping complex around the corner from us has a Brazilian restaurant upstairs. After a name change and a few years of just plodding along, it's suddenly booming, and all the bootiful people seem to be descending upon it in herds.

The problem is that nowadays, it's almost impossible to find parking at the complex. The place has always been bustling in the afternoons and evenings, but the few shops usually have quite a steady turnover of people leaving and arriving, and even at its worst, you'd just drive around the lot once or twice and find a parking opening up. With a restaurant though, it's a different story, and each car is there for at least an hour or few. The result is that people drive around the near-gridlocked parking lot, and there's nothing opening up. I'm sure many of them leave in frustration, and stay away in the evenings in future. So while business is booming for this restaurant, it must have a pretty negative effect on evening business for the Woolies, the Clicks, the Nandos, the pizza joint and the DVD store.

I wonder if there's anything (legal) they can do about it? If the restaurant mysteriously goes up in flames one night, I'll know why.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

On the upside, the Constitutional Court said that it's OK for Laugh It Off to flog their "Black Labour, White Guilt" parody t-shirts, and that South African Breweries can get stuffed. I don't know that SAB did themselves any favours by pushing this issue for so long. Ironically, Laugh It Off have won the case, and will call it a day after auctioning off the remainder of their stock and giving the proceeds to charity.

On the downside, the Mail & Guardian were gagged today, because of an article on an ANC-related funding scandal. This is juicy stuff - the same oil company that crawled up Saddam's bum and had hissy fits about the Iraq invasion a while back were also donating taxpayer's money, basically, to the ANC. Oilgate, it's being called. Will anything come of it? Probably not, but respek to the M&G for making this an issue.

It's funny. The M&G's parent newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, was famous in the early 80s for being banned and censored silly by South Africa's apartheid government. So much so they eventually shut down for a number of years. Two decades later, the paper's still getting censored by the government (or its lackeys, at least). Some things change, but others seem to stay the same.

(via Commentary and Joblog).

Even though reviews are mixed, we'll have to go watch Revenge of the Shite because well, it's just something one has to do. Ronwen wanted to re-watch the first two episodes, so on Friday night we rented the Phantom Menace. It's really not that good, and every time I re-watch it it becomes even less appealing. I fell asleep halfway through (admittedly, as much from a hectic week as anything else), and Ronwen eventually gave up after scratches on the DVD caused the movie to keep dying. I don't recall ever having to take a rented video back because it was so badly damaged, but with a halfway finicky DVD player, renting becomes more of a hit-and-miss affair.

Yesterday started off splendidly, with a vsit to the post office to collect the latest addition to my CD collection: The Spectres' debut album, Rubber Room Rock. This baby went out of print a year and a half ago, and new, sealed copies go as "collectibles" on Amazon for $130. The only other second-hand copies I've seen were hovering around $90, so when I saw a copy for $36 or so, I snapped it up. That probably makes it the most expensive CD I've ever bought, but dang, it's worth it. Classic psycho-rockabilly, brilliantly off the wall songs, top-notch stuff.

Spent a quiet night at home last night watching telly (Return to Me, and Married To The Mob), and mooching aimlessly around the Net. I woke up this morning with a bee in my bonnet. We have a number of old pine bookshelves which have never been painted or varnished, and desperately needed prettifying. We had started staining and varnishing some of them a while ago, and they were turning out quite nicely. I wanted to get going and finish off the rest of them, but finding the right colour varnishes turned out to be a huge schlep. We headed out west, sitting in traffic (on a Sunday, sheesh) and missioning up and down Hendrik Potgieter Drive trying to find someone stocking the right Plascon stuff. Eventually we admitted defeat, headed back to Cresta for lunch, where, go figure, the local small hardware shop had exactly what we needed. Got home, and my enthusiasm was well dampered. I finally got going, and started on one of the bookshelves. I have to admit that Ronwen did most of the painting last time around, so kippie here is still a bit of a newb with this whole painting/varnishing gig. I'm as stained as the wood is, and by the end of the week the skin'll be falling off my hands from washing them in turps all the time. I'm really not a DIY kinda dude.

Needless to say, we're buzzing on the turpentine fumes. Quick extrapolation of the stain-wait-stain-wait-stain-wait-varnish routine across the remaining bookshelves and we're in for another month of this. By then we'll be eating with spoons and drooling uncontrollably. Psssssssssh.

After a bit of a hiatus I got back into the CD ripping. I've been making my way through the Rs, and currently on rotation is a compilation Ronwen bought a while ago called Rocking Against The System. It's a collection of South African music from the 80s, and it really is a trip listening to some of these old songs again. It's not that I was nuts about all of these songs when I was growing up, but a lot of these really were part of the theme music of the 80s in ZA, as it were, for better or worse. The passage of two decades and evocation of fond memories makes some of even the tiredest of these songs sound a whole lot better.

Of course, some of these tracks are Damned Fine Tunes, nostalgia notwithstanding. Most notably for me, the Psycho Reptiles' 'Monster From The Bog,' because, well, if you were a kid in the 80s in South Africa, then that ska-esque tune is well and truly imprinted in your psyche, and being schoolboys and all, the line 'There's a monster... in the bog' took on a whole meaning of its own. No Friends of Harry's 'Competition Rules' is a close second, because, well, NFOH rocked and I thought they were cool long before I knew what 'goth rock' was. I don't remember The Dynamics, but 'Thugs' is just plain groovy. Celtic Rumours weren't bad (and as a youngster it just seemed so wrong and too close to home when vocalist Kevin Van Staden died in a car accident), and listening now, stuff like Via Afrika's 'Hey Boy' just says '80s' in all its eccentricity, and songs like Falling Mirror's 'Johnny Calls the Chemist' just stand as plain well-crafted pieces of music.

The saddest thing is that given the limited market this music had, a lot of these albums are out of print (although Fresh Music is reissuing some of them), and there's very little to be learned about these bands. Ditto for anything as exotic as their music videos (a number of which, I realised, I can still clearly remember). Googling for the Reptiles comes back with around 200 hits, and the majority of them are for the handful of compilations their songs have been added to.

Anyway, I figured I'd do my bit for history, and see what sorts of cool things Google can do with this ;-)

Moon is hiding behind the clouds
The swamp is full of eerie howls
The monster from the bog
He's gonna come out all covered in slime
He's gonna make sure that he gets you this time

A few miles away there is a laboratory
Mixing up the chemicals and pumping them in the sea
All the toxic waste goes to the bed
And that's where the monster was born and bred

Only female flesh can satisfy his need
It's got to be alive and it's got to bleed
The monster from the bog
Yeah he's real ugly and he's slimy and mean
and when he rips your head off you're bound to scream

A few miles away there a laboratory...

The monster from the bog
Be careful what you throw down your kitchen sink
Cause it's not quite as harmless as you might think

Weeell, his hands are calloused and his teeth are green
The elephant hide man it's so obscene
The monster from the bog
When he knocks you on the head and drags you to his cave
It's not quite certain you'll be seen again

There's a monster... in the bog