the corner office

Ronwen's off to Durban for a few days, and while the cat's away, the mouse will... work on assignments. The backlog isn't coming down, which is why yours truly isn't sittin' back and singin' country down in Durbs, too.

PS Thanks for the Walkers shortbread, Sandy!

Sandy flew up from KZN on Wednesday, and she spent the past few days with us. Sad as always seeing her off to the UK this evening. A quiet dinner with friends on Wednesday night, and a lazy few days chilling out at home (I didn't join the have-pounds-to-spend expeditions ;-)

While in Maritzburg with my aunt, Sandy had gone through my grandmother's photo collection, and she brought a number of them up to Joburg. These pictures span the 40s right through to the 80s and 90s - from my grandparents during WWII, to my mom, uncle and aunt as children, to the 'current' generation as children, teenagers and onwards.

The sad thing is that many of these pictures no longer have any context, and the stories behind them are probably lost. Sandy and I could remember and place a number of them, but others are just too old. There's a photo of my grandfather and grandmother when they must've been in their 20s or 30s, but we have no idea when or where it was taken. Another is the only picture of my great grandmother that I've ever seen - a photograph in a kitchen somewhere - and amazingly, on the kitchen table is a blue-and-white crockery jug, which Ronwen and I still have in our kitchen today! It had been in my grandparents' flat in 1997 when my grandfather passed away, and being the 'give all the old stuff to me' person, the jug came home with me. Was this old photo in my grandparents' kitchen, or my great-grandmother's kitchen? I always thought it was great that I had something from my grandparents; it'd be quite something if it was in some way a connection to a generation even further back.

One of the things Sandy and I have agreed to do, (and started doing this weekend), is scan all of these photographs so that we can all have a copy of them. I've had the idea for a while of putting them on a website so that everyone in our family has access to them. I'd love for us to accumulate as much 'story' behind all of these photos as we can, so that these memories aren't lost.

Oh my greatness... it's turned into an annual thing. A 2005 update: (The Other) Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics. (Warning: nsfw and nsfvegetarians).

(Here's the original list).

(via The Agitator)

I polished off book 8 of the WoT today. That's the end of what's on the bookshelves, and I'm sorely tempted to take my 110-odd ronts and get book 9 from Exclusives. Not just yet though - it'll be textbooks and little else for the next few weeks. It does feel weird being 'bookless' again.

My sister's out from the UK for a bit. She arrived at Jhb International this morning, we went through for visit/breakfast, and then saw her onto a plane down to Durbs to visit the family down there. She'll be back up here on Wednesday. Can't wait.

On the way home Ronwen needed to find some sewing pattern, so we popped into the Oriental Plaza for the first time in ages. I was mortified, every single tree in the parking lot has been butchered and had its branches cut off. Why? I'm a bit Dogmatix-ish when it comes to trees; I'm near traumatised. Not just that, but it was butt-ugly too, with these tree skeletons all over the parking lot, and not a whit of shade. Why on earth did they kill all the trees?

What weird (but nice) weather. After a drearily boring and dry bland-blue-sky winter, it was overcast this afternoon/evening, and we had our first semi-rain shower tonight. I'm not sure if this is just odd weather or a sign that spring is trying to get a foot in the door, but it was a welcome change. I'd like to say I think it's springtime, because there's always that one day, or moment, when you get a whiff of the air and you notice that it smells and feels different to how it has been. That's always what nudges over my internal season clock, and this afternoon was my new-feel-in-the-air moment. Given that it was overcast and the air pressure was obviously changing, it's hardly a surprise, I suppose. Either way, it is a reminder that winter's nearly over, and what a poor excuse for a winter it's been. With all the talk of global warming and climate change it's hard not to read anything ominous into it, but it's been a mild, mild winter, and that seems to have been the trend for the past few years. I can't remember when last we had a really cold winter on the Highveld.

Anyway, today (well, yesterday, now) was Women's Day, and it was nice to have the day off (yay for women!). I wish I could say I did something fun on what's basically the last weekday public holiday until December, but I spent it working on university assignments which I'm horrendously behind with. Due dates have been zinging by like bullets in an A-Team episode. Yet again, I've been working on a 'mental block' chunk of work, where what I really need to do is devote two or three days to the stuff without interruption, but just can't get going, and because I can't get going, the work just feels more and more impenetrable. The fact that time's running out has also added to the pressure. Not much longer, though.

Nothing else to report, really. My 200 gig??? hard drive was starting to get a bit clogged up, but I was shuffling some stuff around and messing with backup scripts, and realised that I was wasting a ton of space on old Gentoo backups from many many months ago, that I'd completely forgotten about. Those got deleted and there's some legs in m'drives yet. Yes, that's a very sad thing to blog about, but in a way, not really, because along with new-season smells, cleaning up one's hard drives is truly one of life's simple pleasures.

More sad news - my grandmother passed away early yesterday morning. She was sickly on Tuesday morning, went to sleep, slipped into a coma, and passed away in the early hours of Wednesday. Given her declining health and increasing frailty, it wasn't entirely unexpected. Not only that, but we knew she was tired, and ready to go. That makes it easier to accept, perhaps, but the sadness and feeling of loss is no less.

Much like my mom, my gran had been clear about what she wanted and didn't want when she passed away. She'll be cremated, and when the family is all together again, we'll spread her ashes at the Botanical Gardens in Pietermaritzburg. I think we all choked up when my gran had originally asked for this. When we were living in 'Maritzburg, 25 years ago now, and in the years after when we went down on holiday, my gran would take myself, my sister and my cousins Christopher and Michael to the botanical gardens on Saturday afternoons. They were a ritual we'd look forward to the entire week. We'd collect bread crumbs the whole week so we could feed the ducks, and my gran would pack a picnic basket (usually with goodies she'd baked and made), and we'd spend the afternoon ranging about and exploring the gardens, climbing the hill and generally having a ball. My gran had said some of her happiest memories were of those afternoons with us at the gardens, and thinking back on it, they're some of my happiest memories too.

Dooby doo... twiddling thumbs... how long does it take 3 megs of source code to compile? The weekend's been spent on a Theory of Programming Languages assignment. The last 2 questions need diagrams of call trees and activation records and fun stuff like that. Last year I'd been doing my assignments with MS Word and using Word's Draw tools which did a decent job of generating simple diagrams. On Linux and having to make do with OpenOffice now, alternative arrangements are needed. For most of my assignments this year, I've just printed out the typed-up pages and hand-drawn whatever diagrams I'd needed, and submitted the assignments dead-tree style. Since this assignment is fast approaching the less charitable definition of 'late', I don't want to have to schlep to a drop-off box tomorrow and wait days before UNISA marks it as received, so I want to submit it electronically (and preferably before the clock strikes midnight.)

This means I need me some diagrammin' software so's I can create jpegs and drop them into the document. I just read Tom Duff's review of a free software for dummies book, and he mentions Dia. I haven't used Dia since about 2002, when I tried it on Windows and where it looked so dog-awful with its old Gtk widgets, that I didn't spend much time with it. But it's just what I need now, so I'm in the middle of a quick download & compile. Here's hoping it'll do the job.

Apart from that, it's been a fairly uneventful week. I'm getting a bit more cosy with T-SQL these days, which is fun, with a chapter here and there I've made my way through book 7 of WoT and on to book 8, but getting next to no work done on the new blog app. Given the mountain of assignments I've got to catch up, that seems unlikely to change soon.

Hmm, Dia's compiled. Back to work...

(Update: three cheers for Dia. Although they could win a lot more first-impression kudos if they simply halved the default line thickness in diagrams, so that things looked professional off the bat instead of looking like they've been drawn with the graphic equivalent of a kid's crayon.)

OK, so the name Longhorn was ripe for punning and abuse, but I've read a few mentions that Microsoft's Longhorn will be called 'Vista'. Yes, it conjures the wide open plains and wanderin' cowboys and stuff. I'd still prefer Longhorn, which has bucketloads more character.

I took a squizz at dictionary.com, and (part of) one of the definitions for vista:

A distant view or prospect

No surprises there.

To celebrate the anniversary of the first moon landing on 20 July 1969 (a whole 3 years before I was born), Google has launched Google Moon.

If today is a celebration of technology and progress, you have to stop and consider the incredible, dizzying progress and strides in technology that allows a gazillion Joe Schmoes across the world to sit at their PCs, and at next to no cost, connect to other computers halfway across the planet, and download and view incredibly detailed maps and pictures of the planet around us, and our moon. And not only that, but write up their thoughts about it, and make those thoughts available to people from every corner of that planet. We really are amazing creatures.

As an aside, Google haven't lost their sense of humour - visit the moon.google.com home page, and push the slider all the way up ;-)