the corner office

Reported a few weeks back; the first pictures of a live giant squid, taken by Japanese scientists in the Pacific. An 8 metre long squid is a big-ass critter, and dead specimens up to 18 metres in length have been found.

It's incredible that despite how much of this planet we've charted, measured, studied and Google-mapped, the deepest recesses of our oceans are still unreachable, and we have absolutely no idea what's down there.

In the chaos of the past few weeks I overlooked that I've been blogging (publically) now for 2 years. I won't get into the navel-gazing like I did last year, because not much has changed from a metablogging perspective: I still don't post much technical stuff and I still find myself wanting to treat my blog as more of a day-to-day diary and personal history, and still feel a bit guilty/weird when I do. Somewhere between those extremes I still manage to spew out content and people still seem to read it, occasionally. If you're one of 'em, thanks for your patronage!

The one thing I'd hoped to do by now is migrate my blog to The Corner Office version 2, but that pile of code hasn't been touched in about 2 months now. Soon, I hope...

I got an email from my ISP a few days ago informing me that from this month, Telkom is implementing a hard cap on its 3GB service. So now when you blow your 3 gigs, you lose all connectivity until the next month, not just international connectivity. Why did they do this? Are the local backbones so clogged that they have to cap even that traffic, or is it just an easy way to punish those who blow their caps and then exploit local open proxies, and bugger the rest? Surely not.

Then, yesterday, I get a call from Telkom sales asking if I want to upgrade my ADSL line to their new 1024 offering. So now you can reach your cap even quicker! I was polite to the sales lady, but it took some self-restraint. Man, I hate Telkom.

More than a week since the last blog; it's been pretty hectic. Last week was the usual assignment grind. Ronwen's folks came up from Durbs for the weekend. It'd been years (literally) since they'd been up to Joburg, and it was great to have them.

We went to the Sterkfontien Caves on Saturday. Good timing; we'd seen on the news a few days earlier that the Caves have had a bit of a pro-tourist facelift and rebranding. The place certainly has been improved since our last visit in 2003 or so. Now, when the cave tour is over, they have a large walkway which goes past the excavation site where Mrs Ples was dug up, and then winds around the hill back to the new exhibition complex. I had quite an odd experience walking around the hill (more of a half-hearted koppie, really). The wind was blowing up the valley through the dry grass, and it evoked really strong memories of my childhood. Living in a small town with lots of small mining villages around us, heading up into the koppies and out into the veld was an essential part of being a kid. You reach an age where you just stop doing that, and then you move to a big city where you couldn't do it, even if you wanted to, but the experience of it stays embedded in the psyche. At the risk of getting a bit sheewow-like, I felt an overwhelming sense of connectedness back to my experiences as a child, and to the bit of Africa I grew up in.

It's also a bit of a mindfsck to think that you're standing outside a cave, and that pre-humans might have been standing on, give or take some erosion and geological action, exactly the same spot a good 3 million years before you. We're only digging out their bones, now. It's a bit hard to conceive of what sorts of creatures will evolve from us and be digging up our bones 3 million years hence.

On slightly more modern-day timescales, we also went to friends A&R's engagement party on Saturday afternoon, and apart from the party being good fun as always, the really cool part was bumping into a good friend of mine I haven't seen in years. Another reminder of how quickly time seems to go by these days. One day you're thinking you need to give someone a call and 2 years later you still haven't.

Time went by pretty quickly for the most part this week, anyway. Year-end at work and a project that had to coincide with that meant that the daily hours had been edging up the past three weeks, and this week went from mildly crazy to downright insane. I realised this evening that I hadn't touched my PC since last Sunday night, which is probably also the last full night's sleep I had. I haven't worked hours like this in a while now. Thankfully, my part of the project was complete this afternoon, and I've spent the evening winding down.

Assignments are the next crisis. D-day is looming, and I've taken some time off next week to get them all done. For now though, it's bed time.

Last night saw a really weird storm in Joburg. First "rains" of the season, but it was far too much dust-storm and wind and too little actual precipitation. Today's been overcast(ish), so everybody's hoping we get some real drenching rain out of all of this. At least just something to settle the damned dust.

Work's busy as can be, and the assignment death march continues. I've gotten through a few since last week's Info Security, and I'm on Formal Logic at the moment. It's always been the one subject I dread each year, but this stuff isn't bad. To be honest, it's mainly just riffing on the same old themes we've been doing in AI and the like over the past 2 years, so it's quite doable, notwithstanding one of the most cryptic textbooks I've ever read. I had to double-check something last night, so I cracked open my Logic textbooks from first and second year. I found myself thinking 'how quaint'. I never thought I'd find myself looking back at some of that work on formal proofs with anything remotely resembling fondness, but there you go.

Ronwen's folks are coming to visit us this weekend, so it's a bit of a rush to get everything semi-spring cleaned. I wonder if we can blame the general state of our home's 2-students-in-full-swing disrepair on the dust storms?

Ole Oireeen Bester announces that the Saturday night movie is the Three Musketeers, with Chris O'Donnell, Kiefer Sutherland, and Charlie Sheen. Except that when the opening credits start rolling, it's the 1973 version with Michael York et al. Somebody at the SABC is in for a roasting on Monday. Or maybe they just won't care, which is perhaps why stuff like this happens in the first place.

Oh well, back to m'studies.

Griping about the weather here is a fun pastime, but by and large our 'weather problems' are pretty inconsequential. At times like these I'm grateful that I live more than a mile above sea level, and the worst thing we have to worry about is occasional hail damage.

So soon after Katrina, comes Rita. Measured a few days ago as the third strongest hurricane in the Atlantic in recorded history. It weakened before hitting land, but it still seems to be wreaking havoc. It looks unlikely that the humanitarian crisis is going to be as big a mess as with Katrina, but the economic effects on the USA (and the rest of us as a consequence) might not be pretty.

It's late September and we still haven't had any rain. The air in Joburg is dry and grotty and while some plants are itching to get all springified, everything's still pretty bleak and brown. The weather people say we're (possibly) in for a hot summer (bah), and an above average rainful (no complaints from me). I think I should append 'eventually' to that, because it seems that the rain ain't arriving any time soon.

Blame it on El Nino... or George W Bush, evil mastermind behind global warming. Either way, I'm not a fan of these wonky weather patterns.

I had an obscure thought: the old White Horse Inn wasn't too far down the road (in old country road terms) from the Banbury Cross centre, if I remember correctly. I wonder if the names were linked? It'd be an awful play on words if they were - but you never know...

Interesting trivia: I did a quick Google, and found that the White Horse Inn, which was a landmark of Joburg nightlife for years, until it closed down in the 90s, has been turned into a psychiatric facility.

The week's been a bit of a blur, largely because of the dratted AI assignment(s). I was hoping to be done by Thursday night, which became Friday night, which became Saturday morning, and ended up being Saturday night. Thankfully though, things started to fall into place, and I'm a bit more comfy with the concepts than I was a week ago. Here's just hoping the lecturers don't reject the assignments 'cause they were too late.

The drudge was broken for a bit this evening; it was L's 30th, and we (being the usual suspects) went to Giovanni's at Banbury Cross Village. Pricey restaurant, but the portions more than make up for it and the food was rather good, especially the Pavlova; notwithstanding that they lug the cake dishes from table to table in a less than subtle sales gimmic, and I couldn't help but wonder how many dozens of people had oohed, aahed and breathed over the cakes by the time they got to us.

Some headed off to the Red Room after dinner, but we came home and I carried on with my assignments (sad, sad, sad). Got the last AI assignment done and submitted online about an hour ago, and I've been reading through the next assignment (Info Security). I enjoy the subject, but the assignments boil down to 'Discuss X (no more than 10 pages), Discuss Y (about 8 pages), Discuss Z (no more than 50404040 pages.)' I sincerely doubt that the lecturers actually read ten-page summaries of the textbook and journal articles, so I can only presume that we're being put through this because the lecturers think that the ability to write long, extended treatises on stuff is going to be a really valuable thing in later academic years. Or perhaps they're just mean.

I've taken to hauling the old Deep Purple and Uriah Heep CDs into the car. Ronwen's taking this rather good-naturedly - for now - but after a week of listening to the Smiths over and over and over and over again, I needed a bit of a change.