the corner office

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*

Hmm, apparently IBM is starting to get cosy with PHP. The article refers to an anonymous "industry executive" who says that IBM's getting a bit tired and frustrated with Java, but that seems like crazy talk. Another analyst says that developers can start out with PHP and move up to WebSphere. That also seems like crazy talk - kind of like taking a leap from a Ford Fiesta to a Sherman Tank. But I wonder what interesting things might come of an extended IBM/PHP relationship.

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?

I did my monthly emerge world yesterday, and in doing so upgraded Wine to version 20050111. Not such a good idea - it ended up breaking my Notes client. For some reason, the Replicator page wouldn't open, and hung the client, which is a bit of a showstopper. I masked the package, and moved back to Wine 20041019-r3, and all is dandy again.

The nice thing about Gentoo's portage is that you don't have to muck about with the system tools too often. If you're lucky, everthing just works. The downside is not being able to remember the damned commands and file locations when you need to. Time to build me a cheat sheet.

The nominations are in and voting is open for the 2005 SA Blog Awards.

Many of the usual suspects are there, and deservedly so. But it's something to see how the SA blogging world has exploded - I've never seen half the blogs on the list. How many more weren't even shortlisted? When I first started blogging I'd sub to every South African blog I found, just because they were there. The community, so to speak, was pretty small and a new blogger joining the ranks was quite an event. No longer. It's been something to see the growth since I started in 2003, and I can only imagine what some of the real early adopters who've been doing it for even longer must think. I wonder what it'll be like in another year's time?

Crikey. A British 3-year old with an IQ of 137 has joined Mensa.

As friends and family start raising their little 'uns I constantly find myself asking stupid questions about what kids are supposed to be doing at various ages. "Little Algernon said his first word today" and I'm not sure whether to congratulate the parent or not. Was it "on time"? Was the timing something to be proud of or worried about?

I'm clueless about when babies should be walking, talking, mastering precalculus, etc. But at age 3 I doubt I even knew how to tie my own shoelaces.

Today saw me return the gym after far too long a break. Didn't do anything intense... just "get the blood flowing" stuff. It's a bit depressing how far I've regressed since last year's diligence. I suspect I'm going to have some seriously tender abdominal muscles tomorrow. But as always, it's great to feel revved up after a stretch of exertion.

Ronwen rented Kaena on DVD this afternoon. Lousy story, but absolutely stunning graphics. I haven't seen too many animated movies, so maybe this kind of stuff is par for the course these days... but it's a long way from The Secret of NIMH, that's for sure.

Wasted nearly an hour this evening trying to figure out why a sample app from one of my textbooks wouldn't compile. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why a simple rand() was causing a linker error in this app, and only this app. After spending a lot of time with Java and Eclipse recently the whole makefile palaver is a bit of a jolt again. I wasn't really paying attention when I typed in the source code, and I was looking at rand() in one place but not noticing the rand() a few lines up, which was a typo. Aaargh! The usual lesson learned - when you know things don't make sense, they probably don't, so give up and try something else for a while. That could be summarised into this maxim:

If Googling for your error message returns a page or less, you should probably work on the assumption that you're doing something stupid.

The CD ripping continues - I'm past the A's and onto the B's. I'm having fun doing some genre-bouncing, especially with some of these CDs not having been listened to in half a decade or more. So after revisiting my entire Bauhaus collection and then ending up with Chet Atkins' and Mark Knopfler's "Neck and Neck," things can't get much weirder. (Well, they can, 'cause Syd Barrett's next, but that's tomorrow's story).

Unbelievable. I mentioned earlier this week that I was ripping my CDs, and was using a tool called cdparanoia. Well, cdparanoia finished off reading a single CD track last night, that has taken days (literally) to read. Good sense said I should have cancelled the process, but I was curious to see what the end product would sound like, and also because this is a CD that I really was heartbroken to see damaged.

The outcome is amazing. Playing this CD normally was a bit like listening to a scratched vinyl - jumping, and non-stop scratching and clicking noises. After days of whirring up and down, I now have a nearly perfect-sounding digital copy of the track I was ripping. It'll probably take more than a month of non-stop ripping to get the rest of the CD, but I'll do it when the rest of my CDs are done.

What CD am I so desperate to preserve? It's the Abelarde Sanction's Best of 2000 compilation CD. The deterioration isn't surprising - it was only ever a home-burned, supremely limited edition affair. And why am I so desperate to preserve it? Because it's the only CD that has me on it!

Way back in 2000, friends of mine had an electro-punk-ish band called Atmosphere Control Unit. They were between guitarists at the time, and I offered to jam with them until they found a "real" guitarist. I was (and am) an utterly unaccomplished guitar player, but my ham-fisted noise-making seemed to work and I ended up playing with the guys for well over a year... got to play a good few gigs, and we recorded one track at the time, a badly mastered version of which made it onto the Abelarde compilation. Playing in a band was an awesome experience and I was always grateful for the chance to do it.

I realised after the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2004, that this CD is the only copy I have of that recording, and so, it is... precious to me...

In addition to that, this compilation just takes me back to the "live music" days before Ronwen and I became complete hermits... amazing bands, amazing music, amazing experiences. Many of the bands, the venues and the people have moved on, so this CD is a once-off, small piece of history and a happy reminder of what it was all about.

One of the few things from Thabo Mbeki's State of the Nation address which got my interest, was Mbeki's gripe about the cost of South African telecomms being too expensive. As reported by ITWeb:

We believe that the unacceptable situation in which some of our fixed-line rates are 10 times those of developed countries will soon become a thing of the past

I was reading a print article today saying that our ADSL connectivity costs around 15 times more than many developed nations. Even a small, developing island nation like Mauritius has cheaper broadband than we do. So while it's nice to hear our pres say these things, I'm not sure that many people really believe it.

On the one hand it is good news... perhaps our government is really grokking that Telkom is holding the country back. On the other hand, it's hard to reconcile this with the fact that government legislation is what allows Telkom's continued price-gouging, and it's even harder to reconcile this with the fact that liberalisation promises made late last year have been pulled back and scaled down in the past few weeks, limiting the benefits that real competition could bring.

In the meantime, it's business as usual for Telkom.

(PS for a neat summary of the SOTN, head on over to Commentary.)

Via Radley Balko (here and here), the hip-hop look stands to get very expensive in the US state of Virginia, which is looking to pass a law which will render wearers of "lewd or indecently exposed" underwear liable to a fine of $50. This is a gem of a line from the Washington Times:

It's not clear if the fine would apply to plumbers, carpenters or other laborers who have problems with low-riding pants.

Heh. Heh. Say no to crack.

I have no idea what statement one is making by exposing one's rods to the world, but as long there are no skid marks, what's the big deal? It could be worse. We could go back to that 60s/70's tight jeans look when underwear wasn't really in fashion at all, and men and women let it all hang out, so to speak. They never passed laws against that. I have an old Cat Stevens vinyl and the album cover has a photo of ole Cat perched on a chair at a concert, and I'm sorry, but I got the heebies every time I saw that picture. I'm all heebied out right now, just remembering it. What was that generation thinking? The worst you can say about baggies and exposed undies is that it looks a bit foolish to the uninitiated. That whole tight jeans thing, on the other hand, was plain traumatic.

Anyhoo.