the corner office

New Orleans is one American city that Ronwen and I have always wanted to visit. It seems like the city dodged the bullet when Hurricane Katrina veered off of course at the last moment, sparing the city from the obliteration that was being predicted yesterday. Even so, it sounds like a particularly unpleasant part of the world to be in right now.

Following on from the previous topic, I got the following SMS yesterday: "You could win a R500.00 gift voucher if u book to attend SAICA's event for under-35 CAs (etc etc)".

Apart from the fact that I'm getting cell-phone spam from them, when even a stodgy old institution like the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants is using sms-speak, you have to wonder what the world is coming to.

On the subject of change, I just noticed that the Vodacom Voicemail Voice has changed. For like, forever, we've been listening to one lady telling us how many new messages we have, and please press 1 to listen to them, and now there's a new voice at the end of the line. It's completely irrational, I admit, but am I the only one who feels totally weird about this?

Via a work colleague, A Parent's Primer to Computer Slang, from those thoughtful folks at Microsoft.

A very clever idea, I think. Get the fogies all hip with leetspeek, "Johnny, j00 better 33t yr c4rr0tz0rs or I'll 0wn j00", and in no time the youf will be giving it up as a bad idea, and reverting to something like, y'know, real English.

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. It was Sandy's 30th on Wednesday. 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)

Code introspection is great; the bean idiom is cool in many ways. The only caveat of course is that you can't catch f(oul)-ups at compile time and if you're not honouring the design contract, you learn the hard way. Having spent the better part of half an hour trying to figure out why an ActionForm bean wasn't picking up the a form submit value, and knowing that it had to be something stupid I was missing, I realised the getter/setters for these new button properties had default package scope, and so the damned Introspector that Struts uses couldn't see them. Aaaargh!

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 Sandy'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?

... but someone should make her stop. Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Nguka says that we should do a 'skills transfer' with Zimbabwe when it comes to land reform because we can learn a lot from them.

I always liken the ANC government to a suitor/girlfriend/boyfriend who's absolutely wonderful in almost every way, except that now and then they start foaming at the mouth, wailing in languages noone's ever heard of, and looking for kitchen knives and little furry animals to carve up. Everything else is great and full of promise, but will your wedded bliss end with you waking up one night to find an axe protruding from your chest and 'kill kill kill' carved into your forehead?

This is definitely a foamy mouth moment.

(Via Commentary and Ronwen in the car on the way home tonight)

Update: it appears that the Deputy Pres was joking, and IOL seem to have missed the joke when they reported on it. This M&G article explains things (a bit) better. I'm still a little wary when it comes to our government's plans to 'speed up' land reform, though.