the corner office

I don't mean to make light of something serious, which has already taken many lives and will probably take more. Given that I commute through the centre of London most weekdays, I'm as skittish about the coming weeks as anyone else.

But I have to ask: why don't they just call it pig flu?

GeoCities is being shut down (because Yahoo! is! circling! the! drain!), but some people are trying to archive it (via):

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I've archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It's not for me to judge. It's for me to collect

This resonates with me, which is I have so many boxes of crap. Recently I was digging through some old files, and came across some old Telkom phone bills.

'I have a lot of old phone bills,' I said to Ronwen, 'It's silly but I can't quite bring myself to throw them away, what do you think I should do with them?'. 'Why don't you hang on to them for a little longer,' she replied. 'I have all my phone bills going back to the mid-90s,' I said. 'OK,' she said, 'then maybe only keep some of them.'

Which is not so easy for me, because if there's one thing that compels me more than the urge to hang on to old things, it's the urge to preserve collections.

Bea Arthur has passed away. I remember All In The Family (albeit vaguely), I remember Maude (slightly less vaguely), and of course the Golden Girls, when I was in high school. Bea Arthur's characters became entrenched in our culture; what a memorable lady. RIP.

The world today:

• South African democracy, gotta love it. Jacob Zuma will win, and people will fear for the country's future, and justifiably so. As I've said before though, hopefully he'll be so easily corruptible that big business will pay him handsomely to maintain the status quo. The alternatives aren't pleasant to contemplate.

• So the USA tortured people. Hardly a shocking revelation (bzzt bzzt), but the scandal isn't that it happened, it's that Obama had the audacity (integrity?) to publish the memos. At what point do outraged right-wing Americans stop and ask themselves exactly what values they think they're defending? Waterboard for Jesus! God loves it when non-combatants scream... Hmmm hmm!

  Obama did the right thing and prosecuting the evil people who authorised and encouraged the torture is also the right thing to do. How can any moral person think otherwise?

• Darling's budget can be summarised as 'we are soooooooo fucked'. There's plenty to be annoyed about but the 2k car trade-in annoys me the most because it's just so cruelly arbitrary, and the unintended consequences so patent. Incentivise people to not buy new cars for a decade at a time. How great for the British car industry that'll be!

  I want to know whether Brown and his sorry gang will get to keep their pensions when they get booted. Their incompetence and vote-buying is costing us a lot more money than a bunch of inept bankers ever did.

Looks like Oracle want to buy Sun, after the IBM-Sun talks fell apart.

I think that Java would do better not being entirely subsumed by IBM, who would, let's be honest, totally cock it up. Having said that, I'm not sure that Oracle and Sun cultures would mesh and I don't understand what on-going business value Oracle would get from Sun. Hardware? Not going to sell more just because there's a new logo on the front. No new ways to make money out of the JVM or Java technologies (and Oracle have been Java-centric for ages, anyway), ditto for Solaris and any creamy proprietary uber-Unix goodness. I'm sure Oracle will be glad to get their paws on MySQL, but that's about it.

The easiest way to make sense of it, is to see it as a way for Larry Ellison to pick up a few baubles and piss off IBM and Microsoft.

Speaking of holidays being over, I've started studying again. This week also saw UNISA finally approve and process my registration for a BCom Honours in Financial Modelling. Phew.

When I finished my BSc Honours last year, I decided to take a break from studying and said 'maybe next year'. After some thinking and digging around, and having formulated a vague plan of where I'd like to be in a few years' time careerwise, I decided that studying financial modelling would press a few more buttons than a vanilla computer science Masters would.

Anyhow... UNISA took over a month to sort out my registration, so I'm now a few weeks away from the first assignment dates, and I'm just getting the textbooks and starting up. Combine that with my rusty maths and statistics and I am, to use a colloquialism, nipping myself. It's going to be a heavy year.

Ronwen and Leo got back from South Africa yesterday. I wasn't sure how Leo would react after not seeing me for a month, but the grin and giggle when he saw me was quite special. Having some time off was as good as a holiday for me, but a month was a little too long. I'm glad they're back!

I know there's a recession going on, but you wouldn't have thought so if you were trying to find parking at our local B&Q this morning.

I have no doubt that there are some interesting architectural and technical things going on, but for the most part, people waffling on about cloud computing are just indulging in base bullshittery.

As Oracle's Larry Ellison put it:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

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As April Fools go, this has to be one of the best. The price list is hilarious.

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