Boep Club 2008

It's a terrible thing to have to admit but I get together with a few like minded guys while the wives are at book club to drink whisky, smoke cigars and generally chew the fat. After a while this acquired the unfortunate name of "boet" meaning "brother" club which has since been corrupted into "boep" meaning paunch club. I think the book club think that they're very clever! At the end of each year we have taken to going away for a weekend which is proving to be quite a win. This year we buggered off to Sondela for the weekend; five christians and me, the token atheist.

Sondela proved to be an inspired choice of venue because it's actually a game reserve but with no predators so one can walk, run and cycle everywhere so the mornings would start off with a two or three hour cycle followed by loads of nothing, a braai for supper before we settled down to the real reason for coming to Sondela ...


The first cycle ride on the saturday we had but a small taste of the sand that was to come on the sunday; fortunately we were blissfully unaware of our fate at that stage so we thought the deep sand was pretty cool and experiential. The wildlife at sondela is pretty chilled and you can get quite close to them before they move off as you can see from the next photograph.

Although this looks quite far away they weren't more than 20m. We saw nyala, zebra, giraffe, kudu, eland, warthog and wildebeest which made for quite a satisfying morning. Actually one can't lose by cycling in the park, if you see game it makes the ride and if you don't you still get a great ride to enjoy. The afternoons were spent slumming it at the pool which as you can see looks decidedly dodgy ...

Just next to the pool in the picture was a large heated spa pool with jets'n all which we migrated to in order to get out of the sun of course. We were all sitting in the pool when a group of young afrikaans boys (approx 13 years old or so) asked to jump in and when they did so the pool overflowed which led to the usual jokes about fat people and water and in one of the lulls in the conversation we heard a quiet "Ja rynauw" from one of the boys to another which had us all laughing. There is definitely something about afrikaans and humour that english just doesn't have, I can't quite put my finger on it but somehow jokes and banter are just that much funnier in afrikaans.

Back to the lodge for the traditional bush supper of meat suitably singed; oh and a potato and some green stuff as a concession to me. Here we have hennie striking the traditional south african pose as he tends to the fire.

We were there for three nights and each night the menu was identical and did anyone complain? No, did anyone even notice that we'd eaten the same on all three nights? Again no, but if there were the wives with us would there have been complaints? Absolutely and not because the food wasn't good nor balanced but it simply wasn't different; guys just don't get this need to have different food all the time. We're actually quite happy to have the same meal for at least 3 or 4 nights at a time. Two weeks might be pushing it but changing every night definitely isn't necessary as long as the food is good.

The next morning hennie, carl and myself went for another ride which would prove to be quite a learning curve about riding in deep sand. There is only one word for it; don't! We struggled up these gently sloping hills sweating like pigs in the hot morning sunshine and sucking in great lungfuls of air, the heart rate monitor going peep, peep, peep or in english "slow down, you're about to die!". Hennie had the narrowest tyres so he was battling the most and fell a little bit behind so carl and I waited halfway up a hill only for him to come cruising past us like he was on tar. Big lesson to learn here, when riding in soft sand let your tyres down to 1 bar and it is impossible to describe how much easier it makes the riding. Amazing! and even more amazing is that we, all three of us, should have known this because we have all looked at people in 4x4 struggling in the sand because they stupidly hadn't let their tyres down. At the top of the hill we climbed up to the trig beacon which had an awesome view over the valley.

After recovering from the ride we read, ate and slept before venturing out to the pool in the middle of the afternoon only to have to endure the sight of two teletubbies cavorting in the pool. Whatever happened to the svelte young damsels in bikini's - very disappointing. Some of the people really did look like they had swallowed a webber braai. Back home we went for the final braai

Packing up the house the next morning carl picked up a plastic bag and was just about to throw it away when something made him look inside only to find a mouse looking very dead. That was until one eye opened, didn't like what it saw and went straight back to playing dead. Very cute indeed.

So that was it; what a great weekend.

Builders

Builder v. 1. The process of turning good quality input materials into poor quality products.

Jupiter, Venus and the Moon

I got a phone call this evening from both my parents and my brother to tell me to rush outside with my camera and capture the moon as this only happens once every 500 years or some other very infrequent period so out I went and this is what I shot.



Pretty cool I think. You can find more information here

So very metrosexual

It's that time of year again when management of companies sit around and scratch their collective pate's and try to decide what to do for the year end (very pc) function. Fortunately I am not generally involved in these deliberations, so it was with some curiosity that everyone arrived at work, swimming costume at the ready, to be whisked away to destinations unknown. Rumour was rife as to why we needed to bring swimming costumes but no hats nor suntan creme; my personal favourite was that we were going to indulge in a spot of mud wrestling.

After all the anticipation we ended up at a day spa; for an end of year party? at a day spa. You could see that everyone was a little uncomfortable to start with since it is not the kind of thing that guys tend to do, even if they are in IT. Manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, sauna, jacuzzi and plunge pools kept everyone entertained and amused the whole day and it was fascinating to watch how everyone, guys especially really got into the swing of things; even the ones that I thought would be reluctant. Before we knew it, the day was done and we had to leave the peace and tranquillity to get back to the hubbub of life.

That evening I drove through to pretoria to meet some people in hatfield which is pretty studenty happening kind of a place and used my tomtom for the first time and I must say that it passed with flying colours. The home stretch was particularly great because I came out of a parking lot in a different direction to that which I went in and was completely disorientated but the GPS had me on the motorway going home in no time at all. Fantastic, what a toy!

Saturday morning broke at 05:00; time to get up and ride and the very last thing I felt like doing was just that but get out I did and carl and I did a 94km ride including krugersdorp hill. We did it at a rather slow 23km/hr but it was still quite a ride, significantly more difficult than the 94.7 and I definitely felt much better for it. When I got back, caron was at work so I had a great lunch at woolies while I read the newspaper and then caron met me at a sports bar, another novel cultural experience, to watch new zealand annihilate england. New zealand are just awesome, how they haven't won every single world cup is beyond me and I am starting to think that winning it requires a substantial amount of luck as well as being a pretty good team.

From the sports bar we went out to movies to see "body of lies" which was reasonable and that brought to a close a very satisfying and enjoyable two days. Sometimes life down here just really sucks; I think that we have to put up with so much crap that when things do actually go right we savour it just that much more.

Do we believe what we read or read what we believe?

This was prompted by a section of Ben Goldacres "Bad Science" book where he refers to the following published paper titled "Importance of the lay press in the transmission of medical knowledge to the scientific community" by DP Phillips, EJ Kanter, B Bednarczyk, and PL Tastad.

"BACKGROUND. Efficient, undistorted communication of the results of medical research is important to physicians, the scientific community, and the public. Information that first appears in the scientific literature is frequently retransmitted in the popular press. Does popular coverage of medical research in turn amplify the effects of that research on the scientific community? METHODS. To test the hypothesis that researchers are more likely to cite papers that have been publicized in the popular press, we compared the number of references in the Science Citation Index to articles in the New England Journal of Medicine that were covered by The New York Times with the number of references to similar articles that were not covered by the Times. We also performed the comparison during a three-month period when the Times was on strike but continued to prepare an "edition of record" that was not distributed; doing so enabled us to address the possibility that coverage in the Times was simply a marker of the most important articles, which would therefore be cited more frequently, even without coverage in the popular press. RESULTS. Articles in the Journal that were covered by the Times received a disproportionate number of scientific citations in each of the 10 years after the Journal articles appeared. The effect was strongest in the first year after publication, when Journal articles publicized by the Times received 72.8 percent more scientific citations than control articles. This effect was not present for articles published during the strike; articles covered by the Times during this period were no more likely to be cited than those not covered. CONCLUSIONS. Coverage of medical research in the popular press amplifies the transmission of medical information from the scientific literature to the research community."

Ben Goldacre's conclusion is that, with reference to newspapers, "Despite everything we think we know, their contents seep in, we believe them to be true, and we act up them, which makes it all the more tragic that their contents are so routinely flawed".

I think it fair to say that it is an easy extension to make from newspapers to books and everything written on the web. What we read seems to influence us whether we like it or not.

No wonder religious folks find it so difficult to read opposing views and, at least to a certain extent, vice-versa.

Do you believe what you read or read what you believe? It would seem that we do indeed tend to believe what we read. Going further I think that we also tend to read what we believe because reading what we don't believe creates dissonance (nice new word this!) and that is uncomfortable.

Open Source Economics

I was talking to jason a few weeks ago, actually it must be more like 6 or 8 weeks ago, about open source software and he was questioning how it actually works from a business point of view and I didn't have a very coherent answer to give to him. I've never really thought much about it and I am sure that someone somewhere has probably delved into it in great detail. My answer may still not be that coherent but for what it is worth; here it is.

Restating the question so I can keep in mind what I am trying to answer; the question is "How can I make money if I open source my creative work, thus enabling my potential or real competitors to compete with me on a level playing field?"

I think that this should be split up for the sake of discussion into several statements;

1. "The objective of the person making the statement is to make money; not indulge in an altruistic venture."
Although some people are altruistic in parts of or in some rare cases all of their lives; most people are not and I would find it pretty hard to believe that all open source developers are entirely altruistic. Since open source software doesn't seem to be going away something must be driving it and I think that to answer this, one should consider the net benefit of open source to the creators of the creative works rather than the benefit of the created work in isolation. If one were to give away a small value, being the time invested in creating the creative work, but in return receive a much larger value being the time invested by other people in their creative works which one uses; although no money has changed hands, value certainly has and one would be a net beneficiary.


2. "Releasing a creative work under an open source license really is "giving it away" for other people to use pretty much as they please within the limits of the open source license."
Software, like knowledge, has an unusual property in that it may be shared as in "given away" with both the giver and receiver maintaining full use of or access to it. I think one of the basic problems with understanding open source is the very human resistance to "giving it all away" which is in essence what one is doing as the author of an application or work released under an open source license. Again, one really needs to look at net benefit rather than the isolated return from the creative work in question because although you are indeed "giving it all away" the "all" only describes what is being given away and not what is being received. As long as what is received is of more value than that given away, there is a positive reason to participate.

3. "Competitors really would have access to your creative work and therefore be able to compete against you on a level playing field."
True, competitors really would have access to your creative work but that does not necessarily mean that they are competing against you on a level playing field. There are many aspects that together contribute to the succcess of an enterprise and only some of them relate to the actual product being sold. Alternatively, if what one is giving away isn't in the same playing field that one competes in, the whole question goes away altogether because it may not be possible for a competitor to really use it against you.

I would like to divide businesses up into two categories for the sake of this discussion; those that develop and sell software (open or closed source) and those that don't actually sell software but use software in the production of something else that people pay for be it a services or physical goods. I think that the first category of software creators is in for a rough ride and may even be doomed mostly because the second category of businesses are constantly looking for ways to decrease costs in the production of their services or physical goods. If one way for them to do this is to create applications that are open sourced and in return they gain access to a much higher value by being able to use other peoples open sourced applications; they will do so. Moreover, since they are not trying to derive income from the sale of the actual software produced as it is a almost a by-product of whatever they are actually producing, it is going to be very difficult for the first category of software developers to match. In other words, it is in the interests of those businesses whose products are not software to support open source initiatives since for relatively small amount invested, they can derive substantially more value than invested. Of course there are always going to be free-loaders, those who use but do not contribute anything in return but aside from the unfairness of this, as long as there is a net benefit to those that do contribute; they will continue to do so.

For those that produce software products that they sell and in turn pay for the software products used in the production of their own products there is no moral dilema between closed and open source but they had better hope that their product isn't or doesn't become someone else's by-product. By "someone else" I am not meaning the monolithic business typically thought about but could be universities, businesses or just groups of interested individuals whose interest in the product isn't monetary.

For those that produce services or physical goods, it is in their interests to support open source software since by doing so they are able to derive disproportionate value for the value invested and if they don't have a moral backbone, this ratio tends towards infinity since they don't pay for anything but simply decrease costs.

So, the simple answer is "You can't" but that is not to say that open source does not have a valuable part to play in business in the future.

I feel sure that I will revise this at some later stage but these are my thoughts to date.

94.7km, the 2008 edition

The weekend for the annual Johannesburg festival of cycling has come and gone and what a great weekend it turned out to be. On saturday I rode in the 40km mountain bike race which I completed in 2:28 which was a bit slow so I'm not very happy with the time. I do however have some mitigating circumstances because the course was very muddy, in fact by the end one couldn't see a patch of skin on my legs they were so caked in mud.
I didn't see the altercation but I did see the explosion of one rather rotund cyclist that was being overtaken by pretty much everyone; apparently a faster cyclist told him to "keep his line" which is a pretty normal thing to do and all you have to do is just ride straight until the overtaking cyclist is gone but this moron took it as a personal affront and tried to kick the other cyclist off his bicycle while hurling expletives like a machine gun. The overtaking cyclist looked absolutely dumbfounded as to exactly what he had done to generate this amount of vitriol; methinks fatty hasn't been laid for far too long!
Not too long afterwards we had a herd of cows crossing the path so we spent a few minutes waiting for them to clear and finally I had a novice, not sure how he got ahead of me, stop and cut across my path through a particularly deep and large mud puddle; that was me, wallowing around in about 6" of mud. So, as races go, it was pretty eventful.
Sunday was the main road race which the leaders finished in 2:03 for 95km and although the course doesn't have real hills, it isn't exactly flat either. I don't know how they do it, the 13 leaders finished on the same second so it must have been a terrific bunch sprint at the end. I had a great race and I think I have finally started taking in food early enough that I don't run out of energy before the end. I finished in a time of 3:03 which means that I was 50% slower than the leaders; pretty humbling! Nonetheless I had a great race watching the various charity raisers like the herd of "cows" cycling to raise money for choc or the guys doing 95km on a hand powered bicycle. As a girl I was riding with at that time said as we went past shouting encouragement, "I can barely do the 95km using my legs, I can't imagine trying to do it with my arms!"
When I wasn't riding I spent most of my time eating and sleeping and in recovery mode.

The Duck that won the Lottery

I couldn't recommend this book enough to people that like to think that they think; in other words all us armchair philosophers. What the book deals with are short examples of phrases and arguments that sound good when they roll of the tongue but on reflection are either poorly thought out or completely misleading and although there is a small amount of moralising in some of the sections basically the book sticks to the topic at hand. Highly recommended but not exactly light reading.

Eish, Quiet Mountain is well ... Quiet!

Caron and I have survived 10 years of married life and given the amount of hours that Caron has been working we wanted some real peace and quiet and that is exactly what we got. Quiet Mountain is aptly named and at only an hours drive out of johannesburg is pleasantly close but it was like coming to a stop after a 6 hour journey; it feels a little surreal to 'do nothing'. We didn't actually do nothing because we read and slept and ate and had one walk which by normal weekend standards is pretty sloth like. Actually I wouldn't mind being a sloth at the moment!

Arriving, the first wierd thing that took some getting used to was that there isn't any reception at all. Instead there are speaker phones and bells located at strategic locations which actually works really well. One never sees the staff except when one actually wants something and with only 7 rooms, one doesn't see to much of the fellow borders either.

Above is the view from our front door which, although one of the more modest rooms, was quite comfortable. The tree on the left is a knobwood and viewed a bit closer looks like below. Not the ideal climbing tree I would say.

Being a sort of a semi-retired farm there were about a dozen cats around and one jack russel who thought it his duty to chase the cats. The cats, for their part would follow the jack russel around as he would chase the nearest cat. It was very strange seeming a dog with a moving entourage of cats slowly navigating its way around the garden. There were a couple of swans around as well which would've been quite the menace if they had been able to get out of their ponds pictured below.

There were actually two beautiful white swans but they shared more than their colour, they shared an inordinate love of biting anything they could get their beaks onto. I let them have a chew of my shoe which they found a bit distateful but not before I had a clear indication as to how hard they could actually bite. No wonder they used them as watchdogs during the second world war.

On sunday we went for a bit of a walk because I was tired of lazing around waiting for the gout to clear; not the brightest thing that I've ever done. Foot was really quite eina by the time we got back.

The food is fantastically good, I couldn't recommend it enough and John, the proprietor, is quite the queen of the castle and very entertaining indeed.

Overall it was a great break from the rush and hubbub of johannesburg.

Politics gets interesting

It really looks like there is going to be a significant new opposition party to the ANC and unlike all other parties, it will have the same struggle credentials and racial credentials as the ANC. This means that several of the traditional weapons used against the "all white" DP (which isn't) which wasn't part of the struggle are going to be ineffective against the new party. Hopefully this will lead to a new era when the actual policies and performance of the government and opposition get to compete on the public stage and the morons within all parties get recognised for the liabilities they are and get quietly sidelined.

There is a saying that "When things sound too good to be true; they usually are" and I hope that this is not the case with the new party.

Rwanda

I have been taken to task for the lack of communication on my blog and I cannot really say that I have not had enough time; I just seem to be permanently tired and totally uninspired to do anything at all.

So what have I/we been up to in the last month? Besides the ever present work we have started the construction of the patio and most recently, I arrived back from a business trip to Kigali in Rwanda.

This turned out to be a rather fascinating trip and very pleasant indeed. Maybe my expectations were so low that anything pleasant would have been fantastic but I don't think that this was the case. Kigali is an interesting place, it is clearly very poor and third world but unlike anywhere else, it is spotlessly clean. Apparently the third saturday morning of each month is clean the country day and everyone is allotted their piece of ground to clean. Nobody is allowed to drive anywhere and there are monitors around to ensure this; one doesn't want to argue with someone who has recently been in or through a genocide!
Although Kigali is a city, it is on quite hilly terrain and there are big gaps everywhere that are still farmland so you seem to be looking out over fields to shacks or over shacks onto fields all the time.

Not only are farmlands interspersed between the buildings but well to do houses and poor shacks are nestled cheek by jowel, not at all like the expensive squatter camps ala dainfern that we have in south africa.

The hotel was very pleasant, well maintained and pretty much everything worked including the wireless internet in the room so I was able to keep up with email and generally in touch with work and the world.
What was truly a surprise was the quality of the restaurants; two that we went to were really fantastic and the food available at the hotel was very good as well. For some reason the fruit was just that much juicier and tastier than what I am used to - maybe it has something to do with the total lack of fertiliser used. The restaurants would have been entirely at home in upmarket Johannesburg and sitting outdoors in the warm evenings overlooking the lights of Kigali was a little magical.

Below is the "First Class" lounge at Nairobi airport which, after the luxury of Kigali, was a bit depressing.

The most depressing moment of the trip however was the welcome we received from the incompetent immigration official at ORT. Because the flight lands late they only have one official on duty for the entire plane and I think that he gets the late duty as punishment for some indiscretion. Very annoying welcome back to South Africa; lots of queue jumping and frayed tempers but I'm home.

Gotta get one's hands dirty!

Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. It cannot think its way to solving the world's problems.

- Kevin Kelly

Ai maar dis mooi by die see, ne!

We've just had an absolutely fantastic weekend with kirsten and carl down by the riverside; okay it's actually a dam. We left after work on friday a little worse for wear after a hard week at the grindstone and it was quite difficult to rustle up the energy to load the canoe and the bikes onto the car and go driving all the way down to the vaal even though it is only an hour and a bit away.

We haven't been down for a while so we took an accidental detour through vereeniging, of which the less said the better. We were relying on the GPS that is part of caron's new Nokia E71 but the maps are somewhat outdated so the closest we could get to vaal marina was vaal dam which only has 400km around it's perimeter so it was lucky that caron recognised the road as we approached and that we could find our way from there. I can see that navigating with the GPS is going to be a bit of a learning experience.

Saturday, carl and I started with a 90km ride at an average of 26km per hour which meant that I was pretty tired before we started the boating and canoeing and finished the day up with a braai and lots of whisky, cigars and wine. The ride was great and I managed to finish it quite strongly. There was only one real hill on the ride and it is quite a hill, fortunately it is quite short but it nevertheless managed to push my heart rate up to 107%; I think I need to adjust my max heart rate to 190bpm so that I only just get to 100%.

Sunday was a bit more relaxed and we all rode to the local cafe to have breakfast and then rode back, me pushing caron up the minor hills along the way. Caron really needs to get out and exercise some more. This was followed by more paddling around the vaal marina section of the dam with the kids which was quite hard work since they don't really paddle much leaving me to paddle into the teeth of the gale that was blowing. Alistair and I found the perfect canoe mooring between two jetski moorings, it couldn't get any more snug. When caron got in the back of the canoe it felt like we were on turbocharge but unfortunately we ran out of time to get a real workout for caron in.

Back to the house, pack up and leave; get home, unpack; pack a picnic basket and head off to the RMB starlight classical concert with kim and maureen. The concert was engagingly conducted by richard cock; what were his parents thinking when the named him "dick cock" on purpose, I mean really!

The concert was a little chilly and one could see one's breath as we watched the performers, several of which were truly excellent. Dick the conductor wasn't joking when he noted that there was a excess of talent when they had to choose the 20 tenors to make up the "20 tenors" (Duh!) group. What a fantastic group, they're already great and they've only just been formed. There was also a saxophonist called shannon something or other who was great but the soprano singing verdi or something or other left me totally cold. I'm not old enough to appreciate opera and I like it that way!

A fantastic if a trifle busy weekend. The moral of the story is not to let a little tiredness get in the way of going places and enjoying your time with the people around you.

US Communist Flag

The US Flag post Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ...



As unlikely as it seems, the Communists win!

Quiet weekend

What a fantastic weekend! Caron and I did about as close to nothing as we, or more specifically, I could without being in a coma. Saturday morning I rode with Hennie on a 70km training ride which was quite tough, hennie obviously enjoys the pain because we averaged about 25km/hr over the fairly hilly course. Carl couldn't join us because he decided that, since he was making use of the corporate entry, maybe he should have a ride with the guys and girls before just meeting them on the start line. It sounds like it wasn't the best of choices. From the finish of the ride to the end of sunday evening I didn't do a stitch more exercise, we read, drank wine, went to dinner with kim and generally were as lazy as possible. It was great because it was a change but I don't think I could do this every weekend.

It has been a very pleasant experience not having a TV and DSTV to gobble up huge amounts of time. All the things we normally complain about just not getting time to do - we find we have time for. I'm actually thinking of making a TV less life the norm although I don't think I am going to get that past Caron.

On the political front in south africa, it is VERY interesting at the moment as we don't have a president. Mbeki resigned which is a diplomatic way of saying he was pushed and rather hard too. Zuma can't be the president as he is not a member of parliament at the moment so nobody knows who it is going to be. I guess it will be announced soon. I find it quite ironic that zuma was evicted from the deputy president position due to a court case in which he wasn't present and in which he never had the opportunity to defend himself from accusations. Mbeki, likewise, is being forced from office due to court case in which he never had the opportunity to defend himself from accusations. Methinks this is going to come back and bite the zumaites at a later stage when it is pointed out that the injustice meted out to zuma that they are complaining about so vociferously is exactly what they in turn are meteing out on Mbeki.

All this excitement and this is on top of the meltdown in the US which is keeping everyone glued to the internet. Personally, I wonder when the hypocrisy of US is going to be realised by everyone that it's ok for the US to nationalise private institutions like fannie mae and freddie mac but it isn't ok for venezuela to nationalise their oil assets. I think I'm going to do some doctoring of the US flag seeing as they seem to have come over all communist now. Fidel must have tears rolling down his cheeks with laughter!

The day of the dog

The sunday mountain bike rides are turning out to be quite eventful these days. Although there weren't any dead bodies blocking the path this week it was just as interesting. The day started at 04:45 and it is amazing how much having the first digit on the clock being a 4 makes it feel so much earlier than if it was a 5. Met up with Jason at his place and watched the sun rise over the horizon as we cycled down to meet Vaughn before heading over to Nothern Farm where we met Vaughns brother Scott and a couple of his mates.

While we were milling around waiting for scott to get his kit together there was this dog wandering around not taking too much notice of us but when we set off he followed us. After a kilometer it was clear that he was keen on a real run; keeping up with the bicycles quite easily, especially on the uphills. At the tops of hills he would wait for us, maybe have a lie down in a pool of water as if to say "... so what took you so long?" By the 15km mark jason was starting to work out how he could entice the dog to follow us all the way home. He was clearly very experienced with bicycles because when he was going downhill and he could hear you coming up behind him he would jump off the track and wait for you to pass before getting back on the track. By the 25km mark Jason was in awe and the dog was in danger of being muttnapped! I'm not sure exactly how far we rode with the dog loping alonside but it must have been quite close to 30km although you could see that he was getting at bit tired right at the end; one can easily understand being tired after a 30km run.

Jason's rear brakes have been binding a little which makes it very difficult to pedal; this I know from experience! While I enjoyed getting to the top of the hills ahead of everyone else, I think I may be in for a tough time when jason gets his brakes sorted out.

On our way home we were cycling next to each other about a metre apart and a snake crossed our path slithering in front of jason and behind me; clearly terrified and moving as fast as he/she or it possibly could. That would have been an experience getting a snake wrapped up in one's wheel.

Cathy and her sister Robyn, Vaughn's wife plus attendant children met us at northern farm for coffee so that the husbands could take the children for a bit of a ride. This seems to really work out well for everyone and if it wasn't for church I'm sure Carl and Kirsten would enjoy it was well.

Fractally wrong!

"The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time."

Unknown.

Eish! More Statistics

This time of year in Johannesburg is just absolutely fantastic, cool crisp mornings and warm days. Last Sunday Jason and I did our first ride from my house out to Northern Farm for a long time which I thoroughly enjoyed in spite of some of the sights on the way.

We were barrelling along next to the river and just about to go under the N1 when we were forced to a skidding halt by a large green metal fence which has mysteriously appeared across our path. There was no way around it so we had to backtrack and try going down the other side which proved a little trickier than expected. Basically we had to walk along a 6" concrete strip with a 5m drop on the one side and very steep embankment on which we wheeled our bicycles on the other. To make it a little more difficult, there were pillars supporting the road overhead to get around as well. As we approached the other side we could see people milling around but it was only when we got quite close that we could see the wreckage of a car which had obviously come off the highway. What a mess, but it was only when we got really close that we realised that there was a dead body lying close to the vehicle. Worst of all, we had to jump/run down these giant steps and walk right past the body which was staring sightlessly into the sky.
We speculated that since the dead person was definitely not dressed in a manner one would expect the owner of the now totalled car to dress; that he was was a car thief who had either lost control or taken an off-ramp which wasn't and fell the 15m or so from the bridge. I was surprised at how little I felt looking at the body, I would have expected that the experience would have been more emotionally traumatizing but it wasn't.
We received a bit of a scolding from the site foreman about how dangerous it was for us to pick our way through his construction site to which we politely asked that he provide an alternative route for us to use. We also asked that someone at least put a blanket over the body. Back on the track and pounding the hills was great fun but it is quite amazing at how the paths have changed since we last rode this way.
We met Kathy and Kelly at the coffee house at Northern Farm after our ride and while Kathy and I chatted and drank coffee, Jason took Kelly for a ride which Kelly seemed to really enjoy which bodes well for the future.
Jason and I rode back to his place, our legs starting to get a little sore so it was great to be fetched by Caron rather than having to ride all the way home.

It's just the flick of a switch

Sometimes people do something that is just so mindbogglingly stupid that it has to be reduced to print. Yesterday some electricians were installing the cables to link our new generator to our distribution board and one of them was standing (strange but true) on our existing generator and knocked the mains isolator to off; accidentally I am assuming. This wouldn't have been a problem because the generator he was standing on promptly started to take up the load. What really took the cake was that he actually turned the generator off at the control panel, probably because it was making a helluva racket. The first I knew about it was when my internet connection died, I walked into the server room and saw whole racks with no "das blinkin lights". Apoplectic with anger I stormed down to find out what had happened and I just couldn't believe it when I pieced the story together. The moral of this story is that something one considers to be blindingly obvious, isn't obvious at all to other people. Condescending as it may seem, there really are times when the obvious absolutely has to be stated; even at the risk of appearing patronising.

Becoming a statistic

I arrived home from work on friday to find my front gate next to the opening it is meant to close; not good! Walking into the house I found my mother and father-in-law sitting in the lounge, a bit shell shocked that some miscreants have invaded our privacy and made off with our possessions.

Piecing together the modus-operandi it was obvious that a crow bar is a very useful implement if you are a thief. A crow bar can be used to break open pretty much anything short of a bank grade safe and this is what they used to break the rack on the front gate enabling them to open the gate. Any physical security measure that is actually workable vs a crow bar; something has to break and it isn't going to be the crow bar. The crow bar also made short work of the sliding door and they must have been in the house no more than five minutes but in that five minutes they made off with both Caron's and my PC as well as my brand new LCD TV. Very inconvenient because the took my entire photo collection, including the backups on CD leaving me with only one remaining copy which I desperately hope is ok.

Roland law of escalating security: Accept that you are going to get ripped off every now and then, insure accordingly and without making it easy for the opportunist miscreants, don't make it difficult for the real criminals. You are entering an arms race where the opposition isn't bound by the same morals that you are so don't enter the race.
By way of examples;
Car hijacking used to be unknown but then everyone put alarms and immobilisers into their cars making it all but impossible to steal an unoccupied car. The bandits escalated to stealing the car while you are inside; personally, I would rather not be inside the car.
Once upon a time, criminals would steal or copy a credit card so VISA and Mastercard put PIN's on the card to prevent this. What do criminals do? well they kidnap (worst case scenario but it has happened) you and your card and force you at gunpoint to divulge the PIN. Personally, I would rather they just took the card and left me alone.

The moral of the story is that if you make it difficult enough for criminals, they aren't going to stop stealing because it is difficult, they're just going to change modus operandi and because their reluctance to the use of physical violence is less than most peoples, it is most of the people that lose more than just their possessions.

Don't get me wrong, I don't condone in any way criminal behaviour but in the bigger scheme of things, possesions are just money and if you value them more than you value your and your families well being you really should start examining your priorities as a human being.

One of the things we purposefully did was to make one of the entrances to the house easy to break into so thieves can get in and out with whatever they are taking as quickly as possible. While making physical entry easy, we do have an alarm so that they know that they have only 5 minutes before big guys with big guns arrive to take them on. This is a conscious effort not to prevent theft but to limit it in a similar manner to a credit card. Yes, it can get copied and used fraudulently but at the end of the day, there is only so much the criminals can get away with.

Surprising, even now after a few days, I am unable to actually get cross about the missing possessions. Sure it is annoying and it is going to cost a bit to replace everything but nobody was harmed and it isn't anything worse than an expensive inconvenience.

Themeda 2008 Continued

Something I forgot to mention about our ride yesterday; I really need to buy a handlebar mounting for the GPS, we missed a turn off and rode a steep kilometer long hill only to have to turn around and go all the way back to the bottom. Very frustrating but it was quite close to the start so we didn't take it as badly as we would have if we were at the latter stages of the ride.

While we were on the way home we were discussing whether Jason and I should or could ride down robbers pass and back up to Themeda while still giving everyone enough time to do whatever else needed to be done. Jason wasn't very sure but Cathy was egging him on, not so quietly either I have to add. So it was decided; we were going to ride down robbers pass and turn around and then ride all the way back up.

Sunday morning cracked and we had breakfast as we watched the ruby sun rise in the distance. The first 30minutes of the ride were exhilarating; that was the downhill section. The following 90 minutes was quite hard work. Below is the profile of the ride, not too much flat it has to be said!

I would definitely think twice before tackling this on a road bike even though it is considerably lighter and has no damping to soak up energy; the gearing on a mountain bike over-rides all other factors. I felt absolutely fantastic after the two hours of riding.
We parted company with Jason and Cathy who had to go and pick up Kelly from sun city while we "went to mecca" as Jason was fond of saying. Mecca being our unwanted, unloved piece of turf in white river.
Not much has changed in the estate, a couple more houses but looking at our forlorn bit, we really should get someone in to remove the trees, their stumps and flatten the ground, filling in the ditches and dongas. Very depressing seeing all the work that should be done on a piece of ground one doesn't actually want. Oh, well - there are worse things in life I guess.

On the way to white river we stopped in at the Africa Silk shop in graskop to buy some more mopane worm silk cushions. We bought some a couple of years ago and they have turned out to be great. While we were there Caron got into a bit of shopping frenzy and we left the shop proud owners of a new silk duvet. The outside is cotton but the actual filling is silk and this just has to be the most amazing duvet, it is very thin and light but amazingly warm. Strangely, each duvet has a serial number on it which they keep tabs on so they know exactly who actually has their duvets.

I finish with Carons' version of riding a bicycle.

Themida 2008

We were actually meant to be riding the Jock but I just didn't feel up to 150km of quite hard riding; it's not that we've exactly stopped riding, we're just taking it easy. Very easy!

Since Jason and Cathy had already palmed off their offspring it seemed like a free weekend was too good to waste so we met at Themida near Crystal Springs in Mpumulanga for what turned out to be an absolutely fantastic weekend; I wish they were all like this.

Traveling down to Themida on the friday evening we stopped in Dullstroom for supper at the something pickle which proved to be an inspired choice; roaring log fire, attentive camp waiter and very delicious food. I could have stayed right there for the weekend.

We arrived at about 20:30 having been driving for 4:30, grabbed the keys from Jan the proprietor and gingerly drove down increasingly poor tracks to the huts. We stayed in numbers 7 & 8 which are a little apart from the rest of the huts and the solitude is refreshingly delicious. There is no electricity so everything is run on gas which lends a particular feeling of isolation to the cottages. Jason and Cathy arrived at about 10:30 and I think they were very relieved to have actually found us because the final kilometer really starts to feel like one is totally lost.

Saturday morning we were up moderately early; it's very easy to sleep well at themida because there just isn't any noise at all at night and due to the design of the rondavels, they remain quite dark even at midday. Having learnt from my previous experience where a 3 hours estimated ride turned into an 8 hour epic, we were quite circumspect as to what distance we would do and had mapped out a 32km route with graeme last week. It was just as well, the 32km took us a full four hours to complete which was enough to really feel like one has been on a ride but not so much as to make it start to be an epic.

The ride is shown below in both topography view and profile and is definitely not for the novice mountain bike rider. The logging roads we were on most of the time hadn't been used in quite a while so they were quite difficult to ride on not to mention steep.



At one point you can just make out that we went backward and forth a couple of times trying to find the path that the GPS was leading us on. Blindly following the GPS was quite interesting and a little bit of an adventure because, as we found out last time, something that looks quite innocent on google earth can be quite an obstacle in real life. I could see the hesitation in Jason when we left a perfectly good mountain path to blunder down a very steep pine covered forest slope to emerge a few hundred metres on another, not quite so good, path.

Going down one of the trickier sections I ran the wrong line and a rock stopped my front wheel dead leaving me balancing on the front wheel with my back wheel trying to overtake my front wheel. I'm happy to say that I handled the situation with suitable aplomb and didn't bale like I did later. We didn't see a single person for almost the entire ride and it was only on the last climb that we happened upon a gang of tree pruners and it was right in front of them that I chose to fall off, much to their mirth. Two whities cycling in the middle of nowhere and one of them falls off. Much mirth!



Jason and I in some of the indigenous forest we cycled through, it was fabulous and quite a bit cooler and wetter than similarly positioned pine or gum forests.

Arriving back we spent the afternoon relaxing and sleeping. I woke up at about 16:00 while Caron continued to sleep and spent a very enjoyable 2 hours reading and watching a wild horse have a dust bath in the distance. I really could end every day like this!

We had decided to go down into pilgrims rest for supper expecting there to be numerous restaurants open but there was actually only the hotel which served a buffet for us to choose from. Not bad food but at the price, one felt that one needed to eat an awful lot of food so all the hard work done in the morning was for nothing. The Pilgrims street lights have to be the most eco-friendly in the world - not because pilgrims is particularly environmentally conscious but they are so pathetic that it is not possible for them to actually use any power. I tried an experiment and switched my headlights off and I can truthfully say that I was not able to see anything at all despite the presence of the street lamps.

While we were riding innocently along ...

Cycling has taken a bit of a back seat of late; I think I overdid it in the run-up to the Sani2C and I've been enjoying being a slacker but it's time to start turning the pedals again. We've never really stopped riding but it's the distance, frequency and intensity that have all gone down several notches.

We've been riding on the road and off the road on alternating weekends which has really been a great was of getting back into it. A couple of weeks ago we did a road ride; it was 4 deg. when we started and 3 hours later when we stopped it was 7 deg. and there was a nasty wind the whole way. I was so cold that I didn't actually warm up the whole day. Thankfully those kinds of rides are the exception rather than the rule.

The next weekend we rode off-road at Northern Farm which is owned by Johannesburg municipality and has something to do with the disposal of processed sewage. Not quite sure what they do with it but I think that they plough it into the fields and then grow crops and breed cows - the point I'm making is that it is a working farm and there's a fair amount of cow dung around. So there we were; barreling down a hill, Jason speaking ten to the dozen as he is wont to do when mid-sentence there is an explosion of hacking, coughing and spluttering from him. A clod of cow-dung had flicked up and landed right at the back of his throat where you put pills so that you can't hack them up. As the coughing and spluttering continued I remarked that he should be thankful that it was only cow-dung at which point he started to look distinctly ill and declare that injections to prevent typhoid, dipthoid and any other kind of oid was going to happen as soon as he got home. Of course I was laughing so much at his antics that I could barely stay on my own bike.

It's now two weeks later and he is still alive and well so I think it was just cow-dung after all!

Of Hips and Femurs

Eish, how life changes! Last thursday my father-in-law was walking around what will be their cottage at Kim's house checking on the progress of the builders when he took a tumble. This is not too unusual but what was unusual was that he broke his hip. It was friday morning before he decided to go to hospital and after a quick diagnosis; a hip replacement was decided as the course of action. These doctors don't hang around these days and by the end of friday the operation was over and a brand new hip installed.

To make things more complicated, they've given notice at the flat that they're renting so they have to have moved house by the end of this month. Clearly father-in-law is not going to be doing an awful lot of moving given that he can barely shuffle along on crutches at the moment.

Every evening he has to have an injection for some reason and all the women are too squeamish so I get to do it. It must be every son-in-law's dream to stick needles into the father-in-law AND get thanked for it.

As a result of the operation, Aldon is recuperating at our house and as a result of that our nice peaceful, serene existence has been eviscerated. Loads of sisters-in-law and their spawn visiting at all sorts of time. Jessie (the psychotic cat) and Caron have taken to hiding in corners to escape the maelstrom.

Afriski Winter 2008

Carl, Kirsten, Caron and I purchased a ski chalet last year in the Lesotho mountains so that we could have a short ski holiday without the expense and time required to go overseas. Although technically true, saying that we own a ski chalet doesn't quite describe it adequately at all. What we actually own is 1/26 of a chalet (4%) so the reality isn't quite as grand as it sounds.

Getting to the ski resort we have to pass over the Moteng pass which is over 3000m above sea level and can be very icy and treacherous so, in lieu of snow tires which would be impossible to obtain in SA, both carl and I have purchased sets of snow chains. It looks really funny putting chains on a 3 series but if we need to use them them we're going to really need them.

Carl wasn't able to ski due to his shoulder operation a couple of months ago but I think that a little missing out now will be much better than taking the chance of damaging his shoulder again. Still, it couldn't have been easy watching the rest of us kit up every day and bugger off to the slopes while he was left to his own devices or worse, left with sick children as happened the one day.



In between the frenetic activity on the slopes there was time to relax in the sunshine, indoors of course, and read a couple of novels. We were there for a full 5 days which sounds a lot given the size of the one and only slope pictured below but it goes quite quickly and the slope is actually perfect for learning or working on one's skiing technique.



I think that both the slope for learning on and the instructors were significantly better than we have experienced in europe. The one instructor in particular whose name was rudi from pitztal was particularly amazing both in how he skied and how he taught. Methinks pitztal is going to feature somewhere in my future travel plans.

Taking lessons turned out to be a great idea because we (kirsten and I) were just about the only ones taking intermediate or advanced lessons so we had individual tuition at the price of group lessons. When I was talking to moritz, the other instructor I had, he said that skiing was just such a new sport in SA that almost everyone was a beginner and most people were just happy to leave it at being able to get down a slope safely. Learning how to ski properly will come but at the moment there aren't that many people going the extra step.

Of course, as with any holiday, there has to be some irritating twit that spoils it and mine was an older, grey haired guy on 2' skis that kept on queue jumping. He didn't appreciate it when I pointed his behaviour out in front of the entire queue and tried to edge closer to intimidate me (I guess) because he was plenty close enough to spar verbally.

All in all; a really enjoyable way to spend a week. Work feels so far away when one is skiing.

Back in the Saddle

Although Jason and I haven't actually stopped riding, the frequency and intensity have gone down to about a 1 out of 10 which has been quite pleasant but the time has come, as they say, to pick it up again. Sunday we did a 70km route which was great albeit exhausting. When we started the ride it was 4.5 deg C but I thought it would warm up quite quickly so I was riding in shorts, my concession to the cold being a windbreaker and some newspaper and long fingered gloves. When we finished the ride three hours later it was 7 deg C which is not a whole lot warmer and I spent the entire day chilled but not quite frozen. It was great being on the bike again in the winter sunshine riding past the lionesses and their cubs and helping some other cyclists who didn't have multi-tools to fix their own bikes.

It was shortly afterwards that I was following one of the previously broken cyclists around a corner and as I was thinking that this was too fast around the corner, his front wheel slipped and he went tip over arse over kettle with me braking hard to avoid riding into him. No damage other than some nasty road rash and some bruising that'll remind him not to take corners that fast for a week or two.

We finished the ride at cycle lab and I was very thankful that I didn't have to ride the extra 10km home. I'm sure my legs will get back into the swing of things quite quickly but at the moment - it's quite exhausting.

We had a very rare family gathering at lunch time at Kirstens place; very rare that all the siblings are in the same town at the same time. Had a very enjoyable lunch with lots of wine before we all settled in to watch some of the tour de france. Carl has obviously become an addict judging from the depression that set in when Kirsten insisted on switching over to watch Wimbledon. Personally, I think she just wanted to watch Rafael Nadal show his biceps off.

Politics, Religion and Wealth

"Also note this: secularism thrives in an environment that is economically strong, where good education is the norm. Faith thrives on economic uncertainty, and grows best in ignorance. Guess which one of those conditions is easiest to generate and maintain? Cultivating a healthy society that can grow and sustain itself, with a well-informed democratic populace, is hard work. Producing an economic rathole inhabited by frightened sheep is easy — elect a few incompetent leaders, throw away resources on futile, bloody projects, and unchain rapacious business interests to exploit short-term personal gains at the cost of sustainability, and you've got a recipe for a fast slide back into the dark ages."

The quote is from Pharyngula but could so easily have been describing our current government and situation.

The article also refers to the following very interesting interview by Bill Moyers

Third World Ingenuity

Climate Change

Eskimo Model

More fund raising

It seems that this was my week for doing charity drives, Friday evening found both Caron and myself at a quiz evening at samuel and hannah's school helping to raise funds for the school. Maybe I should put it a different way, we were there so that the school had the opportunity to pick our collective pockets. Our table consisted of 6 women and 2 men which might explain why we did relatively well - out of the 18 teams we placed third which one can't help but feel pleased about. Better still, there were prizes for coming third - the very best kind of prizes as well; alcohol and chocolate.

Graeme Codrington and Hannah's rules

I had a very strange experience on thursday night last week. Kim and Laurel invited me to go and see Graeme Codrington talk at a charity fund raiser which, having no idea of who exactly he was, landed me in the Rosebank Union church. I haven't been in a church for a good many years now and it was quite strange to be back but in some ways, it was like I had never been away. The manner of the MC and the analogies and stories that he used were old 15 years ago, it was a bit like being in a time warp.
We had just sat down and there was "Hello Roland" from the row behind from someone that, although I recognised the face, for the life of me I couldn't remember a name. If I looked to the left and the right, there were people I knew so not only did the topics remain static but the people seem to have been pretty static as well.
The speech entitled "Hannah's Rules" by Graeme Codrington was quite good in the way he packaged the message that he was trying to get across. There wasn't anything really new in what he said and I really hope it wasn't news to the majority of people in the audience but it was nicely put together and every little bit of exposure helps. Hannah's rules comes from graeme's daughter who, although young, is already concerned with the environment and the ethics of people who damage the environment and she is just typical of the new generation of consumers and employees. If you, as a business person, want to remain in business in the coming years you need to recognise that the people you are going to be employing and selling your goods and services to are going to hold you to a different ethical scale to the one that you are used to. Be prepared for them or be irrelevant. Even better, being prepared for them can actually save you money in the here and now.

At least it was for a good cause at least - I think!

How do you answer this?

I was related a story this morning that I found really funny so amidst the doom and gloom of everyday life in south africa:

This actually happened in Holland where a South Africa couple were staying for a while. One morning they woke up and the wife asked the husband to go and get some food for breakfast and gave him 30 guilders with which to buy it. On the way, just around the corner in fact, he walked past a prostitute who gave him some 'come hither' looks and fancying himself as a bit of a player he entered into a conversation with the woman. After a bit of chit chat he got down to the nitty gritty and inquired about the price - 100 Guilders was the answer and so the bargaining began. She dropped her price down to 80 and he was offering 30 and eventually she asked how much he had at which point he opened his wallet and showed her the 30 guilders. "30 Guilders, I won't even do a hand job for that!" she retorted indignantly and they both went their separate ways.
A week later he was leaving his flat with his wife on his arm and they walked around the same corner and lo and behold, bumped into the same prostitute. "See what you get for 30 Guilders" she commented as they walked past.
Now, I ask you. What exactly do you say to your wife at that moment that isn't going to result in celibacy?

More electrical humour

Eish! Pollution as bad a Joburg!

This was inside the Liverpool street train/metro station which, one the face of it, looks quite clean.



Maybe not so clean after all. The fluff and gunk in the air has collected on the wires put there to keep the pigeons off.

A day in London

While Caron was busy working I took the opportunity to take a trip into London to see some sights which I've been keen on for a while. First stop was the Photographers Gallery near Leicester tube station which turned out to be a real disappointment. It really only shows the work of a couple of photographers and even then, not anyone that is known so it was hardly inspirational.

Next stop was the Tate Modern about which I think the best that I can say is that the building and exhibition rooms are magnificent. There is obviously something about modern art which I simply don't get. If art is about communication then it is in a language I don't understand but I think I'm in good company because nobody else seems to understand it either. By way of example:

377ABCAF271C00024754319830000000
000000007D0000000000000084612B1B
27DD21B3222095FCE7DD53EB2367201A
3A42C41757219281AA7D467E5F6820D4
4C72118FDE0DFDA074D721D8BF347A07
0104060001093000070B0100022406F1
07010A5207ADC0048188ADB5E8230301
01055D0000010001000C241F00080A01
DF59D28B00000501112D004E00650077
0020005400650078007400200044006F
00630075006D0065006E0074002E0074
00780074000000140A0100B602F36064
BAC80115060100200000000000

Has real meaning and a message that I, as the artist, would like to communicate to you. I promise you, it really does. Don't get it? Well neither does anyone else but that doesn't mean that it isn't art - you just don't understand the message.

If art is about aesthetics then we all have different tastes but lets not confuse the issues and try and make art to be more than it actually is.

While I was pondering I ended up watching a mother and her children playing far below on the expanse of concrete that forms the entrance to the Tate. Taking the example below


Aesthetic? Probably - depending on the viewer. Meaning as in a message from me, the artist to you the viewer. None! I could make up some bullshit about waiting at the crossroads of life and pondering which direction to go but no, it is simply a picture of a little girl which I found aesthetically pleasing.

Moving on. From the Tate I walked over the Millenium bridge which I found particularly aesthetically pleasing, to St. Pauls cathedral where I handed over 10 GBP of Caron's money to go inside. I like this kept husband thing! As I handed over the money the cashier told me to take off my cap and not to take any photographs because it is a place of worship. I wonder if they see the irony of paying to go into a church. St. Pauls is pretty damn impressive once one gets past the ghoulish aspects of bodies everywhere and just looks at the actual building. Comparing St. Pauls with the cottage below which is almost certainly of more recent vintage one would conclude that standards are going down here but like everywhere else that probably isn't true.

You get what you pay for and in St. Pauls case the cost must have been plenty - kindly provided by the colonies conquered by some of those interred within. So while some are feted here, they are more than likely hated elsewhere.

After St. Pauls I went to the prison that gave it's name to prisons worldwide when they are referred to as 'the clink'. Interesting but pretty brutal back in those days. I'm glad we have moved on - at least I think we've moved on. Sometimes I wonder though.

I finished the day off with a meal in a pub on the edge of the Thames while I waited for peak time to be over. When I had lunch at a sandwich bar quite close to the pub there were dozens of joggers running during their lunch hour even though it was decidedly chilly and they were wearing almost nothing. Judging from the figures that went past me I don't think that jogging is adequate to make up for the food consumption here.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge has always, for some reason, been one of the 'things' which I have wanted to go and see and although I have been to the UK many times I've just never managed to get there. I had always thought that it was quite close to London - it is if you look on a map of the whole of the UK. In reality it is actually quite far away from London; a good two hours drive.
John and Julie, friends of Carons, picked us up at 08:30 for the two hour drive down to Salisbury and Stonehenge. I must say that I did enjoy seeing Stonehenge even though it could be adequately described as "just a pile of stones in a ring" and nobody actually knows why or how it was built although I have a theory (as in "just a theory" aka a hypothesis) of my very own to throw into the ring.

If you look carefully on the bottom left you can get a sense of the size of the stones but don't be fooled - the people in the photograph really were a group of midgets. :-)
My theory on the purpose of Stonehenge is supported by the following photograph of the supposed "heel stone":

I don't think that, from this evidence, that there can be any doubt that the ancient Britons were worshipping those denizens of the sea - the moray eels. One could also speculate that since creatures of the sea are also held sacred by pirates who worship the FSM that Stonehenge is actually an ancient temple to the FSM. Tenuous but possible I say!

From Stonehenge where evidence is sparse and speculation fun we went into the centre of Salisbury (previously known as "Harare") to have a look at Salisbury Cathedral. Not really my "cup of tea" as they say here but Caron and Julie are history buffs so John and I were dragged along. It is nothing if not an impressive and imposing edifice and there happened to be an orchestra and a choir practising for the evening's concert to add to the ethereal atmosphere as we sauntered around to the strains of Elgar whoever he was. I presume he's dead, shuffled his mortal coif so as to say.

Purely by chance we strayed into an enclave and saw an "original copy" of the magna-carta. I, of course, challenged the guide as to how it could possibly be an "original copy" since this seems to be an oxymoron to me. The guide was however correct since there were many copies all made at the same time and no original. The copies were made and sent to the town and cathedrals where they were read to the population. I must say that I did find this very interesting and even purchased an English translation of the magna-carta which I enjoyed reading since it is always referred to in the development of common and constitutional law.

UK in Crisis!

Excerpts from "The Sunday Telegraph" - 18th May 2008

• "Superbugs cause more than 6000 deaths in UK hospitals in 2006 - a fourfold increase from 2001."
• "Police seize 900 weapons over a two year period. This only covers police confiscations - there are up to 8000 confiscations per week according to teachers unions."
• "Richard and myself were partners for 11 years. On the face of it everything was perfect. We had a six bedroom house and I had a lovely, tall, good-looking husband. I had ticks in all the materialistic boxes. I had security ... but not enough excitement. We split because I needed to find out who I was, not because there was anything specially wrong. I saw I needed to make big changes if I was to be proud of my life" - Roz Savage
• "It scarcely made the headlines: after all, fatal stabbings are two-a-penny now. ... That lightness is no more. In British towns and cities, now, people carry a silent weight of fear."
• "The government is staring at a corporation tax black hole of more than 10bn GBP per year, as the pensions crisis ravages companies' balance sheets."

These cherry picked excerpts from the Sunday Telegraph which, in itself, are from the cherry picked articles that the telegraph chose to publish - picture a nation in crisis. My view is that the nation isn't in crisis but it is in newspapers interest to present it as such in order to sell.

England - a working holiday

Caron has been going overseas so much in the last few years that if one was to add it all up she has been away from home more than half a year in the last 4 years so we decided that this trip, I would accompany her and be the 'kept' husband - the secret dream of husbands all over the world.

Caron left on tuesday evening and I flew out on thursday and, as usual, timing from a work point of view couldn't have been any worse. My network administrator resigned unexpectedly and this is going to leave a big hole for me to fill so i've been trying to get him to fill in the documentation gaps but he is about as enthusiastic as a horse going to the knackers yard.

The flight was fairly good, no screaming children, no fat people encroaching on my space. Between drugs, ear plugs, eye patches and neck braces one can actually get an ok nights sleep. A friend of mine maintains that the only difference between cattle and first class is the strength of the drugs that you need to take to knock one'self out.

Landed in the new terminal, the one famed for losing baggage, which is simply cavernous. There are 12 baggage handling points and we were the only one in action. After waiting for about 20 minutes watching the baggage carousel going around and around there was an announcement that there was a 'sorting' problem as the first pieces of baggage popped out from the bowels of terminal 5. Seeing as we were the only ones in the entire hall, I'm curious as to whose baggage ours was being mixed up with - I think it may just be their stock excuse.

I caught the heathrow express into paddington, two tubes to fleet street, a train out to brentwood and a taxi to the hotel. 30 GBP of public transport - no wonder it works here - it costs a fortune. Watching the scenery flashing by I can help but feel that england is a vast exercise in studied decay and grime. There are so many examples of walls or buildings in desperate need of repair; back home people would be complaining of the shoddy workmanship quitely meaning that black people, who do the vast majority of work, just aren't capable. Here the same shoddy work, now done by white people, is 'quaint' and lends 'character' to the scenery. What rot, shoddy work is shoddy work, like the wall that has just about eroded away because the bricks weren't fired properly.

I spent most of the day working remotely which didn't actually work that badly, I had conference calls and support calls where no-one was the wiser that I actually wasn't in the office. I've finally started getting my laptop in order again after it's reformat on tuesday which has made a dramatic difference to the perceived speed.
At about 16:00 I decided to call it a day and take a walk into brentwood about 4 miles distant.

The first thing one notices is that there is an innordinate number of hair dressers and beauty salons - not that it has made much of a difference to the local population. It reminds me of a joke I received which shows a bevy of blonde beauties and the caption was "Swedish girls - making English girls look ugly for 200 years". On the way home I was hit by a plastic water or juice bottle that was thrown from a passing mini-van. Although it hit me quite hard it wasn't that sore thankfully. So it seems that I've left a country ruled by fear and arrived in a country ruled by boredom. Speaking to the barman later on it turns out that this seems to a common occurrence where he lives but he hadn't heard of it around here.

Slapdash, shoddy workmanship

I obtained a geyser blanket from my sister-in-law to wrap around the geyser which had me coughing and spluttering from the time I got into the roof to about 3 hours after I had finished. I think I have a slight allergy to dust.

While I was up there I was looking at the drip tray that had been installed along with the solar geyser a few years ago and I noticed that the damn thing isn't level. It slopes away from the outlet which kind of makes the outlet superfluous. What absolutely irritates me no end is that it would have cost the installers nothing in time nor money to have just installed it level. They just didn't care that they had done an atrocious job: there is absolutely no pride in one's own work these days it seems.

I had another example of this when my parents-in-law's foundations were dug. They couldn't be bothered to dig the foundations to a level depth so as a result, the concrete has a difference of 350mm from the highest point to the lowest point. While I understand that digging foundations is not easy, that is what they are getting paid to do so they should do at least a reasonable job, not the abortion that was done. It's very frustrating that even pointing this out before the concrete arrived failed to get their asses into gear - in fact it seems to have had the opposite effect and two of the workers were found sleeping in wheelbarrows when they should have been working.

While I'm on the topic, I spent the long weekend a couple of weeks ago building a headboard for ourselves. We looked at a couple in shops but they were these disgusting padded jobbies which seem to be universally disliked but the only one's available. After a lot of thought and expense, I'm sure we paid more for this than if we had bought one in the shop, the work of art below emerged from my workshop.



It definitely isn't perfect but I am proud of the design and the workmanship.

Progress at last

Sometimes it seems that there are just so many big issues that need to be solved that one forgets to appreciate the march of progress albeit in small ways.
I went to fetch Caron at the airport last week and they've installed this nifty system to help one find parking bays. Above every bay is a light which is either red or green depending on whether there is a car in the bay or not so you can see where the open bays are from hundreds of meters away. This is one of those inventions where one sits back and says "Now, why didn't I think of that?" - it's so obvious. At least it is now.
We have taken to having some real junk food from Steers which is a very successful franchise here so I tried to place my order for the "vegetarian" burger and the ladies behind the counter looked at me blankly and politely asked "Which one?". I'm so used to only having one choice that it took me completely by surprise that I actually had a choice - in fact I could have absolutely any burger I wanted just with a vegetarian patty. Way to go, I might have eat there more often.
Lastly, my brother-in-law had an operation today and we went to see him and he told us something which to us was quite amusing. After the operation he found himself in a ward with what looked like a "please call the nurse" button in his hand. After a while he wanted to call the nurse so he pressed it but no nurse appeared, he pressed it again and again nothing then he drifted off to sleep thus missing the nurse. This happened a couple of times before he realised it wasn't the "nurse" button it was the "morphine" button - no wonder the nurse never appeared. What a great idea - you can dose yourself up with morhpine.

Women aren't what they used to be either ...

... and the 90% of men that are heterosexual breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Pass me the, hic, whiksky pleash ...