..and a Happy New Year

to all those recovering from Christmas and floating around until New Year. My Christmas was wonderful - my daughter had an absolute ball, and every now and again looks around the wrapping-strewn lounge (I'm not really an efficient tidyer), and says hopefully "I don't know where all those presents have gone!". She had so many presents that we were still opening them yesterday - so she can be forgiven for thinking that some may still be lurking.

The Giant Duck went down a treat and is now regularly snuggled. It is bigger than she is by quite a margin, and probably will be for a couple of year.

I miss Cape Town dreadfully - I miss the Great Boxing Day Braai, and I desparately want to be able to just hang out with friends. We don't know anyone up here with kids anywhere near Zeb's age, and pretty much have only hung out with family since we got here. Hopefully, now that we own a house and know that we are fairly settled in the area, we can start finding social things to do around here. Also, we might meet families next year when Zeb goes to nursery school. (In 11 days - 11 DAYS - my baby starts school in 11 Days - I don't think I'm ready. )

I got the 2-disc version of Pirates of the Carribean, Dead Man's Chest for christmas, and I must admit to some disappointment. Aside from being unmistakeable as an "inbetween" film (like the Two Towers was), I wasn't as taken with Jack Sparrow's character - I didn't get the feeling that he was as redeemable as he was in the first one, he was much more selfish and far less swashbuckling. I don't know... it just didn't grab me as much, which was sad. Maybe version 3 will be better again.

Yesterday I decided to switch on my laptop from work to finish updating the system - I had fetched all the sources and simply (ha-ha) had to emerge world to compile them all. Somehow, I have lost my windows manager completely. I could get to a terminal login, but no startx. Anyway, merrily I continued my emerge quest, and subsequently could not boot at all. So it looks like I have, yet again, screwed my gentoo disto horribly - and will once again have to face the disaproval of my boss, who will once again tell me how wonderful Ubuntu is and how I now have to switch - because he has absolutely no understanding of how long it actually takes me to set up everything I want to on a pc, and how long it takes to install everything. I reckon, if it takes me a week to sort out my gentoo, but then it works, then I have everything set up as I want it, but if I "just install Ubuntu" - then I have to first back up gigabytes of data, try to somehow store / export all my settings on all the apps I use (probably a day's work in and of itself) and then try to reproduce said settings in a new distribution that I don't know from a bar of soap. I'm a bit bummed by the whole thing.

Anyway, I think I will abandon the bastard for the rest of the year, and see if anyone is around to help me when I go back to work next week. I'll take a few good books in with me in case no-one's around. Now I need to try and get some sleep. A has put up new curtains in our bedroom that actually reach all the way to the bottom of the window, so sunrise might not wake me up tomorrow :).

Weathergoth

Extemporanea had a weatherpixie on her site - and I thought it was so cool that I grabbed myself one - proudly now displayed top right.

ow, ow, ow.

It should be ho! ho! ho! - but I am sitting at my desk with a monstrous headache, unable to take anything more exciting than panado. My total abject failure to wean my daughter has some downsides - like the fact that the sight of two panados is enough to just about make me weep with relief. So I've started a really really long uninteractive process on my pc, and now don't need to concentrate on anything for a couple of hours.

Last night I was thinking about movie love / sex scenes, and how, after contortions I could probably never force my fairly unsupple body into, gorgeous women rise and waft gracefully across a room to gaze out of windows, artfully silhouetted in angsty monochrome, or langorously dress themselves again in their drop-dead gorgeous movie-scene clothes. Anyway, I was thinking about this because I have dodgy hips - if I sit still for too long or stay in a wierd position for any length of time my hips "go out" - as in, seize up horribly and painfully, forcing me to emulate a cross between the hunchback of notre dame and Forest Gump (pre the Run Forest! Run! scene). The upshot being that if I was ever in a sumptuous movie sex scene, I would, post-action, have to lurch horribly across the floor - grunting ouch! ouch! ouch! - in an attempt to unlock my dodgy hips, while my hapless companion, whoever he / she happened to be, either ran screaming for the door in horror, or collapsed in helpless cruel laughter - destroying any hope of afterglow, save that related to the twinkling lights caused by me cracking my head on a doorpost in mid-lurch.

I thought all this, you understand, apropos of nothing at all.

Moved

We are all moved out of our old house, and gradually settling into our new house. My daughter has been quite unsettled - understandably, as we have just upped and shifted her away from the only home she probably consciously remembers. I have got the water switched on, but Eskom can't find the property on their computer system. Also, two of our electricity meters have identical serial numbers - deeply dodgy.

I think it's completely unfair that I am at work in the week leading up to Christmas. I have a kid. I reckon primary care givers should have compulsory leave during school holidays. I shouldn't be sneaking in blog time at the office! I should be taking Zeb to see "Faver Kismas" at the increasingly bun-fight emulating shopping centers. I should be making decorations with her and decorating the cake - and swimming, and playing, and running naked through the sprinklers.

It's just not Christmas if the Mommy is at work. It's just wrong. It would have been wrong when I was little, and it feels wrong now. I don't think I'm cut out for this working-away-from-home stuff.

I think I may try to get work as a nursery school teacher. No real extra-murals to deal with, and school holidays off. Plus - the added bonus that one gets to work with kids, who, in general, don't irritate me, as opposed to office colleagues, who, in general, do!

Another cool link

DM of the Rings made me laugh a lot - despite all my stress re: moving, and seeing a therapist today who basically told me that feeling depressed and anxious is all my own fault. Ptoooie. Ah well, maybe she'll have some good suggestions despite her obvious lack of understanding of clinical brain disorders.

Anyway, looking at her pricing structure convinced me that psychologising is a viable living, R450 a session. And she's a "life coach" too.... <insert wretching noises here> - only, on her form, she lists "Life couching" at R500 a session. Not entirely sure that's legal, here.

It's a small world

We are in the throes of packing, due to move house tomorrow. Yesterday, I took my daughter and mom to see the new house. Zeb has been quite interested in the moving process for a while, and was very keen to see the place.

So we ring the doorbell, and the current owner, Mrs S, opens the door. I say "Mrs S" - she says "You!!". Turns out we went to school together. Since I haven't lived in this city for at least 10 years, I have pretty much avoided meeting school mates, so it always comes as a surprise when I do.

All in all, a good visit. Zeb discovered that her new room is painted purple, and is perfectly reconciled to sleeping in the "Barney room" in the new house.

iBleugh

So, I use iBurst. I've mentioned this politely. They still have not managed to solve their open relay problem, or even give me feedback on how its going. Tonight I'm emailing their customer support manager this:
------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr Hall,

I have repeatedly reported this particular issue to your iburst technical help desk - with no luck. It seems they either don't understand the problem, are completely incapable of fixing the problem, or simply don't care.

Many of my friends use Livejournal (www.livejournal.com), a blogging site. Much of my personal online activity revolves around reading and commenting on these blogs. Unfortunately, Livejournal does not allow me to comment, when I am connecting via iBurst. This is NOT a setting on my pc. I am NOT running any kind of mailserver. I can post comments quite happily from the same unit through my work link, just not through iBurst.

I have reported this error at least three times, most recently around November the 14th. A customer service consultant did phone me after that, to tell me that they were working on the problem, and then.....nothing.

The problem is still occuring - it seems at least one of your relays is an open relay, so anyone accessing the internet via that relay is banned from commenting in an attempt to reduce spam. This has to be affecting more people than just me.

This is the error message I get while trying to upload comments to the livejournal site:

One or more errors occurred processing your request. Please go back, correct the necessary information, and submit your data again.

* Your IP address (196.2.124.251) is detected as an open proxy (a common source of spam) so comment access is denied. If you do not believe you're accessing the net through an open proxy, please contact your ISP or this site's tech support to help resolve the problem.

This ip address resolves as:
Server: ns-cache-01.jhb.wbs.co.za
Address: 196.30.31.193

Name: wbs-196-2-124-251.wbs.co.za
Address: 196.2.124.251

Definately your problem.

Sincerely,

String theory

This (xkcd) brought tears to my eyes. Literally. It's an absolute gem of a webcomic find.

Here comes the sun

A good news story from the CSIR - some researchers are studying solar disinfection of water. This would be an easy way to ensure much safer drinking water for many people in sub-saharan Africa, and would hopefully dramatically reduce fatalities in children.

Why I don't comment

Most of my friends have livejournal accounts. This appears to be an
accident of history. Anyway, I use iBurst to access the 'net. (Because Telkom, don't-get-me-started, took over 5 MONTHS to install just a normal phone line in
our house, and an adsl line would have taken some months more). But iBurst apparently,
at least from my location, accesses the 'net via some dodgy relays. Sooo, if I try to post to a livejournal account, I get the following message:


Your IP address (196.2.124.251) is detected as an open proxy (a common source of spam) so comment access is denied. If you do not believe you're accessing the net through an open proxy, please contact your ISP or this site's tech support to help resolve the problem.


Now I have asked them to fix this, repeatedly - but it seems that they don't understand the problem. *sigh*. So I'm going to keep this site updated with my progress. That way, eventually, when I have a real category of the ills of iburst, I will mail just the URL of the latest, scathing blog-post to their tech-support, and possibly to some of their marketing people too.

Anyway, as of today, I have mailed them at least twice - and have spoken directly to their sysadmin once, in the past few months. No progress.

Going for it

Today in our strategy session at work, about how to work as a team from shared values, the facilitator stressed how one has to commit to one's goals - how only by committing to them can one set in motion all sorts of synchronous events and energies that can help you achieve your goals.

He had a very cool quote about it, too, but I can't remember who from. Anyway, I've decided to actively pursue a new job. I really don't handle the commuting at all well. And while the strategy and planning sessions are encouraging, I don't hold out a hell of a lot of faith in our research group leader actually being able to usefully implement any of our grand ideas.

So, today I've emailed my updated CV to the Midrand branch of my old Cape Town employer, and I'm taking a copy to my doctor tomorrow. His son-in-law runs some high-tech company in Jo'burg, and my doctor (who is a really really nice man) has told him to look at my CV. Hey, who knows...?

I've also decided to do something about the dreaded "orange-peel thigh"syndrome. Recently, while watching a home video of myself swimming with my kid, I noticed that the thighs left a bit to be desired. So ....... ta-dah!..... I've bought a swimming skirt! It's fantastic - a virulent pink nylon skirt that is so hideously garish to behold that no-one will want to look at it for long enough to notice that I even have thighs under there - let alone what shape they are.

Roll on chocolate brownies.....

There came plants!

I'm getting very into the idea of growing food in my soon-to-be back garden. So I planted a whole lot of mielies (corn) in a seedling tray two weeks ago. I planted them with my daughter so she could also watch them grow, and she's been watering them every day.

Mielies are completely psycho growers!! I planted them about 5cm down, as per the instructions on the packet, and the little shoots were breaking the surface a few days later.

In the words of little Zeb - "There came plants!!"

We can't move into our new house for an additional month now, and the mielie plants are already a good 15cm high in their little tray. I'm considering planting them out in the garden, or on the verge so that passers-by get a free meal in December.

Delicious

Having been rapped over the knuckles (figuratively) by wolverine_nun, for pointing her to this site and then not having anything posted - I have decided that I should post short stuff from work.

I know I'm behind the times, but I've just this minute started using del.icio.us - and I'm completely sold.

What a brilliant concept!!! Storing bookmarks on-line --- being able to see what other people have tagged.

And I love being able to put multiple tags on a site - I really really struggle to classify my bookmarks hierarchically.

And the reason I haven't posted anything lately - deep, dark, depression. No, really. And who wants to read about that. ... It's just a feeling.

Finished! but bookmarked...

Absolutely exhausted. Set some goals - utterly failed to meet them this month. My mum, who looks after my daughter while I'm at work, and generally, like some good angel, keeps my household running smoothly and cleanly, broke her arm on Thursday while trying not to land on my daughter as she (my mum) fell off a small step-stool. So she hasn't been able to do anything round the house, and I, as a consequence, am exhausted.

Work still leaves me feeling fairly incompetent. Since my husband assures me that I am, in fact, an extremely competent person, this leaves me feeling that I may be in the wrong job. I will begin investigations into alternatives tomorrow! I will. Also, if I didn't work in Pretoria, 55km from home, my Mom might have phoned me to come and take her to the doctor in the morning on Thursday, instead of waiting 'til 2pm when I get home, and lugging my daughter around with a broken arm. So I think I need to find a job nearer home. The twice-daily hour to ninety minute commute isn't doing much for my mental health, either.

The one thing that did make me happy today was retrieving my bookmarks in firefox after they mysteriously disappeared some days ago. Just posting this in case others have the same problem. For various reasons, I am running Gentoo Linux on my laptop at work. When I went to the bookmarks folder I got a whole lot of folders, all saying things like "java.string". Errgh. Then I discovered, to my great joy and delight, that Firefox keeps a limited set of backups of bookmarks. I found these in "/home/<myname>/.mozilla/firefox/inof0vpb.default/bookmarkbackups/". I'm assuming that "inof0vpb.default" is my profile name. I happily copied the last valid file to "/home/<myname>/.mozilla/firefox/inof0vpb.default/bookmarks.html", re-opened firefox, and voila! bookmarks back and one happy person!! :)

He ain't heavy

He's my brother - and I've decided to follow his inspiring example and try to set some goals for myself.

One of my goals was to use this blog to comment on interesting news. My specific idea was triggered by the notion that part of why the world and the general news is so depressing, is because of the sense of helplessness it brings with it. On 702 today, they were talking about exactly this issue, and a trauma counciller phoned in to say that she felt that a lot of South Africans were becomming "negatively resilliant" i.e. losing our ability to be empathic towards victims of crime, violence and war because we are constantly bombarded by these stories, and we simply switch off in a form of self defense. I think this is a real problem. I also feel that too few people actually voice their opinions about things - at least, too few people with non-extreme opinions about anything. So our society gradually becomes disempowered and disillusioned, and more and more permissive and depressing because not enough ordinary people feel that they can do anything about the negatives.

I am going to try to post a "what you can do" section for any news stories where I could think of something constructive to do about them. I may not always do what I suggest, but I'll try.

My next goal is to set some concrete goals. My general goals are: to get a handle on my job - to be more organised at home, and to eat more healthily, and to get my head a bit sorted. I'm aiming to be less stressed and happier - I should mention that I'm fairly seriously depressed at the moment, i.e. often in tears on the way to work, trouble sleeping, repeated negative thoughts blah, blah blah. I should be on anti-depressants, but my daughter, (who I will call Zeb for the purposes of this blog), is allergic to everything under the sun and so I'm still breastfeeding. Bye, bye happy pills.

Concrete goals will follow in a subsequent post, maybe.... I don't know if I want to make them public or not.

Gadget w00ts and woes

I got a cute bluetooth hands-free kit for my phone. Seeing as I'm in the car at least 2 hours out of my day - this counts as a necessity. It's very cute - and sounds very clear to the number of people I tested it on by phoning them from the car today! It has a little blue flashing light - and, most importantly, doesn't hurt my ear like the other one did. My boss feels that great excitement over a cool new cell phone accessory makes me a gadget-y person. Oh so wrong!

I am but an amateur when it comes to gadgets. Witness my complete inability to get the wireless router in the office to talk to the wireless RFID reader. Witness my lack of ability to load my robot compiler on to my Linux box!

I do, however, have a compelling technical reason for the lack of instant interoperability and connectivity heaven...... some days, machines just don't love me!

Here goes...

This is a place where I can vent, lament and generally air my feelings without fear that my friends will start avoiding me. ('Cause they can simply NOT READ it, if they don't like it, right?).

I'm also going to try to post a bit about work (which is often interesting, sometimes intensely infuriating - and a lot more stressful than I was hoping for), how I feel about current news (with a strong South African focus), and generally the stuff I would write in my diary, if I kept one, which I don't.