Bookses!

We (at work) got notification today that the book that our paper will be in will be out soon.

It's one of those catchy, easy to remember titles...

The Geospatial Web: How Geo-Browsers, Social Software and the Web 2,0 are Shaping the Network Society

The book has an accompanying home page here . My contribution is the paper / chapter titled "Fire alerts for the Geospatial Web".

Structured Procrastination in action

So this weekend I .... hemmed the curtains. At some point I'll blog the list of things I have for my structured procrastination experiment. It was a scary list. (Yes, wedding samplers appear on it).

.. no really, I'm not procrastinating

but just check out this post on structured procrastination - it made me laugh a lot, and really, it's ultimately going to improve my work productivity, so could reasonably be classified as work. Really.

Telecommuting Tip and news comment

I don't know how many of you have seen the ridiculous furore caused by FNB dropping their proposed anti-crime ad campaign. Of course government delegations should have pressured them into dropping it. I mean, God Forbid anyone should venture to suggest that there is anything even vaguely not brilliant in our country that the government could possibly be doing anything about and isn't! Anyway, the text of the proposed ad is available on Real South Africa , and seems to me to be pretty innocuous. It doesn't in any way lay blame for our current high levels of very violent, scary crime at the government's door, but simply requests that our president take into account the concerns of many South Africans, and actively, publicly and vocally prioritise crime-fighting in this country. I think I might fill in the letter and send it off anyway.

One letter I have sent to government recently, is one to Trevor Manuel. I think the tips for trevor email address is a really good idea. (Hell, even if he never reads 90% of what gets sent, at least you feel you've had a say). Well, my tip is to try to economically advantage companies that prioritise telecommuting for their staff at least one day a week. I figure we have some major problems with road congestion and greenhouse gas emission, and simply improving our transport infrastructure ain't going to cut it. I think it will take years and years to convince car-driving South Africans that to take public transport is a safe, reliable alternative to driving their own cars (certainly I'm not going near the Gautrain until it's been running for a least a decade - with a brilliant safety record...) and I'm not sure that the planet really can handle everyone willy-nilly driving for that long.

Flicking sore

I broke my toe this morning while carrying the potty to the bathroom. It hurt quite a lot.

I have spent quite a lot of the day trying to convince my daughter that I said "flick".

Link link linkety link link

As Marginalia said, this is important.

Then, courtesy of Confluence , a fiendish word puzzle, Funny Farm . BTW, if anyone can get the unobvious three letter word linking to "chicken" (you'll know what I mean when you get there), please tell me - it's driving me nuts.

..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!! :)