First Draft

We, the creators

2012-01-20T12:04:00.001+02:00

There is a new humanity coming. We no longer need governments and media corporations to mediate the connection of the individual to humanity as a whole. We, the people, can now all observe the erstwhile mediators and see them for the obstructionist censors they are.

If the film industry collapsed tomorrow, would we lack entertainment? If the recording industry closed up shop today, would we be without music? Don't be absurd. What I believe we will see is an explosion of creativity the likes of which the world has never seen before.

If you want change, do it yourself.

2012-01-18T20:46:00.000+02:00

Hello boys and girls (and greetings to the few grownups among you). I have a few things on my chest. If you can't handle it, tough. It's about time I did a "friend" cull anyway. If you disagree with me, unfriend me and save me the trouble.

Save species X. For fuck's sakes. Yes, we are haemorrhaging species like there's no tomorrow. This is indescribably horrible; biodiversity is irreplaceable. Do you know what, though? The poachers are not online. Neither are the corrupt immigration and parks officials who turn a blind eye in return for a greased palm. No amount of petitions will change the fact that bad people make lots of money selling our natural resources to foreign buyers. (Wait, that sounds like our government.)

Do you know how you stop poachers? You and some friends all buy guns (only automatic rifles and up need apply). You go into the bush and go shoot these bad people. All power is based on a threat of force. If the bad people will not listen to threats and you don't apply the force, then the threats are meaningless.

Save our resources. Of course I want to save the resources. It's too bad, however, that our government seems to be doing exactly what the poachers are doing: Selling off our natural resources to the highest international bidder. Our country is being fleeced by the very public servants we elected into power to stop this from happening. It's the banking system all over again... instead of robbing banks, the syndicates got smart and bought the banks. Do you know what happens when you put the fox in charge of the henhouse? Subprime mortgage crisis. Stock market crash. Recession. Fracking. Poaching. Telkom, Eskom, killing off the Scorpions... the list goes on. The fact of the matter is that there is something very wrong with this country and nobody worth listening to has the balls to call politicians on their shit. If you want to save our resources, go camp on top of them with a whole bunch of others and take force multipliers -- think "lots of potential violence". If you're unwilling to do violence upon someone's person to stop this from happening, you're not committed enough. Same goes for species conservationism.

What is the purpose of a government, when it comes right down to it? A government is a corporation which should maintain the local monopoly on violence. When someone threatens you with violence, it is the job of the government and its representatives to stop them before it happens. In the real world, however, we hire private individuals to protect us because the government seems to actively encourage violence against its own citizens, against the very people who got them into power. If you have a contract with ADT or a similar company, why not take that amount off your taxes? It makes sense -- if the the government's anti-violence services had not failed you, you would not need to hire somebody else.

Do you know what we need? We need geeks in Parliament. Not in the peanut gallery, either -- right in the middle of the floor. Geeks have excellent bullshit filters. Whenever a politician makes a statement which is evasive, dissembling or otherwise obfuscatory, the Parliament geek's job would be to say something along the lines of "Yes, but what does that actually mean?"

The easiest thing in the world is to complicate; the hardest is to simplify. If a politician is unable to boil down a complex issue so ANY of their constituents can understand it, they are a failure. Pure and simple. The entire point of representative democracy, after all, is to make the democratic process accessible to each and every voter in the country. Holding a rally and making a speech does not qualify as making democracy accessible. Ask most of the attendees at a party rally about the issues raised; I will bet my bottom ZA dollar that not one in ten can provide you with a succinct summary of the politico's speech. They can probably tell you about the dancers and the pap & vleis (porridge and meat) they got for free. Do you know what this is called? Bread and circuses. The Romans knew about this too -- you could go work out your frustration vicariously by watching the gladiators for a tenth of an unskilled worker's daily wage, and you got free bread. You go home fed and calmer.

Do you know what has changed since then? That's right -- the unskilled workers live in worse conditions than they did two thousand years ago. Rome had running water for everyone; we cannot even claim that.

Change happens in individuals before it happens in society. If you let other people take action on your behalf, nothing will ever change. If the internet has taught us anything, it is that we are many. Take ten minutes every day to do something revolutionary. That, I believe, will change the world.

How do you know you have a truly Mickey Mouse vacuum cleaner?

2011-09-06T18:27:00.000+02:00

Yeah, that's right... The power is measured in "Walt"s.

How I defended a woman and lost my good name doing it

2011-08-06T14:22:00.000+02:00

Okay, here's more or less what happened.

About a week ago, we moved out of our previous place due to it being sold and so on. Long story in and of itself, and not entirely relevant.

On Sunday past (31 July), my wife and I moved into a room in a flat around the corner -- literally -- on the invitation of the residents there, a couple we knew from before. Let's call them Mr S and Ms K. We'd helped them here and there, as and when we could. He's an unemployed blacksmith, she a full-time mother of their 2-year-old girl. She apparently suffers greatly from a hugely swollen ganglion on her hand. The appliances we brought with us -- a dishwasher and an automatic washing machine -- were a boon and blessing to the "poor woman" who struggled to handwash, what with the hand and all.

Things went okay for the first few days... they were both very friendly, though we didn't quite "get" them. We were soon to find out why.

On Thursday 4 August, I was folding some clothes in our room when I heard the sound of an argument rapidly escalating into a fight. Not only were there raised voices from the next room, there were sounds of repeated impacts and shouts of pain. I decided to investigate. At my knock on their bedroom door, mister S opened. He was wild-eyed and obviously upset. I asked him what was going on. He replied -- relatively incoherently -- that she (Ms. K) wouldn't go away or do what she was told. Throughout all of this, their daughter was crying madly.

Before I could even answer, he walked over to Ms K and started gesturing wildly. When one of his gestures turned into a raised fist, I asked him whether he'd raise his hand to a woman that way. He immediately started screaming at me to fuck off and to get out (of the room or flat, not sure which -- either way I wasn't exactly about to leave). The few minutes were a bit of a blur -- there followed a whole bunch of screaming from both the adults (ha! adult my ass) and a lot of crying from their poor daughter. When he picked up a chair and aimed at K with it, she threatened to call the police. At that, he ripped the phone from the wall and threw it across the room -- damaging the phone jack in the process, as we later found out.

I picked up the little girl from where she was sitting screaming with crying and carried her to "our" room. Having calmed her a little bit, I came back out -- S and K had in the meantime done a lot more screaming at each other, and some shoving around on his part before I re-emerged. My having called the police by now, S took off. I tried to keep things calm. The police arrived soon after. They took K's statement and asked her whether she'd like to open a case. She apparently decided to do just that; said he'd been doing this to her for years and that she couldn't take it anymore what with having a daughter and all. I wasn't called for, so I left them to it. The police were there for some time, then left. In the meantime, my wife arrived. We were all fairly nervous, not knowing what would happen. Later that evening, S came back in; K hadn't locked the front door (at the time I thought this was accidental, though I doubt that now). She yelled at me to call the police as soon as he entered, which I did. He left after grabbing some socks.

We were just starting to settle down when the police called me -- they were looking for the address. (New shift.) While still on the phone with the police officer, I stepped out into the street to wave the police down at the right place, I saw S just about 20 meters up the street. I informed the police about this and seconds later saw the car racing after him. For safety's sake, I retreated to the flat again.

Minutes later, to our great surprise, S and the police entered the flats' grounds. "Odd," I thought,
"surely he'd be on his way to the cells by now." When the police entered the flat, however, they didn't ask or tell K anything. Instead, they asked whether they could search our room and stuff. Being off balance, and not having anything to hide, I assented. The officer mysteriously went directly for my laptop backpack. To everyone's great surprise -- or at least mine -- they found a stash of dagga, exactly where (I learned later) S told them it would be. Convenient, eh? Of course, they'd heard the "I've never seen that before in my life!" defense a bajillion times before. They weren't buying the truth I was selling.

With little further ado, I was escorted to the Mowbray police station "to make a statement". (Protip: Cops lie.)

First, I was put in the basic lockup cell. No amenities, just a bright light. I lost track of how long I was in there for. (There's no clock to be seen from within the cell -- I'm sure this technique can be found recommended in every handbook, from KGB to CIA to SS.) My fingerprints were taken a couple of times. This was a blessing in disguise, as this would also be when I could visit the toilet and drink water. This would only become clear to me in retrospect. Waiting in the holding cell, time passed -- I'm unsure how much, but judging by bladder pressure it was two hours easily. My repeated requests to be allowed to use the bathroom met with much hilarity and obvious lazing about of the front desk officers. Eventually I was told that they couldn't let me use the toilet -- despite my being in serious bladder and kidney pain by now -- because "the person who is responsible for taking me to the toilet isn't here right now." It took me quoting from the paper they make you sign (the one with the rights of a detainee) -- a few times -- before they did anything about me. (One thing about that holding cell: it has excellent acoustics; my baritone was amplified wonderfully.)

About then, they decided they'd put me in a proper cell where I could go to the toilet "as much as I wanted". They confiscated my shoelaces, I was led to the back of the yard, made to grab some bedding, and put in a cell. I was almost pathetically grateful when they let me choose whether I wanted to share a cell or be alone. Choosing the latter, immediately hobbled over to the toilet and barely heard the slamming of the cell door over the sound of the tinkling metal toilet.

The bedding was surprisingly comfortable and warm... much more so than I expected. There being no pillow given, I worked out about a half-dozen ways my shoes could form a pillow. The lights stayed on all night; I was ever so glad I'd worn a hoodie for some portable darkness. The less said about that night the better, save that I slept better than I thought I would. Had I had any cell mates, though, I'm sure things could have been much different.

In the morning around 7AM, we were roused and marched into the main building. The other prisoner was put in the (now packed) holding cell, but lucky for me the detective working my case recognised me while outside on a smoke break. He took me up to his office to fill in some paperwork. Apparently I could either pay an admission-of-guilt fine and walk free, or I could choose to contest the case in court. My evidence of my own innocence being somewhere between thin and nonexistent, I chose the former. A (borrowed) R200 fine later, I had a criminal record and I was standing on the sidewalk with my shoelaces in my hand.

During the night, my wife returned to the flat -- only to find herself locked out. Wife-beater had returned and things seemed to be hunky dory between them. K called my wife "crazy" for wanting to take our stuff away. Thankfully she had brought a friend of ours along. Long story short, between them they got most of our stuff out save the bed, a few boxes, and the appliances. (These we fetched in the morning; that's a less exciting story. They were still using both these when I arrived to fetch them, though -- the audacity! -- and I took a certain amount of pleasure in removing the wet blankets and greasy plates from my machines before taking them away.)

Now we're staying with a good friend for a couple of days -- but we have to leave soon. Couchhopping isn't much fun if it's involuntary. We have a place to stay as of 14 August. Until then, I have to rely on friends' kindness.

Of petitions, amnesia and humanity

2011-03-25T17:36:00.000+02:00

Petitions have changed the world. Petitions mattered in a world where writing against the government was a capital crime... where adding your signature to a certain document was a revolutionary act. That was all fine and well in an age where not only ink and paper but literacy itself were scarce currencies.

With the advent of the internet and much increased literacy figures worldwide, however, the worth if not the meaning of the petition itself has become diluted. Yes, you get warm fuzzies about signing a petition to "force the government into talks" about getting rid of corrective rape. The petition's aims are laudable and morally unimpeachable. I want to sign it because it's the right thing to do. I just started wondering exactly how much of a difference not just my but all our signatures could possibly make.

How does adding a "me-too" on some random website help anyone on the ground -- where the rubber *ahem hopefully* meets the road, as it were? Yes, a round million is a good figure with which to attemt to pressure the government into more action than lip service -- but does that million even matter to the Powers That Be?

Our current government's real power base is the poor. The disconnected. The scattered. The ones who live in shacks and work their butts off to clean floors, patrol buildings, fix roads and haul trash. They're lured to official holiday celebrations *coughpolitical meetingscough* with free food and speeches and a grand day out for all. They arrive hungry for explanations -- why are we still living in shacks? Why do our children still die, smoke tik, join gangs, and die young? Their "chosen" leaders feed them, soothe their ears and send them away feeling satisfied for about as long as the free food takes to digest. They're no less tired and frustrated the next day.

What happens to the frustration? Who can an individual poor shack dweller turn to to vent their pent-up feelings? Increasingly, communities are banding together and talking about it. In many cases, they feel it's a good idea to protest or even riot. Government sends in the police; a message is sent, an invisible line is drawn: It's us against you. We, your government, care more about property damage than about people. Rubber bullets and water cannons are deployed. Barring the odd accident, nobody is killed and the crowd disperses. That's fine in the short term, but then some sort of collective amnesia sets in on both sides. Government seems to forget that the crowd was composed of hundreds if not thousands of individuals who each and every one felt strongly enough about an issue that they would commit violence to achieve their aims.

The mob, for its part, has had a nice cathartic protest action. Government seems to make some motions, everyone is hopeful that change is in the air, and the status quo is maintained -- for now. The emotions, the deep-down thoughts, though... those don't go away and don't stop being felt.

All power is based on a threat of force. Non-lethal force is still force. What message does the officially sanctioned presence of a uniformed combat-trained troop send to the people, anyway? "We could choose to hurt you, but we don't. By the way -- don't make us hurt you." The culture of fear is reinforced. People are so afraid of upsetting the apple cart that it takes intensely strong feelings to spur them into action. Usually this is when a group's attempts at effecting change via the official channels have been stymied to the point of crisis. Why does it have to come to that, anyway? What is this nameless thing which causes this inability of politicians to learn from history? I suspect it's mostly due to most of them thinking in terms of, well, terms -- of office. Net so ver soos hulle neuse lank is.

This double-sided amnesia is a double-edged sword. I understand and to a degree empathise with why people do what they do to numb their unhappiness, pain and discomfort. Terry Pratchett once wrote: "What people want, what they really really want, is for tomorrow to be pretty much the same as today." Of course you want your kids to be as safe tomorrow as they are today, if not more so. This is fine for more well-off folk living in safe areas, but what about the Cape Flats? Pick a ghetto, township, bad neighbourhood or informal settlement from a hat -- your children aren't safe and you know it, but even if a child still has both parents, they both need to work in order to put food on the table.

What if that becomes untenable? What happens when SA is finally done getting sucked dry by overseas corporations and the mass layoffs start? Make no mistake, one of the reasons the huge conglomerates still operate here is because of the low cost of relatively skilled local labour. What happens when our looming skills shortage becomes a reality? (Eskom alone is soon to lose fully a third of their engineers to retirement -- and they can't be replaced because we don't have enough trained engineers. That's what happens when the education department plays with their feel-good-make-the-circle-bigger circle jerk called Outcomes-Based Education instead of focusing their energies on finding and training the best and brightest, I guess... but I digress.)

The poorest of the poor often don't have electricity or running water, let alone internet access. Whether or not you believe that the creation and perpetuation of the conditions suffered by the poor is a result of deliberate conspiracy by entities inspired, empowered and motivated to long-term socio-economic dominance -- anyone with eyes and a brain can see that the living conditions of a rather large chunk of our government's power base is extremely advantageous to its hold on power. Internet access itself is beyond the reach of too many, and will remain so while the lowest-priced internet-capable mobile phone costs somewhere between five and fifteen times what an unskilled manual labourer earns per day. (This doesn't even take into account that just getting to and from work can skim a third off the top of that... let alone that due to their work schedules many of these same people have to do their major food shopping at late-night convenience stores at damn-near criminal prices.)

Which channels does the average man in the street then have to get information? A few radio stations, all licensed by the government. A few television stations, likewise. The ones who can afford mobile phones are registered and thus controlled. (DSTV is of course out of reach of Joe Soapless.) The "free press" is feeling the pressure -- both the ruling and opposition parties pay lip service to press freedom while calling for journalists to be licensed and controlled. (Self-censorship is a major daily dilemma in journalistic ethics -- how much can I get away with? How much of the truth will They let me tell vs how much do I have to say?) So whether by accident, political pressure or economic manipulation, the government more or less controls the informational channels between the outside world and the man in the street.

What does all of this have to do with online petitions? Simple: The reason why government can afford to simply ignore a million signatures on an online petition is because the online populace isn't their power base -- we're too well-informed not to see through their bullshytt. It is in government's best interest that as many people as possible remain offline. If literally everyone over 18 in SA had an internet-capable cellphone and actively responded to even semi-official online petitions, government would have to sit up and notice if a whole big chunk of the nation signed one. As it is, 1 million people is less than a drop in the bucket of biomass propping up the ruling class. We need everyone to be connected and aware for the internet to matter at all.

(Of course I sign the petitions if it's a cause I support -- not doing so would be sort of like taking a stand against said cause -- but I harbour no great hopes of anyone in power listening.)

It has always been the case that technology challenges authority. In this case, the technology is networking. Q: What does the network want? A: To be connected. Q: How does the network perceive disconnection? A: As damage. Q: What was the originally intended purpose for the internet? A: To maintain communications by routing around damage in the event of nuclear war.

The faster we get everyone online and aware, the quicker things might just change for the better. I fail to see how it could make things worse around here.

Mark my words, someday the words "network" and "humanity" will be synonyms, and that day shall humanity be free. Denis Diderot said "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." To this I add my corollary: "Man will never be free until the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last lawyer." (I'd have it the other way around, but for the political gutlessness of late.)

Conservatives, Oil, and Dictatorships

2011-02-25T14:59:00.000+02:00

This cartoon and its associated opinion piece got me thinking. (Along with this piece on what conservatives really want -- an eye opener!).

http://www.filibustercartoons.com/index.php/2011/02/23/going-going-gone/

What happens when the oil runs out? By that I don't mean "when conservative news mouthpieces start freaking out about gas prices due to an oil shortage". I mean gone. Nada, niks, fokkol.

By and large, Arab dictators seem to be propped up by oil money. Nobody wanted to disturb the status quo for fear of the oil companies' wrath -- jacking up our fuel prices even more. In 2008, for instance, Libya produced around 1,5 million barrels of the 80-odd million barrels of the worldwide crude black gold output. What will the production look like this year, I wonder? Let's just say I wouldn't buy shares in any oil company heavily involved in Libya.

The oil dictators have always seemed to get along well with American oil companies, probably because these seem to be headed up by old-money rich conservatives with few moral qualms about raping the environment, the economy, and entire societies for personal gain. (Sound familiar? Old money sticks together.) A large majority of the news services in the US are conservative-owned mouthpieces. From the article quoted above:

Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media, and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Talk matters because language heard over and over changes brains.

So what happens when the oil runs out? Yes, firstly the dictators topple due to a lack of rich white erstwhile-slaveowner money. Some see this as an end in and of itself. I completely agree; dictatorship is always bad. I see the dictators as merely the dominoes at the end of a very long row. Corporations in the US and elsewhere have achieved domination through legal means. Suddenly their cash flow runs out, and so do the lawyers. The United States of America is the world's top consumer of oil, using even more than the combined European Union. (An estimated 18,690,000 barrels per day in 2009.)

What happens when the oil gets low with no prospect of getting more? Prices go up. The rich get richer. This will become a vicious cycle of personal gains and a societal downward spiral. The ones at the top won't be affected by these shortages, of course. Their luxury vehicles will eventually be the only ones still driving on America's massive road system. They will drive past all the cars standing abandoned next to empty roads for lack of fuel. Before long they, too, will have no fuel left. The poor will become more and more disenfranchised as they are progressively excluded from economic participation -- until one day, someone will snap and become the spark in the powder keg of disillusionment and unfocused anger which is the people of America. SUVs and limousines will burn with their sneering oil peddlers inside. News stations denouncing the mob will themselves be torched.

The US' love of cable TV and internet over wireless tech will be the undoing of many networks; it's easier to find a cable than an antenna. The sysadmin in me cries -- network damage is anathema -- but the greater Internet will survive. The thought censorship imposed by American ISPs will go with the networks themselves. One can but hope that sysadmins of the people get there first to preserve these, like the Egyptian students protecting priceless museum pieces by simple expedient human chain.

The bigger picture here is that almost the entire world labours under an economic dictatorship. Wherever you can point to a large enough disparity between the rich and the poor, you can be absolutely certain that somebody cynically planned the systematic exploitation of the working classes. Of course this was so successful that others copied the system in good faith, thus giving rise to the multitude of personal responsiblity avoidance exploitation-enabling systems we now know as corporations.

Let me bring that home for you a little. Most of Cape Town is dirt poor. The rich neighbourhoods cluster on the slopes of Table Mountain and Bellville's hills like a crust on a really big pie -- deep and wide, the Flats dominate by square kilometerage, population... everything but per capita income. Conservatives everywhere will point to the disparity as proof that they possess more discipline and personal responsibility than the poor, who are obviously less deserving "because they'd be rich if they worked hard enough and applied themselves instead of smoking tik all day" (I quote a bigot I overheard at a braai recently, sans the racial epithets. He was subsequently uninvited from my home evermore.)

Many of these people work for large corporations run by capitalists. They are the company's first line of profit. They work long hours in suboptimal conditions for meager wages, while the 1 or 2 percent at the top skim off 95% of the cream for themselves. Now add the lack of oil to the mix, and what happens?

Corporations can't move stock. Contracts are defaulted on. The money isn't rolling in anymore, so the workers can't get paid. The factory workers, truck drivers and supermarket shelf stockers can't feed their children anymore. People get savage when they're hungry and they're fighting for them and theirs. They will eventually come after the wealth like a swarm of small sharks attacking a very big surfer with a bleeding toe.

I'm not saying this is a good, right or just thing. I'm not proposing to join the fray of looting and democracy-in-action. If we're lucky, there will be no bloodshed... if we're unlucky, the government will come down hard on protesters. Civil war won't be far behind if the governmental response is sufficiently harsh.

If we're very lucky, though, we can avoid all this. We can realise that social responsibility doesn't end with paying your taxes and giving the local bergie (vagrant) a cup of tea now and then. Our responsibility to our fellow man doesn't end with voting for whomever promises the most free clinics and jobs. (To be realistic, voting doesn't even enter into social responsibility anymore -- it only encourages fat cat politicians into believing they're still relevant.) It's not enough to donate books to the charity shop. All of that is great, don't get me wrong -- but all of that is giving a man a fish. A fish wrapped in ancient newspaper and boxed in the small picture, the Kool-Aid which says that rocking the boat is immoral and irresponsible. The message charity and government handouts give to the man on the street is that everything will be fine if they just carry on with their lives and ignore the injustice we all witness every day. If you don't stand out, if you go along with the mob, everyone's lives will be better.

The idea of party politics draws on this -- a mob protests, a mob gets its will. The ones who profit, however, aren't the ones who bus themselves in at oh-god-thirty in the morning to toyi-toyi all day; the head honcho pitches to prance at the head of the mob for a few minutes for the TV cameras. The rest trudge back to their shacks and dream of one day when their leader manages to make something happen for them. The glorious leader, meanwhile, returns to a comfy home in an airconditioned luxury car and dreams of the personal and filial profits to which his rule over the mob entitles him. Should he attain power, his followers see no more of the profit from their campaigning than do the factory workers on the assembly line see the profits others have attained by their sweat and blood and silent stoic tears.

Is this what the struggle was about? Even that glorious memory has been subverted into profit by individuals and parties far and wide. It seems that no sooner does someone gather a large enough group of people before he turns into a profit pimp, whoring out his followers for personal and political gain.

I have no answers, only more questions. Russia tried redistributing the wealth; their workers' collectives fell prey to the personality cults of Lenin and Stalin, and we all know how that went. Communism and socialism no more the answer the burning questions of today than do democracy and capitalism. All known forms of government and economy eventually fall prey to human nature -- dictatorship just does so sooner than most, hence the revolts we're seeing right now.

When the oil runs out, there will be a great reckoning and renegotiation. Government will no longer be the lowest bidder in the price wars for services. Taxes levied will have to drop, for the simple reason that the services we pay for will no longer even be rendered to the already almost nonexistent extent they are now. South Africa is lucky in that it has few enemies right now. When the oil runs out, though, who knows? We have some of the best (locally-developed!) oil-from-coal technology and some of the richest coal deposits in the world. Will America get greedy and park another aircraft carrier in Cape Town harbour, this time as a show of strength as their embassy in Pretoria does some underhanded "quiet diplomacy" of their own? (Quite literally a dictator-ship...) It's not unlikely. I saw a t-shirt the other day which read "If only Mugabe had WMDs" -- in the wake of the revelations that the whole "Saddam-has-WMDs" story was fabricated, that could well read "If only Zimbabwe had oil". That just gets more chilling the longer I think about it...

Thoughts welcomed. Comments lacking same aren't.

So You Want A Job In IT, Part 2

2010-09-10T14:47:00.000+02:00

It had to happen sooner or later: I'm on the other end of the job seeker's equation. My company is in a retrenchment cycle -- aren't they all, these days? -- and they ~~deigned~~ declined to renew my contract. Highest tree, wind, et cetera... though in this case I'm really only the highest tree by dint of being the easiest toppled, what with being on a contract and all. It's not all bad; I had a great second interview with an awesome local telecoms-ish company and am awaiting word. More on that later.

I got a letter from a recruiter this morning. She saw my profile on Pnet and wanted to enter me into their database. So far, so nominal. The letter then reads:

Your details are not on our database – please complete the attached documents so that we can add your details and be able to contact you for positions.

Now, as you other job seekers out there probably know all too well, every job site out there has its own way of entering one's skills matrix. All of them are laborious, some attain RPITA-hood. (For the uninitiated, RPITA stands for Royal Pain In The Ass.) This means that my skills are available, online, ALL THE TIME. Why should I need to complete an in-house skills matrix (a simple but finicky and time-wasting copy / paste job from my CV) when recruiters actually get paid to navigate the red tape around getting me employed?

By all means, ask my written permission to copy & paste from my CV... just don't find my fully populated profile on a job site, then try to push me through your meat grinder of a process.

That's another thing about recruiters. This time I shall name and shame Express Employment Professionals -- not for being lazy, but for being a mindless meatgrinder of a recruitment company.

Imagine this: I pitch to apply for a position called "Linux system administrator", one I only later found was for an oil company. ("NO THANKS".) Anyway... before anyone from Express would actually see me, I had to complete a basic computer literacy test.No problem, or so I thought.

You see, this particular test was designed in Visual Basic. It pulls in Microsoft Word and Excel windows into a 640x480 frame on an ASP web page. The testing application apparently detects what you do and decides whether or not you've succeeded in the set task. Click anywhere but the exact path of clicks the test app expects, and it decides you've fucked up that question. You have the option of retrying, but seriously... When will I, a Linux sysadmin, EVER use Microsoft Office applications? I'll tell you: When Microsoft open sources Office and supports Real Standards instead of Microsoft Broken Standards Meant To Promote Vendor Lock-In, that's when. (Don't hold your breath.)

I'm tired of ranting. Life is filled with negativity. Here's a happy wallpaper for you ^_^

Blue-sky bird (pic)

2010-08-19T23:38:00.000+02:00

While attempting to photograph a random empty piece of azure sky, I happened to catch this bird in flight. This makes for a wonderful desktop background -- I like to use my desktop's Invert function, and this fits right in: when inverted, the blue bitflips to a weird-but-soothing-on-tired-eyes yellowish colour. Click the thumbnail to see full size. (1600x1200, taken with a Nokia 5230 phone.)

This photo is free for personal use and open source projects :)

Pregnancy: The wait is over.

2010-06-08T14:55:00.000+02:00

In the immortal words of Tank Girl: Listen up, 'cause I'm only gonna say this once.

For those of you who don't know, my wife Christél fell pregnant about 8 weeks ago. Excitement ensued. We weren't ready to have a child, but then is anybody ever truly ready? We would be ready when the time (and baby) came. We felt scared, brave, and closer to each other than ever before. We could do this.

The first scan, around 5 weeks, didn't reveal a foetal heartbeat. This was fine; acquaintances assured me that they only got heartbeat at eight weeks. The doctor at Groote Schuur Gynae Emergency assured us that it's too early to tell much for sure; he told us to come back in two weeks for another scan.

Two weeks went by. We spent most of our non-work time together; we read books to each other, did fun stuff, bided our time. Two weeks on, the scan revealed not much more than before. The doctor has a marvellous poker face, but I could see the news wasn't good. There wasn't much foetal development since the previous time; the doctor sounded less than hopeful, but Christél wasn't in pain or bleeding or anything so he told us to wait another two weeks.

The wait was over on Sunday past. External and internal sonar showed pretty much the same results... yolk sac, very little growth, no foetal pole. The difficult decision had been made for us; the pregnancy would have to be ended. What remained was the easy choice: how would we like to do it? The options: naturally, surgically or chemically. Sounds like a fucking checkout counter... "Paper or plastic?" We went with the medicinal option. The nurse gave Christél three octagonal white tablets and sent her home.

On Monday she and I stayed home together. She had started to bleed and cramp rather heavily, both effects of the medication. This morning (Tuesday) about 05:30, Christél passed the not-foetus. It was over.

Yes, I know that this happens in about 60% of pregnancies. Yes, many couples go through this every day. Maybe they find it easier than I do, maybe they don't. I don't know. All I know is that I am utterly unprepared for the pain, the anger, and the utterly devastating disappointment. I had no idea whether I could look after a child, but goddammit I was going to do my best.

I am raw inside... It feels like a part of me was torn out of the universe, and there's nothing I can do about it.

If you've been through something like this, please tell me how you handled it.

So you want a job in IT?

2010-04-01T16:18:00.000+02:00

Background: My company is looking for a software support engineer. I had cause to deal with some curriculums vitae before passing them along to my employers. Obviously I perused these little slices of life before actually forwarding them along.

What I saw therein made me die a little inside... I can understand that people write like this in everyday; they don't give a crap about their writing in everyday life because their teachers cared about it at school and they're being rebellious or something. In a CV though? Your employment, your very livelihood may depend on the person reading your CV. Do you really care so little about yourself that it doesn't matter how you're perceived?

On the one hand, I don't want to offend possibly prospective colleagues by criticising their CVs. On the other, a CV which fails to impress me will almost certainly fail to impress my bosses. I sent back lists of corrections and a suggestion to re-read their CVs very carefully. The corrected CVs still contained errors. Lots of errors.

Is it wrong of me to expect proper spelling, grammar, punctuation and formatting? I won't go into specifics here. Herewith, however, a few suggestions if you are updating your curriculum vitae with the purpose of actually landing a job:

1a. There is NO excuse for incorrect spelling. EVER.
1b. A word may be spelled correctly yet be the wrong word. Read your CV out loud.
1c. Get your spelling-and-grammar-Nazi friend to correct your CV. With a red pen.
2. The apostrophe indicates possession, not plurality.
3. A unified look: Your CV is not a collage, nor is it a ransom note. Jumping around between different fonts and font sizes makes your CV look like a tabloid "news" story.
4. Nobody cares what your first holiday job was unless you're applying for another holiday job.
5. Don't claim to have good attention to detail and yet miss more than half a dozen errors in your CV after being told to look for mistakes.
6. Smiley faces. Are you serious about getting a job? Then don't use a Unicode smiley face in the place of a period. A smiley face on a CV is what the interviewer draws if they like you very much.
7. Names and certain abbreviations are capitalised when appearing in the middle of a sentence; a regular verb is not.
8a. No contractions under any circumstances. (don't, I'm, etc.)
8b. Never EVER use "etc." on a CV. If you do, however, then don't spell it "ect."
9. Call me picky, but a bullet list of statements about you tell me far less than a concise paragraph wherein you describe yourself.
10. We use the South African English dictionary in South Africa. US English is for when you're actually physically present on the North American continent. When in doubt, spell it like the British do. (Hint: We use far fewer Zs in our words and words like "colour" contain more letters.)
11. Underlining random lines in your CV is pointless and confusing. If it's that important, devote a page to it or turn it into a section heading or something.
12. Non-unified formatting bothers and confuses most people subconsciously. If you use a period at the end of list items in one section, use periods at the end of your list items in every section.
13. SENTENCES END IN PERIODS.
14. EDIT: Sentences start with capital letters.

If you want to suggest any more items, please do so in the comments below.

...but now that dream is gone from me.

2010-03-24T13:28:00.000+02:00

I wish this entry was unnecessary. This is like wishing that history wouldn't repeat itself, however, and for the same reasons.

Sixteen years ago, we stood on the threshold of something greater than just another regime change, something more than a mere colonial handover. South Africa opened the door to hope. The disenfranchised got to vote after being oppressed for as long as their living ancestors can remember. On 27 April 1994, newly-enfranchised South Africans elected the party that had fought long and hard for their freedom. The erstwhile oppressors feared for their lives, livelihoods and families.

Then a wonder happened. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission took to the past not rage and a broadsword, but a scalpel and a gentle but firm bedside manner. The abscesses of the past were excised, festering wounds reopened and cleaned. Justice, as and when needed, was not only firm but correctly firm. Everything was documented, everything public. South Africa might just have needed that catharsis more than the election itself. In the days after the TRC's final report, South Africans had hope.

As it always does, though, life happened. We assumed that the hope would never go away and went on with the ever-important yet wholly insignificant business of daily life. We raged against the small oppressions of Affirmative Action, as-yet-extant racism, and sports quotas. We looked at the past as though it was just that, the past. The old South Africa was taboo, verboten, not to be referenced in polite company. The lessons of the past were forgotten; some things which should not have been forgotten were lost.

The old regime enabled, at state level, some of the worst parts of the human condition. Nearly-legal torture, bombing of innocent civilians, the economic oppression of tens of millions. A state-engineered breakdown of the family structure leading to racial violence and pandemic levels of HIV. The long-term human suffering deliberately planned and executed by the state machine of the Old South Africa is as bad or worse than anything the Nazis did.

That's all in the past though, right? Right? Wrong. There is no reason why this will not happen again. What are the tools used by the old regime to keep the people in line? Main and legal force, to be sure. What else? Media manipulation. Censorship. Doublespeak, doublethink. Fear. Fear for yourself and your loved ones. Fear that your children or your parents won't come home one day. Fear of your children, of your neighbours.

At face value, the lesson Julius Malema and the African National Congress' Youth League takes home from the Old South Africa section of their history books seems to be something to the effect of "All white people are out to screw the black man over." This apparently justifies everything they do and fools the world into believing the ANCYL to be just another vocal and ultimately powerless political faction acting as a puppet for the ruling party. I don't believe them to be that simple and frankly neither should you.

The lesson I learn in our own history books is not a new one. It's not even a unique story. The lesson I take to heart is this: The oppressor comes in many shapes and forms, but the tools are always the same. The local monopoly on violence, control of the judiciary and legislative mechanisms, censorship of the media. Political officers in our midst. Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Most worrying of all, Julius Malema has put out a (misspelled) call for "patriotic" citizens to supply information on these political agents provocateurs (ie. journalists doing their jobs; bloggers doing their own unpaid thing). Turning people against one another. Divide and conquer.

There was another dictator-to-be who used his own youth league to come to power. The ANCYL has the capacity to become Julius' own Hitler Youth, if indeed this is not already the case. Do we ever want children to turn in their parents for having an opinion? For being the wrong colour or creed?

Will it stop there?

You don't have to be white to be an oppressor. You don't have to subjugate people of another race to be an oppressor. You don't even have to wave swastika-equivalents and march in jackboots to be an oppressor. All you have to do is to fool most of the people most of the time into thinking that a small group of rich privileged people that are different from you are to be feared as the oppressors.

With that, you can do anything.

Overhearing African songs

2010-02-13T02:33:00.000+02:00

I am sitting in my back garden at 1:30AM, writing my book. A light drizzle falls, but not on my laptop because I'm covered by an ecosystem-y sort of thatch formed by ivy, dead silver oak leaves, insects, spiders' webs, and the remains of whichever small vertebrates nature selected against recently in the form of Hobbes, Suzy and Pimento -- respectively ginger tom, piebald black and white female neuter and a black smoke queen.

Clarification: The thatch is on top of a covered frame. Not on top of me. That would be unsanitary.

A bunch of young black men just walked by outside. My first thought was "That's really loud. Someone is bound to call the cops." Then I listened again and thought "Man, that is beautiful." Imagine hearing this:

Six or eight young black men's voices at quite reasonable volume -- I could (literally) hear them coming from a block and a railway bridge away. Not every one of those voices was stellar on its own, but they *harmonised*. They sang their song in a language I do not understand, but I knew exactly what they were saying. Their voices spoke of togetherness, the pride of the group, the feeling of Africa's fel sun on your face. Of the sweet smell and soft skin of the girls they danced with tonight. Of brotherly love and their awareness of being together in the moment. The song was banter, good-natured teasing, friendship. Though they didn't literally laugh, their song had the feel of a shared laugh suppressed and then channeled into a song sung whilst walking home. Think about it. Ten or fifteen minutes of being this close, this in touch with your friends. To converse in song.

This put me in mind of something else I was lucky to witness a while ago. I was dumping garden refuse at the Wynberg recycling station and happened to be standing close to two fifty-somethings black men, close enough to overhear them conversing. Note that I didn't say "speaking". To this day I am convinced that they were having a conversation in song. The one would sing a snippet of a minute or two, about the length of a few sentences. The other would then fall in with a few lines of his own. Wash, rinse, repeat. I could hear the song's content, emotional and conversationally, change over time. What it sounded like most, frankly, was two old friends talking about their travels... one telling the other of a place they'd been to and what it was like, the second person in this case asking questions and making comments about the first person's statements.

I have not heard of day-to-day conversational singing before, but I know what I heard. Do you have a similar story to tell? Did you grow up in a culture where this is commonplace? Please tell me about it in a comment, I'm dying to find out more.

The first rule of Book Club

2010-02-11T04:47:00.000+02:00

I had a brilliant book club night. So scintillating was the conversation and so pleasant the well-connected company that I shall avoid all name-dropping charges by not mentioning any. I must add that I ended up having a conversation with @kevl about my novel-to-be. I came away with not a few good ideas, reawakened enthusiasm, and clarity über alles.

I'll also probably have a hangover and believe several brilliantly impossible things before I am sufficiently coordinated to type. Crappy though it may be, my phone's voice recorder will have to do. All phones should come with a dictaphone button on the side, damn it. It's cheap and improves the user experience.

Oh look, my ramble has all dried up. Must be dehydration. I will drink more water and sleep. Hope 4 hours is okay.

Night all!

... But is it OCD?

2008-08-05T13:42:00.000+02:00

It all started when I read this tweet...

Then I read this blog entry...

... and started paying attention to the quirky stuff I do all the time. I will be updating this list as I notice more, but here are just a few:

I must check mail. All the time. Work mail, Gmail, etc. More often than not, I check my Gmail with Gmail Mobile before I get out of bed in the morning.
I never let anyone put sugar in my coffee. The ratios must be exactly right, and are different for every place from which I buy coffee.
I put peanut butter in as many things as I can.
I constantly click pens, or fiddle with the cap if it's not the click type.
I always open my cigarette pack in the same way, and always take out the middle cigarette first. Then the one to the right of the middle one. After that, the structure is lost. Needless to say, I never buy softpacks, just boxpack.
I always pack my backpack in exactly the same way. Laptop in a certain orientation. Charger cord rolled up and packed in the same corner.
Everything in my pockets are always placed in the exact same pockets, and in the same order.
My toothbrush must be wet before applying toothpaste, and I frequently wet it just a little during the brushing.
Speaking of dental hygiene, my toothpaste must always be squeezed from the back. Not with fingers either; only a flat surface and a toothbrush handle suffice to get every last bit out.
I take my feet off the floor when concentrating on writing. Most often I sit in half- or full lotus position, or put my feet on my computer case if I get uncomfortable later.
I must make my bed before getting into it, even if it's been made. That way I know it's arranged properly. Pillows all need to be fluffed, regularly and often.
I cannot sleep if I'm wearing anything that has a collar.
I cannot ignore spelling mistakes, whether in my own or others' writing. I must point it out (others' writing) or immediately correct it (my own writing), even if it breaks my concentration.
I hate hate hate having to use someone else's keyboard. Add a couple "hate"s if said keyboard has an inverted L-shaped enter key.
Breakfast Cutlery Must Either Be Plastic or Have Plastic Inlay Handles.
More breakfast: I eat it out of order and my day starts badly. Oats, eggs, coffee.
Arranging things: I arrange things in symmetrical arrangements. ALL the time.
Sudden loud noises near me. Take heed, thou noisy person: I have done violence upon the person of transgressors.
I cannot parse speech with white noise around. Deal with it.

This entry is now about two weeks old. I have discovered another behaviour: I cannot stop fiddling with the points, to get them in the right order.

I think I either need to seek professional advice about this, or make peace with my own quirks and tics. I really don't know whether any or all of the above is normal or not.

Opinions please?

Ingrained attitudes are alive and well

2008-06-05T11:00:00.003+02:00

While reading this article from Ramon Thomas which was written in response to this article from Mandy de Waal, I could not help noticing a something these articles have in common... the unquestioned, ingrained attitudes of the authors.

Am I the only one that finds it glaringly obvious that Mr Thomas included no women in his dream team? Congratulations! Instead of a "white boys' club" (to quote Mr Thomas' misnomer; Ms. De Waal's list contains women), you now have a non-white boys' club.

This seems to be a trade-off between an intrinsic assumption that only whites feature in the Web 2.0 world, and the fundamental assumption that only men of whichever colour can feature in the Web 2.0 world.

Honestly, though, the biggest problem I see with this "naming thy Dream Team" concept, is the platform upon which it was presented. Honestly, a more-or-less static blog entry for a list which is inherently dynamic?

Personally, I would have set up a wiki for this. Then everyone that wants to name their dream team can do so, and we can add a field for the poster's race and sex too... This way we can get nice graphs and statistics of how many white women list coloured men as good bloggers, and vice versa.

I would do it, too, if I thought it would actually make everyone happy about this subject. But then, I know that the point of all of this is not about being right or wrong... it's all about the debate.

List of Rules and Laws in Physics and Astronomy

2008-04-04T11:08:00.001+02:00

This is just something I happened to come across on a search for something else.

http://www.alcyone.com/max/physics/laws/

Very handy for the scientists among us, and I thought some of you might find this interesting.

Tags as interface? Discuss.

2008-04-01T13:08:00.005+02:00

This post started as a response to a comment made by tumbleweed to my previous blog post. A couple of hundred words later, I realised I had more to say than I had anticipated. A thousand words after that, I decided to split my thoughts into a few separate posts, lest I receive the dreaded "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read).

I have a few thoughts, as a starting point. I'm not lecturing, I'm asking... That's the beauty of being friends with people who are smarter than you; they often have better ideas.

Why not add an abstraction layer between the filesystem and the user? I know, I know, extra system load, complexity, et cetera... but think of the benefits!

I'm thinking of a couple of directions one can take with this. Maybe the abstraction layer works with tags. All you need to do in order to save the file in the correct place, would be to tag it appropriately. Let's say, tagging a file with "documents books manuscript chapter1" would file it under "~/Documents/Books/Manuscript/Chapter1.odt" or whatever. (The format is obviously contextual to the program used, but giving arbitrary extentions should be as easy as adding ODF or CONF or whatever, in the tag cloud.) Adding "done" to the tags may, in this context, move each successive chapter into a subdirectory called "Finalised".

What if your document is suddenly part of another workflow? Let's say you've been editing your manuscript, and your editor wants to see the latest chapter. Adding the tag "email" will make your email client aware of the file, and your computer can do all kinds of nice things to make the process as painless as possible: conversion to a different file format, virus scanning, archiving, perhaps even encrypt your work. All of that makes sense, contextually speaking.

Let's look at this step-by-step, from the point of view of an office worker.

You are a regional assistant sales manager. You receive a work-related spreadsheet document attached to an email. Now what? You need to edit it with the latest sales figures. So you download it to a directory (aka. a "folder", for the youngfolk among us). Now that it's downloaded, you can either (a) open your file manager, browse to the file, and double-click it to open the default application (right-clicking to open it with a different application); or (b) You fire up your word processor manually, open the File Open dialog box, browse to the correct directory, select the file, and click Open. NOW we can start working... when you're done editing, you save the document again. You need to email it back to the appropriate person. Here we go again... open email client, start new email, CC: all the usual suspects, type a subject and some body text, click Attach, browse to the directory, open the file, click OK, click Send. Someone's secretary receives your spreadsheet. Oh, and you need to make a colour print of the graph for staff motivational purposes. "File --> Print --> Choose colour laser printer --> OK".

Is all that navigating-around-the-interface really necessary? What if there's an easier way?

You receive a work-related spreadsheet document attached to an email. Your work tag is "sales manager"; your interface finds the "sales figures" tag in the document. You're given the choice to open the document. The document is tagged with "unfinished", "return urgently" and "email". As soon as you're done adding the sales figures, you add "illustrate" and "print colour" and remove the "unfinished" from the tag cloud. The spreadsheet is furnished with a lovely colour graph and emailed to whomever needs it, and your graph is printed in such large letters as they write.

Is this impossible? Of course not.

Does this support the Interface Rules? If it's done right, you won't notice an interface.

Is this a good idea? Let's discuss it.

Why does productivity software still ask us to save our own work?

2008-03-31T06:08:00.002+02:00

In a technologically advanced world, there isn't exactly a paucity of disk space. Disk is cheap.

True, this was not always the case. Fifty years ago, hard drive storage cost around US$10,000.00 per MB. That's right, ten thousand US dollars per megabyte. (That was a lot of money in those days, what with the US kicking the crap out of the Nazis not too long before that... those war reparations went a long way, not to mention all the clever boffin Germans that the Yanks poached.) Compare that to today's prices, where you can get a 1-terabyte external hard drive for US$229. That's 22 US cents per gigabyte!

We can see that hardware is making advances in leaps and bounds. Not a day goes by that some gadget is released that's smaller, cooler, faster, and pretty much better than anything that's gone before. The changing technology is causing societal changes, in the individual and the collective... not a decade ago, disk space still cost around US$20 per gigabyte. There's no way that the majority of people could have kept more than a couple of small games and a few office documents on one of those old drives; it's just too prohibitively expensive for the average consumer.

But what do we see now? Schoolkids, students, even office ladies... pat them down and you can find between 1 gigabyte and 80 gigabytes of memory on their person at any given time. What do they use all that space for? Not just spreadsheets, baby. Movies and entire TV series. Dozens of albums worth of music.

Frankly, I see no reason to be stingy with disk space. Even the smallest cheapest laptop harddrive has a capacity 60GB or 80GB. You can store a lot of documents on that much hard drive space, even if you leave space for your operating system, a couple of TV series seasons, and your mp3s.

That's why I get irritated when a text editor in which I am editing a 5-kilobyte file asks me "Would you like to save this document?".

If I didn't want that information around for a little while, I would not have taken the time to type or paste it in a text editor, now would I? Is it worth breaking my concentration, interrupting my train of thought, for 5 kilobytes?

I say, NO. I say that that entire mode of thinking is outdated. If I close a window and my work is unsaved, then save it for me, there's a good program. If I haven't given the file a name, then by all means use the first 5 words of my document. If the same document hasn't been accessed by me or any other programs for a week, then compress and store it somewhere. Stop asking me stupid questions, I'm trying to think here. The answer should be obvious. I'm having enough trouble concentrating as it is; I don't need additional distractions from the bloody software I'm using too. We are too set in our ways; we unquestioningly accept this as the norm. The entire "conserve the scarce disk space resource" model of thinking and programming, is an anachronism.

The scarce resource in our world of today is attention. Concentration. We live in a world of distractions, with every waking moment full of things that want our attention.

The entire point of any productivity software is to make you more productive. Why, then, do I often feel like I spend more time battling with the software than concentrating on my work? I'm sure that's not the way it's supposed to be.

I want to propose a few rules for interface design:

If you notice the interface, then the interface has failed in its purpose.
Software should be designed to make the best possible use of these scarce resources:

The Zeroth resource is Concentration.
The First resource is Time.
The Second resource is Memory Usage
The Third resource is Hard Drive usage.

Software should simplify the life of the User.
Software should simplify the life of the System Administrator.

Please feel free to leave comments with rule additions. I'll write the rules up sometime soon.

Privacy = Civilisation?

2008-03-05T15:57:00.001+02:00

Everything you'll read in this post is true.

Right now, the only objects that I'm aware of are my laptop, the chair I'm sitting on, and the cigarette between my lips. I'm sitting outside, naked, smoking and typing this. These facts may seem only tangentially relevant to my thoughts in this post, but bear with me.

What if you had to write your own brutally honest autobiographical Wikipedia entry? How much would you leave out? How much would you exagerrate? What would you not mention, for fear of hurting the feelings of others or for fear of not endangering your future career?

Let's postulate that you have, indeed, written your own Wikipedia entry. Let us also postulate that your article is published online. Now, the world can not only read your article, but edit it. People can remove intimate facts about themselves, add wild allegations and wild exaggerations about you and others.

Worse still, anybody can change your own (completely unselfconscious) semantic evasions of your life's truths, to reflect the hard facts.

How many of us can withstand such levels of scrutiny?

Benefit may be gained from such an approach. Seeing yourself reflected through the eyes of everyone will almost definitely help you to a greater level of understanding about yourself. People will criticise, sure... although I wonder how many compliments you will receive from totally unexpected directions.

Let me use my current situation to illustrate.

I am sitting naked in my darkened back garden. Should I suddenly be sitting here in broad daylight, still naked, would make me start looking over my shoulder to make sure the neighbour kids won't see me through the hedge. But they are strangers, and besides momentary embarassment on my part (and possibly emotional scarring on theirs) this won't change my life overmuch.

But what if everyone I knew were suddenly transported here as well? What if the encounter were mediated in such a way that they felt free to offer any criticism and compliments that they saw fit? Would I be able to continue with my day-to-day life as if nothing had happened?

What if everyone was all together, naked, in one room, discussing each other in such a way, all the time?

The knowledge that each of us are naked at some part during our day doesn't make it harder to deal with people. We take things at face value, deal with (clothed) people as we see them. But how honest and complete a picture is that of any of us?

How much of our sense of self-worth is based upon illusion, self-delusion, and outright deceit?

What is privacy, except a way for each of us to otherwise uphold the lie that is our public image? A place to be naked and alone, honest and yourself?

If your entire life was published to the Internet, all the time, that is your big room full of naked people.

So next time you think of sending me that application request, imagine being in a room with me. Naked.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

In Democratic South Africa, Glasnost sees through YOU...

2007-12-06T10:51:00.000+02:00

This post is not to complain about the inefficiency of Home Affairs with regards to losing my ID book en route to me. It is not to complain about the screaming kids, long lines, and slowness of the bureaucrats. If I started complaining, nothing would get done.

This is about a little event during all these proceedings, in which I took part yesterday at the Wynberg Home Affairs office.

At long last, I reach the supervisor's counter. (I apparently rated an upgrade in service, since I have been waiting for my ID for 10 months.) The supervisor takes my ID number, enters it on the system, and starts looking through the log of what has been done. Being naturally possessed of a curious spirit, I lean over and look on his screen.

"Oh look," I exclaim, "it says that on such-and-such a date, my ID book 'arrived at Dispatch'."

"Please don't do that," he said curtly. "You are not allowed to see that."

*blink*

The entire office is bedecked with posters proclaiming the wonders of the new "Track & Trace" system, whereby a simple SMS to a certain number (charged at ZAR1) will theoretically let you know exactly what the status and location of your ID book is.

Unfortunately, it seems that there is still some privileged information. Transparency, accountability, and freedom of information... these are ideals towards which the (local and national) government is supposedly striving. So why am I strongly discouraged from access to the very information which might just make me feel better about the fact that my ID has been lost in the system, after applying for it 10 months ago?

Has anybody else had experiences like these?

Mobility, organised OR: How I got my Motorola V360 to sync with my Google Calendar

2007-11-13T17:31:00.001+02:00

Idly browsing through the technical specifications for my Motorola V360, I saw that it supported Synchronization Markup language (SyncML), aka Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management.

What all that means is that my phone supports an open standard for synchronising information between all sorts of networked mobile devices, and servers on the Internet. A general rule of thumb is this: Once an open standard exists (and, of course, does something useful), someone will do something cool with it.

So it was in this case.

While Google Calendar itself doesn't speak SyncML, I did find a free service called GooSync that sits between your phone and Google Calendar and synchronises the two. The free GooSync account includes the synchronisation of one (1) calendar only, and only synchronises 30 days in advance. The 20-Pound-Sterling-per-year subscription service includes features such as multiple calendar support, and synchronising up to 365 days in advance.

I obviously signed up for the free option.

Your first step is to authorise GooSync to access your Google Calendar. This was a two-click process: One click on the GooSync page to open Google's authorisation page, and one click on Google's authorisation page. It didn't ask for my Google password, either.

The phone configuration instructions were painless: I chose my phone from a list of models and got the instructions. There was a bit of confusion on the instructions page about what exactly the Sync menu option is called. I knew from before that this phone had some major differences in the firmware between different country-localised models, though, so it's not GooSync's fault.

After defining a new "Sync partner" (as my phone calls it) with the details provided by GooSync, I could synchronise immediately.

All in all a pleasant experience; everything worked out of the box and as advertised.

Blogged with Flock

Flocking to social browsing

2007-11-12T14:20:00.001+02:00

Today marks five days since I discovered Flock browser. It also marks the first blogposts made with Flock's built-in blog editor.

Flock is a social networking-oriented browser. It integrates browser functions with such diverse social networking sites as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, Photobucket, and many more that I haven't ever used before (like Piczo).

For the photosharing sites, you have a photo uploader that you can do basic cropping and editing with.

As I publish this post and my latest poem, I also found that Flock's blog editor seamlessly supports multiple blogs in the same Blogger account. It can also save a draft to the specific blog of your choice, and will even open drafts previously edited and saved using Blogger's web editor.

I will post more about Flock after playing with it a bit more... suffice it to say, for now, that there have been only a few software packages that have transformed my experience of the internet in such a big way in such a short time.

Blogged with Flock

Shirty confusion

2007-10-23T08:10:00.000+02:00

Walking on UCT Upper Campus, you often see a certain t-shirt. It's white, and has "HIV POSITIVE" printed on it in purple. No other information appears on the shirt, except for (one may safely assume) a manufacturer's label and/or washing instructions.

What is this all about? Treating this shirt as an interface to information, I must say that I don't find this a good interface at all.

Does the wearer of the shirt wish to impart that he or she is HIV positive? Do they mean to say that they are infected with HIV, and feel positive about it? Does it perhaps mean that they are not infected with HIV, and feel positive about that fact? Or do they just generally feel positive about the state of HIV in the country and how the government is handling it?

(If it's the last case, the shirt is in rather poor taste.)

Some disambiguation is needed here.

Edit: Does the choice of purple have some significance? I thought red was the ribbon colour associated with HIV/Aids.

International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October

2007-10-04T10:20:00.000+02:00

An inspiration less ordinary

2007-10-01T12:38:00.000+02:00

If I've ever needed some inspiration, it would be on a day like today... a semi-hungover and semi-sleepless Monday.

After seeing the video about Burning Man last night at the Armchair in Obs, and subsequent vowing to go to Afrika Burns, this site blew me away. It's called The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun. On the one hand, it's a flash animation (groans from the geek gallery). On the other hand, it loaded quite quickly even over my EDGE connnection, and worked perfectly in Firefox.

It outlines eight principles (obviously) for making your life more awesome and less ordinary. It's not easy to put into words what it meant to me, but I took a lot out of it. Check it out. It might just change you in some small way.