Ron’s Blog

You’re probably wondering why this blog went very quiet. Here’s why.

I had a lot of issues in my personal life; a noteworthy one being a certain Office Freak – for those who post on my forum, see me personally, communicate with me over GTalk or IRC, I need say no more. For those who don’t, let’s just say that this person made every day of my job living hell. That’s all that needs to be said. Fortunately, at the end of last year, we did an office reshuffle and I got given two absolutely awesome people to share a new office with, so I’m really happy about that – I do feel sorry for the new people who have to share the office with The Freak. I do still keep a convenient stash of death metal in my office for occasions when it gets lost and wanders in; fortunately I’ve never had to use them this year as I have the impression that he’s somewhat scared of me now owing to how often I played those CDs at full blast last year. It takes a lot for me to take the trance CD out and replace it with the death metal one, so you can imagine the near constant frustration that I endured.

Well, here’s hoping that it gets fired soon enough, because it doesn’t do any work.

The other reason is one of time – between work, my church band and related activities, and looking after three forums in what spare time remains, I didn’t have much time for anything else. It’s not as bad as it was previously, but things are still pretty hectic – I really need to take time out and decide what’s important to me and what I should rather stop doing. Also, the whole mess with CTI didn’t exactly help either.

That being said, I believe that this blog of mine has been sorely neglected, and I really need to start posting more stuff on here.

So, you’re probably wondering what’s happened to me, given my recent lack of activity here. I’m still alive; just got things taking up my time (*cough* World of Warcraft).

I’m finally done with the hellhole called CTI. Not sure if I passed everything, and to be brutally honest, given the pathetic way that my course was administered I don’t really care. I’m staying well clear now – if I want some more stuff to put on the CV, I’ll look into some Microsoft certifications (someone at my chuch is a trainer, so I have a good contact in that regard).

Then, PCF has been taking a lot of my time away from me as well. I was asked to take over the management of their forums, and started this in the middle of June. Due to some pretty nasty forum issues, it was decided to switch to phpBB 3 – as their database is huge (13,000 users, 1,000,000 posts – you do the maths), it took me all of a weekend to do. The users seem to like it though – yeah, you’ll always get the odd few who bitch and moan, but in general people were happy. Ettienne gave me the best feedback.

I’m also more involved with the FRAG LAN again. You may recall me leaving entirely; however, they experienced website issues and asked me to come back to manage their website, which I agreed to. With CTI now a horrible thing of the past, I’m able to become more involved again. At the event at the beginning of September, I ended up doing the background music as Brendan (who does it normally) has matric exams to contend with. Long story short, all ~200 gamers were treated to a four hour live trance mix, which they actually quite liked. The plan now is for Brendan and myself to alternate throughout the weekend – as I do trance and Brendan does metal, that will give everyone some decent variety throughout the weekend; the problem that both of us have is that we’re too centred on one particular genre, which is fine for us, but not for the gamers.

I’m busy planning my year-end trips to other parts of the country – depending if Little Annoying Sister finds a flat to move into (aka Free Accomodation), I’ll be in Cape Town for a week in January next year. I’ll also be in CPT in May, as it’s Little Annoying Sister’s 21st birthday. So, those of you who want to catch up with me, those are your opportunities. I’m also thinking of making the effort to pop over to Johannesburg for a weekend to catch up with the PCF users in that part of the world – they’re a really great bunch of people. I just need to find someone who can let me crash over and take me around the place; kulula will do a great job of getting me there and back. (No, I can’t drive up myself – I don’t have my own car.)

OK, I think I’ve said enough. I’ll try to remember to check back in sometime soon.

Take a look at this – it takes what you write and converts it into the manner that a 12 year old AOLer would write it.

I tested it with the following post on my forum:

Ron needs an EPIC fail for his feeble attempt at camping, or what ever he wants to call it, he might as well have gone paint balling on his own, i am sure it would have been the same for him.

… and this is what I got back…

RON NEDS AN 3PIC FALE FOR HIS FEBL3 AT3MPT AT CMPNG OR WUT 3VER HE WANTS 2 CAL IT HE MIGHT AS WEL HAEV GONA PANET BALNG ON HIS OWN IM SURE IT WUD HAEV BEN DA SM3 FOR HIM!!11!1!1! OMG WTF

I now have a new favourite toy.

For those who don’t read the posts on my forum, Andrew posted his thoughts on Windows vs Linux vs Mac last night. I thought it to be a pretty good analogy, so I’m reposting what he said here.

 here’s how I understand it:

there’s three options, windows, linux, or mac.

good things:

windows: most popular, most widely used, most supported, and runs most programs.
linux: more secure, more efficient, free, some other stuph.
mac: very popular, and “it just works” is there motto.

bad things:

windows: insecure, needs a good formatting every few months, insecure, resource hog, insecure, expensive.
linux: complicated, insane learning curve, and if you’re on 56k no natural internets(see insanely complicated learning curve), need lifetime commitment to understand.
mac: doesn’t run many programs, costs more than a first class hooker in vegas, can’t be upgraded, presumably also has learning curve.

personally, I have experience with windows and a tiny little bit of linux. I would recommend windows or mac. don’t bother with linux unless you’re really interested in learning. mac is good for artsy types because “it just works” and photoshop etc etc works well.

Of course, this is entirely subjective, so leave a comment if you agree or disagree with him.

Every now and then, I give Supreme Commander a go. This is typically what happens:

1. Make sure Andrew is on your team.
2. Let Andrew do the actual hard work of hunting down the opposition. After all, he’s way better than you.
3. While the above happens, act all emo and stay in your little corner… while building nukes.
4. Wait for Andrew to do a bombing run and disable the anti-nuke defences.
5. Initiate a nuclear winter across the map.
6. …
7. PROFIT!

Hey, it works when Andrew and I are playing against the AI…

(Yes, yes, I know… I’m going to have to think up a better strategy when I play human opposition. I’m working on that.)

I’m probably going to get a lot of flak from the non-Christians, and maybe even the non-Catholics who read my blog. But what the heck.

Ettienne, in his latest entry, believes that Christmas is a total waste of time. He states the following:

Many people don’t know this… but Christmas was originally a PAGAN festival. That’s right. When Christmas was first created, it was a festival in which public nudity and being drunk, gambling, etc etc etc was what was done. December 25th was a day on which many different gods were worshiped, gods like Elah-Gabal, a Syrian sun god, and Thor, the God of Thunder.

Christmas was never celebrated by Christians, ever, until eventually, in the year 379, the Catholics decided “Hey, how about we chuck Jesus’ birthday in with all these other pagan gods?!”.

There’s a reason why the early Church decided to have Christmas on December 25th, which I found after doing some research. No, it’s not the reason that Ett thinks, although it’s also not the actual birth date of Jesus (I doubt that there are birth records that far back, even within the Roman empire). This article explains the choice of date:

In 350, Pope Julius I declared that Christ’s birth would be celebrated on December 25. There is little doubt that he was trying to make it as painless as possible for pagan Romans (who remained a majority at that time) to convert to Christianity. The new religion went down a bit easier, knowing that their feasts would not be taken away from them.

If that was indeed the intent, no doubt it has been a great success, as Christianity is now the dominant religion in the world today. The article that I linked to earlier mentions that some pagan traditions still continue today; this should in no way detract from the religious aspect of Christmas.

The article doesn’t mention of the giving of gifts to each other, but I remember reading somewhere ages ago that this was done to remind us of the gift of Jesus. Unfortunately, commercialisation has taken this way too far now. I’m not going to go into too much detail on this; I’m sure we all know it. After all, we all see it at this time of year. If you’re really interested, this Wikipedia article details how the religious aspects of Christmas are slowly being degraded by secular, commercial aspects. Maybe we’re just coming full circle from 350 A.D. – regardless, if you’re a Christian, it makes for some pretty depressing reading.

But it’s definitely not the fault of us Catholics. To be quite honest with my loyal blog readers, I’m getting rather sick and tired of my faith being constantly attacked, even by fellow Christians. Mass media isn’t helping either – just look at movies like “The Da Vinci Code”, and more recently “The Golden Compass”, both of which attack the Catholic Church. (Admittedly, they toned it down in the latter movie from the book from which it was adapted, but it doesn’t make it any less worrying.) In particular, I’m really concerned about other Christian groups attacking us. One person that I know ended up at a charismatic church for a while, and I was told that said church (or, at least one of it’s members) was distributing material attacking the Catholic Church. This is just plain not acceptable. We’re all Christians. We all worship the same God. We should be united – not divided.

But enough of that litte rant, and back to Christmas. Don’t ignore it. But if you’re Christian, then put the emphasis into the religious aspect of the whole occasion. As some local churches are saying, “Put ‘Christ’ back into ‘Christmas’”. It’s something that my family does extremely well, and if you’re Christian and reading this, try doing the same. You’ll get so much out of this “pagan festival” this way.

 EDIT: Seems like my shamless copying and pasting from other sources created a Javascript error on this page. Hopefully it’s fixed now.

I present to you: Ron’s Survival Guide. To be used when the rest of the family is away in Cape Town.

1. Make sure you have food that’s of the “put it in the microwave for five minutes” variety. Particularly if you can’t cook.
2. Make sure you have some new trance livesets to listen to.
3. Rent out some good films.
4. Invite three of your friends over for a LAN at your place when it gets too lonely and too boring.
5. Make sure that the dogs aren’t too much of a nuisance when aforementioned friends come over.
6. If you’re really lucky, Telkom will pay you a surprise visit to check the local phone lines for ADSL connectivity. (As a follow-up, I phoned them this morning, and they still say that they’ll do the installation on the 18th.)
7. There was a #7, but I’ve forgotten it now.

To make this week even worse, I ended up with some food poisoning after dinner at the Ocean Basket on Wednesday night. Both my mom and I had the same dish, and we both woke up in the early hours of the morning feeling extremely sick. As usual, I was the worse one off, and consequently I spent much of yesterday lying in my bed feeling like I was about to die. I’ve pretty much recovered now though.

Definitely not my week. First the problems with my switch (which hasn’t yet arrived), and now this…

In other news, the rest of the family leaves for Cape Town tomorrow to take my annoying little sister to UCT. I’ll be staying behind to look after the house, two dogs and two budgies. What fun.

Saw this on the PCF forums. Couldn’t resist.

You’ve probably seen the following maths answer, which I found on rooijan’s blog and posted here a few months back:

To add to that, I’ve just found these…

You just have to wonder what makes people come up with these…

In other news, I’m working on a little personal site similar to what jerith and Edd have. I’m hoping to get it up by the end of next week, but that depends if I can get jerith’s PHP menu generator working – it’s not displaying the little pictures next to pages that have been updated in the past 7 days, like it should. Since I’ve seen it work fine on jerith’s page, I can come up with two possibilities – either it’s because I’m testing it on a Windows machine (I made sure that my site will be hosted on a Linux box, by the way) or it’s because jerith uses PHP4 and the code doesn’t like PHP5, which I use. Knowing Microsoft, the former seems more likely.

And in yet other news, it seems like a lot of people I know have written off cars this year. First it was rooijan, then it was Glen – now Bushman has just joined that club…

UPDATE: rooijan just e-mailed me this…

Just a quick warning before we start. I’ve got quite a lot to post about, so this will be one of my longer posts.

The important bit of news is that I have a new job. The firm’s called AAT, and they code all sorts of SMS systems and other shiny things. They’re in the office park behind John Dory’s in Kloof, so that’s 5 minutes to and from work every morning for me (all I have to do is drive down Krantzview Road, dodge the Thomas More College traffic, and I’m pretty much there). They seem to be a pleasant bunch of people, and they’re on the same wavelength as me, which is quite important. Anyway, I start at the beginning of December. CTI is sorry to see me go, but this is quite a step forward for me, and I’m not going to let this one go.

They didn’t have a problem with my trip to Australia at the end of the year either. Which reminds me… I recently received an e-mail from SAA to say that they’d had to make some slight changes to my flight schedule. While that didn’t bother me at all, what amused me was the tag at the bottom: “This e-mail is sent subject to the disclaimer which can be found at $URL. If you don’t have Internet access, please send an e-mail to $E-MAIL.” Now, firstly if I was receiving the e-mail, I probably would have Internet access to read said disclaimer. And secondly, if I didn’t have Internet access, then I probably wouldn’t be able to send the e-mail to get the disclaimer. Idiots.

As for the Fatality LAN – we didn’t do too badly for a first time. Granted, we had our fair share of hiccups – the first being when we pulled the switches out of the boxes while we were setting up, only to discover that they used those irritating two-prong plugs and we had no adapters. So off we sped to Game in the Pinecrest Centre (the new name for the Sanlam Centre for the ex-Durban people reading this) and bought out most of their stock. Then, we had faults in our power supply and some sections of the LAN kept tripping out. We eventually sorted that out by redistributing some of the PCs, and we were all happy. We ran a few tournaments, which made everyone even happier. I didn’t do much gaming myself (spent most of the time looking after the dedicated servers and fixing nyetwork problems), but yes, I did play some Flatout 2 – had a four lap race, and by the middle of the third lap I had lapped the rest of the field. While I was impressed with that feat, there’s no fun in that – to become better, you need to be challenged to perform better (that’s actually true for most things, not just gaming). And I certainly wasn’t being challenged. The same was true for one game of DotA that I played – and bear in mind that this is one game that I don’t generally do very well at.

The next Fatality LAN is happening on the first weekend of next month. I don’t know what attendance will be like this time, especially when you consider that UberLAN is happening on the same weekend, and being more established it will probably attract more players. But we will play on. As for the next CTI LAN, I spoke to Chris and Steven this weekend (both were at Fatality), and it will only be next year.

It would have been a great weekend had it not been for a rather unpleasant experience regarding the Hillcrest Mugg & Bean. I went there last night with rooijan and some other friends from church – after eating my food I started feeling quite sick. So I hauled my sister out of there and got her to drive me home. Upon arriving, I got out of the car to open the gate, and promptly threw up on the side of the driveway. I’m not sure what they put in those Whippy Wedges, but whatever it was, it certainly didn’t agree with me. But then, I’ve eaten Whippy Wedges many times before, so I’m sure that it was a once-off event. It certainly won’t put me off having them again.

All the rest of my weekends for this month (and next month) are booked up. Next weekend is sort of free, just an important cricket scorers meeting (our lead scorer recently passed away, and we need to discuss the way forward from here). The next weekend after that is BarCamp Durban, and the weekend after that I have to do exam invigilation. Then we’re into December – first weekend is the next Fatality LAN, then the weekend after that I’m involved in a church youth camp, and then I’ll be away in Oz. Glad I’ve sorted everything out with regards to my trip now, because there probably won’t be much time to do anything that I’ve overlooked.

I think that’s quite enough for a Monday morning…

Currently listening to: Agnelli & Nelson – Holding Onto Nothing [Original Paul van Dyk Mix]

I’m off at another LAN this weekend – no, it’s not a CTI one this time. It’s the Fatality LAN, which is happening at the action cricket place in New Germany this weekend. I’ll be doing some adminning (yes I know, I just made that word up), which will probably involve cleaning all the viruses off the network. So I will arrive on Friday afternoon armed with African potato, beetroot and garlic.

This is our first event, but we’re looking to grow it nationally eventually; the aim being to promote regional and national rankings and championships. Well, that’s the long-term goal anyway. For now, we’re all there to just have some fun. Except if you happen to be one of my opponents when Flatout 2 is being played.

I’m not sure when the next CTI LAN is going to be, but due to other LANs in the Durban area it will most likely be the weekend of the 18th/19th of November. That of course means that I won’t be there (assuming that it will be on that weekend), as I’m signed up for BarCamp Durban.

Other than that, I don’t really have anything interesting to post about. Most of the students have finished or are close to finishing for the year, so it’s really quiet. The few that are left have taken to sabotaging my workspace. I went and did some marking, and on my return found my keyboard unplugged, my speakers stuck to my monitor, my mouse ball hidden in my desk, and my chair hidden by Darryl’s desk. I know exactly which ones they were, because they do it all the time just to annoy me. Wait until the little buggers come in tomorrow…

For those of you thinking of installing Internet Explorer 7, I strongly recommend not using it. It’s only a few weeks old and already major flaws have been discovered in it. But then, this is Microsoft that we’re dealing with. Their bug fixing procedure seems to go something like this:

if (manufacturer == “Microsoft” && bugs == true && security_vulnerabilities == true)
{
    ship_it();
}

I would strongly recommend a different browser – we often have huge debates over at the PCFormat forums over which of Opera and Firefox is better. Personally, I prefer Firefox myself but both are excellent browsers and a far better choice than the crap that Microsoft spews out.

One can only hope for the sake of the uneducated masses that they get Vista right…

Yes, I’ve got another road trip coming up. This time I’m off to Cape Town, as my sister managed to get into UCT Medical School. And guess who the lucky one is who has to drive her and her wardrobe down? I’m not sure of dates at the moment, but it’s whenever the residences open (early February if I’m not mistaken).

I’ll probably drive down on the Saturday/Sunday, spend the week in Cape Town taking a break and catching up with old friends of mine that I haven’t seen for a long time – there’s quite a few of them (yes jerith, you’re on that list), then drive back up on Friday and Saturday, which gives me Sunday to recover from the 2 day trip back. I’ll probably be taking the N2 route, as usual. The first day is really dodge the livestock, natives, and native transport (*cough* taxis *cough*) in the Transkei, but the second half of the trip (the Garden Route section) is really awesome. I can just see myself leaving Port Elizabeth early and getting to Cape Town late, as I usually go and stop off at all the little places along the way. One of those places is Storms River Mouth, by far my favourite place in South Africa. If you ever find yourself driving along that way, I would strongly suggest that you take that detour (it’s only 10-15 minutes off the main road, and trust me, it’s well worth it).

What I find really fascinating is that on the N2 drive to Cape Town, there’s only two tollgates, one at Port Shepstone and the other in the Tsitsikamma area, and last time I drove that way (April 2004), they were only around R10 each. By comparison, the trip to Johannesburg is 560km compared with ~1700km to Cape Town, you have five tollgates (Mariannhill, Mooi River, Tugela, Wilge and De Hoek), and four of them cost more individually than what you pay in toll fees for the entire trip to Cape Town. Well, at least none of us have to travel on the N4 in the Nelspruit area, apparently there’s one tollgate there that’s something like R50.

By the way, if you’re reading this and you’ve been communicating with me via e-mail for this past week, the reason why my responses have been so slow is that we’re having some issues with our e-mail system, which we’re trying to sort out. I know that it’s probably extremely frustrating for you, but there’s not much that I can do about it (apparently it’s Head Office’s fault).