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.

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.

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.

 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

You are at medium risk for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is somewhat likely that you are addicted to hand sanitizer.