arbitrary user

Permit me to dive right in

Bad Luck #1: The Warning…

My battery light has been on for a few days… I thought it had to do with the fact that I’d left the interior light on overnight and since the car was starting perfectly I resolved to sorting it out on Tuesday. Bad Idea. Today on the way to class after work my car beeps and suddenly the power steering disappears accompanied by another light on my dash. It’s the power steering light. I pull over hoping that it just needs to be rebooted. Car wont start. Eish. I wait 30 seconds and try again. It *just* manages to start up. Obviously the battery is borked. I decide to get it to a garage still hoping stupidly that this might just need battery water. I drive, without power steering, down the road only to be greeted by another light and some more friendly PINGs. ABS is dead. Ping, break light is on. PING some other not so friendly light. PING… PING… The doors start locking and unlocking themselves (I shit you not). PING, lock, unlock. (Does the car want me to get out before it explodes?)

I get to the Engen Garage on Main Rd in Newlands and carefully pull in and have them look at the battery. Alfred, his name badge read, was wearing a hard-hat but seemed to know more about cars then most pump attendants. “What’s wrong? he asked… “I dunno, the batteries dead and my power steering is dead”. I say vainly hoping that a dab of battery water will fix it. Alfred informs me that I have a No-maintainence battery… ie. They don’t refill the water. “What’s wrong again?” he asks. “ABS, Power Steerings gone, everything” I reply.

“Ah” he says pointing into my engine, “You don’t have a fan belt”. I. feel. like. an. idiot.

Momentum insurance was awesome, flat bed truck, plenty of confirmation SMSs and numerous phone calls from the great consultant, Colin, checking and rechecking that everything was ok. My car is sleeping at Barons in Claremont tonight, where hopefully in the morning it will receive a new fan belt and a charge.

Bad Luck #2: The long way down…

As nice as the flat bed truck people are, their vehicles are a bit beaten up. Climing backwards out of the passenger seat outside my flat (in the dark) I asked the driver how far down it was. This was a retarded question since I had climbed into the vehicle and therefore should know approximately how far down it was to the ground. His reply “A long way down” could not have been more apt. I commited to “stepping” out backwards. It was one of those situations where you can’t see behind you so guess where the ground is. I guessed relatively well, but i didn’t guess I would end up on the edge of the pavement and subsequently collapse like a rag doll onto my ankle. Awe.so.moe. Twisted ankle, looking like a fool. Strike 2.

Bad Luck #3: The dark floor…

I get home to a very sympathetic girlfriend who I recall the story for while making myself a sandwich. Then I notice it. The floor around the sink is dark… We have this “acid stained concrete” in our kitchen. It looks cool, but when it gets wet for a long time it goes dark. Ah crap. SOMETHING is leaking. I open up the cupboard under the sink, which contains a small but very effective geyser.  Yup, the floor is wet. The geyser, or one of it’s affiliated pipes, is leaking. Luckily this is Pam Golding’s problem, but I still need to make sure I’m around to see some plumbers crack.

I thought it came in threes?

Bad Luck #4: What were *you* doing in Jan 2004?

In December 2003 I decided I had had enough of the corporate world and wanted a break. I took 6 months off. I arbed around and generally bummed off my savings. It was a good thing. I learnt a lot of good life lessons in that time; like how to make 2 minute noodles interesting 4 days in a row.  SARS however doesn’t like the idea that I went from being a regular salaried employee to unemployed for 6 months and then back to employed. This isn’t such a big deal since all I have to do is fill in a form and send it to them, but it makes me stress over whether or not they’ll believe me or hassle me for more proof that I did nothing; which as you can imagine, is hard to prove.

There is actually something else, but I’ve decided to leave it out. It has to do with the reason why my fan belt is probably missing and, in the letter that I am writing to a particular company whose fault I believe it is, I have said I will not mention their name anywhere if they take swift action. I don’t even expect them to pay for the fan belt.  If however they decide to not heed my call I will come down upon them with a vengeance that… well, it wont be nice.

lovely.

j.

Another successful GeekDinner is in the bag…

Last night around 70 of Cape Town’s coolest geeks converged on Krugmann’s in the V&A Waterfront and ate, drank and discussed geeky things like wireless meshes and selling wine on the interwebs. I’ll leave it up to more neutral people to say whether or not it was a success but I certainly enjoyed myself.

David Carman spoke about building a wireless mesh in Scarborough… his talk was excellent… I’m very interested in the technical elements of wireless communications but the thing that “got” me the most was the fact that they are providing internet access to kids in the township. I don’t care what authority you’re from and what laws you want to twist to “get your way”, but if you want to take Wikipedia away from underprivileged kids you’re going to have to do so after ripping the CAT5 cable out of my cold, dead hands.

Next up was Ian Gilfillan who essentially told us that, even though he is now an International MySQL superstar, he didn’t get rich doing so.

Alan Levin talked about peering… Alan is a great speaker who did his best to ignore Wizzy’s heckling. It’s comforting to know that we should soon have cheaper international bandwidth in this country, and morally reprehensible (what’s new?) that the government and Telkom have set it up in a way that it’ll still cost an arm and a leg because some irrelevant middle man has the “rights” to sell it at some archaic price as previously defined by Telkom. BMW X5 much? (Alan, did I get the corruption chain right?)

Johann Wegner of GetWine.co.za (our fabulous wine sponsor) was up next and talked about the challenges of selling wine online. His sidekick (what was his name), Sam Paddock, gave a more in depth technical discussion about how they actually do it. Very interesting…

Finally we had Aslam Khan telling us how wonderful PHP and Pretoria are. Actually, he talked about Behaviour Driven Development… a talk which for some reason the two non-technical people I brought along seemed to enjoy the most… perhaps because he used the dog.getBody().getTail().wag() vs dog.expressHappiness() analogy. Aparently non-techies like dog analogies.

I’d like to personally thank:

• You guys for rocking up!
• Antoine for hooking us up with sound and a projector.
• SimplyAV, an excellent AV company that I would seriously recommend you contact if you need AV - (021) 782-5100.
• GetWine for providing the Wine.
• Krugmann’s for hosting us.
• The other GeekDinner organisers.

Finally, just a little punt. These things don’t organise themselves and we’ve got it to the point that it’s actually quite easy to put together. PLEASE, if you have any inclination for helping us organise a future GeekDinner, sign up to the GeekDinner Planning list. We don’t mind if you lurk.

There’s also the announce list which everyone should join so that you know when these things happen. The list traffic is extremely low, about 1 email a month. Finally, for those of you who have succumbed, there is a Facebook group.

Cheers, see you at the next GeekDinner.

ATH,

J.

ps. The photos and the very bad recording (something went wrong) will be available some time over the weekend.

Hi there

It’s me, Jonathan. We haven’t talked in a while. Sorry ’bout that, been a bit busy you know. Yah, me too.

GeekDinner time is drawing near and the registrations are slowing growing.  We still have some space, so please blog about it and invite your friends and your mom.

We’re also in need of a projector and screen, so please if you can organise one please let me know.

ok, the free alcohol story. The other day we went to the bottle store to buy some wine for dinner. As we walked in we were greeted by a promo girl holding two empty Stella beer glasses. Before I could avoid her she said “Hi, we’ve got a promotion on, if you buy this case of beer we give you two free beer glasses!”.

I’m not a big beer fan… I was not taken. Then I noticed there was a promo-boy(18 year-old PFY) standing to my left with a couple of Jack Daniels bottles. I asked “What’s your promotion”. “Oh, I’m just giving away free alcohol” he said with the wryest smile an 18 year old can pull off.

ORLY? Awesome… It struck me then and there (not some other time and place because that would be a delayed reaction and I am sharp as a marble) that this kid represented the entire body of marketing knowledge known to man. People like a good deal. Free Jack is a good deal.

I didn’t partake though since it was probably 10am and really, who drinks *in* a bottle store?. BUT, I did buy a bottle of Jack to replace the unopened one that my friend Jan is meant to come collect for services rendered.

Oh, and the spammer. Steinser Training and some guy called Billy Snyman: If I receive repeated emails from you and am unable to unsubscribe then you are a spammer… Telling me that my email address is not in your database of “addresses out of the yellow pages” is not a valid answer. I await Billy’s feeble excuse and I will keep you posted.

lots of live, peach and shabbiness

j.

The 3rd of the new series of GeekDinners is being held at a really great restaurant called Krugmann’s Grill in the waterfront. We still have some space available so sign up on the wiki to book your place.

There have been a number of people who’ve asked me various questions about the geekdinners, so here is my FAQ:

• No, it doesn’t cost anything… you only pay for the food you eat. (there is often free wine).
• No, you don’t have to know linux to come.
• Yes, you can bring your boyfriend/girlfriend.
• No, It’s not a boys club.
• No, you don’t *have* to speak.
• No, it is not boring.

http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/Cape_Town_July_2007

Also, if you want to keep up to date with the GeekDinner happenings, why not sign up to the GeekDinner Announce mailing list

J.