Category: Aggregate This

Ging!

This evening at the GeekDinner someone pointed out that I haven’t blogged about my cat, and best of all, they weren’t being sarcastic.

So for everyone who’s not following me on twitter, here goes.

just over a month ago someone posted an email to the community mailing list saying that they had rescued a kitten from the train station and asking if anyone had lost it. The cat would end up at an animal shelter if no owner was found and that just wasn’t an option so I mailed the woman and told her that I would take the kitten if nobody had claimed it after a few days.

A few days later we got Ging.

Ging likes to eat.
Ging likes to eat.

Ging is the most precocious cat in the world. She’s tiny but is fearless and wants to explore everything.

Ging is always ready to pounce.
Ging is always ready to pounce.

But Ging is also a lover.

Ging loves things that are tasty.
Ging loves things that are tasty.

But never, EVER, turn your back.

Because the Ging will get you!
Because the Ging will get you!

Ging sits on my lap while I work and lies on my chest while I watch TV. It’s all incredibly cutesy, but I must admit that I’m totally sold on cats now. Dogs are still awesome, but in a very very different way.

As usual you can see more of my photos on my flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbitraryuser/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbitraryuser/

Coffee Filters and Frickin Laser Beams!

I’m always amazed at how difficult it is to get some businesses to actually sell you something. When we moved we lost a box of kitchen stuff. For weeks we searched, convinced that we couldn’t have actually lost it, and equally convinced that the movers wouldn’t have stolen something as arbitrary as a box full of tongs and cheese slicers. The most troublesome loss was the metal filters for our espresso machine.

frikkenlaserbeamsAfter weeks of searching I admitted defeat and decided we’d have to buy replacement filters. I’d bought the machine at @home and every time we’d come across a branch I would ask if they had replacement filters and every time they would say no, but offer to take down my details and call me when they got stock. I did this at about 4 different branches, and after three months of hearing nothing I started returning, weekly, to the same branch in hopes of getting somewhere. Still, 4 months past and I never received a call, not even to say that they were impossible to get.

Our cat loves chasing lasers… Somewhere in the middle of this whole story her laser broke and we were left laserless, which, any cat owner will know, is not a happy place.

I had bought the previous laser for R15 from a street vendor outside Cavendish square. He sold bouncing balls and other bits of plastic whatnots. This was not the pinnacle of retail by any means. Unfortunately he was out of stock but offered to call me when he had stock. I didn’t expect him to… I mean, he’s sitting on a beer crate and has a radio built into a plastic flower blaring badly tuned 5fm. I gave him my number but promptly forgot about our interaction.

2 days later my phone rang. It was the guy from the bouncy ball stall calling to tell me he had lasers in stock.

So, 4 branches and 4 months, weekly reminders and hassling and the big retail store couldn’t even get it right to call me… but a dude sitting on a crate, selling spiderman underpants and cardboard puzzles, called me, knowing full well that the call would cost roughly 10% of the sales price, to let me know he had stock.

I never did hear back from @Home and we eventually found the filters, and all the other stuff, in a box we thought was empty 😉

More Before and Afters

Since we moved in we’d been wanting to buy one of those pine workbenches they sell at places like builders warehouse and do it up for the kitchen. We decided on painting the base in white enamel and staining and varnishing the top.

As you can see, before:
Before

After:
After

I’m quite happy with the difference, it’s made the kitchen feel far more structured.

Visualising the Interest Rate

I though it might be interesting to try and graph the Reserve Bank’s prime rate data… It goes back a long way. I used Python to scrape and collate the data and PyCha to generate the graph.

UPDATE: I’ve replaced my graphs with new versions made by Russell who corrected my original code by interpolating the data correctly over the y axis.

This is the narrow version.

And this is the wide version (click to download the actual 10000px wide png)

Interestingly enough, todays rate cut *was* on that page earlier today, but now I see it’s gone… so I inserted it manually 😉

Odd murmurings about diet.

I’ve been on a pretty strict diet since last Monday and although the goal of the diet is simply to lose some weight I’ve noticed a few very interesting things during the week.

  • Mindset is King. I don’t know what flipped the switch in my head, but I feel ready to diet now. I think this is very much to the “can’t quit until you really want to quit” argument for drug addicts etc.
  • It’s not that hard. I’m not hungry. When I notice myself getting hungry it’s usually less than an hour away from lunch time etc so I just push through till then.
  • I feel better. It’s not that I used to feel bad, but I just generally feel better, less lethargic. I didn’t expect this.
  • Eating smaller portions is a habit you can get addicted to. I used to eat really big meals, now I’m trying to see how little I can eat while staying healthy.
  • It doesn’t take long for your body to adjust… by Thursday I was already feeling stuffed after eating a relatively small dinner.
  • It can be hard to make healthy food interesting but it also gives you the freedom to experiment a lot since you’re going to be having a chicken breast 3 times a week etc. My chef is doing a really good job of trying to keep dinners interesting.
  • I get cravings for massively unhealthy food (think deepfried everything). This is probably the result of my body not knowing what the hell is going on and trying to get me to eat some “normal” food. This will obviously pass.
  • At this point I’m very aware of the diet still, I’m sure that as I carry on it will become “normal” and I’ll stop thinking about it.
  • Saturdays are dietary “off days” and I had a chicken mushroom pie. My lord did it taste good 😉
  • Fruit is pretty good stuff.
  • I’m aiming at a loss of 1kg per week. I lost 2.5kg in the first week. I don’t expect that trend to necessarily carry on into the subsequent weeks, but who knows? I’ll keep you posted.

GeekDinner Stellenbosch

Last night was the first Stellenbosch GeekDinner and I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly because of the venue.

Lovane Boutique Wine Estate was gorgeous and perfect. It’s on the Cape Town side of Stellenbosch so you can get out of the city after work and be sipping wine on the balcony overlooking the vineyards while the sun is still out.

Best of all was the food. A sirloin steak buffet with a mushroom sauce and tons of veggies and a green salad. Dessert was homemade ice cream with chocolate sauce. It was delectable in its simplicity. Something that the GeekDinners have been missing out on since we were at Mell’s Kitchen. The meal was perfectly paired with the bottle of wine had been generously placed on our table by Perdeberg.

Which brings me to a point about food. My partner is a chef. Her life is food and she’s incredibly fussy about getting food perfect… As a result I have eaten some pretty amazing meals ranging from the utterly sublime to french toast.

Perfection turns out to be very hard, even for the simple things. How do you fry a perfect egg? How is the perfect roast chicken prepared?

What any chef who truly knows their craft will tell you, if they’re being honest, is something that any good drummer will also tell you. To really impress, perfect the basics, keep it simple and introduce your own subtle flare to hook the person eating (or listening).

Complicated rhythms that mix 3 time signatures and require super human levels of coordination only impress drumming nerds. Also, making food too complicated before you’ve perfect the basics is like taking part in the 100m sprint before you’ve learnt to walk and too much complexity will just taste like noise to most people, even the “experts”.

Lovane got it right. They got the basics right and they had their own subtle touches which finished it all off nicely. The price was perfect, the venue was perfect. I just need to return to see if their wines are perfect!

If you’ve got a function and need a venue for around 55 people I can thouroughly reccommend Lovane.

There is no cure for stupidity.

A while ago I blogged about a weird comment I had received on one of my blog posts.

In summary, there is an SEO company called SEO Results (aka BizSearch, aka NetAge) that gets its staff to trawl blogs and write comments with the Author URL set to the url of one of their SEO clients.

Author : PMM (IP: 165.146.34.239 , dsl-146-34-239.telkomadsl.co.za)
E-mail : kim@bizsearch.co.za
URL : http://www.pmmproperties.co.za
Comment:
Wow what a difference it looks fantastic, great job done

One would think that after the first run in I had with these spammers they would have avoided my blog?

Anyway, to make sure it’s clear: SEO Results are spammers and black hat SEO idiots… Using them is likely to get you bad mouthed on the internet (like this) and perhaps worse, blacklisted on google.

An online hiatus

For a little over a month now I’ve been compulsively avoiding the time sapping parts of the internets. This isn’t the result of a new years resolution but rather the collective result of being incredibly busy. Admittedly I’ve been on the internet the whole time, but mostly for work or some form of hacking.

My google reader is overflowing, Digg.com could have been down for months, the only blogs I have read are things that someone has specifically asked me to read or randoms that I hit upon while plumbing the depths of python knowledge. Boing Boing, Engadget, DamnInteresting, FailBlog, Icanhas*, XKCD and all-those-things-my-friends-thought-were-mindblowingly-interesting have been ignored… and suprisingly, not missed.

Sure I yearn to know what the fastest SSD in the world is *right now*, or how big the Panasonic engineers have managed to push high contrast LCDs… and about that video of the cop hitting the kid (this happens every few months and causes a flap)… BUT, I’ve realised that it just doesn’t matter… or maybe it does, but not to me… not at this stage of my life.

Perhaps I’m just getting old, but the thing is, this month has passed and I feel better for it. I didn’t plan it this way, but now that it’s happened I get the impression that my little (or perhaps big) addiction to all-things-intertubes was wasting a crap load of my time. I feel good about not knowing. I feel good about the stuff I’ve learnt rather than the drivel I could have absorbed.

In the old days it was still possible to follow the internet… I had more time and the inernet was producing new stuff as a slower rate… but we’ve reached the point where every tom dick and sally has a blog and a phone cam… and is meticulously documenting their lives for the rest of us to pretend to care about. I don’t.

So I urge you. Stop reading my blog. If it’s ever relevant to something you care about you’ll no doubt find it via google… in the mean time I’m just going to upload pictures of my garden and rants about bad web developers.

Over and Out.

Have you seen this video of my cat?