This Geek

She was born at 13h36, weighing exactly 3kg. She’s tiny, but beautiful.

I don’t know why, but as soon as I saw my child for the first time, I cried.

I’ve cried at all three of my children’s births. Does that make me a wimp?

I just got home from the hospital where I booked my wife in… to the maternity ward. Our third child, another daughter, will be born tomorrow via C/Section.

It’s quite amazing. Every flippin’ time they put her in the same ward, in the same bed. :p I guess it means everything will be just fine

It’s been 5 years now since our last child. Everything is scary again in that ‘Oh boy, here we go again’ kind of fashion, but at least we know what we’re doing. Well, I hope we know what we’re doing. :p

Running Apple Software Updater (to get the latest version of iTunes), I noticed that Safari is now available for Windows. So, I decided to give it a bash. I mean, why not? I’m bored. :p

It’s cute. It’s got the typical Apple OSX style skin, but I don’t really understand the point. It doesn’t seem like there are any addons for it… like StumbleUpon (which I use quite a lot). Other than that, it seems like a pretty normal browser. Does tabbed browsing… what more do you need? I don’t see any particular compelling reason to us it, quite honestly. Firefox is more than adequate for my needs.

I’m finding a lot of forms that validate email addresses are marking email addresses with a + sign in it as invalid. What crap! A + sign is a perfectly valid character in an email address. I wish people would catch a wake up, and code their validation according to the RFC’s. Argh!

If you weren’t aware, GMail and GMail hosted domains support the use of + signs in email addresses so that you can classify email. So for eg, you can go to a site and sign up for an account, you can set the email as something like: youraddress+sometexthere@domain.com - and you will receive the mail. You can then know immediately where it came from - even if it’s spam, you can know where the original source was.

My ADSL line at home has been dead for the past 11 days now. It took me 35 minutes on hold on the 27th March before I could get through to a call centre agent to log the fault. I started receiving daily 9am SMSs from Telkom telling me that they were “still working to resolve the fault”. Funny though, the SMSs stopped coming through last Saturday, so I’m guessing they’ve closed the call without resolving it.

I escalated the call on the 1 April (April Fool, me!) at 06h33. Yes, in the morning. Funnily enough, I got through instantly.

I escalated again on the 4th April at 06h39. I don’t think “escalating” actually does anything. It certainly hasn’t done anything for me

I tried to get through to help desk this morning. I was on hold from 08h15. I eventually gave up at 11h45. Three and a half hours. On hold. Trying to find out what the fuck is going on with my dead line.

What cheeses me off is that while I can request a refund from Telkom for the down time - I can’t request a refund from Blizzard for the days I haven’t been able to play WoW.

It also pisses my wife off, because she’s been on holiday for the past few weeks, and she was looking forward to finally getting a chance to play WoW for a change. Hahaha. Shoulda known.

I haven’t listened to Marilyn Manson in a long time, so, this morning while at work, I pulled out my iPod, selected the artist, and since I was in the mood for it, just pressed play so that everything would be queued, rather than refining my selection to one of the albums.

A while later, I headed home, so I plugged the iTrip into the iPod, and continued listening to Marilyn Manson. On my drive home, I was contemplating the album art for “Smells Like Children”, which, to my mind is quite garish and ugly, so I was wondering what his usual fan base response would have been to a more artistic type album cover, perhaps something along the lines of an image of stylized hands praying, or perhaps a potentially blasphemous (yet artistic) image of old Marilyn hanging on a cross. Not even 30 seconds passed when all of a sudden his cover of “Personal Jesus” started playing.

Very weird.

So there I was, loafing at home for the month of January, when I receive a call from EDS. They wanted to know if I would go work for them, but back at Mercantile - the place I had left last September.

Tough call really. I was seriously in two minds about it, but I decided to do it after all.

So I’m back, but not quite my old job, thankfully. Still mostly the same people, with a couple of new (EDS) faces. I started last Wednesday, so I’ve basically been there a week. Only a few more months to go before the contract ends. Although the contract that EDS has with Mercantile is ending then, if they choose to renew it, and they ask me to continue, I don’t think I will. I have plans - and I need to use these few months to get them off the ground.

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I upgraded my computer finally. I’m now running a dual core processor with Nvidia 8800GT’s in SLI. Very nice.

Can’t say I’m too impressed with Crysis though. Although it looks very pretty indeed, it runs like an absolute dog. Unreal Tournament 3 is very impressive though. I get 60fps at 1600×1200 with everything on max.