And boy, is it nice and brisk!
In Lloydminster, it’s just gone 10 a.m.
February 8th, 2010Best firewall ever?
February 1st, 2010I got this in email. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but it made me smile:
1. One human cell contains 75MB genetic information.
2. One sperm contains a half of that; that is 37.5MB.
3. One ml of semen contains 100 million sperm.
4. In average, ejaculation lasts for 5 sec and contains 2.25 ml semen.
5. This means that the throughput of a man’s member is equal to (37.5MB x 100,000,000 x 2.25)/5 = 1 687 500 000 000 000 byte/second = 1,6875 Terabyte/secThis means that the female egg cell withstands this DDoS attack at 1,5 terabyte per second, and only lets through one(!) data package, thereby being the best freaking hardware firewall in the world!
The downside of it is that this only small data package that it lets through, hangs the system for the whole of 9 months!
Jonathan Erasmus is a Tomcruise
February 1st, 2010I love awarding this title to someone who kills themselves and sorts out the problem in one move.
On the weekend, a 24-year-old idiot paramedic called Jonathan Erasmus, climbed over a safety rail to take a photograph, after which he fell several hundred metres to his death.
Dumbass Tomcruise.
Honda Jazz 2002 – 2008 recalled
January 29th, 2010Honda SA has announced today a safety recall of the previous generation Jazz to inspect and modify driver door power-window switches that may, in some cases, short circuit as a result of water intrusion into the housing.
(Source: Honda website.)
Apple iPad
January 29th, 2010I’m not going to defend it or blast it. Enough words have already been written about it. What I am going to say is that I like it and I want one. I’ll even get word processor and spreadsheet apps. I don’t see the need for multi-tasking, because it’s not a tablet PC. And I don’t see the need for more than 16GB of space, because as an eBook reader, it’ll be enough. I estimate most books come in at far less than 1MB, which gives me space for 16 000 at least. Wow.
Various thoughts and comments
January 29th, 2010The other day I drove behind a woman driving a Mercedes Benz, and who had two small Dachshunds on her lap, sticking their heads out of the driver’s window. How is this safe?
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I read that Terry Pratchett is a Humanist. I didn’t quite know what this meant, but it appears at first look to cover my belief system as well, so if I were forced to pick a label, I suppose I’d pick this one. I’m not religious about it, if you’ll pardon the pun.
They have a “statement of faith” which reads as follows (my own emphasis added):
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
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On Monday I’m starting on a new project at work, which has a zero margin for error. I’m even getting my own Business Analyst to help me out. We have to extract data from old storage and re-inject it into new storage, so that the old storage can be freed up. Unfortunately, if we miss some data, there’s no back-out / rollback plan. There’s just too much data and not enough time.
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I butted heads yesterday with one of South Africa’s Spammer Hall of Shame, namely Jaco Derksen. I managed to find out that he uses email addresses supplied by fxstyle.net. They claim to have over 300 million email addresses via opt-in services all over the world. I’m trying to follow up with them, but I’m keeping the Internet Service Providers Association of South Africa up to date.
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Yesterday morning I drove to Pretoria in a follow-up trip to last week. First off, I dropped off documents at the Canadian High Commission (hopefully for the last time before we take our passports through), and then I went to the South African Police Services records division to get our Police Clearance Certificates renewed.
Traffic is getting worse. People do not understand what the speed limits are for, and I would have been able to issue several hundred fines in the hour and a half I was on the road, had I been a traffic policeman.
Douglasdale SAPS FTW
January 25th, 2010I’d like to tip my hat to Sibusiso Mtshali, an officer in the Douglasdale Police Station, for taking me through the fingerprinting and form completion for my police clearance certificate. He was fast, very professional, and even took me to the financial officer to pay my R59.
Parking was good, the station was clean (if a little dingy) and everyone was friendly. Even the drunk criminal suspect who was shuffled past me during the hand-cleaning process smiled and waved, but that was possibly coincidental.
Thanks for making an unpleasant task pleasant.
My iPod turns five this year
January 20th, 2010I am impressed. I have the 60GB iPod Photo. I got it in 2005 with a Firewire connection, and it’s still going strong. Impressive.
What I did on my day off (Part 4)
January 20th, 2010Yesterday I took a day of annual leave to sort out some issues pertaining to our upcoming emigration.
Stage 4: The medical examination
After spending half of our morning in Johannesburg, and the other half in Pretoria, with me driving through a construction site known as the N1 / M1 freeway, dodging idiot drivers, it was time for M to drive to Rosebank for our medical exam.
We got to the doctor’s office for our appointment, at 2:30pm. There were more forms to fill in, including a consent form to test for HIV. This is standard practice, and I’ve signed many of these before. See, in SA, we have a reasonably high infection rate, of about one in four people. It’s fine to have it, but Canada (nor the USA, nor UK) will not let you live there if you’ve got it.
But because of the stigma around it, you need to give permission to the doctor to inform insurance or immigration departments that you’ve got it, and if you don’t sign, you won’t be allowed in.
Neither of us has HIV, but the point is that if you want a better life in another country, your chances are severely limited.
Forms were completed, the doctor called us in, and we had a long chat. This guy is on a very short list of two doctors in Johannesburg that sign off medical exams for potential emigrants. That sort of job would drive me mad, but anyway. He was very chatty, and I think enjoyed the fact that one of his patients was a doctor too.
There was the obligatory poking and prodding (and one particular moment that shamed me), and it was over, bar the drawing of blood. I didn’t slap the nurse this time, because a) she poked my slapping arm, and b) was actually quite gentle.
Then it was over. Time to drive home and have a few minutes before rushing off to my brother’s house for a family do at 6:30pm.
We only had road one incident, and this was on the way back home. The road we were travelling on has several roads that cross it, but each of those roads have stop streets. You know, stop streets, those intersections where you stop, wait for traffic to pass, and then go?
Not if you’re a taxi driver. If you drive a minibus taxi in South Africa, the rules do not apply. You can kill schoolgirls, you can drive in the emergency lane, you can skip red lights, you can drive the wrong way down a street to avoid having to sit in traffic, and so on. Unfortunately, these bad habits have spread to other drivers. It’s chaos.
As we were driving down the road, moving fairly slowly because it was rush hour, a taxi, who was crossing over the road without waiting, tried to drive across the road in front of us. So we cut him off, and he had the nerve to shout, “Jou ma se poes.” I’m not going to translate it, because it’s dirty. The comment, not … actually, never mind …
Stage 5: None of your business
There is no Part 5 for the blog, because family time is private. We only got home at 11pm though, so it wasn’t too shabby.