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There are countless numbers of things, general things, things required to get one through life, things that you should learn through life experiences… things that people universally suck at. One of those things is learning how a turning circle works. In South Africa we drive on the left side of the road (most people manage to do this), so when entering a turning circle you would look and yield to the right. You would think that this most basic principle, even the most braindead 18 year-old that got his license on his birthday after only a few weeks of instruction and is still stalling on every second pulloff would be able to understand and follow it. Of course, if you thought or assumed this, you would be dead wrong, and have probably by now encountered numerous “close-calls” in one of these.

Another one of those things that people are generally horrible at is posting adverts. Without a set template or requirements to follow people inevitably post pathetic ads with little to no information. This is going to make me NOT want to buy whatever it is you’re selling. I like to save money so I tend to purchase a lot of used stuff and sell my old stuff in various places so this frustration comes from browsing thousands of classified ads. What kind of retard believes that “for sale” is an acceptable title for an advert? I already know it’s for sale, otherwise you wouldn’t be posting it in the classifieds. The title is meant to be briefly descriptive to catch the attention of the reader, it should be relatively simple to figure out what to use; here’s a hint: the item/product name is a good place to start… “car for sale” or “Ford for sale” is equally as useless when browsing vehicle classifieds thought the latter is marginally superior.

Following the title is generally the body of the ad. If you’re selling a vehicle there are a bunch of standard things that people ALWAYS want to know. Mileage… the number of people who leave this off a vehicle ad is absolutely staggering. The other obvious things would include: engine capacity, service history, life on wear and tear items (tyres, brake pads, etc.), modifications/additions (if you’ve ripped a R20k sound system out and left holes everywhere I want to know about it), location (seriously…), damage (accident or otherwise), finance situation (if the bank owns your vehicle, it changes the nature of the deal), colour (though I hope you included pictures), even the reason for sale and a plethora of other things. With regards to service history, more info than just FSH is always nice. Such details as: what was done in last service (I don’t consider just an oil change a service), and how long since the last service (if the vehicle is 500km from its next service, again, this changes things). Another thing, if you’re only going to include a photo that’s blurry, scratchy, overexposed, taken at night with no flash, pulled off the manufacturers website, or so tiny that I need to expand the thing to 500% size just to make the basic shape (since you’re certainly not getting any detail doing that), you may as well not bother in the first place.

On a related note, buyers suck, and the majority are completely unreliable. People apparently don’t know what a promise means. Promising to buy something does not mean: “I like the item and I’ll definitely take it today, but I’m not going to get back to you”, “I will only have the money in 3 months time and I may buy it then so please hold it till then and turn away legitimate buyers”, “please hold the item for me while I look for a better deal”, “please meet me at (location) but I’m not going to pitch so enjoy wasting your time”, or “here’s my fraudulent cheque, please hand over the item before it bounces in 10 days time”. Promising means that you’re on your way with cash in hand, or you’ve EFT’d the money already and you just need to collect. After having experienced all of the above, my standard policy is pretty much: the item goes to the first person to pony up the cash. In general I believe it’s the buyer’s responsibility to collect the item when it’s not being shipped, though I will do face-to-face meets at a common location on occasion. However, expecting me to take 2 hours out of my day and do a 100km round trip to drop off a R200 item clearly indicates that whatever it is you’re smoking has had quite a massive effect on your cognitive abilities. Either that, or you were born stupid.

This post is sponsored by all the morons who abbreviate the word “advert” to “add”.

Where you get the urge to cut someone’s face off and then feed it to them on buttered toast. Yea…

I bought myself a new gfx card and Dragon Age for my PC and my whole weekend disappeared. I remember now why I quit gaming. At least I still managed to get my washing done and feed myself though not much else. Depending on your definition, overall I had a rather (un)productive weekend.

I’m not sure I should be, but I’m quite looking forward to Mass Effect 2 now. I envision many bleak weekends to come.

I’m also trying to get through my pile of books and I obliterated the previous weekend doing that; currently on book 3 of 7 out of the series I’m currently reading. Also have about 10 others in a different series.

Vice?

Thinking, challenging, wondering… wandering. Twists and coils. Making the seemingly impossible, possible. Something originally lost, that intangible, undefinable, visceral entity that draws ever closer, taunting, tormenting. This… and more.

With the weather well and truly warmed up, so comes with it the usual night life that stays hidden in the colder months.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been plagued by hordes of what I assume are your garden variety crickets (pictured above). While the one if the photo is pretty small, I would say they probably grow to about three times that size, assuming I don’t kill them first, and kill them I do. Lately it seems that a whole bunch of these infernal buggers have found their way into my ceiling, and they can certainly make quite a racket >_<. I’ve been quite tempted on occasion to toss a “bug bomb” in the ceiling and get rid of them permanently. However, I’m quite partial to having a ceiling over my head, one that is not on fire that is. On some nights I might splat 10 of these things in a single night while they’re hopping around my apartment trying to find some dark and obscure corner in which to camp and annoy the hell out of me. Also, because my ceiling is always dark this seems to confuse the crickets in there, so I will often hear them at all times of day. My solution thus far is to empty half a can of Raid/Doom/Target/etc. (whatever I have on hand) into the ceiling. This will usually shut them up for the rest of the day.

While on the subject of critters, this is what I spotted cruising around my apartment the other day:

It seems I also have quite a spider problem since I murder spiders on fairly frequent basis. This one pictured above is of the Platyoides genus (not sure which species and I don’t really know my spiders), more commonly known as a scorpion spider. Google is decidedly unhelpful when trying to find some more info on this thing. Either way, it looks like it’ll hurt if the thing bites me, so I decided to test some theories about matter occupying the same space at the same time.

Fortunately another warm weather critter that hasn’t made an appearance in force yet are mossies. Hopefully they stay away for a long time yet.

Also, it’s been a while since I’ve been visited by a Parktown Prawn, so no photos there. Given that I live just down the road from Parktown, I do get them hopping around my apartment from time to time. Here’s a few choice quotes from the wikipedia article for the Parktown Prawn:

The Parktown prawn is one of the larger insects found in Johannesburg homes. A large specimen may grow to be 10 cm or more, with long whip-like antennae extending to 5 cm.

A large specimen can jump more than metre high.
The strong exoskeleton of the Parktown prawn makes it exceedingly difficult to kill. They are able to function for a short time when decapitated, and are less susceptible to insecticide than most other insects^{[citation needed]}.

The Parktown prawn is renowned and feared for its ability to jump long distances when threatened (they tend to jump towards you).

I fondly recall my first encounter with one of these genetic aberrations. At the time I was watching something on my PC and was being bothered by some random clicking noise in my apartment. Upon turning my light on I quickly discovered what the noise was. It was the carapace of one of these ghastly creatures hitting my tiles (apartment is tiled right through) after a jump. I can attest to the fact that they can jump over a metre high, as I was visited by one of those massive 10cm monsters that was doing exactly that. While wiki has a clichéd [citation needed] tag against the invulnerability of these things, I can recall quite clearly trying to use a ton of insecticide to make it stfu. In the end I had to pulverise it into a smear with my shoe; which I might add was no easy task either.

Lastly, my finger was the only thing I had handy for size comparison when taking the above photos. Maybe I’ll upload a pic of my finger next to a R5 coin or something.

So, just a few things to catch up on over my extended blogging hiatus.

I got a new bike back in June. A 2007 Triumph Daytona 675 triple in tornado red, which I picked up with only 1350km on the clocks. I then proceeded to crash it not even a month later at Zwartkops in turn 2 when I washed out my front tyre.

I went for a few months wondering why the bike was riding so badly. I eventually got annoyed enough to take it to a bunch of track specialists and drop R1600 on having my front suspension rebuilt. As it turns out my one fork had way too much oil in it and was causing hydraulic lock when under compression which results in no damping… so I may as well have not had suspension at all it was so bad. Quite likely this is what caused my washout with the front.

Next up: I bought a bow back in February and have been shooting on and off when I get some time. It’s a 2008 Diamond Marquis single-cam bow. It’s a superb hunting bow and can be cranked up to 70lb draw strength; I’m currently only running 60lb because I fatigue far too quickly with the thing. I’ve only got a basic sight and stabiliser, but the bow is more than capable of dropping a Kudu bull provided I use the correct arrows.

Also I decided to take up climbing. For now I’m only doing wall climbing out in Kya Sands once a week really, but I’m quite keen to get going with some outdoor rock climbing. Even so, I’m thoroughly enjoying the indoor wall climbing and as a result I decided to start purchasing some kit for myself a few weeks back. The first thing I started with was obviously a chalk bag and some chalk; the difference this makes is astounding. The next purchase was proper rock shoes, and compared to the rentals, the difference is like night and day.

Well, that’s it for the expensive hobbies of which there are quite a few it seems.

In other news; I’m still at the same company who is actually sending me for a bunch of training next week. I intend to go for as much training as I can over the next few months courtesy of my company. The handy thing is as part of our Enterprise Agreement with MS, we get training vouchers, which I plan to use and abuse as I’m aiming for all my certs. For now I’m going after my MSSQL2008 MCITP in DBA. Afterwards I would like to go after the developer and business intelligence ones as well. Unfortunately we have a ton of really high profile and urgent projects going on at the moment and a few extras coming very soon, so time constraints are going to be a limiting factor as always.

Not much has changed with regards to the work situation. I work in a team of 3 supporting a massive host of systems, and given the one guy is very very new we’re generally stretched thin. Good times; at least it’s better than being twiddling your thumbs and being bored all day at work.

In my attempt to resurrect my original blog (http://b.igg.co.za), I completely trashed the thing. Fortunately I was able to extract the DB after a ticket to my host was logged, whose PHPMyAdmin interface was conveniently broken. Given how little I pay for my hosting, it came as quite a surprise when the issue was resolved within 15 minutes of my query. With DB in hand, I loaded XAMPP on my laptop and had the whole thing up and running in a semi-working state within 30 minutes. This allowed me to extract all my content and pull it across to a wordpress.com blog I’d just created. As it turns out, free blog hosts aren’t really as free as they advertise. They like to hamstring you as much possible so you’ll eventually relent and pay for all the extras which allow you to customise your blog to your liking. So I switched back to using my own host, which was quite frustrating, that is, until I discovered my host allows PHP exec, enabling me to untar stuff on the server rather than upload 10 million tiny files using ftp (PITA) without requiring ssh access.

Other things. I moved my blog permanently to my primary domain rather than sitting off a sub-domain. I also installed a nice theme with pink undertones to go with the tone and style of the blog. Though I doubt anyone will care since I already assume the majority of the people who read this blog use my feed anyways.

And so… I continue.

It’s certainly been a quite a number of months since I last blogged, and I had the good, wholesome intention of it being many more before I resumed blogging assuming I ever did resume. However after some prompting from various sectors — most recently a rice-picking kung-fu practioner of various and extreme talents with a delightful penchant for attracting racial stereotypes upon which I can piggyback — I decided to resume blogging. For better or worse, this is what I’ve decided and it got me thinking about why I originally started this blog.

The original catalyst as I recall it was the untimely demise of my first motorcycle and the ensuing rigmarole I went through as a result. 4 years and 4 motorcycles later, here I am resurrecting a portion of my public persona, the surface machinations of my life, which I believe people might be interested in reading. Even so, I write more for myself than anyone else. It provides sort of catharsis for me, and this blog is merely a facilitator for that. In the end, my more serious writings I write only for myself and maybe, just maybe one or two others who I trust, absolutely.

…a special someone that I would write a fascinating and enthralling entry. Then I forgot… oops.