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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the end of last month my direct technical team leader gave his notice. Where I work you’re required to give a calendar month. With that, his farewell was last night and I now find myself in a team that went from 3 to 2. The truly scary thing is that we’ve lost an invaluable resource; someone whose extensive knowledge of the business meant that the huge quantity of technical expertise could be applied rather expertly.

I’ve only been in my position since the beginning of February, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of the systems I admin. Our ERP system is integrated into the business so tightly that it actually requires at least a broad overview of how everything works. This essentially means that I need to learn the business rules that govern the way the systems work internally, if not the technical aspect of the data itself that moves around within the systems. So what we’re losing is someone who has accumulated all that knowledge.

I’m in a rather difficult position now, over the last few weeks I’ve been utterly swamped with work, even opting to work from home on weekends to get some of it done. I believe the other guy in my team might be experiencing something similar. Our work tends to come in waves, unfortunately without more personnel we can’t accomodate the peaks, and trying to replace someone in that position is going to be close to impossible. I believe this is also the reason our team hasn’t been expanded past 3 people, because when we hit dips and have nothing to do the people holding the purse strings wonder what they’re paying for. I shouldn’t need to explain the logic, or illogic behind that particular decision.

So last night as a fit of prescience gripped me I foresaw a few difficult months ahead as more projects get dumped on our desks without the aid. My crystal ball confirms this.

I’m now on standby every second week… oh, joy.

This entry has kindly been sponsored by the Conqueror of Ignorance.

About 6 weeks back I managed to strain the muscle connecting my right scapula to the spine (Rhomboid). A rather painful exercise that has severly hampered most physical activity. The shoulder joint being one of the most complicated joints in the body is highly susceptible to injury and when injured creates a lot of problems. Right now I’ve been unable to ride for long, go do any rifle shooting and gym has also been very haphazard. I’ve been doing about 40 minutes of rehabilitation work on my shoulder almost every day and it’s slowly improving to the level where I can do a bit of gym and some riding without being crippled by pain.

This previous Saturday I went to draw some money out of my credit account. That didn’t go too well as the ATM decided it was hungry and my credit card was the most available sustenance. The only thing I did wrong was to type my PIN incorrectly just once. No grace apparently. So now I have to wait in a nice queue to go collect my new card, whenever its ready that is.

That server I blogged about a few weeks back, well as it turns out I wasn’t entirely correct about its intended purpose. It’s now gloriously serving as a dust collector. Yep, there’s been absolutely no movement on that project, and virtually nothing regarding the other 2 servers.

My job scope is expanding even more as I pick up an increasingly larger number of responsibilities in order to manage to our various application services. I’ve even been shanghaid into some development work, something I’m happy to do, but unfortunately I’m in the wrong department to be doing it as it’s not part of my job function, so I don’t get paid for it.