I almost sent a really large dog to its grave last night (no this post doesn’t have anything with my old domain). Coming home along Belvedere road at around 23h30 last night, I narrowly avoided turning a dog into a permanent hood ornament. This was not your average large dog, this was Great Dane sized; it was just big, which is probably the only reason I saw it in time, considering that I’m rather night blind. I guess I have my new glasses, and power steering, to thank for allowing me to avoid this “hazard�?.

To clarify somewhat: the dog was right in the middle of my driving line, which would be roughly the middle of the lane. For those who know Belvedere, they also know that it’s a really wide road, which in this case is really fortunate as I had plenty of space to do a nice little emergency avoidance maneuvre, which only placed me partly into the oncoming lane — I did check for oncoming cars, and I decided to go that way because there was another car behind me to my left.

Regarding the car behind me, he’s really lucky he wasn’t traveling directly behind me; he probably would have been way too close to avoid it in time given the speed of travel and time of reaction required.

I shudder to think what may have happened had I actually hit this dog. I’m pretty sure I’d be rebuilding the entire front end of my car if I had, not to mention the possibility of being rear-ended by the guy behind.

So on a final note, please look after your pets. Maybe I should have stopped to see if the dog had tags, unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind at the time, and I didn’t see any trace of it on my way to work today.

Python.

. Python

Okay… so it breaks when I put a space after “Python”.

It’s case insensitive too :/

For those who don’t believe me, try it yourself; there’s a search box in the sidebar.

“Python “… and now it’s been fixed :)

I’ve been contemplating a domain change for quite some time now, so on Friday I finally asked my host for an additional domain so that I could do so.

So for those of you who read my blog through an RSS aggregator you may want to update your feed URLs (RSS 2.0 – Atom) as the redirection I currently have in place won’t last forever.

A brief explanation for the domain change: I was getting tired of giving people something at cairbre dot za dot net over the phone, so I decided to register something short and easy to say. GG was my first choice, but being a 2 letter domain name it’s already been registered (just 1 of hundreds of 2 letter domains I checked); so in the trendy internet fashion (… yes I know) I stuck an “i” in front and called it a day. To capitalise on this I’m now also using single letter subdomains (http://b.igg.co.za/ – http://m.igg.co.za/ etc.).

Another reason was to create a domain that had no real meaning aside from being my initials in part. The grave domains were mostly perceived as a morbid manifestation of my personality; to me it was just a grave — `.

Regarding my old domain, it’s now essentially been retired, and won’t have anything done to it — not that I really did anything to it anyways.

Otherwise, it’s been quite a while since I last blogged; this should hopefully change as I begin new things. I’m now starting to learn PHP so that I may put together a full content site for myself. There are multiple reasons for this choice, that I’ll explain in following blogs. I may still learn Py7hon (yes, the 7 is intentional; I get an error every time I try submit a post with a t??? — I have no idea…) at some point in the future, but for now PHP is the language of choice for building web applications.

…at least I imagine it will when you go down on a gravel/sand/whatever path. This weekend I only managed to fall, while stopped, at a stop street, in front of people, while about to set off, having to stop quickly… yes. So I fell over because I wasn’t expecting to stop. When you’re a novice with cleats and spd shoes this happens… quite a few times apparently (I’ll have to maintain a count). Even experienced riders fall over if they don’t unclip in time.

So there I was, at a stop street and about to go, but a damn car came down the road, so I had to stop quickly. I didn’t quite get my foot unclipped in time and I fell over onto a grassy/weedy pavement. At least I didn’t fall over the other way into the road. No harm, no foul — I’ll just chalk this one up to a learning experience. Fortunately there weren’t too many people around to witness my “mishap”; and such is the pain of a new learning experience.

So some of you already know that I bought a bike yesterday. This is part of my ongoing lifestyle adjustments to get fit, lose the excess fat, gain muscle, etc. Incidentally today marks my 1 year anniversary for gym, and in that time I’ve gone to gym 214 times… hmmm. This time last year I was a lot thinner, weaker and had absolutely no base level of fitness — quite a lot has changed.

I was originally going to buy an exercise bike, but when I went to sportsmans again they had no stock. So I decided to buy a mountain bike instead seeing as Mike had been bugging me to get one anyways.

So off I went, searching high and low for that perfect bike that would just become a natural extension of my body. In reality I only went to 2 shops :( (Bridge Cycles & Olympic Cycles) — and I bought my bike (GT Avalanche 2.0) from Olympic because Bridge didn’t have my size in the bike I wanted.

To suit my exercise/cardio requirements I bought a heart rate monitor that doubles as a cycling computer and an indoor resistance trainer that I can mount my bike on. In the end I spent more money on extras than I did on the bike itself; I bought cleated pedals and spd shoes to match, shorty bullbars, a spare tube, puncture kit, multitool to adjust everything on the bike, the obligatory water bottle carrier, and a pump. As for gear, I’ve already mentioned the shoes — I also bought some padded gloves since I have problems with pinched nerves in my wrist, hopefully they’ll help some. Now I just need to get the helmet and some sexy emasculating lycra shorts with padding in the seat.

A quick update on my motorcycle. Well I’ve found a guy that does grey imports and sells them straight to the dealers. Seeing as I plan on buying a 400 (which are all grey imports anyways) I may as well get one from this guy. I’ll certainly save a stack of money by not buying from the dealer. I’ve almost got all my money for my CBR, so this long, arduous process is almost at an end…

I’m quite good at waiting. The lab doing the lenses for my glasses doesn’t have stock of my prescription in the country… yay… it took them 2 weeks to discover this. The order has been sent off to a different lab, but who knows how long I’ll end up waiting for them. *sigh*

Here’s an odd site: eNaTiS (Electronic National Traffic Information System). Mike tells me this site has been around for quite a while (I only discovered it today), and just last week their provisional “go-live” date was 27 November or something. It now reads 2 January 2007. This hardly surprises me considering that it’s an initiative being undertaken by our traffic department and if anyone has had any experience trying to book a license… well I don’t think I need to finish that sentence.

Anyways, being able to do things like renew vehicle licenses and book tests online is quite nice. It doesn’t really affect me much as I’ve got both the licenses I’m ever to likely want for the forseeable future, and renewing a vehicle license has been pretty painless; just post them a cheque and they post a license disc back.

The acronym (eNaTiS) strikes me as a bit immature and unnecessary. Maybe it’s just me, but the tacky alternating capitalisation reminds me much of a 10 year old kid’s first adventure into the territory of online chatting where you would often find something akin to _AwEsOmEgUy2000_ or as is the case these days you may replace the letters with the appropriate number to imitate 13375p34k — the ridiculous nature of this trend is of course a post for another day.

From my previous posts and the new personal description on the main page (not seen if you’re using a feed), some have noted that my bike has been sold. Yep, I no longer have a bike. It’s been sold to the guys fixing it and so far they’ve paid for half of it. Once I’ve got the rest of the money and organised the paperwork I’ll start shopping around for a replacement. Got a few in mind, but there’s plenty of other things to sort out before I get back on a bike.

For any bikers out there that might be reading this, 6 Oct is commute on your scoot day. So if you can, ride your scoot to work next Friday. There will also be a lot of people handing out awareness pamphlets across the country, so take a couple and pass them along.

I went for an eyetest yesterday as I felt that it was finally time to get new glasses. The ones I’m wearing should have been replaced a long time ago, and were going to be replaced the same month I had my accident, but I had to use that money to pay bills. Oh well. Now that I’ve got some spare money from my bike I figured I would sort everything out.

So like I said, I went for an eyetest and the news was all bad. Lucky me. Compared to my current prescription (rather old) my right eye hasn’t changed much, however my left eye (always been the bad one) has deteriorated quite a bit. Yay… I already knew this much, though I’d thought it was actually my right eye that had deteriorated more, apparently not. Either way, the new corrective lenses will improve my vision quite a bit over what I currently have. The bad news here is that they will cost me in the region of R2k per set of lenses :(. I’m wanting 2 sets, so it definitely looks like I’m going to spend more money than I had originally anticipated, as I still have to add 2 sets of frames and the tinting for the one set of lenses (prescription sunglasses, I don’t like those polarising lenses).

But all that isn’t really the bad news. The optometrist who was doing my eye test went and called another optometrist to check my eyes out. They both agreed that I may be in the early stages of a degenerative eye disorder where your cornea changes to a more conical shape (Kerataconus). So I’ll be going back in 6 months for another eye test to determine whether or not this is the case. Hopefully it’s just my astigmatism that they’re seeing because it’s present in both eyes :(.

I went to the airshow at Ysterplaat on Sunday; but I didn’t see Mike and Mike and Lucia who were also there :(. The weather was awesome, clear skies with a few wisps of cloud on the horizon and a cool breeze to offset the hot sunny weather beating down on you. For the 7 hours I spent in the sun that day, I hardly got sunburnt, which is fine by me really. I did see plenty of people who looked like tomatoes though — sorry4them.
Overall the airshow was quite enjoyable, however the decision to stand and walk around for 7 hours wasn’t the greatest one I’ve made. This lead to a sore back at some point and even with all my gym it seems that this problem hasn’t resolved itself yet, though the situation has definitely improved.

Fighter jets and attack helicopters have always fascinated me to some extent, so my favourite shows for the day were definitely the Gripen flight runs, the 2v1 Cheetah exhibition and of course the Rooivalk blowing stuff up. I arrived just at the time that the Rooivalk went up for the first time for the day, so when there was a huge concussive explosion and a massive fireball I was a bit confused. More explosions followed and watching the 20mm cannon turning around as the Rooivalk was maneuvering made it pretty obvious what was happening.