This is in response to letter to our local newspaper, which can be found here. This seems to be a somewhat typical letter of religious intolerance in the local area of the Eastern Cape. It is not entirely surprising that the author does not give their name, but instead calls themself “Celibate by the Grace of God”.
This is a first
I’m sitting in the East London airport, waiting for an emergency flight out to Johannesburg so that I can spend the next four days trying to recover the companies domain controller. The outsourced technician that we have at the head office has been working on the server for two days, no luck thus far. This is after the server spent three weeks effectively down during the Christmas period, loosing all inbound emails for that period.
Getting back into it
I had a short chance at work today to write about 500 words on my upcoming campaign. Mostly simply description for a new location that my players will be travelling too, and with it, some additional fluff for my campaign world.
It’s amazing how difficult it can be to start writing again, especially when you are wanting to take an existing topic, and remake it into something vaguely familiar, but new and exciting. The concept is to entice the players into trying to find out more about the game world itself instead of doing the usual search and destroy.
As such, I am hoping that the players will find reason to research the new plane, called the Burning Realm, and in doing so, learn something more of the game world that they are playing in.
Anyhow, I’m heading off home now, and this evening is mega-burgers at Inkwenkwezi (pictures will follow). This Saturday is my 31st! Gads getting old! And then it’s time to start attacking the campaign will full flourish!
Cheers!
Nothing Interesting
I had one of those days today where nothing interesting happened - as in Chinese interesting - as in nothing bad happened today. This is the last week of vocation before the vacation begins I suppose, most of our suppliers and support personel are already goofing off somewhere other than the office.
Three more days and then vacation. Seriously looking forward to it. There is so much I still need to do, and I need to get my lazy ass into gear and do it!
Banzaaai!
Better
Things are looking better and my life seems to be getting back on track. The greatest stressor in my life is finally becoming a better and better process. I’m actually quite happy and content for the first time in a good few months!
Yay me!
Renewal
It’s been a harrowing period in my life, and I really shouldn’t down play it. There’s been enough drama to make an ongoing story line for just about any soap opera out there, and some of it has been really harsh, and good friends have been lost to bitterness and jealousy. Pride can be a real arsehole.
Regardless, things are on the up and up. As the year has gone from bad, to worse, to perhaps more than is sufficiently fair(1), things are finally starting to come out and improve, no matter how slowly it may be. So with a little bit of hope that’s left, we start the rebuilding again.
Work, as always and as usual, is a pain in the arse, but it is getting better. Within the next two to three weeks things should be where they are supposed to be, and the work load will evolve into maintenance and improvement, instead of complete abandonment of sanity and fire fighting.
So here goes. Hopefully this will be the first post of a more reliable babbling of thoughts and ideas and such. I will probably focus on three things, geekery, roleplaying, and my home country, South Africa.
Cheers.
(1) There were enough bad things that happened to me this year that I began to wonder if maybe there was a god up there and that he really didn’t like me, or something.
Mobile Means Mobile
Yesterday evening I had a doctors appointment. While I’m in the consulting room going over my blood results for my latest diabetes check up, I get a call from the office. I put it to voicemail and finish my appointment.
Heading outside, I climb into my car and call the office. Turns out that the e.net solutions suite for our Syspro server have stopped responding to web requests. Oh dear - I now have a choice, spend twenty minutes fighting traffic back towards the office, then spend another twenty minutes remoting into the servers and restarting them, and then fighting another hour to get back home.
So instead I hop out the car, grab my notebook from the boot, dial up my Hyperlink Mobile account, connect via the Vodacom / Mobile Internet Solutions deal at 1.8Mbps to the Internet, dial into my Johannesburg VPN server and remotely restart the servers.
While I’m waiting for the servers to restart, I start my car, drop the notebook onto the passenger seat and take a drive to the pharmacy a few minutes away to pick up the scripts that I need. As I pull into the parking lot I notice that one of the servers has restarted (I use a simple batch script which I wrote to continuously ping any IP that I state continuously). While the other machine takes its sweet time to restart, I remote desktop into the finance server and make sure that everything is all up and running, and by the time that’s done, the web server has finished it’s restart. I log in remotely to it and confirm everything is working there.
I contact the office and tell them that the restart has been done, and everyone’s happy again, and I’m the hero.
Mobile broadband is fantastic. It’s just such a pity that it is so expensive in this country. We really need to de-regulate the communications industry - there’s far too much government involvement in it.
Anyway, I thought it was awesome to be able to do this while driving around, so I just thought I’d share.
Theme Song
I now have a theme song. It’s an old song, but it’s apt for the place I am in my life. It’s Nicklebacks Someday.
Crazy Day
This post doesn’t have anything interesting in it, seriously - if you’re looking for something intelligent or insightful, or deep and philosophical, look elsewhere, my brain is out to lunch, and is probably getting horribly drunk on despair and agony, it’s latest ladies of ill-repute. As such, allow me to wax lyrical.
To Kill, or Cry?
I’m having one of those days where one is not sure whether to kill the next person to come within clawing distance or to find a nice quiet corner and curl up, wishing the world away. How many things can go wrong simultaneously to screw up my favourite day - Friday?
And no, that isn’t a challenge to the Universe to try and find out and better my Friday 13th nightmare I had a couple of weeks ago.
I said NO Universe!
