The Ramblings of Octavo

I recently read a very interesting article about a new theory. As you may or may not be aware, I have a semi-serious interest in all things space related and am an avid reader of www.space.com.

You can read the whole article itself here. In case you’re not feeling up to it, I’ve outlined the basic idea below:

Gravity is leaking/escaping into dimensions other than the usual 4[*] we know of, causing gravity to be less effective the further from the source than expected (I know this sounds bizarre, but string theory allows for this). This very neatly explains why the universe is accelerating. Apparently this theory may be testable and if it’s confirmed I imagine it will have quite a profound effect on science as we know it. First, it would explain a whole lot about our universe as well as confirm that there are dimensions other than the 4 we know of and that the graviton particle is a reality.

Interesting…
[*] Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years, you should know that time is commonly considered the 4th dimension

Well, I’ve mentioned my horrid Wireless experience several times and finally I’ve gotten around to writing a post about it. My dearest Ibis has already written a quick post about it (which you can read here) but she didn’t have loads of time to spend on it and I thought I’d give y’all my personal point of view.

Basically after much consideration Ibis and I decided to go the Wireless internet route in a bid to screw Telkom over as much as possible. We phoned around and after one disappointment we had a site survey done on a Tuesday by Uninet. Uninet sent around their technician Carl, who was very friendly and seemed to know his stuff. Carl informed us that there was plenty of signal and that if we signed up, he promised that they could have it installed by that same Friday (promise 1).

Carl invoiced me the next day (Wednesday) R2450 for installation and activation of the service and informed me that provided I got everything signed and sealed quickly, they would definitely have it in by Friday. I assured Uninet that they would have the payment first thing on Thursday morning and that they should proceed with the installation on Friday. The installer (Potjie) then called me and promised that he would be there on Friday morning to do the installation (promise 2). True to my word I paid the full amount by 9am on Thursday.

Friday morning at 11am, having heard nothing I called Potjie to find out what’s going on. I get the tired “sorry, the supplier hasn’t delivered the stock yet” excuse. Promises 1 and 2 broken. Annoyed by the fact that Ibis has now been kept waiting half the day and that Potjie hadn’t had the decency to at least call and tell me, I called Uninet and demanded that they sort something out. Mulweli (one of Uninet’s directors) assured me that Potjie would see me on Saturday morning to do the installation.

Saturday afternoon, Potjie arrives, looks at what’s required and informs me that the distance from the computer to where the transmitter must go up is too far for power over cable and he’ll have to lay a separate power cable as well, which of course is going to cost an extra R400 - R600. Potjie and I discuss this and both curse Carl for not realizing this in the first place. Potjie appears to understand my frustration and promises to get Mulweli to call me on Monday to sort it out (promise 3). He also promises several times to keep Tuesday open for our installation (promises 4-8).

Monday afternoon by 15:30 I’d still not heard anything (promise 3 broken). I called Uninet and eventually got hold of Mulweli. I informed him that as far as I was concerned I had already been invoiced and paid for the installation. That Carl had messed up the quote was not my fault and I expected the installation to go ahead the next day at no extra cost to me. Mulweli grudgingly agreed. I called Potjie and informed him that he should continue with the installation the next day.

20:30 that evening Mulweli calls me and tells me that actually it’s a huge job and can we not go half half on the deal. He says that if I could see my way clear to putting in another R200, everything would be cool. I refused and told him again that I had already paid for the job and I expected it done. Eventually he agreed and said he would call Potjie to set up the installation. By this stage I didn’t believe anything Uninet said about calls, so I called Potjie myself.

Potjie seemed less than pleased to hear from me and when I told him that the installation was to go ahead the next morning he spun yet another excuse about how he would not be able to make it (promises 4-8 broken). I asked him what had become of his previous promises of keeping Tuesday open for me and he made yet more lame excuses. Wednesday was out for us as Ibis couldn’t be home that day, so it had to be Thursday morning. We decided on 9am Thursday morning and Potjie promised no less than 3 times that he would be there at 9am on Thursday morning (promises 9-11).

Thursday morning 9:45am (promises 9 - 11 broken). I have yet to hear a word from anyone. I call Potjie to find out what the hell is going on. Potjie initially pretends not to remember who I am. He then informs me that Stephan is doing my installation and he’ll get Stephan to phone me now and let me know what’s going on.

Stephan calls seconds later and informs me that he’ll be there at 12:00 to install. I told him that he was supposed to be there at 9am to which he replied that he was very sorry about that, Potjie hadn’t told him about any pre-arranged time, but that he would be there at 12:00 to do the install. I then phoned Potjie back and asked him how he could just make and break all sorts of promises without even bothering to call me and let me know about the change of plans. Potjie listened for a minute and then promptly put the phone down on me. I wasn’t able to get hold of him again.

I called Uninet and told them exactly what I thought of Potjie and they apologised on his behalf, but that’s about it. Stephan arrived a little later than promised, but he did call before hand and let me know he was running a little late which I appreciated. It took him several hours to lay all the cabling and neaten everything up, but I will say that he did a fantastic job. Very neat and professionally done.

The actual connection is great! I haven’t had enough time yet to really play with it, but it’s incredibly useful to just be able to get on and grab whatever you need off the net. If you ignore all my hassles with Carl and Potjie, overall things were handled reasonably well. Uninet did eventually carry all the extra costs and I will admit that they always treated me with respect and tried their best to keep me happy.

Anyway - that’s it for now

Phew… I’m glad I got that post behind me — Now I just have to tell you about our weekend trip to Simonstown… or you can check out some of the pictures now by reading Ibis’ post about it here.

Cheers!

Ok, Lea made a fair comment on my last post, but I thought I’d address it in a separate post rather than edit the last one with some silly disclaimer.

No, I am not advocating that you (my loyal and devoted reader) should defraud Google or their advertisers. That would be a Bad Thing. I was not being serious about you clicking on the ads and getting a kickback, but I thought that perhaps it would help people to at least see them and take note, rather than simply ignore them as I (and most people) do. If you read the post carefully you will see that I said I may buy you a cold one, when the cheque arrives in 2050. I think that this should be a fairly clear indication to the few readers I have that not only do I not expect to make any money off Google ads, but if I do, you can be sure I’ll spend unwisely on a night out.

If anyone is anal enough to report that last post to google as a breach of their TOS and google actually do anything about it, then I think I’d probably prefer not to have ads anyway - Adsense if more of an experiment for me than anything else. I honestly don’t expect to make any money off it and I’m actually more interested in seeing what kind of ads it populates my blog with given my varied posting topics.

Anyway, enough said - bring on the google law team!!!

It’s official! I am now a true blog whore. Even though the traffic this blog receives is tiny and no one is ever going to click on an add, I’ve still added Google’s Adsense to my blog in the desperate hope that I might make a few cents.

For my technically illiterate readers (yes Badass, I’m referring to you), every time you click on one of the ads at the top of the page I get paid some insignificant amount. The idea being that with enough clicks you get some decent money out of it. The catch of course is that they don’t send any money until you’ve made about $50, which (realistically) is never going to happen on this blog. Nonetheless I’m not one to be put off by common sense or reality, so I’ve given in to my innate greed and put it up.

In that same spirit of greed, I have a deal for you! Google’s TOS (Terms of Service) state that if I click on the links myself that’s fraud and I’m a bad person… but that doesn’t mean I can’t share some of my profits with all you nice click-hungry readers does it?

So click away at the ads on top and I might just buy you a cold one, when that cheque arrives somewhere in 2050.

Cheers

Before I get into today’s post, please be aware that I will very soon be detailing my entire wireless experience in explicit detail for all you gossip hounds. It’s not pretty and I’m spitting mad at the moment over their pathetic service. Anyway….

On Monday morning I woke up feeling tired and gritty as if I’d been up all night even though I’d had plenty of sleep. Ibis reported feeling the same later on when we talked about it. I got to work and glanced at my watch and noticed that it was wrong. At first I thought my watch must have stopped, but it hadn’t. The second hand was going around as normal. The watch said 3:43am - I have an analogue watch, but I knew it was am as the day hadn’t fully clicked over yet. I thought perhaps the battery was winding down and the watch was loosing time.

I set the watch forward to the correct time and decided that I would soon find out if it was loosing time, since by the end of the day it should be out again. Since then my watch has as usual kept perfect time. It wasn’t broken. It wasn’t the battery and to set the time on my watch you have to pull a pin out quite deliberately and then push it back in just as deliberately to start the hands again. For some reason my (Swatch) watch stopped… and then started again. Even stranger is that Ibis noticed a strange perfectly square set of small cuts on her leg that evening when she had a bath. We both sat and thought about what could possibly have caused such a strange mark, but could think of nothing.

Putting all this together, we could come to only one sane conclusion. On the Monday night, we were abducted by aliens.

I know this sounds like a sensational claim, but it explains everything! The stopped watch, the extreme tiredness we both felt the next day as if we’d been up all night (which obviously we were) and the strange mark on Ibis’s leg. Clearly the aliens must have repressed our memories and I am currently considering hypnotherapy to uncover the repressed memories. If those alien bastards messed with my Ibis, I’ll kick their pervy gray butts back to Sirius!!

Cheers!

No, I’m not being serious about the aliens, even though these strange events did occur as described