The Ramblings of Octavo

I wanted to wax poetic about Einstein and relative time and amazingly profound things like that, but I’m simply incapable this morning.

There are approximately 24 hours until Ibis and I leave the ground at CT International and I am no longer able to think of anything besides getting away. I think this stems mostly from the fact that in the past 5 years, I’ve had very little in terms of a real holiday. In fact, in the last 3 years I haven’t had anything even resembling a holiday. My productivity has been steadily declining as I become more and more disinterested in my work and enjoy it less and less. I firmly believe though, that this holiday is just the thing I need. I hope to return from it fresh, relaxed and with a much healthier attitutde towards my work. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens I guess. Today is really going to drag…

Well, this will be the last post before we leave, so don’t expect any updates to this blog until the 5th of October or so.

Ok, so it’s currently about 94 hours until Ibis and I hop on a plane for Joburg and then Singapore! W00T

Of course I had a very depressing day yesterday when I finally figured out what I had assumed to be true for the last 3 weeks is not at all true. Friday is not a public holiday. Saturday is. Woe is me. It’s kinda like waking up and thinking that it’s weekend so you can go back to sleep and then just as you’re drifting off with a smile of contentment, you realise that it’s actually Monday and you have the week from hell ahead of you.

Anyway, everything is finally ready for the trip. We have our foreign exchange, I got FICA compliant (so my Credit Card doesn’t get frozen at the end of the month while I’m in Thailand) and everything else seems to be in order. It’s now just a case of waiting for Saturday. Einstein has never been more right about the relativity of time. This week is dragging out like a stoner having his last joint before the bus leaves to his 12 step program.

In other news, a co-worker took a particularly impressive sunset pic recently - check it out

It’s almost unbeliveable - this blog is 1 year old today. I started “Rambling” a year ago with a post called “Ripple Chox and other oddities!”. It started out primarily because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. What was this sudden “blogging” craze and why were so many people jumping on the bandwagon? With very little actual idea about what blogging was I signed up for an account and started what I thought would be a sort of diary. Since then, “Ramblings” has grown into more of a platform for my ranting at crappy service or bad drivers, a place I can tell friends about the goings on in my life, a soap box to preach my more controversial beliefs and somewhere I can share my views on new technology and science.

In this time I think I’ve realised part of why it’s such a craze. It gives people a chance to put their thoughts and feelings down in a completely safe way with as little or as much anonynimity as they wish. For me personally it’s also a great way of keeping friends and family aware of whats going on in my life and what I’m up to. It’s like letter writing - except it’s addressed to anyone who cares to read it.

Many people spend hours working at their blog and they put a lot of effort into it. For me, that takes a lot of the fun out. I worked initially on my blog template and after a few months got it to the format it is now - which I personally find quite attractive. The style of my posts is generally fairly similar - I usually take one or two things to talk about in a post and make the title a silly combination of those idea, but it’s not like I spend hours and hours planning what to talk about. I just sit down and write…

Anyway, I think we’ve gone far enough down memory lane for one day As usual, I’ve got another cool story for you today - this one from ZDNet news… Robots smaller than a human hair.

UPDATE: This is post number 82 which works out to about 1.5 posts per week!

8 days left…

I’m very happy to announce that my brother got engaged last night! I’m super happy for them both and I’m really glad that he finally asked her. Congratulations Melinks!

This should be fun! The NEC in Japan are developing technology for cellphones that will allow you to scan an entire page in a few seconds with your phone… not only that, but the phone then uses OCR to turn the images into a text document. Of course this just means that soon, cellphones will be banned from bookstores
In other news, I finally figured out my problem searching for camcorders is that they’ve got differnent names in America - once I found that out, reviews were easier to come by and I’ve now pretty much settled on the Canon Elura 85 (aka MVX330i).

9 days left

Well it seems that spring has finally sprung! I walked out of my flat
this morning into a warm spring morning and immediately noticed all the
scents from the various flowers that suddenly all seem to be in bloom at
once. Yay! I love the warmer months and the changing of the seasons is
always something special.

If you can’t do without your GPS and cellphone, then the next few weeks may
be painful for you It seems that although the sun is supposedly at the
lowest point in it’s cycle of activity, the few solar storms that do occur,
are biggies. The biggest flare ever recorded happened a little while back,
but luckily the spot was facing away from the earth, however, we are just
rotating in front of the spot now and more solar storms are forecast.
Already 1 satellite has been toasted and the GPS network was affected for a
while. If any more storms occur in the next few days we may experience power
blackouts, disruption of cell networks and GPS failure. You have been warned (Read about it here

Oh - one last thing… Foregin currency for our trip has arrived!!! YAY!!!

11 days left…

P.S. This was meant to be posted yesterday, but the internet wasn’t playing
along. Today the weather was crap all over again…

P.P.S sorry this post is formatted so badly… that’s the LAST time I use the email option to publish a post.