Cliché

That’s right. Not only do I have a camera, I also have a mirror.

I took a bunch of photos over the holidays, but didn’t post them regularly. Now I have a backlogue of pictures to post that has left me feeling so overwhelmed that I just stopped taking photos.

I’ll slowly post backdated pics until all the daily photos I took are online.

After that, normal programming will resume

The reason nothing has appeared here for some time is because I’ve diverted my spare-time energies to creating this sort of thing.

Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

All manner of people are impressed, and want me to throw together Baby Shower Invitations and Wedding Thank You Cards. I’m more interested in creating things involving human ears, toilet bowls, and chunks of meat –  but I guess I’ll have to postpone the surreal for later.

I should start charging for the cutesy stuff.

If you think you deserved an invitation, and didn’t receive one (and you are actually in the right part of the world to join me on the day) let me know. You too could be celebrating my 30th birthday in juvenile-jumping-castle style!

Hunchwrist Before

Hunchwrist Repairs

While pregnant with Jethro, Angie developed a weird growth in her wrist. Officially it is known as a ganglion cyst, but I took to calling Angie “The Hunchwrist of Randpark Ridge.”

So far, we’re still married.

She was admitted to Linksfield Park Clinic on Thurday to have the cyst removed. They insisted we get to the hospital at 6am, but only wheeled Angie into surgery at 2pm. She was out of surgery at 4pm. By the time Angie had eaten something and was dressed (more difficult with only one functioning arm) it was rush-hour. Almost two hours driving to get home. Bah!

The whole day was used up waiting for a 2 hour procedure. Surely the hospital knew which operations it would be undertaking during the day, and the approximate time each procedure takes? Surely such a schedule gives an indication of when a particular patient will go under the knife? Surely it is unreasonable to tell everyone to get to the hospital by 6am, especially if you know you’ll only deal with some of them in the afternoon?

We could try complaining, but one worries that they will spitefully remove the entire hand, instead of just the hunchwrist. The medical industry really is the most peculiar service industry out there. I think it has something to do with them referring to their clients as “patients,” and assuming patients are patient and don’t mind waiting.

Hospital Observations

Although I wasn’t the patient, I still had to do a lot of waiting around at the hospital. To pass the time I watched people enter the foyer and I drank a little too much coffee. Combined, these elements inspired me to write about these people on my cellphone in real-time. The transcript of what I wrote is reproduced below, edited only for spelling and grammar.

It comes across a little scathing, I think. I blame the coffee.

We really are just glorified hairless monkeys with technology.

The guy who just walked in, with the yellow writing on his T-shirt and the tattered jeans, walks with a funny gait. He thrusts his chest out too far, making him seem over-balanced and top-heavy. Or is he overbalanced because his stomach reaches out as far as his chest? He holds his hands up at the level of his chest, and flaps them around limply, bending at the wrists. Obviously he’s strutting, but what’s with the wrists? That doesn’t seem too macho.

Then there are these Eastern European types sitting across the table from me, incessantly talking too loud in a guttural language I can’t understand. The balding man wears a striped T-shirt and shorts, but I wish he’d worn trousers. It is a hospital, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so squeamish, but something  terrible has happened to this man’s legs recently. He’s obviously had those metal pins embedded in his tibia. You know the ones. Those things that stick out of your leg, instead of having a cast. They say the leg heals faster, but it makes you look more like a cyborg.

The wounds are obvious, and he seems to display the bloody gory bits proudly. One leg bandaged, the other not. Just round, dried-blood circles, with a red line joining the dots. A fleshy dot-2-dot puzzle. Join them up in order and you get a zombie!

He talks to his mother, but she doesn’t have any ghoulish markings on display. They quiet down when another couple sits down next to them. The old man of the couple cranes his neck around to the TV mounted on the wall. But’s it’s almost obliquely above him. Not a great angle to watch the cricket.

I wanted to go on about the cricket a little more, and how strange the behaviour of men wanting to watch it is. But my cellphone battery died. This also explains the abrupt ending.

The Waffle Master is finally master of his Waffle Group domain.

Look for the Waffle Group at wafflegroup.com from now on.

Change your rss feeds to http://wafflegroup.com/feed/ or http://feeds.feedburner.com/WaffleGroup

The end.

Apparently, Baltorina’s [jpg] “…make one-of-a-kind collectable dolls that are so lifelike they are often mistaken for real babies.”

Shouldn’t that be “often mistaken for zombies,” because these things seem to plunge quite swiftly, and land hard into the uncanny valley.

More disconcerting images are available at the Baltorina’s home page. Can you tell which is real, and which is the doll?

Another reason, other than scrapbooking, to keep away from HobbyX.

When you search for search, what does your internet search engine search for?

Google is undeniably the market leader in internet search. Surely every search engine, when prompted with this query should return Google as the first hit on the list? Surely, if the search service you ask has the user’s best interests at heart (those are your best interests), this is what would happen?

With the possible exception of Google, that is. By entering your search for search into Google, you obviously already know about them. To serve their users optimally, they should tell them about other search engines.

I decided to test my hypothesis — search engines have their users’ best interests at heart — by checking whether they tell me about Google. More importantly, Google had to be the first hit (after sponsored ads, if any).

Method

Starting with Google, enter the search term “search engine” in the search dialogue box. My starting point was Google.co.za

The first hit on the page (that was not a sponsored link or advert) should be followed. Assuming the link takes one to a search engine site, the term “search engine” is entered into the newly discovered search engine’s dialogue box.

Repeat the above steps until a stable pattern emerges, or until one is returned to the starting point (in my case, Google.co.za), or until a site is returned that has no search input box.

Results

Google.co.za -> Search Result
-> Altavista.com -> Search Result
-> Search.com -> Search Result
-> Altavista.com -> Search Result
-> Search.com -> Search Result

Stable pattern established.

Conclusion

WTF? Search.com is a meta-search engine, so it just spat out Google’s search result. I suppose, arguably, arriving at Search.com is arriving at Google + others. But Altavista? Who uses Altavista these days? I can hardly believe it still exists, so what’s going on here?

Addendum

Repeating the experiment, but searching for “search” instead yields this:

Google.co.za -> Search Result
-> Yahoo.com -> Search Result
-> Google.com

Hooray! My faith in the intertubes is restored.

It would seem that I may have been going about this whole “life” affair the wrong way. The curious thing is that if I really think about it, I’ve been aware of this fact for a long time. Yet I persist in ignoring the obvious. I persist in following some sort of path which seems to be the pragmatic choice, or at least my notion of what the pragmatic pathway is.
The pathway is really a load of crap though. It is a pathway of fear, uncertainty, and doubt: also know as FUD. FUD is a marketing or sales strategy, used to disseminate negative and vague information on a competitor’s product. I shall return to this concept of FUD shortly.

There are a few basics that are required for life. Breathing, eating, drinking. That kind of thing.
Most of the time these things are not free. If corporations or governments could figure out how, they’d charge for the air we breathe. That really seems to be the only thing on the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that we don’t have to pay for. To get food, drink, and shelter, we need money. To get money we need to do something that other people find valuable enough to pay us for.
This is an inescapable fact, regardless of where you fit into society.

On leaving high-school it became necessary for me to decide how I would maintain my livelihood. I looked at what was on the market and I saw competing products.

1. The arty/journalistic writing career
2. The technical/engineering/science career

I liked both products, and could see myself putting either product to good use, but I liked the look of Product 1 more. It seemed more free-flowing and unrestrained. Bohemian. Non-conformist. Quirky. Bizarre. A generally better fit for my many oddities and eccentricities. That was my perception. I was more in the target-market for Product 1 than Product 2.
That is not to say that Product 2 did not appeal to me. It involved gadgetry, and machines, and clever mathematics. Problems and solutions. Technicalities. High concept. The deceptive allure of intellectual snobbery.
Even then it was clear to me that Product 1 was like a perfectly fitting tailored jacket. Product 2 was a jacket bought from Markhams. Taken in isolation, the Markhams jacket looked pretty stylish on me. Compared to the tailored jacket, it made me look like an apartheid government official.

I chose Product 2 because of the FUD surrounding Product 1. It was really convincing. I thought it went a little like this:

• Writing for a living may sound romantic, but you’ll never actually get anyone to pay you to do that
• If you don’t choose Engineering, you’ll end up homeless, hungry, and begging on the streets, because no-one will give you a job just writing
• Even if you, through some sort of highly improbable chain of events, manage to trick someone into actually paying you to write things, they won’t pay very much. Nor will you have any form of job security
• Any literate person can write. Paying someone to write is like paying someone to breathe
• Engineering is safe. Engineers are in demand. Engineers get jobs. Engineers get paid well.
• Have you ever heard of a struggling engineer? But you don’t have to look too far to stumble upon a struggling writer

There might be some truth to the FUD, but it really was a skewed, slanted view of reality. There are plenty of successful writers, journalists, and novelists out there. There are plenty of careers in which writing is a core function. These writers are not starving and homeless.
Engineers do get paid better than writers, on average. This wasn’t relevant to me. My concerns were about getting enough money to live comfortably.
The FUD tricked me, but where did it come from?
I generated it myself. Strangely self-sabotaging.

Ever since embarking on my chemical engineering career path, I’ve searched for ways to make writing the focus. I haven’t actively acknowledged this. I’ve pretended that writing is just a hobby I have. I keep tricking myself into believing that I really want to be a chemical engineer, with some writing on the side. I’m not tricking myself any longer.

Over and over I stray back to writing, but cloak it in a technical or engineering guise.  I gravitated to the Introduction to Environmental Engineering course. I said it was because I wanted to be a bunny-hugger. To an extent this is true, but the real reason was because it involved essay writing (a very rare thing in the engineering syllabus).
Late, I registered for a Masters degree. Ostensibly to save the environment again. Actually because it would involve writing a lengthy manuscript dissertation. Writing something that long would prove that I could which would leave me with no excuse to actually write a book.
Never finished the damned thing, but that’s not the point.

Even before I embarked on the engineering career, there were other signals I ignored.
On the last day of high school, while collecting farewell signatures, my English teacher inscribed on my shirt, “Hope to see you in print.”
I’m finally sharing that hope, although it may be ten years later than she expected.