Category: society

Driving to work is stupid

Note: This post has been sitting around in draft form for longer than expected, thus references to dates are likely to have inadvertently been turned into lies.

I conducted an experiment. It’s an experiment I’ve been meaning to carry out for a while now, but it involves getting up a little earlier in the morning than I usually do. Getting up in the morning isn’t something I have a natural aptitude for, and so it is understandable that getting up even earlier than normal was something the core of me abhorred.

On Tuesday this week, I managed to drag my protesting body out of the bed in time to eat breakfast and leave for the office on foot.
I could’ve risen at the usual time and just left for work when I normally do without my car, but then I’d have arrived late. Arriving late means staying late, and since I’d have walked to work I’d be needing to walk back home.
Since I live in Johannesburg, I didn’t feel to comfortable walking home late at night.

I set out into the suburb by taking a short-cut past the dam that my property overlooks, instead of leaving home via the main entrance and walking a circular route to get back to the main road.
Walking on the grass next to the dam, feeling the wind on my face and hearing the birds chirping was something I missed out on while driving. The squeaky noises from the yapper-dogs, who disrupted the serenity with their barking, were less appreciated. The barking soon faded away behind me, and I paid it very little attention.
As I approached the road I noticed a great number of cars parked along-side it. That was my first impression, but I quickly realised that the reality of the matter was not that the cars were parked, but rather that they were stationary. Occupants resigned to their fate of slow, painful progress up the hill to the stop street. Slow, painful progress turning left into the next road, and then excruciatingly slow and painful progress of turning left on to the M5 and trundling along towards the turn-off to the highway. Most cars had only one occupant, and they all seemed so lonely and detached.
I walked passed them all.

Probably it is only fair that I point out how close I live to my place of work. Most people work a lot further from their homes than I do, and so walking to work is likely to impact dramatically on their commuting time.
I live about 3.5km from my office, yet I’ve been driving there every day. The walk took me roughly 40 minutes and, considering my life has lapsed into a somewhat more sedentary style, if I did it every day it would be an excellent substitute for dragging myself off to the gym. Remember that I’d be walking back at the end of the day too.
For those who try to make as much distance between their homes and their offices as possible (probably due to hating their jobs inordinately) the challenge of walking to work is much greater.
Most of those people probably haven’t explored the possibility of driving their vehicles to a certain point, and walking the rest of the distance. How practical that might be will vary from person to person.
Angie has tried it by leaving the car at a conveniently placed shopping centre (positioned where the traffic starts to get unpleasant) and walking the rest of the way to her office[1].

My walk to the office was invigorating. I was outside, in the world. Feeling and experiencing it more fully. I wasn’t enclosed in my personal confinement capsule, detached from other people. I wasn’t able to delude myself that those other people were not really people, but arseholes who conspire to ruin my drive to work by cutting me off.
I couldn’t do this because I walked passed people on the street, and if I wanted I could reach out and touch them (they might have been a bit alarmed by this though). I confirmed their existence as real, living people — not obstacles in my way to my destination. They were the ingredients that added to the richness of my journey.
I could interact with these people. If I said “hello” they greeted me back (sometimes with puzzled looks on their faces, other times with more enthusiasm). Not one of the people I greeted ignored me or showed me the contempt that other drivers showed me when I drove my car.
A white guy walking to work in South Africa is quite a rarity and because of this I had one guy whistle to me from across the road. Once I spotted him, he seemed abundantly happy and waved at me enthusiastically. I returned the gesture.

What a rosy picture I paint. There were a few drawbacks though. Something unavailable to the pedestrian is the driver’s isolation. I’ve just shown how isolation is a bad thing, but isolation also allows the occupants of the vehicle to keep exhaust fumes out of their lungs by closing those air-vents. I could wear a gas-mask with a filter of some sort, but I think people would be more inclined to cross the road to get away from me when I attempt to greet them.
Walking is exercise, and depending on the ambient temperature, perspiration ensues. I forget to apply deodorant at my peril (or possibly everyone-in-my-office’s peril).
Walking hurts the feet, but that’s just because I don’t do it every day. I’m upgrading this experiment to a habit, and so I think my feet will get used to it (although they do ache a little at the end of the day at the moment, and I have a blister).
Pavements and sidewalks are in short supply. Apparently municipalities don’t expect people to walk any where near a road. Roads are for cars, and everyone important has a car, right? There are some pavements scattered about, but the effort to lay pavements has been organised in a very decentralised manner. A little pavement here, and then long stretches of heavily eroded dusty footpaths.
I’d like to say that if more people walked, then more pavements would be laid, but that’s ridiculous since most people in South Africa walk to work, or walk to catch a taxi which takes them to a point where they must walk to work. Understandably, pavements might not be a top priority in South Africa, but maybe they could be nudged up the list a little. Expect more on this pavement issue in a future post.
Smokers stuck in the traffic get nervous and need a cigarette but find they have none left. They might ask you for a cigarette as you walk by. This isn’t really a drawback, but since I’m not a smoker I felt bad not being able to ease their pain just a little.

As with everything, there are positive and negative aspects. My contention is that the positives of walking to work easily trump the negatives. I’ll be walking from now on, unless I need the car to get to a meeting or something, because driving to work is stupid.
You should try it too. Probably walking to work (or taking public transport) will be too much for you to do every single day. That’s not a problem. Try it for one day.  If it works out ok, try it  another day. Set a goal to get to work by alternative means once a week, or once a month.
At the very least, even if you decide not to adopt the behaviour, you managed to experience something different.

[1] I lie. We’ve simulated this when I needed the car and dropped her off at the mentioned shopping centre. The end result is the same though.

On death and social networking

I’ve often wondered about what happens to a person’s internet profiles and presences once the person stops living.
Let’s say Jimbo the Internet User dies. He has a Yahoo! for email, several accounts for on-line forums, accounts for AOL and MSN messenger, and accounts for the social networking site MySpace.

Yahoo! likely have a policy regarding dormant accounts. If the user fails to log in for a certain period of time, the account is tagged as ‘dormant.’ After a reasonable period of time,email in the dormant account is deleted. Perhaps Jimbo’s username is still kept in Yahoo!’s database, but for all intents and purposes Jimbo’s Yahoo! email account is as dead as he is.
Jimbo, being dead, stops posting comments on the Peculiarly Shaped Pieces of Dried Skin Forum. Nobody really notices since people’s true identities are not usually divulged in that kind of environment. If anyone does notice, they just conclude that Jimbo is no longer interested in strangely-shaped, dehydrated dermis (which is true in any case). The same is true for Jimbo’s other fora.
Jimbo stops logging on to AOL and MSN. Most of the people he interacted with here had met him in person, and hadn’t just got to know him through the internet. In all likelihood, these people know he’s dead, have attended his funeral, and are not surprised by his missing buddy-icon.
Jimbo stops logging on to MySpace, and stops adding stuff to his profile or his friends pages. This is where it all goes a bit weird.

Like the instant messaging technologies, people who knew Jimbo in the physical world interacted with him via social networking sites. These people went to his funeral and are saddened by his passing.
Unlike the instant messaging technologies, Jimbo’s MySpace profile is persistent (at least initially, since Jimbo was a very active user on the site). He doesn’t have to log into it for it to still be accessible by his friends and people who knew him. The friends still access his profile, and post public comments to him. They address the comments to him, and some talk to him as if he is still alive.

I hadn’t come across profiles of dead people before now. I’ve speculated about the stuff regarding email, forum, and instant messaging accounts. Thanks to an article in the Mail & Guardian, I am no longer speculating about MySpace accounts. A site exists which commemorates the deaths of MySpace users, and links to their MySpace profiles. It contains obituaries, which are mostly written quite tastefully.
Following links to the deceased person’s MySpace profile is where the oddness ensues. I found people wishing their dead friends a happy birthday, or happy Easter, a year and a half after the person’s death.
I suppose it is a way to express emotions and to be able to “talk” to a dead loved one, even though there will be no response. It feels like there might be, because interacting via MySpace (or Facebook) never required both participants to be present at the same time. Since the messages are visible to the public, it makes it feel like maybe the message will also get to the dead person. It’s unlikely that people would keep sending email to a dead person’s email account because no-one else will see that, and so how could you be certain that the communication ever took place at all. If there is no evidence of the communication, then the grieving party will have to accept more readily that their loved one is physically gone.
The presence of a dead person’s profile just seems to prolong the act of grieving. The profile is still there, just like it was when the deceased was alive. This is similar to the situation of a grieving parent keeping a dead child’s room just the way it was when the child died. Except, in the case of MySpace, the page is dynamic while the child’s bedroom is not. People keep posting to the page, keeping it alive, supporting the illusion that if the page is still alive, so is the person. The bedroom doesn’t do that. The bedroom is trapped in the past, and still a symbol of denial, but it’s quite clear that the living person is missing.
The MySpace profile of a dead person doesn’t show that. Although the dead person never responds, they didn’t respond when they were away on holiday either. Perhaps they’ve just taken a long holiday?

It took a while going through the various MySpace profiles linked to from MyDeathSpace before I found an error message, informing me that the profile did not exist or had been removed.
The profile was gone, in the same way the person was gone. This seemed much healthier to me.

Apartheid Museum

Embarrassingly, it takes an American to get me to visit places in South Africa that I would immediately seek out were I not living in South Africa.

Amanda is in South Africa gathering data for her masters dissertation which, to the best of my understanding, involves interviewing people who have undergone traumatic experiences. I don’t envy her, but I do admire the work she does in studying human trafficking. She is only here for eight weeks, and then back to the States with her information and notes to write up the thesis.

Given this context, it is understandable that Amanda didn’t want to waste time visiting the Silly Buggers Museum (which is unfortunate because I hear that it is very nice). She wanted to visit the memorial to that political system that no-one in South Africa ever agreed with. Funny how a system like that could come into being with absolutely no support. I suppose everyone who thought it was a good idea must have died or emigrated (or both).

If you haven’t been to the Apartheid Museum, and you live in South Africa, I hope your excuse is that you live in Hotazel and have never been to Johannesburg (and only have a vague understanding of the concept of city).
I suppose that’s a little hypocritical of me, considering I visited it for the first time on Sunday and live in Johannesburg. I’ll revise the statement slightly.
After reading this post, I hope you will be making your way to the Apartheid Museum within the next month, provided you live in South Africa and are not holed up in some god-forsaken dorpie in a desert somewhere.

The Apartheid Museum is a beautiful place. Using simple, minimalist architecture it conveys a sense of serenity and peace. Yet there is also an undercurrent of something heavy waiting within. Something these plain concrete walls and tranquil water-features conceal furtively.
As I bought my ticket and entered the museum, a cold foreboding passed over me.

If the architecture of the place doesn’t have an impact on you, then the entrance can’t possibly fail to.
Each person who pays for entrance is given a ticket labelled “White” or “Non-white.” The tickets are handed to you arbitrarily, regardless of your actual genetic heritage. There are two entrances to the museum, and you don’t get to choose which one to enter via. The ticket you have chooses for you. Random. Arbitrary. Ridiculous.
The statement is very powerful, as the first part of the museum keep the “whites” and “non-whites” separated. I wondered whether the museum would be entirely separated like this, and whether I’d be reunited with my wife before leaving.
This initial impact is a lasting one, and the intensity of the place persists throughout.

I found the museum to be brutally honest about South Africa’s turbulent history and, more remarkable, brutally honest about the current state of the nation. Although apartheid has been dismantled, not everyone has been emancipated.
The display on the part women played during the struggle movingly illustrates to what extent women went in fighting against the social ills of the time. I was impressed that the display ended by highlighting the inequities that many women in South Africa still suffer, despite the change in government. The crimes against women that are rife in this country were listed. These things are realities in our country, and the curators of the museum were not afraid of pointing them out. The apartheid museum is not propaganda vehicle of the New South Africa, shouting out “Rah! Rah! Apartheid is vanquished! Look how perfect everything is now.”
This wasn’t the only place where the museum gave a balanced representation of the political events which had occurred. For this I am grateful, and inordinately impressed. It kicked any cynicism I might have felt about South Africa squarely in the buttocks.

We were at the museum for roughly three hours, and I didn’t even look at everything. I was, however, quite emotionally drained by the time I left. Of particular poignancy to me was the short twenty minute film on the 80’s, shown in the auditorium
The film depicted the civil unrest of the time, and the events leading up to and during the declared state of emergency. It depicted a very violent, sadistic time. People rioting, and fighting. Police cracking down on them, generally using gratuitous force. It was distinctly unpleasant to watch, yet completely compelling. I couldn’t get up and walk away, despite the senseless acts.
It was poignant to me because I a child living in South Africa during this time, and knew nothing of these events.
I had a vague idea of this “state of emergency” thing. I vaguely understood that black people were treated differently to me, and other people with fair skin. At the time I had no idea that white people were doing those things to black people. Obviously, the state controlled media was doing a good job in those days.
I was appalled by and ashamed of my ignorance. Certainly as a child, I could have done nothing to alter these events but I still felt mortified about my past as I watched the film.

The Apartheid Museum was an emotional rollercoaster. It brought me to the verge of tears but, annoyingly, my male socialised conditioning blockaded the tear-ducts. It made me laugh out loud at the absurd pontifications of the apartheid government officials and politicians (those natives must carry passbooks, which provide a handy folder to store all of their documents, which they are liable to otherwise lose — being a careless bunch of barbarians and all). It made me feel very sombre. It made me feel very positive about South Africa.

We’ve come a long way. We’ve got a long way to go. At least we’re being honest about it.

Later, Angie and I discussed our feelings about the museum and we reckon that every politician currently in office should spend three hours at the Apartheid Museum. It’ll help them remember why they are in office in the first place, and what they should be trying to achieve there.

Thank you for the frogs

It was my birthday yesterday, and I received many frogs.
Thanks to everyone who sent me a message-carrying frog.

As most people won’t understand what the hell I’m talking about, I should probably attempt to explain myself
A tiny frog lives inside my cellular telephone. Whenever someone sends me an SMS, it croaks. I call this “receiving a frog.”* This isn’t an accurate term for what occurs as I do not receive additional frogs when people send me messages. Regardless of this, the frog does croak and it is as if I have received another frog since I cannot believe the frog is still alive in the phone after all this time (with no source of food or water).

Other methods of communication were also used in conveying happy, well-wishing greetings to me. Amazing, ground-breaking technologies such as Electronic Mail and Telephony were utilised.
Others used an inexplicable phenomenon known as the Face of the Intertubebookwubwubs, you young whippersnappers!
Some used Spoken Word Propagated through Gaseous Medium Interface (SWPtGMI, pronounced SwiptaGimmee)

Thank you all for your kind words and well-wishings. Quite a few people like me quite a lot. It never ceases to amaze me because I’m quite a grumpy bugger.

* Actually, Angie called it this but I immediately adopted the term.

Piracy on the Lake of Zoo!

Sunday was a most curious day of inept piracy on the low fresh-waters of the Lake of Zoo.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Latter-day pirates, especially in landlocked provinces like Gauteng, are something of a rarity. In order to spot them, it is best to seek out bodies of water where boats and other watercraft may be found.
Zoo Lake may seem like an unlikely spot to find such miscreants, but in fact it is not. Numerous pirates converged on the Lake this Sunday past. I and my kitchen-wench were amongst them.

Yaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrr!!

We dressed in the manner of pirates, and converged upon the lake. Or rather, the others dressed in the manner of pirates. We dressed in the manner of witches and daemons.
We set upon the boats and attempted to row. Herein lies the ineptitude of the pirate dressed in the manner of a daemon.
Rowing is all backwards, and counter to the intuition.

Yaaaaaaaaarrr! Curses!

Still, the pirate/daemon/witches eventually came to terms with the treachery of reverse-backward rowing tricks.

Alas! Witches and daemons are not pirates at heart, and partook of less rum than those who rampaged across the low fresh-waters, terrorising children and geese alike.
The rum turned the  pirates unruly, and they strayed from their noble cause of ransacking the lake of litter to ransacking fellow pirate/witch/daemon vessels of supplies. Witches lost hats. Daemons lost arcane powers of patience.

Grrrrrr.

‘Twas verily a morning well spent, and had we witches and daemons been more inclined to drink, ‘twould a well spent afternoon have been too.

Daemon!
Daemon

Witch!
Witch

Pirates!
A small selection of Pirates of the Lake of Zoo

Cake Baking as a Metaphor for the Digging-Holes and Getting-Stuff-Out-of-the-Ground Industry

Google knows about this blog, and since what I intend to write now is work related and critical of certain entities, it may upset the relationship my company has with those certain entities.
Given the above, it is necessary to be a little cryptic and to make lavish use of metaphors. If you know me well enough, and know what my current job is, you’ll probably be able to figure out which entity I’m referring to.
If you don’t know me at all, you still may be able to. Perhaps the post title may be of assistance to you.

Let us pretend that I work in the baking industry. I don’t but, for the purposes of this tale of bureaucratic anal-retentiveness, I do.
The baking industry in South Africa is strictly regulated. If one wishes to bake a cake, one must fill out the necessary Cake Baking Application forms and submit them to the Department of Cakes and Confectioneries (DCC).
A number of items must accompany the application form:

  • The exact description of the place you wish to bake the cake, including a map, and deeds of ownership
  • A Cake Baking Recipe, detailing how you intend to go about baking the cake, including such details as:
    • ingredients to be used
    • equipment required
    • which chef you intend to use
    • how much cake you intend to bake
    • proof that you can afford to buy the ingredients
  • Details of the company which intends to bake the cake/s
  • The applicable application fee (either cash, or a cheque made out to the DCC)

Every province in the country has its own provincial DCC office. The one in Gauteng always checks the application forms, and all accompanying documentation and so forth within 30 minutes.
I spent 3 hours at the DCC in the Free State submitting a Cake Baking Application for a client. Having not submitted any applications in the Free State before, the extra 2.5 hours to lodge the application came as a gradual, but ultimately quite excruciating surprise.

At first, it seemed that things were going well. Shortly after my arrival at the DCC offices, a nice person came to look over the application.
At the Gauteng office, the nice person who takes the application from me usually just checks that everything required by the legislation and regulations for a Cake Baking Application is present in the application. If it is, she takes my application fee and bids me farewell. They never check whether or not it is all in order — just that it is there. The 14 days stipulated by the Cake and Confectioneries Baking Act is what is supposed to be used to check through all the details. The Gauteng office does it this way. The Free State office — not so.
The nice person, who afforded me a great deal of time with which to practise patience, looked at the provided map. She then proceeded to check that every aspect of the map was correct, and that everything described in the application form, and the applicable deeds of ownership all matched up with one another.
My client wanted to bake a lot of cake all over the place, so there were a lot of deeds to cross-reference with the information on the map. I discovered that I need more practice in patience. Quite a deal more.

Eventually, she finished going through the map and deeds. She’d found some problems. I negotiated that I send the corrections through via courier. She, to my relief, agreed that that would be acceptable.
After that I waited a long time while pretty much nothing happened. Or rather, to me it seemed that nothing happened, but in actual fact, gross inefficiency was under way. I thought everything was done and that I just needed to pay the application fee and go. Just under 2 hours had passed at this point, and so I was very keen to leave, but no-one wanted to take my R500.00. If I didn’t pay the fee, then they wouldn’t accept the application.
My enquiries as to why things were taking so long were met with cryptic responses, which with hindsight I managed to decrypt. They had to check that no-one else had applied to bake the same kind of cakes in the same area. Again — something that should be done within the 14 day period stipulated by the Act.
At the time I just tried to keep patient.

At some point nearing the 3 hour mark, a person who I had not yet met came through and informed me that they were very sorry, but they were having a problem with their system. It had just recently been upgraded, and the only person who knew how it worked was not in the office. They asked me if I might be able to help.
That’s right. They asked me to come and do their job for them. I really wished they’d asked earlier, because then I would’ve left the building after 2 hours and 10 minutes, instead of the 3 hours that I actually spent there.

I’m heading back there on Monday to withdraw the frigging application because the place we said we want to bake cake isn’t quite in the right place.
At this rate, I’ll have so much practice at patience I’ll reach Nirvana in almost no time.

Microsoft — not threatened at all

I suppose I should own up to inadvertently following useless links. There is an excuse, but it’s slightly feeble.

I decided to streamline my assertion to not follow random links from google reader by creating an Approved Reading list. In doing this, it was necessary to click on my technology in order to purge it of evil. No really…
The link at the top of the list was this: Free Software Movement Dead — Microsoft
How the hell was I supposed to ignore that?
Following that lead me to more vexation, with Microsoft claiming a whole bunch of patent infringements (that, by the way, is a good article for the non-geeks amongst my readers to have a look at), but it seems they’re just making a lot of noise with little to back it.

But, now that reader has been streamlined to provide me with my government approved reading, this sort of thing shouldn’t happen again.

Holidays in the Former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Today I was investigating interesting places to visit in Eastern Europe. The reasoning behind this is that Eastern Europe isn’t as orderly as Western Europe tends to be, and certainly not as orderly as Scandinavia is. Going to Europe seems to be something that we are investigating, but I’m damned if I’m only going to end up in London.
The other positive aspect of Eastern Europe is that it is likely to be substantially cheaper to spend a few days there — at least that’s what I’m led to believe.

Point is: I searched google for “best tourist destination eastern europe” and noticed that the 4th hit was this dubious gem.

Maybe I need to reassess whether or not the advantages of Eastern Europe outweigh the disadvantages.

Return to Goblin’s Cove

Easter weekend. Angie and I booked two nights (Saturday and Sunday) at Goblin’s Cove. We’ve been there before. It was weird then. It’s still weird. But we like weird.
(I also note that imageshack has eaten the photos on the page that links to. Stupid imageshack).

This time, however, there was a freaky crazy psycho woman running the psychedelic coffee-shop. She didn’t like bees.
The way she pulled her raven-black hair back made her look very severe.
The way she carried around a can of insecticide and a lighter made her seem a little crazed.
The way she used the flame from the lighter and the spray from the compressed can of insecticide made her seem a little pyromanic.
The way she incinerated the bees dispassionately made her seem evil.

Then she closed in on the table near us, where bees were happily investigating the sticky tablecloth. They weren’t bothering us. Psycho-woman was, especially as she waved the can and lighter about.
Angie asked her to please leave the bees alone. She replied that she wouldn’t possibly think of setting them alight near us. She went away, and at least those bees were spared — for the meantime.
As we sat at the table in the open-air coffee shop, situated in a pleasant, tranquil forest, we were unsettled by the just noticeable, slightly sweet, slightly charcoal smell of heavily crisped bees. That smell, and the occasional sound of localised pressure changes in the distance as the oxygen was sucked from the air to help form a bee-apocalyptic fireball.

Everything else was pleasant though.

One of the waiters at the main restaurant (not the coffee-shop) took quite a liking to us. We rather liked him too. There was an instantaneous rapport between us. After lunch (which ended relatively late) he suggested we come visit. After all, he lived on the property, just next door to the restaurant.
So a little later we wandered over and visited our new friend Wikus. He was staying in a house that was designed and built by the same guy who’d put the insane architecture together for the Goblin’s Cove restaurant. We had a look around. Up the spiral stairway. On the creaky, uneven wooden floorboards. Holding onto ropes, because there were no railings where there should’ve been. Incredible place to live.
Wikus told us he was a little paranoid about living there because it had massive windows and no burglar bars, and a not entirely secure front-door. Wikus is originally from Joburg. That should explain it all.
We spent quite a while sitting there, drinking with him, chatting, smoking. Talking politics, talking religion, talking history, talking relationships, talking shit. The restaurant’s cook came over for a little too. Jaco was his name, I think. Wikus and Jaco are both of the age where the big bad old apartheid government conscripted them. Wikus did his national service and then 6 months later, they scrapped it. He never went any place too intense. Nothing too crazy happened. He thinks Afrikaaner nationalism is a little ridiculous, and they kicked him out of F.W. de Klerk’s office (where he was going to be a staff clerk) because he’d been bust possessing marijuana.
Jaco went to Angola. Jaco fought in a war, for something he thought was justified. Jaco seemed like a really pleasant guy (he joined us for about 20 minutes or so, before going to bed). I quite liked him, and I really liked his cooking, but one could see a level of distress underlying the surface. Demons lurking there.
It made me think about who was helping these people. On both sides of the struggle. People who fought in wars and did things they’d never dream of doing today. Who is helping these souls? Or are they just left in torment for the rest of their lives, forgotten by society. The dirty laundry that no-one wants to face up to, let alone clean.

Getting intense. Unintentional. Still, it was an excellent weekend and we met interesting people and experienced interesting things. We exchanged contact details with Wikus. I really hope we don’t let inertia stop us connecting again.