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I think I can safely say that this year’s birthday has been one of the more memorable and enjoyable birthday celebrations I’ve had in the last 31 years.

After Friday night’s movie, I pretty much expected the rest of the weekend to be restful and relaxing. Life, however, decided to surprise me in the form of my new housemates taking me out to Gold Reef City for the day on Saturday.

Now bear in mind, I haven’t seen Gold Reef City in probably 21 years… I was still in primary school when I went there with my Mom and her family. And my recollection of the place is dim, except for some events… like me trying to walk out of the mint with a gold bar.

It certainly appears to have changed a lot since then.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Andrew, Gwen and I went on some of the rides (Gwen’s face after the Tower of Terror was both amusing and concerning… the poor girl was quite shaken by the experience) and wandered around the park, experienced the 4D theatre, saw the Gumboot Dancers, tried our hands at winning some prizes at some of the stalls, etc.

We got home around 5pm or so and I had to get ready to go out to Catz Pyjamas in Melville for the joint birthday bash organised by Rozz for herself, Nick and I.

Craig was kind enough to pick me up as my little old VW Beetle was not up to the task, suffering a little with battery issues at present so driving at night becomes quite hair-raising unless you keep your foot on the gas to keep the lights on.

By the time we got there, most of the folks were already there, except for Rozz, Nick, JJ and Vanessa who were stuck in traffic due to some accidents on the way from Pretoria.

From there, the evening just kept on getting better and better. Good food, good company, good times!

And I got spoilt rotten… to the point that I was almost in tears, very much overwhelmed by the generosity and thoughtfulness of my friends.

Gift #1 – From Matthew, Marti and many many others who I still need to thank.

They surprised me with a TomTom ONE XL GPS… Now you have to understand a few things here… I am notoriously bad when it comes to directions. I get lost in my own backyard… And I’m forever getting lost whenever I go to a new place. Sure, I have software on my laptop to try and work out routes, etc but as my friend John recently discovered, the software does not necessarily choose the best or safest route.

However, with this gift comes a new joke… TimTim (thank you, Pieter… you’ve scarred me for life!) has a TomTom…

Gift #2 – From JJ and Vanessa

I’ve always loved swords. From the day my father showed me his grandfather’s cavalry saber (which we sacrilegiously used in the garden to chop up small branches and other such vegetation) to the day when Maarten offered me the chance to learn kenjutsu in exchange for some website work to promote his academy. There is just something awe-inspiring about holding a sword in your hands, feeling it cut through the air. And this applies even moreso to the Japanese katana.

When JJ and Vanessa gave me this long, wrapped box, I wasn’t too sure what was in it, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to open it up to find a beautifully crafted sword. Especially not a recreation of the sword from “Last Samurai”.

It is a truly stunning looking piece.

Back to the party… dinner was great but all in all, I think the best part of the evening was the company. And if the time we left Catz is anything to go by, I’d say everyone got on pretty well. We eventually stumbled out around 12:30am after which Craig and I sat talking at my place until around 4:30am, catching up a little on what has been happening in his life.

Sunday, after trying to catch up on some sleep, was spent relaxing at home, watching the Code Geass anime series I’d gotten from John, reading and listening to music or playing a little Warcraft III now and again to take a break from what I was doing.

It was a good weekend. No, it was a great weekend. But now it’s time to get back to work.

I’m on training tomorrow and Wednesday so I best get some work done today so that I don’t sit with a small mountain of it on Thursday.

Ciao for now.

Wow… tempus fugit… time flies…

Considering that my last post was in February sometime, and we’re almost done with April, I feel I’ve neglected this site for some time. Time, specifically spare time, has become somewhat of a rare commodity for me lately…

Ok, some updates (for those that care and even for those that don’t):

I’m moving… where to, I’m not too sure yet, but I’m hoping it will be a little closer to work to cut down on traffic, etc. I should be seeing a place tomorrow night that sounds perfect…

Work has been going well, just busy. At present I’m on-site at BCX (Business Connexion) in Midrand, standing in for a work colleague who has decided to get married… poor sod… another one bites the dust. I’m studying as well, brushing up on my Checkpoint Security Administration knowledge so I can write my CCSA (Checkpoint Certified Security Administrator) and CCSE (Checkpoint Certified Security Engineer) exams when I get back to the Randburg office.

What else? Oh, I’ve been raiding a little again in World of Warcraft with my US Stormrage guild, Awakened Guardians. My rogue is somewhat under-geared and underpowered in comparison to some of the uber-backstabbers out there, but some recent gear upgrades has made her a far more formidable than she was.

Sadly, with this move, I’ll be offline again for some time unless Telkom miraculously pulls it’s collective finger out of deep, dark, unmentionable body cavities and does something quicky for a change…

Not that I’m a pessimist… not at all… I’m just a strong believer in Finagle’s Law, which states:

“Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.”

OR

O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law, “The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.”

In other words… Murphy was an optimist.

I haven’t had much time lately to discuss or even explore the various metaverse cultures out there or my more recent research into trans-humanism, but catching up this morning on one of the more interesting blogs out there on these topics, I found that Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks want to make a 3D CGI movie of one of my favourite anime films of all time… Ghost in the Shell. As a self-confessed fan-boy of the Ghost in the Shell franchise and Masamune Shirow’s work, I sincerely hope and pray that they don’t screw it up…

Reading further (my GoogleReader has too many feeds for me to catch up on all of them in one day!), I see that there is talk of a live-action version of Akira. While I was never that fond of the Akira story, it was and is still a well-known landmark within the anime/manga culture and I hope they do it justice.

Other than that, not much else to report. Eskom is keeping us on our toes with load-shedding (thank Heavens for laptops with batteries and podcasts/movies to watch while waiting for the lights to come back on), traffic is a pain in the butt (especially on Allandale and Malibongwe)… and I think I need a refill on this coffee… or maybe some hot chocolate.

Let’s see, what has happened in the last two weeks worth writing about.

Ah, yes, the storm and subsequent demise of my ADSL modem and laptop. And MPH.

I’ll start with MPH… I’ve never been to a car show before and certainly never anything like MPH, so thank you Rozz, for a very different and entertaining Christmas present.

Didn’t get to see all that much of the car expo itself, but the ‘theatre’ part of the show was brilliantly executed by the hosts and their accompanying stunt drivers. The banter between Hammond and Clarkson was a welcome familiarity for those that have watched any Top Gear at all, and I think poor Sasha Martinengo didn’t stand much of a chance of stealing any limelight from those two.

There were some stunning driving/stunt sequences, some amusement in the form of the soccer match with cars, the hosts driving their own inventions and the half-a-car race, a rather different take on bull fighting with a very flexible female matador and a bakkie as the bull, mixed in with some of the best looking cars available today. A petrolhead’s dream come true, I think.

The whole thing was marred a bit though, by the travesty they called seating. I think no matter what shape or size you are, those seats are just uncomfortable, especially if you’re a little taller than most and your knees end up crushed against the seat in front of you.

Anyway… it was still a good time though. Good times with good company… it’s all that counts really.

We left MPH, only to be greeted by a magnificent storm and downpour.

The next day wasn’t much better. Though for the most part, it wasn’t stormy. Or so I thought.

There I was, happily sitting on my bed, playing World of Warcraft on my laptop, headset on, chatting to friends, when ZAP! … Everything went dark. Ok, not surprising, considering the mains tripped on the distribution board… flicked the switch and we had power again. Except that somethings didn’t come back up. Things like my brand new Netgear ADSL modem and my laptop. And there was the smell of ozone and electrolytes in the air to confirm my suspicions.

Ah well… It’s meant that I caught up on some of my reading this week, though I have ended up working late to get some research, etc done that I normally would have done from home.

In the meantime though, I’ve put my old Telkom ADSL modem back online and built up a small PC from spare parts. Nothing great, but it’s enough to run XP and Office, browse the ‘Net and listen to MP3′s. I got a new Netgear as a replacement but not in a rush to install it just yet as without the laptop, I don’t really need the wireless just yet. And frankly, my housemates can wait a bit before I put them back online again… maybe this will encourage them to pay me for their usage.

Hopefully I get the laptop back this week coming. Apparently they’ve replaced the motherboard, and I’m hoping I didn’t lose any data of the hard drive.

Hmmm? What is a “thought branch”? To me, it’s the phrase I use to describe the way I seem to think sometimes and have observed others doing so as well.

The basic idea is that you start of with a single branch, or idea and while discussing or investigating it, you find similar related subjects and begin exploring and discussing them. These in turn have their own related subjects and so you can potentially veer off the path of your original discussion or investigation, following the branches where your interest takes you.

To give you an idea, something I sat back and looked back at recently while discussing books about folklore with Rozz:

1992 or 1993 (I can’t remember anymore) – A school play, working with Craig and Stuart doing backstage lighting and music, if I recall. Craig was playing a cassette with Enya‘s Shepherd Moons on. I fell in love with the music (having only ever seen the video for Orinoco Flow on Good Morning South Africa as I was getting ready for school in the mornings) and started collecting all of Enya’s music that had been released til then, getting it as birthday presents, etc.

Somewhere along the line I remember getting into an argument with my next door neighbour, Michael, one night when he was visiting (I think my folks and his were at a parents-teachers evening at our respective schools), as I was playing my Enya CD’s on my hi-fi and he asked me to turn it off, as being of a particularly intolerant religion that is rather peculiar in their beliefs, he could not listen to music sung in a tongue he could not understand, in case the lyrics were meant to subvert him and steer him off the path he was on. Oddly enough, the song at the time was ‘Angeles‘ and I explained to him that she was singing about angels, to which he responded that she may be singing about fallen angels or rather devils.

I then took it upon myself to go and translate the lyrics of all the CD’s to prove a point to Michael that there was nothing sinister about her music and in between sitting over 200-year old gaelic- and welsh-to-english dictionaries, I started exploring a) the irish- and scottish-gaelic language and b) the folklore of the gaelic people, especially after the re-release of Enya’s album “The Celts”.

This led me to read about the Celts, celtic history and mythology, to search for books such as the Mabinogion and discover some of my most loved characters in myth and legend. These led me to explore some more fiction author’s works (I was a school librarian then) and found many variations of the Arthurian legends, which, up until then, I had only really read briefly here and there.

That lead me to read “The Mists of Avalon“, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. “The Mists of Avalon” in turn reminded me about Morgana le Fay, or Morgaine as she is known in the book.

That book and the others before it, led me to look into druidic lore and teachings, which taught me about the various deities, one of them being Cernunnos, the Horned God, otherwise known as Herne the Hunter. That in turn, helped catch my attention while wandering through a bookstore one day where I saw the cover for “Greenmantle“, by Charles de Lint.

de Lint’s books grabbed me and I read everything I could get my hands on by him, enjoying titles such as “Someplace To Be Flying”, “Yarrow”, “Forests of the Heart”, etc. “Forests of the Heart” got me reading up about the Greenman.

The Greenman is linked to Cernunnos again, as well as unlikely figures such as Peter Pan, the earliest renditions of Father Christmas, Robin Hood, Robin Goodfellow, Puck and the Green Knight. The Green Knight leads back to the Arthurian legends and books like “The Once and Future King”.

“Yarrow” introduced the concept of energy-vampires, leading me to research more about vampires than is classically portrayed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This led me to buy books on vampirism that showed a variety of vampire-like stories from pretty much every cultural group today.

Interestingly enough, every culture shares at least two stories… one is The Great Flood and the other is vampires.

Browsing through a second-hand bookstore one day, I saw CJ Cherryh’s Chronicles of Morgaine. I bought it and read it right through, finding it to be a very enjoyable book, describing Morgaine, in essense, as a figure striding across many worlds, appearing here and there in different stories and myths as she goes about her tasks.

Reading through CJ Cherryh’s list of books, I came across “Rusalka“. The word ‘rusalka‘ reminded me of playing Sierra’s Hero’s Quest IV where you as the intrepid bungling hero are stuck in a medieval town where a good many things go bump in the night… in one scene you walk out to a lake and a young woman is in the water, calling to you. If you go into the water, you die by her hands, so talking is about all you really can do with her. We won’t mention the run-ins with the vampiric bunnies though…

So I went out and found a copy and loved the book and it’s concept of wish magic, and discovered yet another entity to research… the “Vodyanoy“, which reminded me of another character in a book, where the author combined a Grendel-like character and something akin to a vodyanoi into a grotesque being called the Fisher King.

I later found the vodyanoi again in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels, where the Vodyanoi are an aquatic people skilled in water magics. In Miéville’s “Perdido Street Station“, striking Vodyanoi dockworkers use their water magic to blockade a shipping route.

More recently, the movie, Night Watch, caught my eye and I began researching it a bit more, only recently finding an english version of the books by Sergey Lukyanenko, which means I have some more reading to do.

Another recent study of mine, is about the kabbalistic lore around golems and the lore used to bring them to life and return them to stasis, inspired by two unrelated events… One, playing “Vampire: The Redeption” PC Game and the other, watching “Ghost in the Shell II : Innocence“.

The golem in turn leads back, or rather, on to, such stories as Frankenstein and other avenues of research about creating life such as the experiment by the alchemist Paracelsus with homunculi…

Ok, so after that long-winded story, what is the core of my post?

The main branch shown here is a love of mythology. The branches off that branch that I’ve chosen to follow are a love of celtic and later slavic folklore and mythology. Subbranches of that are vampirism and lycanthropy, fueled by my own roleplaying research. Gaming, music, reading fiction, etc have all had their impact as well, steering my interests at the time down certain paths.

And it all started with some music… (Thanks Craig, it’s all your fault!)

Amazing how something so small can open up a world of opportunities to discover…

Today, the Internet is a vast playground for this sort of exploration of knowledge. And tools like Wikipedia (and Google) make it that much easier, with linked topics, reference sites and all sorts of other avenues of investigation.

I can lose myself out in the ‘Net very easily. Just give me the bandwidth to explore, an unlimited data cap and a topic and let me be…

Sometimes I wish I could just plug in directly and travel the ‘Net behind closed eyes as my body rests and explore.

There is so much out there and so little time to discover it.

Last few nights have been somewhat busy for me… and I think the lack of sleep is catching up to me today.

For anyone that works in the IT industry, the old saying, “no rest for the wicked” could not be truer… You work your allotted time at work and perhaps a little more than necessary (I know I do, as does Rob and Rozz) and then go home and generally do one of two things… either sit down in front of a PC again to play games or surf the ‘net or try and switch off in front of the TV or some other distraction.

Usually I watch some anime or whatever is playing on the TV for a bit, research a little and maybe update this blog a bit, browse deviantART for new wallpapers or inspiration, then try get an early (or earlier than usual) night, knowing the next morning I need to be up before most people, a) to avoid traffic and b) to get a head start on the day’s tasks.

Lately though, I’ve been doing upgrades on my forums, from phpBB version 2.0.22 to 3.01, fighting with South African latency while uploading a million and one small files to my internationally hosted server, creating backups (just in case, you know!) and trying to puzzle through the documentation to see where I am going wrong…

Or building an old server up into a general workstation for the girls at home to use, as Tarryn is starting her new job soon and will lose her old laptop, and frankly, I’m a little wary of letting anyone other than a work colleague, that I trust, use mine. Last night I managed to get a majority of the work done on the server, but it was painstakingly slow-going as it’s an old Pentium III, with 512MB RAM and two SCSi 20GB drives… Windows XP runs on it… or should I say, it ‘jogs’.

I’ve loaded all the chat programs they could want on there… MSN, GoogleTalk, Yahoo… and most importantly, antivirus. AVG is perhaps not the best, but hell, it works… And I made each of them their own limited privilege profile so they don’t have to stress about anyone else reading their mail from the dating sites they’re so fond of frequenting.

Need to sit down with Tarryn as well, sometime, and teach her Adobe Photoshop. Think the poor girl has jumped into her new job without really knowing what is expected of her… if she’s going to be doing design work, I think she may be in over her head…

Other than that, now that my one set of forums are upgraded, I need to tackle the other one. And then figure out how to integrate all the other php packages  such as phpRaid, etc back into the new boards…

When I will get a chance to play again, I don’t know… we’ll see what happens end of the month. By then things should have settled a bit more. Right now, all I seem to be able to manage is getting home, feeding myself, showering then collapsing onto my bed, watching a few episodes of anime (recently finished “Eureka Seven” and “Fate / Stay Night” and about half way through “Ergo Proxy“) then drifting off into an uneasy sleep, only to wake up a few hours later, feeling like a truck has hit me…