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…
It certainly has been an eventful start…
I’ve been stationed at ABSA for the last few days, standing in for one of my colleagues while he is off on paternity (and annual) leave. I’ve also flown down briefly to Cape Town to attend and photograph Sheelagh and Andrew’s wedding.
Flying to Cape Town was a bit weird for me. For the last 9 or so years, I’d been used to travelling up from Cape Town to Johannesburg or Durban on vacation or to visit friends and family or for work. Now, I’ve reversed the destinations… and I must admit, Cape Town no longer feels like home to me. I felt very much like a tourist in a place I used to call home… me, the person who swore he’d never live anywhere but at the coast.
I landed Friday morning, was picked up by Louise who took me to go get my supplies I needed for the wedding (18 rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film and spare batteries for my Canon EOS 500n), then spent some time with her and her family until meeting up with Rob for lunch after which I spent the rest of the afternoon with him and some of our mutual friends, Andrew and Mervin, that work with him at Tellumat. That evening, after picking up Lou again, we met up with some guild mates from Awakened Guardians at Century City for some drinks, etc and finally wandered over to Cattle Baron to meet up with some of Lou’s friends.
Saturday morning, bright and early, I was in Cavendish Square, photographing Sheelagh and her Mum- and Sister-in-Law-to-be during the various stages of their hair-styling. Then we bundled into Lisa’s (Sheelagh’s best friend) car, went to go fetch dresses and bags and headed off to Monkey Valley in Noordhoek to get started with their makeup. After a while I decided it was prudent to make myself scarce so the girls could change and get dressed and went to go check my surroundings for the shoot, judging light levels and backdrop inclusion from various angles.
The ceremony was very nice, the bride looked stunning, the groom looked nervous (though that may also have been due to some stiff breezes swaying his kilt) and everyone was very happy for the newly-wed couple. We took some group photos on the lawn and then the bride, groom, best man and bridesmaids wandered down to the beach with me for some shots their.
In retrospect, the path we took was not the best one (coming down was ok, climbing back up was not as easy) as the loose beach sand made climbing some of those dunes rather… well… interesting at times.
We finished up at 11pm that night after the traditional cake-cutting and first-dance photos and I left for home, wishing the newly-weds all the best, promising to visit in Australia sometime in the future.
The next day, aside from sore muscles, I spent relaxing, chatting to Rob, listening to music (I introduced Rob to the group ‘E Nomine’) and catching up a little, talking about his planned move to Australia to be nearer to his daughter, my goddaughter, Timeah.
Before long, though, it was time to pack up and head to the airport. We stopped briefly along the way to get something to eat and unfortunately, cut it a little too fine as with some unaccounted for traffic, I ended up getting to the check-in counter 2 minutes too late to check in… I begged, pleaded… everything short of threatening, but they were stubborn and would not let me check-in.
So I got put on standby for the morning flight. Fortunately Rob had not yet driven too far so he was able to pick me up again and I spent the night there.
I called several people to tell them what had happened, including Matt, my technical manager, as I was supposed to be back at ABSA in the morning.
Bright and early, I was back at the airport and then my ordeal really began. For unbeknownst to me, all the Johannesburg and Pretoria people that had been on vacation were there trying to get back home as well… Suffice to say, I did not get onto the 6:30am flight. Or the 9:15 one. Or 10:20 one. Matt arranged for Reshan, one of my other colleagues, to stand-in for me at ABSA, so at least that was taken care of.
Eventually, they squeezed me onto the 1:00pm flight and I arrived home, very agitated, annoyed and heartily sick of airports just before 3pm. Matt, was kind enough to pick me up and drop me off at home where I promptly collapsed and swore not to get onto a plane for another few months, at the very least.
Yesterday was back to ABSA… back to a semblance of normality. Here until the 18th, after which it’s back to the office and my new favourite pastime… log analysis.
