On Monday, the beautiful Daniela and I will be off to backpack around Italy for two weeks. This is my first bit of travelling and I can't wait. If you've been, and have any tips, please share. We start off with five days in Rome, then five in Florence with a few day trips to Pisa and Assisi, then cap it off with two days on the beautiful Island of Ischia.

I'm currently sick as a dog, but lying in a 5 star hotel. I guess I break even.

I highly recommend the Arabella Sheraton in Cape Town. They have been nothing short of fantastic. There are few things better than arriving back at your room, feeling rubbish, to find a gown, slippers, Lindt chocolate and drugs on your bed. While this is Cape Town, they were only flu drugs.

One year ago today I cut off my beard. I did it because I thought I shouldn't start my first job looking like a Maddog wannabe. I have since realised that nobody cares, and am proud to say that it is back in full swing. It grows much slower in the lofty heights of Johannesburg (humidity makes a difference, who would've though). I am still without mustache however, this bothers me somewhat.

I have run into many people who don't like beards because they feel people with beards have something to hide, I find this quite amusing. The rest either think it makes me look good/bad with no clear winner as yet. I do look noticeably older however, I quite enjoy the fact that clients don't ask me how old I am as much. Instead of having to show them how incredibly bright I am like before, I can now slip into the annals of mediocrity :)

I am deliberately not including any pictures, so I can continue to get those wide-eyed reactions from my friends.

Some geeks in a small town in the Cape of our country, South Africa, hacked together a mobile Java MSN client. They called it MXit and gave it away free. Given the disproportionately high difference in price per byte of SMS vs GPRS provided by our mobile operators. It caught on quickly.

However, the media, and indeed a seemingly large chunk of parents have become very concerned about the latest evil in our society. A rather tech savvy journalist friend of mine just included the phrase "A Society in Crisis" in his last blog entry on the subject, and our daily news tells of an emotionally scarred teenager who just had a 'helluva' ordeal. He'll probably never love again, poor kid.

This topic has been grating my tit for some time now, and I felt the need to counter-rant.

One of my favorite authors and columnists, Tom Eaton, recently wrote a book playing on all the horrid writing and prose in the Da Vinci Code. It is hysterical and I want it. I wanted it a lot. Then a package arrived at the post office for me, and voila a free copy of the book for me. Now, who sent it, thank you very much, but who sent it?

Tonight we had a team building exercise, nothing cheesy, just a bit of fun. I really enjoyed myself. But the reason this has me blogging at 8:15pm on a Friday night instead of shaking my buttocks, is because everytime I walked through the offices for whatever reason, I kept finding work mates huddles away at their desks. Of course it doesn't take much convincing to get them to join the party. What impresses me about this is that is highlighted a sentiment I have been feeling for a while now, but have been nervous to voice: I love my job.

Sure, these people could be slaving away at their desks on a Friday night because of overbearing managers and too tight deadlines, but mostly it isn't. They are here because they let work get away with them, which is just too easy to do here.

Anyway, enough gushing about work. Have a great weekend everybody.

Today marks the beautiful Daniela and my 3 year dating anniversary. Please excuse me while I gush a bit, this is a serious gush, so stop reading if you aren't interested.

Recently I bought a Nokia 9300i. Phone cock-swaggering aside, it allows me to be connected to the internet, permanently. I can ssh to my machines, I can look up facts on the internet and I can read without moving my eyes further than a few square centimeters of screen. This is nothing new, what is new is that I can now do this all the time. I can do it in the middle of speeches, in restaurants or on the toilet.

[geeking musings to follow]

In a seqel to the wildy popular Snakes on a Plane meme, the grounds and gardens manager of Rhodes University brings you, Snakes on Campus.

I really appreaciated this from the Easter liturgy:

Our commandment was to love one another as we love ourselves, not to assist God in meting out punishment.

Happy Easter everyone.

Living in Jozi is great, but it is difficult to get exercise. You sit it your car and sit in the office. I have been mulling the idea of joining a Gym over, but have always been uncomfortable with the idea. For ever activity the Gym offered I can think of a cheaper/better way of doing it. For example instead of spinning I could buy a bike, instead of Tae-bo I could do a martial art, instead of swimming I could go to a municipal swimming pool, instead of lifting weights I could buy my own or unpack the boxes in my house etc. I am a fan of team sports, the social aspect of exercise is important to me, but Gym is the antithesis of that, even when you are working in a group e.g. aerobics, it is still a very solitary affair.

So, instead of shelling all the money out on Gym, I have bought myself a bike; this bike (the big picture) to be exact. I pick it up tomorrow. Once I get the hang of it I am going to join the Jo'burg Mountain Bike club.

Neener, neener Virgin Active.

UPDATE: removed the 'screw you' it wasn't what I meant.

Yesterday I bought a new tie. This morning I woke up and put it on. I had breakfast and drove to work. Thirty minutes later someone drove into me for no particularly good reason. I promptly drove home and got back into bed. It's best to know when the day has you beat.

I got my first salary, yeah! A few minutes later, most of it was gone. Bootstrapping is hard.

This is the second birthday of my blog. I am currently at 588 public entries (18 private), which are made up of 1186360 characters. People have provided 404 comments (excluding SPAM) and 111 trackbacks. Now isn't that exciting?

Today went well. Nadia Musa, an ex-rhodent was my "buddy" and showed me around, she was awesome and definately went above and beyond. I was introduced to more people than I can remember (I usually have trouble remembering one new person's name). Does anyone have a tip on how to remember names? Most of the day was spent getting an info dump on how things work. By lunch time I had information overload.

My favourite part of the day was when I learned they have a central planning office. The commie jokes ran thick like vodka through my head, but nobody really appreciated them, least of all Lenin and Trotsky who work there.

I got a kief laptop, a Dell Latitude D600. One of the privledges of being in SSG (Security Services Group) is you get admin rights on your machine, so I promptly LiteStep'ed windows and slapped Ubuntu on, despite warnings that the IT people wouldn't be able to help me if there was a problem. The ubuntu install took less time than it did to configure bloody Microsoft *grumble* Outlook. Poked around in the network a bit, couldn't ssh out even with some tricks, but I didn't want to do anything too noisy on my first day. I recon I have a shot at asking for access instead of investigating ssh proxy CONNECT tunelling. The internal company homepage requires IE [sic]. I found IETab a great firefox plugin which uses IE as a rendering engine within a firefox tab, now that's cool.

I am being deployed to a client tomorrow already. Talk about being chucked in the deep-end. I am looking forward to it, although I may get lost in Jozi traffic on the way. Everyone there was very friendly and helpful and I can definately see myself getting on with most of them.

The confidentiality policies are hectic and I figure I basically wont talk about anything work related other than my 'feelings' and 'emotions'. Hence the lack of disclosure of which enormous company I am being deployed to tomorrow. *strut*