Wedding pics online

Due to a number of requests, I've put some of the wedding photos online. There aren't table photos and the like, since the pictures came to us on a DVD, and flickr only gives us 20Megs upload a month. The group photo also didn't make it, because that's about 10 Megs, so it gets rejected by Flickr. I can hopefully downsample it later, and upload it then. Of course, as part of the upload process, I had to get a place to put photos on the web. I have a gallery at the computer science department, but abusing this for lots of traffic is frowned upon by the admin (and space on the server is limited). Picasa has an online service, but that would entail getting on the internet in Windows, and (a) that ain't happening through the university's firewall at the moment, and (b) that would make adminning it later a pain. Picasa now has a "linux version", which basically means it runs under Wine, but when your Linux is as old as mine, the new Wine doesn't run, and the "linux version" means nothing. So, I had to go with Flickr, which is generally the best online gallery. Except that if you want to do anything useful, you've got to pay a membership fee. Which I'm not planning on doing. So now I have a glorious 100 Mb of space, with 20 Mb of upload per month. Yay! Now that the background is past: here's the link to the wedding pics. Note my fancy name (37963....). I can only replace that with a paid membership, I gather. During the whole upload process, I got into an IM chat with a guy I know who used to live up in Joeys with Andre and Theuns, soc. Turns out he's moved down to CT for da lifestyle. Which means he has a new job and is spending 12 hours + on it per day. Sometimes I'm glad I'm still a student ;) Last Thursday was exciting. I spent the morning racing between 9 PCs tring to run virus scans on them. Some of the PCs had Norton Antivirus on, and they were doing OK, but others were running Avast! Now Avast, despite it's MP3-player interface, is a pretty good antivirus program, as free anti-virus packages go - probably at least in the Top 3 in the English-speaking world. But, alas, it would find the viruses, and then it would not be able to delete them. I refer specifically to the variants of Win32:Warezov. In the meantime, another PC on the same network was so broken by another virus, it couldn't be shut down. By the time I had to leave the network to its own fate and move on to my other responsibilities, I had come to a conclusion: if you use Windows, and local e-mail programs accepting attachments, you are going to get a virus sooner or later. Even with the latest and greatest antivirus tools. However, it's likely to be a lot later with a subscription antivirus package. So do the math. How valuable is your (oft-times confidential) data? If it's important, (a) buy a decent antivirus package, (b) make sure keeping PC software updated is assigned to someone's task list who knows how, and (c) arrange for regular backups (ask me - I'm still struggling to get things going on the Go website after the recent hack, and that was with pretty recent backups). If you're going to go the free route, I still suggest (b) and (c), and as an added precaution, try using an online mail and calendar solution, such as that provided by Google at Gmail (if you need an invite, I've still got). Thursday night yielded a depressing quality of Go for me as well. I got myself into trouble against Adrian, and only serious time trouble saved me from a thumping by Bernard. My last game against Jaco added insult to injury, when he trounced me, mentioning that he wasn't really pushing, since I was obviously playing half-heartedly. Which I didn't think I was. Post game analysis showed that to mean that I was switching between plans (attacking vs moyo) too often, rather than sticking with just one. With all of the excitement last week, I fell behind with my thesis. So I planned on coming in over the weekend to try and play catch-up. However, first there was a conference dance on Friday night - Dalene had given a talk at the Lord Charles' Hotel in Somerset-West, so we scored a free double ticket. Last year we went because Dalene won 2 prizes, but this year, we were just there for the social side. 2 of her colleagues won the prizes this year, so she's still hobnobbing with the top brass. Pity her husband shows no class ;) Jeanne and Douw from our cell group were at our table to provide some familiar faces, but I ended up seated next to an enology student called Riaan. We hit it off quite well, and spent the evening joking, drinking, and eating to our heart's content. I even managed to fit in 2 dances. The next day I decided I'd rather put time in packing for our move later this month, and then head to the office on Sunday. Made some good progress there as well. That evening I helped out at the Stellenbosch Night Shelter, since the supervisor and his wife were at a family funeral. All round, general chaos ensued, but finally I got back home. And packed some more. On Sunday, after some morning packing and a crumbed chicken breast lunch, I headed off to work. In the heat. The plan had been for Dalene to drop me off at work on the way to the shops, but she had instead dropped off on the bed upstairs, so I walked. Which meant I was supremely disappointed when my desire for some water and a comfy chair were thwarted by the failure of the card reader to register my card and open the door at my department. So I headed home. The walk gave me blisters. I will not comment any more. I got home and dropped off. Sunday night: Church. It was the Christmas Song service, and we were warned to be there early, but of course we forgot. Which meant that we got there to find the parking lot and streets in chaos, and not a spot to be had in the church. We decided to walk around the corner, and attended the United Church instead. In contrast, there were 18 people there, including the elders, the priest, and the people leading in the music. It was quite interesting since the sermon was delivered in more of a cell-group, interactive, q&a style. Unfortunately, people weren't that responsive to the questions. I had some comments, but they were more academic and background-oriented, and since I didn't want to stir the pot too much, I kept my trap shut. I was surprised to see a friend who's been at dancing school in Cape Town the past year, Jessica, helping to lead the singing. Topic was: is man a king or a slave (the king perspective from Psalm 8, and the slave perspective from Job 7). This was linked in a rather tenuous fashion to Hebrews 2, why I can't quite say, except that it had something to do with following the example of Jesus. The most fascinating aspect of the sermon to me, was that the metaphor of a weaver's shuttle is used by Job, for the speed with which his life passes. He then says that they "end without hope". What is not clear for the English reader is that the Hebrew words for hope and "thread" are the same, making the metaphor more of a play on words. Pretty cool. And this morning, I got to my office, and the card reader was still busted. Which means my meeting with my promoter came to nothing, and after I got back from that, it was still busted, and then some blokes from the Engineering faculty broke in for us. It seems the computer behind the card reader was down, or something. Anyway, I'm back in my office, now. At last. Oh yeah, I had another fun banking experience, but I've decided it was just a misunderstanding, so I'm not going to rant about it.