dhiren.za.net

I've been drinking too much coke recently, so I'm going to see if I can do without it throughout October. This is going to be difficult :(

Lunch at Didi's Pub in Dar es Salaam on Monday
Apparently Didi's is a babber as well as a pub!
It's actually pretty decent looking place
The locals hanging about having a few beers
Some dude was walking around selling pirated dvds

So the deployment in Dar es Salaam went off mostly well - there were a bunch of snags here and there, but around 6.30am on Friday morning, our stuff was declared working as well as it should, under the circumstances. Which meant I was clear to spend the weekend in Zanzibar as planned.

I'm lucky enough to be in Dar es Salaam this week for work. We're deploying a project for Vodacom Tanzania which meant being on site to test and to be on standby when we go live.

I got here on Sunday evening about 7.30pm East African time... it's an hour ahead of South Africa, and has had me pretty confused at times, because we're in constant contact with guys back in SA working from that side... plus my phone and laptop clocks are both still on SA time. I'll probably get used to it just as I'm about to leave.

I guess the move to Jhb is going to be a permanent one. I signed an offer to purchase a duplex a week and a half ago, and got finance approved yesterday. So hopefully sometime soon the transfer goes through and I can finally live in my own place. (click read more for pics)

Knowing that they'd be liable for costs anyways if they got a postponement, we were made a settlement offer, which was exactly what I'd offered to pay right at the start, 3+ years ago.

My dad was initially thinking we shouldn't accept the offer, and make them pay all my expenses for this trip, to force them to sort themselves out. But in the end we both figured that we might as well get it over and done with now and not have to bother about taking time off work again, etc.

I'm leaving for court again in a few minutes. Hopefully this is the last time. My dad called me on Sunday to say that the lawyers for the other side wrote last week requesting a postponement. This is after we wrote to them in March asking them to let us know in advance if they'd be ready or not, as I'd have to come down from Jhb for this. They didn't respond to that. And at the pre-trial thingie two weeks ago, they indicated that they'd be ready to proceed.

I got to Lesotho just after 7pm last night. It's my first international trip, so I guess I'm starting small. Since Lesotho isn't generally on the top of most people's travelling destination wishlists, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that this trip was for work.

A few weeks ago my dad told me that he'd received notification that my new court date had been set. He was a little concerned because I had just resigned and I'd already be up here in Jhb by the time I had to go back to court.

So today I booked leave for May 29 and 30 - I have to be in court on the 29th, and I figured I'd make a long weekend out of it.

This weekend was very tiring. I had to pack up pretty much everything into my tazz and then unpack it all once I got to Jhb. I had bet Darryl at work that I could fit everything into two boxes. I lost :( Altho, I am still amazed at the amount of stuff I managed to fit into the car, and still have space to see through the rear-view mirror and blind spot. Not very much tho. And I still left loads of things back at home.

Saying goodbye is incredibly difficult.

I had LASIK surgery yesterday morning. It's really amazing - walking out of the operating room, things are blurry but already a lot better focused. And it doesn't hurt at all, even though you're awake the whole time.

I resigned today. In just over a month I'll be moving to Midrand to work at Vodaworld writing software for Vodacom's prepaid systems (or so I've been told).
Resigning wasn't as painful as I thought it might be, probably because my Team Lead already expected it anyways. He seems more excited about it than I do, although I don't know if thats because he's finally rid of me :( Seriously tho, he knew I haven't been happy for a while and figures the change will be good for me. I think so too.

I've been working on a new time-waster project for the past few weeks. Rather than re-type the entire description, I'll just link to the Project Fred website instead.

The short version is, it counts the number of keystrokes and mouse clicks as you use your computer, and submits these to the Fred website, where you can compare your useless stats against other people's useless stats.