I'm running out of titles

I haven't been blogging much lately - surprisingly, there wasn't much to blog about over Christmas (I got some kind of stomach bug on Christmas Eve, so my Christmas was not a terribly pleasant one - although compared to the tsunami on Boxing Day, I guess a stomach bug is really minor). And New Year was pretty much a non-event - my parents and I watched the count down on tv, which wasn't very spectacular, there were a couple of fireworks and flares outside, and then everyone gave up and went to bed :-(

There just hasn't been much to blog about in general - work's been pretty hectic, as we're doing testing on our entire system - some of the guys are doing component testing, I'm doing system testing so that's keeping me quite busy. It's pretty interesting, although it can get frustrating trying to track down errors in components that other people have written, but on the plus side I'm really learning a lot about the system internals (I had been working more on the peripheral components, such as the crypto side). And strangely enough, I'm actually enjoying it - I actually tested a couple of things after I got home after going out Friday night, just because I was curious to see what would happen. Actually, that sounds rather sad - but it's really just because it's interesting :-) But then I really do enjoy my job in general - the work's interesting, the
people are cool, and the vibe is nice.

What else can I say ... it looks like the Zanzibar trip isn't going to happen, unfortunately. The package was advertised for R6200, per person sharing, but their price for a person travelling alone is at best R9200 - plus about $60 for a visa, $25 airport tax in Zanzibar, R520 airport tax in SA, as well as malaria medication, yellowfever vaccinations, and travel insurance. So that's quite a bit more than the price they lure you in with, and I think that for that amount of money I can probably go somewhere more ... well ... somewhere you can actually drink the water, eat the food, and not have to sleep under a mosquito net, if you know what I mean.

Ah, here's something to save for posterity (and later reference). I've finally figured out to en/disable the hourly chime function on my watch. You see, every now and then I accidentally switch it on (normally while I'm trying to switch off the alarm in the morning, while I'm still 90% asleep), and I have no idea how I switched on or how to switch it off - since the watch didn't come with one of those tiny manuals that I always thought was totally useless - until now :-) And although it's really irritating during the day, it's surprisingly easy to sleep through your watch going "BEEP" every hour. Eventually, though, I'd accidentally hit on the right button combination to switch it off, but I never knew what I'd actually done. And it doesn't have an indicator to show whether it's on or off, either, so you either have to keep resetting the time to just
before the hour, to test it, or you have to wait until the next hour. It was getting quite embarrassing - I'm an experienced software developer, I have a MSc in Computer Science, but it took me a week to figure out how to switch off the hourly chime function on my watch! But, finally I not only managed to switch it off, I actually know what buttons I pressed to do it! So, because I know I'll forget it again, here's the secret: you have to press the left bottom button to get it into stopwatch mode, and then press both the bottom buttons at the same time. So that's my contribution to the sum of human knowledge for this week.