Loadshedding EP

Once again, it’s dark. Well, it’s not, because it’s light, but if it were dark, it would be dark. Yes, we’re being loadshod once again.

There was plenty of warning this time around and yet some people still seem to be confused, despite the best efforts of the City Council and Eskom to keep them informed. These individuals then react with anger. It’s proof that you simply can’t legislate for stupid people, I guess.

Me? I react with creativity. It’s been a while now since I’ve written any music and I’ve decided that I’m going to write an EP with loadshedding as my muse.
It’s early days, but already, there are song titles forming in my mind. I sense that a mixture of genres will ensure mass appeal.

The folk classic: Peggy, Don’t You Open The Fridge
The rock ballad: I Never Knew I Wanted Coffee (Until The Power Went Out)
The electronic dance piece: Generator X (Dubstop Remix)
The boy band pop hit: Solar, So Good
Some hip hop: Crap Traffic –  It’s A Four Way Stop Thing.
Oh, and obviously a death metal tune about Eternal Night, or something.

Like I say, this is just the bare bones. Now I’m going to hang some riffs and one (or more) soaring vocals on them.

You’re probably going to love it.

Fair Play: Afrihost sorted my internet problem

You may have read that I had issues connecting to my blog from home and from the lab yesterday. There was plenty of to’ing and fro’ing with Afrihost (who are both my ISP and hosting provider) on email and twitter, but nothing got sorted.
Many kind people made suggestions here and on twitter, but I had floppy beagle issues last night (Colin got snipped and chipped), so I didn’t get chance to do a lot of exploration.

Then, this morning, incoming email from ‘Critical Care’ at Afrihost. I had no idea I was in such a perilous state. And here’s what they had discovered:

As suspected from my side, the Netstat rules for your IPs on your public connection were on the temporary prohibit list which I have now removed and you will be able access the website from all devices from your home network.
I have investigated the reasoning behind the listing and the reason seems to be that the website was attempting to be accessed from these IPs during an update – when security becomes most strict – and rather to be safe than sorry they were listed.
These updates only happen once a year so the likely hood of this happening again is extremely minimal 🙂

Thanks, Michael.

I don’t really understand what went wrong, but to find some sort of analogy, it seems that my home and work network were being tjatjarag and the website felt threatened, probably remarked something along the lines of “So you think you are a king?”, pushed them to the floor and barred them from entering the metaphorical building.

All is sorted now.

Oh, and Colin is much recovered this morning too. Thanks for your concern.

Intermission blog

Beatenburg done and now we’re awaiting Jared and 30 Seconds to Mars. The spotlights are on…

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… the scene is set.

Last time out, Jared climbed to the top of the stage. He was a bit mad back then. But that was 5½ years ago.
We’ve all grown up a bit since then, right? Although I might go a bit mad again tonight.

Review tomorrow. Possibly.

Yachts

I missed out on going to see the yachts from the Volvo Ocean Race when they were in town this year. As you might have noticed from the lack of quality and quantity of blogging lately, I’m chaotically busy with trying to fit in experiments ahead of the the Christmas and summer break and trying to fit in everything else before we head up to the UK “soon”.

But the footage of the teams leaving Cape Town and heading the 8000 odd miles to Kochi in India was stunning:

That’s the corporate package – if you want the technical detail, you can watch the full, 85 minute version of the start here.

The stopover in Cape Town was supported the the tune of R750,000 by the city council, and while the maths still needs to be done, it looks like a sound investment, given the number of people going to see the yachts in port (not me) and seeing the city on TV and – increasingly – on the internet.

The event will be televised to an estimated 1.8 billion people, and the publicity will help position the city as a desirable investment and tourist choice.

Worth every cent then…

Holiday Snaps

Not mine, you’ll be pleased to hear. No. These are from the Rosetta holiday mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about these photos, save for the fact that they were ever even taken at all.

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You can surf through a couple of hundred pics, all the while marvelling that you’re looking at images taken on a piece of space rock moving at thousands of kilometres an hour, some half a billion kilometres from Earth.

It’s all rather humbling.