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Arguably the best explanation of Facebook.

(PhD comics is a recent, but much enjoyed discovery)

CTPUG 4

So, another CTPUG meeting successfully dealt with.

My pygame talk did not go as smoothly as I had planned, it must be said, and no-one laughed at the "Seriously, who did not see that coming" subtitle, which is a great pity, as I thought that joke was quite good. My demonstration of broken threading refused to break, which was most strange, since it broke quite happily here at home. Given the two in the morning origin of parts of the talk, I think it went as well as can be expected.

Kevin's talk on numpy went over quite well, and sets him up t be roped into to talking at the next one as well. One less talk to find.

After the pygame meeting, most of the attendees migrated to a pleasant little pizza place on Long street, where we had pizza, at quite reasonable cost, it must be said. I wish I could remember the places name, because it is worth remembering.

End of my current car Troubles (hopefully)

My car finally seems to be back in operational condition, due to a badly leaking water pump, leaving the engine running dangerously hot after only a few minutes. Since, based on my email records, the water pump collapsed on the 1st of Feb, this has been an extremely long and drawn out saga.

The major difficultly seems to be how ridiculously hard it is to get parts for remotely old cars in the western cape. Growing up in the Free State, where it is common to keep cars running for yonks, this catches me off guard every time. That I ended up having to get a water pump couriered down from Bloemfontein to eventually get things solved indicates just how strange the problem is. Still, the replacement pump seems to be working fine, so hopefully all will be well for a while.

Facebook

So I signed up to Facebook.

Why? Idle curiosity, mainly, but I've done many things because of that, so that's not too unusual.

My first impression are mixed, and thus so the are the following comments:

• WTF is up with the "find friends in your address book" thing? Who though having facebook trawl my contacts list for people would be a good idea?
• The interface is often clunky
• "The wall" looks like an astonishing bad invention. It seems to want to be somewhere between a forum and a set of blog comments, but without the ability to compartmentalise into threads that make conversations manageable in either.
  
• What people are willing to post on the wall is quite eye-opening at times
  
• YA online status thingy to play with
• Randomly searching for various people eats up a lot ore time than one would think
• Finding the person you're looking for can be quite hard
• Following links in various people's social networks is another dangerous time sink.
  
• The temptation to push misleading information into "how one met" and such fields is quite strong.

Still, early days yet on my interaction with facebook. While unlikely to be something I have open all the time, I'll no doubt check it quite often.

Because it's so true

from the irregular Radeon blog, comes this marvellous QOTD