Wheels

Sometime towards the end of last year, I lost an argument about how traffic lights work with a minibus taxi. While I got off reasonably unscathed, my poor Honda didn't, which was a very sad experience.

Consequently, I spent some time looking for a suitable replacement. This took longer than I wanted, due to general end of year craziness, but eventually resulted in something I quite like.

Now that I have the licensing all sorted out, I hope to be able to enjoy the remaining good biking weather before winter sets in suitable style.

An Observation

It's regrettably common for car drivers to try and muscle out motorcycles, and, given that the motorcyclist is the squishier of the parties involved, it's usually better for the motorcyclist to choose discretion over arguing too hard about right of way.

As an enthusiastic motorcyclist, I've this happen to me numerous times. It is, however, hard not to feel particularly ticked off when the car in question sports a prominent "Think Bike" sticker.

Ahem

MINE! :D

Motorcycling

The bits that aren't either terrifying, frustrating or miserably uncomfortable are frickin awesome (and sometimes things are awesome anyway).

Common experiences

Communication is much easier when people can call on common experiences. While many concepts and experiences are fairly universal, there are others that are far less common, and, while it may be quite possible to cover the broad outlines, it is very difficult for someone who has not shared a similar experience to truly grasp the details.

Dealing with a mosquito buzzing around inside your helmet on the N2 probably falls into the "not universal" category.

Speed Traps

I really, really dislike camera speed traps.This is especially the case when I have recently received a fine from a camera trap, but, even those usually quite long intervals between such fines, I maintain I high level of general dislike for them. Of course, it is the righteous indignation for the fine I received on Friday, for which I have no real extenuating circumstances, and am completely at fault, tat prompts this post.

A large part of my dislike is the total separation of the South African camera traps form any form of law enforcement. They are run purely as a money making scheme. The fact the most cities out-source the
whole process should surely ring alarm bells at several levels of government, but apparently is viewed as good business.

The objections to running camera traps as a business should be reasonably self evident. There is o incentive for the company placing the cameras to place them in points where speed reduction is an actively good thing, since, many people being semi-sensible, the number of people speeding will be comparatively low. Likewise, at points where exceeding the speed limit is less of an issue, it's in the company's interest to place cameras to maximise revenue. That this is completely the reverse of the desired behaviour, is the problem.

Similarly, to increase revenue, cameras are disguised. This allows several bites at the cherry before people learn that the camera's there, and allows maximum exploitation of out of town people, who have the added advantage of not being well placed to contest the fine.

this also creates the aspect that annoys me most - the long delay between offense and punishment. Receiving the fine some weeks later means that a) one cannot argue against the fine based on traffic conditions or whatever, and b) the actual events are vague, and thus any defense is difficult. This is also in the interests of the company, as revenue suffers when people can successfully contest fines. Likewise, there is no incentive for applying the law flexibly, since a narrow, legalistic interpretation, is better for the bottom line.

My last objection is not against the cameras system specifically, but the way in which it is used to completely replace all other forms of traffic policing. The number of moving offenses that don't involve speeding on our roads is quite staggering, yet only the one is targeted. And since this is targeted, people adopt tactics to defeat it, such as using false plates, or mounting the plates in positions that are difficult for the camera to observe. Since no other policing is done, these tactics are completely safe. That the system fails to address such obvious gaming of the system is a sad inditement of the system's effectiveness.

So, to summarise: Camera Traps BAD, especially when they nab me.

Cape Town Weather, how I wish I could predict thee

I grew up in the Free State (during a drought, nogal). Now, weather prediction in the Free State is easy. You look up at the sky, shake your head wisely, and say "It's not going to rain today". While the weather will occasionally prove you wrong, your average success rate will be pretty good.

Unfortunately for me, I no longer live in the Free State. Weather prediction in Cape Town is much less simple, and, given the tendency of various weather patterns to hide behind mountains (rather unfairly, I feel), prone to being unreliable.

Throw into the mix that I got my bike back from having a choke cable replaced (which took surprisingly long) yesterday, that my rain suit is (I hope) sitting in my office in Stellenbosch, rather than here, and we have potential disaster. Biased towards taking the bike, I happily looked at the scattered high clouds this morning and said "This looks safe, I'll take the bike". Bad idea. 5 kms on the way to iThemba LABS, and it's raining fairly hard. Bother.

So, having arrived at work wet, and generally uncomfotable, I watched with some relief as the clouds cleared during the course of the day. "At least the trip back will be dry", thinks I. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

I noticed some clouds gathering as we neared the evening, so hastily got some stuff done so I could leave before the rains started. I didn't quite make it. About ten seconds after I locked my office, the heavens opened, and I found myself, minus a rain suit, riding through quite downpour. Consequently, I arrived home feeling decidedly bedraggled.

Of course, just to annoy me, the weather cleared as I entered the Strand, and I spent the last few kms of the trip dripping furiously in fairly bright sunshine.

LARP'ed

So, I played in Simon and Adrianna's LARP, the Grove of Fallen Leaves. It was all very last minute - I agreed to play a little more than 24 hours beforehand, due to a player pulling out.

The first obstacle was actually making it to the LARP. This shouldn't have been an obstacle, except that I had to take my bike in to get the choke cable repaired, and they did not let me know that my bike would not be ready until quite late. However, by use of the less than optimal Cape Town train system, I was able to make it across (relying on Simon and Adrianna's hospitality to work around the lack of trains back until the next day).

The LARP was fun. My theatrical background was probably a it of a disadvantage, since I was more likely to play the character, rather than the game situation, although, given the way the game went down, I'm not sure i there was much I could have done differently to change things.

The LARP suffered from hitting a critical level of mistrust, and, despite trying to play a conciliatory role, the rest of the players were more interested in mistrusting each other than actually resolving anything, which was somewhat frustrating.

Still, overall, I had good fun, which is about the best one can expect out of this sort of thing.

CTPUG 5

So, yet another CTPUG down. Attendance was down to the basic core group. I'm not sure why the attendance dropped as it did, as UCT should have been about as accessible as the Bandwidth Barn, but so it goes.

Since Kevin hadn't finished his talk last time, he continued with demonstrating numpy, using a fairly simple compression scheme based on Haar wavelets. While the talk ended up taking rather longer than anticipated, it overall went quite well, I thought, and was generally quite enjoyable. The interactive debugging session mid-way through, while pretty everyone there chipped in (an error caused by missing a copy in places).

After the talk, though, my usual vehicle karma kicked in. The choke cable on my bike broke, wihc, given that a cold wind was blowing, meant I run the battery down trying to get things started. Fortunately, I was able to convince jerith to give me a jump start, and get home OK, but it will make transport an issue until I get the problem resolved. unfortunately, the choke is not easily accessible on the Suzuki, so I can't really work around the problem, although a pair of long-nosed pliers may help (will have to try that during the week).

It's been cold

When you spend a couple of minutes wiping the frost off you Bike's saddle, before setting out, then it's pretty darn cold.

Consequently, I can confidently state that last night was pretty darn cold.

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.

Hot Fuzz

After the (sadly not that unexpected) disappointment that was Spiderman 3, it was a relief that Hot Fuzz, which I saw on Wednesday, was indeed as funny as I'd hoped.

Yet, despite being a very funny movie, it has vanished from the circuit very quickly. When I went to see it, it was only showing at Long Beach, which, in the cold weather, made the trip to go so it rather more effort than I liked (the ride back got very cold indeed) and is now completely off circuit in the Western Cape. I am at a loss to understand why, as it has done good business elsewhere, and seems like it should have been given an opportunity to built up some momentum locally.

Anyway, it has at least restored my belief in the ability of movies to be entertaining. Here's hoping Prates 3 is at least fun.

And then the rains came down

Today was wet, cold and generally miserable - a typical Cape Town winter's day. Of course, due the ongoing saga of my car's water pump, I had to take the bike in too work, which is not ideal in this sort of weather, especially as the Suzuki seems to have picked up a slight allergy to water somewhere, and tends to get grumpy and difficult after about 15 kms. The whole experience is vastly enlivened by the usual gormless stupidity that passes for Capetonian driving in the wet.

Still, the major rant I have is about Windows XP. On Monday, I had a very distressed email from one of the students saying that she couldn't get WinXP to boot without a blue screen. After explaining that, due to other commitments (watching 2 world cup semi-finals count of commitments, no?) I couldn't look at it before today, I felt I was obliged to pop across in the evening to look. And indeed, the machine complained of an "unmountable volume" (or something like that) fairly soon after kicking into WinXP. I spent some frustrating minutes trying to convince windows to boot into something that would run chkdsk, before giving up and booting into Linux. From there, it was easy to check that, according to smartmon, the actual hard disk, while starting to show signs of aging, was still basically OK. Linux could mount the NTFS filesystem though, so I ran ntfsfix on it to force a chkdsk run the next boot, and voila, chkdsk ran, and Windows was happy. Now, why windows couldn't do this for itself, without my basically hammering home the message with a sledgehammer, is a mystery to me, and, considering how common and annoying such mysteries are with windows, merely more fuel for my loathing of an OS that tries so hard to protect you from the details that it becomes absolutely opaque. And, while I would very much like to understand exactly what happened, the truth is that, due to the vagueness of the error message, the apparent randomness of the fix and the tendency of most windows forums to lack comments from people with a deep understanding of the system, the amount of cruft Google kicks up on my searches has totally put me off the idea of trying. Anyway, at least the problem appears to be solved, which is some gain from the whole affair.