Due to ill health of an elderly relative I will be flying to Cape Town tonight. This will probably be for one week.

I am safely back in London, and feeling rather zombified, but a long night's sleep should sort that out. The flights were not bad, just long.

While en route I read a couple of magazines and Death at Victoria Dock
Then I went for the movies with old favourites: The Usual Suspects and L.A. Confidential Then off to foreign language movies,
Flammen & Citronen is about two guys in the Danish resistance against the Nazis, in Copenhagen, 1944. Flammen has flaming red hair, and Citronen has his face in a permanently sour expression. I enjoyed it quite a bit, the atmosphere is somewhat noir rather than thrilling. It seems that in Copenhagen 1944, the only things to do in Copenhagen were: brood ominously in hiding, chain-smoke, do a drive-by assassination, double-cross someone, conduct a doomed love affair, drink. Repeat and combine. It had well-drawn, flawed characters.

After that I watched a couple of episodes of The Simpsons, including off-the-wall rock ones where Homer does a Kurt Cobain impression in a band called Sadgasm, complete with hilariously obscure and emo lyrics; and one where Bart is Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols, and Lisa is Nancy Spungeon. Yep.

Then a rather different film called Go Go 70s about rockers in 1970s South Korea. The plot arc is standard, but the cultural layering was rather appealing to me, as the band in the film gradually found their feet, going from bad Asian covers of "Mustang Sally", "Soul Man" and the like, to eventually building their own scene with hybrid influences. Or possibly by then I hadn't slept in over 24 hours and my critical facilities had shut down, which let me enjoy watching young Koreans jumping around to recycled soul/rock in 1970s clothes (and thereby somehow sticking it to the Man).

Doha on the way back was still flat, brown and hot (35C at 8am. Ouch) but mercifully brief. London on arrival was overcast and wet, a bit like Cape Town on departure then. Seasons, we has them.

Things I have done in the last few days:
Driven around Cape Town buying lights and other house fittings. Mostly done now.
Various meetings with various people. More to follow on Monday.
Not gone into most of the house; the floors have been sanded and are covered in varnish.
Driven around in a tiny Hyundai with a very annoying gearbox.
Been to gym a couple of times.
Been to Cavendish mall many times. The bank is there, among other things.
Drank wine and gin and tonic while watching funny movies:
- Who is killing the great chefs of Europe? Very watchable, very 70s,
- Gamers: The Dorkness rising – better than it had any right to be.
- Black Sheep- Baaaad. Ewe. And other sheepish puns tht get your goat.
Ate excellent food at Cargill's in Rondebosch with extemporanea
Ate pizza and drank caipirinhas with mac1235
VIsited my Aunt B, who seems in better sprits than she was last time I was here. I'm not sure if this is becuase she's healed up after her hip replacement, or the Zoloft is working.
Vaguely applied for contract work in London, but not chased it too hard yet, because I can't interview until week after next.
Bought fabric, honey and other perishables that will surely push my suitcase's weight over 20kg on the way back.
Read a couple of books. Fiction, next up some ASP.NET MVC or silverlight, honest.
Watched overcast weather alternate with drizzle and pelting rain.
Wondered how sunny London is getting on without me.

Short summary of travels: took 24 hours, nothing went awry.
Qatar airways is OK. they have bad movies on demand, and airplane food served regularly. I've had worse.
London to Doha, flying southeast on a summer night made a very short period of darkness.
Doha early on Monday morning is, at first impression, hot, flat, brown, dusty, smelly. Skyscrapers loom in the distance through the dust/smog. The airport is not totally tiny, has busses trundling from long distances from aircraft to terminal. Transfer was mercifully brief and painless.
The flight to Cape Town is also the flight to Johannesburg. It was more than half-empty before the stop in JHB, and even emptier after.
Cape Town is in winter, which means it's dark before 7pm as we arrive, and cool damp air.
My phone is still not working right, probaly O2 have not yet ported the number in properly.

On the flight, I watched Quantum of Solace which made not a quantum of sense but was stylish, Bolt which was light enough for my sleep-deprived state- I liked the cat but the dog's character was underdrawn; and Gran Torino which I knew wouldn't suffer from small screen and poor light to mar special effects since it's character-driven. It was OK human drama set in the US Hmong community. And Clint Eastwood does has best grumpy old man. With a shotgun.

I also read Bruce Sterling's "The Caryatids", which was excellent near-future fiction for 2009, a sort of chillingly believable post-catastophe utopian farce, with clones; though it was a bit lacking in plot focus. I will read it again, to see if I misssed the subtleties.

Now I am realy tired, but the jetlag rule applies: No sleep 'til bedtime.

This is a long shot, but does anyone have experience of using O2's sim-only contracts? Particularly with a G1 or similar webby phone? How good is the Unlimited (*cough* Excessive usage policy applies *cough*) Web Bolt On? Will the webs work this way? Is it a better deal than the T-Mobile package at a similar price?

I'm going to have to replace my phone very soon, as the existing handset will go back to my employer. I might need to do it in the next week.

I will be pleased to be rid of Windows Mobile, and have a couple of handsets in mind that have nice stuff on them like GPS maps, twitter clients and POP email.

1) iPhone. Inevitable, really that it would be under consideration.

2) Google G1 phone. Can I get an unlocked handset?

3) HTC Magic. My attitude to the G1 when I didn't need a new phone was "good, but like most things the V2.0 is when it will start to shine". So now the HTC magic is out and it's not exactly a G1 V 2.0. No physical keyboard, which I really like on my current phone. How much is the premium over G1 for getting a newer model?

Any thoughts, comments, experiences of the HTC magic?

A few months ago, fired up with gardening enthusiasm, I bought a packet of tomato seeds on borough market. They are some funny continental variety (Saint Pierre) and I sprinkled them thickly. All of them came up, and now we have an incipient Tomato Jungle of Dooom!!!1 (where's the blink tag when you need it?)

I planted out one of the many pots of deedlings today, and filled the bed allocated to them, probably a bit too densely. The other pots sit there, rustling ominously in the wind.

Who wants some tomato seedlings? Going free to good home. By good home, I mean someone who will feed them chemical fertilisers, tie them to sticks, leave them out in the sun and rain, eat their babies and then throw them on the compost heap in Autumn.

Offer is valid only in North London.

In light of my free time I have booked a trip to Cape Town to finish up family property-related business.

Dates are:
Leave London on Sun 24 May 2009, Arrive in Cape Town Mon 25th
Leave Cape Town on Thur 4 June 2009, Arrive in London Fri 5th

If you're there I can meet during that time, but I'd suggest evening meeting. Business will take priority over wine routes and the like.

I have accepted the my employer's redundancy package. I will miss them.

Meanwhile, I am an experienced .Net developer at large in London. Job offers and suggestions are welcome.

Data from Jobstats: The crash of '09 is looking worse than the crash of '01. It's not fallen from such a height, but it has fallen a lot closer to zero. Aaargh.

This is a small Connemara black-faced sheep, photographed in Ireland. They often range freely, avoiding traffic in a very un-ovine manner.

I can has? They're cute, all jet black and snow white and splodges of bright colour, with little horns. I'm sure it would be happy in the back garden, and as a bonus it would save me from having to mow the lawn.

The books that I read while on holiday last week are :

1) I brought with me short_mort's copy of Kerry Greenwood's Cocaine blues. This is the first of the novels featuring Phryne Fisher, the female private Investigator in 1920s Melbourne. Mort is a fan of Phryne.

It was light and a quick read, and the plot wasn't always believable, but the characters are well-drawn, and are likeable when they should be. The background of the time seemed believable to me. Phryne herself is a financially and sexually liberated woman, and that is an anachronism with which the modern reader can identify. I will read more of this series, since it's fun and they're in the house.

2) After that went rapidly, I bought a copy Charles Stross's Saturn's Children for 20 Euro from a bookshop in Galway in the rain. I have wanted to read Mr Stross's latest since it came out.

Stross doesn't fail to do his thing of raising uneasy ideas in an intriguing read (and is also a Heinleinesque adventure story). It's solar-system-travelling sci-fi, and the best tale of sex robots in space I've ever read.

Oddly, many of the reviews that don't like it get the basic details wrong - it's Solar System not galaxy spanning, and a few hundred years from now, not far-future. It's not as straightforward or satisfying a story as some, but it does have a gnarly, weird logic to it.

3) After I finished that, I decided that I needed something cheap to fill in the last few days, and stopped into a second-hand bookshop in Clifden. I got an old copy of Different Seasons by Stephen King for all of 3 Euros. I haven't read much Stephen King, but I do like the stories that I have read. The first story in this anthology is "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption". You may have seen the movie of it, the story turned out to be quite good (the movie is quite close to it). As you know, it's a prison drama, not the horror and supernatural that King is famous for.

The second story, Apt Pupil, has also been made into a movie (which I have not seen). It's not supernatural but is quite chilling. I read most of it on the flight back home.

The other two short stories are yet to be read.

OK, lazywebs of London:

Has anyone else noticed a lack of Dreft Dark/Woolite dark clothes washing liquid in Sainsbury's and Tesco? Or is this just a local issue?

IF not, what has happened to it? Where can one get some?

I have voted in the South African Election. I went down after work, and the queue was shorter. It took less than an hour. People were cheerfull, took the bureaucracy and random paperwork in good humour. I have a loony afrikaaner/religious/political pamphlet. My ID book has been stamped and my left thumb inked, as is the South African custom on this occasion.

That's better. I'm glad that I voted after work. I voted for ... let's just say that it wasn't a Congress.

I'm way too busy doing everything. Some days you can't win.

I got to the main office at 9am today, to find that the review meeting for $PrevClient had been cancelled at the last minute. Took the time to catch up on my timesheet (still need codes for $NextClient) before I was going to head over to $NextClient. I looked up that I am indeed registered to vote in South africa's general election on the 22nd (they hadn't sent any email in reply), I checked details of where to go on that date ... and found that overseas voting was being held on the 15th. Yeah, today.

I had time due to the cancelled meeting, so I went home to collect ID (and while there, unload washing machine, load it again, and take in some parcels that had arrived outside the door. Busy). I got to Trafalgar square by 11:30, and found the queue winding past South Africa House to the National gallery to be long, wide and not moving much. After a few minutes I gave up and headed to $NextClient, who are near TCR.

Despite the crowds, I did not think that a large percentage of the estimated 600 000 South Africans in London (update: probably 100 000 not 600 000) were present. None of the ones that I know are. The process has not been well-publicised at all, and many were discouraged or missed the cut-off dates. If I'd known about it even a few days ago, I would have been there at 7am when it opened. The government may have been legally required to allow foreign voting (voters who mostly do not support the government) but that's about as far as it goes. If they could have put the polling booth in a swamp filled with aligators, they might well have.

No, it's not a bad thing to vote against the current South African government. They've been in power too long. it happend to UK Labour, it happend to the ANC. the party of Jacob Zuma is not the party of Nelson Mandela anymore. It's not even the party of Thabo Mbeki.

On the plus side, our 2pm meeting is in the cool and freaky cat building of Mornington crescent. I used to live across from there, but have never been in.

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Update: I went down after work and sucessfully voted

Help me, O geeky lazywebs:

I'm spec'ing a PC. With around 1 Terrabyte of storage on an internal SATA Raid mirror. What's good in large hard drives at present? Which brands have had quality issues lately?

(By good I mostly mean reliable. £20 cheaper or 10% faster is no good if it and all the data on it expires a year later.)

I had a drunken ar conversation on Thursday night over UK politics. The current government, the Labour party of Gordon Brown, who said things like "No return to boom and bust" and "I will not allow house prices to get out of control" are, in my opinion, going to be kicked to the kerb at the next election simply because voters don't stand for governments that have been seen to hurt them personally (they'll still vote in a slender majority for a party that disastrously invades Iraq under flimsy false pretences, but that's not personal hurt and is another story). And because those particular quotes are very telling.

So can you really blame labour for the UK part of the global financial crisis? London is a banking centre, it's not an insignificant part. There are various tacks to take. e.g:

1) The other lot would have done better. This is, I think, unlikely. The conservatives started it and if anything, are even more eager to let bankers do whatever the hell they want without oversight. As it turns out, they chose to care more about personal annual bonuses than long-term company survival.

2) Change governments anyway, just to send a message. - that failure results in being removed from power. This is I think, what is happening in a lot of voter's minds. Stereotypically, it just results in an alternation of clueless liars.

3) None of them saw it coming, so you can't blame any of them. I think this is also not quite right. It was predictable. The way that the major parties have interests that blind them to the right things doesn't make them blameless.

Any thoughts? Is the party of the right the new party of the left? Have they zigged when Labour has zagged, and ended up with less illiberal nonsense?

We might have some form of liquor acquisition syndrome. Consider what the recent trip to Cape Town netted:
From Duty Free: 1 liter each of of Smirnoff Blue Vodka and Tanqueray Export Gin, very nice, but the remains of both left were in Cape Town.

Bought and brought back from Cape Town:
750ml of Backsberg Brandy (and very nice it is too. But there's half a bottle left of one that was opened in November)
2 * 750ml of Backsberg "Klein Babylons Toren" 2005 drinking red wine.
2 * 500ml Villiera Cellar Door Rhine Riesling Noble late harvest 2005 sweet white wine.
And left by the thankful house-sitter, 700ml of "Kráľovská Čerešňa" – Slovakian cherry booze (43% alcohol)
This joins the existing bottles. At current rates of consumption, we will still have most of it at the end of the year. There are still unopened bottles from the new-years trip to Slovenia. But the Blueberry schnapps is going down steadily. Because it's nice.

I am trialling a new twitter/Livejournal integration strategy: I am not integrating them at all. I have stopped tweets being shipped from twitter to LJ.

The theory is to let LJ be LJ and let twitter be twitter. If you want the tweets, you know where to get them.

In practice, I see most of my recent posts here being exported tweets with no replies.

It's quiet in here. How are you all doing?