Well hello there friends!
We have just returned from a ridiculously enjoyable holiday in The Drakensberg, or uKhahlamba in isiZulu.
More specifically, we started in Giant’s Castle, the place of no internet mentioned in the previous edition of the WHV, and also the subject of that post’s main image, but we spent the largest part of the week at Cathedral Peak.
Due to it having been holiday and all, the rest of this post will follow the trusty old bullet list form.
I am currently in a place with no to extremely little internet. Just getting the photo above uploaded was an adventure.
I briefly debated breaking my current WHV posting streak due to exceptional circumstances, but decided against it, at least for now.
Anyways, I might have no internet, but the scenery here is phenomenal.
(It later turned out that just getting this blog post uploaded on Sunday evening was not going to happen.)
Winter is coming, somewhere on the R44 between Betty’s Bay and Gordon’s Bay.
Let me start this week’s edition with something that a friend forwarded, quite ironically, from the dark underbelly of the internet, also known as “twitter”:
Daily activities to avoid:
- Consuming endless (news) feeds
- Discussion w/ anyone with a big ego
- Thinking without pen & paper
- Arguing on Twitter
- Mindlessly saying yes to meetings
The majestic view from Bodega onto the Dornier cellar and the Hottentots-Holland mountain behind it.
Welcome back peeps! Make yourselves at home.
It seemed that nothing much happened during most of the week, but I started writing anyway. It turns out there was slightly more than nothing much. Writing stuff down does have its perks.
This rainbow unicorn, floating serenely on a cloudy background, is winking right at you. Down below, we are celebrating GOU #3’s second birthday. Photo taken with the expert assistance of GOU#1, age 11 going on 32.
Untitled artwork by GOU#2 (age 7), who is also known as My Most Favourite Middle Child.
I somehow forgot to take photos this past week. At the very last moment, GOU#2 delivered, as if commissioned, the piece shown above.
The WHV visual element lives to fight another day!
The rest of this post is divided into three parts: One for the programming nerds, one for the running nerds and one for the arm-chair psychologists. Feel free to pick and choose!
The legendary Koos Kombuis (aka André Letoit) performing with Schalk Joubert on bass and Vernon Swart on percussion in the Helderberg Nature reserve, eponymous mountain visible through the trees on the right. This was a surprisingly amazing end to the week.
Fragment of potato skin, taken with phone camera through GOU#2’s microscope at 100x.
We have a serious deadline coming up on Tuesday, so I’m going to make these few WHV minutes count.
BULLET LIST TO THE RESCUE!
Day zero has again been postponed, this time to June 4. We continue with our water saving efforts.
That unexpected side-project I mentioned in last week’s post did end up going live that very night. Armed with the Django Rest Framework and plenty of battle scars, it took about 17 hours from idea to fully deployed REST API, a large part of which was debugging the paper’s math and spreadsheets.
Do you know what time it is?
It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for a new edition of the WHV!
GOU #2 has made what will probably be the most significant contribution to this week’s edition. I am happy that it’s in the form of an art piece, although I am slowly also growing quite excited at the prospect of one of my GOUs popping up here one day with an acerbic comment.
Our family through the eyes and hands of GOU#2 (age 7), also known as My Most Favourite Middle Child.
Photogenic and non-camera-shy dragonfly I met in Paarl over the weekend.
As I went through my notes to extract material for this week’s post, I noticed a small discrepancy between the task description for the previous post and the published version: #129 in my notes versus #130 in the published post!
It’s too late now to rename #130, so in this reality I’m just going to have to deal with the fact that WHV #129 will never exist. I have decided to name this edition #130-2 so that eventually (well, in about a week), we will be back to uninflated post numbers. Nobody likes inflation. Except perhaps tyres. And balloons.