I’m enjoying some “boyz”  time with my son, where where generally just do “the dirty jobs we like to”, climb on the roof and fix WiFi gear without Mom complaining,  and then going for a backside dump into the leather couches to  eat some biltong, endure a marathon series of “Brainiac”, and otherwise devour  ”unhealthy” foods, play PS3  games, play bowls  and generally behave in “manly” fashion.

A single-dad/customer of mine told me that being a single parent is not that hard (his being single not by choice). I agree, from a basic logistic point of view that it is entirely do-able. But there are some serious emotional aspects  that I would just not be able to cope with, if I had to be a single, “entirely responsible for all welfare parent”.

Ruben and I are having a nice time, and all,  but we are seriously missing that “other” half that makes our lives complete. It’s the motherly touch. It’s the attention to detail. It’s the “being able to offload responsibility”  to someone other that just yourself, that simply makes being a complete family unit worthwhile.

It might sound basic, but I  miss the other half of me,  that half that makes sure that we eat decent food, the half that makes sure we don’t do stupid things and the half that makes sure we behave responsibly.

The other half of me that will philosophise over a glass of wine.  Ruben misses the mom that tucks him in (even though I generally do it, and she in turn lets me), and tends the sores, the day’s heartaches and the homework, and the things that “need doing”.

Our Daschies miss the invitational slap on the lap, and the coochie coochie coochie, and the attention that I cannot give ‘em.

In the final analysis,  we’d be “OK” without our Mom/Partner/DaschieMinder if some zombies came and ate her brains, or if some absolutely unnatural disaster struck.  We’d “survive”. But honestly,  I can absolutely not fathom the idea of life without her. “OK” is just not “OK”. I cannot replace her.

It  would really, really, really suck. Actually, it would just be downright miserable.

All I can do right now  is to  wait for the next “major release” which is when she comes back on the 14th of Feb. I will be cheering with little flags and ditty’s on the airport apron as the flight lands.

Single Parenthood?

“Single parenthood” is a misnomer. Some people define themselves as “single parents” even thought there is a second parent. That does not necessarily imply  single parenthood. It’s divorcehood, and what it boils down to is contractual differences between two polarized parties.

Divorce or separation with children inevitably results in what I call a continual “merge window”  – and  feeble attempts to “svn up” and merge the “diffs”  of a child from two different sources. The result will always be substandard.  I reckon it’s an extremely difficult  thing for two parents and a child-in-the-middle to attempt to have a “HEAD” version of life…  Of course — it’s not UNdoable. It’s just very difficult.

“svn up -r divorce” is probably the worst thing you could do to the little human that you’ve (against his/her will) brought into this life. But sometimes these are the cards that are dealt, and sometimes this is the way relationships crumble. At least there is still some argument, and at least there is still (generally) two parents involved.

But, absolute, naked, true,  SINGLE parenting, is an absolute loneliness and responsibility that in my view is almost untenable, and takes  a super extraordinary person to deal with… I know a handful of these extraordinary people. People  that against all odds are the people that manage actual, proper, unadulterated, balanced, SINGLE  parenthood.

You are god-like.

Here’s a pip to you. I’ve been going 10 days. I have an end, some love and a little flag in sight.

You don’t.

You are god-like.

The game was called “Legends”, and was a community and fan driven spiritual successor to the Tribes series after Dynamix was closed down by Vivendi Universal games.

Legends, was based on the then Indie-sourced Tribes engine, redubbed Torque, and released by the ex-Dynamix team under the Garagegames banner.

Marc and I had some discussions around the licensing of his songs, but in the end, I couldn’t really offer him anything else than fame and possibly (mis)fortune for having his music embedded in a completely free game.

I’m glad to see that a few years later, his tracks Industry and Oxyacetylene were released as part of the Gran Turismo series of games.

Cubanate’s music simply has the attitude, and gusto for action games, and would be a perfect fit for any future action games. I’ve not heard of Marc, and Cubanate for many years, but I hope that he has found a niche in sound production and making some commercial money off his great musical talents.

In a (probably overinflated, self-gratuitous) way, I hope that I may have had some influence on making him considering the game and electronic media as a sales avenue for his music.

The sad part is that there is actually very little live, or otherwise staged footage of Cubanate left on the internet. I reckon if Cubanate had ridden the Web2.0 wave a little longer like bands such as Sister Machine Gun, and Nine Inch Nails, they could have continued their awesome industrial electronic hit career. Of course, one can never predict or understand the band’s internal politics and cannot question their personal decisions.

I saw Cubanate live. Once. In South Africa, in Hillbrow, in a derelict broken down building that absolutely suited the crass, industrial nature of Cubanate’s music. It was one of the most awesome experiences in my life.

Long live Cubanate, and one of my favourite tracks:

Other Cubanate tracks to “look” for, in order of priority:

• Lord of the Flies
• Human Drum
• Autonomy
• Forceful

In total — 12 Peers  – less than 72 hours. That’s about a peer per 6 hours. In fact, the first 12 hours turned up the most of the local ones.

It was all as simple as finding a contact in the organisation and exchanging peering details and netblocks. Of course, has been settlement free as well, and Neology will continue to do so as long as it has capacity. And if we don’t have capacity we will endeavor to provide more capacity.

Thanks to all the new peers,  you are part of the drive that is going to make INX’es in South Africa a success in the current and future tense.

It makes sense to peer settlement free at JINX. It’s good for the local internet. Except if BGP and route-filters are rocket science, as is generally the excuse toted by the “unmetionables”.

Sanity check:

It’s actually cheaper for me to get transit to the “unpeerables” via Telkom, rather than attempt to negotiate their prohibitive local peering requirements and pricing. Thanks Telkom, you are my friend. True value for money! Oh wait. Doesn’t that defeat the entire point of JINX ?

Here’s the thing — I’m paying for the SAIX local transit, and the “umnetionables” are paying for it too. So, in the end — we all paid for SAIX transit. If we don’t peer via SAIX or JINX then it would have to go SAIX, or international. So — wouldn’t it just make sense to peer at JINX? Yeah. I thought so.

Finally, many thanks to Graham, and Regardt for “making it so”. And thanks for all the V6 work as well. Neology is probably one of the better connected V6 providers at the moment, simply due to our willingness to do V6. We are hoping to establish peering with all the remaining JINX participants at this point. Basic logistics and time-zone issues appear to be the most common issue. Not “peering” agreements.

To the “umentionables” (you know who you are) … Thanks for your “cooperation” and entirely ridiculous peering policies. o_O

So I’ve got a shiny new router  in at JINX, at 158 Jan Smuts Ave, Rosebank. JINX Central. The prime peering point for ISPA members.

We’re a new JINX Peer. My router is there, with 8 Gig ports. Awaiting BGP peering, and whatnot.

Except apparently my router  cannot be turned on,  because the JINX rack is out of POWER. Also, according to rumour we’re the first new JINX peer in nearly three  years.

Sigh.

Honestly I cannot think of anything better than Andrew Eldritch (Sisters of Mercy) and the following song: “Under the gun”. Terri Nun is the girl doing backing vocals. Eldritch had a preference for hiring vocalists, guitarist and other band members in order to just make a single song. This did not make him popular all the time. But it certainly worked.

Eldritch was hard on his musicians. He is a perfectionist. Over the course of the Sisters’ existence he went through nine band members. Every video made was painstakingly constructed to his specification. It didn’t make him popular with his band members, but he rolled ahead regardless. And the results show. The man is a musical genius.

This educational post has got a bit of a “gothic” slant to it. Eldritch hated being labeled as goth, or for being labeled as the “father” of the genre.

And that — I have to agree with. Goth, is simply not a label. It is merely a dark state of mind that many people experience. Some of them longer than others. It is a lovely, dark, imaginative place to be. Every teenager should experience it in my mind. I still make space for that state of mind regularly. It puts perspective on the world.

Many parents freak out when their children “turn to the dark side”, but having had the experience, and being involved in the Gothic scene I can honestly say that the only thing that parents have to fear is themselves, and their prejudice.

I was classified “gothic” for a long time, but for me it was simply a state of mind. Not a “look”.

However, if you’ve never put on some tight leather pants, thrown on a loose fitting cotton shirt, struggled with your eighteen-up Doc Martins and applied some black nail varnish, and then proceeded to have some deep conversations about love, live and death over a bottle of wine — then you haven’t lived. It was not about the look. It was simply about the rebellion and romance of it all.

Apparently, when Sisters of Mercy opened for Depeche Mode, with “Ribbons”, they had to wait half an hour for the crowd to calm down. The embedded version of Ribbons below, is audio only since most of the liver versions on youtube are just really crap. Incoming!

If you don’t own “A slight case of Overbombing”, then about now would be the time to go Amazon it.

The next song is by “The 69 Eyes”. They’re a Finnish band, and epitomize everything in a modern  ”Goth” band. They’ve taken the Gothic genre, combined it with good quality music, and vocals without trying to be too pretentious.  Some of their older video’s such as “Wasting the Dawn” did have a bit too many girls “sowing the seeds” for my liking but the quality of their current music is a testament to their evolution.

I want hair like that fucking drummer!

“The Chair” — “The 69 Eyes”.

Finally, and this isn’t really gothic, but just brilliant musicianship.

Were you under the impression that Marilyn Manson was simply a talentless dolt, trying to impress teenagers across the world?

Wrong.

If Tim Skold, and an accoustic version of (gasp) Justin Timberlake’s song “What goes around comes around” does not impress you then I guess you’re a BeeGee’s fan. This cover clearly shows Manson’s vocal abilities. And of course there is simply no disputing Tim Skold’s capabilities as a musician, but that’s is worth a post on it’s own. This cover simply kicks the pants off the original. What are the chances of Justin Timberlake ever covering a Marilyn Manson song ? Hmm… Yeah. By the way this song was recorded in a radio station after an interview with Skold and Manson. Not shabby for an impromptu performance.

Marilyn Manson – accoustic cover of “What goes around comes around” by Justin Timberlake.

So, to tie up with the “interference” portion in the title of this post. To any would-be or current parent. Don’t interfere. Darkness is a fact of life. It’s better that your children get exposed to it, and learn how to deal with than to attempt to interfere by “hiding” it.

In the end, they’re going to find out the following:

“We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn’t have to stop there.’” — Dana Gould, via jwz.

Music just makes the entire world so much more bearable when you’re watching a database removing defunct rows. Reducing “plumbing” data to single-key dbm hashes is just a performance win. But when you have some legacy to deal with, it’s not always that easy.

For all the young budding computer scientists and DBA’s out there: forget about “first normal form”. Forget about relational databases. Forget about anything you learnt during Comp.Sci. It’s all bullshit. The only way to scale is to consider your data as “disconnected”. Unconnected. No hard relations. If you need to relate, code is going to be more optimal in joining stuff that an RDBMS ever will be. Build systems that allows you easy, speedy access to the most relevant data, regardless of relationships.

Relational databases with referential integrity, and all the crap that goes with should be the domain of a good programmer as implemented in code. Not some half-baked entity relationship diagram produced by a poor DBA, with complex SQL queries to find out if “bob” is a “user” or a “customer”.

Build high-speed disjointed storage, forget about SQL “JOINS”. Build , and use high-speed distributed API’s, and queues using gearman, and whatever else the hell you fancy to retrieve and store your data — and only the data you need.

Devolve every storage issue into what it is – a storage issue. RDBMS is the evil of the 20th century. Hastables, and “flakey” relationships is the way to process thousands and millions of requests per second.

Using an RDBMS for anything more than a couple of rows  is just simply “insane”. In the membrain. You will go down the painful performance alley. And steer away from anything containing the tag “SQL”.

Unless all you’re writing is YEAFBS (yet another fucking blog system) based on some dumbass MVC framework. Cause then you’re good. Except, it will NEVER work in the real world.

As a furthering to musical and database education — watch Oomph “Augen Auf”

Augen Auf meaning – “Open Eyes”. Something an RDBMS will give you, but at a pedestrian pace. Partition your data. Store it in it’s most optimal fashion. Don’t worry too much about consistency. What matters is speed and ” relative” accuracy.

Oomph don’t allow embedding, but it certainly is is one of the best videos from Oomph.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YClJQBq4qpU

This is simpy one of the best covers of a classic 80’s song in a long time.The video is absolutely awesome too. It’s got nothing to do with databases or “first normal form”. Thank God.

I felt that music and audio streaming was the NEXT BIG THING, because I was also a partner in TheFridge (a nightclub). I researched audio streaming technologies. I pimped the little IPC with extra hardrives, and ran Apache, and a selection of seriously nasty perl scripts that could stream music. This little box was called http://beer.inet.co.za/ and it served for many years as the development team’s general testgrounds and the company’s internal fungrounds. We even ran an internal mailing list, and nntp server on the thing.

Of course, after management discovered the thing I was forced to shut it down,  due to it’s popularity, and supposedly dubious content.  I guess they didn’t appreciate me recreating a bad.attitude newsgroup ala JWZ.

I had to move my fungrounds to the interwebs. I started a series of “musical education” pages on an external webserver, and tried to replicate the fun that was had on beer.inet.co.za but it was just never the same. In fact, my http://rodent.za.net/me/ pages got me more takedown notices in a month than a badger sheds hair in a day.

So, in the spirit of something I did years ago, and with the “litigation free” hosting services of youtube.com, I present some more awesome music, and “musical education” albeit 8 years later.

With the advent of Youtube, I can now simply rescind all responsibility for content since I’m not hosting any of this… Haha!

I link largely for the music, not the videos.  Hence the small video format. I’m sure you know how to make it bigger. Clicky Clicky, Hacky Hack. It’s not rocket science.

Covenant

Covenant is easily one of the most underrated electro bands. I’ve been a fan since I ran TheFridge. Covenant’s lyrics are appealling, thoughtful, and (most) of their music is the angry kind of calm that can only be compared to Depeche Mode.

“Bullet” had one of the best videos for it’s age. The Anton Corbijn style shots and matrix-like effects were simply awesome. Bullet is a thoughtful ballad executed with skill and balance.

“Go Film” was simply a clone of the beats and ideas behind Depeche Mode’s “Photographic” but it was certainly executed in style as only Covenant can do. “Go Film” was a dance floor hit at the club for many months. I remember girls coming up to me in the DJ booth asking for more of that “dancy depeche mode”.

Carter – The Unstoppable Sex Machine

Welcome to Punk, Brixton, and the great british cockup. Punk. Punk was the eighties, the tailend of the nineties and overall just great. Rebellion, reality, guitaring, anger and great lyrics all rolled into one. Carter “The Unstoppable Sex Machine” was one of the great theatrical punk-brit bands that ended the final season of punkhood.

The first video “Surfin USM” will put everything about Carter USM into perspective. It is from their live concert in Brixton. If you think you’ve seen people mosh about to pedestrian songs such as “Nelly the Elephant” and thought it wild, then you have not seen how insane “Surfin USM” becomes on a dance floor.

The famous intro:  ”When you’re younger, you can eat what you like, drink what you like and still climb into your 26 inch waist trousers and zip them closed. When you reach that age, 24, 25,  your muscles give up, they wave a little white flag and without any warning at all you’re suddenly a fat bastard”. You fat bastard! You fat bastard!

Here’s the song continuing from the video:

Inspiral Carpets

“This is how it feels” – was covered by Carter the Unstoppable Sex machine. The Inspiral Carpets version is the best though… Just imagine driving down a long dark dirt road whilst on holiday in Stilbaai and shouting the lyrics at the top of your lungs.

This was one of the songs that expressed 400% of how I felt at the time, right after writing matric examinations, and fluxing in that space of “what the hell am I going to do now ?

If you have know idea what I’m ranting about at this late hour, then it’s probably the time to get educated on the original Bob Dylan version of the song too.

I apologize for the pointless youtube embedding just for delivering some audio, but apparently google gets away with more rights violations than I could. There is a point to my rambling…

Firstly — the Bear McCreary/Bt42 version:

Then — Bob Dylan version, overlayed into the closing of Season 3 of BSG.

If you don’t know what BattleStar Galactica is, then well… Let’s just leave it there.

So what’s this got to do with “All along the watchtower” ?

At the end of the day, I got to this point by contemplating what is happening with the Mobile Interconnect Rate, and ICASA, and government. I stumbled across the song, during a random trawl of my media collection, and felt that it was quite applicable to the current happenings in terms of regulation in telecoms.

Bob Dylan is a great balladeer, and the whole point of “All along the watchtower” is that it is in essence, a reverse, recursive song. “At the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.”

We have been here before:

When ICASA drafted their hare-brained ADSL regulations in 2006, everyone thought it would be great, and broadband in South Africa would be on the upswing. Little did we know. The regulations simply indicated that ICASA has a near zero understanding of any subject matter on their plate. The nett result for ADSL subscribers have been an even more racketeered DSL and bandwidth market. Telkom still has a stranglehold over the local loop. Telkom has found nifty ways around regulations such as “Local bandwidth usage shall not be subject to the cap”.

More fail predicted:

ICASA has been hopelessly unsuccessful in regulating the tiny bit of legislation they have control over. The DoC has been a complete basket case for the last 10 years.

Now suddenly there is a hive of activity? Politicians are showing their teeth. The operators are running scared (there’s a 19% ‘negotiated’ drop!)

ICASA is still trying to fight their way out of the paper bag they created. I predict that any and all regulation around the Mobile Interconnect Rate will be as pointless and ineffective as the ADSL regulations were. This is simply due to the fact that ICASA,  and it’s councilors have simply no idea of the subject matter.

We are the union, and the watchers:

The bottom line is — who is watching the watchers ? They are clearly incapable of doing so themselves.

MyADSL, the consumer, and every disillusioned internet user has become the watchdog. The consumers are the watchers. And they’re not turning to malformed regulation anymore. They’re just publicising their frustrations on the internet. I believe that activism and opinion has done more for the broadband market than any well-intended governement regulation.

A marketing manager’s nightmare.

Well done all.