A pause from Teddiebere...

... until it's Neil's turn.

This morning we went to Pieter's farewell ceremony from his Teddiebere kindergarten. There were some performances, mostly poem recitals, which were very sweet.

Pieter's the one second from the left in the indigo shirt and black shorts

Now it'll be a year or two before we'll be back with Neil!

Pieter tried on his new school uniform and rucksack the other day:

A preview of what to expect in January

Fun on a Sunday afternoon

In contrast to the previous weekend, we had a quiet weekend, mostly at home. The weather was good and on Sunday afternoon we took the kids for a swim in one of our neighbouring estates, Midlands.

There was a good opportunity for a cross-view stereogram (many different levels of depth) so this is the one I made:

Click on the image if you want a larger version

Variations

Theme

Variation 1

Variation 2

A little explorer

It's interesting and fun following Neil around when he's in "explorer mode" to see what he gets up to. I took this video just before supper time last night:

A bunch of birthdays

For Paul's fortieth birthday on Friday we all went to Kobie and Anelle's house where they made some potjiekos.

The eight cousins (soon to be nine)

On Saturday everyone came to our house for a late lunch (or early dinner).

Marisa and Madelize, proud of their handiwork (some charcoal and I can claim credit for the getting the meat done)

Everyone (minus a sleeping-Neil and behind-the-camera-me)...

... plus Neil and me (here later on our walk) equals 18

This morning—Marisa's birthday

Miss nonchalant

Today we had lunch at Marisa's parents' house.

Marisa says she hasn't had a birthday with all her brothers there on the day since 21 years ago

More presents!

Marinda; I think some ice cream made it inside too

Neil, savouring his full stomach (or—wishful thinking—admiring his father)

The eighteen all at once for this photo

Galas

Miekie and Pieter had their galas on Friday and Saturday respectively. Miekie, who was terrified before the time, ended up winning her freestyle and butterfly events! Unfortunately I had meetings so I missed it. Marisa was there and took photos and videos:

I made it to Pieter's gala:

(Pieter only started using his arms over halfway through the length, thus giving his competitors a fair chance.)

This weekend is a multiple-birthday weekend. I'll have a post on that later today.

Pieter's graduation from Teddiebere

Last night we had Pieter's graduation from Teddiebere. There were some formal bits including something that was said about each of the five graduandi (from a very biblical perspective). Here's the one about Pieter:

Then the graduandi demonstrated their talents by performing songs and reciting poems. Parents received flowers and wine.

Gifts, speeches, photos

"Baccalaureus Ursorum" would have worked well too I think

A future BL no doubt (or BU if my hints propagate through to the right ears)

Afterwards we had a dinner of lamb, veggies and salad, which was really very good!

Baby steps and splashes

A temperature in the mid-thirties didn't discourage Neil from his walking practice on Wednesday:

Later on we went to the pool to cool down.

A sudden wave of weddings

I'm not sure exactly why, but on Sunday a spate of soft toy wedding ceremonies suddenly took place in our house. I felt a bit like a wildlife photographer as I captured some moments on film.

At the venue

One of the couples

The congregation

At the second venue

Encryption

I'm so pleased to be on the beta testing program for Let's Encrypt.

It's high time that secure communications are available to all sites at an affordable cost, i.e. free. I'm happy to say that my server system gupe is now encrypted. All previous links to the unsecured version are automatically changed to the secure version. Gupe has a monitoring daemon, it powers dashboards at airports and at other companies. It runs my bookmarking system and has integration with other tools. When I get to finishing my timetable calculator it it'll host that too.

I moved gu.pe off to a virtual private server from its previous host because I needed root access to set up the encryption.

In the spirit of encryption I started signing all outgoing emails with an encrypted certificate a few weeks ago. Has anyone noticed? Probably not. Why banks don't do this is beyond me.

I've also moved away from the Gmail web interface and mobile apps because they don't yet support encrypted or securely signed emails. I'm very proud to say that I'm now using the geeky Mutt as my email client on my PC (running in a Linux virtual machine on top of Windows) and K-9 on Android. Both fully support PGP style functionality and connect to Gmail using IMAP without any hassles.

A great thing about Mutt is that you can use VIM as your email editor!

Cancelled flights

I was supposed to be in Belgium today but unfortunately Lufthansa cancelled the flight to Frankfurt that I was meant to be on (as well as my onward flight to Brussels). Their cabin crew is on strike.

I spent several hours in the queue at OR Tambo Airport yesterday just to be told that the only available alternative was for me to go via Dubai and two other stops before arriving in Brussels. A 24 hour trip for half a day of meetings is not good so it made more sense to postpone the meetings. I met some interesting people in the queue while waiting though!

The family were very pleased to have me back home already yesterday evening.

The farewell notes I was given before the flights were cancelled

A planetary conjunction

Last night Venus and Mars were the closest to each other (visually only, not physically) that they'll be for quite a number of years. I got up early this morning to have a look.

Top left: the moon; bottom right: Venus; to the left of Venus and slightly higher: Jupiter; very very close to Venus (down and to its left) (and too dim to see unless you enlarge the image by clicking on it): Mars

Miekie has been preparing a speech for her class about a foreign country. Fittingly she chose Austria. Here are some of here initial thoughts that she scribbled down a few days ago:

Static!

The week has flown by and now it's November! It feels as though the whole year has just flown by.

On Saturday I popped in at the new Cowhouse Market, which is held every weekend. Marius recently quit his job and now runs his own craft beer brewery, Hazeldean Brewing Co. He sells beer at the Market every weekend.

Botha the brewer

Stereogram of an unused part of the market

We spent the rest of the weekend relaxing. Alexander and Misha came for a quick lunch on Saturday.

Our trampoline-cum-playpen...

... -cum-pseudo van de Graaf generator

Buck spotting in Midstream...

... and some incidental bunny spotting