Pseudonym

The Gaborone Town Lodge unwittingly provided me with a good idea for a pseudonym, if I ever need one in the future...

Flattering indeed

Last day in Dornbirn

Today is my last day here. I'll be off to catch the train back to Zurich in a few minutes. This morning my mother and I went for a nice long walk up and down the Dornbirner Ach. I know it from the previous time that we were here and the children will remember it too. The vegetation looks quite barren compared to in September.

Crossing the Ach (the grass wasn't any greener on the other side)

At a park that the children will remember (actually, the grass is probably a little greener on this side after all)

The park has a nice slide. I thought I'd take a video of myself on the slide for entertainment purposes...

On the way back we walked past inatura where we also spend a few pleasant hours in September.

A quick inatura waterwheel stereogram

The children spent a lot of time here in September, cycling around on their borrowed bikes

We had a lovely salad for lunch and now it's time to pack and be off!

A quick visit to Dornbirn

I'm in Dornbirn for a very quick two and a half day visit before travelling further to Antwerp. I flew with Swiss from Johannesburg to Zurich and took the train to St. Margrethen where my father picked me up.

A nice salad with cheese and eggs for our Sunday lunch

I'm too late to see the nice snow that was here in the town a week ago, so my parents took me for a drive in the mountains on Sunday afternoon to see some there.

Finding one's car can get trickier if you've left it in the snow for a while...

(But we didn't leave ours for very long)

Like a proper tourist I made a video while we were driving around. Nothing exciting if you're used to snow...

We popped in for tea, coffee, cake and nuts at Wendelin and Waltruad's house before returning home.

Their view from their house

The cozy inside; not so late, but already quite dark

Kersefontein stereograms

Here are a few quick ones...

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:

Travelling to Cape Town

After getting back from Botswana on Thursday evening after a thankfully positive auction, I had one day at home and then had to get up early this morning again, at 4:15, to catch a 5:55 flight to Cape Town.

Luckily I saw the following interesting star and moon formation while driving to the airport (I tried to see it last night but it was too cloudy): the moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter fairly close to each other. Jupiter was extremely faint (due to too much ambient light, including streetlights). As you can see from the Sky Map app screenshot, Mercury would have been visible too (if I had a telescope and time handy).

I couldn't even have coffee on the flight because I had no cash on me. I had expected that there would be an ATM in the departure area at the airport but [note to future self:] there is not, so get cash before checking in and going to the departure area.

Northern stars

I'm been using the opportunity of being in the Northern Hemisphere to look at some stars and constellations that aren't visible from South Africa. However, attempts to photograph them haven't succeeded. The best was when I kept the shutter open for several seconds but as I don't have a tripod with me it just resulted in a blurry smudge.

If you were here in person you'd see the Big Dipper going up to Polaris... instead this photo shows just about nothing

Harvest moon eclipse

Being in a bit of a media vacuum while on holiday I almost missed the harvest moon eclipse. Nel reminded me of it the night before so luckily I could set my alarm for 4:10 on Monday morning and I spent a whole chilly hour outside in the cold (in my pajamas, but with a jersey) watching it!

Two-to-the-eighth

Having a birthday on the 255th day of the year is fantastic. Two to the eighth power minus one is a pleasing number. It's 11111111 in binary and FF in hexadecimal. Importantly though, it's the maximum value of one byte. The next number, 256, is the same as zero. You have to catch the overflow in another byte to make sure you keep counting without an automatic modulus. So having a party on the day after my birthday has a nice new-byte feel to it.

Here are some photos of yesterday courtesy of Marisa!

Marius lecturing about beer

Some of the kiddies (they outnumbered the adults!)

Some kiddies were a bit shy

The kiddies colonised the trees...

... the trampoline...

... and the other trees

Neil, a future tree-climber and trampoline-jumper

37 years down (hopefully less than 37% of quality time down)

I was spoilt by Marisa, Miekie, Pieter and Neil this morning: coffee and presents in bed.

The party is to be held tomorrow. We had a nice day at home in the meanwhile and later Marisa, Miekie and Neil went to Misha's kitchen tea. Pieter and I met up with Alexander for some coffee (and a peanut butter and chocolate milkshake).

That nice Italian jacket was a present from Marisa

That's Misha, believe it or not

Misha's kitchen tea had a disco theme; Miekie looked sparkly enough!

Maja behaved a bit out-of-character today, dropping a smelly, eh, you-know-what, in Pieter's room in the early morning hours. The years must be catching up with her too (even though she's only, what, three? Four? Something along those lines... my memory isn't what it used to be... :-p )

Growth projections

Neil was weighed again this week. His growth rate is still very predictable and, according to my calculations, he'll hit 10.0 kg exactly 1 week before his first birthday.

Having stayed mostly healthy during the winter, my time to be sick has finally come, just before my birthday. My voice has been reduced to a whisper and I can also still make low frequency rumbling sounds, but can't really talk. Hopefully it'll be over soon!

The birthday invitations I made seem to have been a bit confusing according to the feedback I received. Oh well. This is the invitation:

Varyingly successful stereograms

These are two stereograms I made using photos taken during the weekend.

Pity about the confusing twig in the foreground... it's always a compromise between losing detail and getting too much stereo differentiation

Better!

A meta post about meta posts

It looks as though I'm settling at about a post every two days. In order to maintain this rate the odd meta post (i.e. a post about posts) may sneak in (such as this one...).

(A previous post with a touch of self-referentialism is: Hi!)

gu.pe

I often use gupe as a username on the Internet. It's from Gustav Peter. So a few weeks ago, for no real reason besides for my own amusement / hobby, I purchased the domain name gu.pe (thanks to Peru for making its second level domains available for general registration). It's now running my own link manager, which I wrote in Python. The bare domain (i.e. gu.pe/) currently just links to this blog and my link manager gives me the ability to rapidly create short links to other URLs (addresses on the Internet). I think it's really handy and very cool (but hardly anyone I've encountered thus far shares my enthusiasm). An example link is gu.pe/mutti which I've set up to link to my mother's blog; it's easier for me to type in that than the long link that it redirects to. In that sense I'm using my link manager as a sort-of bookmarking system.

I thought I'd check if gupe means something in another language. The closest I could find is guêpe in French, which means wasp. This morning I created a little logo for my link manager. As a link manager's job is transparent, the logo is only visible to the manager (me) when doing admin functions on it.