The Maladjusted African

• Somebody needs to start feeding Jessica Alba again. She's *this* close to losing me.
• Spain better be the bride tonight
• I just made a sick, sick tortilla thingy with cabbage, brown mushrooms, leeks and onion lightly fried in chilli'd garlic. No meat. I rock.
• Previous tenant simply refuses to come and collect the ugly, rickety wooden table she left on the balcony. Makes for a good clothes rack tho. I take particular glee in hanging my boxers off it.
• I always forget something important when I go grocery shopping. Today's soul sapping exclusion? Beer. I know it's Sunday...but there are ways.
• Hov murdered Glastonbury. Noel who?
• Chick on BBC Food at the moment  is quite...melonous.

The title is lifted from the lyrics to the eloquently titled "Big Pimpin" (Mssrs. Jay-Z, Bun B and the late Pimp C )

But it's the lyrics follow on sentence that struck a chord with me today.

It goes..."and up your vocab".

Driving home from work this evening I tuned into Kaya FM and caught the tail end of a discussion on literature. From what I could gather, the show consisted of two giddy females engaging the audience in an impromptu book club meeting. I don't recall the name or the author of the book they were discussing, but I still found myself pretty engrossed in it all.

A long, long, long time ago, before God invented the internet, I wanted to write. And I read a lot. I'd go to the varsity library and instead of picking up a book on computer algorithms or data structures or operating system design, I'd be reading the literature review sections of The Spectator and hunting down those unfortunate enough to have fallen victim to the barbed pens flung from within those pages. Yeah, I purposely read bad fiction too.

Books are a beautiful thing. They're timeless. It's always bittersweet when I walk by an Exclusive Books and they're having a sale. A huge table is laid out with boxes brimming with books that they're literally begging people to take off their hands. This is amazing to me. You pay a pretty penny for the Godfather DVD Boxset to this day, but the hardback upon which it's based is sitting somewhere at the bottom of a cardboard box, right next to "Asparagus Recipes For Summer". Bitter. Sweet.

Anyway, so I used to be fairly good at wrestling the English language into submission. These days, not so much. I haven't picked up a book in over five years. And as counterintuitive as it seems to me, it's somewhat obvious that writing needs just as much practice (through reading) as any other discipline, else you get rusty.

But I do wish I could have taken part in the conversation instead of looking longingly into the window, wishing I could afford the time.

Sigh.

Someday.

I'm in my very empty new flat.

All I have in it are my couch and my bed. And my laptop. A few pots, a few pans, the basic necessities in the kitchen and so on. And that's about it.

Oh and my TV.

Which is very, very off.

I can't get it to show any of the free to air channels and my satellite dish only arrives sometime towards the end of next week.

I'd always threatened to throw my TV out, figuring...well...50 something-odd channels and there's never anything on. Well, now there's nothing on alright.

I'm a chronic insomniac. It's 1:30 AM.

And. I'm. Bored. Shit. Less.

So I blogged.

So it’s been about a month at the new gig. So far so good although the one thing I absolutely hate about the first few weeks of any new job is the aspect of having to “drink from the fire-hose”. I’m intensely independent in everything I do, so the first few days are always frustrating with all the business domain specific terminology being flung around like curses at a Too $hort concert. The one good thing in this instance is that, working for what is essentially a private bank slash asset manager, alot of the terminology can simply be googled. This is a double edged sword though. Rather than digging in and getting actual work done, I often find myself wanting to know what it is I’m doing and why; what it all means etc. The nature of software development is that anybody with a spec and a keyboard can hack out a solution, but I’ve been that guy before, and it’s decidedly not a good place to be.

I’m energised nevertheless because there’s alot of scope for experimentation with new technology at the gig. I’m playing with Silverlight at the moment, for example. Yeah, Silverlight. Hmmm. More on that later. I’m not yet decided as to whether the experience sucks or just…kinda sucks.

It’ll be interesting surreptitiously comparing notes with Vimbais’ experiences being the new gal wherever it is she’s at. I suspect my account is likely to be just a little less neurotic. Just a little.

I really need to get this series on DVD.

I religiously watched the first series when it aired here in South Africa, and then I switched jobs and was never able to make it home in time to catch any other episodes of the subsequent seasons.

So by blind luck I managed to catch the final few minutes of the very last episode of the very last season.

And it was the most touching few minutes of television I've ever scene.

The thing with Six Feet Under is that the writing is so consistently tasteful and mature. Considering the rather morbid themes around which the show revolves, this is no mean feat. The little I've watched of the show has literally helped to add in it's often humorous way, perspective to that aspect of life that we try so hard to shut out. Death.

Anyway, catch this brilliant piece of television here

I've been toying with a fairly unique idea for a rich client application for quite a few years now.

I first had the idea 5 years ago in fact.

And I've sat on my ass and idly watched the interwebs, subconsciously waiting for someone else to implement it and get rich off it.

And nobody did.

All the while I'd daydream about just how it could be implemented

1. First I'd need a good UI library that I could create a skinnable and non-standard UI with.
   • Microsoft released WPF
2. Ok well, what about a nice cheap way to store user-created files?
   • Amazon released S3
3. Hmm, well ok but I hate having to administer a server and Amazons E3 doesn't support Windows instances
   • Rackspace's Mosso supports Windows instances
4. Yeah, well, how do I keep all this user created content synched up so that it's accessible from a users PC, cellphone, notebook etc
   • Microsoft released a beta of Live Mesh

So as you can see, I really have no excuse left. Every single day another star aligns.

Most recently, the WPF team blogged about the new performance improvements in the latest bits of WPF. And memory/hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper. Broadband gets faster and more ubiquitous. Services like twitter keep popping up like glorious weeds.

It's almost as if some all powerful God of technology is taunting me.

Well I made the first step. I registered a domain.

Now all I have to do is get coding.

Give me strength.

I start a new job next week.

I'll still be writing business software, but for the first time in almost a  decade I'll have to go out and get actual work clothes.

That's right yall, your boys gone corporate.

I'll be 33 in August so I suppose I might as well wean myself off the sneaks, worn jeans and smedium t-shirts.

Then my transformation into a wizened old fart will be complete.

So lets say there's a government.

A South African government, say.

And lets say your people, effectively your constituents aren't happy.

They're lashing out at you, and they want answers.

Because unemployment is rife.

Illiteracy is rampant.

And crime is an epidemic.

How do you solve your problem?

Lets say, maybe, you don't.

Lets say instead that a neighbour of yours, say Zimbabwe for example, has recently fallen.

And Zimbabweans are fleeing across your borders into your townships daily.

And all the while unemployment is still rife, illiteracy is still rampant and crime is still an epidemic.

I don't know, but...I think your problem is solved, then.

And you wouldn't have had to lift a finger even.

Provided of course that you don't smirk when you denounce the violence that these new settlers are being met with, you'll do just fine. Maybe.

The title?

Well the term "Mukwerekere", (I believe it's of Tswana origin) loosely translates to "bloody foreigner". Not just any "bloody foreigner" mind you, just those that come from an African country that is not Lesotho, Swaziland or Botswana. And of course South Africa.

French? You're good.

Canadian? Welcome, eh!

Irish? Top o' the mornin!

You get the idea.

Now being a "bloody foreigner" myself, you'd think I'd find the term offensive. Contrarily though, I've always felt the word held a certain poetic charm; whimsically  graphic.

Childlike.

You see, the etymology is that if you (the enlightened one) came across a couple of these "bloody foreigners", and they happened to be speaking their native language, all you would hear is an audibly nauseating "kwerekwerekwerekwere".

It's great.

So I used to date a girl, who oddly enough is from an area in Tshwane where xenophobia has taken on an increasingly violent turn, and she'd often lunge into these uninterrupted five minute long, almost stream-of-conscious-like rants on how these "bloody foreigners" were taking jobs and committing crimes and they stank and they were so fucking ugly...and, and, and. And then she'd finally fall silent and seethe for a few seconds before sighing exasperatedly and burying her face in my chest murmuring "But not you. Ok? You're my favorite Mukwerekwere".

Metro

YFM

Kaya

You suck!

I'm trying to remember the last time I actually learnt something from any of these wack stations.

Whats that? I'm supposed to turn my brain off and be entertained you say?

I refuse.

For radio stations aimed primarily towards people that love music I would expect at the very least a smidgeon of cluefulness on the topic of, oh I don't know man, how about music?!!

Instead, we have a bunch of sniggling, giggling, self important amateurs one upping each other with inside jokes because "you know, we're just so fucking cool and our lives are so much cooler than yours and you wouldn't believe just how much cool shit we get up to oh and heres a tidbit of celebrity gossip I grabbed off the Internet to regurgitate to you".

Ugh.

I recently discovered Radio 702 though, that's right, talk radio.

It rocks. I listen. I learn.

Good riddance.

Shout out to Robert Marawas sports show though.

Just downloaded an EP called "Style Wars" by the latest emcee to be hyped up by...well I don't know, the Internet I guess. But also, by Erykah Badu and most recently, Nas himself.

Jay Electronica.

Fuck the corny sounding stage name. The kid is good.

Damn good.

Frankly, there's just one niggling problem with him as far as I'm concerned.

He sounds ALOT like Nas 50% of the time. Then at other times he gets his Canibus on. Yet still he morphs into Prodigy.

Still, as far as the art of emceeing goes, this kid has the gift. He can write. And the thing about his writing is that he's just as comfortable in battle mode as he is in introspective mode or swag mode. The third verse on "Something To Hold On To" is especially poignant.

It'll be interesting to see how he comes across on an official album. Lupe Fiasco's pre album hype didn't match the lingering corniness of either album he put out in my opinion. I hope Jay gets laced with the types of beats that won't water down or drown out the personality that I suspect he has.

One interesting thing about him is that he's from New Orleans, which means he's a Southern Artist (TM). But to hear him spit, you'd never guess. He's very, very East Coast sounding...New York to be exact. He even uses East Coast slang. This worried me slightly as I listened to the EP, but then I smiled as I heard him spit on..."I Feel Good"

"They said down South was wack when it came to rap

That our thoughts was too slow, and we couldn't adapt

When in fact we taught yall how to build a label from scratch

While you was whinin bout the points in your contract black, yup

We slip when we talk and we dip when we walk

When we came to the game, n****s stole our slang

Uh huh, we hit the game with a brand new funk

And plus we taught you how to sling a record outta your trunk

Its Dirty South till I die homie"

Yeah. I like this kid :)

Oh the "Hillarity". It's going to take Hillary Clinton a long, loooong time to live this one down.

God, I hate politricks.

Digg comment of the day "Hillary did NOT have sniper relations with those Bosnians"

It's weird. The one DSTV channel I could probably watch all day is the BBC Food Channel. I love sports but with Arsenal and Pirates sputtering along, there's often nothing interesting on. I love the crime channel but there are too many poorly produced features on it for me to watch for more than an hour. News?? Too depressing. But food?

Yeah. 

Food.

I used to watch Master Chef Goes Large like it was a soccer game. On some "No!!! You idiot, put down the paprika!! Put down the paprika!!!!"

Ahem.

I love food though. Eating it at least. And I'm a silent critic too. Hmm...could do with a stick of lemon grass.

But the rub is, I can't cook for shit. And that bothers me to no end. Yeah I can whip up a traditional nshima (pap), meat and veggies...but that's like an Englishman saying he can whip up a plate of bangers and mash. Nah. I wanna cook, cook.

I want to be able to improvise recipes out of a half empty fridge, cajole disconsonant flavours into a pitch perfect chorus of taste, damn near knock a date off her feet with a plate of braised oxtail ravioli.  Yeah, mad cookery skills will get you laid bruh. True story.

So that's going to be my newest hobby as soon as I get my new place. I'm planning on buying a camera so I can post pictures of those creations I'm actually proud of. Should be interesting.

The 2 spam bots that read my blog are more than welcome over for a stint as my guinea pigs.

I have a confession to make.

I like Test Driven Development. To bits even (heh). But I've never, ever been able to grok any of the .Net based mocking frameworks that I've tried. RhinoMocks, NMock, TypeMock...nada. It's not that I'm an idiot (arguable yeah, but...) it's just that grokking them always seemed to take more time than I was willing to afford. Thing is, if I have a problem to solve, don't give me another one. So, Daniel Cazzulino's post entitled "Why Do We Need Another Mocking Framework" made me raise an eyebrow when he wrote...

When I look at a Rhino Mocks quickstart and read about its "3 different record/replay syntax styles, 4 types of mocks, 7 if you include MultiMocks...", I can't help but think that it's far from ideal for any newcomer. The situation doesn't seem to be significantly better in other .NET mock frameworks with similar range of features.

I've already argued in the past why I think forcing regular developers to learn and understand the difference between a stub, a fake, a "true" mock and a dynamic mock is unproductive and largely irrelevant for their TDD needs.

Also, even though quite common in the mocking community, the typical record/replay model is alien to developers and introduces yet another new concept that makes the learning curve steeper than needed.

Amen. Of course. But. I was sure that whatever Mocking framework he was punting would still make my eyes glaze over. Whats the saying...many a road have been paved with good intentions...or something like that.

I was wrong.

Moq Rocks!!

Even without bothering to read anything beyond his blog post I cracked open Visual Studio and just wrote...

[TestMethod]
public void DefaultBalanceIsReturnedCorrectly( )
{
    Moq.Mock<IAccountKeeper> mockAccountKeeper = new Mock<IAccountKeeper>( );
    mockAccountKeeper.Expect<int>( x => x.GetBalance( ) ).Returns( 100 );

    Assert.AreEqual( 100, mockAccountKeeper.Object.GetBalance( ) );
}

So this Saturday I ended up in church.

No, really. I did.

It was pretty much a "well, why not" type of decision. An acquaintance of mine had been badgering me about attending for a while and I ran out of viable excuses not to attend "just once, I promise you just once and if you don't like it...". So I woke up on Saturday morning (late!), jumped into jeans, T-shirt, sneaks, the car and rolled out.

Yeah, jeans, T-shirt and sneaks.

Picked up my friend, had her do the "left here, right there" thing through the wet, bustling streets of Yeoville (pretty interesting hood, but that's a story for another day) and smiled inwardly as we parked and I glanced over at the church entrance where broad-smiling men stood in ill-fitting suits and greeted the late comers. Jeans, T-shirt, sneaks. By the way my acquaintance was dressed like she'd just had an audience with the Pope. But naw man, these church-door-greeter men's toothy smiles were unwavering as they ushered us in.

Ok then.

We sat and thence began the series of sermons and songs and rituals that have always bugged me about...well religion(s) in general. And as usual (mind, the last time I'd been in church on purpose was some 3 years prior) my mind wandered.

Why do we have to stand for specific songs only?

Why do we have to kneel sometimes...only sometimes?

Why do we have to have 3 or 4 prayers interspersed with the various sermons and songs?

Why is everybody dressed up so formally?

Why am I 100% sure that there will be talk about money, money, money? (The congregation was all but called out as "thieves" for not tithing)

And (being as this is now the digital age), why am I 100% sure that I'll be able to google for this pastors "sermon" and find it online?

And so with the last sermon having been delivered we all sauntered out and hung about for a bit being introduced to so and so and how are you and yeah the weather is terrible  and chiefs finally won!! and where's my car. I looked at all these people in their Saturday Best and wondered how many of them could say they got something special out of the days proceedings. I compared it to the aftermath of the IT talks/conferences that I'm more accustomed to. With those, we always hang around and discuss how excited/underwhelmed we are about whatever tech was being demoed. Here, my considerable eavesdropping powers yielded not a single quip about the state of Jesus' sandals after the whole walking on water thing. Seemed to me like this was a weekly thing where everybody felt obliged to come because...well...we're good God fearing people and dammit that's just how we do, nah mean?

Yeah.

I abhor routine for routines sake.

Church just isn't for me. And there are a variety  of other reasons for that though I suppose my feelings on the issue are mostly coloured by the fact that I have a deep, deep love for children and I've never been able to reconcile their endless suffering (just turn on the news) with the worship of a deity that I feel should be able to prevent it. So I'm a cynic at the best of times, a silently seething atheist at the worst. Now, that's not to say that I think we're alone...just that we're on our own. There's a massive difference. Still, religion serves a purpose and I'll grudgingly concede that we're better off with it than without it. If it keeps people happy, sane, content...if it gives them strength to face each day...then I'm all for it and I'll dip a toe in from time to to see if the water is as warm as they say. So far, no dice.

The jeans, T-shirt and sneaks? They ended up much later that afternoon laid back with friends having a beer and watching the game. Who says I don't think ahead?