This week’s powerball currently has a rollover jackpot of 90 million Rands. A highly attractive target. But before going off to “tata your chance”, let’s look at the statistical probability that you’ll win the South African powerball game.

I’ve been quite taken by the Time Traveler’s Wife (The novel by Audrey Niffenegger). Which is why I’m writing this post – the film adaptation of the book has left me with a hollowness inside that the book did not have, even though I so enjoyed the film. So herewith my first blog film review. DISCLAIMER: PLOT AND FILM SPOILERS TO FOLLOW, please do stop reading if you ever intend to read the book or see the film. My recommendation is to read the book first.

I’ve been quite shocked and saddened by the online disappearance of why the lucky stiff last week. Heck, the blogging engine for this site is written to make use of his micro web framework – camping.

_why wrote (writes!! we await the second coming) some of the more interesting ruby code out there. And he also wasn’t afraid to write things that were quite out there – on the borderland between programming and art. One of his creations was called blimlimb (the code is still around, but I fear some of the blimlimb scripts and repository history is lost). Imagine this, you’re sitting in a peaceful IRC channel and all of a sudden a whole troupe of bot actors appear in channel. They start performing a play for you, complete with actions and appropriate dramatic pauses. And the weird part is that the bot puppetmaster can also add a bit of improvisational scripting to spook those in channel further.

(Sign seen at the Bellville cemetery) No camping, no cars, no HIV…

This is the most directly targeted HIV/AIDS campaign that I have seen thus far, but I’m afraid it may be a little too late.

Welcome to my new blog – it’ll have all the sort of interesting ‘tech’ GNU/Linux/OSS/Who-abbreviated-this posts that I’d be most interested in reading about, the odd technical snippet that I’ve found to be indispensable, and maybe an article or two about plants will creep in here as well. I also give you my word that I will try to only post items of quality here. Although as they say a man’s word is never done….