A long time....

It's been quite a while since my last update here.

I have been so busy enjoying life with my new eyes, glorious girlfriend and wonderful surroundings that I hardly looked at a computer. Then, when I did come to work I spent so much time getting my computer up to date that I still did not reflect upon the last couple of months.

Life is good to me. :)

So, where did I leave off? Oh, yes, the course in Malaysia. It was a fun place, but nothing like home.

Once I got home Isolde and me went to Blutkoppe for a day camp. Just the two of us. It was like walking around in the garden of eden. I still get a lot of teasing about running around in the desert all naked. We were there completely alone, of course. We did not see another soul for at least two days. It was, in a word, perfect. Our campsite had a lot of shade during the day, and the silence all around was amazing.

The weather was perfect, too. We went for walks around the place, and I saw this tree growing out of the rock. I am always amazed at how the trees manage to do this. Bare rock. Something growing out of it. Does not compute.

We saw some Zebra and Ostrich on the way back as well.

That was a great start to my long vacation in Namibia, and I am truly thankful that I could share it with such a wonderful person.

The rest of the holiday will be in another blog, as it is getting close to my bedtime out here on the Gulf of Mexico. I still need to function tomorrow!

LASIK

Firstly, I would like to publicly thank Karly and Lea for their wonderful hospitality.

Thank you very, very much!

This eye operation in Cape Town has probably been the scariest thing that I have ever done! In hindsight, though, it was well worth the pain. The only anti-pain stuff they give you is some eye drops that deaden all feeling in the eye and some Valium for the nerves.

I would have preferred to be knocked out, to be honest. They stick these things in your eye that hold the eyelids open, and then put this device on your eye that sucks to the eye, and cuts a small, very thin flap of the eye. The doc then flaps the flap away and puts the laser to work. A person can smell the burning as the laser works.
I was gripping my chair sooooo tightly that I had white knuckles after the op, and I don't think I was breathing at all during the operation. Luckily it's only a few minutes per eye.

I left the hospital on my own, barely seeing well enough to dial the taxi's number on my phone. Then I went to bed. With eye protection flaps to stop me from rubbing my eyes, no less.

The next day everything was quite hazy, but in focus.

It's now two weeks later, and I am already on a course in Malaysia. There is still a little haziness when I look into bright lights. Hopefully this wil go away in due time.

Thanks, again, to everyone who supported me while I was getting this done, and for giving me inspiration while I was thinking about getting it done!

KDE 4.3

Well, it finally arrived! KDE 4.3 made it to the outside world! I spent a day or so compiling it, and to be honest, it's....

Hmm... not that much different from KDE 4.2 actually.
I had a bit of a time battling to get the icons installed, and then once I got it all up and running the first thing I did was to revert back to the "Oxygen" theme. The new "Air" theme is too bright for my cave-dwelling type eyes.

So, here's to hoping that KDE has finally reached stableness enough that people will not even notice that it's not there and carry on with work as we all did last year.

:)


I have a few good applications installed on Sorcerer, most of which depends upon KDE. During the last year I spent some time getting Sorcerer to also be a Multimedia distrobution. I can edit AVCHD directly with openmovieeditor, amarok 2.1.1 runs smoothly and supplies all the tunes when I need it. K3b has recently released a QT4 version, and that runs beautifully, too.
For my photos I have DigiKam, also in QT4 version. All of this goodness runs on 64bit, too!

Sooo, now I am just going to back up my root dir as a good one, and then carry on making little movies... the end of my trip out here in the Gulf of Mexico is coming to an end. This morning we got a very nice lightning show, some of which I managed to capture on video.

Hopefully I'll post a little sanitized movie of work out here. I am not allowed to show any company stuff, so it might be a little boring.

:(

About time!

Ah, my previous holiday was so cool. I had the time to test my new Land Rover. What better test is there than to pack a trailer and go camping?

The plan was simple. Take Ethen and some of his friends, and go into the wide open desert and get some peace for our souls by a little camping. The first place we were to go to was Vergenoeg. We actually wanted to have a few friends come along just for a night BBQ and chat around a campfire.

When we finally hit the road, it was only Isolde and me as adults, and Ethen, Karl-Pierre and Zonique making up the kiddie ranks. With me testing my new trailer, there was plenty of space in the car, and the kids made the best of it by playing and sleeping and whatever.

When we finally got to Vergenoeg, it turns out that they do not rent out to public anymore, and so we were turned away. We decided to go to Spitzkoppe mountain, and do our first camp there. It was on the way and only an hour's drive away. The view from our campsite was amazing!

We made camp, including pitching tents and everything. The weather played along... it was simply beautiful out there. The mattresses are stretched over the car to air them out a little before going into the tents.

At night out little camping light fused and stopped working, so we all sat around the fire for a bit, and then went to bed.

When we awoke the next morning, this was what the mountain was looking like. Once the sun popped up, all the mist disappeared, of course. The kids were up the mountain like a shot, and it was quite some time before we saw them again.

Isolde started breakfast....

With the mist gone, the view cleared up and the desert was wide open before us once more. I walked around a little while everyone else was getting fed and so on.

At a suitable late hour we packed up camp and prepared for the road to Brandberg, where we were planning on staying for the rest of the long weekend.

Brandberg...

Brandberg had a few surprises for us, like the tame Springbuck in the picture above, a tame meerkat, and two days of blissful peace and serenity.

There were countless birds, too. Whenever we would sit still for some length of time, they could come stealing into our camp, scrounging for food. In the early morning hours they made quite a bit of noise!

We read books and lounged by the pool and made "potjiekos" and read good books. On the second day we went driving up to the Brandberg mountain itself. Although the sights there were beautiful, the place was heating up something awful, even in the heart of winter. Soon we went back to our nice shaded camp spot with warm showers and flush toilets. It was quite a good camp... I enjoyed every little bit of it, and would do it again in a heartbeat! Some days I feel like the luckiest person in the world!

Brandberg Camp

Sooo, I had some trouble uploading photos and videos. Finally I got a video of the camp up... I guess I'll be using this site to upload photos then.

:)

Back in the US...

It's been a little more than a month, and I had a fantastic break, mostly thanks to Isolde.

More about the break once I have made and uploaded the videos and pictures.

So, we are back on board the WG Columbus, and she is just now deploying her gear. Congratulations to Crew 1 for a job well done.

I will be staying on Namibian time this time around, and working with some new people.

So, I missed my grandmother's burial by a few hours when I got home. It was a bit sad. My mom went down to Cape Town for some rest and relaxation after her ordeal. She returned quite fresh and full of life, and seems ready to tackle life's ups and downs again.

She is making this fantastic album of her life, with pictures from when she was little, and how people around her grew up, etc. I would love to digitize it once she has it all together. Funny that all her pictures are in black and white.

In the US...

So, all the gear is on board, and we are tied up just in front of the drydock that we will be visiting. Later today we'll get in there, and then finally we will all be able to see just what the damage is to our thruster.

It's just two days till I tackle the 48 hour trip home. Man, I can't wait to be back home. It's been a long trip, and I miss my friends, family and most of all, my girlfriend!

There are also a few other things to look forward to in Namibia. I had a trailer built for my Land-rover that I bought last trip, so that should be done by now, and what better excuse to go camping than: "we really need to give that trailer a test"?

It's winter now in Namibia, so it'll be cold at night time, especially in the desert, and the days will be a little more temperate. I think we will be traveling to Brandberg and Omdel dam this break.