Busy week

This week looks as follows:

Today (Tuesday, 13 December 2005) after work somebody is coming to try on some costumes, afterwards I am meeting a friend for a movie.

Tomorrow after work I am meeting somebody else, which will most likely last until midnight.

Thursday I am getting another visitor or two to pick up costumes. Afterwards I need to pack my suitcase and water plants. Durign the day we close the office as well, hopefulyl early, then I can still do a few other things.

Friday morning I am meetign a friend for breakfast at the Golden Acre, and afterwards I will be waiting at the bus terminal to catch the bus from Cape Town (South Africa) to Windhoek (Namibia).

DOOM movie in South African cinemas

Yesterday I went with a friend of mine to a cinema to watch the DOOM movie.
Having played DOOM 1 to DOOM 3, I just had to watch that, especially since "The Rock" is in it. As a wrestling fan, that was yet another reason to watch the movie, and I love sci-fi horror/action movies in any case.

The movie caught a lot of the atmospheric effects of the DOOM 3 game while maintaining the story pretty well. There is still room for a sequel.

Busy week and vacation in Namibia

This entire week has been the usual end of year chaos at work, at home and my my home based work. Everybody wants my time to meet them, so I ended up juggling schedules.

A lot of year-end functions seem to be happening this weekend. A lot of people rented costumes for either today or tomorrow. Yesterday I realised, that I need some costumes in different sizes which I didn't expect that I would have to get those in different sizes.

Next week Friday I am leaving on vacation for Namibia to visit family. There everybody wants to see me as well. I will probably require hectic work when I am back, just to relax from the vacation.

Busy lazy weekend

This last weekend started out as being quite busy but Sunday was more like a lazy edition, even after doing some cleaning up. Rest was urgently needed and that is also hard work.

On Saturday the bank queue was going super slow as expected, and other people wanted to waste my time before that.

The WWE RAW episode on Sunday was the one where the death of Eddie Guerrero was mentioned. Basically E-TV is one month behind.
On Sunday I had a look at the websites of some of the wrestlers that came here to Cape Town:
Scott Steiner (for all the freaks)
Charlie Haas
Rikishi
TNA Wrestling (a lot of former WWE wrestlers are there now)

Problems with Visual Studio .NET 2003

For the last couple of days, I have been trying to get a form to work in an application that uses an apsx extension. The problem was, that the moment that RequiredFieldValidation was added to the form, the IsPostBack or Page.IsPostBack always just returned False instead of True when the form was submitted.

After trying this on several computers, it turned out that some default client side scripts were not installed with Visual Studio .NET 2003 to be used with IIS. To fix this, I had to run a command-line utility which was used to allow ASP.NET files to be run is called: aspnet_regiis.exe

The solution to the whole problem was:

1. Go to: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322
2. Run: aspnet_regiis.exe -c

What was the annoying part is that only one PC was giving a hint about this, otherwise there was aboslutely no information why nothing is happening when the form is submitted.

Thoughts about professional wrestling

After my recent chat with Rikishi (aka Kishi) and Black Pearl while they were here in Cape Town, I started thinking of the huge problem of getting better known internationally if you don't have international television exposure. This is a huge problem in terms of keeping the fanbase and keeping the up cashflow of the organisation over a long time. This seems like a huge amount of work to become an established household name.

Touring through different countries is tedious and stressful, but that is what is requried for the fans which are ultimately the lifeblood of any sports organisation. These professional wrestlers really put a lot on the line for their career, especially since they cannot do this all of their life either.

Darth Vader and Pirate costumes have arrived

Due to the expansion of my small home based costume renting business, I have ordered a deluxe Darth Vader costume and pirate costumes for couples. Yesterday I was sitting in traffic jam, so I never got a chance to go to the post office to pick up the packages containing the pirate costumes. My supplier in Empangeni gave me the tracking numbers, but I haven't received a notification from the post office yet.

With the Darth Vader costume there was no invoice attached or in the package and I specifically asked for that. This caused a long trip out to Epping which due to the traffic is quite annoying. The trip to the post office for the other two packages will be done this Saturday.

First impressions: Darth Vader costume

A deluxe version of the Darth Vader costume has arrived today. The helmet is not bad at all, except that it is only the front section. There is padding inside around the eyes, so that they don't fog up.

The suit itself is very nice, but a bit tight at the top to get into, the cape is attached to the suit. The belt is hopelessly too big. What those two pieces hanging down the side are for, I would like to know.

With the suit, I also ordered seperate gloves and a voice changer. The voice changer I haven't tried yet due to the lack of time and batteries.

Meeting with professional wrestlers

After the wrestling event on Monday at the Good Hope Centre, there was an autograph signing yesterday evening after 8PM at the Saddles Steak Ranch in Claremont.

Wrestlers appearing there were Nathan Jones, Rikishi, Plack Perl, Green Berret, the Singh brothers, ODB and others.

Not too many people showed up for the event, but it was great to meet them in person.

I got hold of a business card with a link to NU-Wrestling USA.

World Wrestling Superstars (WWS) in Cape Town

Last night was an international wrestling event in Cape Town. For a totally unknown organisation, the attendence was good, but that was only because a lot of the wrestlers were known from WWE. A lot of these wrestlers from World Wrestling Superstars (WWS) had WWE contracts that expired at some point or just simply left WWE.

The show was great, it started of with several ladies dancing in the ring, followed by a local band marching through the arena with bagpipes and drums. After that the wrestling started.

During the one tag team match, the referee was always in a perfect position during a stranglehold, but also had a perfect blindspot which was abused by another wrestler each time. The entire event took three hours, and I only got out of there jsut before 11PM.

Apparently there is supposed to be an autograph signing today at 8 at the Saddles in Claremont, but I am not sure if that is 8 in the morning or 8 in the evening.

Costume booking issues

Due to all of the year-end functions taking place, I am beginning to juggle bookings of my home-based costume renting business. There are sometimes very close overlaps for certain costumes, and in some cases I got to check with some clients again at what date they were looking for something.

Yesterday a lady was asking for a specific Star Wars costume for five days. The time she needs it is shortly after I am getting that back from another event of soem company.

Today somebody wanted to come to check the small Catwoman costume that arrived on Saturday. Maybe some other people will come as well or they will come tomorrow.

Soon the ordered Darth Vader costume should arrive as well as the Pirate couple costumes.

Meeting friends at the train station

This morning I took an earlier train than usual, just to find somebody there who is normally leaving that station two trains earlier. For many months, we used to travel together by train from the Cape Town station to the Monte Vista station.

Vacation in Namibia

As every year, I will be going to Namibia to visit my family as usual.
This time I am leaving on 16th December 2005 and coming back on the 7th of January 2006. I am just very concerned about my mother with her job situation and my father with his health problems.

Costume bookings heating up

The costume bookings in the last couple of days have become quite a bit more frequent. As I get more bookings, more costumes had to be ordered or in different sizes. My booking system needs a serious upgrade to keep track of all the things going on.

Another DoW weekend

This last weekend was quite a bit about lack of sleep due to Organised Chaos (OC) and another Dawn of War session at Jokobus' place.

A bad weekend

DOSW ten year reunion

This morning came an email from a classmate dating back many years to when I was still in the DOSW (Deutsche OberSchule Windhoek [German High School Windhoek]).
On 17th December 2005 is the ten year reunion in Windhoek at the Heja Lodge from 17:30 onwards.

We close the company on the 15th, so hopefully I will make it on time.

Rip van washing line

Last night there were some strange sounds outside. First I thought it was somebody walking around at 10PM at night and really nearbywhere I am staying. The lack of footsteps tossed out that thought shortly after, since that would have been clearly heard. Then I suspected a cat that tends to come for visits, but that would never be so noisy.

In the end it turned out that the seperate noises which I heard were the individual strings of the washing line finally breaking. Tying up the strings wasn't a problem, but I just didn't have the strength or weight to get it back onto the same spot. At that hour, I didn't want to take everything that wasn't mine off, try and get the line up there with that lack of light, and then hang up everything again.

International connectivity

Yet again the international connection of South Africa to the rest of the world is fluctuating. It is too long overdue that another telephone provider comes along to become competition to Telkom. There is supposedly one, but that story is nice and quiet.

If there would be two or more competitors, instead of the current monopoly situation, then at least the service levels to all of those paying customers would improve. From what I can see with every move that Telkom makes, is that they just try and milk the poor paying consumer for as much money as possible before the second service provider can have an influence on that.

Wireless ISPs are an option, but in the end, they still use Telkom lines for international connections.

Patching and booting

It seems like applying the Dungeon Siege 2 patch v2.2 does not seem to work when attempting to update the game from a fresh install. After a long search of finding a download server where files can actually be downloaded faster than 0.6 K per second (thank you to fileplanet, adrenaline, fileshack, gamershell, etc., etc. for not being of any help and throwing adverts at me!). The URL that finally was of help, after some serious search results filtering was Game Revolution. The site may not be quite fully up to date, but otherwise it is great and files actually download, unless they don't exist anymore for certain games.

After a short session at work yesterday, I went to a friend of mine to help with a problem he has got due to a PC of his brother-in-law. His own PC cannot detect CDs in his DVD writer some some weird reason. His Windows XP CD did not install properly on the PC of the brother-in-law. Other CDs had the same problem, but with different files. It seems like the memory of the PC is damaged or something else. The PC did not come from a proper shop, but as usual from somebody that the brother-in-law knows.

Yesterday evening, while waiting for a client, I had a look at the new Quake 4. The fact that it is a continuing story from Quake 2 is very nice, so it immediatly becomes a known environment (a nasty one). The transitions to the next section are all smooth, and keeping all of your squad mates alive is important or face a swift death. No more single person running around like every other first person shooter out there.

Crazy Halloween weekend

As compared to last year October (2004), this year (2005) was a lot of requests from people who were trying to rent costumes. Tomorrow a batch of nine costumes is coming back, which means lots of laundry.

So far I have never been to a halloween costume party, but that kind of thing is very new here and only now starting to be picked up by the local population.

Last night my PC decided to give me a nice NTLDR not found message, which resulted in a reinstallation of Windows, since I didn't have write access to the NTFS partition with Linux (too experimental still and Microsoft doesn't want to share much info that would actually help the public [read here: software buyers]).

The version 2.2 patch of Dungeon Siege 2 gave its problems, ending with error code 15, which means: Cannot find an old file.
This was after a clean installation using the four original CDs.
Lately I have had a huge amount of problems with applying official patches to games installed with official proper legal CDs or DVDs. It seems like the quality of software is yet again getting worse.

Paper war sorted out...for now

In the hopes of finding an important paper, I went through my infamous stack of papers on my kitchen table to throw away letters for ex-tennants and product catalogues, that mysteriously come to me by mail, without me asking for them, or handing out my contact details.

The paper was found, and the paper stack shrunk a lot smaller. Lots of useless paper rubble was removed and it was about time, since it got a bit overwhelming.

Costume ordering

In the last couple of days, I have had issues trying to get hold of a costuem that was supposed to be sent to me from a local supplier.

Yesterday evening, I have had yet again the problem with the Catwoman costume, that the pants are too big, so I finally ordered the small version and a new Superman costume. My current Superman costume is busy trying to fall apart sicne it is being rented so much.

Yet another Catwoman size issue

This month is going crazy in regards to people wanting to rent costumes from me. Halloween is not much celebrates here in South Africa. Last year October I hardly rented out anything. Renting out two costumes per month was a lot back then.

One of my Catwoman costumes is currently in Secunda, the other one is booked to be picked up on Friday for Saturday and be brought back on Sunday. Another lady phoned me today for that one also for Saturday. So far it is not certain yet, if that costuem will be rented by the person who has booked it, so the other lady might still have a chance to rent it.

Now I really need to get another Catwoman costume in a smaller size, as well as another Superman costume since my current one is busy breaking and it is very popular.

Nightmares for several days

The last couple of days were filled with overtime time, working on weekends, and work or burglary related nightmares.

I am trying to get some project finished for a client and have been coming in to the office early and left late, as well as working on weekends which I normally do not do.

Mostly I ended up waking up sweating, or waking up because of a dream in regards to all kinds of things suddenly going wrong on the project. Another dream was about somebody breaking in, going past valuables, just to steal a stack of shirts.

Lock dilemmas

Saturday morning when I brought a friend of mine back home, we ended up standing in front of a very locked gate. The key managed to turn the turnable inside part of the lock as it is supposed to, but the catch that is supposed to move decided not to do so.

The end of the story was that nobody came and went at 3AM, the lock didn't open, and my friend ended up staying at my place for the night. On Sunday I brought him back on my way to the office. Another resident there had no problems with his key, so it could be a key related issue.

Dawn of War Winter Assault

This weekend I installed the Dawn of War expansion pack called winter Assault. Getting free space wasn't much of an issue. The installer was a pain.

First the I had to restore the original executable so that the installer would work, since the official patches didn't seem to be useable. Unistalling the game did not work for some weird reason, so I had to manually delete it, and hunt it down in the registry. After a long day at work, this is exaclty what I didn't want to have to do. Stuff in the registry was scattered over multipel profiles, only after deleting those entries in every profile, I saw "Install game" instead of "Play game", all of that just because the uninstall did not work.

The third time around, after reinstalling the original game and the expansion pack, I finally succeeded. Why the developers don't remove the CD check once they supply patches is beyond me. Always digging out those valuable original CDs, just because of a CD check is an annoyance.

At the time when I could start having a look at the new features, I was highly annoyed and more interested in uninstalling rather than playing the game. Due to the unstinstall previously designed skins and banners also did not come across to the new installation.

The official patches are a pain as well sicne they are incremental. Tehy might be smaller to download (especially on a 56K Modem), but to do any updates is a pain.

Home business website update

Last night I made a business decision on the topic of getting outside staff to help out on occasions. This is mostly aimed at students who need a bit of additional cash or want a bit more experience. The decision to add a jobs page to the site, also triggered setting the site for a higher resolution, since it was initially designed to fit the 640 width. Since Windows XP is using 800x600 as a default, the new width has been set to 780 pixels width to cater for the scrollbar on the right.

Amongst the job listings are: resellers, people needed for photo shoots, people needed for a promotion next year, people with sewing skills for creating new costumes. Some of the jobs are for younger people and some are for all ages.

The reseller system will be commission based, and should theroretically end up as passive marketing. Even if that works partially, I am going to be quite busy.

Days of catastrophic disasters in the office

These last three days (including today) have just been chaos, mayhem and nothing actually working, except for the phones ringing the whole time.

The hard drives of two different servers died and clients phoned accordingly. Email doesn't seem to work on occasions. All kinds of clients had their emergencies, while I ended up hopping between three different projects due to deadlines. Obviously overtime came along.

Yesterday evening I was supposed to meet another client for my home based business, but that was shifted to today because of the overtime at the office yesterday.

Today was a continuation of yesterday, but things seemed to have calmed down a bit and are back under control.

Marketing staff for advertising and increased costume renting

For the last couple of days, I have been playing around with the idea of advertising some commission based referral concept to improve word of mouth marketing and increasing the quantity of costumes being rented out.

Obviously this would give less income per rented costume, since part of that money would go to the person referring the client to me, but it might actually help with more market exposure and improved market research.

The difficult part is how to present that on my website, so that it doesn't look too badly like blatant advertising. I could use the opportunity to add a jobs section due to the occasional (currently once annually) event or promotion coming up where people are needed. Currently I do need some peopel for posing in different costumes to get decent photos taken for the product catalogue ("costumes" page) on my website.

Popular costumes in Cape Town

Since market research about which costumes are popular amongst the Cape Town population is more or less not existing, I have always been asking clients who rent costumes from me, in regards to what else they might be looking for.

What I do know is, that the Superman costume is the most popular costume that I do have. Lately the requests for a full Darth Vader costume have become more common, which means that I would have to get one of those from overseas and possibly a decent helmet with it, since the current costumes only have the front part of the helmet.

So far two of my clients have actually had their own Darth Vader helmet, which they either got overseas or locally at some strange shop.

My own research comes from telephonic or email enquiries, talking with people and the survey that is on my site as well. Looking at what some people wear at costume parties is also a great pointer towards what might be popular.

PC City building games: Pharaoh and Cleopatra

Many years ago, I bought an entire package of city building games in a bundle, which included Caesar III, Pharaoh and the Pharaoh expansion called Cleopatra. I was hooked years ago a few times, now I am back on that same issue. As far as I remember, even the latest version of SimCity wasn't as detailed with the effects of just simply building one extra building, and then having to make decisions that in the very long run can change fortune or misfortune.

The ways of getting an income differ depending on the map and mission. There are many aspects to keep track of, and achieving certain goals require some hard decisions. A decision that was working for one thing might cause some severe problems later on (like a sudden overproduction and then not having room for the goods that are traded).

As missions in these games advance, the demands become a lot fiercer. For example not being able to give the Pharaoh Gold and Money on time will bring his army upon your town, while the Bedouins are attacking, money is in a deficit, buildings are collapsing, fires ravage throughout the city, and the trade is going nowhere fast. Raising taxes doesn't actually help much with the money problem, since the population might get upset and leave. At this point in time, you should hope, that you are actually still employing a tax collector and that the tax office is still standing. The main income comes through sales and trade.

There are things to worry about such as various gods, finances, the Pharaoh, warlike neighbours, malaria, fires, floods, buildings collapsing (if you haven't got enough architects), prosperity rating, kingdom rating, popularity rating, food supply, water supply, lack of various services, and so on.

These games are really intended for multiple attempts and a cool mind to get this right. Once successful, it is a great feeling to have a prosperous city after going through hell initially.

Game Review: The Punisher

After seeing a gaming friend of mine play the game called "The Punisher" I decided to try it out myself. He plays every game on easy, and he was complaining about the bosses in this one.

I started playing "The Punisher" on medium difficulty. The first feel was just like "Max Payne" but not quite as atmospheric, but otherwise quite similar.

An annoyance is the fact when you have two shotguns and you want to change to double pistols for accurate shots, then one shotgun is always thrown away. This is a blessing and a curse, since a lot of time is wasted when reloading both shotguns during a gunfight, but both shotguns are also highly effective during a close quarters shotgun, where a single shotgun is too slow.

Once finishing a mission, there are new challenges added and to beat your own time/score. At least it isn't exactly the same replay.

So far I haven't gotten to a boss yet. From what I have seen when my friend was playing, the same problem as with "Max Payne" happens where a boss takes hundreds of bullets and the health hardly goes down, or there are only very specific things that actually work and only at certain times. What makes the boss fights even worse is the fact that other bad guys pop up the whole time and waste precious moments and health that could be used on the boss. Having to fight bosses multiple times doesn't help with this.

Overall the game seems good, but the formula is slowly beginning to get stale as well.

Crashing computer harddrives

Yesterday was a lot of bad stuff going on with faulty and/or crashing harddrives of two different computers. One of our major servers at a hosting company had a hardware failure. The server is currently getting everything reinstalled and restored. This kind of problem comes with daily wear and tear, can happen if components start getting old.

After my clients left in the evening, I went to a friend's place to fix a network problem, which turned out to be a lot of problems due to a partially faulty harddrive. My friend is yet again at some rehabilitation. His wife has apparently already been to eleven of those, but has excapted out of most of them.

The drive at my friend's place is slowly dying, once that has happened the entire system needs to be properly reinstalled. My friend used to have an Aplle Mac for many year. When that machine got old, the harddrive died horribly according to what I was told.

Crazy phone call day

Today is just plain weird in regards to crazy phone calls:
I got multiple calls from the accounting company where a friend of mine lives and works. It seems like that is a network problem, most likely a network cable. These things are quite hard to judge over the phone, especially when the person on the other side is quite computer illiterate.

After that phone call a client phoned with DNS and mailing script issues. At least the developer that they have got isn't a total loss to society, so I gave him the required information and he shouldby now already be able to at least have something working.

Shortly after that, a supplier of mine from Empangeni phoned, which is more or less on the other side of the country.

Shares talk

On the train this morning there was a very interesting discussion about shares for listed and unlisted companies. I missed the earlier train due to sleeping too long and not hearing my alarms. The talk was quite interesting in regards to what scams some people are doing even with all of the regulations in place to prevent a lot of stuff like that.

More costume renting requests today

Today I got more phone calls for costume renting purposes, including a call from Tygerberg Children's Hospital, which seems to be one floor below where my father currently is located. As expected, they want a lower rate, which I find acceptable, knowing that the hospital needs money urgently for staff and facilities maintenance.

The other person is lookign for a clown costume, for which I urgently need more wigs, clown noses, another mask and possibly make-up. So far I have had no requests yet for that costume.

For Christmas I am trying to organise a Santa suit, since I had enquiries for that last year. Getting a bunny suit for easter is another matter.

Internet connectivity

Yet again the internet connection is slow and unreliable. Apparently the second national telephone provider is having their launch today, at least four years after that was supposed to happen. Telkom always tries tomilk everybody for money and prevent any competitor to do something about their monopoly. The real issue is of course the internet connection speed and downloading issues. Here in South Africa is no flatrate, Telkom has put this nice wonderful cap on everything.

I am still considering the option of Wireless internet connectivity, since I continuously get disconnected from two different ISPs. Most likely the lines are too busy.

Hectic work

Currently I am busy with getting a website ready to go live Saturday evening at midnight. Some things are causing grief. Some includes are being ignored on occasions, and that causes a page to be a bit empty.

More costume renting

An existing client phoned this morning to rent another costume for the end of the month. Finally some of my efforts are beginning to pay off, and I can start expanding my business if I can rent out multiple costumes every month.

The next step would be to get some of the costumes requested (like Shrek, Santa Claus, bunny suits, etc.) and get some others which people won't find elsewhere.

Back to the hospital again

On Saturday, my father was brought back to the hospital. His bloodpressure went up quite badly and he is totally confused, so that nobody has a clue what he is trying to talk about.

His first stay in the hospital was five weeks where he left too early, then three weeks later he was back for seven weeks. Three days after his birthday, he is back there. Hopefully that won't be to long this time around.

Yet another costume to repair

After getting my deluxe Chewbacca costume back from when it was rented recently, it looked all fine from the outside. As usual, it was put into the washing machine. After taking it out, I discovered that the seam started seperating at the one arm, but that is only really noticeable from the inside and not from the outside. Now I am wondering if the washing machine wasn't maybe a bit too full, and the washing cycle could have caused that damage. That will be easy to fix, but it will cost me some time and money.

I have realised lately, that a lot of my costumes really are just meant to be used a few times, but I knew that in any case. Many have paid themselves off already, but many more still need to be rented. Maybe it is time to go to stage two and slowly get some better quality costumes which should hopefully last longer. Cheap buying is sometimes expensive buying.

Time between birthdays

Today is the day between my father's birthday and my sister's birthday.

The small birthday party yesterday was lots of fun with some good chatting about many topics. There were issues about new jobs, cars, car engines, air filters for computers, computer networks, computer games, tenant rent discussions and some medical debates. This always happens when Prof starts talking, then few will get a word in. :)

For my sister I have had absolutely no idea what she wants or needs for her birthday.

Framed photos and memories

A good friend of mine has several photos of his past in frames standing in his apartment. The most recent one was a photo of him and myself at the costume party at the German Carnival Matieka. Another friend of ours (always at home playing games) came to visit one day and saw the photo. Then he asked when that happened, since my friend only frames photos of certain memorable events or periods of his life. Fortunately none of us were recognisable on that photo, that could have given a lot of questions. He did not seem to realise who he was looking at on that photo. :)

Last week when we were at his place and talking about a girlfriend, I heard some questions about who that is and yet again sensed some slight odour of jealousy. Hopefully that won't cause friction later on.

Missing the train home

Walking together with colleagues from the office to the train station is usually quite fun, except when that causes delays and then missing the train. This is exactly what happened yesterday. One my my colleagues takes the bus at the train station and another one takes a later train than what I take. The last bit I rushed to the station, just to see the train disappear in the distance.

The next train along my route only leaves just after 7PM, while my usual train leaves at 6:15PM. As I was waiting for 7PM, I saw one of the usual people from the train in the morning. We started chatting, and he suggested to take the train he was taking since he is usually picked up by his wife, so he offered to drop me off at home.

Yahoo! Messenger problems

Lately I have had some really annoying problems with Yahoo! Messenger: I use it at home on occasions, and usually sign out (as I did the last couple of days). At the office out of some strange reason, I get a message, saying that I am already signed in on another computer then I cannot sign in. After that, the application crashes. Signing in at hoem usually works with no problems, provided that my internet connection from my dial-up 56K modem actually works. The help section on Yahoo is absolutely no help at all for that topic, but everything else is covered. Downloading the Messenger was a pain to begin with.

MSN Messenger gives similar nonsense with the usual excuses of checking the proxy and firewall settings. In the meantime, every protocol has got access to the outside from any application on any of the platforms that we use at the office. At least the web based version of MSN Messenger works.

ICQ is to some major extend also a pain, since it always wants to start in the middle of the screen, and even when not set, it automatically adds itself to the start-up of Windows. This all makes me sooooo happy indeed... :(

Family birthday and tenant rent

Today is my father's birthday, I haven't seen him for a while, but I will see him this evening. While I am there, I will attempt to ask him about the case of the tenants and being behind with their rent.

Last month the tenants had an excuse about bailing somebody out of prison who was drunk, drove while drunk and due to that, attempted to murder somebody. Apparently this has happened before, so it is obvious, that that person has not learned anything out of a brief prison stay, if he gets bailed out all of the time.

This month, there is an issue about money that they are waiting for from their house that was sold, where they were badly cheated on since weird things happened with the ownership papers. That is still no excuse not to pay rent.

If the latest by middle of next month no money becomes visible, then some legal steps need to be taken. This takes the bank money transfer periods into consideration.

Identity theft on mailing lists

On Yahoo! Groups I am the moderator on a mailing list, where sombody suddenly got really active with advertising to sell something. Many people complained including the person whom everybody believed to be sending all the adverts to the list. The real person does actually sell those items, but only upon request, and not by aggressive advertising.

The investigation that followed the matter caused the identity theft to be discovered. The person who did that was banned and a message was sent to the members to explain what has happenend. Previously I have only read about this problem in various newsletters, but never actually encountered it yet.

What gave it away was a search for the name of the person, where the email address was quoted as well. After that it was really obvious what was going on. Hopefully now the members will settle down a bit, because many got upset.

Finally got contact with new supplier

After several phone calls, I finally got email contact with my latest supplier who is manufacturing costumes. The costumes really look good, but most of them seem to be useful mostly for events and not so much parties, which is currently my main market. Now it is just a matter of getting the entire list of costumes that can be ordered to make a selection of what I want to get for now.

The usual Catwoman size issue

On Saturday somebody came to possibly rent a Catwoman costume that I have got. The problem was, that the medium sized costume is too large for that person. This has happened before and seems to be the third time. I really need to get the small version of that to have any success with it.

I have two Batman costumes from the animated series, where both costumes are a medium size, but the costume with the muscle chest is too big and the costume without the muscle chest is too small. Both Batman costumes come from the same manufacturer.

PC Game: C&C Generals Zero Hour

Saturday was full of driving around to find all kinds of things, just to find out it was mostly a waste of time. At least I got hold of two capitvating comic books. :)

Sunday I was supposed to get a visitor (client), but that was postponed due to a boat show. That visitor will come this evening.

The afternoon consisted of visitign a friend, who had a visitor and a client visiting at the time. The client had a problem with an iPod that disconnects automatically shortly after connecting it. That iTunes was the cause of a lot of those issues.

Later on we played a bit of Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour. No matter what some people say about the game: it is a very good game, except for the annoying intro videos that EA wants everybody to watch all the time. Unlike WarCraft 3, the resources are more or less infinite. The computer can be a nasty and an easy opponent.

The different specialities of the Generals take a different way of thinking to properly utilise them against others. The GLA seemed very different from the USA and China in regards to playing, and they don't have an airforce, but they don't actually require micromanagement of power stations and airbases. To make up for the lack of airbases, they have their tunnels, which have to be built first. The tunnels can be lifesavers.

New costume supplier found

A problem of mine has more or less solved itself by a phone call that arrived yesterday. As I am in the process of expanding my home based costume renting business, I was looking for somebody locally to manufacture costumes for anything that is not a licensed character.

Some lady from Pretoria phoned me yesterday with a proposal for selling me costumes and also making them in her factory. She picks one company per province to supply costumes to which she sells. Somehow this came just in time, but I need to order costuems three months in advance most likely due to financial year quarters.

The duck pond

As summer is more or less here there is a lot more light in the morning when I am sitting in the train on my way to work. Between the railway line an the N1 opposite Century City and Canal Walk is this slightly biggish pond. The last couple of evenings I have noticed ducks that are swimming amongst the plants. This has now become more visible in the morning as well.

Missing music CDs

Recently it became apparent, that some of my treasured music CDs have gone missing. They are not where all of my other CDs and DVDs are. I know of two people that would take them without asking and one of them is overseas.

The annoying part about that is the fact that those are difficult to get, and the companies selling them here put 138 percent markup on music CDs, which is the very reason why I stopped buying music CDs, because that became too expensive a few years ago due to the continously rising prices. Then sometime after that the music industry started making a big fuss about people copying the music instead of buying... I wonder why

Most of the music available these days and being played at least ten times per day on radio for months on end, is mostly rubbish music for the masses that don't know of better. The really good stuff is not being played on most radion stations.

Christmas Function/Dinner Season

As every year, companies are having their annual Christmas functions/dinners and the requests for costumes are becoming more.

Somewhere I should actually still get a decent Santa suit, maybe a mask of an old man as well for it. Santa is supposed to be old, not young.

The same applies for easter, since I have had requests for easter bunny suits, but those are quite expensive.

For the next Free Comic Book Day promotion I need to get another costume at least and hopefully find somebody who can be there as a female superhero character. I still clearly remember the last fiasco with the students that bailed out two days before the annual event, just because they were not informed properly by the agency that organised them and other reasons.

Recording from a TV Tuner card

A few years ago my television fried itself and could not be repaired. Due to a lack of space and finance to get another small television like what I had, I got myself a TV Tuner card for my PC. Since I already have a screen and the antenna, I just needed the tuner part.

Normally the video recorder (tapes) was set to record shows from television while I was at work and then I watched them on my Television/PC later. Due to age, the VCR started wrestling with the tapes instead of recording the WWE wrestling that I normally watch and other things.

PowerVCR 2 version 3.0 which came with my TV tuner card ended up being slow, bloated and mostly useless. It also took more than one minute to start up. Some other application came with the TV tuner card which doesn't look pretty but runs well and supports the light-weight remote (with the all-important mute button). Except that this application doesn't have a recording feature. With my old RivaTNT card was an application with could also use the TV Tuner, but that ended up being totally unstable and only had brief manual recording.

Recently I got PVR Plus which came with another card, that has got sheduling to record shows, runs fast and stable, starts up quick and looks nice. Now the problem is that it records in MPG format (makes sense to do that), and a lot of modern media players just simply cannot handle jumping to a specific location inside of an MPG video. I tried Media Player Classic, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player 10 and eventually I found that the very minimalistic BSPlayer can actually do what the rest could not.

It has taken me now a bit more than two years to finally get something that allows me to replace my old faulty VCR.

Weird phone calls

This morning is stuffed full of the strangest phone calls available.

First somebody phoned me from Secunda (on the other side of the country), just to rent some of the costumes that I rent out from home. Later I got a written confirmation from that person with some horrible colourscheme and font. The text was all uppercase and in attorney-speak.

Finally at the office, it was raining phone calls for Metropolitan (insurance company), JunkMail and Cape Ads (that is another story on its own) and some other strange things. I am in the internet business and haven't got anything to do with these other companies.

The Cape Ads/JunkMail story evolved to another level:
The 082 number that they have for their Adhotline is not controlled by Telkom (I phoned and asked about that and they said I should phone Vodacom), Vodacom tells me that the number is invalid. When I phoned the number, the call doesn't end up anywhere. How some people get through to our 021 number is a total mystery.
Slowly but surely these calls for Cape Ads/JunkMail all the time is becoming an annoyance.

Family issues again

Today my sister in Wndhoek asked me if I had any idea for a birthday present for our father. As always I have no idea what he needs or wants, or even what he is interested in. Her birthday is two days away from his. She also told me that one of our uncles has died last Saturday. That was something which I expected for a while due to his medical condition. Since I only saw him once every few years that wasn't much of a shocker. My father was close to death this year and 12 weeks in the hospital is not a fun matter.

More costume rentals

Today another phone call for a birthday party happening this Friday. On Monday three people came from nearby somewhere to look at some of the costumes that I rent out. The phone call today was for different female characters. Yesterday a lady phoned who was quite desperate to rent my Catwoman costume, since nobody else in Cape Town (possibly South Africa) seems to have it. She probably needs that for a Halloween party. Finally some people are appreciating the fact that I list all of my costumes on my website:
BKE Costume Rental.

Online games: What makes and breaks them

For a couple of years now, online games (web browser games and otherwise) have been evolving into a social community activity. First person shooters normally don't develop much of a community, expect for new mods, maps, graphics packs, etc. Role-playing games that tend to take several months to play normally end up with IRC channels, forums and of course in-game interaction with other players. Normally the players can also group together and form Clans, Alliances, Parties, Cults, etc., depending on the game type.

What does get highly annoying with the browser based games is when the game is full of bugs and incomplete sections, but then the developer focuses on stuffing every frame (frames based games) full of adverts which cause errors and annoyances. I have played an online browser based game since February 2005, the round is getting closer to finishing (6 to 12 months usually), and the game is now in Beta 5. The greatest annoyance is the fact that now ads pop up inside the main frame, and since they get clipped off, there is no way to reach the close button on the right. The advert for the premium account to remove the ads and get extra features is always present, but that is only available for two countries in Europe, while I am in South Africa.

World of Warcraft

Lately I have really been getting keen on purchasing a copy of World of Warcraft just to simply go and explore a nice big virtual world and interact with other players as what is done with other massive multiplayer online role playing games. Currently I am busy on one since February this year. I am just concerned about the connection speed for overseas and the resulting phone bill.

More potential costume rentals

Yesterday evening three people came to look at costumes for a birthday party on Friday. they are most likely going to rent four costumes and they are situated in the area where I am staying.

Counter-Strike weekend

It has been years, since I have last played Counter-Strike. This weekend I played the new version with the Half-Life 2 engine. The new version of Counter-Strike is less interactive than the old version.

Several unsuspecting minds very introduced to the evil addiction of Chuzzle. :)

Definition: Organised Chaos

Everything is neat and clean for the person who put the stuff there, but not for anybody else.

Busy weekend

This coming weekend will be quite busy with sleepless nights due to a visit to a friend in Kuilsrivier forthe entire weekend.

A friend of mine got a new PC yesterday, which was very long overdue, now he can finally play DOOM3. Hopefully he enjoys the freakshow and dark corners.... :)

Weekend plans dilema

Last night I got a phone call from someone in Kuilsrivier about network games the entire weekend. This tends to cause certain dilemmas with my existing weekend plans since I was planning on visiting somebody else whom I visit every Saturday evening.
A sneaky email has been sent out so now I am waiting for the replies.

Rent issues

I had a serious chat with the tennants yesterday about their outstanding rent.
Apparently they had to use it to bail some fmily member out of jail for drunken driving and attempted murder due to being drunk. According to their promises, they will pay double the rent money at the end of month.
Once they start saying something about electricity due to lack of cash, then that is the perfect opportunity to ask if the rent has already been paid.

Game Review: Dungeon Siege II

The game Dungoen Siege II (DS2) is one of the few games noteworthy of actually getting my attention. Most games in my opinion are just yet another rehash of another rehash of some clone of some other game.

Some people say that DS2 is a Diablo 2 killer. Based on what I have seen it comes close but doesn't yeat beat Diablo 2.

DS2 is using an enhanced engine of the original Dungeon Siege. The expansion pack made it nice. Many character and design flaws, as well as the annoying level-up problems were fixed.

The scenery is quite nice, but it starts becoming repetitive at times. DS2 has got main quests and sub quests. The sub quests let the player do a lot of backtracking between Acts 1 to 3, which gets rather annoying. The information given in some of the sub quests is also a bit too vague. Certain sub quests only become available with having certain characters in the party.

A new feature is the specialities and the associated powers which recharge during combat. The monster AI has been improved a lot, but the monsters aim a bit too much for the combat mage all of the time. The player and party AI seems to have become more stupid and degraded. There are bugs where weapons do not show when held, and spells (Transmute in particular) don't seem to always function.

A new feature are the pets that can be developed, once they are fully grown, the pets are not as much fun anymore, but they become quite powerful. The spells are also just repeats (lesser, greater, master), sicne they are just different-powered version of the same thing. The design flaw were a spell cannot be used later on since the mana is suddenly not enough anymore has fortunately been removed.

Another good thing is the fact that the difficulty selection has been done like Diablo 2, and the character level is now shown ingame.

The 3D graphics and scenery have been improved, the story as well and fortunately no undead since that topic became quite stale.
For any game the following applies: Good graphics does not mean that the game is good no matter what the artificial hype says.
In the case of DS2, the graphics actually complements the game.

Good advice: don't run DS2 with non WHQL compliant video drivers, otherwise there will be some very interesting graphical glitches.

Overall, the game is great, this is the closest that any game got to Diablo 2.

Sleepy weekend

This last weekend was more or less as usual, except that I was a lot more tired than I expected. The worst thing is that I slept through most of WWE RAW.

I got a letter from a lady who is married according to my informatino, but she mentions that she is apparently interested in me. For me that might be a welcome message, but I am not interested due to her history of all kinds of issues, including drug abuse, court appearances and the occasional jail cell stay-over. I get easily frustrated if there is someone around me the whole time who bothers me about all kinds of things.

Visiting friends in faraway places

Yesterday evening I drove to Big Bay, which is a couple of Kilometers away from Melkbosstrand to visit some friends, who have invited me for dinner there. The evening was quite interesting and exactly as expected.

My friends are planning on opening a voluntary non-religious rehabilitation centre somewhere in a farming area. The idea is to only have people there that actually want to be rehabilitated. For the government and other rehabilitatino centres where people are forced to become religious fanatics against their will, there are apparently constant waiting lists of at least three months.

Internet problems

Today is yet another day where internet connection swapping is frequent, but still doesn't quite solve the connectivity problem.

A friend of mine is having a good fight with connecting a Windows 98 PC with a Windows XP PC. Lots of VxD error messages, and the usual typical problem of the netowrk neighbourhood not showing any PCs on the network. This problem has been around for years, and has never been fixed properly, just like all of those Windows Explorer bugs in Windows XP, which date back to Windows 95.

Of course the usual MSN Messenger sign in issues are frequent as well.

Cold day after warm day

Today had a cold wind, after yesterday was so hot. It is not quite summer yet, but will be soon.

Tomorrow I am invited for dinner at a couple that owes me money, but seperately from each other. Just to make sure, I am not going to take cash or Bank cards along.

Back on the train

After having to drive by car yesterday in the traffic jam, it was very relaxing this morning to walk to the train station and then chat with one of the usual suspects on the train. This morning is also a lot warmer than last week.

It seems like the condition of my father is steadily improving.

The new costuems that I got yesterday are quite nice. The two with the padded muscles are very comfortable as well and there is also no tension on the zipper at the back.

New superhero costumes have arrived

After a lot of delays, expenses and red tape at the depot, I finally managed to get hold of my latest order of costumes for my home based costume rental shop.

First there was a car accident on the N1 where a car lost its left rear wheel. At home I had to convert some emails to text files for printing later. Then there were constructions at N1 City, which caused me to walk a detour. Bank queues and slow walking people followed soon. Then I could finally print out the emails and drive to Capemail in Epping.

At Capemail, I didn't want to bother parking inside, just to find out that later I had to actually bring my car in, just to get my parcels out. At least the guy at the exit was friendly and helpful.

The costumes themselves are nice, especially the Iron Man costume that I had ordered. Mr. Incredible seems a bit big for me, but it also seems to be a different design. The Invisible Woman costume does not have a zipper at the back as expected, but these stick together strips, except that they are round and small. The mask of the Iron Man costume fits me well, but I got to put it together when the rear is already on my head otherwise I won't be able to put it on. The Iron Man suit itself like Mr Incredible suit has got a zipper at the back.

Meeting old school buddies

This weekend was the annual German Oktoberfest in Cape Town. It was lots of fun at the Paulaner Bräuhaus at the V&A Waterfront. I met somebody who could possibly be a distant relative of mine and school buddies from somewhere around 1990 to 1992 or later.

On Friday I got two papers from Capemail in Epping about two packages of the costumes that I had ordered. The problem is, that there was no amount mentioned on the papers and the place was closed on Saturday. This morning I phoned there, just to find out that I need to bring a printed invoice along. The problem with that is that I don't have a printer and I would have to take my car to the office so that I can drive to the place during lunch break.

Traffic jam and war

Today was a good super high quality traffic jam on the N1 (Cape Town). Apparently there was a small accident on the attached M5 which was cleared up quickly, but since everybody had to slow down to watch, that caused huge slowdown shockwaves from the smaller M5 onto the big N1 and that caused another four-car pileup as well.

The online game that I have been playing since February has now become a full scale war amongst several alliances.

September this year is long

So far it feels like this month is nearly halfway, just to notice that today is only the eigth. There are still another full three weeks to go. This is going to be a tough one in regards to finance, and I am still expecting two packages for which I have to pay. The tennants are already broke, so I don't know how they are going to get through the month.

Small business exapnsion

It seems liek my small home business is now slowly beginning to expand faster. The enquiries are coming more, it is becoming easier to finance new costumes. This year there were two enquiries from the film industry and a promotion for a comic book shop.
Yesterday I have started contacting other costuem renting companies which do not share the same niche market about referers for enquiries that do not cover what we actually have. This should hopefully help both of our businesses in the logn run.

Computer game addicts

A friend of mine is quite badly addicted to games. He has got financial problems, needs to desperately upgrade his PC, but yet he buys games.

Yesterday, Dungeon Siege 2 was available in the shops, it was supposed to be released on 15th September 2005 only. Normally I get home from work at around 6:40PM, 7:20PM he phoned me to ask if I already bought my copy of the game. At that point in time, buying a game was the last thing on my mind due to other issues and financial reasons. I had to tell him, that the earliest when I would buy that would be at or after end of the month. He really needs to get his priorities sorted out!

Most games the last decade have all just been copies of other games, so there is hardly anything that even gets my attention. If I buy one game a year it is a lot, since there are years when I don't buy any.

Matieka and Readers Den on the internet

All of the reports and links going to the Reders Den Comic Book Shop website seemed to have pushed the website to the top spot on Google when "readers den" (without the quotes) is typed in. There are other shops internationally with the same name, but international in this case is of no use locally. I am already looking forward to the next Free Comic Book Day promotion next year at the Readers Den in Claremont, preparations have already started. Which characters will appear there are another matter, but hopefully arrangements can be made to get female characters as well. The students bailing out this year was a disaster.

It seems like that the Matieka website is also becoming better known. Judging by the number of downloads of the event programme and the number of visitors to the actual events, the website with the details must have helped something. Soon, I will start updating the site and giving it a new look with some event photos.

People that have got no clue what they want!

Yet again, there was this highly annoying situation of some person asking me to help out to do something. The work was done exactly to specifications, but that person had something totally different in mind than what I was told. If somebody wants attention that way, then that person will soon not be liked too much by those who are being volunteered to do work for whatever reason. These people would not understand the issue then in any case.

Another case is of course where nobody wants to be accountable for anything. Somebody who works at a government department told me something interesting about that. If bills are not paid or other things, nobody seems to be responsible for anything. This is for certain departments, so I don't actually want to know how bad the big picture is, and the inefficiency and waste of tax money in regards to this.

Matieka 2005 photos received

On Saturday after a lot of hassle and misplacements, I finally received the photos that I have ordered of the German carnival called Matieka which takes places annually in Stellenbosch. When I get around to scanning in those photos, I can finally update the website to make it look a bit more lively.

This coming Saturday, I can give a friend of mine his photos that he ordered.

The trip to Stellenbosch was also good to test if I still get the heat problem with my car radiator. The radiator mostly stayed cold.

Rainy day

Yesterday was supposed to be some rain, there was a bit during the very early morning, but not during the day.

When I woke up this morning, there was a lot of rain coming down. I was expecting that to continue on my way to the train station, but there was nothing of it at the time.

According to the weather report there is going to be rain in the afternoon or evening. It would be annoying if that only comes down on my way home from work.

End of month budget blues at the beginning of the month

Since September is only five weeks long and the bills are topped up as usual, plus car repairs, plus products that I have ordered for my home business, I have now a small financial dilemma on how to get to the next payday.

The everyday rice issue is already in effect, but jsut eating rice cannot be good either, but at least that is one way to stretch the budget quite a bit.

The one order that I sent off has been cancelled due to the telex taking too long or the bank just simply being full of nonsense. Most likely it is the nonense part...

The next challenge is going to be cheap but proper and effective marketing, since there is hardly any budget for that.

Hospital release and hot car engines

This morning my father was released from the hospital. He was in there for more or less seven weeks. I have no idea what his plans are now, but I can take a couple of guesses based on his behaviour and questions.

Last night I fixed my problem with the engine getting too hot and the fan not switching on: The thermostat switch was slightly scorched and a fuse was not in the right spot. At least now I have no worries about driving long distances again.

Microwave baking recipe

1 cup self raising flour
1 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla essences
quarter cup fish oil
1 cup boiling water
2 eggs
mix flour and sugar baking powers pinch of salt
separate bowl mix 1 cup boiling water vanilla essences and 3 TSP of cocoa
beat eggs and add
7-8 minutes in microwave
no 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp vanilla essence, quarter cup fish oil, pinch of salt, 3 TSP cocoa, 1 cup boiling water and 2 eggs

Costumes ordering, heated cars and hospitals

Yesterday, one of my suppliers asked me about my question in regards to splitting my latest order of costumes into two packages. Once I told them why I have requested that, they agreed with that. If it wasn't for the problems of size/weight and customs, then I wouldn't have to go to all of that trouble.

Another supplier is having issues with money transfers. Now I am waiting for confirmatino on that particular order.

I had a good chat with somebody who wants to become a maskot for a sportsteam. The whole thing sounds like lots of work, but work that is fun.

A friend of mine has nothing better to do than getting all exited about how many days still to go until a game that he is waiting for is going to become available. He plays far too many games the whole day in any case. He buys many games and DVDs, but really cannot actually afford to do so.

Today I will get the spare parts to sort out the heating problems of my car, hopefully then thigns should go a bit better.

On Wednesday, my father is going to get another examination at the hospital. Hopefully he can finally leave that place after that.

Heated car

On Saturday the temperature of my car went to the maximum that the indicator could show and there was a nice and think steam cloud coming out from under the bonnet. Last night I found out that the thermalswitch of the fan doesn't work anymore. The fan is supposed to prevent this from happening. The fan itself is working, obviously if the fan isn't switched on, it is useless in that scenario.

Costumes ordered

For my home business, the next Free Comic Book Day at the Readers Den and the next German carnival (Matieka) in Stellenbosch, I have ordered several new costumes. The costumes include Iron Man, Invisible Woman, Batman, Captain America and Mr Incredible.

Weekend results

This weekend was yet another hectic one:
On Saturday there was not enough time to sort out banking, shopping, driving to Stellenbosch to pick up photos, pick up a friend, drive to another friend, get soem other things sorted out and still free up space on my PC by backing up files onto DVD.

On Sunday a friend of mine phoned me at least five times, I was beginning to get highly annoyed.

On Saturday I bought a Bluetooth USB Dongle, now a friend of mine wants to borrow it to transfer some files to his phone.

Ongoing MSN Messenger connection problems

Yet another day where signing in with MSN Messenger just simply does not work. The connection testing still tells me that I can connect to MSN. What a bunch of lies!
Seeing is believing, and I saw it did not work.

Currently we have to use a temporary IRC solution. For other purposes I am using Yahoo Messenger which seems to work perfectly. The fact that my one ISP doesn't get its routing to the Yahoo site working is another annoyance.

USB modem issues

Two days ago, my SmartLink USB modem started with issues where from my two USB 1.1 ports at the front of the PC it could not dial out anymore and the sounds are very distorted. The modem still functions fine using the USB 2.0 port at the back and then the sound is right except for the volume being a bit low. Maybe there is something faulty with the front USB ports, or Windows decided to give issues. I also tried to get my modem working in Linux, but the documentation is a bit wrong on how to set it up. The modem drivers don't work when SMP (Symetrical Multi Processor) support is compiled into the kernel. After recompiling the kernel and recompiling the modules, I got this nice error messge: Invalid Module Format
The recompiling was supposed to rebuild the module, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I will retry again later this evening...

Messenger wars

It seems like there is more competition amongst the different instand messenger applications. The new Messenger from Google showed up today, Microsoft brought out versino 7.5 of MSN Messenger. Yahoo Messenger isn't bad either, it is in any case far more reliable in regards to conenction and has got a lot more features than MSN Messenger.

A lot of nonsense happening

It seems like my father is being released from the hospital too early yet again, because he is causing so many problems there and fighting with the doctors and nurses. Last time it nearly killed him three weeks after he was released. Now he needs a bit of rehabilitation, but I doubt that he will do that. His mind isn't quite 100% right yet due to his kidney problems. He thinks that if he can walk or at least stand up, he can leave the hospital, and if he can leave the hospital he is healthy. It is impossible to explain the situation to somebody who doesn't listen and doesn't want to understand the situation. During the day, there is nobody who can really look after him, since everybody is working full time at stressful jobs.

The great sleep

Coming back on Sunday morning between 3 and 4AM left me a bit tired. I nearly swirved off the road a few times. Once I got to bed I slept for at least ten hours.

On Sunday afternoon, my father came for a brief visit to pick up his car. He was out of the hospital for the weekend, and can actually now stand on his own.

Cheques and lack of sleep

Yesterday a phone call came along from a friend telling me that I have to come to his place to pick up a cheque from the receiver of revenue. This means that once I get back home from the hospital it will be nearly 8:30PM. Getting to his place takes another thirty minutes, then he still wanted to look at my DVD collection, which is going to take an awful long time. Afterwards I still have to drive back (another thirty minutes). By the time I get back home it will be close to midnight. Once I finally get home, I can have my first meal for the day.

Tomorrow morning I have to find a shop that sells car headlights, then I have to stand in the queue due to the cheque, then I have to do some shopping since I have got hardly any food left. A couple of other things also went empty. This is going to take a while in the morning, and the crowds are going to cause delays.

In the afternoon I have to do some cleaning up in the house, watering a couple of plants and try and get some sleep before the next hospital visit hits. Then I still want to watch something and then another hospital visit, followed by a long drive to visit a friend of mine and only coming back sometime after 2AM or 3AM. Usually I end up sleeping on Sunday until at least 11AM and/or later. By that time there will be a lot of noises outside which disturb sleeping.

Issues and more issues

Today is just one of those days that I would like to forget:
Some clients from a very small project came again and wanted changes, even after they have been long ago explained certain limitations of the system being used and that the system will not be changed because that would affect other clients as well. They are just trying to push their luck and not do any work while they are at it.

My sister notified me about the health of my grandmother, which is understandable due to her age. Not much luck yet in regards to enquiries about the huge hospital bill, the next one is still coming.

Other clients are also busy becoming a daily annoyance, as well as certain colleagues because those same clients weren't told certain details.

Painful Lasagne

Last night was yet another odd cooking evening: A few days ago, I bought some cheese for making lasagne. Normally a block of cheese doesn't stay around much before it gets eaten, so I decided to make the lasagne before I really go ahead and eat the block of cheese.

The ingredients this time were interesting: Mince, noodles, cheese, spices, peas, tomato sauce, BBQ spices, BBQ sauce.

The cheese made a nice crust on top. Something with that combination caused the food to lie really heavily in the stomach, I still felt the after-effects this morning.

New definition

Due to the existing experience of people becoming more stupid as mor rain falls, I have seen some really stupid driving happening the last couple of days. My thoughts were hovering somewhere around dorks and idiots until I combined the two words to become:
dorkiot

Hospital bills

Yesterday a nice hospital bill of 47 thousand Rand arrived. The first bill was 4 thousand Rand, which is already nearly half of my monthly salary.

The second bill might be arriving one of these days, but that bill is still under construction, and it is going to be nasty. If I get that and end up in hospital due to a nervous breakdown, then it was really bad.

More laundry

Last night there were two loads of laundry to sort out. Most of it was costumes due to a sudden flow of rentals. One costume ended up getting some interesting spots, I need to rinse that again this evening that the rest of the soap comes off.

My website also needs an update and I need to order more costumes once I got my finances sorted out. The main problem then will be the space to store them. There is hardly any floorspace left, and I need to thorw away a few things, plus get a new furniture piece.

Slow day, photos, hospital issues and more

Today is yet again another slow day at the office. Normally the day goes fast. I was expecting rain this morning due to the heavy rain last night and the predicted rain today, but that did not happen. Normally when there is rain, the intelligence level of the drivers in the morning traffic jam gets reduced based on the amount of rain coming down and the amount of water lying around. This seems to be a recurring phenomenon :)

The photos of Matieka (annual German carnival in Stellenbosch) are finally available at www.fokus.co.za. First I went to the actual event in Stellenbosch, then I went there a week later again to check if the photos are available, just to find only a few. Last Saturday, I went there again, just to find the same collection. Today finally the website is showing the entire collection of photos. Now I have to wait for a friend before I can start ordering photos.

My father is finally walking a bit, but he canot properly stand, so he needs to be supported for everything. He won't like the idea of crutches, but then again, his arms will most likely not be able to support his weight, since they are in the same condition as his legs. He seems to realise now finally, that he won't be able to do the work that he used to do. The options of what he can do are very slim, since he doesn't want to do desk work, and I cannot imagine him working in most shops. His age also counts against him.

Today, finally the first client has asked for an RSS news feed. I am surprised it took this long, but that is not an issue, since there are already working implementations available on live sites.

Yesterday a potential client wanted to have a list of sites that I have worked on. Most of the more than 100 websites, I cannot even list, since I haven't done the actual design, I cannot list those.

A friend of mine had the following interesting new ideafor an organisation: Liberal Garden Gnome Society
The actual description would be somebody who is not allowed to smoke in the house, and stands outside in the garden somewhere smoking a cigarette.

Best business month so far

Due to a sudden surge of birthday parties which are costume parties, my home based costume rental business has currently go its best month. This small financial bonus helps a great deal towards various expenses caused by having to pay the bills for two people.

After checking the log files of my website, I discovered a reference from the site www.namibier.de which is a site about German speaking Namibia born people currently living outside of Namibia. On that list I discovered somebody whose name looked very familiar from the last Matieka in Stellenbosch. That person is also living in Cape Town. Just to meet some more German speaking people here in Cape Town, I have contacted him. Now I am waiting for his latest response.

A friend of mine stayed at my place for one night, he was mugged in Tableview on Monday and badly beaten up (broken nose and other bruises). Five against a small and not very physical person is not very nice. My friend is known to always have money problems and then they still went and mugged him.

My father walked a few steps last night, but he is now thinking that he can get out of the hospital today. He is still very confused and probably forgot that there are still various tests being done on him, and the doctors still have to correct his irregular heartbeat.

Evening stayover

Last night a freind of mine stayed at my place for the night. His wife caused some problems and they were evicted from the house that they stayed in. She was supposed to be brought to prison, but persuaded the police to be brought to the hospital because she is in such a bad condition (drug addict). My friend got mugged on Monday, his nose is broken and dislodged and he has got a lot of bruises. This morning he went to the taxirank to get back to Tableview.

Public holidays leftovers

The public holiday wasn't too bad. I managed to gt most things sorted out that I wanted to sort out. The dishes will be washed today, since that could not be done yesterday.

A friend of mine came for a visit from a long distance away and he ended up renting a Superman costume for a birthday party. At least my monthly expenses are covered and I made a small profit from my home business. He also gave some good suggestions about what else to order.

The rest of the day was filled with sleeping, hospital visits, cleaning and trying to continue watching a series that I have been trying to finish.

Weekend fiasco

Saturday was a long drive. The morning was filled with paying bills and shopping, followed by picking up a friend in Oranjezicht and driving to Stellenbosch for checking if some photos can be ordered, just to discover that due to the sheer volume, only half of them are there. Next weekend we will drive there again, and the weekend after that as well to pick up the ordered photos.

There were the usual two trips to the hospital (mostly snoozing there due to lack of sleep), followed by a LAN Session (copying stuff and network games) in Bergvliet, followed by a drive back at night with only one light.

Sunday was mostly sleeping and waiting for the rain to finish before going shopping to get breakfast at 3PM. Lunch followed after 6PM.

As I was about to take my friend back home at 10PM, I got a phonecall from the mother of another friend who asked me to phone him, since he got tossed out of the place where he was staying. His wife caused a lot of nonsense and nobody knew where she was, the landlord has changed the locks, and my friend needed a lift to a place where he could stay for the night. A crazy drive through Tableview followed that trip, just to get back to known roads. In the end I ended up back home at 11:55PM and having to get up after 7AM for work. So much for a nice quiet and relaxing evening...

Matieka 2005 photos and related laundry issues

Hopefully the Matieka 2005 photos should be ready for ordering this Saturday, which means that I have to drive out to Stellenbosch and look at them, pay there, then drive back there the week after to pick them up.

The costume that I had on at the costume party has got some nasty stains that don't want to come out properly. I am concerned about the fabric colour coming out before the stain comes out.

Hospital stories continued

The second extended visit of my father in the hospital is turning out as expected: his condition is getting better, worse, better, worse, better,...

The dialysis improves his condition, once that wears off everything goes downhill. Some of my family members have no real understanding of the situation and are impatient and make a big fuzz about the matter which just worsens things. The irregular heartbeat is another matter as well as the not fully functioning digestive system.

I expect this to go on for several weeks at least, for that time, I will continue my daily visits to the hospital.

An evening spent in a Spider-Man costume

The recent German Carnival Matieka in Stellenbosch had a costume party as the main event with lots of people. For the evening I wore a two-piece high quality Spider-Man suit, which covered me from top to bottom.

The first issue of course would be that everybody is looking at me and finding my outfit/costume choice amusing. fortunately that wore off quickly as the evening progressed. Some people tried to take my mask off, some asked me politely to see how I looked like underneath the mask. Others thought they knew me, just to discover that they have never seen me before. :)
Those that did know me, didn't actually recognise me until I showed them who I was.

Something that is never mentioned in comic books or movies is the fact when there is light shining onto the material covering the eyes, is that the wearer of the costume cannot see much.

One lady wanted to lift up my mask, and ended up giving me a kiss similar as in the first Spider-Man movie. Later in the evening, I met two ladies for photo shoots that I have met in the previous year for photo shoots.

Fortunately it was winter, so I did not get too hot in the costume, but being on the dance floor did start causing a bit of heat.

Since that costume is a high quality, it allowed for a lot of flexibility. To be able to drink or eat, I always had to lift up the mask and then lower it afterwards.

Somebody said that I have a tight butt, later some people thought it was funny to grab me from behind. Last year when I was dressed in a Batman costume, they threw the cape over my head and thought that was funny. This happened to a friend of mine as well. Some people just want to have fun at the expense of other people, instead of having fun together with other people.

Generally it was a great evenig and the costume is great, even though it cost me a great fortune to get it, since the costume wasn't cheap and customs is charging a lot. Photos of the evening should soon be available from Fokus and there are some in the gallery section of my costume rental website from the Free Comic Book Day 2005 promotion.

Matieka 2004

After waiting for the Matieka 2005 photos, I discovered a Matieka 2004 photo on Fokus. I was wearing the Batman suit in 2004, a friend of mine was Superman. This year I went as Spider-Man and my friend went as a Clonetrooper.

Matieka 2005

Matieka 2005 was a lot of fun. There were a lot more people than last year. Photos of the event can be ordered at Fokus.

More people should have worn costumes at the costume party, which would have made even more fun. I have met a lot of interesting people and had too much beer. :)

The people who dressed for the event made a good effort. I was quite surprised about getting the first price for best costume. My friend and myself also met for photo shoots with two very friendly ladies whom we have met last year at the same event.

Many people tried to take off my mask to see how I look underneath that, many failed, those who asked they were shown. That Spider-Man costume is nice for such events, except for some people with stupid comments or trying to make inappropriate jokes at other people's expense.

Teambuilding weekend in Matjiesfontein

This last weekend the entire office drove out to Matjiesfontein in the Karoo somewhere. Most things we did were quite fun, but I had a cold already before we left. It seems like most people in the office have managed to get their own copy of it. Because of this I missed three visiting hours at the hospital, and the birthday of someone where I sometimes go to play network games.

Now I am hoping that this cold will go away sooner rather than later, since that might be dangerous for some patients in the hospital, and I don't want to be sick anymore by the time the German carnival happens at the end of the month. For that costume party during the carnival I might go as Spider-Man, and sneezing or running nose is not good with a mask on.

New adult sized superhero costumes spotted

Yesterday I browsed a few of my regular sites to find stock for my costume rental business, just to see, that there a couple of new Star Wars and Superhero costumes available. Money is rare, so I can order two, or maybe three at most, and then I will get hit hard by the customs fees, so the decisions are difficult.
There are new Iron Man, Flash, Batman, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Clone Trooper and Emperor Palpatine costumes.

The german carnival Matieka in Stellenbosch is coming up end of July.
As usual, I will attend the big costume party, but haven't decided yet what to wear, it also depends on if it is raining or not.

Back to the Hospital again

My father has been sent back to the hospital due to his kidney issue. They released him too early when he was there already for five weeks.

This means the daily routine of coming home from work by train, walking home, getting into the car and driving off to the hospital. Most likely this will take a couple of weeks at least.

Of course this also means lack of sleep, not much time for anything and other issues.

Commercial filming with rented Spider-Man costume

Today is the day when a film studio located in Gardens (part of Cape Town) was supposed to film a commercial with a
Spider-Man costume which they wanted to rent from me. The whole commercial filming has been stopped yesterday because of some decision. It would have been nice to see an advert with that on South African television, but that would probably be an advert for kids or it would only have been shown on non-public channels.

Delays by the Metrolrail Court Team

This morning the train came a few minutes late as usual. At the next station was the Metrorail Court Team waiting. They were after people smoking on the train, those with third class tickets sitting in first class and those with no tickets at all.

This event was expected to happen due to the strike and the related increases a bit more than one month ago.

My father is back in hospital, which is what I expected to happen as well. He just wanted to leave there and continue his existing lifestyle, but he doesn't seem to realise, that he cannot do that anymore.

Yesterday a film studio wanted to rent a tight fitting Spider-Man costume from me, but then they decided not to make the commercial anymore. It would have been nice to see that one on television. :)

Wireless ISPs

I have been trying to get hold of Cape Town based ISPs via email, but that seems to be a hopeless case. They don't seem to be very serious abotu their business, and of course Telkom would probably limit their available bandwidth. Of course with the Telkom monopoly still happily going on, this will most likely remain like that for a while.

Hospital visits

The tranfser of my father to a South African hospital from a Namibian based hospital went smoothly. Hopefully he will get some treatment for his various conditions...

Yesterday I finally got my DVD back from a friend who borrowed it for two weeks, and I didn't even have a chance to watch it after I bought it.

A lady who is interested in masking contacted me, unfortunately she is in a different city.

I am waiting for a package with two costumes for my home based costume rental business (http://costumerental.bkernst.net/). The female range is going to be expanded with Supergirl and Wonder Woman as well as a Batman ultility belt (with pockets) which I order from Nightmare Factory (http://www.nightmarefactory.com/). Most of my other costumes I usually order from Clicket (http://www.clicket.com/) but they don't have everything.

FCBD 2005

The last Free Comic Book Day was a success. I was dressed as Spider-Man at Readers Den in Claremont, Cape Town, South Africa.
An article about the event can be found on ICV2.

Walking out in the Spider-Man suit in the morning felt very awkward with everyone watching, but as they walked into the shop, and we started handing out chips packets, that uneasy feelin went away. Later the temperature dropped quite a bit, so I got a bit chilly. Speaking with that mask on wasn't easy. That high quality costume is quite amazing.

There were some of the expected rude and stupid comments from some people. SOmebody even asked how much we were being paid to be tehre in costume, since he would most likely never even want to do like that, because his ego would not allow that.

The kids and parents got excited about seeing some characters there in person. Most kids just could not stop staring. :-)

Comic book promotion tomorrow

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day.
There were students supposed to wear Superhero costumes and handle the promotion, but they bailed out at the last minute.
Now I have to do the promotion of that shop as well, next to my own advertising.
This unrealiability because of inflated ego and lazynes is unbelievable.
I still feel a bit uneasy about wearing that tight Spider-Man costume. I have worn it before at a birthday party, but not at such a large public event. It is a bit exposing at the crotch area, and I don't want to wear cycling pants udnerneath, since there would be an ugly looking rim.
After that promotion my mother is coming from Namibia and will stay for about two weeks.

Lots of things happening

Finally I can get to Google and Blogger again! These Telkom bandwidth limitations and routing problems are annoying.

News: 7th May 2005 is Free Comic Book Day 2005. Read more about it at Readers Den Comic Shop.
There will be several costumed characters. So far three are confirmed and one is a maybe. All the costumes come from BKE Costume Rental (which I own). The confirmed characters are: Batman, Superman, Spider-Man (I will be wearing that costume) and possibly a Clone Trooper.

One week after that will be the Star Wars Episode 3 promotion in Monte Casino. Get more details from: www.episode3sa.co.za

Dawn of War Easter weekend coming up :-)

This easter weekend, there will be a LAN session in Kuilsrivier, hopefully we will be more than five people this time around, some people just don't show up.
Sicne my Batman costume got stolen, I got to get a new one for my home business, some other costumes are being repaired and I have placed an order for a Darth Maul and Darth Vader mask from Clicket. There were three enquiries for easter bunny costumes.

30th birthday party

The 30th birthday party last night (12 February 2005) at Jade's place in Richwood (Cape Town area) was very nice. A lot of people didn't show up and it was a fancy dress party with a movie theme. It was a lot better and more fun than the party at Robbie's place in Lakeside a few weeks ago.

Photo shoot results and 30th birthday

The photo shoot didn't turn out too well, since the lighting wasn't right. Everything will have to be re-done.

The 30th birthday party was quite interesting with all the drunk people at the braai. There were supposed to be 29 people coming, but a lot less turned up.

Photo shoot and advertising campaign

Yesterday we did a photo shoot of various new costumes for displaying on my small costume rental website.
The costumes included two Spiderman costumes, Clone Trooper, Jango Fett and a Jedi Knight.
Now I just need somebody for posing in the various female costumes to get decent photos for the website. Maybe a student might want to earn extra cash...

Now I am working on a business card, getting a sign ready for advertising at a hairdresser near my home and possibly newspapers.
Newspapers seem to be quite expensive for advertising and the Yellow Pages also seem expensive and accroding to my experience it is difficult to get the details of the ad changed properly once the ad does exist.

New year and its issues

2005 has started, work has started and various issues are already happening: stuff ordered arrived a lot earlier than expected, the car of a friend of mine got hijacked, his wife (as I recently discovered) spent the night in jail and other exiting things...