Hoke’s Ramblings

Another web-widget I wasted an afternoon hacking together:

I’m a Google Earth addict, and wanted to do something ‘useful’ with it – here’s my attempt:

You can now run a traceroute (tracert in Windows) and upload the ‘report’ to this site, and it’ll spew a KML file at you with all the hops, with vague descriptions, and a path linking them (at least the ones with resolved locations!)

You can find this nifty little tool here.

There’s a comment address there, but feel free to leave (spam-free) comments in this post, too.

For the technically inclined, I’m resolving the IP addresses using MaxMind‘s free GeoLiteCity database.

Having recently been blessed with the wonders of ‘broadband’, I started browsing arround Google Video. Then is struck me it’s a great place to get exposure for my LOTR/Matrix spooflet, so I uploaded it. Probably violated all sorts of copyrights and what-not, but it’s all in the name of fun, eh? You can check it here.

It seems Telkom has a lot to live up to. I have just received a letter from Workman’s Compensation regarding an accident in January 2002.

(And speaking of Telkom, I’m told I should expect to hear my ‘next’ installation date within 48 hours.)

And on the two hundred and ninety-sixth day of anticipation, the Beast hath decreed thou shalt be visited upon by a white chariot with a silver stair to reach the heavens, and thou shalt be joined with the rest of the world. But the Beast hath, in accordance with inactivity of the previous two hundred and ninety-six days not visited upon the promised land.

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, freeman and slave, to call a number, so that no-one could get connected unless he used the mark, which is the name of the Beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom, if anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a den of persons and it’s number is 0800 456 786 option 1.

There’s a new Hockaday in the house! His name’s Connor (recently dubbed McLOUD) and is a Boerboel X Surprise from the SPCA. It was actually heartbreaking walking around the kennels and seeing all the abandoned animals, but Lina and I are happy we could give at least one a good home.

It’s all very sudden, though. We were supposed to only get him on Thursday, after he’d been sent to the vet etc, but when we went to pay on Tuesday, they told us he’d already been sorted out, because two of his siblings were being sent to the vet anyway. So wham! All of a sudden we have another puppy!

The little guy has so much energy it’s ridiculous, and you have to be very careful now where you put your feet. I fear many sleepless nights lie ahead of us, but it’s well worth it

Pictures here

So, a guy comes around to my place today to install ADSL, right? I almost think to myself, “hooray!”, but don’t, because as forseen by myself in a vision, all is not well on Telkom’s end of the line.

The dude tells me he’s a Teljoy contractor and Telkom haven’t done their part of the work. He also tells me that they aren’t allowed into the exchanges, otherwise he could’ve fixed it himself.

The other interesting thing is Telkom policy prohibits phone wires from going through roofs/ceilings, but apparently feeding the cable through trees is ok. ??

More one day…

Based on this coincidental combination of random pictures, reading material and movie reviews, one might actually think I was rather obsessed with the matter…

For those with Google Earth, you can check out my confluence track here. The most treacherous parts are coloured purple. This track doesn’t quite do the slopes justice because of the downsampling, but it should give you some idea of how nasty it was.

The route we took was anti-clockwise. If we’d gone the other way we could’ve cut out all the mountain driving, but hey, who knew? ‘Sides, it wouldn’t have been any fun then

For several reasons, I’ve chosen to move away from my current blogging engine ‘Simple PHP Blog‘ and move to the more ‘professional’ well supported and actively developed engine ‘ WordPress‘

The new site is available at www.hokemon.com/wordpress. Please update bookmarks and more importantly, RSS feeds, if you use them.

To some of my more regular readers, the new site will undoubtedly look somewhat more tasteful, but rest assured this is only a temporary measure until I can get my hands dirty with WordPress theming.

The other drawback is that invaluable, meaningful comments such as these and these will be lost. To that end, I’m keeping this current blog online for the time being for posterity.

Also, most of the older links and images are probably broken. If you find any, please feel free to let me know.