So everyone wants to know what's happening now...

The ISP I work for in the UK is now re-adveritising my job in the UK and Europe, and they will then make a new application for my work permit to the UK home office.

It goes something like..

• we put the ad in (tomorrow)
  

• we wait 30 days

• make the application

• get an answer in 7-10 days.

so that takes us to about the 10th May when we should know for sure.

So we figured we'll try get me to go work out of the Paris office for the time being. Booked a plane ticket for this Wednesday, booked a hotel, got travel insurance sorted on short notice, got hold of my bank statements (Barclays International private banking rocks!) and off I went to the French embassy on Friday morning. Only to get my application denied because I'm going to work in France. So we need to get special permission if I want to "go over on business". Not sure why the embassy web sites (both SA and UK) don't mention this at all? Anyway, so I had to pay a R759 to cancel my flight ticket, and I must now try and see if it's possible to cancel my travel insurance, which was about R2000 (for a year though).

Since I'm staying in South Africa for another ~2 months or so, I decided to look for other connectivity options, since I'm slowly but surely getting bored of, and running out of House episodes to watch in the evenings (my friends here do not go out in the week it seems).

Vodacom 3G is driving me insane - then it works, then it don't, and the R2/meg out of bundle option is bloody expensive! I'm not really paying for it, but if I am going to get slapped with a bill, it's going to be nasty. I also tried a MTN prepaid sim, but MTN's data services is even worse! (It used to rock about a year ago when I used it on our own APN and VPN setup, but I suppose that's why it rocked).

I've decided (actually after reading a blog article by Johann about Amobia Communications, a Wireless Network Operator) to get a wireless link installed to my parents place for the time being. It's R2,500 for the kit and installation, and then about R300 a month for a "Broadband 512" service with 2Gb cap. Additional 1GB cap at R115, which is OK. I hope that I can just cancel my consumer account when I go back, and when my brother come to Cape Town for holidays we can then just buy an account for that month. If it works out well I might actually just keep it going for my parents to use. Will be cool to do the skype with video thing from time to time. Something not possible on dial-up!

Anyway, so I applied online this morning, submitted my details for the site survey. Not even 30 minutes later, I had a phone call from the friendly sales lady at Amobia, confirming that they had received my request and will be in touch to organise the site visit on Wednesday. I'm holding thumbs that it will be quick and painless! Will keep you updated with the progress on this :-)

So atleast I know now

The UK home office made their decision about my work permit application on Thursday. I thought, being the UK and all, we'd know by Friday, but they refused to tell us what the verdict was over the phone. Got to wait for the letter in the post.

So I had to wait the whole weekend. Atleast I managed to watch 14 episodes of House season 1..

I found out yesterday morning that the appeal to my first rejection got rejected as well. So that pretty much means that I'm not going back to London any time soon. I should have gotten a copy of my lease agreement earlier, because I only found out yesterday that I need to give a two months notice on my flat. When I found out about my work permit got rejected the first time, I was advised to just keep it until we find out what's happening with the appeal. Yay for paying 4 months rent and not being there. I told you guys I only planned on coming back to SA for 2 weeks. (Oh, just the rent equates to ~R65,000).

I'm so pissed off.

Old school

I went to help David upgrade mopani last night. It's one of the two SchoolMail servers, handling (amongst things) UUCP based e-mail for a few thousand schools here in South Africa. I actually wonder how many UUCP hubs there's left in todays Internet world.

The upgrade from FreeBSD 4.9 to FreeBSD 6.2 went quite smooth (OK, we cheated -- did a reinstall, opposed to a build world). We also managed to add another two disks. So future upgrades should be even easier now! Raid 1 mirror for the OS, and Raid 5 set for the data.

We hope to do the same upgrade on ochre this weekend, then both systems will be the same configuration. And finally documented, something we've got away with not doing for the last 8 or so years. I wonder why I like documentation so much these days? I must be getting old, keep on forgetting stuff.. or something.

Bleh

I have been feeling a bit down the last few days. I'm not even keen to go for a beer. And we all know how much I (now) like my beer!

Tomorrow is my grandmothers' funeral. She passed away on Friday, after fighting a loosing battle against an aggressive cancer, which she was only diagnosed with about a month ago. Pretty much all went down hill after the first time I saw her since I've been down. Atleast it went all fairly quickly, and I have been here for my mother. Strange how things work out... Tomorow is not going to be a nice day, but I'll have to try cheer everyone up - probably the last time in a long time that we'll all be together as a family. Johan flew down from Johannesburg this afternoon, and we went for a drink earlier. Parentals is out at Kirstenbosch, at the Cliff Richard concert.

My cat is still angry at me for some reason, she just wants to fight with me all the time. She changes her mind quickly when I eat biltong, though...

I knew using IMAP was bandwidth intensive...

but it never really bothered me much, because I never had to pay for my bandwidth usage before. It's just one of those perks when you're working for an ISP, I suppose. When you do however start to pay-per-meg, it tends to get nasty.

Here's my traffic usage totals for the month of February so far:

Direct totals: 5893.684MB in, 301.978MB out

Incoming traffic by type

imap	3292.429MB
http	1574.504MB
ssh	624.422MB
unknown	383.195MB
https	15.258MB
ftp-data	3.054MB
smtps	0.793MB
ftp	0.028MB
dns	0.002MB
smtp	0.001MB

Outgoing traffic by type

imap	128.083MB
http	70.235MB
unknown	48.78MB
ssh	46.041MB
smtps	5.898MB
https	2.822MB
ftp-data	0.089MB
ftp	0.028MB
smtp	0.001MB
dns	0.001MB

I suspect that this usage so far equates to roughly £60. Ouch!

27 dinner

I decided on the last minute to go join Neil, Aubrey, Alan and Johann at the 27 dinner dinner last night, since there was bound to be some people that would not pitch. And some did not - *eyes* Guy.

Really enjoyed the evening, even though I only really met 3 new people - Jonathan, Ian and Tania. Was a bit dissapointed with my cold tomato and basil soup (not sure anyone can compete, after having the Gin and tomato soup at Hassar in Rondebosch..), but the main course meal (something porky) was quite good.

Was quite entertaining listening to some of the guest speakers, I'm not going to go into detail - go read Johann's blog.

Stayed chatting till around 00:30 and then I went to drop off Neil.

Tonight is the Hivemind moot at Bananajam - should be another good fun filled night out!

A month in Slaapstad

What was suppose to be only two weeks in Cape Town, has now turned out to more than five weeks (and counting) so far. A special thanks to my lawyers (who will remain nameless for now) for doing such a great job, not letting me know that it got rejected almost a month ago, and not even appealing to the rejection of my work permit. Needless to say, they are now fired!

Ooh. And this makes my day too ;-)

temptation:~ bje$ ping -c 10 tsogang.networkgods.net
PING tsogang.networkgods.net (213.253.1.15): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 213.253.1.15: icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=2978.091 ms
64 bytes from 213.253.1.15: icmp_seq=4 ttl=46 time=3996.757 ms
64 bytes from 213.253.1.15: icmp_seq=7 ttl=46 time=1859.436 ms
64 bytes from 213.253.1.15: icmp_seq=8 ttl=46 time=1237.878 ms
64 bytes from 213.253.1.15: icmp_seq=9 ttl=46 time=773.913 ms

--- tsogang.networkgods.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 50% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 773.913/2169.215/3996.757/1175.109 ms