Arcade cabinet gets an overhaul

Around 2007, Ilda spotted an busted up arcade cabinet which had been dumped outside our building in Cape Town. I got very excited, ran downstairs in my pajamas and hauled it into our garage, fixed it up as best I could and turned it into a MAME arcade.
In our new place, the machine sits in [...]

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Ilda arrives soon

Ilda will be arriving soon again, this time with Luisa for a visit. Have got my holiday time all ready and booked, just trying to get all my work out of the way so I can enjoy it properly.

: : : : : : : : [...]

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Thanks Steven, Noam

An old friend from UCT, Steven, arrived with his wife Sarah for the weekend from San Francisco. Now Steven works at the Commonwealth Club, where Noam Chomsky was recently an invited speaker. So as a late birthday present, Steven got me two autographed copies of his books.

It’s always nice to see people from a previous [...]

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Rabbit hutch progress

It is going slowly. The base has been done for a while.
Now I am working on the top part. I have the long walls (which are a frame with wire mesh) – still need to put them together with the short walls, the hinged tops, and somehow figure out a partition.
: : [...]

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Squirrel feeder Redux

So I posted how I had put up a little feeder for squirrels on one of my trees. Well, some chubby American squirrel put his fat ass in the box and it collapsed (maybe the feeder was working too well). So I decided to build a sturdier one.
About 20 minutes after I got it finished [...]

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Squirrel feeder FTW

Since I saw the trees in our back yard, I’ve been wanting to put a squirrel feeder in there. A couple of days ago I found an old wooden chocolate box, attached it to the tree with some long screws, and filled it with some bird seed. Success!
This little guy was munching for about 15 [...]

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Rabbit hutch v2.0

Been working on the new rabbit hutch for the bunnies. Here is the previous one:

This time I am making several improvements – first off, it is bigger (2.25 meters long, as opposed to about 1.6 last time) – so that means power tools (last time I built the whole thing with hand tools, which was [...]

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Exchange 2010 has left the building

With these simple words, Paul, our release manager, released Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to manufacturing.
It was quite a day. In fact as late as 9 pm yesterday (the day before RTM), I was in the office digging though some code looking at what were hoped were some false positive warnings on a security tool we [...]

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Welcome to Bellevue

Wow, it has been a crazy couple of weeks. We are finally at a state where the house is just needing a couple of tweaks.

We have done a ton of DIY work. We painted two rooms (the study went from dark green to yellow – that took four coats of paint!), replaced locks, replaced lighting [...]

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We bought a house

We had planned to move quickly on buying a house when Ilda arrived, but we ended up doing things a little faster than we thought. Ilda arrived on a Wednesday, and by the end of the following Monday, we had looked at 22 places (and countless other ones online). Lucky for us our agent Shelley [...]

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