Tania.co.za

Geek Dinner

I have been in a really foul mood since yesterday. I tried Muse, and dancing, and other things, but it just got worse until eventually I almost wished I could beat someone up.

Going to the Geek Dinner tonight really helped. Thank-you, Marius, Graham, AJ, Jerith, Kerry-Anne, Arno, Christel, Wessel and Jonathan. And the staff at Adesso in Rondebosch were decent and efficient, and the boss was eager to please. Marius was impressed with the wine, which was supplied by Perdeberg. And super-impressed with Arno's trackball mouse. (When Marius used the word 'sensual', Arno started getting worried.)

Another thing that helped was hearing how Arno had a computer go down at half past five this afternoon, and how he then slipped on a dislodged floortile and in putting his hands out to break the fall, switched off four important Solaris production servers, which don't reboot easily. Suddenly the problems I had with Jonathan's computer this afternoon seemed less awful.

More about all this later when I have pictures. (They must have wondered why I was photographing the ground rather than the people; it was because the paving was from Pavatile, and the manufacturer was in our midst.)

16 Days of Activism

A year ago -- or was it two years? -- during that period known as 16 Days of Activism Against Woman Abuse (or whatever they call it exactly) I was on the run to another town with an abused woman whose dik-getikte husband wanted to kill her with a rapier. I am still angry about the lack of help we initially got from the local police, the inability of POWA to provide us with any useful advice, and the huge effort it took to to eventually get her into a safehouse. I am still cheesed off that she eventually phoned her husband to come to the safehouse to collect her. I don't know what I would have done differently under the same circumstances. All I know is that I would rather have 16 Days of Training for Police in Dealing with Abuse and a law like I have heard they have in America, where the police are obliged to investigate an abuse charge even if it is withdrawn. I see no purpose in wearing a ribbon with a pin to mark this time, or in encouraging my friends to join some Facebook group to show that they oppose the abuse of women. I can't see how it could help or change anything. Has any abuser ever seen his mate join such a cause and say, "Oh wow, Joe Bloggs is such an exemplary citizen that it makes me want to stop thumping my girlfriend"? I admire the character of Sarah Connor in Terminator II, and I would rather see ten women like her blasting their way out of captivity to save the world than seeing a thousand people sign a declaration saying that they oppose abuse while the abuse statistics remain unchanged by their sentiment.

Inspired

"It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life..."

Shortly before the rand looked at the dollar and jumped off a cliff, I got a good deal on Muse's Hullabaloo Soundtrack and Origin of Symmetry from Amazon.com. I had owned the Symmetry album before, but unfortunately in the winter of 2007 I lent it along with a Leopold Hoffman CD to an elegant gentleman with whom I later formally cut off communications when, after numerous requests from me via various media, he failed to constrain himself from using flirtatious language.

Back in the Cape after two weeks in Gauteng, I listened to Symmetry yesterday non-stop and loudly wherever I drove and felt full of joie de vivre, a mood reinforced by a successful meeting with Scrum expert Peter Hundermark and one after that with an agency which I approached to service students from Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya and other African countries who travel to South Africa to attend our Project Management courses.

Scrum courses from 2009

The outcome of the meeting with Peter Hundermark was, inter alia, that Scrum training (and even Scum master training), delivered by Peter and his accredited facilitators, will be available as a course option via ProjectManagement.co.za from 2009. Scrum is an Agile Project Management methodology that is becoming increasingly popular in the realm of software development. It is radically different from traditional "waterfall" approaches and is well suited to situations where customers find it difficult to define what they require, and where they need to see some kind of working version early along in the project.

My mood was dented slightly when Martin Butler, the presenter of our university-accredited Programme in IT Project Management, stood me up for a meeting. This morning, upon scrutinising the recipients of the memo in my electronic diary entry, I realised that I probably did not actually inform him of the date, although I diligently informed all my colleagues! We've now arranged to see each other on Thursday.

ProjectManagement.co.za's course for Wits

The first of my two recent weeks in Johannesburg was spent training administrative, academic and research staff at the University of the Witwatersrand. It's the third time I have presented this course at the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Development (CLTD), and doing it several times makes it possible for me to hone the content finely to the needs of the typical participants.

And it has paid off. We've always had good feedback from Wits, but ProjectManagement.co.za got fantastic feedback from the November course. All the participants stated on their post-course questionnaires that the training exceeded their expectations. One of them, a strategist involved in an AIDS education-through-drama programme which trains students from all over the SADEC region, actually flew from Durban to Johannesburg to attend the training because of what he said was an "immense improvement in the work performance" of his two colleagues, Jill and Amira, after they attended the previous course I taught at Wits. Another participant. Esther Price (a lecturer in Psychology) was able to leave the course with a pretty good initial project plan which she could put on the table in a meeting the following Tuesday for a conference which she has been tasked with planning for 2009. The plan for an additional Wits language unit also got a decent kick-start during the step-by-step project scoping session.

America's new president

Barack Obama was elected president of the USA during my time at Wits, and a colourful diversity of perspectives emerged in the conversation during around the urn and coffee mugs early the next morning. The participants hailed from a variety of countries and continents either through birth or through ancestry. Said one dark-skinned participant, "You can say that Barack Obama is America's first Black president, but being Black is not about your appearance, but about your culture. He was raised by his White grandmother, so he is actually White," to which the equally dark-skinned Esther Price replied, "Well, I was raised by my White [presumably adoptive] grandfather, and I am certainly Black."

Then the darkest man of all, an engineer from the DRC, spoke up. "I am not glad he won," he said "I would have preferred McCain."
With Wits being a well-known liberal university, and this man being black no matter whether you based it on genetics or enculturation, the rest of the participants thought he was joking. When he saw that they were smiling in appreciation, he explained himself: "No, I mean it. I am conservative. Next they may just ban Creationism in schools." Now much as I would have thrown in my lot with the Obama supporters, I had to admire this man's boldness and convictions and appreciated him all the more for it.

And I came to the conclusion that the local equivalent of Barack Obama being democratically elected by Americans would be if a White man were raised by a Black adoptive grandmother and became the democratically elected president of South Africa.

ProjectManagement.co.za's course for Krones

On my second trip to Johannesburg I was accompanied by MC Botha, who presented the Cost and Time Management component of our course to a group of engineers, project leaders and other staff from Krones who came from all over Africa for training at the company's Johannesburg office. We used several real projects, such as the modification of existing bottling lines to comply with the new warning label legislation, and the overhaul of a series of 30 production lines in 6 plants throughout South Africa, as vehicles for studying the various Project Management tools. I have done this exercise with groups on in-house courses before, but the Krones group who handled the project about the installation of a filler and flash-pasteuriser prompted me to award a special prize. I have never seen such a professional presentation produced by any group in such a short period of time using Project Management skills which they learned during only a few days.

Working with MC was pure joy. He is not only bright, but also extremely likeable, and I think it stems from his love and respect for people. He is easy-going and has a sense of humour which everyone can relate to, and that is something extremely rare. I am not naturally good at maths, so I appreciate it when people don't go through calculations at a level suited to experienced physicists. MC's explanation of Earned Value was the best I have ever heard. I also loved the way he explained the Critical Path Method by starting with the Gantt chart and then shifting tasks according to their float, which is not the way that most people would have done it, but I think it brings home the value of the method so much more clearly. After that, the forward pass and backward pass made sense to everyone.

Back in the office, we have had a surge in enquiries from all over Africa, and I am knee-deep in developing proposals for in-house courses and public seminars.

And still blasting Muse to the world from my car, with my windows down.

Impasse

Thus says the Lord GOD: I swear I am coming against these shepherds. I will claim my sheep from them and put a stop to their shepherding my sheep so that they may no longer pasture themselves. I will save my sheep, that they may no longer be food for their mouths. For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will look after and tend my sheep. As a shepherd tends his flock when he finds himself among his scattered sheep, so will I tend my sheep. I will rescue them from every place where they were scattered when it was cloudy and dark.

Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse... Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

How different my life could have been if all these years I hadn't let it matter so much that I am an unrepentant sinner, if I had simply acted upon my obstinate and irrational convictions for the good of others, in spite of the fact that sooner or later I would have been accused of hypocrisy, selfishness and evil by almost every system of faith and probably by nearly all who know me. Too often those who have a conscience are paralysed by it, leaving those who have none, to act.

How different it could have been if I had not been so bound by the real and imagined need of my gender, to be led; if I had reasoned instead like Deborah or Jael, found a cause, led a battle or done a deed that resulted in a great salvation. How different things might have been now if I had brazenly revealed the secrets of my faithless, unfaithful and faithful heart.

Yet in doing so I would have risked not only my own life, but also the lives of others, prior to the establishment of a platform for righteousness.

And so I continue to make only the most ordinary sacrifices whilst waiting for someday.