Tania.co.za

Boodskappe wat lesers vir my stuur

Die meeste van die boodskappe wat ek deur my Webwerf kry is maar dieselfde soort gemorspos as wat 'n mens ook per e-pos ontvang, die soort ding wat jou probeer aanspoor om medisyne wat jy nie benodig nie deur die Internet te koop, of om liggaamsdele wat jy in elk geval nie besit nie, te laat vergroot. Maar af en toe vra iemand vir my vir Bok van Blerk se e-posadres (ek het dit nie, hoor; besoek sy Webwerf), of soms kry ek 'n noodkreet van iemand wat aan kliniese depressie ly, en ek probeer dan help waar ek kan. Maar hier is een wat 'n bietjie meer out of the ordinary is; ek het dit gister ontvang, waarskynlik in reaksie op die foto wat op my tuisblad verskyn:

Name
mary

E-mail
mary@gwisa.com

Telephone
0827654329

Message
Kry n nose job!

Repentance in discipline

I promised that I would provide answers to some of the questions, so here's the first: Yes, I have stuck to my resolve regarding my sugar intake.

Tea with only one spoon of sugar, at l'Olive in Stellenbosch. The birthday card was made by Colette, who is in prison.

The next thing I intend to get right is my discipline regarding study. Not only have I have not paid due attention to the importance of reinforcing new knowledge in order to maintain a healthy learning curve, but I have also slacked down a lot in learning new things. In some ways I am beginning to behave like an old DBA who works for years on the same mainframe, becoming an unemployable Fachidiot when removed from her niche. Not that I can be described as either a Fachidiot or unemployable (or a DBA, for that matter, in spite of being an IBM CSE on DB2 UDB); but I have become similarly mentally lazy, often occupying my intellect with the same kind of stuff that probably goes through the head of a Barbie doll. I always rather enjoyed pretending to be ditzy; I never really wanted to be ditzy, though. I was shown up very badly last night when I discovered that I had forgotten how to count in hexadecimal. That wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't also forgotten that the hexa- prefix means six, which was probably the most embarrassing thing that happened to me since February, all the more so because I regarded myself as being not too bad when it comes to Greek and Latin roots. This morning in the car I realised that I had also forgotten the names of most of the groups in the Periodic Table. I am feeling increasingly "out" when it comes to mobile and wireless technology, winging it on old knowledge and degenerating into a jack of all trades rather than continuing to maintain a good level of polymathy. So, this weekend, the books are going home with me, and I am going to work out a study régime so that by the time that I lecture at Sun City in September I will have made significant strides in the renewal of my intellect.

Flood

I dragged a number of friends to the Geek Dinner last night. The first news we had of the flooding came from one of them. He's the multimedia editor of a major news publisher and he had to leave to deal urgently with video footage which had just come in. There was a lot of potential for aquaplaning by the time we hit the road, and I vaguely remember reading an SMS sometime in the night in which he said that 2,000 people in the Peninsula were without a roof over their heads. By the time that I put on the radio this morning the number had risen to an estimated 10,000 or more, and Cape Talk was calling for donations of blankets, clothes and canned food. (See? I have upped my tolerance for Aden Thomas' scratchy voice.) I went and dropped off two bags of winter clothes at my local Pick 'n Pay (they didn't know yet that they were a collection point) before coming to work.

I have publication deadline for this afternoon. I will write more if I have time before I leave the office today.

Oh and another thing...

I think I may have an explanation for my Compulsive Otherwiseness Disorder. (As soon as something becomes mainstream, I don't want to be part of it anymore.) I reckon I have traced the reason for this to something that happened to me just after I left school. It wasn't entirely their fault, but I just couldn't forgive them or easily get over it.

Details to follow.

Your agony aunt is experiencing a Schedule Variance

Just trying to mix some metaphors from the realms of popular journalism and Project Management to see if I can create a new hybridised pseudodiscipline to rival the likes of "technomadic marketing", "spiritual intelligence" and... Now what was it I wanted to say? Oh ja, I remember. This is not going to be very coherent, I can see. I completely forgot that I had a meeting this morning with a really, really important potential new customer. The most important wine company in South Africa, to be precise. Rescheduled, had the meeting, and went home for lunch on my way back to the office. I never do that, I usually eat at my desk and don't take breaks, so this was a lot of fun in spite of the guilt. Two of my neighbours joined me. We didn't have water in our side of the building this morning, though, so we were all dirty, and I cooked the rice using milk, ice cubes and Appletiser. (Don't try that, though, unless you have dhania to mask the smell of the Appletiser.) One of my neighbours didn't have any other liquid at home to drink until then (except for a bottle of Captain Morgan which he had borrowed). So they were both grateful for the coffee which I made from the liquid which eventually emerged from the tap.

OK, I am hopelessly side-tracked now. I need to answer certain questions which various readers of this blog have been asking me. (Why do people read this when I write so much twaddle, I wonder?) The questions include: How does one lose 10 kg in a month? Did you really cut back on your sugar intake or did you just plan to do so? And: If flirting isn't a good way of solving loneliness, then what are people supposed to do instead?

Bear with me, I will answer those questions (because I know everything about everything except for Particle Accelerators, Aussie Rules Football and Dravidian Astrology) once I have resolved my present Schedule Variance...

Oh, I know. I should have put a hyperlink to ProjectManagement.co.za on the term "Project Management", because blogging is a way of making money and of optimising your search engine rankings and bla bla bla bla. I don't want to care too much about that right now. All of this blog marketing stuff just eventually leads to sponsored opinions. And in the end, blogs won't be read anymore, because people won't know who's being real, and who's not. But I wrote about that a long time ago anyway, so let me not repeat myself or I may become just another crusader myself.

Happy

On Friday night, a friend of a friend had a birthday party, and I was among the sundry invitees who extended the invitation to a number of their own friends. I also figured out that most of the regulars who had not been not notified would probably end up at the same place sooner or later anyway, and I was right.

A few days ago, I wrote that three of my friends were in the early stages of courtship. I am now unimaginably delighted to report that on Friday night one of them was at last kissed by the Princess of the Hebridean Fairies, thus turning him into a Happy Prince, freeing him of all manner of lethargy, instantly transforming him into a diligent and determined student, endowing him with a permanent smile and fortunately for me, also increasing his prowess at chess. (He beat me twice last night. Not that that's anything new, it's just that it's becoming easier for him. So I am now exposed to improved tutelage, at no cost.)

Unfortunately, Friday night did not yield the same success to all the others in their amorous endeavours. The Vesuvian landowner remains overcome by the lava of life; the Angel is still battling the devil of distraction, and it appears that I too may have been a romantic disappointment to a friend that night (and I am not referring to the anonymous opportunist who entered the dancefloor to ask for a kiss, got "no" for an answer, and then declared that there was no point in dancing).

But I will let time pass a little before I write that story, out of respect for the gentleness of the soul.

Gesprek

"Hoeveel keer het ek jou al in die openbaar ge-embarrass?"
"Jy het my nog nooit erg ge-embarrass nie. Jy's net soms bietjie weird."
"Neeeee! Ek wil nie hê jy moet dink ek is weird nie! Ander mense mag maar so dink as hulle wil."

Later weer, per SMS:

"I don't want you to think I am weird just because I express my normality differently from other people :-(" (Paradoks van die maand — ek het kopiereg hierop, hoor. Fix maar die grammatika as daar iets skort daarmee.)
"No, i think ur weird because u are. Its not an insult... :-)"
"But..."

Et cetera, et trivia magna, ad nauseam, ad infinitum, as it usually is with insecure people until they actually get the hug they didn't realise they wanted.

Dating blues

A number of my friends are currently in the early stages of courtship. One of them had finally had the relevant date last night, and usually I would have heard something about it via SMS afterwards. So this morning, having heard nothing (and hoping that they'd spent such a long time together that telling "little sis" about it wasn't even on his mind), I sent a status request. The reply: "In my previous life I must have designed the Titanic." And then, a couple of minutes later: "...Or owned a villa in Pompeii."

Om te flirt is nie...

...die oplossing vir eensaamheid nie. Daar is ander dinge wat werk. Ek sal later 'n langer artikel hieroor skryf. Ek noem dit net solank as 'n tydelike maatstaf in diens van die gemeenskap om dalk 'n paar armsalige siele wat bereid is om my raad sonder verdere stawing te aanvaar, onnodige lyding te spaar.

My name is Tania and I am... not an addict

The nature of my addiction

Those who know me well enough to have been to a coffee shop with me, or who have had supper at my home, have sooner or later had a variation on this conversation:
"How many spoons of sugar did you just put into that mug of tea?"
"I don't know for sure. I think it was five heaped ones. I do it by feel, I can't get it quite right if I count."

One recent night at Mystic, I ordered a pot of tea. It was one of those small standard catering teapots from Continental China. You get about two and a quarter cups of tea out of one of those. When I finished that, I ordered another pot of tea. At the end of the meal (we had pizza), I counted eleven empty tubular sachets of sugar.

That kind of sugar consumption was normal for me. And of course there was tea at home and at work too, and sometimes a mug of tea before going to bed. Occasionally, I cook up a pot of chocolate sauce and eat a cup full of it, or eat an entire slab of Cadbury's Mint chocalate just before putting off the light. (Invariably, I'd wake up with a big hangover, which nothing but three Paracetamol tablets could cure.)

Even since before we went into business nearly 10 years ago, my partner has been expressing concern about my sugar intake, and every year or so I have had my blood sugar checked, mostly to be able to say to him, "See? It's normal. I am fine."

But of course, I am not really fine. In addition to these sugar hangovers, the diuretic effect of the tea means that I visit the toilet very often. Over the years, I have heard various medical experts say that of all the legal subtances you can abuse, sugar is greatest accelerator of ageing (notwithstanding the fact that smoking is far more likely to actually kill you). I have often been told that I don't look my age, and when I have asked, "How old do I look, then?" the estimates have usually been in the range of ten to fifteen years younger than what I really am. So, just think: if it weren't for all the sugar, I probably would have had to show my ID in order to get into a bar!

The nature of my repentance

To be fair, I must give a bit of background to why I was able to take my recent decision.

Some time in the early 1990s, I became a disciple of Jesus. (I use this expression to distinguish it from the usual understanding of what it means to become a born-again Christian.) I repented of every sin I could think of at the time, and was baptised in a swimming pool. Subsequently, I discovered more sins, and continued to repent. After many years, I left the church, not in order to sin, but because the church had become corrupt, and in order to stay there, I would not only have been forced to commit many serious sins, but I would also have become insane. This is no exaggeration.

In chosing to leave, I nevertheless had to follow a very difficult path. I got lost, and became weak and faithless and somewhat cynical, but I never gave up hope, and although in fairness I cannot be called a disciple anymore, I never fell into the trap of thinking, "Oh what the hell, I have done this already and I am doomed anyway, so I might as well do that as well". If I sinned, it was not with that excuse.

Influence 1: What the Bleep Do We Know?

My understanding of the mechanism of repentance was limited in the years when I was in the church. Much as I would want to deny it (because I didn't enjoy the film), What the Bleep Do We Know? did have something to do with a recent change in my way of thinking. I saw the film with Mikhailo some time in 2005. One of the medical experts interviewed gave an explanation of how people's brains can become accustomed, or "addicted", to certain thought patterns (although he might have used another term), and that if they only knew that it is possible, they could choose to think differently, forming other patterns, with a noticeable impact on their lives. I know that I am not explaining this very well; you are probably thinking, "Ja, ja, the power of positive thinking and all that jazz, so what's so new about that?"  What was new for me was the apparent physiological rationality of the explanation. Much of the film was hype and hoo-ha to me, and I wouldn't really know which of it was theoretical science, which was empirical science and which was pseudoscience. But a few ideas eventually sunk in over the following months.

Influence 2: The psychologist

The second influence came from two visits to a psychologist at the end of last year. I wrote down a lot of stuff and read it to her. She mostly just listened and didn't say much, and I was disappointed that after paying her so much money, she didn't at least tell me that I was quite mad and in serious need of intensive lifelong medication. She simply indicated that, like most Afrikaans women, I have an over-active guilt gland, and that the kinds if things I was doing to unwind were no cause for concern over my mental health.

From then on, I began to emerge from my "analysis paralysis" (an embarassingly apt expression I subsequently learned from one of my cousins); I stopped fearing my thoughts and feelings, had fun with my friends, and in spite of continuing work strains, general uncertainties and a persistent tendency to feel insecure in relationships, I was mostly very happy and exceedingly chuffed about being one of the most privileged people in the entire world.

Influence 3: How to give up smoking

I don't smoke. I never have, and I can't imagine that I ever will. But, perhaps because of my concern for several close friends who do smoke, I found myself listening attentively to an interview on Cape Talk one night (yes, I confess, I am tuning in to 567 again). The interviewee was a man who had been a smoker for several decades, and who has subsequently written a book on how to give up smoking. I think his surname was Carr. He was in South Africa to present a series of short seminars which apparently had an extremely good success rate at getting people to give up smoking permanently. The interviewer asked him how it worked, and he explained that it was simply a presentation of four or six hours (including smoke breaks!) during which the excuses which people typically use to keep smoking whilst professing a desire to give it up, are disarmed through intensive reasoning. He gave some examples of the kind of arguments he used, and he explained, inter alia, how people could deal with withdrawal cravings by reasoning through what these cravings represented. Some people phoned in and said that this simply sounded like your typical religious indoctrination service complete with an altar call; in effect, they accused him of using a type of mass hypnosis incapable of producing a lasting result. Other callers, who had either read the book or attended the programme long ago, explained why they were able to stay away from cigarettes permanently afterwards. The key here is, they were able to explain it. Logically. Rationally. These were not simply anecdotal endorsements. They made sense.

I realised that the manner of reasoning used in this method could be applied not only to smoking, but to so many other things which we allow to control us. The lesson of the film had begun to fall into place and had become practical and specific.

The turning point: Taking my own advice

One night I went out with a friend who was feeling depressed. He was feeling debilitated by what he initially thought was part of the psychological condition for which he was undergoing treatment, but what he had now begun to suspect was actually a character flaw. The thought that his inability to pull himself out of unproductivity was somehow a permanent part of his nature, and that he was doomed to a life of misery. He felt powerless against the temptation of debauchery, and this made him feel very gloomy.

I did not share his perspective, but I realised that it would not be easy to tell him mine. Having suffered from clinical depression myself, I knew that the disease can be very debilitating, but I was far more convinced than he was that depression played only a minor role in his behaviour. The real reason, I reckoned, was sin. Sin is a "religious" word, though. When you call something sin, many people immediately fall into ways of thinking about it that don't really help them to change. Either they don't want to listen to you anymore, because they think that your use of such a word means you are trying to convert them to join your religious clique, or they apply some complicated thinking about sin which they learned somewhere in a religious context. But they do not do the simple thing which is required, namely to stop sinning.

I asked him a couple of questions, and prepared to write a very long poem in which I hoped to expose what I still believe to be a frustrating fallacy in his thinking. I wanted to explain to him (yes, explain) why, contrary to his own belief about how these things work, he could quite simply decide to change. But I was very busy at work, and I never got around to writing the poem. Through thinking about what I hoped to say, though, I realised that there were many things in my own attitude and behaviour that I could simply decide to change.

(For the purpose of this exposition, I can see need to have a quick working definition of sin. Briefly, I mean anything you do, especially knowingly, that can harm yourself or your relationship with others or with the world, particularly in the long term.)

A day or so later, he SMSed me, still miserable, and asked "Wat is mooi in jou lewe?" (Roughly translated, "So what's beautiful in your life?"). My reply was immediate. It included love, and the fact that I am privileged to have a group of friends, that I can choose what I want to eat, the blank canvases on the walls of my flat, and the ability to decide to change things I don't like about myself.

"Klink asof jy 'n positiwiteitsaanval gehad het," he replied in what I assumed to be cynical amusement. ("Seems like you've had an attack of positivity.") He remained sad for some time, and I was concerned, but ironically, I felt almost incapable of helping him: my work commitments kept me busy for long hours, and often during that time I just didn't muster enough goodness to push through the barrier of my own laziness which so often accompanies my tiredness. I wished that I could have simply have passed on the reasoning by tilting my head like a decanter and pouring out the relevant reasoning into his head so that I wouldn't have to put so much work into helping him overcome his laziness!

Through luck or mercy, or both, he largely continued to survive the effects of his action and inaction. But from that time onwards, I began making decisions about things I wanted to change in my own life. I could afford to be much stricter with myself now. Instead of feeling sorry for myself if I struggled with insomnia, for example, I found that I could chastise myself for choosing to occupy my mind with the thoughts that kept me awake rather than trying properly to fall asleep. I could choose to not respond to such self-chastisement with debilitating guilt, but rather with repentance. My sleep improved.

In some things I failed. I didn't keep my office tidy, and I often became distracted at work instead of concentrating on one thing at a time. At times, I still lost my temper, and sometimes I was selfish, negligent or undisciplined. But I did not lose faith in my God-given ability to repent. If I wasn't succeeding, I was able to admit to myself, without feeling down about it or burdened by my own accusation, that it was my own fault, and that I could do something about it. There are times that one must choose the lesser of two evils in order to be righteous. This was the hardest lesson I have ever had to learn, and to this very day I resent that things work like that. But most sin is fairly simple to overcome, because it means choosing between something more obviously good and bad.

While "simple to change" doesn't mean "easy to change", appreciating the simplicity already lightens the burden. A week ago I had breakfast with Long John. He is a doctoral student in medical science, and a smoker. While we were sitting at a coffee shop, another patron approached him and asked if he could lend her a lighter. Our conversation then turned to the topic of smoking, and it turned out that he had been reading the very book I had heard about on the radio. Although he had not finished it, he said that the effect of his reading so far was that when he simply relaxed into a routine, he smoked more, but when he actually stopped to think and reason with himself using the humorous arguments in the book (none of which focus on the medical facts, which every literate smoker already knows either generally or specifically), he was able to resist the next cigarette.

Reasoning, then, is an important part of overcoming the difficulty involved in taking a simple step.

My decision

Now that I at last had someone who could give me the exact details of the book, I decided that I would buy it. But before I could do so, I had to take a business trip to Johannesburg. I arrived on Wednesday and spent a long time at the airport waiting for my contact. I had coffee, and later on in the evening I had tea with one of the other guests. Two cups. The next day, I had a mug of tea upon arrival at my contact's office, then again at the tea break, another at lunch, and a mug of coffee during the afternoon break.

By the time that I had taken the final sip of coffee, a decision had begun to form in my stomach and in my mind: This has to stop, and I can chose to stop it. That afternoon, when I got back to the hotel, I wasn't feeling good, so I got into bed early. What I wanted was to get cosy with a cup of tea, but I had already decided that I would put an end to this addiction once and for all. I despise sweetener, and had always maintained that I would sooner cut down on the amount of tea that I drink than to cut down on how much sugar I put into it. But I now firmly changed my mind: I would do both, with immediate effect. During the next few hours and the following day, I refined the terms of my decision. The net effect of the rules I made for myself translated to a reduction of over 80% in my sugar intake.

I knew that once I had made my decision, I had the ability (which is in every normal human made by God) to stick to it. I worked through my initial "withdrawal" using the technique described on the radio in the context of smoking. Inter alia, this involves reminding yourself that the worse the craving, the more the proof that the addiction has enslaved you to your own detriment, and the more reason that you should be hating your slavemaster and resisting him with angry determination (my own metaphor; I can't remember how he said it).

It has been three days now, and I feel as though I have crossed the plain into another country. I don't know what permanent damage has been done by all these years of concentrated sugar consumption, but I can hardly believe that I allowed this to go on for so long when all I needed to do was simply to pack up and get out of Sodom without looking back.

If I sin again in this respect, I cannot imagine that it would be for any reason other than that I forgot to, or, for some inexplicable reason, chose not to think.

A brief comparison between Microsoft Project and PSNext

So, I am back from Johannesburg. Several friends SMSed regularly asking when I would at last be coming back from "Sodom" (sic), at what precise time I would be home, and so on. And they didn't want to borrow money, so I felt cottonfluffily happy at being so wanted. My cup runneth over. (And I was only gone for three days!)

Well, the purpose of the visit was largely fulfilled: I learned enough of what I need to know about PSNext to get going as a trainer on this enterprise Project Management software, and I negotiated the basic terms with the distributor. I have Tomcat running on my laptop and the training database installed, plus all the Java components, so I am almost ready to roll. I do still want to evaluate some of the free Open Source Project Management offerings out there so that I can see where they fit into the landscape (I downloaded OpenProject a long time ago and never got round to installing it), and I also need to to update ProjectManagement.co.za with details about the various options.

I haven't read the distributor's feature comparison yet, but if I had to provide my own summary of Microsoft Project versus PSNext, I would say that there are two major differences:

Firstly, Microsoft Project appears to be designed "bottom-up", while PSNext is designed "top-down". What I mean is that Microsoft Project is a desktop scheduling tool with complex add-ons to enable you to do enterprise-level collaboration and reporting. It is feature-rich, but then all the users have to pay for all the features instead of just paying for those they use. PSNext, on the other hand, is designed for use by a Project Office or Programme/Portfolio Manager and then also for everyone higher up in the organisation and lower down in the Project Management hierarchy. As such, it allows for many user-defined fields and roles, and licencing is based on a per-feature basis. (Contact me if you want me to show you what I am talking about.) So if a certain user only needs to use timesheets and to view his own assignments, there are licence tokens used only for that and nothing more. A Project Manager would typically also use the planning components and the resources, so additional licence tokens would be used in his case.

Secondly, Microsoft's application architecture is (no surprise) "Microsoft-based". It integrates quite well with other Microsoft Office products and with Outlook. (For the last three years or so, Microsoft Project has been marketed as an extension of the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, I think they are now calling it Microsoft Office Project.) PSNext, on the other hand, can run with any regular database as a back-end: DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server (if you insist), and I think even MySQL. Being Java-based, there are connectors for many things (I think via XML, but I can't remember if I was told this or whether I just assumed it). I still want to get the reading matter on how to create the dynamic links with SAP systems and the like, but my impression is that it's not nearly as cludgy or expensive to set up as sewing together a Microsoft Project collaboration portal with enterprise integration.

I certainly do not intend "throwing out" Microsoft Project -- it has its place, and I will continue to train users on it -- but there are simply situations where PSNext is the better option, with a vast number of features which Microsoft Project simply can't offer as part of a normal, native installation.

Update from Tania, who is now a grown-up

I had a very nice 21st birthday, and I wrote a looong story about the whole experience, and then just didn't have the guts to publish it because I included so many emotional and physiological details. In order to be able to appropriately thank everybody (incl. Mikhailo and my parents, Jonathan, Miguel, Henk, etc., and my ever-thoughtful friend who gave me the Are You a Geek? book, which has provided a lot of personal entertainment since then), I am just going to have to cut and paste bits from it from time to time.

I am going to Johannesburg on Wednesday for three days to get trained as a trainer on PSNext, a Java-based Project Management software application. After hearing all the stories about baggage theft on Oliver Tambo, I have decided to travel with hand-luggage only, and smallish bags at that. This is exciting for me, because I usually travel like a typical blonde in pink, with far too much stuff (men actually even giggled at me at Upington airport last year because I was so onhandig). I have always envied seasoned backpackers, who look so lean and efficient. This time I am going to wear... almost everything at once!

I am sorry that the heading of this posting contains a comma and no full stop. If you are going to use punctuation, you should use everything or nothing, so you really shouldn't use a comma if you're not going to use a full stop. However, a heading should not have a full stop, and the phrase would have looked funny without a comma. So I had to do what I did.

Longing

Has anyone else, so many years after reading the book, still wished with tears and passion that they could have met Dorothea Brooke?