Russian Roulette

There is nothing greater than riding along at 40km/h in the middle of a peloton, the only sound the music of your tires on the road. But as with all things in life, there is a price to be paid. Like birds flying in formation, the peloton travels as an integrated unit, where riders save energy by sticking close and everyone is expected to share the pull at the front. This often means that there is less than a hand-spans length between you and the riders around you. The danger comes when riders get tired and their response times to changes in speed are slower. And on the day that there is a bullet under the hammer, there is nothing you can do.

This fact was again brought home to me at a cycle race this past Saturday. The last 5 km of the race consisted of a 1 km climb, followed by a 4 km downhill. When we hit the hill, I was surprised when no-one staged a break away. This was when I realised that we had been racing so hard that no one had the energy left. We climbed over the apex of the hill and started our descent on the other side. Like a massive flock of birds, the peloton spread itself over the two lane roadway. As our speed increased, I started overtaking other riders and hence moved over to the right wing of the bunch. Approximately 1 km into the descent, there was a shout and suddenly the whole center of the peloton just ... disappeared. In a split second, all that was left of more than 50 riders, were just those lucky enough to be on the outskirts of the group. But the worst was the sound of men shouting and the scream of metal being dragged across tar.

A world opens up

On Friday the 16th, Adriaan and I learned how to lead climb a rock climbing course. In theory, this has opened up the world of sport climbing for us, since we can now climb anywhere in the world where bolts have been shot into a rock-face. In theory. The reality is, for me anyway, is that for now lead climbing is s*** scary. I don't mind heights, I don't mind falling, it's the hitting hard surfaces part that I have a problem with.

The jump from being able to climb a rock wall using a top rope, and climbing that same course via lead roping is quite a big one. In top roping, the climber is attached to one end of the rope, the belayer to the other end and the 'middle' of the rope is threaded through the chains at the top of the climb. This allows the climber to take a lot of risks, simply because you can't really fall. But lead climbing is a whole new ball game. First off, at the start of the climb, the climber and belayer are only separated by approximately 2 meters of rope. The climber then proceeds to climb up the rock face and at each bolt attaches a piece of equipment, called a quickdraw, to the bolt and then threads the rope through the quickdraw. This act may sound simple, but as we found out on Friday, a lot can go wrong at this point. Finally, the climber reaches the top of the course, attaches two quickdraws to the chains at the top, threads the rope through and is then lowered to the ground by the belayer. When clipping the rope through a quickdraw, there are three important things to remember.

1. You MUST thread the rope correctly through the quickdraw. It is very, very, very important that the part of the rope that goes from the belayer to the quickdraw lies against the rock face to the back of the quickdraw, while the piece of rope going from the quick draw to you is to the front of the quick draw. If you thread the rope the wrong way and you fall, it could happen that the rope forms a loop back on itself, and clips out of the quickdraw.
2. Clipping must be quick. There is nothing worse than literally hanging by your fingertips and struggling to clip a rope through a quickdraw. And the more you struggle, the more you panic, the harder it gets. Fortunately, we were taught a few different techniques for clipping, and all that is needed now is practice.
3. Don't z-clip. Basically what happens is that when you try to clip the rope through the next quickdraw, you accidentally take in rope from underneath the previous quickdraw, instead of from above it. This results in a system that loops back upon itself and the increase in friction in the whole rope system is so great that you can't climb any further. This happened to me once and I swore the air blue around me, because I had to climb back down, hang from one arm and try to untangle the whole mess.

Once we had the above principals firmly ingrained into us, we were taken to a relatively easy wall and given a chance to practice. Which was fine. Until they told us that the next part of the course was learning how to fall. For the first controlled fall that we had to do, we were told to climb to a quickdraw, clip in and let go. Which went ok. However, for the next fall, we had to clip into a quickdraw, climb to the next one, but instead of clipping in, we had to let go. Nuh uh. I had a right royal fight with myself in order to convince my hands to let go. The reason for this hesitation was that I knew that once you climb past a quickdraw and you fall, the distance that you are going to fall will be twice the length of rope that goes from you to the last quickdraw through which you clipped. In the end, survival instinct lost, mainly because I knew I could trust my equipment, but more importantly, I knew I could trust Adriaan.

With this ordeal past, we were allowed to play on the climbing walls to our heart's content. I have to admit, it was a lot of fun, but the only sad thing is how much more quickly lead climbing tires one out, as opposed to top roping. Consequently we did not climb all that much. But after climbing, we did go and play around in the bouldering room for a hour or two.

Safety Information

As part of a new project, I get to play with a couple of cell-phones. While reading through the manual of one of these, my eye caught the following piece under the section for "Safety Information":

Repetitive Motion
When you repetitively perform actions such as pressing keys or entering finger-written characters, you may experience occasional discomfort in you hands, arms, shoulders, neck, or other parts of your body. If you continue to have discomfort during or after such use, stop use and see physician.

Now I'm wondering, just exactly which 'other parts of bodies' have been used to REPETITIVELY press the buttons on the keypad of a cellphone. Enough so that the manufacturers felt it necessary to include this clause in their warning.

May you live in interesting times

I look at the world around me and it has become abundantly clear that pirates once more roam the high-seas, or more specifically, the high-bandwidth. Like buccaneers in the days of yore where Spanish galleons carrying gold from the New World were fair game, so today do cyber-pirates launch DoS or phishing attacks against servers that are the live-blood of billions of people. In those days if a merchant ship was caught its crew was given a choice: Die or join. Today surfers of the cyber-world are also given two choices. Have your PC enslaved to a botnet, or have it crippled with viruses/mallware/adware/spyware so that it becomes virtually useless.

So what are we to do? Do we listen to the vaunted security experts that say: "Well, being attacked and having your servers go off-line is inevitable. Best thing you can do is optimise your recovery procedures."

I say nay.

Do we listen to the researchers who say: "Let's start from scratch. Let us begin anew and design a better Internet. An Utopian cyber-world where bad people can't exist."

Again I say nay.

I say, let us follow in the footsteps of our forefathers. Let us assemble crews that actively hunt these cyber-pirates and eliminate them. But the question that now arises is, who will pay for these hunters? Normally governments are tasked with protecting their citizens. But the very nature of the Internet defeats this idea for protection. Fact is, countries are just too small. So what is larger than a country?

I think the answer to that one is the internet servers themselves. My solution to these piratical behaviours would be: As soon as an attack happens, record all possible data from it. Then make that data available to the whole cyber community and offer a bounty for the capture or elimination of the attackers.

Alternate Nursery Rhymes

I'm a little teapot
short and stout
heres my handle
heres my.........
........ Dammit! I'm a sugar bowl!

Mary had a little lamb
she tied it to a pylon
10000 volts shot through it
and turned its wool to nylon

Mary had a little lamb

Her case comes up next week...

Mary had a little Lamb,
Her father shot it dead,
She still takes the lamb to school
Between two bits of bread.

Mary had a little Lamb,
You've heard that tale before,
But have you heard she passed her plate
And had a little more.

Mary had an little lamb
It danced in skips and hops,
It danced into the road one day
And ended up as chops

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack jumped over the candlestick
Poor little Jack, should have jumped higher
Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire

Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle
The cow blew up on the launchpad

Hickory Dickory Dock,
Three Mice Ran Up The Clock,
The Clock Struck One,
The Other Two Got Away With Minor Injuries.

The Ideal Mate

Coeur Robuste, Poil Doux et Brilliant, Dents Saines

Size doesn't matter...

... numbers do. This morning I was reminded of the Chinese saying: "Like ants eating a bone", when I found hundreds of ants crawling around in Cannibal's jar. That's right, my favourite spider is dead. She did not die in glorious single combat with another spider. Rather, she was traumatised to death when hundreds of ants invaded her jar.

It all started yesterday when I fed her another spider, henceforth referred to as Mr. P. Mr. P was about the same size as Cannibal, except his lower abdomen was slightly smaller. So I was not really worried about Cannibal, since she had the weight advantage in the coming conflict. Cannibal was peacefully sleeping on her log, when I introduced Mr. P to her. I don't know if it was just morning grumpiness, or if it was just her usual sunny disposition that shone through. Either way, she was not impressed with Mr. P and proceeded to chase him around the jar. When she caught him, the resulting fracas was quite impressive. It involved a lot of leg flailing and mandible gnashing. It all ended rather abruptly when Cannibal executed her favourite move, namely ripping a leg off of her opponent.

The two spiders broke apart and Mr P headed for the lid, while Cannibal went and sat at her water bowl. I think both spiders managed to inject their opponent with venom, because both spiders were distinctly groggy. But this was to Cannibal's advantage. Because of her weight advantage, she was able to overcome the effects of the poison much faster than her opponent. For about an hour, both spiders sat licking their wounds, or in the case of African Hunting Spiders, cleaning their mandibles.

Then Cannibal started to hunt again. Up she climbed on the tree stump that was leaning against the side of the jar. At the top of the stump, her questing legs found Mr. P. The chase was on. Over the rocks, under the stump. Frantically Mr. P tried to get some distance between himself and Cannibal. All to no avail. As he was crossing the bottom of the jar, she launched herself from the tree stump and landed on him. She flipped him onto his back, but he was not ready to die yet. With mandibles locked, they struggled across the rocky bottom of the jar. But in the end she pulled him into an embrace with her legs. An embrace he could not escape from. As time passed, his leg twitching became more erratic and infrequent. Finally, Cannibal released her jaws, and pulled back. Only to plunge her mandibles into Mr. P's neck, or where his neck would have been if he had one.

After another quarter of an hour, when all movement from Mr. P had ceased, Cannibal released him from her deadly embrace. She then proceeded to spin wires across his body, and then hoisted him up to hang suspended from the lid of the jar. Then she bit down again, and proceeded to suck him dry.

Enter the ants.

This morning when I reached my desk, it was crawling with ants. They must have discovered the remains of Mr. P and decided to cart off what was left. Unfortunately, they also happened upon Cannibal. I found her hanging from side of the jar on a single thread, barely alive. I did everything possible. I destroyed hundreds of ants through any means necessary; with water, Doom, by hand. But in the end it was all to no avail, the trauma had been to great. At approximately 10:30 this morning, Cannibal passed away into the great beyond.

I had never really minded ants. But for this, for this I will demand blood price.

Those zany Chinese

Waiting for a rabbit to hit upon a tree and be killed in order to catch it.