Pie Noon

Clinically obese regulars at the canteen at my former work would often gaze aghast as I forced down my second slice of post main meal cheesecake, before stumbling off to find coffee. How, their high-BMI, hungry eyes seemed to ask, did I manage to remain in such fine fettle despite such obvious binging and such flagrant disregard for all the good advice dispensed by the multi-billion dollar lifestyle industry? Tapeworms? Bulimia? High metabolism? Secret colonic irrigations?

Wrong! It’s my trademark diet. If you’re living alone and unable/unwilling/too busy to cook and wanting to not get fat, then listen up, for I here launch the Keep Your Body Guessing Diet.

A typical week:

Monday:

• Breakfast: Eat any pizza / milktart / etc. left over from the night before. Once at work, immediately have a strong cup of coffee to get the day going.
• Mid-morning: Snack on anything free/lying around, and try to get in at least two more cups of coffee before lunch. If you're doing it right your urine should be nice and transparent, and you should need to go about once an hour after lunch. This is good for your eyes as it takes them off your monitor at regular intervals.
• Lunch: Have two pies and either a muffin or doughnut. Don't have a fizzy drink else you'll feel really bloated and unable to do anything except chat online and read IMDB forums.
• Mid-afternoon. Drink at least two cups of coffee to combat the Post-Lunch Somnifery (PLS).
• Evening: Do 45 minutes hilly run to deal with the lunchtime muffin/doughnut. Go home and have a cold beer. Watch out for feeling light-headed if you drink it too fast whilst still dehydrated.
• Supper: Fast food (non super/up-sized). Use plenty of tomato sauce on your chips to cram in all those lovely anti-oxidants and eat any lettuce that falls out of your burger. Have half a slab of dark chocolate for dessert with a cup of coffee.

Tuesday:

• Breakfast: Ultramel Chocolate Custard. This stuff is frickin' fabulous and can be squeezed directly into your mouth from the carton, which is useful if you’re in a rush after hitting snooze for an hour. Don't eat the whole litre in one go, and don’t squeeze too hard when it’s near the end as it has a tendency to suddenly splatter all over your face.
• Lunch: Take the vegetarian option at the cafeteria so that you can justify having a large slice of cheesecake or similar for dessert.
• Evening: (Option One) Go for a 30 minute run followed by a 90 minute paddle with a full set of push-ups, squats, crunches, etc., followed by a supper consisting of only high-protein stuff like tuna by itself or biltong until the taste gets to you. (Option Two) Feign illness and bunk the session, instead going out and having a lavish meal at a restaurant with a lot of Champagne.

Wednesday:

• Breakfast: None - the idea is to be totally ravenous by lunchtime.
• Lunch: Take the big fat main meal option and wolf it down hungrily. This is the start of 24-hours without food – a key part of the regimen.
• Evening: 60-90 minutes aerobic exercise.
• Dinner: Ideally you will have timed things such that there is nothing in your fridge to eat. Capitalise on the fatigue from your run and go to bed early without any supper. A slight emotional low and minor hallucinations at this point are completely normal.

Thursday:

• Breakfast: Nothing. Your stomach will have shrunk, and you will feel surprisingly not hungry.
• Mid-morning: Start scouting about for someone sympathetic to take pity on you and invite you to dinner at their place. Stave off dizziness from lack of food by drinking coffee and concentrating on work.
• Lunch: You’ll find that you can’t actually eat that much due to your stomach having shrunken. Keep it small in anticipation of a big supper.
• Evening: 60 minutes brisk aerobic exercise to get you in the mood.
• Dinner: At the sympathetic friend's. Eat quickly so that you can be the first to get seconds as soon as it is polite to do so. With luck there'll be dessert too. Drink lots of red wine and don’t turn down an after-dinner whisky.

Friday:

• Breakfast: Nothing. Coffee once you get to work.
• Mid-morning: Need to start getting hydrated ahead of potential weekend boozing. Only one cup of coffee.
• Lunch: Must be a big one, as getting in a full supper before Friday night drinking is always uncertain as something is bound to pop up. At minimum two pies and two slices of cake and perhaps a chocolate. Maybe a nice (low-fat) drinking yoghurt too. You will feel stuffed after this, but no-one is remotely productive after lunch on Friday in Cape Town anyway.
• Mid-afternoon: Drink only as much coffee as is needed to stay awake until everyone leaves work (15h00-15h30 around here).
• Evening: You should by now be a couple of hours into your sundowners. Eat anything within range if you plan to keep drinking all night. Statistically, you will screw this up at least once a month, and fail to retain your supper, instead finding yourself in abject misery as you lie wretchedly on your bathroom floor. Like re-installing Windows on a regular basis, this ritualistic act of purging and rejuvenating is good for both body and disposition.

Saturday:
• Brunch: Rise late and eat muesli. It is important to have muesli lying about in case your mother visits and inspects your kitchen for signs of healthy food.
• Lunch: In lieu of food have an utterly brutal two-hour paddling session or equivalent – ideally the kind that leaves you feeling like your arms are going to fall off if you try driving afterwards. Go home and sing loudly in the shower till the hot water runs out. This soothes your muscles and helps you to warm down your lungs properly.
• Mid-afternoon: Either have a nap on your couch, or (if feeling heroic) force yourself into a sufficiently upright position to enable you to play a not too frenetic computer game.
• Evening: Indulge in whatever culinary delights present themselves for your amusements, being careful only to stick to one type of alcohol. Dining expensively will ensure that you assimilate essential trace spices, minerals, vitamins, etc. that you might otherwise miss. Restaurants where the menu is entirely in French and the staff can pronounce everything correctly are best as they are bound to have a crazed, award-winning chef whose fierce Gallic temperament was responsible for him being thrown out of the Sorbonne for seditionary behaviour, and whose amuse bouche will nourish you with exotic substances and delight whoever it is that you are attempting to seduce.

Sunday:

• Breakfast: Wake with the dawn and eat dark chocolate. Go for an early rowing session - two hours or so with at least one long steady-state piece during which you can zone out, relax your mind and contemplate your week while the others all concentrate on some or other aspect of the stroke. Be sure to shout something like: “Come guys, let’s work those quick hands away off the finish!” every ten minutes or so, so that they all think you’re paying attention to the goals of the session.
• Lunch: Bacon and egg rolls with chocolate brownies and cream soda are ideal for flooding your depleted body with sugars and fats and whatever the green stuff is in cream soda.
• Mid-afternoon: Relax.
• Evening. Go for a run. On the way home stock up on chocolate for the coming week. For supper, be sure to plan a simple yet atypical food/drink combination, e.g. Champagne and ice-cream, pineapple juice and brie or chocolate milk and salami.

Now randomise and repeat.

Pulp Non-Fiction

I do so enjoy writing mildly condescending letters to sites that they could sadly never consider publishing. I picture a harried editor reading it and saying, "What a dick. These wankers always think they know better..." before printing it out and heading to the bathroom. They probably think I'm some crotchety retiree with nothing better to do - which is funny when I think of how prodigiously critical I will be in 35 years or so when I may be retired and will have all day to wax at jaded and eloquent length about whatever takes my fancy.

But anyway, it's a civilised way to vent after another very long week. Here I go again, and once more the target is that bastion of mediocrity, www.news24.co.za:


News24 really needs to send its writers on training courses to better their English in particular, and their journalistic skills in general. I wouldn't know which stories originate from feeds and which are written by your staff, but typos, poor grammar and often banal prose aren't worthy of such a widely-read site.

"Warriors in charge at Newlands" is an example. Sure, one generally writes out single-digit numbers in full, but not in the context of cricket scores, where it now sticks out horribly. Whoever set this out just didn't think at all. Also, who saw fit to put a comma in: "The batsmen to be dismissed were, Adam Bacher (41)..."? Surely understanding high-school grammar like this is a prerequisite for being a journalist?

And what about a bit of editorial oversight in something like "Seen a ghost lately?"? The article states: "Tapping into an explosion of interest in phenomena that defy scientific explanation..." Come again? Where's the research behind that statement and its two totally unqualified assertions? Surely you're not lending credence to a belief that science has no explanation for things regarded as "paranormal"? I admit the whole article could be read as mildly tongue-in-cheek, but you've gone and stuck it in your technology section with a dross of serious science about it! Where's the insightful editor's comment pointing out to otherwise easily-led readers what selection effects are? Lazy.

Many of the office workers and professionals I know who read on-line news daily regard News24 as dumbed-down journalism for mass consumption, a few good columnists notwithstanding. I would never expect you to publish this, but please take the criticism to heart - News24 is painful to read sometimes.

Punctuated Equilibrium

With as poignant a farewell as could reasonably be imagined from a team of 20 or so male developers, testers and analysts, I took my leave of the company at which I have had a very enjoyable eighteen months. I quit the oak-shrouded buildings as afternoon drifted into Halloween, and prepared to kick off All Saints Day at my new daytime abode in the downtown city. My parting message to the office sums up my mixed feelings at leaving such an agreeable work environment as I slowly crank my career:


And then there was I____...

It's been a great ride the past year and-a-half through the byways and backwaters of Optimised Routing. From the badlands of Balancer with its dark pits and wondering monsters, to the Elysian bliss of getting to deflower nice fresh virginal modules, I've had a sweet time all told. But baser motives compel me not to get too comfortable, and so I must bid you all farewell.

I'm not one to descend into sentiment, so will say only that as colleagues go, you've been commendable, and that I give you a collective "A", with distinctions in liveliness and combativeness. I shall surely miss the immense and sometimes fractious technical debates, the thoroughness of System Test, the caketime repartee, and the general unflappability of the doughty OR troops in the face of often daunting odds. If pressed to single out a most cherished memory though, it would have to be the Bar-One cheesecake from the canteen. O, the chocolatey transports...

To Abel, I pass on the LART. May you use it to righteously smite down insolent managers, feature-creep propagators and/or anyone who attempts to impose unrealistic deadlines on beleaguered developers.

To Allon, I leave the fetching blondes from upstairs.

To Erron, I leave my outstanding Remedy issues and my choice Burt Bacharach collection. The latter may help to ameliorate the former, or vice versa.

To the Coalition of the Unwilling (Allon and Graham), I leave my unsullied codebase. Be gentle.

Were I improprietous enough to invoke the maligned pattern that caused all the trouble, I might depart with: T_________.getInstance().exit()...

It's been swell. Be good.


Is it prudent to write a less than linear email like this to 200 people, more than half of whom you don't know at all? Probably not, but I liked these guys.