andersoj.org oddments

I write from Cape Town, the first place we actually stop for a little while. We left on Sunday, arriving here midday on Tuesday, which with a bit of arithmetic wrangling yields about 45 hours of travel. Happily, some of that was spent asleep on a couch in the flight-attendants' in-flight lounge in Frankfurt.

Frankfurt has gone a long way to redeem itself in my eyes on this trip. Both the Lufthansa and South African airlines folks were outstanding, and very helpful. We actually bought chocolate for a very nice lady who helped us sort out our midstream change to standing by on South African air. A very nice flight, if a bit long. (10 hours, and still in the same time zone. wierd.)

I'm making a bit of progress through Rush's "Mating", a National Book Award-winner novel set in Botswana, and recommended by Phil. Depressing though it is, it still doesn't hold a candle to that Coetzee book Stoller got me to read last Christmas.

Spent most of the time on the airplane programming. Those of you who know me well will be amused that I have now tried Eclipse, an integrated development environment. It highlights syntax and spell-checks your programs, and otherwise acts way smarter than EMACS. This is an experiment to see if I can be more productive with an IDE for this looming demonstration I have to do.

The only hiccup so far is that the car reserved for us in Cape Town had a dead battery. We were quickly shuffled to a new car with equally confused polarity. I am glad that Angela is taking the lead on driving down the wrong hand side of the road.

Tomorrow, hoping to see a bit of the famous markets here in town, then some of the wine country.

We are surprised and pleased that we'll be meeting up with Dave Kao and AJ Nadelson later in the trip, in Maun. The winds of Providence blow heartily on our sails.

All our best, and hopefully the next missive will include a photo or two (and a snippet of code, for those so inclined.)

JA