I'm still not sure what this blog is about

I kind of wanted to write a blog post about this really spiffy RPC library I'm busy writing. With some gentle macro abuse, I've managed to come up with a readable, cross-platform friendly (!) way of doing Remote Procedure Calls in C++. It's not entirely implemented yet, but all the hard bits are, and it has most of the properties I want. Maybe I'll talk about it more when it's done. At any rate, discussing it in detail would probably bore my tiny and non-technical readership to tears.

My younger brother Cavan, whose blog is over here, suggested that posting pictures is a good way of coming up with something to write, so I figured I'd give it a shot. The picture I found for today isn't going to mean much to anyone who is not a sibling, but it's really an amazing shot--this portrait was found hanging on the wall in the spare room in my aunt's house in Johannesburg. It was probably taken about six months to a year before we left Africa. My father was with me, and we spent some time and effort capturing it as best as possible with a digital camera. The original is more brightly colored, but I think we did a passable job of it.

Cavan, incidentally, is the babe in arms on my mother's lap. Isn't he cuuuuute? The cute little girls on the left are my younger sisters, and the evil looking tyke in his school-uniform shirt is yours truly. This was several years before I started wearing glasses (as far as I know, I wasn't even short-sighted yet), and is from the period my mother is referring to when she talks about how she nearly went crazy from having four small children in the home.

I get a lot of incredulity when I tell people that I'm from South Africa. This is because my American accent borders on flawless. The follow-up question is usually one of "what were your parents doing in South Africa?" (they assume I'm actually an American who just happened to be there) or "how old were you when you left?" The above picture answers the second question very well. I have yet to come up with a non-sarcastic answer for the first question.

I got a phone call from a South African woman a few days ago, asking for some help in updating her web-site. I'd been referred to her through the local Suid-Afrikaaner grapevine. Her comment was "How long have you been living in the United States?" Twenty-odd years, I answered. "Because you still have a very strong South African accent." It's all about context. It's not that I hide it well, it's more that I'm a linguistic chameleon.