In love ... with a squirrel!

Yesterday and today have been really tough emotionally but I am here in Cape Town at someone else's expense and the show must go on. Yesterday we worked through all the FINSS modules to get a feel for how they work and whether we would be able to cope with the program on our own. The front end has really been set up as simply as possible so data capture of all the facets of fisheries is straight forward. The trick comes in when you want to get the data out. The programmer, Marco Garcia (who was in attendance) reckons that anyone can figure out SQL so most queries need to be written from scratch. At least these queries can be setup at installation though and never thought about again, unless of course you want something else out. The photo is of Shaheen Moolla explaining the finer details of the database.

Today we were given presentations by the participants from Mozambique and Seychelles where the software has already been installed and is in use. They seem quite happy with it. It is fairly easily customisable so can be made to suit each country's needs while the core of the data remains compatible with all other users.

We finished early today so I decided that I needed to get out and walk a bit. I started off with going to The Company Gardens to see the squirrels. At first the only thing I saw was drug addicts harassing the passersby - not the best welcome to the city - but eventually I found a bench in a quiet part of the gardens and, soon enough, two squirrels arrived. They really are cute and I would have loved to have put one on my pocket! My earliest childhood memory is feeding the squirrels in these gardens but I actually think it is a false memory that came into existence from everyone telling me about my feeding the squirrels as a small child. I didn't feed the squirrels today, just admired them!
From there I went to St George's Mall and just window-shopped a bit and looked at the souvenirs on sale. I could not make up my mind whether or not to walk to the Waterfront but eventually just sort of wandered over there.

At the Clock Tower area I had a look at the seals on their little floating dock but the smell was so very bad that I took a couple of very quick photos and moved on. There was one really huge seal (the one in the top left of the photo) that had some sort of rope around its neck - I wonder why no one has done anything about this? As I said though, they smelt REALLY bad and I moved on.


It was good just to walk around and watch all the holiday-makers getting excited about the various scenes that they could take photos of. At one place there were a whole lot of people taking photos of their travel companions with Table Mountain in the background. I didn't want to be out done so here is my tourist photo. Hope the gull had a good time!

Tomorrow I am off to Somerset West. It will be good to not be in a hotel and to be in the company of friends.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A little fun in Mombasa

Image
It was so good to be back in Mombasa. It was 9 month since my last visit. This time I stayed at the Bahari Beach Hotel. Amazingly I had not stayed at this hotel before. Initially I had thought that I had been there but the beach hotels in Nyali are starting to all look the same to me. The Bahari Beach Hotel is a lovely place and I enjoyed it even though I was there for a series of back-to-back meetings. My bedroom was super comfortable with a lovely hard mattress. The only issue I had was that the in-room safe initially worked intermittently but eventually was fixed and for my inconvenience was given dinner and a glass of wine at the duty manager's expense. The gardens were really beautiful and a tranquil sight to wake up to every morning. And I loved watching the cats cavorting around the grounds while having breakfast. Unfortunately the tides were against me so only managed one walk on the beach but I did get to swim and I had fun one evening watching some Maasai dancers.
Read more

Roasting in Comoros

Image
After a dreadful series of flights on Kenya Airways to Mombasa last week, I started on this trip with some trepidation. My concerns were for naught really though. The inbound flight from Nairobi to Johannesburg arrived on time which gave me a lot of confidence that my flight would leave on time. In the end we left a half hour late but this was due to a passenger not having the correct travel documents and his luggage had to be unloaded. The wait in Nairobi was quite endless but I spent my time getting some exercise by walking up and down the departure gate corridors. There are only two so it was a bit monotonous but better than just sitting around. The flight to the Comoros departed quite late as the inbound flight was late. This meant that instead of arriving in Comoros at 23:35 we arrived at about 00:30. The Dreamliner arriving at OR Tambo International Airport There were ten of us that were arriving in Comoros for the same meeting and all of us needed to apply for a visa
Read more

Maputo

Image
My one night at home was a welcome change from sterile hotel rooms but there was so much to do and before long my suitcase was packed again. I thought that I would be nervous flying this morning since I was flying with SA Airlink who have had a bit of a bad time recently with accidents and incidents but I was completely okay. Maybe 2010 is my year for having discarded my fear of flying completely but the real proof will be next month when I fly from Mauritius to Seychelles and back on Air Seychelles since it is thanks to Air Seychelles that I developed this ridiculous fear in the first place. What contributed to my enjoyment of the flight was that it was on another cute little turbo propelled aircraft, this time a Jetstream 41. It only takes 29 people and there were only 11 on-board making it really comfy. Take-off was to the north-east so we had a lovely view of Durban and I couldn't help thinking as we flew over uShaka Marine World that that was the closest I have been to my off
Read more