The DailyWTF post What the Ad? - Portability, 1980's Style featured the TRS-80, which just happens to be the nifty little device that gave me my first taste of programming - all the way back in Std 1 (that's 3rd grade for those who don't know their lekker from their kiff).

I only heard about Opera Software's scheduled visit to Durban on Monday. While I couldn't attend the lectures at DUT or UKZN I made damn sure that I could attend Thursday's "informal gathering" at the Suncoast News Café. You see, I started using Opera when it was still ad-supported (and I honestly don't remember the first version number that I used). Before Firefox even existed I was using a tabbed browser with mouse gestures, cool keyboard short-cuts, colour themes, customizable everything and built-in mail client. But I digress...

If you ever accidentally pour a mug of tea on your keyboard and surrounding desk, hope that it is a Microsoft Basic keyboard. Because I did that yesterday and was very impressed with the keyboard design.

So, I'm back to trying to compile emacs-nt again, having discovered that the required W32 headers are in fact conveniently supplied by Mingw (albeit in a different package). Now I'm getting an "Unknown Processor" error. gcc -dumpmachine tells me I have an arm processor on my PC... perhaps this is the problem o_0

UPDATE: It turns out the Symbian SDK also provides a gcc, and this was in my path before the Mingw one. Hence the strange architecture.

I was bored, so I went to amatomu. There I noticed Durbzblog, by Marc. The posts about Mauritius caught my eye, and I started to read further, and doing so I found a link to Marc's Facebook. Amongst the wall posts I noticed Dave Duarte (whom I've run into a few times on the interwebs), asking Marc for help organising a 27dinner in Durban.