November 2004 - Posts

Another Sanlam Rip-off
I have been contributing to a Stratus retirement annuity with Sanlam, which is supposedly an assurance product, for nearly two and a half years. I have decided that this is an unnecessary monthly expense, but if I cancel the policy now, I lose every cent that I have paid.

Management costs are built into the first few years of your investment, so that in case you don’t continue with its payments, they still benefit by charging you for a service no longer provided.

It’s thus effectively only assurance for them, not for the consumer.
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Posted 25 November 2004 12:41 PM by bkelly | 4 comment(s)
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We Can All Use Forks (and One Day We'll all have Blogs)
This is in response to Georgina Guedes column on ITWeb titled To Each Her Own. Their feedback page was giving me grief, so I thought I'd post my comment here.

Four tine forks as we know them only gained worldwide popularity in the 1900's. The earlier two-tined variety was only adopted in England in the late 1600's.

Now, we don't call someone a gasto-geek because they use a fork and we don't (maybe in China), and by that I mean to demonstrate that at some point technologies cease to be noted as technology per se, and submerge into common use.

Anyone seen a typewriter lately?
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Posted 23 November 2004 03:34 PM by bkelly | no comments
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The Beagle
I’ve promised myself (that way I can break it and forgive myself) that I will now blog every day. I owe it to my readers, the poor souls. I have nothing much on my mind today because it’s been dissolved by many, many Castle Milk Stouts at the Keg and Beagle last night. I’m not the only one; I thought I was late arriving at 09:45, but my colleagues (who were doing their own dissolving somewhere else) only arrived at 10:45, even more delicate that me.

I went to the den of iniquity to help a lovely young lady install MS Office on her notebook (I think she just wanted to see me again), but was unsuccessful. This brings me close to today’s subject: the Keg Boys year end function. We are such an institution that we have deemed it necessary to have an end-of-year outing to Werner’s Bistro, Morning Hill, and I couldn’t help but invite the lass’s sister to the dinner. Now they’re both joining me. Hopefully the joining won’t end there.

While I’m talking about the Beagle, I’ve discovered another nice little pub in Sandringham; the old bowling club in fact. The catering is run by my mate Barry, and his food is good, and the bar is run by Dave, and his booze is cheap. Enough about them; I wanted to mention the very good two person (it’s sometimes a male vocalist, and sometimes a broad) band that performs at the Beagle every Thursday night. Pete plays anything from Counting Crows to Black Sabbath. In fact, his rendition last night of Paranoid (for Moi) was outstanding. He also does a very, very good Gary Moore cover. Come round sometime. Maybe if enough of you join us I’ll get a commission from the publican.
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Posted 19 November 2004 01:50 PM by bkelly | 1 comment(s)
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Humans Suck
Two newspaper reports I read today really piss me off. The first is about a man in America that has set up a remote hunting web site, where anyone anywhere in the world can aim a rifle at animals on his farm. Now I am not opposed to hunting; in fact if I could go hunting regularly I would never buy mass farmed meat. I prefer honest meat that I have to work for; the pull approach to carnivorism as opposed to the push approach adopted by the meat marketers.

What I am pissed off about the potential for fun killing. Is this man going to mail a deer, antelope, or wild pig to some trigger happy short dick individual in Japan? What about the horrible probability of a mechanically aimed gun operated by some myopic teenager from a condo in Manhattan wounding one of the poor beasts. Who is going to do the follow up dirty work?

All this and he is depriving virgin hunters from drinking the blood of their prey on the first kill.

My second issue is with this bunch of superstitious narrow minded dimwit arseholes in Fish Hoek that have declared war on sharks in False Bay for attacking a woman swimming in their home uninvited. They apparently are even willing to lower themselves to the point of baiting the sharks with chickens filled with broken glass. Did somebody promise these epitomes of cranial numbness that all the sharks would wave and say hello whenever they saw a human? Is this something hitherto unheard of? Are these rogue sharks encroaching on some small minded enclave of oceanic serenity?

Why don’t we declare war on all lions, and all snakes? Why don’t we declare war on ourselves? Why don’t we put razor blades in their children’s ice creams and see how they like it?
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Posted 18 November 2004 04:38 PM by bkelly | 6 comment(s)
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