The Mail Owl Scrolls

Mutant gene to blame for early risers

I didn’t realise that my waking up early in the morning was “anti-social” and that I’m a mutant of the human species *waits for shrieks of laughter and agreement to die down*

I thought this article was rather amusing as the scientists are treating “Early-bird Syndrome” as if it was cancer.

I’m a self-proclaimed early-bird and I enjoy missing the morning traffic, reading blogs, posts and email in peace and, importantly, getting the freshest cup of coffee in the office.

To think that there are people who live in fear of waking up at 05:00 or that I should have visited my doctor for a diagnosis is preposterous.

Do not pass the taxi rank, do not collect R10 000

"We have fines, some of us for nearly R10 000. We get paid on commission, so if we don't drive, we don't get paid. And then we also can't pay our fines," said Lulamile Vumani, another Codeta driver from Khayelitsha. [Ref: IOL - Commuters caught in the crossfire of taxi war]

I find this quote from very amusing and a typical example of a “Catch 22” that should never have arisen.  I think if you have R10 000 in outstanding fines you shouldn’t be allowed to drive at all, let alone bitch that the government won’t give you a taxi permit.

While I’m on the topic of taxis I took the liberty of actually ask people who use them regularly a couple of questions.  My big question was why the commuters put up with such appalling conditions and risk?  Everyone had the same answer, they’re afraid the driver would throw them out.  So as I understand it, drivers are tyrants or kings of the road, treating their subjects as they please and un-afraid of the law which governs the rest of the community (Did they pick this up from the Russians, and lately the States, or did they think it up themselves?).

For taxis, I was a change not to be enforced by the government but by the people who use them.  When consumers refuse a supplier, the supplier inevitably changes his service to meet the new need.

April SA Developer Adventure Golf - Johannesburg, South Africa

Time to tell you about the next SA Developer Social happening in Johannesburg; we’re going to play Adventure Golf at Fourways on the 16^th April 2005!

That’s right; bring your golf shirts (or SA Dev t-shirts) your family and all offline the skill you can spare.  No amount of practice with Tiger Woods Golf 2005 will help you at this event.

Date: 16^th April 2005

Time: 14:30 (we’re going to the Milky Lane afterwards to celebrate)

Location: Fourways (Yes, Fourways mall has a website) http://www.fourwaysmall.com/

Contact: Andre Odendaal 083-410-7702 or email andreo@gmail.com

Hope to see you all there!

[Update: 07:26 11 April 2005]  I've moved the adventure golf to a little later to start after the Patterns & Practices session

2005 South African Blog Awards - Conclusion Part 2

D’ave said “Working hard is not an excuse for not blogging” so I’m going to say that I’ve been partying too hard and I’ve been too hung over to blog.

But I’m sitting now getting ready to watch the racing (I’m a Williams fan, but I think Kimi is going to take the championship) and writing this now; as Abstract Deviance says “Geek Nirvana”.

The primary topic of this post is a review of the SA Blog Awards.  I think it opened a lot of eyes about the nature of blogging in South Africa.  For myself, I never realised blogging was so big outside of the technical sphere; which makes me really think about Scoble’s comments about RSS feeds for websites.  Really, I would never have thought that there was a Food category!

Well done to all the winners of the SA Blog Awards for 2005 as well as to the runners up.

Personally, I feel invigorated by the awards and I’ve been having thoughts about what I can do in my blog to get a nomination next year.  I would like to compete in the Technical and Lifestyle categories; picking up best writing and best design along the way.  Currently I’m referred to as “Umm a guy from dotnet” by Aquila Online.

This isn’t a rant, but I do agree with Aquila that RSS feeds should be compulsory for a blog.  Even my news comes from a feed, why should I visit your site to know what’s going on; make a feed available for me and I’ll read it.

So the blogs I’m going read since going to the awards: Aqulia Online and Cherryflava.  Blog you should read because of the awards: Joblog, 2Oceansvibe and Commentary.

2005 South African Blog Awards - Conclusion

So I’ve been beaten to the blog by Jo’blog on the quickest post about the SA Blog Awards; but I want to commit to permanent memory the sites that I can remember in the drunken haze:

http://www.jamesfrancis.net/

http://www.jeanpant.com/

http://www.brokenkeyboards.com/

http://aquilaonline.blogspot.com/

http://www.splattermail.org/

http://chump-style.blogspot.com/

Personally I had an awesome time and I really look forward to the next blog dinner!

2005 South African Blog Awards

New RSS Reader - Thunderbird

For all its memory leaking faults, I really enjoyed using SharpReader above all others.  It had a simple to use and uncluttered interface; required nearly nothing in terms of configuration and didn’t come with features I didn’t need or want.

But it did take a big chunk of my memory, and it had issues being behind a firewall.

I looked at RSS Bandit (too many, preinstalled news feeds and a tonne of option to setup) and RSS Owl (the tabbing feature really doesn’t work for me); I even checked out Pluck (again, too much configuration and it was finicky on which RSS feeds it wanted to read) and I thought that I would be stuck with the unwanted love-child SharpReader.

Then Simon introduced me to Thunderbird.  Not only does it have a clean and neat layout, it was so easy to setup a feed.  Because it does primarily does email, I gave it my gmail account details and was given back all the functionality I could want in powerful email tool.  Now I can work with my web account offline!

Now if only there was a blogging plug-in, I would call Thunderbird my centralised web tool (and I might even install Firefox again to compliment it).  Hmm, I wonder if I’m geeky enough to build the plug-in myself.

If I have to have a fault with Thunderbird (just to keep consistency with finding issues with everything) it’s that it doesn’t minimise to the system tray.  However after visiting the plug-ins page, they are aware of this much needed feature, so I’m happy to wait until it appears.

So on the whole, I am one happy consumer; and I wish Mozilla all the success and fortunes that go with creating great software.

March SA Developer Wakeboarding - Conclusion

I need a break this week so I can recuperate from the weekend.  On Saturday was the SA Developer Wakeboarding Social, where Kevin was definitely king-of-the-hill/wake!  Special shout out to all the families who were dragged along by SA Dev members, I hope you all had a great time.

Depending on whether you’re a fan or not, we were lucky that to catch Millers having a huge promotion at Leisure Lakes the same day as our social.  This meant that the only beer available was Millers, but they put on a wakeboarding and motocross and were handing out cool prizes.  There was also a spray-paint board; so before the kids got to it, Ruari pulled out a bit of SA Dev urbz style on it.

Find all the photos of the event here, my personal favourite is Kevin and Kevin feeding the ducks in the evening.  I have to brag at this point that I bought myself a digital camera (Canon A400 Cybershot) earlier that day and all these photos were taken with it.

Stay tuned for the next SA Developer social, I want to have one more outdoor activity before winter forces us in doors; but so far the weather has been telling me otherwise.

March SA Developer Meeting - Conclusion

Arno, Kevin and I hosted our first SA Developer meeting last night and it was an awesome success!  Kevin organised the venue (thank you Torque-IT) and while Arno couldn’t be at the meeting (he had a customer in Nelspruit to look after), he was the one who arranged the awesome speaker.

About 17 members rocked up and I’m so happy to be able to match faces to forum screen names (this mean you phyreg0d).

And the speaker, Jorge Oblitas, gave an amazing talk on Web Portals for ASP.NET 2.0; it was so good that we had another talk after the snacks on web profiling.  We gave him a SA Developer cap and key ring to take back to Peru with him.

For me, the greatest success was the new evaluation forms.  The new forms ask questions about programming and company environment which the Leads can use to focus their events and the simpler residence questions make it to fill out and the leads can look for venues that are convenient for everyone.

Now our next step is a follow-up meeting to discuss what we can improve for the next meeting in April and then, onto the Wakeboarding social.

March SA Developer Dinner - Conclusion

We had leads, Regional Directors but where were you?

We’ve been having a successful tradition of having shots of tequila up in Johannesburg (thanks to Jonathan Scott); but last night at the SA Developer dinner I was presented with 5 to do in one session, because the Regional Directors and some of the leads chickened out!  I’m going to have to cancel this tradition before I have kidney failure.

Anyways, that aside, you all missed a really awesome dinner.  As soon as I can steal Ruari’s camera away from him long enough to download the pics, they’ll be blogged.  We had Jorge Oblitas and Jason there who are speaking on the Ascend program (Jorge is our speaker for SA Developers meeting on the 9^th March 2005) and it was really interested to speak to them and find out what are communities getting up to in other countries.

So make a plan to join us next time; wives, girlfriends and kids are more than welcome to join in too!

Interesting facts about Wakeboarding in South Africa

I just have to blog that if you google for “wakeboarding south africa” the SA Developer social event in March is ranked number 2!  I got this piece of information from someone emailing looking for more information (Hi, Tracey!)

So NOT ONLY must you all come and join in the activities on the 12^th March 2005 but I want you to bring your family and friend along for an awesome time too.  Also bring your cameras to catch the action on and off the water, as we’ll be braaing and making merry as well.

If you haven’t heard about the event yet, check it out here.

March SA Developer Meeting - Johannesburg, South Africa

I hope you’re all reading Kevin’s blog and are coming to the SA Developer meeting on the 9^th March 2005 at Torque IT

We have Jorge Oblitas speaking on ASP.NET 2.0!

Following the trend; PLEASE RSVP here, here, here or here so that we can get an idea of the catering requirements. If you are reading this and it’s late to RSVP don’t worry, just come anyway! We will also have some goodies to give away (thanks Ruari and Simon), so hope to see you all there.

You can find Jorge Oblitas' English blog here: http://truesouth.blogspot.com or in his home page (in Spanish) here: www.icuadrado.com