South Africa is in talks with Venezuela to buy oil directly, Venezuela has told the US Ambassador in their country to get out. Brazil is in talks with South Africa to increase trade.
Maybe this is the way the world needs to break free from the clutches of the United States and other bully countries; stop playing with them and start your own group of friends.
This is Uran. Uran is my cat. I am allergic to cats. I think Uran is very pretty.
Part the One:
Traffic fines have a habit of being illegible, however one wouldn’t expect this to carry over to the internet.
I by mistake RSIGN:STOPPINGNOM/VR217ed and it’s going to cost me R500, I just wish I knew what RSIGN:STOPPINGNOM/VR217ing was so that I can avoid doing it again.
Part the Two:
I generally give people the opportunity to be nice, but when they are not nice I generally come down on them like a ton of bricks. It’s how I am and I wish I wasn’t so all or nothing about my communication style.
Anyway, I have this little wager with a friend (at the moment it’s a beer but it should really be a bottle of Jamesons) that a perfectly polite, non-threatening, complaint email I sent to a certain company will not work. It was hard rewriting an email with the word ‘please’ in it when the previous version had some choice phrases like ‘shitty business practices’ etc in it.
I’ll keep you posted. Love that Jamesons.
Sometimes a little deadlining does miracles.
So here we go. I will be officially launching a private beta of Half Price Tuesdays on the 29th of September at the September Geekdinner, final details of which will be available shortly.
Unfortunately, if you’re not already on the list for the event you won’t be because it’s full, but I will open the beta to others shortly thereafter.
If you are coming to the dinner, please don’t expect fireworks or rocket-science; hpt was meant to be coded over a weekend, but I got carried away in the design phase.
A while ago I created this for graphjam:
It should be obvious to most of the readers of my blog that the use of “Tigers” and the placement of “Sudan” was purposeful.
Unfortunately half the commenters seem to be dumb people called “Brittany” (guess where she’s from) who are just clever enough to check the wikipedia article on tigers and yet not quite clever enough to grasp the point of the map.
Um, shouldn’t this be on Failblog? There are no tigers in Africa.
and:
Perhaps this should be on failblog due to the completely inaccurate placement of the Sudan.
With first prize going to this gentleman:
Technically most countries in africa carry no international significance. that’s the whole point of this map. and my lol’s.
I only wish I could convince myself that he’s trying to be incredibly sarcastic… but I can’t.
😦
Yesterday Lynnae and I went to the Homemakers Expo and the best thing about it was that I got a free back-issue Popular Mechanics which will live aside the toilet for the next few weeks. The second best thing was that we had media passes and didn’t waste R45 getting in.
I guess the problem with shows like this is that all the big vendors are totally over them. Why else would companies like Defy, Bosch, Smeg etc not be there? I can only imagine (as someone who has a tiny bit of trade show experience) that these companies learnt a long time ago that trade shows cost a bucketload of cash to put together and generally just frustrate your staff who end up having to work on weekends.
Nobody buys anything at trade shows, except, Wonder Mops (and other idiotic things like an egg cracking device).
Wait, picture this: We walk past a stand for something along the lines of “The Amazing Egg Cracker 6000”. Lynnae sighs and wants to walk on, but I, in a trainwreckian desire to hurt myself decide I *have* to know how they sell this thing. I walk over and ask for a demonstration. So the poor girl, who’s run out of eggs, begins “So what’s the problem with cracking eggs? Simple, you crack it on the side of the pan and egg ends up on your fingers, eggshells in the pan, and you invariably break the yolk!” she says, like she’s probably said over a thousand times in the last 5 hours. She looks up at me for that reciprocal head-nod.
I shake my head and say “Not really”.
She’s momentarily stunned by then carries on undeterred, “Well, with the Miracle Egg 6000 that’ll never happen again, you just put the egg in the device and squeeze the handle and instantly you have a perfectly cracked egg.”
“Thanks” I said as I walked away. I imagine that this is a wonderful invention for people with physical disabilities but for everyone else I think you’d be better off just buying 6 eggs and practicing on a Sunday afternoon. I’ve perfected (with a little help from my private chef) the single egg separation technique where you separate the egg white and yolk with the egg shell… Gotta learn how to do that with one hand though.
But, slightly more mind blowing than the egg cracker 6000 is the perpetual rollout of Wonder Mops and Miracle Orange Fibre stuff. The perveyors of this modern day snake oil have their routine so slick that you find yourself entranced by the bright colours and the disturbingly charming man with the Britney Spears microphone and smooth talking demeanor who occationally winks at the woman in the front row.
I was reminded of the old Westerns where the travelling salesmen stands beside his wagon and annouces his miracle cures for athritis and the black lung. Often telling the townsfolk that it is the most popular thing in the big cities and was invented in New York!
If there is one thing I remember from my youth (and we’re talking 20 years ago now) it’s the miracle mops, incredible dirt trapping floor mats and designed by NASA multicoloured dusters being sold at tradeshows (like Design For Living etc)… WHAT THE HELL DOES NASA NEED A MULTICOLOURED DUSTER FOR?
People! Nothing has changed in the past 20 years… Just like your multi-action, triple-flex, anti-bacterial, pro-enzyme, plaque-fighting toothbrush with the matrix-eque 3D graphics advertisements, everything at tradeshows is a big lie to make you pay too much for crap you don’t actually need.
Which is why the people who sell stuff you do actually need aren’t at the trade shows.
over.
Why must I be an asshole to get stuff done?
For about 3 years I’ve used Vodacom 3G without hassles. My usage has been random and it’s never made sense to buy a bunde (500mb). I just moved to woodstock and am going to be living without real internet for 2 months so, in an attempt to not be too broken by the R2 a megabyte charges, I “enabled” a 500mb ad-hoc bundle.
Within 5 minutes I got an SMS saying that my bundle had been activated.
That’s when my 3G stopped working.
Numerous calls on saturday and sunday left me dumbfounded. I heard the same story over and over again. Supposedly they had inadvertantly deactivated my data services on my account and just had to re-enable it and everything would be hunky dory again.
They’ve done that 4 times now, over 3 days, and it still isn’t working.
I’ve been told before that team leaders would call me back, that consultants would call me back… etc etc. NOBODY has called me back. Sounds a lot like Telkom actually.
I’ve now dealt with a callcenter team leader called Shakiel who supposedly is going to fix my problem… but it’s going to take 4 hours to “activate” the data services… He will supposedly call me at 5pm.
So when I needed 3G the most it completely fell apart. Well done Vodacom, your brilliance astounds me. Idiots!
UPDATE: It’s working again. Thanks to Sonny at Vodacom. It seems being as asshole works.
If you run a decent OS (linux) you should be able to:
sudo apt-get install fcrackzip
Then read the man page but know that there is one little gotcha. fcrackzip’s default brute force starting length is 5 characters and by default it will run up to 6 characters. The gotcha of course is that if your password is 4 characters long you will never find it. So always run it with the -l flag and start at 1.
jonathan@jonathan:~/Desktop$ fcrackzip secret.zip –verbose -b -l 1-10 -u
found file ‘fool.swf’, (size cp/uc 87763/172969, flags 9, chk 6136)
found file ‘file.exe’, (size cp/uc 632452/1176497, flags 9, chk 614d)
found file ‘logo.jpg’, (size cp/uc 49916/ 51346, flags 9, chk 6113)
found file ‘code.txt’, (size cp/uc 5661/ 34639, flags 9, chk 6141)
checking pw g:*~PASSWORD FOUND!!!!: pw == idea
Easy peasy. It finds that password in 0.796 seconds.
Someone owes me a beer 🙂
Monday was my birthday party, Tuesday was drinks with Pieter (the gay farmer from Augrabies), Wednesday was my actual birthday and dinner with the folks, which left thursday and friday night to essentially pack up my entire life into boxes. Which we did. 45 boxes to be exact, plus a crapload of furniture.
So on saturday morning my moving guys arrived and started hauling. I decided a few years ago that moving my own stuff is out of the question since it would require days and days of moving in my car, and, even if I could hire a bakkie, I would hate to have to carry a couch down 5 flights of stairs, and still take a ridiculous number of trips to get the job done.
So, by about 3pm on Saturday I was completely moved into Lynnae’s flat, which is a temporary arrangement until we can move into our house in 2 months. (Speak to me if you need a reliable and cheap mover)
So we spent the rest of Saturday sorting through stuff and packing cupboards. Sunday was our domestic day; we went shopping for drill bits, I fixed the toilet seat, went to fruit and veg city and made strawberry jam (from scratch). Oh, and we made an awesome curry for supper that is also going to be tonight’s supper.
Now I need a holiday.
I’m moving to Woodstock on Saturday for 2 (maybe 3) months. This is this morning’s XKCD. Serendipity is crazy. Although I won’t be using the cantenna that Lourens and I actually did make ourselves — because my 14 dbi panel antenna is a little more reliable.
Speaking of moving; we spent last night packing stuff into boxes, I think we’re about 60% of the way and, as usual, I can’t believe the amount of crap I have. It’s not that it’s junk, it’s just stuff…
Luckily most of the stuff is just going to stay in boxes until we move into the house in Obs.
Thank god for movers & girlfriends!
ps. I am looking for a cheap supplier of BNC connectors (male and female)… does anyone have any they want to flog or know of somewhere that sells them at reasonable prices?
(I really need to fix this wordpress template so I don’t need to do this.)
arbitraryuser 