Autodesk is mom jeans

Where do I start?

Ok, firstly, the Mom Jeans thing is a polite way of saying “you suck”. It comes from the Hillary meme.

I’ve been planning on building a multiple hard drive mount for ages… Yes I’m a nerd, get over yourself.

Basically I want to build something that can hold up to 8 drives and cool them efficiently. This will sit next to my server and be plugged in via 1m sata cables (as soon as I can find someone in SA who has them)

Being the nerd I am I’ve done some sketches and technical drawings of what I want to put together, but since I am such an incredibly raging nerd I figured I would download the autocad trial and model it properly so that I would have a very accurate cutting list. (The chassis is going to be made out of wood)

I go to the autocad website and click download trial. It says that this offer is only available in the united states and canada… and they do IP based filtering to enforce that.

Now please, for the love of science, WHAT THE EFFF?

What is so special about your trial software that other countries can’t have it? Seriously? Oh, they’ll SELL it to me no matter where I live… but if you want the trial you have to be in North America. What kind of stupid, idiotic, short-sighted, ignorant pea brained idiot thought this up? There I was thinking autocad is so cool and I’m going to use the trial to model my little weekend project… and I end up thinking you’re a bunch of idiots. Well played autodesk, well played.

Obviously I could connect to a shell server in the US and download it from there and then pull it down to South Africa, but, THAT WOULD BE BREAKING THE LAW!!!

Or I could just download the full version that won’t expire via bittorrent.

Doing either would be illegal.

Obviously I did neither.

j.

(As a side note: Yes, I realise that autocad is windows software and I will need to run in it a virtualised windows environment. I could not find any open source alternatives that looked like they would do the job. May the nerdosphere have mercy.)

(As a secondary side note: Autodesk, why do you do this? May I offer a suggestion? Your software is very specifically for a particular set of specialised industries that rely heavily on it. People like me just want to model our little weekend projects. I’m sure there are plenty of people just like me who have probably broken the law (unlike me,obviously), propagating your piracy problems. Why don’t you offer a free lightweight cad program that can be used by hobbyists. I’m sure you know what kind of feature sets would be applicable to hobbyists and what kind of features you could only make available in the full version. This would result in an entire community of people who love your software and your company. Those kinds of people do not pirate. )

Africa is family…

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of people saying stuff like “If the rand gets any worse I’m leaving…”.

While I don’t blame you for your sentiment, I would like to point something out. Living in Africa, specifically South Africa comes with its own set of pros and cons… a set which are as unique as our curious culture.

We live in a fascinatingly evolving time. South Africa has its crime, poverty and education issues, but we also have the singularly unique position of hope for the future…

Ten years ago, while the first portable MP3 player was hitting the shelves in America, we were in the midst of one of the most important political revolutions the world has ever seen. Ten years on they have the iPhone and an economy that is teetering on collapse, oil prices that have skyrocketed and more debt than they can possibly ever escape from.

Perhaps you would rather live in the UK? Healthcare issues, increasing crime, increasing debt, pollution, crappy weather and British people (I joke)… While I will always have fond memories of London, on the last occasion I was there (which was for 3 days) I couldn’t get over how it felt like things were slipping… Stuff didn’t look as neat as it did 6 years earlier and the people all seemed a little more depressed and negative than they did before.

South Africa, on the other hand, has potential and I’m already happier living here than I was when I was living in London. I have a good job, I work with good people, I get paid a fair amount (could always be more, joe), I have a wonderful standard of living and a great Afrikaans girlfriend. (Granted there are a lot of Afrikaans girls in London, but you miss the point)

And like I said, we have potential… We have about a gazillion unemployed people out there all with the potential to come up with something great. We have similar numbers going through our school system, which admittedly is a different system to what school was like 10 years ago. School, and ultimately African ingenuity, is preparing these kids (those who have a hunger to succeed) for greatness.

Just the other day I met two black guys from Guguletu who run internet cafes in the location and want to start up a Wireless ISP… These are not Rondebosh high school boys… these are boys who went to school in the township and are hungry to succeed. And the fact that increasingly more South Africans are earning money is what is making it possible… That is inspiring… if these guys succeed you know that their kids will have the opportunities that their parents never had. There are a gajillion other stories just like this.

Sure, there are stories of tragedy every day and at a level that is probably unmatched by any other countrty in the world, but, I like to take the Wikipedia approach… If enough people are working together towards a common positive goal we will exceed the forces working against us and ultimately live in a better country.

I don’t ever expect the roads to be paved with gold, but I’d rather live in a country with hope than a country of hopelessness. And there is Africa in my blood…

The Dyatlov Pass "Accident"

Nine experienced mountaineers are found dead in the freezing Russian Urals… from the looks of things they were woken up in the middle of the night and somehow “blinded” by “something”, chased semi-naked through snow into the forest where they tried to make a small fire with green twigs to stay alive… there was perfectly good firewood nearby — they just couldn’t see it… 3 were then killed by “something” and the other six died of hypothermia.

Oh, and one of them had his tongue cut out… and their skin was orange… and this is all supposedly true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_Accident

Blair witch eat your heart out. (not literally)

Updated lateness apology: In my rush to get to work this morning I forgot to thank Jonathan Hitchcock for sending me this link.

Microsoft Gold Certification means nothing…

Many years ago I worked for a company who was a Microsoft certified partner. This was a long long time ago and I must admit that back then I was quite impressed by the fact that they were Microsoft certified partners… until I started working there. Redmond hands out certifications like a crack whore hands out cheap tricks — indiscriminately and to anyone who’s willing to pay fifty bucks.

Needless to say, this morning I was reading my gmail when I saw an ad for a “Microsoft GOLD Certified Development Partner based in Cape Town” and being the sado-masochist I am I clicked on the link… it was one of those /showpage.aspx?page_id=36 sort of sites. Ugly, but not necessarily dodgy. I put an apostrophe in the page id to see if they were cleaning their inputs and behold:

Line 166: Octigon.Octane8.Containers.Page tempPage = this._page;
Line 167:
Line 168: while (tempPage.Id != 1)
Line 169: {
Line 170: if (tempPage.Parent.Id == 1)

This shows that the site is vulnerable to sql injection… which, while not necessarily implying that the site can be hacked, does imply that, given enough time, you probably could hack it or at least cause some damage. The page also pukes out all kinds of file paths and stuff that would be useful if you were trying to do them harm.

The point here is this. Why is a web development company who are obviously bad web developers Microsoft Gold Certified?

The answer can only be that Gold Certification means absolutely nothing.

THE WHOLE F-ING POINT OF THE STRUGGLE WAS THAT OUR KIDS COULD GROW UP WATCHING DSTV INSTEAD OF GETTING SHOT IN THE FACE IN SHARPVILLE!

You have to say it and try and sound like a 13 year old:

“It’s a democratic country and you can’t make me to do it!”

I imagine that would have been my response to my teachers if I was being forced to say an oath every day in school.

And ironically I would have been right… I would have been zit faced and snot nosed, but I would have been absolutely, categorically, right! In a democratic state you can not force anyone to recite a statement of beliefs, especially in the form of a promise to that state, against their will.

Your age does not affect your democratic freedom and I’ll tell you why: The ANC Youth League.

The ANC Youth League was founded on the ideals that the youth of South Africa were powerful and wanted freedom from the oppressive state. Kids are also easily radicalised and will cause untold shit if they all band together and you don’t listen to them.

And so it is unfortunate that we have let those radical ideals of freedom slip away from us to the extent that some people in government think it’s a good idea to institute a compulsory oath to our schools.

Imagine if they wanted to add this compulsory oath to the workplace. Imagine if every morning at 11am everyone in your office had to stand and recite a promise to uphold the constitution and forgive the past injustices… I’m trying not to swear here, but let me just say that most of us would be very very very pissed off and would probably end up rioting on the streets. One of the core precepts of a constitutional democracy is that you have the right to challenge that constitution.

Why should children be treated any other way?. If I had a kid in school today I would tell him that he can recite the oath if he wants, but he could, if he wanted to, recite my oath:

natalie_with_gun.jpg
Hey, when else am I going to be able to legitimately add a picture of Natalie with a gun to my blog?

“We the youth of South Africa, recognising the hotness of Jessica Biel, honour those heroes who shape our porous minds like Tony Hawk, Steve Jobs and Natalie Portman”

“We promise to argue with our parents about music, play video games and score chicks”

“We sincerely declare that we shall eat Nandos, Bunk School, Watch too much TV, Sneak our dad’s alcohol out of the house on a Friday night, Spend way too much time on facebook, Tell our dad’s we love them occasionally, Try our best not to be fat asses and most of all, always be kief to other people.”

Now that’s an oath… These are kids. The injustices of their past is that yesterday the DSTV wasn’t working.

THE WHOLE F-ING POINT OF THE STRUGGLE WAS THAT OUR KIDS COULD GROW UP WATCHING DSTV INSTEAD OF GETTING SHOT IN THE FACE IN SHARPVILLE!

SO why the hell is the government making 6 year olds say “We the youth of South Africa, recognising the injustices of our past…”? I hope like hell that those kids don’t recognise the injustices of their past, because that past is disgusting, filled with oppression, police brutality, racism, exploding packages ripping people’s limbs off their bodies in their own houses, incarceration, children being shot in the back, unfair education policies, segregation, heroes being murdered and a whole lot of other stuff I’d rather my kids learnt about properly, at the right age, than have flippantly wafted in their faces every day.

This makes me pissed off.

Oh, and remember that radical freedom movement, The ANC Youth League? Well, guess what they want to do… Yup, you guessed it. They want to ban the sale of alcohol on Sundays… I shit you not. The descendants of the actual heroes who actually got shot in the face for the implicit freedoms of this country now want to introduce a law that has been proven to only really affect the poor and UCT students, and has nothing to do with morality or alcoholism.

I suggest this. How about the ANC Youth League members, those who joined because they want to uphold the ideals of the group, not buy alcohol on Sundays.

Where is the love? – Chapter 1

Love is not something we generally associate with business — we don’t love most of the companies we deal with and more unfortunately, most people don’t even love their own jobs. If you’re in business it is more than likely that your company doesn’t love your customers (beyond what could be considered blatant cupboard/money love) and even if your company doesn’t hate its customers, it probably isn’t partaking in public-displays-of-affection towards them or even letting them know how they feel.You might think I’m joking. But you’d be wrong.

Unless you’re in the business of manufacturing leopard print kitchen appliances that only work in small Eastern European countries, the chances are that someone else is doing what you’re doing, and probably better. The longer I am involved with businesses the more I realise that most consumers seem to pick the companies they deal with in a seemingly random manner. It’s not really random, and there are plenty of books out there detailing why consumers act the way they do and if you care to study them you’ll probably end up with the same conclusion I did; that humans are herd-like animals, apparently no more intelligent at choosing which grassy hill to stand on then a pack of cows on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

cows2.jpgAnd this for the most part is reality… Consumers choose one company over another because other people are doing it and aren’t spontaneously self-combusting. Spontaneously Self Combustion seems to be the benchmark for good service these days. If the customers aren’t exploding the company must be doing a good job.

But like young Brook Shields felt in the first part of Blue Lagoon, there must be more to this.

Who is that first cow and why did he walk onto that particular hill? We know why all the other cows followed him — because cows are like humans, a little bit stupid.

That first cow was probably a lover.

He loved the feeling of the dewy grass under his hooves, he loved the way the mist sat peacefully in the lower lying parts of his hill. He loved how he could return to his perfect spot where the grass was perfect and the sun was perfectly aligned so as to warm up his bum and not be in his eyes. And how the tree was nearby for later when it got too hot and he wanted some shade… and the view… he loved the view. It reminded him of Scotland.

All the other cows went up onto that hill because that’s what cows do… that and our lover cow hadn’t yet exploded.

Consumers, as I have already pointed out, are a lot like cows. We do love to have the sun shine on our bums and not in our eyes. And when we find a company that makes us feel that way we generally stay with them for a long time.

Unfortunately companies are not grassy hills. Generally they suck. They take your money and give you just enough of whatever it is that they’re meant to be giving you so that you don’t go mad cow on their scrawny, dried up grass, no shady tree, hill asses.

In my imaginary little world I like to believe that that perfect hill is actually loving that cow back… loving how his hooves feel running down its back, loving how the cow stands in the same spot, chewing on his puke and gazing happily into the distance. The hill loves feeling loved.

There is a problem though. Cows don’t have money.

If cows had money our lover cow would become a perverted cow. He’d look to see which hill he could get for less and could he perhaps swap the tree for a small umbrella and maybe the grass didn’t really need to be real grass so long as when he ate it he didn’t explode.

This is what customers have become. Selfish perverted annoying little brats who make you angry and call you at 6:15 when you’re just about to go home and moan that their widget isn’t working just like you promised it would and if you don’t make it work RIGHT NOW they’re going to leave your company and start using that other company who’s customers also aren’t exploding.

And then we wonder why we don’t love our customers… and why they don’t love us.

There is another way. Love. Imagine if your customer loved you and the widget. Imagine if you loved your customer. You probably would have spent more time on that widget, setting it up just right because you loved the way the customer loved you when their widget was working perfectly… and if your customer loved you and their widget still didn’t work they’d call in the morning because they’d know it would be an inconvenience to call at 6:15pm. Because you loved them and they loved you.

You may think I am mad, but there *are* company-consumer relationships like this.

My idea of shocking Valentines gifts…

Moo.com LoveMy girlfriend and I have been noticing the ridiculous amount of utter valentines garbage that is being punted by the various retail chains… PnP, Clicks and yes, even you Woolworths!

Last night we were debating what the most hideous valentines gifts would be. I think we may have them.

For Her: Worlds Greatest Lover Trophy

Stylishly injection molded from recycled toilet seats, with a faux wooden finish sticker around the base, this trophy screams “I love you this much”. It’s also larger than you think. It must be able to hold a litre of beer. Perhaps that should be the serving suggestion. On second thoughts, perhaps “You’re my number one” would be more tacky?

For Him: Homemade Droewors Necklace

Nothing says I love you more than small pieces of dried flesh and congealed fat tastefully threaded together with a rusty needle you borrowed from your mom. To add that special something we suggest threading a “sweety pie”, foil and all, in the middle so as to create a stylish centerpiece of love.

I am so tempted to make one of these.

love

j.

I'm watching you Mr Zuma.

Perhaps this is too late? But it must be said… I’m watching you Mr Zuma.

Jacob Zuma is undoubtedly (short of being found guilty of some or other fraudulent activity, and even then one can’t be sure…) going to become our next president. He will be democratically elected in a free and fair election. He will ride to his victory by being the champion of the people. Well, I’m a people and I have some stuff to say.

I can look past the multiple wives. I can even *gasp* look past the womanising with one of his struggle comrade’s daughters… She was 31, a fact that the media repeatedly seemed unable to report — preferring the phrase “young daughter” instead. Bill Clinton was one of the better U.S. presidents with regards to policy and finance. He too had a womanising problem, but he never led the U.S. into a recession or sent their boys to die in an unnecessary war.

JZ was found not guilty. We have to respect the courts, especially in the political climate at the time… For those South African’s still living in a dualistic, white vs black world, you need to wake up and realise that just because the government is predominantly black, doesn’t mean they all like each other. If Mbeki had wanted to, and our courts were flexible enough with their justice, one could assume that Zuma would have been found guilty… but he wasn’t, and to me that says that he probably was innocent. Bottom line: There were plenty of powerful people who would have loved for him to disappear… but he didn’t. However Mr Zuma, you have said some pretty stupid things; case in point being your statement in court about showering after sex with an HIV positive woman. Now I realise that unlike Mr Mbeki, you didn’t attend fancy universities overseas and learn about how not to stick your foot in your mouth, BUT, that was a pretty stupid thing to say. One that resonated throughout South Africa, and the world, like the sound of a bone snapping in some horrific youtube video of a guy falling off his skateboard. I hope like hell that you realise how much you made us cringe.

I must however admit that my overwhelming optimism is beating a path for you in the bush of skepticism that is my current outlook on your looming presidency.

You did not go to a fancy university and learn how to be calculated and politically correct, and inefficient. You are a champion of the people. (or at least you claim to be). You have spoken out against South Africa’s lack of response with regards to Zimbabwe. You have promised to work hard at eradicating poverty. You are essentially spouting all the rhetoric that is required of the non-incumbent, with one small difference… you might just follow through.

Case in point, Thabo Mbeki. Great guy, comes from a great family but about as politically active and efficient as the Queen Mother. I can’t think of anything he did besides not say stuff… even with your own fraud and rape trials, the very leader of this country spoke in calculated, non-committal terms and never once gave the impression that he actually had a point of view. While this might be the “presidential way”, it’s certainly not something that the “people” want.

South Africa does face a lot of unique challenges, foremost being the gap between rich and poor, which manifests itself in our high crime rate. Sure, we might have corrupt police chiefs and/or corrupt officials, but so do many other countries who don’t have ridiculous murder and rape statistics.

This is a grass roots issue… the average Joe needs to be able to get a job and live a dignified life before we can expect the crime rates to actually drop to reasonable levels.

I hope like hell that you truly are the champion of the people and will be the leader, not of a party, but of a group of knowledgeable South Africans dedicated to making South Africa a better place. I don’t care if you get another 10 wives in the process. This is Africa, we need an African leader. I just hope we’ve found a good one in you. And if the job wasn’t hard enough, you need to put the people first while not pissing off the middle class and the elite.

Ultimately Mr Zuma, history will judge you, not the media. Your term comes at a time where South Africans are still predominantly voting along cultural lines and no true opposition exists. You have, as they say, “got it in the bag”. But as South Africa matures there will be greater pressure from the people for a government that is not dominated by one party. South Africa is evolving… So Mr Zuma, take it as a foregone conclusion that during your term the pressure to govern with excellence will increase, perhaps not to the point where you or the ANC need worry about losing grip, but perhaps enough to highlight any cracks in your stature that might be showing… and if those cracks exist there will be pressure to purge you and appoint the new hero du jour… Mbeki took the safe option, he never stuck his neck out and as a result he can leave office without looking too bad, or too good. I think it is a foregone conclusion that with your charismatic personality you will be sticking your neck out… South Africa will be watching and hoping for the best.

The people might not be revolting, but they are fickle.

Ps. If you need any help with decision making, I’m always available on my cell.

J.