2008 in review.

2008 was a good year; incredible things happened and they all happened so fast!

  • The girl and I started dating.
  • I started writing about politics again.
  • I started drinking beer.
  • I finally read the entire “Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
  • I reaffirmed my love of this country.
  • I started cooking more, bought proper knives, learnt how to bake bread.
  • Something I wrote got featured on Stumbleupon
  • I sailed to knysna on a tiny yacht.
  • I moved my stuff to a server in Germany.
  • I got featured on GraphJam
  • Started learning about buying property, prices, bonds etc.
  • Started reading up on analyst predictions for the interest rate and its drivers.
  • I stopped using my credit card.
  • We bought a house!
  • We started hiking.
  • I moved to woodstock, temporarily.
  • I stopped being allergic to one, very lovable, cat.
  • We moved to our house in Observatory and started working… 🙂
  • Obama won!
  • We started cycling, although much to Lynnae’s disapproval I am not doing the Argus.
  • We grow, and eat, our own veggies and herbs.
  • I hurt my foot.
  • I learnt how to plaster, work with expandable foam, grout, paint quickly and generally fix things that needed fixing.

2009 looks to be an interesting year… I believe that the political landscape will be shifted drastically, and 2009 might turn out to be the second most important year in South Africa’s history.

I was productive in 2008… not as productive as I would have liked, but still, a huge step up from previous years. My goal for 2009 is to be even more productive and self disciplined.

Make 2009 fulfull all your deepest desires.

The coming revolution…

The internet, for all it’s vices, has made the world an incredibly small place. I buy books from Seattle, business cards from London and storage space from San Diego. I chat with friends in New Zealand, India, Finland and Joburg on a daily basis. At ground level the online economy seems pretty stable. Online businesses are lean, mean, fighting machines forged in the dot-bomb furnace. Compared to the sumo wrestling auto industry we’re Ethiopian long distance runners. (Enough with the analogies now)

The offline world however is in a crisis, big corporations are falling over on a weekly basis… most of them failing due to fat cat, short sighted management, while others are just innocent victims of the carpet bombing that is this economic train wreck.

Then I read things like this. George Oates, one of the key people and designer at Flickr, got let go by Yahoo, who bought flickr a few years ago. It’s not so much the fact that they let George go, but rather they way they did it… Basically getting her manager to call her while she was overseas and read a message to her from a scripted “cheers” letter. Her blog post about the ordeal is brutal. Within 14 hours of the call she had lost all her privileged access to all that was flickr; something that had been the centre of her life for many many years.

George’s story is the logical conclusion of the ‘corporatised’ world that we’ve all bought into… and I think the world is starting to see the folly in supporting a system that can turn around and kick you out when you least expect or deserve it.

I have this sense that people are starting to dislike, and distrust, big corporations. In the 50’s and 60’s corporations were the saviours of the failing economy, hell, if you could work for a corporation you were sitting pretty… Working for a corporation meant you had a stable job and even though all you got for 50 years of service was a hundred dollar watch (who needs a watch when you’re retired anyway?), you were happy to have had the job.

But the world is different now, for whatever reasons people expect more from life than just ‘having a job’. We want to have fun, be challenged, enjoy working, laugh, be successful and get home on time to have make supper for our smiling kids and watch 30 Rock on Tivo.

So where does this leave the workforce? Well, the internet is making *not* working for a corporation easier and easier. Now days your small print shop in a side street of London can turn into an international brand with customers from Tibet to Texas, but, most importantly, that small print shop doesn’t need to become a overweight corporation in order to carry on being successful. It’s the long tail global customer effect. Hell, you could sell clothing for conjoined twins on the internet and still swing a profit.

Perhaps more interestingly though, the internet has made running your own company a lot easier. Re-read that last sentence. The internet has been around for almost a gabillion years now, but it seems like only in the last 5 years has the promise of “running an online business from your garage” come true.

Perhaps the supreme irony of the situation is that Yahoo itself was once a small company that got big, and in turn bought up flickr, the blood, sweat and tears of a small team, most of whom have subsequently left Yahoo or been fired. How different life would have been for all those people who gave birth to flickr, if they’d just stayed a small team who focused on being the best and staying happy while doing it…

Corporations have been holding the workforce hostage… but the distributed client base and self organisation of the internet is starting to make it harder and harder to not start your own thing, or join a small company with big vision.

Similarly customers are more and more looking for micro providers, buying local produce, supporting up and coming manufacturers and looking to identify themselves as unique by buying products that weren’t made in batches of a million. Perhaps it’s the inherent knowledge that the companies that are producing t-shirts in batches of a million are run by the same kind of people that will fire you from the very company you helped start and feel nothing while doing it.

You’re a person… let the machines be the robots. The revolution is coming, and it won’t be televised, it’ll be broadcast.

5 Reasons to Vote

1. Every vote counts.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” – Margaret Mead.

2. It is irresponsible not to vote.

While you might feel that your life is okay, your vote could be the difference for someone else between clean drinking water and disease ridden rivers, between having a job or living a life of crime, between life and death.

3. Vote for the best candidate, don’t expect a perfect candidate.

I’ve heard people say that they don’t believe that any party deserves their vote. The reality is that no political party will ever be perfect. If you don’t like it, either join the party that’s closest to your ideology or, if you really want to excercise democracy, start your own party and vote for yourself.

4. You don’t have to win to make a difference.

It might not be possible for the party you support to win the election but having a strong opposition in government keeps the ruling party in check.

5. Fifteen years.

Only Fifteen years…  That’s how long ago black South Africans could not vote. That’s a blink of an eye in terms of the history of this country. Thousands of innocent South Africans died in the struggle… a struggle for freedom that manifested itself in the form of a piece of paper with a cross on it. Whether you’re black, white, or any shade in between, not making your mark on that piece of paper now, only 15 years later, would be disrespectful to those people who sacrificed their lives for your freedom.

Quality Vacation Club Scam

Just to add my 2c to the herd.

There is a group of people who operate under various names and basically phone people, tell them they’ve won a car or something and then make them attend a prize giving where they discover they’ve won nothing but then subsequently get lured into some contract holiday garbage which invariably ends up costing them way more than they expected. This bait and switch operation is the very definition of a scam.

Long story short, if someone phones you and says you’ve won something, don’t believe them… alternatively you can tell them to drop off the car at your house when they have a moment 🙂

In the mean time, another South African blogger wrote some stuff about the scam on his blog and QVC are subsequently trying to sue him for over half a million rand, which is basically their way of saying “We’re bigger than you”… well, they might be, but they’re not bigger than all of us.

You can read more about this case here and here

ps QVC, aka Quality Vacation Club, aka Prestige Business Solutions, aka Unique Connections, aka World Connect/VIP/VIP World Connect, aka Prime Vision, aka Media Magic, aka Mega Communications, aka Ezweni Communications, aka Dynamic Communication, aka Real Communications/Real Communication, aka Ecoworld, aka Market Matrix.

Why would a legitimate business need so many aliases?

I encourage other bloggers to get this story out into the wild so that these con artists start to feel the google crunch.

My Foot!

Jou Ma Se Seun Se Voet!A week ago I had an interesting and surprisingly funny, even at the time, incident with an abandoned building and a floorboard that didn’t want to be a floorboard any more.

The wound has healed nicely but the pain in my ankle is still plaguing me so I finally decided to get an X-Ray just in case something was actually wrong. The Radiologist says that I haven’t broken anything but that I should “keep off it for a few days to give it a chance to heal”… I assume he’s a big fan of levitation then.

Anyway, I’ve organised parking in my building and crutches. Now I just need to figure out how to levitate.

Mostly pictures of our cat (and a few of the house)

I finally got around to downloading the pictures off my camera and discovered that most of them are pictures of the cat. I think this means I am officially a cat blogger.

More pictures

In other news, I was exploring an abandoned/demolished building and fell through the floor into the crawlspace (about 1.5m). Yes, laugh it up. I’m okay. My ankle is bit busted up and I have a nice cut on my leg that is starting to get emo.

This weekend was another relatively productive one. I ran cables RF+CAT6 through the walls so we no longer have cabling running down the passage and then fitted a cupboard thing in the bathroom. We were supposed to go for another bike ride but then I did the floor falling thing. We did have tea (well, chocolate milkshakes and scones and milktart) at Rhodes Memorial too.

We also finished watching the end of Season 1 of Californication. Excellent series… Probably the best television series I’ve ever watched. Can’t wait for Season 2.

Over and out.

There is nothing worse than an expat asshole.

So we had a lovely dinner with my folks and then after they had said their goodbyes I checked my email and was left seething. An asshole ruined the entire evening.

I’m on a number of civic mailing lists for Observatory, the suburb we live in. One particularly active list is the neighbourhood watch list which is peppered with crime reports and the occasional report of residents aiding the police (who’re doing an incredible job) catching criminals.

It can be a daunting list to be on. Especially before you even move in. But soon you realise that crime is everywhere and that being on this list is like spending your days in the police station… You’re going to hear about a lot of crime.

Pessimists piss me off. People who think they’re being smart by saying thing like “Oh, It’s obviously going to go the way of Zimbabwe” etc etc. What these fuckers don’t seem to realise is that assholes like them have been saying shit like that since the dark ages. I have a friend whose grandfather sold everything in 1990 because he was convinced that Mandela was going to take his home. He died, bitter and twisted, in a caravan, while all around him the Rainbow Nation smiled.

Anyway, back to the mailing list. Some asshole, who has already fled the country, in reply to a report about a cash in transit robbery that happened in front of a child, felt the need to basically tell everyone that we’re fucked and “Get out of that hellhole which South Africa has become!” and “There’s no future in SA for you and your children”. He also went on about white suburbs and how the criminals hate our skin colour.

My reply was cordial. I suggest politely that he never post on the list again because we don’t really need his pessimism.

But here’s what I wanted to say.

You ignorant fuckwad. You racist, bigoted, coward. How dare you come onto a public forum and spout your simple-minded drivel, aimed at nothing else but undermining the good that these people are doing. The blood of generations of slain innocents stains our soil and punctuates our history…The struggle is not new or unique. Our legend is one of truth and reconciliation, of forgiveness and grace… and I would be honoured to have my own blood take its place in this soil while I worked to make this country better. You on the other hand ran away. You asked whether we love our children more than our country… My answer to that, you shallow dipshit, is that no parent wants to see their child hurt, but I would rather build a better future for all the children of this country than teach my own that running away is an option. In short, fuck you and the horse you left town on.

I didn’t post that because it’s a public list and we’re trying to be civil.

I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with a Zimbabwean the other day. He, like millions of other Zimbabweans, left their country because the realistic alternative was starvation or torture. He will never be anything but Zimbabwean. He has a passion and a deep love for his country. He knows that HOPE is greater than FEAR. He believes that normal people make a difference, even in light of insurmountable obstacles. He knows that the human spirit can stop tanks and dictators even when their bodies can’t.

A lot of what Tawanda, the Zimbabwean, knows about the human spirit was taught to him by us. South Africa.  A country where the story is so incredible that people would have not believed it if it were not for CNN.

This blood in our soil belongs to men and woman far greater than any of us can comprehend. Millions of unsung heros, children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters… I could not dishonour their sacrifice by running away now.

And hey, I’m actually loving my life. You’re the miserable dude in the first world telling other people how fucked their lives are over the internet.

ps. I have no issues with people leaving the country because they just want to live somewhere else. My sister lives permanently in the UK. She left for a whole bunch of reasons, crime was obviously a factor but it wasn’t the biggest factor. She can’t wait to come home for holidays.

pps. I don’t have any children.