Month: June 2007

10pin bowling — And the winners are ..

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Yesterday afternoon a bunch off us (about 40 – 8 teams) from work went 10pin bowling at TygerValley.  After some fierce competition there was a winning team.

In the photo from left to right is Tertia (yes the one and only from So Close), Fouche, Adam, Cobus and myself.  Now it must be said that we probably had a slight unfair advantage with Tertia in the team. What she lacked in 10pin bowling she made up in disrupting all the other teams with clicking photos of them and just getting in their way.  Thanks a lot Tertia.

In the end it was a great gathering which carried on till late in the evening for some of us.  Kevin, hope you made it home.

Thanks must go to Tertia and Andre for organizing a great afternoon/evening.

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27dinner – 27 June 2007

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Firstly I am back to using ScribeFire to blog since Qumana did not live up to my expectations .. for some reason it will just die on me at the most unappropriated time.

Yesterday evening I went to the 27dinner held at the Hotel School and overall it was a great evening.  Not as good as the first one at the Hotel School but great none the less.  The food was ok .. nothing to write home about and the last talk did not go down well — rather not mention names.

Once again Stormhoek provided some wine — Graham, the pink one is not for me thanks but the Shiraz on the table was great.

I met 2 guys from Die Burger who attended this for the first time — sorry guys but with all the new people I already forgot your names.  It is good to see old media embracing new media.

Met some people in real life that I have met previously in the virtual world.  Eric and Lorynne, it is was good to meet.  Lorynne, you must have a great time in Spain.  Oh and the guy from Yeigo .. good to meet somebody whose product I am actually using.

And then there was all the old faces — Dave, Max, Nikki, Tania, Joe, Malan, Henk and a couple of people I probably have left out.

Lastly thanks for the cupcake.

Other blog entries:

I really need to find a way so that I remember the next morning who the people was that I met .. is it ok to ask for a business card or something at these kind of events? 

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Blogging, laptops, rugby and 27dinners

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This blog post is written using Qumana as an offline blogging editor.  I have been using ScribeFire mostly but it was time to try something new and when Luis mentioned it in a blog entry, I gave it a try. BTW if anyone knows of a blogging tool that support ATOM publishing then let Luis know.

I got another laptop this week, unfortunately not a new one but a hand-me down, to replace my failing HP.  It is an IBM Thinkpad T42, and what a major improvement over previous laptops I had.  This is the first IBM Thinkpad I have used and now I understand why people are so happy with Thinkpads.  It just feels more robust and nothing beats the clarity and resolution of the screen.  It is just a pleasure to work on it.

This coming week it is time for Cape Town to have its 27dinner again.  It is again being held at the Hotel School and if the previous one is any indication, then this one should not be missed.  Hope to see some of you there.

I have to say something about this afternoons rugby.  To be brutally honest, I have no idea what the outcome is going to be.  My heart say Boks all the way, but I think with the injuries and changes, it is going to be an uphill battle for the Boks.  And to go into the match with a brand new captain is not going to be easy.  I am just worried that Victor might struggle in the line-outs due to the extra pressure of being the captain.  We need him at his best in the line-outs.

Now onto my all-time pet hate .. these chain e-mails that people just forward …I hate it, hate it, hate it. So if you happen to be one of those people that send this crap to me then please, and I am asking nicely, STOP it.  Anja said it even better than I could.

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IBM announces Quickr

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We knew this was in the making but Quickr has now been officially announced by IBM … the Quickr Blog has all the details.  The date for General Availability is 29 June 2007 which happen to be the same date Lotus Connections will be available.

So what is Lotus Quickr .. I quote

an open standards-based team collaboration tool that helps teams inside and outside the company firewall easily and effectively work together across geographies, working styles and operating systems.

Lotus Quickr provides a rich set of team collaboration capabilities, including blogs, wikis and team space templates supporting a variety of business processes to get a collaboration project up and running quickly.

Now I just need to get my hand on using these tools.

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Day at the Rugby — South Africa vs Australia

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Thanks to Deon and Pieter from Clickatell, I was invited to the rugby game yesterday between South Africa and Australia.

I was picked up at home and then again dropped off back at home, thanks Deon for being the taxi driver. Met some great guys, Deon, Christo (he started 20Twenty bank and is now into Hotels),  Andre and Arthur — was good to meet you guys. Arrived at Groote Schuur High School ground around 1pm where a great lunch was served and lots of beers consumed.  Werner Greeff was the guest speaker .. think he should rather stay at playing rugby/golf than speaking 🙂

Around 2:30 we made our way across to the stadium and took our seats just in time for the teams taking to the field. What a great game of rugby.  Nerve raking for the last 10 minutes or so but hey we won and that is what counts.  Think we need to do better next week against the All Blacks if we want to win again.  I tend to forget how much better it is to be part of 50000 people at the game rather than to watch it on TV.  Yes, you have a better view of the close up game on TV but nothing beat 50000 cheering fans.

After the game we bumped and pushed our way out of the stadium back to the hospitality tent for some celebrating beers and dinner.  There were some lucky draws and a fellow table guest won a hospitality package to the South African/New Zealand cricket game at Newlands in November.

Thanks again to Clickatell for inviting me.

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Good to be a South African!! — Synthasite

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One of the RSS feeds that show up in my feed reader is of Ajax Magazine.  One of the feeds was on Synthasite, developed in Cape Town, South Africa.

It is good to see work done in South Africa gets mentioned on prominent international sites and being tested by big companies like Amazon.

Synthasite is also being tested on
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which in theory allows it to be
infinitely scalable, although accounts will initially be limited.

I have not had a look at Synthasite yet but will give it a test and see how it performs.

Well done to Vinny and the team .. keep up the good work.

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Why are you twittering?…..

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This is the question I was asked today from somebody I have no idea who the person is.  It is neither one of my Twitter friends or Twitter followers.  Maybe this person is somebody that viewed my profile on Facebook where my twitterings is displayed via the Twitter Facebook application.

This made me think about how to answer this.  In the end, I think it is more that I follow other people than to tell the would what I am doing.  And via the people I follow, I have stumbled or was told about some really interesting things.  Things I would have no idea existed if I was not twittering.

However, founding out that people do actually read my one or two twitterings made me wonder whether I should actually share more about what I am up to.

So that one person from Knysna who is reading some of my twitterings, either become a follower so that I can start following you or just contact me to solve this mystery for me.

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cocomment — Never miss a comment follow-up again

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I comment fairly often on other people’s blog entries but always forget to return to see what responses I receive on my comments.  Not anymore.  Thanks to Miguel dos Santos for putting me onto cocomment. With a Firefox extension (everybody is using Firefox, right) or even adding a plug-in to your own hosted blog, you can now track all you comments in one central place.  How neat.

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Winter, cold weather and flu

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In general I never get sick when the seasons change but this year seems to be the exception.  A couple of weeks ago I was as sick as a dog with flu and it seems that I am due for another bout of it.

This morning when I woke up, I could barely swallow.  However I had some important customer meetings to attend and dragged my body out of bed and went to work.  What a mistake.  Barely got through the meeting.

Came home early and tugged myself in bed after taking some medicine.  Feeling a bit better now after some Chicken soup.  Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

Off to bed to see if I can sleep this off.

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Stem wat gehoor moet word ….

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Anja, of beter bekend as oopkop, het vandag ‘n Dubuut blog inskrywing van 2 liedjies wat sy sing.  Ek het skoon hoenervleis gehad nadat ek daarna geluister het.  Ek is nou nie ‘n musiek kenner nie maar daai stem … “wow”.

Anja, jy moet defnitief uit die stort klim en die wye wereld ‘n smakie geen van jou sing talent.  Ek sal eerste in die ry staan om die CD the koop.

Die wat nog nie Anja se stem gehoor het nie, gaan luister gerus … kliek hier.

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