its been an interesting day, and particular due to the many changes, news flashes and todos. Phuti indicated to me that he had intentions of dropping out of his university course with just one credit to go. Can you imagine having gotten this far and then considering giving up. I think I know to many people who regret not having a degree or other formal qualification hehind them, and here he is about to make this bad judgement call...thank god he ran it by me and Felix, both of us taking on the parent role of "no, that is not an option, you must finish... so get cracking". Considering that Bill Gates only recently got his degree, Terry Ng from Kineda does have a point when saying that only a few make the big time without a formal background, yet it is vital to have some form of competative advantage. Interestingly, I recall Russell (in Singa)saying that if he had failed his A-Levels, he is sure that he would have been more successful to date than conforming to the daily routines of a corporate. There is a truth in his comment.

 

Registered on this silly Facebook today, guess you cant avoid 99% of the population being registered. However, consider the response from the Korean profile website Cyworld where the boundary between private and public becomes blurred. We each link for the sake of linking, and next we know WAY to much about the other person...name, family, home town, location, hobbies, schools, friends etc. It wont be long before we'll see user configurable privacy levels to reduce the amount of leakage in this public platform. Considering that 10 million Koreans are registered on Cyworld, more millions on Nate and then some on Naver Blogs, you've got just about the entire 45 million population covered. Obviously, Mina has her own profile too... but I'll keep that to myself ;) Well, Ill ponder the Facebook

 

Thorsten Deckler confirmed that the building plans had been passed through council, and that all was ready to go ahead. Yeah! Lets hope to see some progress soon and that our dear builder and friend Godvinda to continue.

 

Got passed this interesting read that Singapore's Real-Estate Bubble Won't Be Pricked by Andy Mukherjee. Interesting that this countries fiscal policy is such that they are playing a competative game yet want to keep away the speculators. Amazingly, interest rates in Singa are still below 1% and the inter bank lending rate (ie base rate for morgages) hit a low of 2.25%. Consider this and the contineous increase in wealth, and you wonder where all the money is going...? At least all looks stable and good for the IRs in the 2010 run up.

 

Had an evening out with Elmir and Drew from theProject at this quaint lil restaurant in Parktown. Ill find the name tomorrow but I certainly recommend it as just the romantic venue to enjoy a warm, relaxing atmosphere. Good company, good food and fun chats.

 

Lastely, considering that I can now monitor our home network, I was most surprised to see hte excessive usage by those connected to the residential network. Not that this is a problem but merely the fact that the downloading goes totally unnoticed: 1 GIG in 24 hours...anyway, episode 23 of Heroes is out and definitely a must have, and I wont hold back either. Thank god the HTB is keeping the network in shape as else all would suffer, particularly my VoIP calls via Connection-Telekom.

 

once again, not only pressured by the day-to-day but further by the complications of getting to told to follow the processes, sort out the red tape, clear the legal requirements and then seeing these ventures through *sigh*. This time its a lil old building to be renovated on Jan Smuts Ave and teaching me all about the leg work required in such a project.

 

This time round, unlike the technology and financial projects which involved components that I can control, influence and integrate, its all about council, town planners, architects and structural engineers, builders and body corporates. I cant say I'm over the moon cause of these processes, the numbers make sense and fit onto a single A4 ...but I am slowly starting to agree that the processes do exist for a reason. The reason is however still unknown to me =) but I guess if there are too many parties pressing for the straight-and-narrow there is lesser chance for quick wins in cutting out the red tape. I guess in the property/development game there are opportunities, but certainly no short cuts ;) May I best learn that now.

 

I'll see how much to blog bout this venture, but otherwise it'll just be here for reference even if it might sink like a rock due to the dalys by the processes ... *sigh*

weird, Dominique White actually lives a few blocks from me?!? and, weirder, not having seen him since SATNAC 2005 in Stellenbosch, we run into each other at the Coloney Arms on a Friday night! I mean, who on earth would ever go to the Colony on a Friday night *yeah*. It was truely bizarre but fabulous reconnecting after such a long time, and great to find out that he is moving up the Deloitte & Touche corporate ladder. Indeed, a character I'm glad to have stumbled across... again *g*. it was the first evening though that I further got exposed to the Icommons by his girlfriend Daniela, particularly that the organisation is based here in Johannesburg and on a social mission under the Creative Commons banner.

 

Rest of the weekend, spent it on quite a technical level, implemented some VLANs on Linux and trying to configure the HTB traffic shaping. Stupidly, the Webmin HTB admin scripts use the . (period) as a comment delimiter in the bash script used through the browser. The problem is that the VLAN interfaces range from 1.1 to 1.5, and thus similarly delimited by the . (period). The question now is how efficient is inter-VLAN firewalling and traffic shaping, particularly in a local area network where the only real bottleneck is the 512kbs ADSL uplink.

 

Spent some time trying to figure out how to get the DTMF to work on Uplink Skype2Sip, just to find out that it doesnt support any of the inband, rfc or auto modes. Build a few cool things with the Prototype Sortable Tables for reporting and dynamic content. Finished off the Wonderboom website which now runs out of a DNN 4.4.1 code base, performing impressively better on the .NET v2.0 and SQL 2005 combination.

just blink, and by the time you open your eyes its 'next month'.

 

charles was noting that its nearly June... i mean, we hadnt even hit the 20th of May yet and it was 'nearly june'. I guess one reason we want this month to pass so quick is the huge amounts of birthdays we have to deal with...Jonathan Kretzmer, Bergen Larsen, Anja Van Staaden, Mariaan (Of Dion), my mom (and probably a few more whom id like to give more than just a present, actually spend some time with them and catch up on the months *haha* gone by).

 

things havnt been bad but time has seriously been flying by. im not sure if its the hours of work, the city of Johannesburg or other that create this impression.

 

interestingly, I recently attended a talk by Christopher Dell, a german improvisator and admirable musician. He held a talk at our usual gathering at the Friday Sessions, and struck everybody with his abstract interpretation of: form, structure and content. His animated presentation actually revolved around architecture, the design of buildings and cities, the creation of usuable spaces and the confines within which conventional planning restricts creativity -> effectively never improvising and always keeping to the sheet music. His talk extended onto the true visionaries who understand the outcome in terms of form, and know that it requires structure and content to create this final state; yet the state is the outcome and not a byproduct of the structure. Too sad that to many beurocratics (or perhaps non-creatives) force everyone else to work by the book, restricting them to the confines of what is-, looks- or should be normal, considered practical or efficient. Where is room for just creating an environment (micro, macro or any level inbetween) that is not based on plans, drawings, guidelines, color-, height-, permiter restrictions, body corporate rules, laborious legal and approval processes... particular if the outcome should have a certain form...and further, most of us are restricted by cash (in any case) which limit us in going beyond the means of simply putting up a practical structure. However, work and living spaces are subjective, and for this very reason we buildings, public spaces and many joining paths should be designed as opposed to just built. Perhaps South Africans are notoriously for creating large, spacious, sterile, and mostly unpractical work, shopping or lifestyle environments...?