Category Archives: Thoughts

Supporting local artists

Posted on 14 April 2007 | 4 comments

Today seems to have been a day for supporting local artists. I bought a copy of So Close, Tertia Albertyn‘s book this afternoon and was going through my feeds a little while ago when I came across her latest post about Verity, a local singer who is employing the interesting technique of pre-sales to raise the money to record her first album. I had been meaning to become one of the future owners for a while now and saw Tertia’s post as a sign that now was the time. So I have bought a copy and have become future owner #994. I’m looking forward to being a part of the album creation process by helping to choose the songs that Verity will record.

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Jo’burg needs more ways to bury its dead

Posted on 11 April 2007 | Leave a comment

The Mail & Guardian Online reported that Jo’burg needs more ways to bury its dead; it occurs to me that some creative solutions involving all the old mine shafts might be in order.

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Wat is daardie woord?

Posted on 9 April 2007 | 8 comments

Sometimes the human brain works in the weirdest of ways. I was watering the garden the other evening and my mind was wandering when it locked onto the topic of bras, no not those guys from Urban Trash, but brassieres. So you’re thinking “He’s a guy, what’s so weird about that?”, well the weird thing is I wasn’t visualising a nice pair of boobies in a Wonderbra but wondering what the Afrikaans word for a bra was. I’m pretty bilingual and when I sometimes have trouble thinking of a word I can usually refer to my sons’ old school English-Afrikaans dictionary, but somehow I don’t think that will help this time. I’ve tried googling but didn’t find anything of use, or interest, other than the rather interesting image accompanying this entry. No doubt somebody will be able to tell me what the Afrikaans word is but perhaps you know of an online resource that can help with English-Afrikaans translation.

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Return of Snap Preview

Posted on 8 April 2007 | 1 comment

Yesterday I blogged about a way to get rid of Snap previews by adding a line to your hosts file. I thought I would never see another but minutes ago I did. So why didn’t the hosts file fix work? Simply that it assumes all Snap previews are served from spa.snap.com but it seems they are not. The one I got this evening was served from bp0.blogger.com. I could just add another line mapping this address to localhost (127.0.0.1) but I don’t know what I might break. Does Blogger serve up other content from this sub-domain? If not it is safe to add it to the hosts file, but if it is used, adding it poses the risk of messing up any Blogger pages I visit.

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Damn You, Music Moods

Posted on 7 April 2007 | 2 comments

I was in Somerset Mall this afternoon on my way to pick up some groceries. As I walked back from Paper Weight (gotta check for new photo mags every week) I spotted some tables outside the supermarket and assumed them to be from Paper Weight as usual, until I spotted the sign saying DVDs: 2 for R129.95. I have a weakness for collecting older, classic (to me anyway) movies so I had to browse around and see what I could find.

There was the usual selection of lame recent movies that someone mistakenly thought people would buy, but I did find four movies that were on my mental “I’d buy those” list. Empire Records, The Commitments, Blade Runner and Seven. I also bought a copy of Celtic Tiger, Michael Flatley’s latest show, for Mela, who loves musicals and dance shows. Of course I had all these in my hands before noticing the small print on the signs. The special I saw applied only to movies marked at R69.95 and none of the ones I had were that cheap. So on my grocery trip I spent R430 that I had not intended to. Damn you, Musid Moods, why can’t you keep your evil temptations in your store where I know to avoid them?

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Mandatory Bluetooth car kits

Posted on 7 April 2007 | 2 comments

Craig suggested that Bluetooth car kits should be mandatory in new cars. A good idea but I doubt that would make everyone use them. After all, how many people do you still see that don’t wear seat belts, even though they are known to save lives and have been mandatory in new cars for years. Perhaps the idea should be taken a step further by blocking the signal inside the car so that the only way to make or receive calls will be via the installed car kit, whose antenna would be mounted outside the vehicle and therefore not blocked.

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The Cure for Snap Previews

Posted on 6 April 2007 | 1 comment

I don’t like Snap Previews.  Far too often I get them popping up because my mouse pointer just happened to hover over a link unintentionally.  Basically, if I want to see what’s behind a link, I’ll click on it.  Displaying previews, expecially when I don’t want them is really just stealing my bandwidth.

Fortunately John Watson has posted a more permanent cure than the temporary, cookie-based fix that Snap offer.  The solution is as simple as adding this line to your hosts file;

127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com

You’ll find your hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows or in /etc/hosts on OS X and Linux.

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What’s Your Opinion?

Posted on 5 April 2007 | 5 comments

Since I started this blog I’ve been posting a mixture of my photos, my weird thoughts, photo of the day (for a while) and the odd funny or interesting thing I’ve found elsewhere.  Lately I’ve been thinking of splitting my photos off to a dedicated photo blog, where I would post a daily photo and perhaps some words about it.  I see from my stats that there are one or two of you out there that read this blog and I would like to get your opinions on whether I should;

  1. Keep things roughly as they are
  2. Start a dedicated photo blog
  3. Keep one blog and post more photos
  4. Keep one blog and post more text
  5. Keep one blog and post more of everything

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Creative Commons at work

Posted on 5 April 2007 | 1 comment

I got feedback from Caroline thanking me for making Flying The Flag available under a CC licence. She used it in a SoulCollage she made for Reluctant Nomad, who blogged it with accreditation.

This is only the second or third time that someone has told me they used one of my images.  It makes me wonder how many times they have been used without the user letting me know.

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Peter Steals?

Posted on 3 April 2007 | Leave a comment

OK, maybe Steals is a bit strong, even if it does conveniently rhyme with the site owner’s surname, but I was amazed to see this article reporting that the consumer complaint site hellopeter.com requires companies to subscribe, at a fairly substantial annual fee, to have the ability to respond to complaints made about them.

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