Our company holds an annual photographic contest for employees, with the winner’s photographs featuring in the company calendar. I have had my photographs featured for the past three years and just received an e-mail letting me know that two of mine have been selected for the 2009 calendar.
My photos are highlighted with yellow rectangles in the image above and larger versions can be viewed at Groot Constantia and Hout Bay Harbour.
As a fan of Adobe Lightroom I was very pleased to see version 2 released and planned to buy an upgrade right away. I went to the Adobe store, only to find out that I have to pay US $129 to buy the upgrade from the South African store while it costs only US $99 from the US store, but I can’t buy there. That’s crazy; I want the download version not the box version so it’s not a question of shipping or higher logistics costs. In fact I will probably end up downloading from the very same site that US customers will.
So why the price difference? And where’s this global village I keep hearing about?
Ok, it’s not quite as bad as the subject makes it sound, but I noticed a few minutes ago while reading a TechCrunch post about Regator, that the name, e-mail address and web address fields were pre-filled with the details of the last commenter. Pretty ironic when there is a message alongside the e-mail field saying that your address will not be published. I snagged a screenshot.
TechCrunch screenshot
When visiting the same page again, after another comment had been made, these fields were not pre-filled. Perhaps this was caused by some strange coincidence, as I had clicked through from Rafiq’s blog and it was his details in the form as he had left the last comment. Pretty strange.
I saw a promo for an upcoming run of classic movies on SABC3. Some of them are ones that I don’t own and would love to see again so I went to the SABC3 web site to look them up. Imagine my surprise when I found that their movie page contained links to subsections for movies in April, May and June. Today is 21 June, so why on earth would I want to know what their movies for April and May were? I either watched or missed them but that is no longer relevant. There is no mention of the classic movies, which are presumably coming up in July, but perhaps we don’t need to know about those.
You would think that with all the organisation it takes to draw up schedules, and advertise them; that they would also keep on top of updating their web site.
I rescued this little chameleon from our cat earlier and released it into a dense bush where it will be safer. I hope that it will be alright as it had a wound on it’s other side.
Since posting last night on how to synchronise Plurk and Twitter, I have come across ping.fm, a service that lets you post in one place and have your post delivered to a variety of other services, including not only Plurk and Twitter but many others too.
Go and check them out and sign up if you’re interested. They’re in closed beta so you will need a beta code to be able to register. You can use landofping.
I’ve blogged before about Verity, a singer from Cape Town, who is taking the unusual route of raising money for her first album by pre-selling copies rather than signing her soul away to a record company. I was prompted to post about this again after receiving her latest newsletter, in which she says;
My first single “Angel” is starting to get playlisted by various radio stations around SA so I am looking forward to seeing how it does. You can find the song available to DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN HERE… and I would love to hear what you think.
I also have a web interview that my good friend Bruce Muzik did for his website that you might ENJOY WATCHING HERE…
We are in the final push to sell the last 185 copies on my site. If you enjoy listening to “Angel” and the interview inspires you, then please mail the links to your friends so that they can see if they would like to join the Future Owner family and help us get the album ready to post by the end of May if all goes well!
Please buy a copy of the album. Help this brave and talented woman to meet her goal and remember that by doing so you are also helping her to help others. That’s right, a portion from each sale goes to charity.
Posted in Thoughts
Tagged album, cd, charity, dreams, empowerment, liveyourdreams, Music, powa, verity
Coming back from dropping my mom-in-law at home I got stopped by the robot (traffic light for the non-Saffers) at Somerset Mall. I was maybe six or seven cars back from the line and watched a young black guy walking towards me trying to hand out advertising flyers. Not one of the drivers in front of me was prepared to take a flyer; I did.
The way I see it is that people handing out flyers are probably paid very little for being on their feet all day, dodging cars in sun or rain. I’m sure that they are expected to hand out all the flyers they were issued with and may be paid less if they don’t. So I always take a flyer to help them get their day’s work done. I urge all drivers to do the same. I’m not suggesting you must support the businesses doing the advertising, I could care less if you even read it; just take the flyer and toss it in the bin when you get home and you will be helping someone. So what if you have the inconvenience of opening your window, most of us have electric car windows anyway.
Posted in Thoughts
Tagged Advertising, flyer, help, pamphlet, poor, robot, support, traffic light
It seems to me that there are several types of accounts/people that might follow you on Twitter.
“twollectors” and “twammers” are likely to feature on The Twitter Blacklist, which may have a bearing on your decision to block them or not. If you are a Firefox and Greasemonkey user there is even a Twitter Blacklist script that displays a nice big red banner at the top of a “twacklisted” user’s page.
The question is; which of these do you block? I have previously always blocked “twammers” and sometimes blocked “twollectors”. The question is whether there is any advantage to the Twitter community as a whole for them to be blocked. If you don’t follow them their updates are not seen on your profile page, but they still appear in your list of followers. Twitter says that blocking someone has the following effect.
I suppose that there may be some value to your reputation in not being associated with them, in which case you won’t want to appear in their list of friends and not have your updates appear on their profile page. But is there any tangible value to them if you do appear on their list of friends or you updates are seen on their profile page?
Update (2008-05-01)
First tweets below found with SUMMIZE.
In all my forty-five years I have never donated blood; not being a fan of either pain or needles, I have always shied away from doing so.
Today the WP Blood Transfusion Service is holding a donation clinic at our offices so, knowing how important it is to be a donor, I decided that today would be the day of my first donation. I filled in the forms and presented myself to the “vampires”, only to be told they didn’t want my blood. Seemingly the fact that I had my gall bladder removed in January means I can’t donate until August. Great, now I have to go through working up the courage to make my first donation another time.
Posted in Thoughts
Tagged blood, donate, donation, donor, gall bladder, plasma, surgery, transfuse, transfusion
craniac's place 