Just collecting and telling stories..

• Monday, tea with Edward at Caveau to meet the EmitIT guys, Kauai for lunch, spinning.
• Super Green: my new favourite smoothie flavour.
• So Mia’s mom calls me “single guy”.. “enjoy the Kauai single guy“.. like this is a bad thing? The irony.
• Parking payment hassles again, R3.50 for 5min this time. I found out the human parking meters get 17% comms. This one also agreed R3.50 for 5min is “unfair”.
• Started using Songbird as a music player on my desktop. Lame iTunes was just not working well with Oggs.. I guess now I can really use Last.fm.
• Amusing how complex things often become simple when you explain them to others.. about explaining a strange relationship.
• Tuesday, took a mental health day (as Rachel would say) and worked from home, phoned Mia for her birthday, a really fun soccer game at La Med with Matt and Andy.. I scored 3 goals, attended the GeekDinner at Tao Yuan.. I really enjoyed it, excellent talks by Henk and Bryn.
• I’ve developed a liking for Steaz ice tea, very nice.
• Nikki said something interesting last week.. at some point most bloggers struggle to post, they kind a hit a wall, but once they get over that (or if they get over it).. they kinda just get on with it. Very true.
• Wednesday, a quick 1km swim since I was a bit stiff from soccer, sunset swim on Beta Beach, Dave the cowboy at Julep (love that “I changed the lock song”) with Rachel and Andy, pizza at Royale.. not bad, but stick to their burgers.
• Andy is now unemployed. Good thing I kinda hopefully found him another job already.

• “I know Chai Tea” — Andy, from a tshirt he spotted

• Amoebit:
  Amoeba/rabbit cross; it can multiply and divide at the same time.

• Thursday, a quick 1km swim on the way to work, meeting with Georg, cleaned up my music collection a bit, Clifton 4th sunset and swim with Andy and Steff.

• “What are you doing for Easter weekend? I’m sure I had something on?” — Andy, the wedding planner.

• I found Qimo.
• Friday, gym, swim, backup day.. made an off-site backup of my music and photos.. a healthy 160GB, Taste of Cape Town with Georg and Keith.. nice venue, Dave at the Grand Daddy, SA Blog Awards, Boo Radleys, Kink with Andy.. nice place, fun to be out on the town.
• Interesting new spinning bikes at the gym.. Scanner Darkly / Minority Report stuff.. comes with a big LCD and these instructor videos that touch on the spiritual/emotional side of cardio. Machine making man happy. The thing about devices like these is that today we find them strange in a month they seem normal.
• Backups really make you see how IO bound computers still are. I hope we all have solid state super fast disks in 3 years.

• “The first half of the bottle is great, the second half is spectacular” — Francois Naude, Winemaker, about Beyerskloof Pinotage.. best selling Pinotage in the world. I like their vibe.

• I have this crazy idea that I want to move back to Stellenbosch in two or three years.. mostly related to finding a school for Mia.
• Saturday, fetched Mia, V&A to watch Monsters vs Aliens.. her first cinema movie.. she loved it and she was a little angel, shopping.. Body Shop.. got some strawberry lip balm, music shop for a new movie, toy shop.. played with the Leap Frog Tag stuff, food shopping, book shopping.. Olivia and the missing toy, sunset Beta beach swim.. seems Annelien is back, home cooked dinner, bath, we read both Olivia books, sleep.

• “This is a hobo suit, darling. You can’t be seen in this. I won’t allow it.”
  – Edna, The Incredibles

• I like Aston Martins.. the DBS looks pretty cool, but I just can’t get over the rear light design.. it’s ugly.
• Sunday, tea, puzzle building, watched A Bug’s Life.. pretty cool, really nice Sunday lunch at Andy’s parents’, Beta Road play park and Little beach sunset.. took some nice photos.
• We’re into sing-along tunes for the car at the moment.. Mia likes Rocketman, Under the Bridge and L.O.V.E. (Sinatra.. and Amelie iirc)… Downtown gets played over and over.. “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go, downtown..”

See you at Balkanology.. have a fun Easter weekend kids.

I figure I often write about people and things I assume everybody knows about. I’m guessing my more loyal followers and close friends know all this but.. for the rest of you I’ve started a Get Up To Speed page.

Let me know if I missed something or if there is something that you have been wondering about for a long time but never thought to ask.

ps. I also added a nifty little plugin that displays the number of times a post has been viewed.

Something bugged me about the SA Blog Awards.. I could not really put my finger on it until tonight.. walking home from the beach.

We’ve built up such a long standing tradition bitching about this event that I figure need to bitch a bit if only to improve the process. Since so few people are complaining I guess it must be getting much better (-:

It comes down to semantics, but I like analysing the obvious. You see.. to nominate and to vote is not the same thing.

The selection process had me confused.. mostly because of the language used on the rules page.

In my mind a nomination is something that happens to get something into the pool of possible voting options. Sometimes a nominee needs to be seconded, but in general a nomination implies just one nominating. At least in my mind.

I guess I was surprised to see the process go from a nominations phase to a top 10 voting round so quickly. I guessed the judges had looked at all the nominations and picked the top 10 which would move to the voting round.

I was wrong.

You see.. nominations are votes in the nomination round. I think what many people (or just me) miss is that you have to get a lot of people to nominate your blog.. not just one person.

I’m lazy. Most people are lazy. When I see a “nominate me” badge I think.. whatever, I’m sure somebody will nominate it, I’ll wait for the voting.. but that’s too late.

Also, in the nominations round, I figured.. no big deal, I’m guessing maybe at least one soul would nominate my blog, I’ll worry about it again when it comes to voting.

My suggestion.. make very sure the rules and the selection process is 100% uber clear and make sure the language used is tip-top.. or introduce another step..

1) Nominations (get option data for the database)
2) Big list of stuff to vote for (public voting)
3) Short list of stuff to vote for (judge voting)
4) Results

ps. Yes I know there is a section at the bottom about how the judging works that tells me nominations are actually votes.. but, I’m lazy remember.

I often get asked this question. Let’s see..

I like green, I like swimming.. because it’s immersive, I think frogs are pretty zen, I like the amphibian idea.. living in more than one world.. and because frogs are sensitive creatures..

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.” — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Did IQs just drop suddenly?

Waiting for my lunch today I checked out a few magazines. I find something called Golf Punk.

I kinda get the logic of how you apply FHM thinking to golf.. hot chicks doing any sport must sell right? Darts, pool, golf.. the pillars of sporting excellence. Wait are these even sports.. is chess a sport?

I hate that whole FHM culture. Scum.

We can only hope that the current economic climate and the pressures on print media purge the world of lame magazines like these.