RSS
 

Archive for August, 2010

Public Servants Strike South Africa – Cosatu are murderers and hooligans !!

25 Aug

The public servants strike currently affecting South Africa like a black plague is now really getting out of control. Cosatu has stooped to new lows in inciting their members to strike, disrupt, intimidate, damage, destroy and essentially to murder too. Murder you say? Yes I DO !!!

As a result of the public servants strike, hospital workers have allowed sick people and babies to die, that my friend is what we call MURDER because it has been done intentionally. Cosatu therefore are directly responsible and have blood on their hands. The leadership of Cosatu should be arrested, locked up and left to die. Oh I’m being harsh ??? Really ??? Is what they’ve done excusable? Is it acceptable ? Is murder okay when you’re trying to make a point? No No NO it’s not frikkin okay and it never will be either !!!!

Everyone thought when we had black leadership in this country that things would change, well nothing’s changed. The same scenes you are seeing on TV today are the same things we saw on TV 20 years ago. Then it was under white leadership, now it’s under black leadership but the picture is still the same. In fact I lie, the picture today is even worse because the ex-government would not have tolerated this kind of despicable behaviour yet the ANC are too timid to show they have any balls. 20 years ago we saw white policeman firing rubber bullets at hoards of hooligans, today we see black policeman doing the same thing, what has changed? Nothing !!!

Of course the ANC will always find a way to keep blaming this kind of behaviour on Apartheid but really that excuse is growing weak now, they’ve had control of the country for 16 years and not even they can control the holligans. They can take another 100 years and it will still be the same, and they’ll still be blaming Apartheid. The ANC will never own up to their own faults but they may eventually realise that there is just no controlling these barbaric masses that tick the vote boxes for them.

The fact that the military has been called in to assist hospitals etc, should be enough reason for the govt to declare war against the strikers, but as I said earlier, there’s a big lack of testicles.

What amazes me is that the Cosatu fat cats still earn their whopping salaries while the people they brainwash go unpaid, and they’re too thick to realise they are the puppets of a few greedy men. The effect this action will have on the economy and inflation will far outweigh any benefits the strikers are seeking, so even if they get their demands the knock on effect will see them worse off than before and of course, it’s the taxpayers that will fit the bill for all of this.

This country has no hope of a future as long as this barbarianism is allowed to thrive, we will end up like every other African nation. The “little” bit of good that came of the World Cup has been undone in less than a month …. WELL DONE COSATU ….. WELL DONE !!!

 
No Comments

Posted in Life, South Africa

 

Noisy Planet – Earthquake Activity on Planet Earth

25 Aug

Anyone interested in knowing what the planet’s up to should keep a daily check on the web site below. This USGS site lists all the earthquake activity around the world as it happens, amazing to see some days there are 40+ earthquakes but only few ever make the news, actually only those those affect human life. We tend to think there are only earthquakes when they make the evening news but as you’ll see from this link our planet is moving and bumping plates all day long.

Visit: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php

USGS Earthquake Activity List

USGS Earthquake Activity Worldwide Last 7 Days

 
No Comments

Posted in Life

 

South African Idol – Just how Fair is a voting system that does not work?

23 Aug

It seems that year after year we keep seeing just how poor our cell phone network operators are at handling mass volume SMS systems like the South African Idol’s voting system. Since last night’s Idol’s show sending votes through has been a tiresome task, every try results in a nasty “Network Out Of Order” message and this requires you the voter to keep retrying. Not only is the Idol’s voting system unable to accept the plethora of votes coming in but it has also dragged down the regular SMS system.

Last night the first vote I tried to send went through after 7 tries, the second vote went through after 15 tries and my third vote I only managed to send this morning as I just gave up last night. This morning however I again had to send the vote about 3 times to get it through and a regular SMS to my friend over the Vodacom network took me 5 retries. This just once again proves how our cellular operators charge us an arm and a leg for a service and are unable to spend the money increasing the size of their network to actually handle the load, a simple show like Idol’s drags a cellular network to it’s knees year after year and I doubt we’ll see much change when Idols 2011 comes along either. Why? Because the network operators quite simply will remain profteering without putting enough of that cash back to good use. I hope ICASA is listening.

Now the question? Just how fair is such a poorly managed voting system to the contestants? The voting lines are open until 10pm tonight to allow for people to vote (with all the network errors) BUT the onus is on you the voter to remember to vote. Most people now get busy on Monday morning and can easily get carried away with their regular work week and forget to vote but if they had had the chance to get their votes through last night while it was fresh in their minds they would be able to carry on with their week knowing it’s already done. So how many contestants lose valuable votes as a result of this and see themselves out next week just because their friends could not vote?

I think until South African mobile operators can offer world class service to such shows, the producers should look at alternative solutions for such shows. When we get our next SA Idol, think to yourself just how accurate of a reflection that is from the voting public. Boo to shoddy cellular network services.

 
No Comments

Posted in South Africa, Television and Movies

 

Racism embedded in Marketing

11 Aug

While making a cup of coffee this morning, I looked at a packet of white sugar as I had never done before. The words “pure white” suddenly for the first time ever stood out like a sore thumb.

I then thought of the opposite product which is “unrefined brown” sugar and this got me thinking even more about terms like this that are flashed into our subconscious on a daily basis giving us constant messages that white is pure and non-white is not quite as pure.

We’ve all become very conditioned to the differences between these colours and one has to wonder just how much big companies and marketeers have to do with this conditioning. Are they even aware of it or are these old school tactics deeply and deliberately embedded into our society?

The ruling class of any country relies on the people fighting with each other so that they can run off with all the frikkin money. So .. are messages like this in our consumer products designed to keep us thinking this way, to keep racism alive and to keep us fighting?

Sure makes you wonder.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Life

 

Where have good manners gone?

10 Aug

For practically my whole adult life I’ve been a sounding board for people and their problems. Friends in trouble and friends in need are always quick to pick up the phone to hear my voice and to help them through their troubles or to make sense of their lives. I’ve never had a problem helping people or giving freely of my time, often dropping my important work to help them. What amazes me though is that once people feel better about themselves they carry on with their little lives and seldom if ever does a thank you come along.

I help people purely because it’s in my nature and I don’t expect anything in return but there is such a thing as good manners. We are mere inklings in the 21st century but already it seems that old values such as good manners have become an endangered species, people these days just cannot seem to find it in themselves to do the right thing, to give thanks and praise or acknowledgement and credit where it’s due. It’s like you’re literally asking them to part ways with a limb.

I hope you who are reading this will take this to heart and to always remember to give a little thank you to the people who help you through life, it’s the least you can do.

 
No Comments

Posted in Life

 

My Windows 7 Woes Resolved (ObjectDock)

03 Aug

I’ve put up with the one single thing annoying me in Windows 7 for far too long now. Yesterday I just lost it and started searching for a solution to my problem.

The problem is that the Windows 7 taskbar does some annoying new things which you are stuck with because somewhere between one of the release candidates of Windows 7 and the final code, some bright spark at Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to force everyone into using the new taskbar without being able to turn off the annoying features as you could do in the past and also in past flavours of Windows.

There are suggested solutions for stopping taskbar thumbnail previews none of which work, there is a setting in the group policy editor that Microsoft included but changing the setting does not work on all version of Windows 7 least of all in Windows 7 Ultimate X64. Then I came across a taskbar tweak utility for Windows 7 which kinda works but depending on a how a piece of software is written it can quickly make it not work. These thumbnails are definitely something written into each piece of software and few if any developers give you an option to disable that annoying feature. Mozilla Firefox is one that does it occasionally, it depends on the version of Firefox which changes rapidly.Older versions of software do not do it.

Ok so none of these fixes produced the desired result. I then decided to switch Windows 7 to a non-aero theme thereby disabling all the niceties of Windows 7 turning it back to an almost XP style look. BORING !!!! Why have Windows 7 and an awesome graphics cards if you’re not going to run Aero???

This afternoon I decided to try ObjectDock from Stardock which is a complete replacement taskbar for Windows operating systems. Boy was I surprised after I installed it and I wonder where has this been all my life. Okay, let me be honest, I’ve always know about Objectdock but I never tried it as I thought it was simply some flashy add on for Windows and we tend to think how can people do better than Microsoft. Well I can say one thing this new taskbar replacement kicks some royal Windows 7 @ss.

It has the ability to hide the windows taskbar altogether YAY !!!
It has ONE icon for a running program regardless of how many windows that program has open YAY !!!
It’s lightweight – currently using less than 3MB of Ram YAY !!!
It’s much nicer looking, like the OSx menubar
AND
It obeys my commands.

I have Aero back and a great looking and functioning taskbar.

If you’ve had enough of the annoying Windows 7 taskbar try Objectdock, the free version is more than adequate. You’ll be surprised.

PS – I don’t work for them :D

 
No Comments

Posted in Technology and Computing

 

I have renewed faith in the South African Justice System – aka. Jackie Selebi gets 15 years !!

03 Aug

Just heard on the news that Jackie Selebi was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his crimes. I had personally given up all hope of any justice system left in South Africa but today my faith has been renewed. It is good to see justice being served and it gives me hope for the future of this country.

I sure hope that the justice system will retain it’s independence and remain free from the ANC’s constant tampering with laws to try and protect themselves. We’re not quite out of the water yet and pieces of legislation like the “Protection of Information Bill” which is a bill designed by the ANC to “protect” anything they the government deem as “secret”, which amounts to just about anything.

So while I have renewed faith in the justice system, a piece of legislation like the Protection of Information Bill can give the ANC the power it needs to further avoid any dealing with the law. Should anything be requisitioned by a court and that document falls under the Protection of Information Act, the court will not be able to access the documents. Isn’t that oh so convenient. The bill also allows the ANC to prosecute anyone (media especially) who print anything that is deemed to fall under this act and of course the ANC can change their minds overnight so if you print something today, they might just decide tonight that what you printed falls under the new act and decide to lock you up the next morning …. hmmmm ….. dangerous bit of legislation this is.

 
3 Comments

Posted in South Africa

 

WordPress 3.0 still has some pretty shoddy mysql coding

02 Aug

I love WordPress, been using it since version 1 and it sure has come a long way, unfortunately even version 3 still has some pretty poor mysql coding. I have a particular blog on which I sent 13000+ articles to the trash. I then asked WordPress “nicely” to empty the trash and it’s been going for  almost 4 hours and it’s still not done. Why can I drop those 13000 records within 1-5 minutes using a simple mysql statement and WordPress cannot? Seems there is some rather messy mysql coding still lurking around on WordPress. Oh well … back to doing stuff like that manually, thank goodness for phpmyadmin :)

 
No Comments

Posted in Technology and Computing

 

i-Stuff

02 Aug

Thought this was very funny :)

Got my son an iPhone for his birthday the other week and he was overjoyed

Recently got my daughter an iPod for hers, and was told I’m the best dad in
the world

I was dead chuffed when the family clubbed together and bought me an iPad
for father’s day.

Then we all clubbed together and got my wife an iRon for her birthday and it
was around then that the fight started.

 
No Comments

Posted in South Africa

 

Taskbar Thumbnails – The biggest annoyance of Microsoft Windows 7 and it’s not possible to turn it off.

02 Aug

I love Windows 7, it’s by far the fastest and most stable version of Windows ever. I’ve been running it for over 18 months without a single glitch. There is however one major annoyance of Windows 7 and that is Taskbar Thumbnails. No doubt the feature was added to boost productivity but it actually does the opposite and one wonders where Microsoft does their product testing or how they arrive at these silly software additions.

First of all in Windows 7 32-bit you can disable this feature but the same setting used to disable it in the 32-bit version of the Operating system does not work for the 64-bit version, so much for shared code across both platforms, hmmm. There is a workaround for the 64-bit version which is to extend the MouseHoverTime but really this is an incredibly stupid workaround. Why Microsoft does not allow users of their software to simply disable new additions is beyond me. It’s just as easy to code an ON as well as an OFF option at the time of programming but fixes like this get stifled in red tape after the product has launched …. it’s doubtful any service pack (as history has shown) will address such a bug and yes it IS A BUG. Past service packs for all Microsoft OS’s seldom address changes like this and users have to hope that Windows 8 will allow us to turn it off. I’m not holding my breath though. I’m hoping for a third party utility that can properly address it.

I’ve been a Microsoft user since before Windows, since Dos 1.0 days, and every version of Windows has had the ability to turn off all the annoying new features and strip it down to the old way users like to do things. But no …. with Windows 7 Microsoft has decided they will not allow us to do that. Unless of course we decide to completely turn off Windows Aero which is responsible for this incredibly stupid behaviour. That kind of solution kind of defeats even having any of the niceties of Windows 7.

I wish Microsoft would learn to respect users of their software who have been around since day one, users who have helped shape their software over all these years. Not being able to turn off these features is annoying to power users and these features waste more time than the time they were designed to help save.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Technology and Computing

 
 
lilywhite
Afrigator
BlogCatalog