arbitrary user

Statement from Jonathan Endersby of Accident on the night of 29 March 2007

My girlfriend (Rian xxxx, Witness 2) and I had just finished walking around Rondebosh common and had just climbed into our car when we heard a car screeching to the right of us. The car, driven by AJ xxxxxx had lost control and skidded across the road, through the parking lot and collided head on with the back right side of the parked Jeep which was not occupied at the time.

I saw the vehicle the whole time that it was skidding and had clear line of sight of the collision. My car was parked less than 8 meters away from the scene of the accident.

I climbed out of my car and ran over to see if the driver was ok. The driver climbed out of his vehicle and we asked him what happened. His exact reply was “I didn’t see the corner”.

An elderly coloured couple who had been parked to the right of the Jeep in the parking lot also came over to see what had happened and they told me that the driver had thrown a bottle out of the car before he climbed out. (I later pointed out to the police that there was a plastic coca-cola bottle which smelt like brandy next to the car)

The television in his car was on upon impact.

I took a picture of the car’s license plate because I was worried that the driver who seemed to be panicking would try and drive away.

The driver seemed like he wanted to run away so I then told him that I wanted to see his driver’s license. He asked me if I had a cigarette and again I told him that I wanted to see his driver’s license. He started to look through his car for his license and I phoned 10111 to get the phone number of the Rondebosh police station whom I then called and reported the accident telling them that I thought that the driver was drunk and was going to try and run away. The driver did not hear my conversation with the police because I had walked away from the vehicle so as to not panic him any further.
I walked back to the car and heard him on the phone with his friend asking his friend to come and fetch him… Again, his exact words to is friend were “…I need to get out of here…”

I walked up and told him to show me his license at which point he gave it to me and I took a photograph of it with my phone. I confirmed that the driver of the car was indeed AJ xxxxxx as per his driver’s license. The driver then took his drivers license back and I told him to wait for the police. He did not listen to me and started walking away from the car. I told him again to stay and wait for the police but he continued to run away. At no point did I or anyone else threaten the driver.

About 5 minutes later a tow truck driver arrived who again phoned the Rondebosh police department.

Within a few minutes the owner of the vehicle, Simon, arrived with his girlfriend/wife?. They had been jogging around the common. We told them what had happened and that the driver had run away. Simon ran
down the road to see if he could see the driver but didn’t find him and came back.

A few minutes later the police arrived.

I have never met the driver (AJ xxxxxx) or the owner of the Jeep (Simon).

I can be contacted on 082xxxxxxx.

I agree that all of the above information is true and I am prepared to testify to that fact in court.

======================================================================

The best part of this story is that the kid in the car is now claiming that 2 white males beat him up (which would explain his injuries???) and laying charges to that extent. He’s 21 and was a real class act… low profile wheels, tv, racing seats, nightstick in his car etc. (oh, and drum brakes on the back…idiot)

The police are charging him with reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident because they can’t prove the drunk driving. If he starts purjoring himself as well he might be in a worse situation than if he’d just taken the drunk driving rap. His parents arrived at the scene about an hour later and apparently he’d been crying on the phone with them.

Oh, and the skid marks were over 50 meters long. If you go to the parking lot soon you’ll still be able to see the spray painted markings where the cars were and then look for the dot on the road which is where the skid marks started.

His car is a write off, the jeep looks fine.

Because it seems that far too few people know this, Human Rights Day (21 March) is a commemoration of the Sharpeville Massacre where 69 innocent people were killed and over 300 more were injured during a mostly peaceful protest against the Pass Laws.

The Sharpeville Massacre marks a watershed moment in South African history. The event was one of the first times that the international community stood up and took notice of the truly brutal and oppressive regime in power. The event made it to the international press and four days later the government banned all black political organisations. Many leaders were arrested and many others were forced into exile… and this, unfortunately, happened in 1960.

To put that in perspective; South Africa only got its freedom in 1994… If we assume that the recent events that took place in Zimbabwe were Zimbabwe’s Sharpeville (which I doubt), Zimbabwe would be due for freedom in 2041.

I sincerely hope that progress can move a little quicker with pressure from countries like South Africa… 13 years is a very short time to forget what oppression feels like and the passion with which it was fought, Mr Mbeki.

ath,

j.

Telkom wants to get closer to Joe… (read the article)

Like I was saying to Joe earlier, every time I speak to people about this restaurant website they seem to want to get involved or they have some excellent idea to add to the concept.

So the basic premise is a web 2.0 (and by web 2.0 I mean user generated content etc) restaurant reviews website where the reviewers are broken up into various bands according to their karma and the number of reviews they’ve written. New reviewers have their first 5 reviews moderated. Once they’ve got past their “New Reviewer” status they become “Reviewers” who can invite additional people to join the site but they only get 1 invite per review they write.

All the reviews are rated in digg’esqe manner and reviewers gain or lose karma (trust) accordingly.

Reviewers who achieve certain levels of Karma and write a minimum number of reviews become “Food Gurus” who have additional functionally available to them.

Food Gurus are the people who

• Moderate the “New Reviewers” reviews for quality etc
• Are also responsible for updating the non-review based restaurant data (addresses etc)
• Respond to reviews that have been tagged as “inappropriate” or “suspicious” and potentially banning dodgy reviewers etc.

The idea is that the trust based invite system will hopefully keep the site as honest as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

“Every generation needs a new revolution.”
Thomas Jefferson

I make no pretence that anyone besides a few close friends read my blog, but those that do deserve to know.

I resigned. A while back actually. I’m not going to mention names because that would be tacky but I was not happy and for some pretty big reasons.

Vision was the single biggest reason. No vision… or, to be fair, vision without the ability to achieve it. (Actually, vision and the delusion of being able to achieve it.)

So I’m moving to Frogfoot to become a revolutionary.

One day I’ll write a full post on what to look out for in an interview but for now I’ll just bite my tongue.

ath

I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a web 2.0 restaurant review site with a few twists and the obligatory overuse of gradients, big buttons, whitespace and ajax ;)

Twist 1: The actual review has to be less than 160 characters. This is not so that it can be SMSed but a way to keep people to the point.

Twist 2: When you write a negative review for a restaurant you’ll be asked to provide a “rather go to” restaurant.

Twist 3: I’m thinking of keeping it super simple with just a single star rating accompanying your 160 character review.

Twist 4: Reviewers are brought on board by invitation only… Every user’s first 5 reviews are moderated and you can only invite other people to be reviewers once you’ve reviewed 5 restaurants.

(For those of you who actually read my last rant about systems and rules; The rules I am talking about here are rules that define the specialist functionality… There are plenty of review sites that let anyone paste pages of drivel and never get to the point.)

As any good systems person would, I always test my ideas:

Restaurant: Krugmans, V&A Waterfront

Review: What a lovely surprise of a restaurant! It looks like it’ll cost an arm and a leg but the service is top notch and the food is great. I had their huge camembert & sweet chilli burger at R47. Awesome! (160)

Average Main Cost: R50

Star Rating: 5 out of 5

Restaurant: Cape To Cuba, Kalk Bay Review: Great décor but sadly the quality of food seems to have slipped. We were two large groups and only about 30% of us were “happy”. My meal, the fillet strips in chilli and chocolate, was not worth R99. (160)

Average mains cost: R70

Star Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Rather go to: Polana

Review: Chapmans, near Chapmans Peak, Hout Bay

Review: We only had two deserts and two cappuccinos. The brownies were bad, the tiramisu was bad and the cappuccinos tasted like watered down wimpy coffee and presented similarly. The bill was R90.

Average mains cost: No idea, didn’t look.

Star Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Rather go to: No idea, Where is good in hout bay?

What do you think of the idea? While typing this I thought that one benefit of the 160 character thing would be that you could get the review sms’ed to you… but really, sms is a retarded format that hopefully wont be around in a few more years?

Anyway, let the debate make it stronger or kill it early so I don’t waste my time.

ath,

j

So the gf and I decided to grab some food before we hit the ice bar. We sat down at the Little Mermaid, a restaurant in the V&A waterfront, and perused the menu hoping to find something that looked appetising at a reasonable price. We both eventually settled on getting their lunch steak… a decent looking meal for fifty something rand. The only problem was that it was past 6 and their “lunch” cut-off time. Never fear I thought, I’ll just ask nicely. Surely they would be ok with that?

Nope. Even though we said we would leave if they refused to sell us the meal, they still declined. It’s a well known fact that restaurants with two menus usually do so in order to get more money out of their dinner time guests. Before we left I decided to go and speak to the manager to get their side of the story. Their story was this: They had a system in the kitchen and that system dictated that at 6pm they packed away the lunch time steaks and unpacked the R40 more expensive steaks for dinner.

I stood there dumbfounded, 100% in something akin to a moral dilemma… As a systems person I can understand their argument, whether you believe them or not, that systems make sure that the world works and in the absence of systems you end up with chaos. But, on the other hand, I wanted my fscking lunch steak and I wasn’t prepared to pay extra just because I got their a few minutes late.

I walked away temporarily pacified, but the more I thought about it the more I realised how wrong they were. Their system was limiting their ability to serve the customer properly. I wouldn’t have been told it was “impossible” at the Cape Grace, the 5 star hotel nearby, a point I made but was lost on the two managers.

Really what this highlighted was how the systems we interact with (or design) can be fundamentally flawed by our own need to “stick to the rules”. I’m obviously not calling for all out anarchy, but I do believe you need to ask yourself one fundamental question when implementing a rule in the systems you design:

Is this rule limiting the freedom of the user and their interaction with the system to an extent greater than that which is required to keep the system running?

In other words: Could the restaurant have sold me a fscking steak without going bankrupt? The obvious answer here is yes, and it becomes more obviously “yes” when you consider that any user (customer) who feels like the system did something special for them is going to feel a certain affinity for that system (restaurant) and probably return multiple times.

The more you become aware of this the more you start to see it in real life. I had my wallet stolen and upon getting my new cards, signed up for internet banking only to discover that by default my monthly transfer limit was set to R0; something that requires you to go into the bank with your ID to change… This wouldn’t have been such a major issue if I hadn’t JUST LEFT THE BANK where the teller told me that all I needed to sign up to internet banking was my card number and PIN. In addition to that, my beneficiaries were all deleted… Why did my internet banking profile had to even get removed? Couldn’t they just have unlinked it from one card number and added it to the new one? Did they even think of the customer when designing these systems?

Then vodacom… I want an Nokia E61. I’m due for an upgrade in 7 months, BUT I’m willing to PAY THEM MONEY in order to get the upgrade now. Apparently this is impossible?

Can you think of other systems where a rule has been put in place that makes no sense and impacts the user negatively? Perhaps more important, can you think of systems where the designers have had the foresight to make the system flexible enough to accomodate the more unusual requests?

Hi

I had my wallet stolen a few days ago and therefore don’t have a credit card to make payments for additional bandwidth… I thought I would be able to sign up for internet banking and make the payment that way however after going through the online registration process I am now unable to make any payments without visiting my bank and getting my daily limits increased. (Yes, as retarded as it seems the daily limit on a new account is R0).

Having said all that I have a girlfriend at home trying to do research for her PHD and unable to get online. Could you PLEASE make an exception and enable the additional gig. Feel free to bill my account via stop order for the amount or alternatively I’ll make the payment as soon as I can get to my nearest branch.

Regards

Jonathan Endersby

And less than 10 minutes later:

Jonathan,

Done.

Now seriously, can you EVER imagine that happening with Telkom?

Viva Amobia, Viva!

ath

I just thought I should do the obligatory punt of the GeekDinner, 27 Dinner and Clug park.

Firstly, The GeekDinner is not the 27 dinner.

If your idea of fun is listening to someone talk about the joys of hacking asterisk or joking about routing tables, feel free to sign up for the next GeekDinner. I seriously can not wait… At the last 27Dinner I was lucky enough to end up at the most awesome table full of kindred spirits. I think the conversation at that table played a part in concreting why geeks need their own dinner.

If hearing about the latest affiliate marketing scheme gets you hot then sign up for the next 27Dinner.

Finally, If you enjoy reading technology centric blogs then you should probably bookmark Clug Park, a collection of the finest South African Linux and sundry related blogs money can’t buy.

Also, I’ve got some pretty big news I’ll be dropping in the next few days, but I’d just like to say thank you to all those who know and have made it possible/supported me.

ATH

In keeping with the JOCUAMAOE trend… (click on the image)