arbitrary user

Just came out of a meeting and noticed a new comment waiting to be moderated on one of my blog posts.

It was from a post about property that I wrote a while back. The comment seemed legit enough, a little off topic, but still legit… Then I noticed the url that the poster had used… it pointed to a joburg based property company’s website. I viewed their site and noticed that their SEO was being done by a South African SEO company… Funny that… Lets look at the poster’s email address domain… oh look, owned by the SEO company.

So I called them and asked to speak to the girl who’s name was used… I told her what had happened and asked her, very nicely, whether she thought that sort of thing was ethical.

You’ll never guess what she said.

“No, it’s not ethical“… She sounded ashamed and admitted to not wanting to do that kind of thing, but not having a choice.

“I hope you find a better job soon” I sheepishly suggested…

I’m not going to pretend I could ever understand what kind of situation she’s in that she feels she has to continue working for a bunch of spammers, but I sincerely hope that she gets out of there fast. Allowing your integrity to be eroded is not a healthy place for any decent human being to be in… and she sounded like a decent human being.

A friend of mine has this boss who works till 9pm most nights. She’s doesn’t have kids and she’s married to a guy who lives in Joburg. She has achieved a lot. She is an achiever. She earns a fat salary. She drives a nice car. People know her name. She’s actually a nice person too.

Now she wants my friend to work late as well. My friend isn’t happy about that.

It all depends on what your priorities are. There are no wrongs and rights here.

On saturday I’m going to remove the kitchen door that has swelled slightly and plane it down so that it doesn’t scrape on the floor any more. For some reason that is a priority for me.

On saturday evening I think we’ll end up sitting on a couch and drinking champagne (it’s the day we move in after all)… That time, with just the two of us, is a priority for me.

The difference of course is that when I’m 70 years old I’ll have the memory of that evening we sipped champagne and that day I fixed the door on my very first house. I’ll also have all those evenings where we talked rubbish while cooking supper together, watched inane tv shows and played with the cat.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d rather have those memories than a fancy car and a list of people who know my name, but I respect any person’s decision to focus on those things.

Years ago I worked for a large travel company. There was an old lady who worked there… her job, for the previous 25 odd years, had been to travel the world and write about her adventures. One night at a company dinner she was telling us stories about all the incredible places she had been. Another woman of similar age said to her, “Oh, I wish I had lived your life, it sounds so amazing!“… To which the jaded traveler replied rather seriously “I would trade you my entire life for one week with a loving husband and children!“.

I think I was 19 at the time… Those words continue to haunt me… and guide me.

So I’m in the local Apple shop standing at the technical counter when Cokey Falkow walks in and stands next to me. He waits a while since everyone is busy with other stuff.

Then after a few minutes one of the other shop assistants walks into the technical area and, even after seeing Cokey and obviously not recognising him, says to one of the other shop people in earshop of Cokey,  “Dude, Colin Moss is in the shop!”…

(In case you’re wondering, Colin was actually in the shop…)

We’re 5 more sleeps away from our big move… This feels a bit like the week leading up to the 100m finals at the Olympics… So much preparation, so much stress… so much, well, everything really… And now all there is left to do is wait.

There’s something intrinsically human about that emotion… that necessity to just wait, knowing that nothing you could ever do could make time move along faster. You experienced it the week before Christmas when you were 5 years old and you’ll experience it when you’re 80 years old and waiting for the delivery guys to drop off your new off-road motorbike.

So we fill our time with packing boxes and trying to plan things that don’t really need to be planned, like where are we going to put all the boxes in the new house…

So now we’ve run out of things to pack or plan and we’re left like two little kids grinning at each other knowing that soon we’ll be home.

Happy times indeed.

I love English. It is the only language I can even begin to express myself in and the older I get the more I grow to respect it. I am not however an English professional, which is lucky for me because I wouldn’t be a very good one. (I’m trying to be better though, promise!)

I do however realise that proper English needs to be looked after by the people who care for its future much like a young parent cares for a child. You can’t let it be molested by laziness because it will rapidly become an unrecognisable fat slob of a language.

So it is with great pleasure that I read one of the senior editors at The Sunday Express getting all frothy at the mouth over English abuse in one of the paper’s own editions.

My two favourite lashes were:

P5 – Someone is described as an ‘ex-pat’. At the very least that’s amateurish. Look, let’s make it really simple; if you don’t know what a word means or how it’s spelt, don’t f***ing use it.

P9 – The conflict in Georgia provides us with some classic bollocks. What is a ‘battle tank’? Does this mean wars now have referees who decide whether or not a tank is allowed to go into battle?

Are all other tanks to be described as big metal cars for soldiers with a decorative gun on top?

The thing I love the most about this kind of bashing is that it truly is done out of love for the language. Also, any toff who can throw in a few “f**k”s is my hero… (Mr Fry that means you!)

Read the rest of the rants here.

I love a good game of internet pile-on as much as the next guy, but god damn this is hilarious.

The brilliant designer Coda, based in Cape Town, regularly gets his site design jacked by punks all over the world and most of the time he just laughs it off. Then the other day someone pointed him to the new Optimal Energy site done by Clickthinking, a Cape Town based (ie. They must know who Coda is) “web company”. You can read Coda’s opinion here.

Right now I guess Clickthinking are busy digging the hole they plan to live in for the next few weeks until this quietens down, but damn, Optimal Energy should be pissed… They got fleeced and are probably feeling pretty damn uncomfortable about their *brand new website* right about now.

ps. No link-love for Clickthinking… just google them.

We get invited to quite a few media things… Normally I don’t need to worry about what I wear. I have some smart stuff and some casual stuff. My “Beware of Squirrels, They’ll Steal Your Nuts” shirt was stolen, and that was the most “out there” thing I owned.

But now we’re invited to some or other launch and they’ve stipulated their dress code as “Elegant Casual, Jackets for Gents“.

This sort of thing makes me so angry I can not tell you…. and I know it’s really dumb that it irks me, but it does. I don’t wear jackets…. It’s just not me… but yet they want *me* to go…  so I have to dress up like someone else in order to fit into their stupid fancy dress party.

The world is a fascinatingly diverse place; Why on gods green earth would you want people to hide that diversity by all dressing the same? Hell, I only ever go to these things because of the interesting people, now I’ll have to actually *talk* to them in order to find out whether or not they’re boring-jacket-wearers.

over and out.

ps. You just know that some stinking-rich couldn’t-give-a-fuck-billionaire is going to rock up in shorts and a t-shirt.

So after chatting to some people who love their hacked iPhones, and seeing a terminal running on one, I have to admit that they’re very pretty and possibly very powerful. However all that power is being locked up inside the shiny little box, and Apple seems convinced that that is the way forward for their platform. They’ve even resorted to telling some app developers that their apps are too similar to the existing Apple apps, and therefore won’t be allowed onto the marketplace.

But before I turn this into an anti-iphone blog, the reason I’m again saying that Android is going to eventually reign supreme is because Motorola (whose cell phones I’m not a huge fan of) are planning to employ 300 developers to work on Android internally. While this might just mean that Motorola ends up producing more crappy cell phones, it also might mean that they are having a bit of a mind shift… (possibly caused by the iPhone’s success?) and want to build something that competes for that power user rather than the 16 year old school girl they’ve apparently been developing phones for for the past few years. And physically motorola build solid devices. They have a rich history of building miliatary grade equipment and comsumer trendoid crap like the Razr (Is that how you spell it?)

Regardless of what Motorola end up doing, the real winner is going to be the Android software stack that they’ll no doubt push code back into. I’m not sure how their licensing is going to work, and they might chose to close source all their android applications, but they’ll no doubt have a positive effect on the Android operating system/software stack, and that’s all that matters.

ps. Thanks to Jonathan Carter for pointing me to the news story.