28 July 2006
That important five rand
| I saw this geriatric pink Chevrolet next to me yesterday when I was filling up at the Sasol service station. It was quite quaint, but what amused me really was the price. In true supermarket style, it can't be just R12,000; it must be R11,995 -- not even R11,999, because people aren't taken in by that these days! The number to phone, just in case you want to buy this item of memorabilia, is 072 591-0859. (Sorry, this is in Cape Town in South Africa; I know you might have been hoping it might be nearer to where you live in southern Bangladesh or Upper Volta.) |
25 July 2006
OK, I have this Google thing figured out
How it works is this: If you search from Google.co.za, you have the option of either searching the Web or searching pages from South Africa. Even if you choose "the Web", you will not get the same set of results as if you searched from, say, Google.com or Google.co.uk. (Also, the .com will redirect you to the .co.za site if you're not careful at the start of the search.) So, the bottom line currently is: Pavatile ranks at number 5 if you search "the Web" from the .co.za site, and at number 16 if you search from the .com. We're nowhere significant in the .co.uk search, and I couldn't be bothered to search from Google Finland, Google Borneo or Google Antarctica, since those areas do not currently represent our primary target markets anyway...
21 July 2006
Boohoo
I had such a nice day yesterday. And then today, Pavatile's site slipped down all the way to page two in Google...
19 July 2006
My campaign to get Adrian to grow his beard
I think Adrian looks good with a beard. Adrian wouldn't mind having a beard, but he reckons that where he works, people who have beards are not taken seriously, and therefore having a beard will make it more difficult for him to achieve his work goals. Since no amount of arguing with him, or nagging, will persuade him to grow a beard, I will simply have to persuade everyone who works with him to grow a beard first. Today, I am launching my campaign. This is the poster which I am going to sneak into the Genetics building...
Feel free to save this image to your own computer and to send it to anyone else who needs a beard.
19 July 2006
What the... ?!
My blog tracks referers and stores the details in the blog database. Now, pray tell me if you know, how the dickens it happened that the search highlighted below led someone to my blog?!
19 July 2006
Who needs Microsoft?
Mikhailo got himself an i-Mate, a kind of telephone with a built in camera, running the Pocket PC OS. So, last night when all I wanted to do was go home, he decided that he wanted to take a Microsoft Project file along with him to a meeting the next morning, and it was upt to me to "make that happen". In fact, exporting to Excel and viewing it on the mobile spreadsheet just wasn't gonna do it for him; he wanted to actually do the whole tutti of project scheduling and costing on that small gadget. Well, I teach a Microsoft Project course, so I am quite adept at making excuses for why you don't have multiple undo levels and all that, because I have been led to believe that the complex thinking which the program has to do requires enormous processing power and RAM...
Well, basically, I discovered, that's just a lot of twaddle; and we don't need twaddle in our lives. What we actually need is twiddle: I discovered Pocket Plan. For a Microsoft Project user, it's really intuitive. And there's a desktop version too (see screenshot above).
Cool, fine, multiple projects and all that are probably not going to be managed to the same degree of complexity, and you certainly don't have a multiplicity of view options, so don't imagine that as a Project Manager for the 2010 World Cup you're going carry every subproject in your pocket; but for the average Microsoft Project user, for whom the program is simply an ad hoc planning tool, Pocket Plan and its big brother, Plan for Windows, is a cool option.
Mikhailo left for his meeting this morning, with Hannes Pretorius' plan in his pocket.
18 July 2006
Another step up!
Well, um, ja! I haven't even had time to put up photies of the weekend, or to tell you about my sneaky campaign to get Adrian to retain his beard, but I just have to announce that Pavatile has moved up another step in Google since last week: It's now at number FIVE in Google for the search term paving, and has risen to near the top for cobble and cobbles.
13 July 2006
Who said Google doesn't care about meta tags?
These are meta descriptions, my friend! (And check out who is number one in South Africa for this search term!)
13 July 2006
Audiobooks
Does anyone in the Cape have any non-fiction audiobooks they'd like to give me (or sell, or swap for something else, for that matter)? I don't care to acquire a TV, so when I am not listening to the radio or reading A Concise History of the Modern World, I listen to audiobooks for entertainiment. If you have any you'd like to get rid of, send me a message. CDs or tapes, it doesn't matter which.
Let me qualify what I mean by non-fiction, though, as Exclusive Books is quite clueless about this, so perhaps I should not assume general understanding. Exclusive Books had The Da Vinci Code — a fictional novel — in the non-fiction shelf. OK, so maybe someone put it there by mistake. But I can't imagine that all the loads of esoterica and New Age self-improvement hoo-ha was also inadvertently deposited there, so the staff probably really think all that stuff is true.
Here are some of the audiobooks I have enjoyed so far (to give you an indication): Blenheim — The Battle for Europe; The Truth at Last, by Christine Keeler; Black Hawk Down (I think it was abridged, although it consisted of four tapes); Gotcha (about a big cash robbery) and The Cult of Violence (about the Kray twins). If I could get something "educational", e.g. about physics, biology, linguistics, etc. it would be nice too; although I have tried learning Italian this way, but that is better suited to concentrated listening, and I want something that I can go to bed with.
12 July 2006
In memoriam
| DERRICK J HOUY 03-08-1972 – 12-07-2005 The legacy of some grows less and less; his grows more and more. One year on, our mourning persists. |
11 July 2006
SEO success!
Pavatile is currently number six in Google for the search term paving!
10 July 2006
The weekend
| Saturday BarCamp has had spin-offs for many of us. Rafiq, Dave and I met to discuss an idea, and when the meeting ended, we were all excited and we kept looking for excuses to continue the conversation, until Rafiq suddenly felt really ill, and had to depart. Having discovered a shared taste for a certain kind of film, Dave and I decided that a bunch of our friends (including Rafiq, who is yet to be notified of our arrangements on his behalf!) should all go out and watch the latest X-Men movie when we meet again in two weeks' time. | Sunday The following day, Adrian and I went to lunch at my cousin Emile's house. We were quite a large party of people, including Emile and Sassa's sons, Sassa's mother and my parents. The group was completely unbalanced in that all the women present were extremely locquacious extroverts, and there was just no way that anyone else could say more than two sentences before we flattened them with weapons-grade chatter. Monday Today, I managed to get a meeting with one of South Africa's top litigation attorneys as we intend to take on a powerful monopoly who has done us a dirty. More about this later... |
5 July 2006
Havent't really had...
| ...or made the time to blog about this properly, but Rafiq and an illustrious relative and Miguel and I are going to start a Web site soon with exclusive (and non-exclusive) news about a big event which is going to happen in Cape Town within the next few years. Start guessing.... meanwhile, watch this blog (and Rafiq's) for details! Adrian tried desperately to prevent me from taking a picture of him last night when we were at his computer (with me trying to explain the difference between a blog and a listserv, which is sort of like the difference between an amphibian and a forklift), complaining that he wasn't photogenetic... I mean photogenic (you'd think a geneticist would be able to organise himself an infusion of prettiness cells in the warts and the hunchback, but no...). In spite of his protests I was, however, able to get this detailed shot of him. |
3 July 2006
Pa's birthday
| Pa turned 75 and celebrated at Ruben's in Franschhoek with me and Ma and Emile and Sassa by opening the bottle of De Toren which Marius gave him 5 years ago. (Since then it has increased in monetary value by about 700% — which was no excuse not to drink it.) |