andrewdotcoza

My blog has moved to http://andrewdotcoza.blogspot.com.

Author:	John Connolly
Publisher:	Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN:	0340834595
Edition:	2004
Number of Pages:	404

Completed 2006-05-05

A relaxing book, not of great genius, but of certain entertainment.

Its a collection of short horror stories of various lengths. Mr Connolly writes with a forced but amusing wit, while the horror aspect of many of his stories relies on the presence of a Dark And Brooding Evil ™, that makes things predictable rather than spine chilling, as good horror should be.

Nevertheless, he seems equally at home in settings that range from old-world England to contemporary America. His America tends to be very Thomas Magnum but I enjoyed it. The first and last stories in the book, The Cancer Cowboy and The Reflecting Eye were the best. The Cancer Cowboy is the most chilling of the yarns and might lead you to some intimate self-examination before its end. The Reflecting Eye, while enjoyable, is notable for its stunning pulp-fiction like dialogue which, if intended seriously by the author, should contribute less to his reputation than it would if satirical.

My copy of the book has a very nice paper-back binding, coloured to resemble a leather-bound tome of about 100 years ago.

I give this one 3 kitty licks out of a possible 5.

My MTN cell phone contract with Autopage blesses me with a phone upgrade every two years. I’ve just been through this experience for the 4th time, having been with Autopage for the last 8 years. Generally, I have found their service to be excellent and, combined with the fact that I do believe that MTN is the better connection, I have found the upgrades to be seamless, from the perspective of making calls.

As cell phone technology has matured, however, upgrades have become about a lot more than making calls. Each new phone brings with it a selection of new features which I feel obliged to try. Usually, I discard the newest features as unusable, often returning to them when my next phone arrives and the technology has matured.

This year I followed my usual process of visiting the Sony-Ericsson Web site and selecting the most feature rich phone that is available. I have come to like the functionality of Sony-Ericsson flip phones, so I usually select one of these. Unfortunately, this was my undoing on this occasion. From the Web site, it seemed that the W900i was the phone to have. I had mine for 2 days before returning it on the grounds that it was unusable. I’d happily answer questions about this judgement but I don’t intend enumerating this phone’s manifold faults here.

It should be said that the return of my shiny, new, black phone was a disturbing experience that, very briefly, made me question my 10 year loyalty to the Ericsson brand. On reflection, I decided that I could just about manage with the Sony-Ericsson W800i as a substitute. It only comes in one very silly colour, its not a flip phone and it does not have 3G capabilities but, aside from that, it has a feature set very similar to that of the W900i.

I have now spent 2 days with the W800i and I think it might just be the coolest thing that I have ever owned. My contract does not include a 3G package, so the lack of this feature is not going to bother me at all. I’ve had non-flip phones before, so I have no problem managing calls by pressing buttons and, in view of the features of the phone, I’d take it if it were coloured like a Spice Cam. (I know someone who actually owned one of these but, wisely, sold it to buy crack.)

The phone has a large screen – about the same size as my previous Sony-Ericsson Z600 but with a far higher colour depth. It includes Walkman functionality and comes with a 500Mb Sony Memory Stick Duo. My phone included some pre-loaded songs. There is a charger, a USB cable, a walk-and-talk headset and earphones that integrates very nicely with the Walkman features, and an adapter that allows the Memory Stick Duo to be used with the older Memory Stick format readers. My contract upgrade also allowed me to get a free Sony-Ericsson Akono Blue Tooth headset.

Make no mistake, its difficult to hand over one piece of kit, no matter how poorly designed, and receive a lesser model in return. It was thus with mixed feelings that I first unpacked my W800i. Honestly, I was disappointed. The software on the W900i is just nicer. It has a full Web browser as opposed to the W800i’s WAP browser. It also has a better interface to the “organiser” features, comprising tasks, calendar items and notes, and its synchronisation software was beyond compare.

Sony-Ericsson has had problems with synchronisation software for the last 5 years. Initially, they shipped a crippled version of the XTNDConnect PC synchronisation suite. I managed to use this, with Blue Tooth, for 4 years. It was always temperamental and quite complicated to configure. I never did get the tasks component to work properly. At some stage, however, Sony-Ericsson started to ship a different synchronisation application, even with the Z600, and it was this software that came with my W800i. Its simpler than the XTNDConnect offering but, in my opinion, twice as bad and very, very slow.

The W900i ships with Sony-Ericsson’s “PC Suite”, which is truly excellent. Not only does it synchronise all Outlook data sets perfectly, but it looks fantastic. If you are not using this to synchronise your phone with your Outlook, you may as well not bother. So, since it does not come with the W800i, what did I do?

First I tried to use the W900i software. That never worked. The package simply informed me that it was connected to an unsupported phone. As a last resort, I went to the Sony-Ericsson site and downloaded the latest synchronisation software for the W900i. Its marked as version 1.20.175, and it works perfectly with my W800i, even though my phone is not included in the list of supported models on the Web site.

With synchronisation sorted out, I was prepared for two years of being content with my phone. Content, however, is not a good feeling for a technology geek when it applies to something that will be the lifeblood of their business and social life for an extended period of time.

Thankfully, there is an abundance of Java applications written for phones such as the W800i. I decided to shop around and see if there was anything cool that I could use. It took me about 10 minutes to solve the Web browser problem. Opera-Mini comes in a version that works perfectly on the W800i. Its different from the browser on the W900i but, in terms of bandwidth usage and usability, I think that its actually slightly better. Among the other gems that I found were MSN clients, a Google Earth client and even a compass.

The Walkman functions on the W800i are great. The preloaded songs on my memory stick are, to be honest, pretty sucky. Perhaps the problem is that they are not my genre, but they are DRMed and can only be played on W800i phones. The sound quality seemed questionable to me and I battled to get as far as the end of the first song. My own MP3s, however, play brilliantly. The Walkman software picks up the MP3 tags with no problem and I was surprised by the ease with which I could navigate to my desired artist, album and track.

The W900i comes with an external radio, volume control and track navigation gadget. I found that it didn’t work consistently and got in my way. All of these functions are built right into the W800i and work beautifully. The radio only works when the headset it plugged in because the wire doubles as the FM antenna. The headset itself includes a lapel mike with a button that allows you to answer calls. When you phone rings the music pauses and you can have a conversation without removing the ear phones. It seems like you could plug any generic earphones into the 3.5mm stereo jack on the headset. I do, however, miss the Hi-Fi adapter that shipped with the W900i. Both phones come with 3 different sized earpiece sets for the headphones. This is useful for me because I found that the default, middle, size was uncomfortable in my slightly deformed left auditory canal. My headphones are now lopsided, but completely comfortable.

Both the W800i and its spastic cousin ship with 2 mega pixel digital cameras. They take excellent photographs and, for still, day time shots, actually do better than my venerable HPC200 digital camera. Both of them use high-intensity LEDs for low-light conditions, with the addition of the usual “night mode” sensitivity setting. The W900i includes an automatic flash function. The W800i, however, requires one to turn the light on manually.

 

The connectors on both of these phones are of the new-new Sony-Ericsson type. Each accessory seems to take up the entire connector. You cannot, for example, use the mains charger and the USB cable at the same time. This is mitigated by the fact that the phone charges through the USB port if you plug it into a PC. Nevertheless, it also means that you cannot use the headset and charge the phone at the same time. Since I have found that the music playing times are far, far less than the optimal figures given on the Web site, this means that I would not be able to spend an entire working day listening to my tunes. I suspect that I might get better battery life using a different sound file format, but I’m not prepared to convert all of my MP3s. I hope that Sony-Ericsson includes a separate charging facility on their next phones.

Obviously, there are many features of the W800i that I have not yet mastered. Blue Tooth synchronisation works, but the phone and the PC keep connecting to each other once the sync is complete. That bothers me because it also has an impact on battery life, although I feel sure that I can correct the problem when I have configured things properly. The Blue Tooth headset seems to work very well, although it uses the old-new Ericsson charging connector. I’m intrigued to see if it will work directly with my PC and, of course, to see if the Blue Tooth remote control feature of the phone does anything cool.

The W800i is a very fine piece of equipment. Calls are crystal clear, if feels sturdy in one's hand and the key pad is solid and easy to use. The little joystick navigation tool is not quite as nice as the one that came on the T610, but one gets used to that. The battery cover is difficult to operate and feels flimsy but, since it’s the sort of part that gets used perhaps a dozen times over the lifetime of the phone, I hardly think this is a problem. The phone is nice and comfortable, and I’d love it even if it were just a phone.

The W800i, however, is not just a phone. It’s a very fine camera with a built in phone. It’s a very fine music player with a built in phone. As much as I hate the appellation, it’s a “lifestyle device”, which might explain why it only comes in a white and orange colour combination.

I’m glad I chose this model Sony-Ericsson. I’m pleased that I gave the W900i back and that I never waited for the W810i. For what I want to do, this phone is perfect. I’m already comfortable with it, and I take it out of my pocket with a very rewarding sense of pride. I give it Andrew’s highest award – the Teeth Marks of Approval – and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who is the market for a new mobile.

Dear Sir or Madam

On 12 December you published a letter from D.E. Aldendorff of Jeffreys Bay entitled "Criminals not entitled to rights". I would like to draw this writer's attention to the story you published on 13 December entitled "St Albans prisoner sues after indecent assault by warders".

It is my opinion that views such as those expressed in the letter are the direct cause of incidents such as those that occurred at St Alban's Prison on 25 November. I would be very interested to know if the writer believes that the rights of the prisoner, Mr Fondling, were violated that night or whether he had this barbaric sexual assault coming to him because he had broken into someone's house.

A ruling that upholds the rights of one South African, even if they are a prisoner of the state, is a ruling that upholds the rights of all South Africans, including D.E. Aldendorff.

Andrew Freeborn
Cape Town

Yesterday I went into Du Noon for the first time since moving to Cape Town a little over 2 years ago. Du Noon is what we call an “informal settlement,” or a “previously disadvantaged area,” or a “squatter camp,” or a “location”. The people who live in Du Noon are very poor and those of us who refer to their suburb as a “squatter camp” also imagine that many of its residents would cheerfully shoot us in the face for the change in our wallet and, in some cases at least, we would be right.

Yesterday, however, Du Noon burned down.

Today, local news services are reporting the story very differently from each other. News24’s front page weighs in with “Fire rips through shacks”, posted at 19:30 last night and apparently written from Johannesburg. They say that “400 shacks were destroyed by 17:30.”

IOL, by contrast, displayed the story, with a picture, on its secondary “South Africa” page at the time of this writing. The front page picture, however, is entitled “Smokin’!” and refers to the air show which took place a few kilometres away from the fire, within sight of the great pall of smoke. Nevertheless, their “Fire leaves more than a thousand homeless” is quite comprehensive, claiming that up to 450 shacks were destroyed by the time the fire was brought under control at 16:30.

A local radio station reported this afternoon that the fires broke out again at around midnight last night, destroying another 350 shacks.

That, then, makes for about 750 dwellings destroyed in a single suburb during a 24 hour period. According to IOL’s calculations of 4 residents per dwelling, this disaster has left about 3000 homeless.

I live in a suburb that looks like this from about 180m in the air.

Table View from 180m up
(Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

A few hundred metres away (as you can see from the Google Earth co-ordinates) lies Du Noon which looks like this.

Du Noon from 180m up
(Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

Du Noon burns as a 747 flies overhead (Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

We look over the river and we see shacks. Usually, like me, we only bother to look across the river when there is an impressive plume of smoke that piques our curiosity. When that happens, we drive our fancy white cars to the big white hill in Gie Road and we climb through the white sand, all the way to the top, where we watch the black people’s shacks burn. Some of us comment that it sure is a big one and a few people shake their heads.

I actually started thinking on that hill. Each year the press tells us about these fires objectively, dispassionately, and using sanitised words and statistics. We are told that a certain number of shacks were destroyed and that another number of people were rendered homeless. Are these just shacks, though? Are these structures not the private homes of people? “Homeless” is a term that we white people associate with the dirty beggar who asks us for money outside the shop. In this case, though, we should be talking about entire family units that have lost everything that they own - mothers, fathers and children alike, thousands of them, stranded under the elements because 750 homes in their suburb burned to the ground.

If you examine the satellite photos that I have provided above, you will see that it takes a fire front of a few hundred metres to destroy 750 homes in Du Noon. In Table View the fire front would have to be several kilometres long before a similar number of homes were destroyed. The magnitude of the human disaster, however, would be the same. Imagine 750 Table View homes being gutted by fire and ask yourself whether or not an air show would be considered more “Smokin’!” than that.

A closer view of the Du Noon burning (Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

Yesterday, while I was standing on that hill in Gie Road, I woke up to something. I woke up to the fact that those people standing on the hill with me did not actually realise what they were watching. I started speaking to a few of them. I asked them what they thought would happen to those poor people who’s houses were burning down. Every single one of the people to whom I spoke looked uncomfortable for a few seconds and then got in their car and left.

I left too. The Gie Road hill lies just North of the Diep River, which flows in its turn between the white suburb of Table View and the black suburb of Du Noon or, more technically, the Doornbach informal settlement at Du Noon. Heading South for a few blocks, past modern townhouse developments and so-called “eco-villages”, brings one to Blaauwberg road which, if one is to cross the river, one must follow in an Easterly direction over the Julius Gelb bridge.

The main fixture of the area East of the bridge is a taxi rank, Africa style. Its not a place to which many Table View residents go although most of us drive past it every day to get to Koeberg road, which leads on to Milnerton, the N1 and the rest of the world as we know it. That requires a turn to the right, to the South. Turning North towards Du Noon is the habit of quite a different demographic group. In a sense, one could probably conduct a racial census of sorts by sitting at this intersection and counting cars.

Yesterday, I turned North and started heading through the industrial area, past the Killarney race track, into the fiery heart of Du Noon. Ordinarily, I would never have been daring enough to do this. Typically, however, people are not much of a threat when they are watching their entire lives being destroyed by flames.

The Du Noon fire, from Du Noon (Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

The most compelling memory I have of the visit is that of people running along the road for kilometres, towards the flames, with a look of complete emptiness on their faces. There were not even a lot of them. In fact, I saw surprisingly few people at all. The safer areas of Du Noon seemed to be going about their business as usual, not even noticing as these empty, stricken souls ran towards what remained of their homes. Moving in the opposite direction were a few people carrying their few, blackened possessions heading, I was told, to the town hall.

I spoke to some excited children, a security guard, a traffic policeman and a fireman who, with pleading in his eyes, asked me if there was anything I could do to get a helicopter to dump water on the fire. Nobody knew what was going on, what supplies were needed and where they should be taken. Short of running a private aid station out of the boot of my car, there was not much that I could do. Getting in and out of the area was becoming more difficult because of the white people sitting in their cars at the side of the road watching the houses burn.

An hour and half into the disaster, I could see two fire engines and an ambulance, with a few more arriving in fits and starts. Much activity was happening very close to the fire itself so I imagine that most of the emergency vehicles were concentrated there. I did not go much further than about 100 metres past the traffic department cordon for practical reasons. Ahead there was a raging inferno that was more than the available emergency services personnel could deal with. The last thing they needed was a white boy in an AK-47 t-shirt to look after. I made them aware of the fact that I was willing to help and had some medical training and then waited at a safe distance. Most of the injured had already been treated by that time and the only help they needed was fighting the fire itself.

One thing I do know that makes a lie of many of the press reports: I left the scene at 16:30 and there were no aircraft being used to fight the fire at the time. Meanwhile, the air show continued unabated behind me, as I watched the homes of people burn by their hundreds.

Why do we not care about these things? Why do we sit and watch a suburb burning without showing an ounce of humanity towards the people who live there? A Primus stove explodes and 750 houses burn down. In white culture, that last happened during the Great Fire of London in 1666. In Du Noon it happens every year. The residents of Du Noon live, for the most part, without running water, sanitation or electricity. If they had these things fires like this would be much less likely to occur. At best, Du Noon is 300 years behind Table View in development. In many ways, this last weekend has taken the place back to the Dark Ages. Will you think about that today? Will the Mayor of Cape Town? Will Mbeki?

Will I?

The proposed National No Phone Day discussed in my last blog entry has not met with much public enthusiasm. Instead of the 100 responses that I hoped for, I have received 9 so far, including my own.

Nevertheless, I have decided that this issue is too important for me to be discouraged by initial failure. Earnestly, I hope to galvanise the online community around National No Phone Day and my intention is to keep the fires lit until we have enough interest for the project to carry itself. I have now created a "registration" form on Andrew.co.za, accessible through the following link:

http://www.andrew.co.za/nnpd.htm

All this will give me is your name and, if you chose to enter it, your E-mail address.

Some people have expressed concern that I am collecting E-mail addresses to resell to spammers. Please read the Andrew.co.za privacy policy here. Besides, I've never required your E-mail addresses, only your support.

According to this Business Day article, it is cheaper to fly to Hong Kong to download 100Gb of data than to do it through Telkom's ADSL service. Come on, people! Surely this merits some action?

Thank you to all of those who responded positively to the idea and who shared such great information and suggestions on the topic. To those of you with reservations, Andrew.co.za will be waving this banner around for some time. I really hope that you come about and gather the courage to express yourself. If you have any concerns that you want me to answer, you are welcome to ask me a question here.

Telkom is the South African telephone monopoly that we all love to hate. Many of us complain about their service and their rates every day. All of us keep using our phones.

Are we South Africans or South African’ts? I’m a South African, and so is my fiancée, Shanu van der Berg, who first thought of National No Phone Day.

E-mailed petitions and protest letters have become part of life in South Africa, as have viral marketing protest ideas, which also make their way into our inboxes. These don’t work, simply because people forget the importance of the message as soon as they finish forwarding or deleting the E-mail.

National No Phone Day will be different. We will not only boycott the use of the telephone networks for 1 day but we will also put our names to the effort, pledging one day of sacrifice to send a message to the telecommunications companies of South Africa. This message is that we have had enough.

At some point, nearly everyone has dreamed of leading a popular uprising, usually while drinking with their friends. In reality, very few people make the effort. If the South African public is to express their disgust with the telephone systems, someone is going to have to take charge of the effort. In the absence of better qualified volunteers, that will be me.

Here is now things are going to work:

I’ll post this blog entry by 03:00 on Friday, 4 November 2005. I’ll notify my usual mailing list, as well as a few other selected friends. If any reader thinks this is a good idea, please leave a comment at the bottom of this entry. If you leave an E-mail address, I promise not to sell it or use it for any purposes other than the organisation of National No Phone Day. Please also tell your friends about the idea, in case they wish to express interest. To count for this, you need to be a South African or living in South Africa.

If I get 100 clear expressions of interest by the morning of Tuesday 8 November 2005, I will press ahead with this plan. If not, it will be abandoned.

Once I have 100 clear expressions of interest, I shall create a page on http://www.andrew.co.za on which you can register your pledge to join National No Phone Day and invite your friends to pledge too. It is possible for this page to be erected by the end of next week.

As soon as the http://www.andrew.co.za page has been erected, I shall start work on a National No Phone Day Web site. This will have a proper mailing list and is targeted to go live by the time we have collected 10000 pledges through the temporary page.

With 10000 interested people, we will be able to decide on a date through a discussion process, as well as collect ideas for National No Phone Day events. Our goal will be to collect 100000 pledges before we go operational.

On National No Phone Day, 100000 South Africans will demonstrate their disillusionment with the status of the South African telecommunications industry by not using their phones. This should include landlines, cell phones of on all networks, the sending of SMSs and possibly also the use of Internet connections. The National No Phone Day site will go dark, as will my personal site and my business site. Pledgers, where possible, will be encouraged to take their sites down for the day as well.

Letters of discontent will be prepared and delivered to the offices of Telkom, Icasa and the cellular networks, as well as any other relevant organisations on which we decide. I shall be hand delivering such a letter to a selected organisation in Cape Town. I would certainly enjoy some company, and we would encourage suitably situated members of the public to hand deliver similar letters in other centres, where possible.

It is likely that we will have to apply for permits if the number of people involved in these deliveries is large. Under such circumstances, it would also be nice to have photographers on hand, a press presence and people with guitars singing protest songs. There will be no violence, destruction or threats to life or property. This will be a peaceful operation and you will be committing to this when you make your pledge.

We all need to be clear on one thing: Not using the phone for 1 day will not bring Telkom to its knees. It will not, directly, change the way telecommunications happen in South Africa, nor will it liberate us from the cruel economic and social oppression inherent in the telecommunications business model. It will inconvenience the telecommunications monoliths and draw massive public attention to our collective plight, both nationally and internationally.

We have written letters and complained. None of this has helped. Maybe, just maybe, we can make a difference by standing up and being counted. When the history of South Africa’s telecommunications revolution is written, the first part will be filled with monopolistic woes, technological limitations and iniquitous profiteering on the part of certain companies. The second part will start with what we achieve on National No Phone Day. You are a South African. Make it happen!

I got my ADSL today. I am so goddamn happy. It feels almost like living in the first world.

Of course, I am fully aware that this lasts until about the 17th of November, when the Telkom account arrives, after which I will be feeling somewhat tender. Actually, despite the elation, I feel somewhat tender already.

Like their fixed line brothers, you see, Telkom Internet, are a bunch of ass-raping bastards.

To start with, all of their service packages are elaborate constructions designed to prevent you from ascertaining what you are actually paying for. I spent several hours deciding between HomeDSL 192, 384, 512, 384 Premium, 512 Imperial, 1024 Princely Hocus, or whatever. Note that the page has changed entirely since I place my order a month ago, and it seems to be more confusing than ever.

Each number represents your apparent line speed. I took the 384, which seemed to have a good price/performance ratio, but then had to choose between the various 384 packages, some of which include free minutes that can only be used for local calls between 01:30 and 01:35 on Sunday nights when the moon is in its second quarter, and others which include free voice mail (some of you know how much I would love to have that one!) and fax-to-E-mail services identical to the dysfunctional one I have on my MTN contract.

Eventually, I chose the vanilla package without any extra crap. Somewhere, deep within my limbic system, I'm convinced that I am losing out on an amazing deal. My higher centres of reasoning, however, are quite content. They know that I am being ripped off, and they take comfort in knowing that I am being ripped off blatantly, in a way that I can understand, rather than through some unspeakable second tier services which will take 3 months to activate, probably never work properly, and which I will feel compelled to use at least once, since I am paying for them anyway.

This, of course, settles the matter of having an ADSL line running into my house. One also needs to have an ISP. Now, ISPs have some wonderful deals. I'm not talking about the many faces of MWeb, but some of the smaller operators who sell things very competitive DSL accounts for much less than Telkom's capped accounts. Of course, Telkom has anticipated their services and some ISPs have had difficulties interacting with Telkom networks in the past (read this!). Having found that all ISPs with the legal clout the fight Telkom are more expensive than Telkom, I puckered up and decided to go with the Telkom ISP package too.

So far so good. Today, while waiting for the "engineer" to arrive, I suddenly had a paranoid thought: What happens if the ISP can't be activated immediately? They might close at 15:00 or something! So, I phoned. That's when I discovered that they had no trace of my ISP order at all, despite phoning me about it 3 weeks ago when they thought that the line had been installed, even when it hadn't. I re-ordered the ISP service, opting for a cheaper one than my original order, and stayed on the phone with them until it was activated.

Within minutes, Jerome the "engineer" arrived to connect the wrong wire to the Telkom network. His work done, he attempted to convince me that that nothing functioned because there was paint on the telephone wall jack. The usual petty arguing with Telkom employees followed and, before long, the correct connection was made. I find that it is important not to flinch when dealing with these people.

Within seconds, my ADSL was up and running. I thought I had won. I really did. Then I realised that my former phone line was now an ADSL line and that I somehow needed to get a conventional PSTN phone connected to it if I was still to have a roof over my head when Shanu returned home. "So," I asked, "how do I make phone calls?"

"Yeah, you see, you got to get a splitterrrr and a filterrrr for that to work," says Jerome.

I already had a splitter. Eventually, Jerome managed to "find" a filter in his bag, which he let me have for R50 in cash, no receipt, no questions asked. The bastard.

So, now I have ADSL. The cost breakdown is as follows:

1. Installation
Install ADSL	R404.00
DLink DSL router	R615.50
2. Monthly cost:
ADSL Line rental	R359.00
Telkom ISP	R199.00
3. Sneaky, extra costs:
Monthly phone rental	R78.00	(Because you are billed for a PSTN line also)
Monthly "Infinit call"	R52.75	(Formally "R7 Callmore", which I need to cancel explicitly)
Monthly Backup ISP	R145.00	(For when I exceed my ADSL cap)
Jerome's rip-off filter	R50.00
Connection of existing jack	Unknown
Assorted phone follow-ups	Unknown
Waiting 1 month for service	Priceless

Even with all of that, we should be saving a few hundred Rands per month on the phone bill. Trying to run a software development company on a dial up modem costs a fortune and I will not be doing that again.

My technical complaints are as follows: My Telkom ISP E-mail address does not work. I can send mail to it, but I cannot log on to retrieve mail. I find this delightful and will probably leave things like that. My normal telephone conversations now have terrible sound quality. I'll probably leave that for now too.

All in all, a typical Telkom experience. The service is not great, but its the best sort of Internet connection that you can get in this country. It beats the heck out of dialling a network into the Internet with a 56K modem and I am generally very satisfied with the result.

Since moving to Cape Town, I've been making a collection of odd advertisements that have appeared in my postbox. Some of these are brochures and others appeared in the local community newspapers. Its time to unleash the best of them on the world.


This leaflet arrived at our previous home in Parklands in 2004 and is the most valued item in my collection. By my reckoning, it includes 2 spelling errors, including one in the company name, and a serious grammatical irregularity. Not bad for an advert of 47 words. The troubling thing is that someone printed hundreds of copies of this thing without noticing.


This gem appeared on the back cover of an Easi-Ads booklet on 18 February 2005. I don't know what happened to this poor man between the two pictures but I don't want it to happen to me. Notice the psychotic look in his eyes in the "after" photo. Going from being a jolly, Jack Daniels drinking hippy to a perlemoen gangster in one easy step will do that to you. At least, so I am told.

In Table View, hair companies have particularly bad ads. The mistake that they usually make is to include their own pictures.


As god is my witness, figuratively speaking, I would not let these people touch my hair. The argument that there is nobody to dress a hairdresser's hair can admittedly be made, but Leon and Jane work together. Judging by his hair, I would rather have Leon working on me. Leon and Jane come from the same edition of Easi-Ads that had the Salon McMasters ad on the back cover.

"Patrick Adams has no hair!" could be the rallying cry of an immaculately coiffured generation. He appeared in the Tabletalk of 15 September 2005.

Edit: Some visitors did not realise that the images shown above are thumbnails and complained that they could not read the text. Please click on them to see the full sized images.

The astute observer will have noticed some changes around here recently. These have formed part of the relaunch of Andrew.co.za. The colour scheme of the blog has been updated to match the usual colour of my site. At the same time, I removed the blog images that I was hosting on the Andrew.co.za server and published them on a dedicated image hosting service.

This is the main reason for the entry. I recommend that if you have any image hosting requirements, you check out http://www.imageshack.us. They offer an excellent free service that enables you to host images of up to 1Mb is size on their servers. As long as you stick to their terms and conditions of service, which require you not to violate copyright and not post pictures of you taking crack or displaying your private parts, they offer 100Mb of bandwidth per hour per image. This is phenomenal since, as long as your site does not land up on the front page of Slashdot, your images should always be available.

For images above a certain size, they offer a fantastic thumbnail feature which you will see in some of the older entries in this blog. These not only increase the download speed of your site but also offer useful information about the image in a black bar, allowing the user to decide if it is worth clicking the link and viewing the larger version of the picture.

On the down side, they do have a lot of ads. These allow them to run a free service and can thus be forgiven. These ads don't interfere with the display of your images and are only visible on the ImageShack site itself. They also have a slightly idiosyncratic login system. You don't get a user name and password, but rather a special URL which contains the unique numeric ID of your account. If you don't have this with you, you cannot log into your particular collection of images. You can still host an image anonymously, which means that you can still use the service, but it may be difficult to find your image after some time has passed.

Some of you will know that things have not been going particularly well for Shanu and I recently. We have suffered a few tragedies such as the death of one of our beloved Alaskan Malamutes and a fire at Shanu's work. Things are returning to normal slowly but steadily.

Overcome with the importance of being a Young Democracy, the South African Government passed the Promotion of Access to Information Act [PDF] in the year of 2000, it being the second Act of that year.

In summary, this piece of legislation is intended to ensure a culture of openness in the operation of South African private and public organisations and prescribes that every such organisation submit a manual, comprising a guide to accessing the information held by that body, to the South African Human Rights Commission.

Since my company, Aequitas, is a private organisation under the definition of the Act, I was obliged to submit such a manual just like tens of thousands of other small South African businesses.

The submission and the processing of these manuals is a mammoth task for the SAHRC. It is very likely that the Government and the SAHRC underestimated the volume of submissions that would arrive. Nevertheless, word was put out on the street that 31 August 2005 would absolutely be the last deadline for the submission.

The small business community of South Africa was thrown into chaos. We were bombarded by hundreds of advertisements from people who would take care of the submission of our manuals for a cost varying from R170 to R1200. Accountants, auditors, business consultants and Web sites all jumped on the bandwagon, offering us great deals that would make this problem go away in return for modest, and sometimes not so modest amounts of cash.

During Paranoid August of 2005, only one advertiser, Pete Carruthers of Pete’s Weekly, pointed out that all information needed for the submission was available on the SAHRC Web site. With the template they supply [PDF], one could conceivably complete a manual in under five minutes and submit it to the E-mail address provided for the purpose. In my case, it took me twenty minutes to complete two manuals, while having a fight with Microsoft Word and cooking pasta.

That, I thought, would be the end of it. Like a good citizen, I completed my company’s manual and E-mailed it PAIA@sahrc.org.za, in accordance with the instructions found on this page, on 17 August 2005. Like a paranoid citizen, I set my E-mail client to request a delivery receipt and a read receipt.

Today, on 30 August 2005, I received a deletion notice from the address mentioned above, containing the following text:

Your message

  To:      Promotion of Access to Information Act
  Subject: Submission of Manual for the Promotion of Access to
Information Act
  Sent:    Wed, 17 Aug 2005 01:40:27 +0200

was deleted without being read on Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:42:05 +0200

By making this blog entry, I wish to place on record that I have done everything that is reasonably within my power to comply with the provisions of the Promotion of Access to Information Act, with particular reference to the instructions found on the Web site of the South African Human Rights Commission.

As a final step, I shall resubmit my manual immediately. I am lucky, in that I thought to request a read receipt. Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of small business owners who did not do so are sitting at home right now, comfortably unaware that their submission has been deleted and that they are, after all their efforts, criminals in the eyes of the law.

If anybody who submitted their manual via E-mail is later prosecuted for not meeting the deadline, please contact me. I have evidence to show that an unknown number of submissions were deleted from a mailbox at the SAHRC at 11:42 on 30 August 2005, and I will happily make this evidence available for your defence.

As for me, I’ll go quietly when they come. I’ve done everything that I can to comply with this stupid, stupid law, and I feel that any consequences of non-compliance would amount to persecution rather than prosecution.

This story appeared in the Eastern Province Herald today.

My response:

Dear Sir or Madam

As a former Port Elizabethan, I read your recent article about the criticisms levelled against Fascination Books and J. K. Rowling with great embarrassment. (2005-07-12 Church group attacks Potter magic days before new book release.)

Witchcraft and Wizardry have been part of European culture for thousands of years. Ms Rowling uses this lore as a platform on which she can build her wonderful stories. As occult instruction manuals, the Harry Potter books would be no more useful than the Complete Works of William Shakespeare or, for those less inclined to read, an evening in front of DSTV.

The suggestion that Ms Rowling has masterminded an occult corporate presence in Port Elizabeth is simple minded and more worthy of an isolated rural community in a hick movie than a city that upholds itself as a leading venue in Africa.

Perhaps, though, that is not the point. Perhaps Christian communities do feel threatened now that they no longer have a political monopoly on the public's thinking. Perhaps teaching children to read and to use their imaginations does pose a threat to the continued existence of closeted and unquestioning belief in the Bible. Perhaps all of these accusations hold merit and Ms Rowling and her cabal of booksellers have contrived a sinister plan to inform the public of their beliefs through the medium of entertaining stories.

If this were the case, they would be perfectly entitled to do so. Freedom of Religion means ANY religion, and Freedom of Religion is entrenched in the South African Constitution in Section 15, immediately preceding Section 16, which recognises our right to Freedom of Expression.

I'm sure that Pastor Lottering has not received any complaints from Wiccans about the accuracy of the Harry Potter stories. I doubt that he has received many complaints from Wiccans at all, or from Hindus, or Buddhists, or Muslims. I doubt that too many of these people like to speak to Pastor Lottering, and that might be because of his judgemental and intolerant attitude towards the choices of others.

Good for you, Fascination Books! Merry Meet!

Andrew Freeborn
Cape Town

In response to this article, I have composed the following letter to the TygerBurger:

Dear Sir or Madam

I was greatly disturbed by your front page article of 6 April 2005.

Now that we have cleared most of our country for farmland, now that our cities belch poison from their industrial areas and we have the capacity to tip entire ecosystems with the demands of our human population, it seems disgusting to me that the lives of these mallards are to be thrown, like so many sops, to the politically correct ideal of protecting our environment.

Surely there must be a better solution than this wholesale extermination? Your article states that the "slaughter" has been on the cards since 1999. This means that at least 6 years have passed during which capture and release programs may have been considered. Perhaps it is naïve of me to think that such an option is suitable but I would rather be naïve than cynical enough to look these beautiful creatures in the eye and then feed them the final, fatal meal.

The fact that the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and the yellowbilled duck (Anas undulata) produce fertile hybrids indicates that they are very closely related as species. One wonders whether the innocent mallard, going about its daily business of being a duck, is to be murdered purely because of the colour of its feathers.

Andrew Freeborn
Table View

Those of you who read the blog from its first entry may remember that it kicked off on 16 July 2003 with a review of a Logitech road show, hosted by Pinnacle Micro, in Port Elizabeth. On 9 November 2004 I received an invitation to another Logitech road show event, this time in Cape Town.

The invitation consisted of an E-mailed electronic flyer sent out by the Cape Town branch of Pinnacle Micro. It is reproduced on the right.

At this point you may perhaps be forgiven for thinking that I might have fabricated this advertisement myself. Of course, I have no real way of proving that this is not the case. I have the original E-mail message in which I received this flyer and, hopefully, will soon have a response from Pinnacle Micro mentioning the charming looking young lady in the lower right hand corner.

Until then, even I will not believe completely that Pinnacle Micro and Logitech intended to distribute promotional material containing  this:

Lest any readers believe that I rail against this flyer for puritanical reasons, let me say that the "filth" component of this does not bother me at all. Indeed, I'm not offended in any way. I am, however, puzzled by how this imagery could be seen as respectful to women in general and women in the computer industry in particular. Do you notice the way the near naked women is (un)dressed as a maid, serving what appears to be beer and pie? Isn't it "yummy"? Don't we possibly have a stereotyping problem here? How does this make female computer guys feel? Please leave your comments using the link below.

I cannot escape the deep seated feeling that this sort of thing is not OK. At the same time, I'd like someone to tell me if it is. I figure that I could sell a lot of stuff with pictures of chicks, beer and pie.

The scanned pamphlet to the left used to live in my father's car in Port Elizabeth. It had been handed to him at an intersection and it lay on the dashboard for a considerable amount of time before I laid claim to it. (The passage of time is indicated by the 6 digit PE phone number. By my recollection, the change to 7 digits happened in about 1996.)

One could deride the thing for hours and, under different circumstances, I would. Something gave me pause today, however, and lead me to ponder how bizarre Christianity has become in its Africanised implementations. What happened was this article in the Eastern Province Herald. The following excerpts tell the story.

The role and future of sangomas and inyangas in the church will come under the spotlight at a meeting of the Methodist church later this month.

The meeting in Mthatha will be asked to consider the status of sangomas and inyangas who are allegedly leaving the church.

Black members of the church want the issue discussed and suggest they should be allowed to become “heads’’ of the church.

Methodist church mission director the Rev Gcobani Vika said the church needed to take a clear position on the issue of the sangomas.

“Quite a number of members who are called to become sangomas have left the church because there appears to be no room for them,” he said.

Methodist church spokesman Val Pauquet said the matter of Methodists who are sangomas and inyangas becoming future leaders of the church could not be divorced from the whole debate.

OK then! The "Jesus Saves" part of this equation is probably well known to most who will read this blog. The sangoma side of things may be less so. I found some useful information here thanks to Wim van Binsbergen who, incidentally, quotes from Thessalonians on his home page. Reading Wim's explanation of the role of Sangoma, however, it is clear that there is no common ground that can be occupied by Christianity and the belief system of anybody calling themselves a sangoma.

Basically, decent Christians would have been rounding up the sangomas by the, well, thicket (what is the collective noun for sangomas?) and burning them at the stake as recently as 1800! I'm not saying that sort of behviour is ideal but I do think that 200 years is a bit of a short time in which to turn 180 degrees and condone animal sacrificing, ancestor worshiping spiritualism within the ranks of the faithful. That works out to be a smidgeon under 1 degree a year which, though it seems small at first, is actually rather more than you would expect from the Rock of Ages.^*

This, then, is all too often the state of African Christianity: two steps away from pure voodoo. Whether they are hooking up with the local sangomas to found Jesus's Own Initiation School or sharing a saviour with some guy in a cheap suit selling suppositories that cure AIDS for 50 bucks a pop, African Christians are looking stupid, and its going to take a lot more to fix that than getting someone to "pray strong for them".

^*: In the 2004 years since the birth of Christ, this means that the church would have had the time to completely reverse any doctrine 10.02 times. A little refinement of this mathematics could give us a very interesting spiritual calendar from which we could calculate the half-life of faith.

This blog entry used to explain why I am not a people person.

It involved work related correspondance which, upon reflection, has no place on my personal blog even if the names have been changed to protect those that commit outrages against all that is decent and pure.

The original blog entry has been voluntarily censored so that, as I join battle with the proverbial infidel, I do not become as he is: an ignorant, rude, boorish poopy mouth.

Personally, I'm very sorry that you cannot read about my experience. Please consider visiting these soothing Web sites instead.

Andrew

Today I went to Pick 'n Pay in Parklands, Cape Town with Shanu. While there, I saw this:



I suspect that nobody likes customers who point and giggle every time they see "ASS" written somewhere in a shop. Thankfully, the sort of cretin that goes around their shop writing "ASS" on stuff seldom has the balls to do anything about it.

The towels themselves come from India. They seem very thin and totally lacking those qualities of absorbtion so typical of the sort of thing you would use to dry yourself off. Interestingly, they have the same sort of feel as toilet paper.

It is possible that these towels are the product of the same business empire that made the muffins so loved by my former colleague, Cedric. Unfortunately, Cedric has doltishly lost the picture. Do you have any favourite ASS products? Leave your comments!

I have been a bit slack when it comes to updating recently. Hopefully this can be forgiven by the all new colour scheme which strives for some sort of readability.

My cat, Pajero, is ill and her medicine does not seem to agree with her.  The vet is confident that she will be OK, but one does still worry.

I'm going with Shanu and her family to watch Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 in a short while and I may post a review here after.

The original recipe Black Cat peanut butter with the yellow label has not yet appeared in the shops despite the fact that Tiger Brands informed me that it would be launched in mid September. Peanut buttergate did, however, feature on News24. (These links may not work if you are not registered with the site or if you are not in South Africa. It appears that you don't have a right to know after all.) I am recommending Thokoman peanut butter in the interim. Its slightly runnier than real Black Cat but it tastes the same.

You should also see some ranting here about Cape Town's new water restrictions. They seem a bit heavy handed to me and I plan to address the matter with my elected representatives. Apparently Port Elizabeth is now also planning water restrictions. Guys, no matter what water restrictions you implement, ours will still be better!

I am never going to use http://www.easypay.co.za again, ever!

But Andrew, what is this Easypay thing?
Easypay.co.za is a company that seems to collect payment on behalf of other companies. They do this in several different ways. One of these is there Web site, http://www.easypay.co.za, at which one can register and then use one's credit card to pay bills to people like Eskom, Telkom, some medical practitioners, the George Municipality's traffic department, etc. If you see a long number, usually starting with "9" and surrounded by ">>>>>>>" or "<<<<<<<<", you will probably find that this bill can be paid using http://www.easypay.co.za.

That sounds like a good thing! Why aren't you using it again, ever, Andrew?
Because http://www.easypay.co.za is UNRELIABLE and http://www.easypay.co.za is UNCONTACTABLE, thats why!

There is no telephone number on the http://www.easypay.co.za site, only an E-mail address, support@transwitch.co.za. My bank (FNB) and I have both been trying to get a response from http://www.easypay.co.za for the last two days. No response has yet been forth comming. THIS IS WHY I SAY EASYPAY.CO.ZA IS UNCONTACTABLE!

It is also possible for http://www.easypay.co.za to tell you that your transaction has failed but still to submit it to your bank! This happened to me on the night of 14 September 2004 when I tried to pay my electricity bill of R520.70. At the time, I received a message from http://www.easypay.co.za stating "Bank Response: No response from bank: please try again".  I printed it out (using the button on their Web site) and you can download the PDF file here.

At the same time I received a notification from my bank that a debit of R520.70 had been submitted to my card. The amount has not yet cleared but is sitting in the "Outstanding Authorisation" limbo of my credit card account, clearly visible on eBucks.

I do not believe that this error was the fault of http://www.easypay.co.za. I do, however, have very little faith in a system that explicitly tells you to "Try Again" after a transaction has already been submitted. I would expect any responsibly designed system to warn me that there is a problem and tell me to contact them or my bank. THIS IS WHY I SAY THAT EASYPAY.CO.ZA IS UNRELIABLE!

http://www.easypay.co.za, however, does not really believe in being contacted. My bank has been trying since the morning of 15 September 2004. The lonely E-mail address on their Web site does not seem to elicit a response from them. I have been trying since this morning with a similar lack of success. In the mean time, my electricity account has not been paid, I am being charged interest on the outstanding balance and my payment is sitting in some sort of zombie zone where nobody can tell me whether or not it will go through.

Its an interesting situation to be in, really: Risk taking a double hit on the electricity bill or not paying it at all. This has been the situation for 2 working days now, an amount of time which I believe is perfectly sufficient for someone to be able to contact me or my bank and make an attempt to resolve the situation. Make no mistake, the service delivered by FNB in this instance also leaves a lot to be desired but they cannot be blamed for the fact that they are unable to contact http://www.easypay.co.za to sort the problem out.

Oh dear, Andrew! Thats bad! What are you going to do now?
I'm glad you asked that, actually. I intend to do the following:

1. I am going to pay my electricity acount again by an electronic funds transfer as soon as I am finished posting this blog entry.

2. I am going to contact the bank and cancel the pending transaction tomorrow morning.

3. I am going to tell as many people as possible about this blog entry and warn them that everything might not go as planned when they use http://www.easypay.co.za.

4. I am never going to use http://www.easypay.co.za again, ever!

Oh, and if http://www.easypay.co.za has a problem with what I have written here, I shall simply point out to them that they have had 48 hours to acknowledge the problem and answer my questions about the future of the zombie transaction. For a financially based organisation that has my money in its power, this is more than sufficient. The fact that no response has reached me in this time and that the credit card division of a major bank cannot seem to find a way of making them respond is, in my opinion, more than sufficient reason for me to exercise my right to free speech and warn my friends and associates.

If they still have a problem, well, then they can bring it! Ahait!

(And now I will check the banking site again to make sure the problem was not fixed while I was writing this entry.... Nope, it hasn't, so here we  go!)

Have you got your Self Realisation yet? Act fast before stocks run out! CLICK HERE! JUST DO IT!

Thanks to Martin for sending me this gem. Pay a visit to the whole site here:

http://www.brightonyoga.com/

"Sri Mataji, please give me Self Realisation"