Author: Shaun

I had the privilege of witnessing something great last night. I think it’s proof that South Africa is getting there and that there are people who want to and can make things work.

Picture the scene: 5 guys (3 of one race, 2 of another) and 2 beautiful, scantily clad women sitting at the same table. Now one would think that all the attention would be focused on the ladies. Not so. The poor ladies, who were supposed to be our entertainment, had a serious attention deficit. But why?

Two of the guys were having a detailed discussion on the merits of time travel versus doing the best you can in the present, (with a whole lot of other alcohol-induced philosophy). The other guys were discussing racism, crime, politics, the future of our country and open-source versus closed source IT. All these discussions were crossing all racial barrier lines with nobody getting upset, or angry. Just intelligent, well thought-out conversation. As it turns out, we all have the same basic set of concerns for South Africa. And we’re all doing our darndest to improve things.

I saw the future of our country last night. It looked promising. Very promising. I was proud to see that.

More on the headline later. Wow, this weekend was just stupid. Stupid boring for the most part that is.

Friday: Leave work late with rumour of party happening at La Boom. I hate La Boom. Correction – I’m not the hating type, I just don’t particularly like La Boom. End up skipping it. Spend the evening dealing with standby support calls from work. Oh, and building on the Firefox extension which I hijacked to try improve. Debugging javascript sans tools is a bitch. Watch old friends episode and hilarious Lethal Weapon II featuring South African accents and apartheied style racism comments galore.

Saturday: Up with a lovely call at 7am for more work support. Spent the next 6 to 8 hours deploying apps and fixing problems. This is not what I signed up for when considering standby support is it? Oh well. Take a long bath and have a cigarette to calm down. Later in the afternoon I start making plans to hit a jol, see a band or do something that evening. Phone the world, well, the world except JP, but the world doesn’t answer – I’ll have to go it alone. As I’m about to get all dressed up I end up fielding another support call. Two hours later I’m working, pissed off and miles away from anything resembling a band. Oh well, b-grade afrikaans TV the rest of the evening’s entertainment will be.

Sunday: Spend the morning looking for a good business card design for 52weeks. Read fully half of Hugh Macleod’s entire blog from entry number one. Awesome reading. Eventually settle on a number of candidate designs which I will hopefully get sorted out soon. I even managed to find a cartoon there that totally made me think of Peas on Toast.

A short while later I’m dragged away from my day by Ant, JP and K who rope me into some CD shopping. Left the CD vouchers at home though. Drat. End up buying two of Seth Godin‘s books, something I would never have done pre-blog-rss era. I’m not even in marketing. Well technically everyone is in marketing – market yourself etc etc. Pretty amazing stuff this blogosphere long-tail nonsense. End up at News Cafe for a couple of beers, nachos, and chocolate brownies. After that we head on back to JP’s house for a couple more drinks. End up cracking open JP’s “Jaegerbomb starter-pack” bottle of Jaegermeister, mixing it up with some Red Bull, and drowning ourselves in herbal energy while obnoxiously singing hits from The Parlotones‘ RadioControlledRobot album at the ceiling.

At last, a hint of weekend finally arrived on Sunday evening. I would’ve been a wreck this morning if that hadn’t happened.

Tags: weekend, firefox, LaBoom, LethalWeaponII, Jaegermeister, 52weeks, businesscards, gapingvoid, Peasontoast, HughMacleod, Parlotones, SethGodin

Rex Hammock exudes wisdom related to the London Liquids on a Plane “Terror Attacks”:
“While cable TV was trying to make us panic yesterday, a much better barometer of sentiment revealed we weren’t lapping up what they were dishing out. The stock market stood rock solid…”

While we in South Africa are far enough away to feel relatively little impact, the US media would typically pound the message of fear into their audience. I’m glad that didn’t happen work. It’s a small victory for the American people.

Tags: 0810, London, terrorism, airplane, bomb, media, RexHammock

A brilliant response to the wild goings on at Heathrow.

Courtesy the Fantastic BoingBoing.

In life there tend to be a couple of great matches. Things that just suit each other whichever way you look at it.
Sorta like “Beer + Amstel” or “Good Coffee + cigarette”, “King Steer Burger + Chips”, Me + ???(insert rockstar attitude girlfriend) or even “Corne and Twakkie”.

Tonight I had one of those “combo moments”. Granted, it was a triple play : “Scarlet Box + Evolver + The Parlotones“.

Wow, wow and wow. I loved every minute of it. What a treat, and close to home (Boksburg) too!!!
I especially enjoyed meeting the band members of Scarlet Box. Jenna is a babe. Quality. (As is Jitka).

Jenna = not stupid too (at least from what I can tell), which equals big plus points. Me like.
Yeah, yeah, bugger off you naysayers, I’m allowed my little bit of fantasy, OK!

Tags: ScarletBox, Evolver, Parlotones, rock, music, combo, fun