Category: Entertainment

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Entertainment

YaWN – Yet Another Wedding Night

In truth, Saturday evening’s wedding of two new friends of mine at L’Aquila near Pretoria turned into a lot of fun. It started a little late because the brother of the bride went missing, but in the end it all turned out very well.

I even had the opportunity to practise my “langarm” and “sokkie” skills… (a high-paced, high-energy dancing technique made popular by Afrikaans South Africans – think ballroom dancing on speed without the accuracy in footsteps and with a lot less grace).

This “windsurfing”, as I prefer to call it, is extremely popular and any South African male will probably be initiated into this style very early on in life. If he isn’t, he’d better steer clear of the dance floor – it’s a war zone out there – and like me, will have to catch up as soon as any friend who is Afrikaans gets married.

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Entertainment Music

Saving Silence at Charelli’s

Last night’s adventures turned into an unexpected treat – Brad and I went out for what was supposed to be a quick drink at Charelli’s – and discovered a great rock band playing there. Saving Silence is a 5 piece outfit boasting powerful melodic rock, solid acoustic guitarwork and a few edgy twists in their set too.

Highlights of the performance were the ballad written for a cousin’s wedding (unfortunately the lead singer tended to mumble the song names), the funky reggae tune where they bring on the rapper, and a cover of ACDC’s Thunderstruck on acoustic. Very good stuff. Their album is due out around August.

As a side note, I like the idea of a good black rapper heading up a straight-laced rock band. Serious rock with just a hint of funkiness through rap, kwaito, R&B and soul could do very well in South Africa, targeting the right combination of audiences. This sort of collaboration has to be done right, in the same way it was with “Can you feel it building?” by Tweak, Pro-Verb and Josie. Artists, are you listening?

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Freedom Humor

Laugh It Off Wins Constitutional Court Appeal

Congratulations must go to Justin Nurse and Laugh It Off Promotions. They stared into the face of the brute goliath SAB and dared to pull a tongue at them. The constitutional court has ruled in defense of that “tongue-pulling”. So get your browser down to laughitoff.co.za at or around the 3rd June 2005 if you want to get your hands on one of the 1000 “Black Labour, White Guilt” T-shirts they created.

More details on this story can be found here and here.

It is fantastic news to hear that our Constitutional Court still has their heads screwed on correctly, and understands the right to free speech as one of the most valued in our democracy.

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Computing Entertainment Music

Cherryflava thinks Musica sucks. But how bad?

Just to add to our woes as described on Cherryflava’s site, Cherry managed to miss the fact that the Musica download site, on top of being hugely incompatible with the target market for music downloads, is also hosted in the United Kingdom – fat lot of good that does for us international-bandwidth restricted suckers in South Africa.

Categories
Computing Humor

Enhancing Data Transfer Rates

When RFC1149 was originally published on April 1 1990, it seemed that the entry barrier to implementing this method of encapsulation was too high. But as always in technology, time has seen change and it took a mere 11 years for a working implementation of TCP IP over Avian Carriers to surface.

Now with the advent of higher speed technologies such as ADSL, experiments in optimisation have been conducted on this protocol. The result: Carrier Pigeon is FASTER than ADSL!

Further biological carrier experiments were conducted a year later, with the discovery that even snails are faster than ADSL. Now that is progress far superceding even the likes of Moore’s law, I believe.