About 6 years ago I started installing advertisement monitoring systems in Africa for a small media company. A media company of course has good relationships with their customers i.e. television and radio stations.
The first installations I did was in East Africa, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. My first trip was kind of hectic, the logistics was screwed up totally and we had a lot to learn.
Our first mistake was thinking that renting a car and self driving is a good idea. The roads in these cities are atrocious, and the drivers worse. And the irony is that for the same money you can get a full time driver with a car of the same quality. Anyway on this first trip I was driving around in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi dodging potholes and Kamikazes in cars.
Continue reading ‘Africa from the rooftops - East Africa Trip 1′
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About two weeks ago I googled for info on “Saturday Voices” (Saterdagstemme) at “Die Boekehuis” in Johannesburg. “Saturday Voices” is a regular event at “Die Boekehuis” where well known (and not so well known) authors, poets, critics or academics launch and discuss their work. more....
I get lots of e-mail, about 300 messages a day (excluding spam). Ok admittedly I don’t really have to deal with all of it immediately but if you let it go you very soon have thousand of e-mails waiting in you INBOX. more....
I guess everyone that has an interest in matters internet related already know that there is a new kid on the block in the search engine market. Go have a look at http://www.cuil.com if you haven’t done it yet. more....
Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day
You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”
The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”
Continue reading ‘If you can read this, thank your sysadmin’
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Yesterday Andrew McGill posted the message below on the Gauteng Linux User Group mailing list. Because he is not blogging I’m doing it for him. What he is describing is one of the biggest frustrations people have with so called new and improved software. more....
If you have a look at the page “Where I’ve been” you will see that I have traveled in most of Sub Saharan Africa. I travel in Africa for work, which is installing advertisement monitoring systems for one of my customers. more....
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News for nerds, stuff that matters
How the City Hurts Your Brain
Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
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