During the years I kept my iLife up to date and even did a website or two with iWeb. IWeb had one drawback in that it really was geared towards publishing websites on .Mac or MobileMe its new name.

Apple released iLife9 in the beginning of this year and last week I finally spent the money to upgrade. It definitely does not disappoint. iPhoto has two great new features, faces and places. Faces uses facial recognition to search for people in your photographs. With a bit of training it actually works great and it took me about an hour to tag the recognized faces in my photos with names.

Places is a bit more mundane and allows you to tag your photos with GPS co-ordinates. It helps of course if you have a camera or phone with built in GPS but you can tag you photos with places without owning a GPS. iPhoto will show you a map with pins stuck into it indicating places you (or your GPS) has marked. If you click on a pin iPhoto will show you the photographs taken in that place.

iWeb now also has the possibility to directly publish to a site using ftp. For me this is quite useful because I don’t own a MobileMe account and for simple websites iWeb works really well. It is also a lot easier to add your own code to a website.

Garageband is a music creation program that comes with iLife. Not being a musician I always played around with it a bit and used it for simple mixing tasks but not much more. It now comes with a Learn to play feature. You get a set of free lessons (that you have to download) to learn playing the piano or guitar. I tried out the first two piano lessons and found them very easy to follow. I’m sure that someone that wants to learn to play seriously will find these lessons very useful. After you did the free course there is the possibility to download lessons created by successful artists teaching you their music.

All things considered I think iLife09 is worth the money.

To my surprise I found lots of info on past events but very little about upcoming events and no Boekehuis website. Why the surprise? Well “Die Boekehuis” is a very successful bookshop specialising in South African and World Literature. In 2006 they got listed by the International Booksellers Federation’s list of 50 unique bookshops in the world. Everyone in Johannesburg that I know, who has a real interest in books knows about them so they are successful.

I visited “Die Boekehuis” last week and asked: “Why don’t you have a web presence?” The answer was simple: “We don’t really have the time to properly maintain it.” They did however offer to put me on the announcement e-mail list for “Saturday Voices”. You can ask nicely for the same by mailing boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za.

This made me think and ask the question: “Does a small, maybe niche business really need a presence on the world wide web to be successful?” Taking “Die Boekehuis” and my own small buisiness as examples, no, not really. I was also simply too busy to maintain anything but a single homepage for my business. My work came via “word of mouth” advertising from mostly happy customers. “Word of mouth” seems to work even better for “Die Boekehuis”.

When I started out as a small consulting business everyone told me, I must get onto the web. Being someone that actually sells and maintains computer systems I believed them. As I said above all this turned out to be wrong. In fact in 8 years I got one serious enquiry via the website, unfortunately the person was in the USA so I couldn’t help him.

No you don’t need the web to sell 4000 year old technology. It seems that you don’t even need the web to sell brand new technology.

Amazon.com probably disagrees.

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”

Why does one stay a System Administrator then if the stress is so much. You will find the answer in the scary devil monastery FAQ

Sysadmins are driven by a desire to _make_it_work_. We loathe non-functioning
pieces of crap. Similarly, we hate seeing equipment working at substantially
below its potential due to moronic admin decisions.

After a while, you quit and go to work for somewhere else, where you’re
promised you won’t have to be a sysadmin.
But the machine on your desk crashes every five minutes…