The new year

We made it safely back to Cape Town. We traveled approximately 3000 km in the week that we were away. I have seen parts of the beautiful country that I have never seen before. Unfortunately the weather was playing along most of the time to get pictures. As you can see on the picture here the clouds were rolling in for more rain. We stopped over in Graaff-Reinet on our way to Oudshoorn and I took a pic of the church in the middle of town.

We are preparing now for the new years eve party at a friends house tonight. I hope that everyone will have a great party tonight.

I hope to go out and get some more pictures soon to update here. Also have my 30th birthday coming up this week. Hope to remember some of it... ;)

The journey home.

It is 06:45 and we just had breakfast at Kroonstad. Going to Graaff-rienet now.

Big storm

We just had a huge thunder storm here in Pretoria. It rained 60 mm in
less than hour. There was some really close strikes. Tried to get some
videos and pictures. Will have look at them as soon as i can get to a
pc.

In Pretoria

We just arrived in Pretoria. It is 30C outside and we are enjoying a beer.

In Jo-burg

We arrived in Johannesburg at 5 this morning. On our way to have breakfast.

10 hours of driving done.

We just arrived in Bloemfontein. It is 00:00. There are some people
that drive like absolute idiots. I now understand why we have one of
the highest death tolls on our roads.We drove through a huge lightning
storm. It was amazing the lights al around us as we drove. The first
1000 km is done, another 700 to go. At least there is not as many
trucks on the road as usual and most of the traffic is on their way in
the opposite direction.

Testing the remote update

I have enabled the remote submit facility on my blog to update it why we are traveling.

Holiday and printed pictures.

I went to Cape Town International airport this morning to see my girlfriend off. She is going to Germany, to her parents for Christmas. It is going to be strange to not see her during Christmas. My parents and i are driving up to Johannesburg to go and visit my sister and the rest of the family.

I had the one panoramic pictures, posted previously, printed on A1 yesterday. i First mad a gloss print at Agfa in Canal walk and then tried to find a place where i could have the picture framed. After searching the entire Canal Walk and being told that no one can help me this year, I went to Duo Frames in Monte Vista. They are small but they know what they are doing. The woman i was dealing with was friendly and gave a lot of advice for future prints. E.g. If I print pictures that i want to frame, I should rather use a canvas print, because when a gloss picture is covered with a glass panel and the picture and the glass touch, you get "wet spots".

So last night when we went back to Canal Walk I had the same picture printed on canvas. Can't wait to see it framed.

Emile and Salome's tour through Europe.

I am following Emile's Blog where he is currently updating his blog with their travel stories as they tour through Europe. It makes for an interesting read. I hope you check in and read some of his humorous comments ;)

What do you want for Christmas?

Well, I am going to see that family this Christmas, but this guy wants a xbox 360...
Hope you get what you need and you give what other want.

We visited Bulshoek

As a company we went away to Bulshoek dam this weekend. It is located a couple of kilometers on the other side of Clamwilliam. I have added some of the non-work-related pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Panaramic of Cape Town

Last weekend I took the camera out around Cape Town and took some panoramic pictures. I am loading them to show how beautiful the mountain can be. ;)

Panoramic Cape Town

Since I don't have Internet access at home at the moment I will not be able to update as often as I like. When I get the opportunity. I will pop a new picture on the blog.

Shy Guevaras

Last night we went to Klein Libertas in Stellenbosch to go and see Shy Guevaras perform live. Charl and Dedre invited us to join them. Charl works with some of the band members. I took the trusty Camera along to snap up some pictures and video.

I really enjoyed this evening. The bands performed on a stage outside. The weather was absolutely perfect and the music was awesome. I will be donating the pictures to the band so that they can sort through them for their website etc.
Check out their website for some song downloads. If you get the opportunity to see them live, do so. It was worth the drive to go and see them.

I will post some pictures of the other bands (Bed on Bricks and Taxi Violence) once i have sorted through them.

I will also try and upload a video I made of one of Shy Guevaras' s songs.

Gone Fishing

We got up at 6 this morning, took a drive out to Brandvlei near Worcester ( about 100km from Cape Town). The Stean, Charl and some other friends (that don't have blogs ;) wanted to go fishing. We went along for moral support and taking pictures.
Here is a dragon fly that I caught on "Film". Here is a picture of some of the guys fishing in a stream that runs under the N1 (Highway running out of Cape Town.) it is a bit of a walk, but worth it. If I wasn't taking pictures, I would probably have swam here.When I got home this evening, I saw this nice cloud formation...
I also have to put another sunset picture ;)

The Sun sets over the weekend

The weekend is over and nothing much to say. A nice sunset on Saturday.


The clouds made some interesting formations. I think we should go somewhere and get some sun rise pictures sometime.

From the beach

Took this picture over the weekend before the sun set. i have always loved the way that the sun beams shine out from behind the clouds.

Thanks to you.

I have been checking the stats for the blog and have found that there are a few people that come visit on a regular basis.
I would like to thank you and I would like to hear from you. Please send me an email or a comment so that I can hear what you like and don't like about the blog. Also I would like to hear what kind of pictures you would like me to go look for. :)

A visit to the beach

After returning from a client this afternoon I decided that we must get out and do something outside. So we drove out to Bloubergstrand to take some pictures of the sunset.

There was some amazing sights with the sun disappearing behind the clouds and breaking through small holes.

The last picture here is of the sun breaking through the clouds over Robben Island.

Emergency photo shoot.

I received a phone call this evening: " Hello?...Hi?..Leon....Can you hear me?... are you getting pictures of it?" I opened the curtains and saw why the phone call. Thank you Salome and Emile , Again... ;) The sky was almost on fire.

What a sun set.

Thank you Emile, I had to take a short drive to get these but I think it was worth it.
So far I am impressed with the quality of the pictures of the Panasonic FZ-50.

Rooivalk

I have finished working through all the pictures and have also uploaded a video I made of the South African Rooivalk performing a 360 loop at the AAD 2006:

Africa Aerospace and Defense 2006 show at Ysterplaat

We left early this morning to get a good parking spot and see as much as possible before there was to many people. We spent most of the morning walking through the displays. Some amazing vehicles and arms.
I will post most of my pictures on my PicasaWeb space. We got to see the last flying Shackleton, ThunderCity's 4 restored English Electric Lightnings, the Rooivalk do a loop, the new Gripen Fighter jet, and a "missing wing man flyby" by the Silver falcons as a tribute to the pilot that crashed and died in the sea on Friday afternoon. My condolences to the family and friends. I will try to post one or two of the video as well and update here accordingly ;)

Just click on this picture to see the entire gallery of pictures.

Africa Aerospace and Defence 2006

Sep 23, 2006 - 119 Photos

Finally a picture to post

I took these pictures today as the sun was setting. It has been a while since I have been able to get a decent picture or any picture for that matter. i hope that you enjoy these. If ever anyone wants better quality versions of these pictures please contact me.

Tomorrow I am going to the air-and defence show at Ysterplaat so I hope to have some more pictures to put online tomorrow night.

New Camera

I have finally got my new camera ( Panasonic DMC-FZ50 ). I have not had a chance to take any pictures yet. I will be going to the airshow at Ysterplaat Air force base on Saturday. Will take a few pictures there.

Will also be going to Bredasdorp on Sunday to go visit some family. Hope to have something to publish by then.

Free Energy?

Well, this is not from Cape Town, but it sure are hell would help around here. I found the story on Digg first. It looks like this Irish company found a way to generate more energy from an electro-magnetic reaction, than they put in. So I thought lets start finding more about this company and this story. Here are some of the interesting links that I have found so far. Remember that you can't believe everything that you read on the Internet. :)

Here is the Patent Pending. Interesting read.

Steorn's homepage

Someone of the forums reported that they had similar theories 8 years ago but could not prove it. (Then 12 hours later he is no longer sure about it and he original post has been removed.)

Search results for Google News on Steorn

A blog entry where Eric Burger discusses the Video challenge that Steorn made to the Scientific community.

Here is a news entry on the Irish Post website regarding the research that Steorn was involved with in May 2006 and earlier.

Here is a bit more details about the patent and devices that they are working with.

Some other Magnetic related devices that has to date not seem the market place...

MEG

Hoax?
Why post this story on a games site?

Connection with Halo 3 of XBOX 360?


I will wait for the results to see what happens, if anything before stating that this is a working solution. There has been many similar stories where people find ways of doing something better and then just get sweeped under the rug...

This is an experiment for me to see what the Internet and the news will report around this story.

The 3 main lines that people seem to follow are:
1. a marketing scheme to get email addresses,
2. a huge marketing scheme for the Xbox 360 (Halo 3) and a lot of work would have been put in to make this an advertising hoax
3. there could possibly be some truth in this.

Time will tell.

Blogger Beta

Tonight when I checked my blog, I saw that there is an option to sign in for the Blogger Beta so i signed up. Thought this was going to be painful exercise, but was pleasantly surprised at how well to conversion went. the new Control Panel is a dream to use and the live editing is brilliant.

Now to just get a new camera to post more new pics. I told Bret from The Spot that I would try and post a Panoramic shot of Sutherland. I will now try and upload this picture.

Oe,Oe, the spell checker in the Beta Blogger is also a bit nicer and faster to use... Now lets hope that I type the correct words for it to try and check... ;)

No update yet...

Thursday and nothing yet. Nothing found and the police hasn't updated me yet.

Petrol price just went up with 31c per liter. Interest rates went up today with 0.5%. House prices still going up on average.

At least I found the invoices for the stolen items and can hopefully claim for it now. I just hope that this will at least work out.

Police Update...

Today at 14:00 the inspector that is looking at our case gave me a call.
He said about 30 minutes before our burglary another house was burgled close by. He thinks that they are related. I gave him some more information that I got from the neighbor and the landlord and he said that they will look into it more tomorrow. He will give me a call when he has more information.
I really appreciated that he took the time to give me a call on a Sunday afternoon.

We were talking about crime in general last night at a friend's house warming. It was actually sickening to think that here in South Africa we have been conditioned to the crime in such a way that we are just glad that nothing happened to us. We almost take the crime for granted. I am really starting to wonder how this compares to the rest of the world.
We don't see anything about the "petty" crimes in the news local or abroad, so how bad is it really everywhere else?

The really scary thing is that almost everyone you know in South Africa has been affected by crime in some way or another. We have had at least 3 break-ins at our office over the years. We just beef up the security every time.

Got Robbed. Part 2

The Finger print people were here now. They checked the doors and anything where we thought the person might have tried to look for things to steal, but no fingerprints were found.

The neighbor says that he suspects a white guy that may live in one of the houses in the street behind ours, standing empty. There are 2 houses that has been standing empty for couple of months already.

Just got robbed!!!

I woke this morning at 5:55 with someone bumping into a small table. I thought it was my girlfriend going to the bathroom, but then I saw she was still lying next to me. So I kept quiet and watched the person walk slowly past the bed to the bathroom. The person switched the light on, went in and closed the door. I woke my Girlfriend and told her to get out of the house immediately.
As soon as we got out of the house I called 112 the Vodacom emergency service and explained my situation. They said they would send someone. The person was still in the house at that stage.
Nothing happened for 20 minutes. I called the Police directly and explained my situation again. They said that they would send someone. We checked the back of the flat and found my wallet, my girlfriend's bag and a lot of other stuff that was thrown there. So the person had left. Another 15 minutes passed with me standing on the cold. The Police van stopped in the driveway with about 7 officers. It was the van that drops the off-duty officers at home after a shift change. I explained that the person must have left the house. They drove off to see if they could find the person in the area.

Another 20 minutes passed and 2 officers arrived. They looked through the flat, took our details and opened a docket. We could now asses that they took my Work backpack which contained my Digital Camera and as well as my Girlfriends Laptop. The Samsung laptop is useless to them since it doesn't have a working battery and they left the power cord. Then it has a BIOS password set and even then it is German laptop with German Windows. It is basically useless to anyone else, but her research results of 4 years hard work are stored on it. If anyone finds such a laptop or my Konica Minolta A200 with a camera bag and other accessories PLEASE contact us, leave a comment on the blog or contact the police. There will be a generous reward if the laptop/data can be recovered!

Edit: 2006-07-29 08:49
Do you know that they even took my girlfriend's toothbrush. The TOOTHBRUSH. No cash. My wallet was emptied, but I had no cash in it and my girlfriend's wallet was not touched and it had cash in. No cards taken.

What do we do now?

Edit: 2006-07-29 08:49
We found that he didn't take my digital camera battery charger, but he took my cellphone charger.

Why does windows suck so much?

I have found a brilliant little freeware application to add watermarks to my photos. It is called FastStone Photo Resizer.

I have a very nice picture of the moon setting over Tablemountain. Got this the other morning before leaving for work.

But talking about work, one of my colleagues started a list of his reasons he doesn't understand Windows. ( and doesn't like it)

I got his permission to put this online and get some more feedback.
Here is his list:


FTP via Explorer

Copy 13KB of files over a 64kbit link (7KB per second).
Should take 2-3 seconds to copy the files.

Explorer pops up a window saying "Calculating time to transfer files"
This takes 5 seconds.

Then it pops up the copy dialog, with 20 seconds remaining
at the bottom. Copy takes 2 seconds.

Explorer spent more time working out how long it's going to take,
and still gets it wrong.

---------------------
Microsoft Outlook brings up an unknown error. The Operating System,
E-mail client and Mail Server are all written by the same company. There
is no component in the whole configuration which is not by Microsoft. But
the applications still don't know what's going on.

---------------------
When you synchronize to an NTP server, it brings up a message saying it got
the correct time from the server, but the time displayed as the time of the
message is still the wrong time. If they get the correct time, why not use it?

---------------------
I have a removable drive. When I've finished copying files on to it in the
afternoon, I uninstall it from Windows and take it out. The following morning,
a message window pops up, saying Windows was unable to write to E:\Mft$ (which is
God knows what). Why not write everything when the device is uninstalled? Why
wait hours to figure it out? What is E:\Mft$?

---------------------
.NET Terrarium is a DotNET terrarium simulation. I thought it would be wonderful
to try out, and consequently learn C#. The Dotnet installer blue-screens my Windows
2000 Pro. I tried this twice. After the second time, it worked. Now I have a Firewall
message popping up every once in a while that Terrarium was unable to connect to a
Terrarium server. Why is the client running when I don't want it to. Then I noticed that
I have a new Terrarium screen saver, which I don't want. That's what's trying to phone
home to Microsoft. My screen saver.

---------------------
Microsoft Outlook sometimes spends hours synchronizing. It delays reminders. I've seen
reminders pop up 5 HOURS after the meeting, and I didn't even know there was a problem.

---------------------
Microsoft Outlook Express - You notice that you're low on space, so you select a bunch of
e-mails and press delete. Outlook Express promptly tells that you it didn't have enough space
to delete the items, but maybe I'm expecting too much.

On a similar note, you can run out of space when moving items from one folder to another,
because it first copies the whole lot to the new folder, and then afterwards deletes the
old ones.

---------------------
I go into the RECYCLER directory on a drive, and notice a few folders, which I don't need.
I press delete and it says "Do you want to delete these folders to the recycle bin? Yes/No?".
I'm not sure why there are two options, since I do know those folders won't be deleted no matter
which option I choose.

---------------------
I get a brand-new PC, with Windows XP Professional SP 2 installed from CD, all shiny sparkling new.
Explorer crashes a few hours after I boot. I don't understand how it ever made it out the door.

---------------------
I put my USB flash drive into Windows XP, and browse to a folder. Windows pops up a message saying
"Please insert the second disk in this multi-zip folder" or something similar. It doesn't say
which zip file is multi-disk. I didn't ask it to open any zip files. So now I first have to press
escape before I can go on.

---------------------
Windows allows other applications to pop up Windows over what you're doing now. So I can be in
the middle of typing something and just as I'm about to press enter, a window pops up. I press enter,
the window disappears. I have no idea what it was or what I just said okay to. Yes, you can argue
that this is a poorly written application popping up, but Microsoft can prevent it from just
displaying and do that flashing thing in the taskbar. That only works sometimes obviously.

---------------------
Microsoft Outlook sends these magical winmail.dat attachments which only Microsoft Outlook can open.

I've received e-mail from people, and I use Microsoft Outlook Express, and it doesn't work. I don't
understand how they can break a simple thing like sending an attachment along with an e-mail.

Carnarvon Fly-in 2006 Part 2

With the price of petrol it is these days, it is sometimes cheaper to just push the plane. We had to move it to allow other planes to take-off.

This was the ATC (Air Traffic Controllers). Thanks to them all the aircraft could takeoff and land without any problems.

Birdfield Wines and Oranjerivier Wine Cellars had stalls in the hangar from Saturday. They sold wine, Sherry, Port, Jerepigo, Muscadel, Brandy, Witblits and more. We will still go to the Oranjerivier Wine Cellars just to buy some more of their Jerepigo.

The SA
Red Cross Air Mercy Service(AMS) was there to give their support for the fund raising. The funds raised this year will be used to install the lights on the runway. The AMS can't use the airstrip in Carnarvon at night at the moment because there are no lights. With lights the population in this area will have access to the medical emergency services at any time.
EDIT 29-June-2006: Check the AMS Website for more of my PICS.

Sutherland and the SALT Part 1

This is the Primrose Bed and Breakfast in Sutherland. We spent the last three days here. It is run by Denise and David. We want to thank them again for an absolutely brilliant stay. It really did feel like visiting old friends.














It was so cold during the night, that everything had frost on in the morning.













We went to go see the SALT. It is amazing to see the technology at work here. The tour is worth it, if you are willing to participate. ;) I don't want to give to much information about the SALT, but as you can see this building is huge.




















There are quite a few other telescopes on the plateau. From Korea, Germany, UK and of course South Africa.

Carnarvon Fly-in 2006 Part 1

On the way to Carnarvon, early in the morning before the sun came up.

This is the "Three Sisters" that the town "Three Sisters" is named after.

This is the road from Victoria West via Loxton to Carnarvon.

When we got to Carnarvon, there were still some Trike's in the hanger.

Cape Town in the dark again.

Well the power cuts are back. It seems there was a problem with some equipment so they did an emergency shutdown since they could not monitor the exact problem.

The picture I added today, was taken earlier this week from "Lovers Lane" on Tygerberg hill. I drive past there from work everyday and try to stop when ever there is a beautiful sunset like this.

Some South African music in the cold

This past weekend I discovered the DSTV Channel MK89 that specializes in South African music. They play a wide range of music, from slow ballads to fast paced beaty music.

The one song that particularly caught my attention was "Loslap" from a band called "Snotkop". It was a mixture of Afrikaans rapping and hardcore guitars. A REALLY catchy tune.

We are now getting ready for some power outages again, since Koeberg is in the process of maintaining the one nuclear reactor and we are experiencing one of the coldest winters in a couple of years.

Today's picture shows a nice sunset with a thin layer of clouds just hovering over the mountain.

Kaptein's frosty all bran bloggings

I found a couple of my Friend's Blogs and thought I would link to them.
I hope you visit them and enjoy there sites...
Kaptein's frosty all bran bloggings
and
Stean's General Rambles

I can't make a posting without a new picture now can I. ;P

The mist over Cape Town:










A spectacular sun set here in the Cape.

Oblivion in South Africa

Well, the main reason I haven't been updating my page here is because of a game called Oblivion. One of the best role playing games that I have seen to date. Also there wasn't much to say.
I have found 2 pictures that I could place here. The one is from a golden sunset during the first rains that he have had in months.
The other is of a Strelitzia. We went on a Sunday afternoon walk through the neighborhood, I saw the Strelitzia in someone's garden and took the picture.

During the news tonight they announced that the petrol price is going up again, 39c. This will take our petrol price to the highest it has ever been. Not looking to good for us.