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.

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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.

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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$?

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.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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.