Category: learning curve

School night rookie error

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Last night was great fun. A few friends round for a braai, several (or more) beers and an awful lot of really good wine. There was much merriment, some really well-cooked fillet and everyone had a really good time.

But partying on a school night? Rookie error.

This morning, as perhaps you may already have imagined, was less good. Mild dehydration coupled with a distinct lack of sleep and sprinkled with a topping of new medical waste disposal guidelines and international conference calls at work.

Never party on a school night. Move either the party or the school.
Because it is plainly clear that you really can’t do both. Not at my age.

The consequences of my foolishness are several-fold:

– I’m really rather grumpy and have shouted at the new medical waste guidelines quite a lot because they are rubbish. (In my defence, they were already rubbish before last night’s shenanigans.)
– I have drunk almost all the coffee in Cape Town. And as any fule kno,  that’s a lot of coffee – mainly because of all the huge coffee plantations and associated agriculture just downstream from the Theewaterskloof Dam.
– I’m almost certainly not going to be able to stay up to watch the Magic of the FA Cup 3rd Round this evening. The Tall Accountant tells me that “Liverpool will clobber them” (“them” being Everton). I’ll just have to find out in the morning.
– It’s gone 4pm and I’ve only just remembered that I have to write a blog post today. Even though I have to write a blog post every day.
– I am tired in all eleven official national languages and I still have 3 pages of technical stuff to read, digest, cogitate and forget. Back to it.

Lesson learned.

Until next time.

Flights

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For some reason, it seems that I like planes. Not in a Let’s Go And Stand At The Airport For Days On End And Note Down Their Registration Numbers way, but definitely in a Since We’re At The Airport Let’s Go And Have A Coffee Somewhere We Can See The Runway From way. It’s an interest, not an obsession.

Of course, the only obsessive bit of this interest is the Airbus A380. Scarce in Cape Town thanks to our thin taxiways, but always a pleasure to get on in Dubai and go to Manchester. This (mild) obsession resulted in me following British Airways A380 pilot Dave Wallsworth on twitter. I mentioned this to you on here almost two years ago.

Captain Dave  has now released a pair of YouTube videos showing exactly how an A380 takes off and lands. Yes, it’s a bit nerdy, in that it’s 10 minutes (each time) of real time footage, and it seems that aside from a few short words and actions, the crew don’t actually seem to do very much*, but it’s also annotated so that each thing that they do do is explained clearly.
If you have some spare time (and who doesn’t in early January?), it’s worth a watch:

And then, should you so wish, there’s the landing to look at as well.
WARNING: You will end up in Johannesburg at the end of this particular video.

One thing I did notice in both videos is that there’s an awful lot of looking out of the windows, presumably for other planes. I’m not sure if I find this comforting or not. Sure, a final check left before heading onto the runway seems like a pretty good idea, but should it really be necessary? I suppose that it takes minimal effort and it could make a huge difference, but I do wonder if it ever has. A bit like me looking left when turning onto the dual carriageway this morning, so as not to hit the utter twat of a cyclist going the wrong way. (An incident that was apparently entirely my fault with only a few months until the Cycle Tour, obvs.)

Having flown on these beasts several (or more) times, albeit never on a BA one or into Joburg, it’s really interesting to see what happens up front when we’re sitting in the back having our headphones and blankets collected and trying to find where our shoes have disappeared to.

 

* almost certainly because they’ve done an awful lot of things previously to make sure that they actually don’t have to do very much during this ten minutes.

Resolve

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Happy New Year, readers!

I’m generally not the sort to go around making New Year’s Resolutions (although, yes, I have done it on here in the past). But if I want to change something I am doing, I don’t feel that I have to wait until January 1st to sort it out.

However, actually there are a couple of things that I am doing that I feel I might want to change, and today* seems like quite a good time to do that.

So: fewer plastic bags this year, get my knee fixed this year (I have an appointment with the surgeon next week) and get fit(ter) again, and more photography, drone flying and blogging [audience groans] this year.

I’m sure that there was something else as well, but it escapes me for the moment. Probably the effect of all that brandy on my brain.

And no, cutting down on that isn’t the missing item on my list.

 

 

* well, “today” really, because this is one of those break from the blog posts.

How to save money on property

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Cape Town property prices are regularly described as being “like, fully out of control, bru”.
If you’ve already got your foot on a rung of the property ladder, that’s not something that will really bother you. Maybe you might even consider it good news. But if you’re yet to move into property ownership, then that first step can seem ridiculously far out of reach.

This is widely touted as a problem which is new to Millennials, but only by anyone who never tried buying anything decent in Sheffield (or anything at all in Oxford) on a microbiologist’s wage in the 1990s.

Just saying.

So, you want to find a way of getting more for less, and who can blame you? Everyone loves a bargain. Step forward then, some high school girls from the Sacred Heart College (SHC) in Geelong, Melbourne, Australia.

If you are looking for an affordable home in your preferred suburb, it may pay to find the street with the silliest name.
House prices on streets with silly names are significantly lower than houses on nearby streets, a study by Victorian school students has found.

(That’s students from a state in Australia, as mentioned above, not from the late 1800s.)

Working with staff from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the University of Sydney and a Melbourne real estate agent, the girls analysed house sales on the streets over the past 47 years.
They found that property prices in streets with silly names were about 20 per cent lower than properties in the normally-named roads.
As the report notes, that amounts to a $140,000 saving on a median-priced Melbourne house.

That’s R1.4m, which (after some rudimentary calculations) also tells us that a median-priced house in Melbourne costs R7m and kinda puts those wild claims about Cape Town back into some kind of perspective.

The students identified 27 streets in Victoria with silly names, including Butt Street, Wanke Road and Fanny Street.

STOP SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!

I’m rather busy at the moment, so I don’t have chance to follow up on this in too much depth right now, but there’s a De Cock Avenue in Deurdrift:

And a Dikkop Close in Pelikan Park:

And I even found a Fanny Avenue in Joburg:

The biggest issue with that last one being that not only do you live on Fanny Avenue, you also live in Joburg. (Also, “Lung Candy, Norwood”?!?)

I don’t know if the house prices in any of these roads are lower than their local peers, but if you are looking for a way to knock a bar off your first (or next) house, then this would seem to be the best way of going about it.

Thank me later.

Weekend puzzle

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Meh. Friday. It’s almost the weekend. Don’t @ me.

Last month’s 6000 miles… crossword post was a huge success. A whole two people got in touch about it. Not all of the comments were positive, but equally not all of them were negative either and that’s a new record for this blog.

Thus, without further ado, here’s this month’s offering:

[crossword]

(Again – if you don’t see an interactive crossword puzzle above, click here to reload this page.)

Nice early invoking of this guy.

Even I managed to get quite a few clues this time around.
How did you get on?