Category: learning curve

Had it

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As summer breathes its final breath and dies its final death, barely hanging on here in the Cape with a measly high of 28°C expected today, the bad news is that we still have a mosquito problem. Specifically in my bedroom last night. This is the downside of Cape Town summer for me and I will consider it a GoodThing™ when the cold comes and kills off the last of those little bastards.

It could be worse though.

Worse because right on our doorstep, a child is dying from malaria every minute. We’re lucky that SA is pretty much a malaria-free country, but every year, malaria kills 650,000 – mostly pregnant women and children under five – which is a huge, huge number, especially since malaria is a disease that is both preventable and treatable.
I’ve actually had malaria: thankfully, I didn’t die from it. But even then, it’s a wholly unpleasant and debilitating disease. It’s not something you want, even when you know it’s going to get treated.

Tomorrow – April 25th 2013 –  is World Malaria Day and one way you can help out is by buying a bracelet from Relate Bracelets, a social enterprise which has partnered with United Against Malaria Bracelet for R30.

UAM1

Fairly funky, I reckon, although I freely admit to not being a huge bracelet expert. I’m going to get my daughter one because she’ll love it and I’m going to get my son one, because he has that kind of surfer boy look when it’s sunny and the mozzies are out.
Funds sold from this bracelet go to The Global Fund, which distributes nets (I need this), indoor sprays and provides access to medication.

You can get your bracelet at selected Game and Tiger’s Eye curio stores (Indaba and Out of Africa) or if you are agoraphobic, online through Digital Mall.

Do your bit, get a bracelet and make a difference.

Youtube videos not playing on Chrome – Solved

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I’ve been having a few issues with Youtube videos not playing in my Google Chrome browser. Instead, I just get a black screen and misery. I could, however, get those same videos to play on Internet Explorer.

This situation was beginning to irk me, so I did some rudimentary exploration around my Chrome place and found out that it was a Flash player plugin conflict which was causing the problem.

Having found that out, this is how I solved it.

  • Check your plugins by typing chrome://plugins/ into the URL bar.
  • Look for the Adobe Flash Player plugin. You may see that it says (2 files) after the plugin name. Therein lies your problem:

plugin

  • I found that the easiest way around this was to Disable one of those files.
  • To do that, look to the top right hand corner of the plugins tab and click the little + Details link.
  • This will open up the individual files each of which will have a Disable link.
  • Choose one to disable and… er… disable it. It will become greyed out.
  • Restart your Chrome browser and test by looking at a page with a Youtube video on it.
    Like this one, for example.

And there you go. Please leave thanks, comments and cold, hard cash in the comments section below.

Happy Youtubing.

Constantia Food & Wine Festival

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I’m tired. This afternoon brought with it much activity and when your right leg is incapable of much activity, you take the strain. Thus, I am strained, and was it really worth it?

The Constantia Food and Wine Festival promised much, but delivered little. It was poorly organised, poorly stocked (many places had run out of food by 5pm) and very expensive (R360 for the family to get in). The kids’ section was underwhelming, there were too few toilets and the queues for everything were ridiculous.

Thankfully, the company was good and the wine (and the beer, although Keg King ran out of some of that as well) was excellent. But we soon realised that it was too irritating to have to wait in line for ages just to get 25ml of red in the bottom of your glass, so we bought bottles and avoided the crowds – and the exhibitors. Which isn’t how it should be.

So this one will go down as being remembered for the views, the booze and the queues for the loos.

As a learning experience, it worked. We’ll save our time and money next time around.

Clarification: Mark from Keg King says (via twitter) that he never ran out of beer. But when I went to buy beer from him, I was told of my first two choices (of four on offer): “We don’t have any of that”.
I’m happy to clarify here that they hadn’t sold out of those beers, they just didn’t have any of them.

Danger! Common Sense Ahead!

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And we’re applying it to social media.

Yeah. Exactly!

Yesterday’s big news of Margaret Thatcher’s death was not entirely unexpected given her recent health issues, and nor was the mixed response to her passing. Much like Marmite, you either loved her or you hated her, but is there (or was there) really no room for any middle ground?

This article from Willard Foxton in the Telegraph shows us that social media forced us to see other people’s opinions which might differ widely from our own and reminds us that any form of unerring adulation or hatred here is probably rather ill-conceived.

The nail is pretty much hit on the head with this:

Surveying yesterday’s social media hysteria, the conclusion I draw is this: anyone who loved Margaret Thatcher as the perfect PM and is unwilling to accept any criticism of her, or anyone who thinks she was pure evil, like a medieval peasant recalling a folk memory of a tyrant king, is either disingenuous, ill-informed or a bit thick.

And often all three.

This could be applied to many (any?) other individual, situation or event as well. And probably should be.

Striped things

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The tigers weren’t the only striped things we saw at Vredenheim last week:

image

I spotted this wasp and there were also these zebras:

image

The difference being (aside from the size and the taste, obviously), that one set of stripes is to make potential predators more aware of the animal and the other is to make them less aware of the animal.

All of which brought me to thinking why we have potentially unnoticeable zebra crossings on our roads and not the far more obvious wasp crossings?

Is it really any wonder that the rules surrounding these road markings are so poorly observed when we choose to deliberately camouflage them?