Category: learning curve

Africa

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I’m already looking forward to the third installment of David Attenborough’s Africa (we’re about 4-5 weeks behind the UK here).
With the whole resting the ankle thing, I get to watch the recorded episodes again and it’s amazing how much extra detail you notice on a second viewing.

Having already been treated to the Kalahari and the Savannah episodes, I’ve been looking for a suitable currency converter as I now want to visit everywhere I’ve seen. Together with the next episode “Congo”, things could get expensive. But then it’s the big local one which had my UK Facebook stream in raptures last month. And no, one can’t (legally) get iPlayer down here.

Having only seen clips, I’m quite intrigued to see what Sir David has to say about the the Cape, aside from his pronunciation of  “Agoolhas”, which although true to its Portuguese roots, is far from the colloquial method and would get you some funny looks in the hostelries down there.

Anyway, as I said, we’re heading north to the rainforests of central Africa ahead of that, so I still have 10 days to wait.

Africa is on BBC Knowledge (DSTV channel 184) at 1800 CAT on Sundays.

SS Wafra

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It’s 42 years to the day – and almost to the minute as this publishes at 1730 CAT – since the oil tanker SS Wafra grounded on a reef off Cape Agulhas after her engine floundered due to a leak in her cooling system.

Almost half of her 472,513 barrel cargo escaped, with some 26,000 tons of oil leaked at the grounding site, of which 6,000 tonnes washed up at Cape Agulhas. A 20-mile (32 km) by 3-mile (4.8 km) oil spill resulted that affected a colony of 1200 African Penguins on Dyer Island near Gansbaai.

wafra

The vessel is on fire in this photo because the SA Air Force bombed it in an effort to scuttle it and er… failed:

The ship was refloated and pulled off the reef on 8 March by the German tug Oceanic, but started to break apart. To prevent further oil contamination of the coastline, the larger section was towed 200 miles (320 km) out to sea to the edge of the continental shelf (36°57’S 20°42’E), leaving a 160-kilometre (99 mi) oil slick in her wake. On 10 March 1971 Buccaneer aircraft of the South African Air Force attempted to sink her with AS-30 missiles, but succeeded only in starting a fire. The ship flounded ablaze for two days before a Shackleton aircraft was eventually able to sink it with depth charges in 1,830 metres (6,000 ft) of water.

HISTORY!

DSTV E45 error – Monday 25th February

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If you are reading this, then you, like me, are probably struggling with an E45 “Service Not Authorised” error on your DSTV.

A little bit of searching – I used “Google” – gave me this from Fathima at MultiChoice:

Please don’t try any trouble shooting from your side.
Services will resume shortly.

So – please don’t try any troubleshooting from your side. Services will resume shortly.

Have a special day. (I added that bit myself.)

UPDATE: Incidentally, I had a quick look at twitter as well and while people were getting irate about the problem, they weren’t actually doing anything other than… er… getting irate about the problem. Read around a bit (which, I appreciate, you are doing now) and you can lower your blood pressure.
Many were also annoyed at the lack of response from the @dstv account, but with over 150 tweets per minute going through, I’m not sure  how people could reasonably expect a personal response.

UPDATE 2: Aaaaaand… it’s back. For me at least.

UPDATE 3: Aaaaaand… it’s gone again. Oh dear.

UPDATE 4: Aaaaaand it’s back again.

Terrifying runways

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Going flying this weekend?
If so, don’t read this.

Gizmodo has put together 23 of the scariest runways in the world. The most local one is the Matekane Air Strip in Lesotho:

image

which is described as:

400m long, and then nothing.

Asia and South America are particularly well represented.

I’m staying with my foot firmly rooted to the ground, thank you very much.