In Life, London on
22 September 2008 with 1 comment
After my move to London (just under 2 years ago) I started smoking quite regularly instead of my usual social fag or two.
I put this down to a stressful work environment and to missing my family, friends and home in SA.
Anyway… I’ve been smoking for nearly 2 years now and I’ve recently decided to quit.
This is mainly because of health reasons, but also because I’m tired of living a lifestyle that causes friction in relationships and in socialising with / meeting new people.
So this is how I stopped:
- I made my excuses and enjoyed the numerous smoke breaks at work.
- I then developed some severe chest pains and a nasty cough that made me rethink things.
- So… I got shit scared because of known heart problems in my family and gave up cold-turkey style.
So… I’m confident that I’ll keep up this no smoking thing… but if I fail miserably I’ll be sure to confess here.
Coincidently - a buddy of mine has set up a new group on Facebook.
Check it out.
In General on
5 September 2008 with no comments
Stephen Johnson’s talk The Urban Web was quite interesting.
While I find that his product,
outside.in is quite good, I did feel that much of the talk sounded like a sales pitch.
Let’s hope the rest of the day focuses more on new developments / technologies in the social media industry.
Apart from that one niggle, the conference is going quite well - even though I mistook a delegate for one of the Madgex team.
Check back for more after the next talk.
Posted by email from Sergei (posterous)
In General on
4 September 2008 with no comments
Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was
developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election
fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the
collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.
The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis
information from the general public provides new insights into events
happening in near real-time. It is being developed by a group of
volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa. So
far there are representatives from Kenya, South Africa, Malawi, Ghana,
Netherlands and the US.
Ushahidi plans to make the Ushahidi mapping tool available globally for
free. After initial testing with NGO’s the tool will be distributed to
interested parties and organizations, and the Ushahidi team will
provide technical customizations and support as needed.
Here are 2 of the current deployments of the system:
In General on
2 September 2008 tagged berocca, blogger relief, stress with no comments
This is absolutely brilliant and much needed when one is maintaining in the region of 3-4 blogs daily.
I think I’m definitely running on empty and might have to pop on over and request a relief pack.
Check it out for yourself.
In Life, London on
20 August 2008 tagged banking, barclays, britain, consumer, customer service, uk with no comments
I’ve been living in London for just over a year and one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced so far is definitely the UK banking system.
The first frustration I experienced was the simple task of opening a simple current account. This was severly delayed & forced me to live off my South African credit cards. - which obviously charged ridiculous withdrawal charges.
The 2nd frustration was some problems receiving a pin number for my card and the 3rd was getting Internet banking working.
Well… After all this I thought my troubles were over, but today I had even more.
I went to the bank to get a letter stating stating that I’m covered indefinitely for travel insurance. I just needed this to apply for a Schengen Visa for Germany.
Apparently nobody is allowed to type up a letter containing my name and the fact that I actually pay for travel insurance.
This means that I now have to purchase additional travel insurance just to apply for a Visa.
Again… Even though I’m already covered.
Barclays… Please get your act together.
In General on
6 August 2008 with no comments
For quite some time, I’ve had an idea of which directed I want my community website, Kak Duidelik, to go.
Yesterday, Smashing Magazine released a new free Wordpress theme that I thought would complement my brand very well.
With some simple updates, I’ve added my newly designed logo and updated the masthead with a Table Mountain illustration I did some time ago.
Hope you guys like it.
Posted by email from Sergei (posterous)
In General on
4 August 2008 with no comments
I found these great photos of Cape Town on a friend’s Facebook profile.
They were taken at the height of the previous Apartheid regime, so you can see that these are predominantly in the former “white areas”.
Despite this, it’s amazing to see how different things were. I hardly recognise the place.
See and download the full gallery on posterous
Posted by email from Sergei (posterous)
In Design, Life on
22 July 2008 tagged iphone, ipod, wordpress with no comments
Andy Peatling of Automattic today announced that the new iPhone/iPod Touch Wordpress App will be available on the iTunes App Store.
So… Guess what?
I’m writing this from my iPod Touch while laying on the couch watching The F Word 
It’s (un)surprisingly easy, allows multiple blog setup and… allows photo uploads… Which is really more of a feature for mobile (contextual) blogging by iPhone users.
Once I’ve delved a bit dealer into the App, I’ll post a more concise update.
For now… I’m fairly impressed.
In Photography on
10 July 2008 with no comments
If you’ve been looking for a dead simple blogging tool, then Posterous is for you.
All you need do is send an email to post@posterous.com and bam! You’ve got an instant blog.
Now… I must admit that I didn’t believe it could be that simple. It sounded much too good so I decided to test it.
I quickly launched my Apple Mail, dropped in a few standard elements for a blog post… you know… images, links, videos…. that sort of thing and clicked send.
Within a minute I received an email linking to my new post as well as some info on how to set up a “friendly” blog address.
The whole process took about 5 minutes.
Brilliant!!!
Have a look for yourself.
In Design on
9 July 2008 with no comments
I took some time last night to backup my database and site files for Kak Duidelik, a community project I started 3 years ago.
It took a while to complete, so I left it to do it’s thing over night.
This morning I stole a few minutes while Tina was getting ready to upgrade the existing software in preparation for my move from Wordpress (single user) to Wordpress MU (multi user).
Everything went well except for a small problem with one of the plugins. The homepage layout was completely broken 
Anyway… I left it all in a bit of a miss when I left this morning, but managed to find a backup of a working plugin that I could upload.
Did that! Done and dusted and everything is good with the world.
Tags: kakduidelik, upgrade, community
