Seeing as its Christmas Eve here in sunny South African I thought it might be a good time to do my 2009 wrap up post for the year that was. This year saw a few ups and downs for me with the highlight of the year being my recent qualification as a full member of the South African Institute of Professional Accountants. Since the start of my university career its something I’ve tried to achieve for close to 10 years so to finally clear that hurdle in my professional career was a huge milestone for me. I also ended my tenure at Boshoff Visser and embarked on a new job at NF Maartens & Co and while I miss some of my co-workers from Boshoff Visser I think it was a good career move on my side and something I needed.
On the personal side of my life it was also an exciting year with some exciting visits down here in the Cape, as well as the great honour of helping Craig at his wedding where he tied the knot with Chantelle. Unfortunately I’ve also lost touch with some people with whom I was good friends and I’ll miss them but I’m feeling good in the knowledge that I’ve also had the great fortune to meet some wonderful people who share my interests and outlook on life and that is something that is incredibly hard to find.
Overall 2009 has been an important year for me and hopefully one that’s going to usher in some great new changes in my life in the years to come. To all my friends, old and new, thanks for making this a year to remember and I hope all of you will be blessed in the years to come. To all those of you who are stumbling on this post via random searches, here’s hoping you like what you see on the site and that you too had a great 2009 and will have a wonderful 2010!
I’m not much for making New Year’s resolutions but I do know that in 2010 there is a lot that I want to do with my life. With the FIFA World Cup being played on the African continent for the first time I would love to attend one of the matches and become a part of the rich history of the sport of football. I’d also like to try to go overseas for the first time in my life and experience different cultures and see the sights like a real tourist. I want to get more involved in my writing and return to my days of reading books by the dozen. Even if I only do one of those things I’ll be a happy man in 2010.
So once again let me say to one and all out there: Happy holidays and be safe! See you in 2010!
Well well well, what a day its been. I’ve been sitting in the office doing some work while waiting for my Friday to end and the weekend to hit. Much the same as every other day you might think and you’d be right. That is until I received a mail from SAIPA (South African Institute of Professional Accountants) to tell me that I had successfully passed my board exam that I’d written in November.
I can’t begin to describe how overjoyed and relieved I was to finally hear the news that I am now a fully qualified accountant. Its been a long road getting here and at some points I’ve doubted my ability to make it but the payoff has been huge. My studies at Stellenbosch and my articles at several firms have all taken their toll on me so to know that it’s finally over and that I can view myself as a true professional accountant is a huge relief to me.
As an added bonus this is of course the month with Christmas, New Years and my birthday so there’s plenty of reason to celebrate! It’s great to know that I can go into 2010 on this high and I can’t wait to tackle the next step of my career.
Throughout my time as a Linux user I’ve always relied on good ol’ faithful Firefox. So far it’s handled all my surfing needs with great skill and aplomb. At the same time I’m also quite fan of Google and their services so when Google Chrome came out I was eager to give it a try. Unfortunately for me I was constricted to only trying it out in Windows as there was no official version for Ubuntu.
I tried the Chromium project (on which Google Chrome is based) as well as the nightlies for Google Chrome but I’ve never been a fan of using anything less stable than a beta. So I was relieved to see that just last week Google finally announced the arrival of Chrome as a beta for the Mac and Linux platforms. Google provides both 32- and 64-bit debs for Ubuntu that installs the Google repository and the latest version of the Chrome beta on your machine. It’s as easy as you’d expect from a company such as Google which prides itself on simplicity in design.
The browser is remarkably stable and has yet to crash once in the week or so I’ve used it and seems to perform as good, if not better than Mozilla Firefox on my machine. As an added bonus Google also announced the availability of extensions for their browser which means that many of the same functions you get in Firefox via plugins is now also available in Chrome. Of course the extensions are not yet as mature and stable as their Firefox versions but given time they should hopefully become better.
An indicator of Google Chrome’s improvement over the last year or so is that I’ve been so impressed by it of late that I’ve now made it the default browser across all my various PCs and operating systems. While Firefox is still a great browser to use it just seems to have become bloated of late and Chrome has focused on providing a fast and secure browser that is best at what it does without using all your memory. Perhaps when Firefox finally gets around to using separate processes for its tabs and extensions I’ll give it another look, but until then I’m going to stick by Google Chrome.
I’ve always been a fan of Westerns and Rockstar’s games in general so when I saw the video for Red Dead Redemption I was over the moon. April 2010 can’t come soon enough!
Those of you who have a Feedburner feed for your blogs and have been relying on Twitterfeed or a similar site to post your blog updates to Twitter will be glad to know that Google has announced that Feedburner now has the ability to post directly to Twitter. Another tidbit of news is that Google also has its own URL shortening service, goog.gl that will be used by Google Toolbar to share web pages on social sites and by Feedburner when posting blog updates to Twitter.
I’ve been having hassles with Twitterfeed so I’m interested to see how Google’s servers deal with mass posting to Twitter. The one drawback is that it will only post to Twitter which means that if you make use of any other microblogging services such as Identi.ca or Facebook you’ll still have to rely on sites such as Twitterfeed to post to those sites.
If you’re interested in trying it out you can follow the instructions in the Feedburner blog post to set it up for your site. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Those of you who have a Feedburner feed for your blogs and have relied on Twitterfeed or a similar site to post your blog updates to Twitter will be glad to know that Google has announced that Feedburner now has the ability to post directly to Twitter. Another tidbit of news is that Google also has its own URL shortening service, goog.gl that will be used by Google Toolbar to share web pages on social sites and by Feedburner when posting blog updates to Twitter.
I’ve been having hassles with Twitterfeed so I’m interested to see how Google’s servers deal with mass posting to Twitter. There are some drawbacks in that it will only post to one Twitter account and the only service it currently supports is Twitter which means that if you make use of any other microblogging services such as Identi.ca or Facebook you’ll still have to rely on sites such as Twitterfeed to post to those sites.
If you’re interested in trying it out you can follow the instructions in the Feedburner blog post to set it up for your site. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
The past two weeks have been great fun with the arrival of the one and only Newlande (aka Wakeangl) to the sunny climes of Cape town. After years & years of pestering her to come to Cape town she finally relented and made the trip all the way from deepest, darkest Bloemfontein to explore the wonders that the Cape has to offer. While she kept trying to tell me she was here to do a bit of work on her thesis I knew the truth, that she wanted to relax and see how us lucky people in the Cape live.
Our first order of business was to meet up for Zombieland and dinner at the Spur. For some reason every time we go on holiday somewhere together we end up at the Spur eating the same burgers. Maybe next time we’ll break with tradition
Probably the highlight of the trip was when we travelled through to the V&A Waterfront for a shopping spree and a trip to the aquarium which was followed by a nice dinner with friends at La Romantica. it didn’t go all to plan though as the shopping trip turned into a marathon 7 hour session that ended at 7pm which just so happened was the precise time our dinner was scheduled to start. A couple of quick calls later we headed off at full speed back to Bellville and managed to meet up at the restaurant with Stu, Rouan, Neilan, Kirsten & Roger for a wonderful meal of sushi steaks and snails. Yep, I finally managed to try snails and while Newlande seemed to be able to get it down without any effort it took me 5 minutes of chewing before i could force it down. The rest of the evening was filled with laughter, banter and some great conversation.
Leaving La Romantica saw me going through to the farm to spend the night as Simon (whom Newlande was staying with) was off to a wedding in Langebaan and I didn’t feel too comfortable leaving her by herself on a farm where break ins are a scary possibility. Of course this meant I had to sleep as best I could on the world’s most uncomfortable couch. So after a solid 1.5 hours of sleep I escorted her through to Tygervalley to meet up with yet more friends before finally collapsing into my bed and grabbing a shower on the Sunday.
The end of her trip came that Tuesday and saw several of us saying goodbye to her at the airport. It was definitely great to have her down here and hopefully we’ll see her down here soon again.
(Yes, that is me on the left in the above picture )
You might recall just under two years ago I posted about the Sony Ericsson K850i I had chosen as my phone when it came time to upgrade my contract and how I was raving about it. A year or so down the line and I’m beginning to loathe this phone. It seems to have software that the devil himself designed and later firmware patches have solved some of the bugs only to introduce even more. The battery casing also has the tendency to shift the battery when it’s in my pants’ pocket thereby turning the phone off and leaving me to discover it a few hours later leading to plenty of missed calls and SMS messages. I have managed to solve the battery issue by wedging a rolled up wad of paper between the battery and the casing but should that really be something you’d have to do with an expensive phone?
In all honesty I cannot wait for May 2010 when my next upgrade comes around and while I’d love to get the Motorola Droid or HTC Hero phones (I’m a huge Google fan) I have the feeling that I’ll rather stick to a plain and simple Nokia that can just phone and SMS. At the moment I’d rather take a phone that just plain works out of the box above a phone that’s laden with features which I might not even use. I’m already eyeing up the Nokia 6720 Classic that is the replacement for the Nokia 6220 Classic that my friend Karl started using a while back but I’ll wait and see in the mean time what else strikes my fancy before May.
Seeing as its Christmas Eve here in sunny South African I thought it might be a good time to do my 2009 wrap up post for the year that was. This year saw a few ups and downs for me with the highlight of the year being my recent qualification as a full member of the South African Institute of Professional Accountants. Since the start of my university career its something I’ve tried to achieve for close to 10 years so to finally clear that hurdle in my professional career was a huge milestone for me. I also ended my tenure at Boshoff Visser and embarked on a new job at NF Maartens & Co and while I miss some of my co-workers from Boshoff Visser I think it was a good career move on my side and something I needed.
Well well well, what a day its been. I’ve been sitting in the office doing some work while waiting for my Friday to end and the weekend to hit. Much the same as every other day you might think and you’d be right. That is until I received a mail from SAIPA (South African Institute of Professional Accountants) to tell me that I had successfully passed my board exam that I’d written in November.
Throughout my time as a Linux user I’ve always relied on good ol’ faithful Firefox. So far it’s handled all my surfing needs with great skill and aplomb. At the same time I’m also quite fan of Google and their services so when Google Chrome came out I was eager to give it a try. Unfortunately for me I was constricted to only trying it out in Windows as there was no official version for Ubuntu.
Those of you who have a Feedburner feed for your blogs and have relied on Twitterfeed or a similar site to post your blog updates to Twitter will be glad to know that Google has 
The past two weeks have been great fun with the arrival of the one and only Newlande (aka Wakeangl) to the sunny climes of Cape town. After years & years of pestering her to come to Cape town she finally relented and made the trip all the way from deepest, darkest Bloemfontein to explore the wonders that the Cape has to offer. While she kept trying to tell me she was here to do a bit of work on her thesis I knew the truth, that she wanted to relax and see how us lucky people in the Cape live.
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You might recall just under two years ago I posted about the 
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