My Blog

2 quick ads:

1. My company is looking for 2 developers to join us in the R&D team.  I’m not sure on the exact qualifications or salary range, but its a great place to work. 😉 (Its the only company I’ve ever worked for where old employees come back after a year or so)  You’ll need to know a fair amount of .Net and related technolgies. (My 2nd interview with them was a written test which included questions on “Theory” , SQL, Database design, OO Design, writing pseudo code solutions, and some tests to see how wide my areas of expertise ranged.)  I’ll post something on SADeveloper.net when I know more about the exact requirements.

2. I’m selling my XBox.  I bought it 4 months ago, and I’ve hardly played it.  It just sits there and looks at me every time I sit in front of the TV (which is not very often).  I got it in France (its totally english), it has 2 controllers, a DVD Remote kit, a demo disk, and 2 Games (MetalGear Solid 2, and Crash Twinsanity).

And now we return to the normal programming….

I just knew I was going to go back on my word when I said that I’d made my last iBurst related blog entry.  But this is kinda cool…  I’m part of some viral marketing.

Last year around November I started hearing about iBurst.  Then a friend of mine subscribed and I heard even more.  In February I started talking about it and soon afterwards my boss started asking questions about getting a faster network connection at work.  (Our team does R&D, so getting new demos/webcasts/products/etc from the internet is part of what we do)

Then at the end of February I subscribed (via FusionReactor) and I blogged about it.  Kevin read about it got it and blogged. My boss got excited about it and got me to demo it to some of our networking guys.  (One of them has already contacted FusionReactor to get them to check out the signal at his home.)  Then another guy at work heard about it from the networking guys and has started looking into it (he might need it in a month or two so that he can communicate with his family in SA while he’s overseas).  And I’m now starting to hear rumors that our company is going to start using iBurst for our connectivity soon.

Isn’t that cool, I’m part of a viral marketing type thing… (aka a new techie meme in South Africa)

[Update: Aparently Craig told Kevin about my blog entry.  So I heard about it from ITWeb, a friend (Sean) got it, I got it then blogged about it, Craig read it and passed it to Kevin who got it and blogged, and now Craig is going to get it too… 🙂  AND last weekend I popped into a computer store near my home (why I popped in is another story) and while I was there I saw that they also have like a mini internet cafe going so I was going to suggest to them that they try iBurst. Today I walked past the store while returning a DVD and I saw an iBurst UTD modem on top of their “main“ PC. So iBurst is cropping up EVERYWHERE. :-)]

Well, not me exactly…. but my marriage.  Yesterday was our 1st anniversary.  🙂  We went away for the weekend to Marakele National Park and stayed in the Tlopi Tented Camp (Check it out in their Accomodation section)  The camp was amazing – relaxed and picturesque.

The park was cool, but don’t believe their posts on the forums – you really DO need a 4×4 to see many of the cooler parts of the park.  Well, I’m assuming they’re cooler because my little Tazz just isn’t ready to act like a 4×4 yet, so we didn’t get to see any of the 4×4 trails.  They have about 20km of road in the one section that you can drive on, and in most of that you’re either flanked by dense bush or tall grass (way taller then my car) so we saw rhino and ostrich(at the one camp site), warthog, and some impala in the “main” section.  They also have a drive up one of their mountains to the sentech towers on top.  Its about 1km above the rest of the park so you get some spectacular views.  On that drive we saw stacks of animals (just too far off for us to enjoy it without binoculars), but we had some really close views of Klip springers(sp?). There were 2 of them (1 male, 1 female) that were about 1m from the passenger window of the car, unfortunately they bolted as my wife pointed her camera at them.  The views made the drive more than worth the time, it was great.

On Sunday we decided we’d seen enough grass and went to the Pilanesberg (For a private game reserve they certainly don’t have an easy to find website, anyone know of their official site). 😉  We saw rhino, water buck, steenbok, a HUGE (>150) troop of baboons, a herd of about 15-25 elephant, blou wildebees(i think), hippo, springbok, impala, a bunch of birds, and some other animals that my memory is not choosing to remember right now.  We had lunch at the Pilanesberg center (where we managed to find a pair of binoculars).  After that we stopped at Sun City to catch a movie (Shark Tale)

On the whole it was a great weekend… and a wonderful way to celebrate one year of marriage to the most amazing lady.

I feel a little bad about my rant yesterday regarding customer service.  It had less to do with iBurst and more to do with the general state of customer service.  Its guys like Shaun (from iBurst) and Grant (from FusionReactor) that give me hope for the future of customer service in their companies.