Blogging...? Blogs...?

Given the fact that I have sent a mail to most of our friends and family, notifying them of this blog, I thought it appropriate to explain exactly what a blog is. For those of you that already know, skip this post, and scroll down to the next.

So, what exactly is a blog then? Well, I guess the best way to describe it, would be to say that it is a form of personal online journal. It is derived from the term "weblog" - which is essentially a diary of posts, in reverse chronological order. The term "weblog" soon morphed into "we blog", describing the process of "posting" thoughts and messages onto a personal message board. A blog typically consists of text and hyperlinks, and may or may not include images and video. For more about blogging, take a look here.

K and I thought that we'd create this personal space, where we could post regular thoughts and messages about what we're up to. We all live such a fast-paced life, that communicating with friends and family on a regular basis is quite difficult sometimes. We promise to post regular text and image updates, and hope that these will give you a sense of what is happening in our lives. We encourage you to post comments on the site, and let us know what's happening in your lives too. We're not completely abandoning traditional means of communication of course, but merely opening up another channel.

Look forward to hearing from you soon.

K and G.

Robbie who...?

Now I'm not the biggest Robbie Williams fan ever, but K certainly has an appreciation for his...uh...showmanship, so when Richard asked whether we were keen to go and watch him in April 2006, at Loftus Stadium in Pretoria, we decided that it would be a good idea. Until we saw the queues for tickets that is. The tickets went on sale yesterday morning, and rumour has it that the die-hard fans had camped overnight to be first in line when the systems came online. I recall doing a similiar thing back in 1997, for the 21 March 1998 U2 concert at the Jhb Stadium, but Robbie Williams - I don't think so.

Anyway, after spending most of the morning at the shops with K, I decided that I would give the tickets one last stab, provided there were no more than 10 people in the queue. Luckily for the rest of the gang that I was buying tickets for (Richard, Simona, Joanna, Nicole and K) there were only 6 people in the queue, and I managed to get some. They must have been some of the last tickets on sale, as we heard that no less than 1 hour later, the entire event had sold out.

I guess he'll put on a great show...with maybe one or two songs that I'll appreciate. We'll see...

IM Chat is cool, but voice is better...

Since having ADSL installed a month or two back, our lives have changed somewhat. I was warned by colleagues from work - "once you get ADSL, there is no turning back". Anyway, it has made the world of difference to the way we work now - as we're always "connected". If you've ever used MSN, the benefits of being online all the time, especially from home, are quite nice as we have quite a few friends and family members overseas, and the easiest form of communication is via MSN messenger. Take last weekend for example, both K and I were chatting to her dad, who lives in Perth, on two separate laptops. Or the regular chats that I have with Gary (who lives and works in China), our mutual friend and best man at our wedding. Like I said, IM (Instant Messenger) chat is pretty cool, but with an ADSL connection now, we thought we'd give Skype a try. Skype is an application, not too dissimiliar to MSN, that allows you to setup a list of contacts, and then make voice calls to the contacts, using the internet to carry the call. What's better of course, is that its all free. Ok, you do obviously pay for your ADSL every month, but that's a fixed cost now, whether we make use of it or not. Cutting a long story short, we called Gary yesterday and had a 20 minute conversation with him - with surprisingly good quality sound. Every now and then, there was a bit of a break in the speech, but it was simply buffered, and not distored as a cellphone call can become when out of range. We also put a call through to our mate Ronald Tweedie, who lives in Chester in the UK - again, great quality voice conversation, that cost us nothing. Now the trick is to convince K's folks to get a broadband connection at home :-)