The Madness Continues...

If you haven't had the pleasure of reading John van de Ruit's Spud, do yourself a favour and get your hands on a copy. I finished reading 'The Madness Continues...' this week, and only have good things to say about it.
The first book introduces Spud Milton and the rest of the characters that play a role in his Grade 8 year at an exclusive South African boarding school. The diary style entries are a laugh a minute, and cover all facets of Spud's adolescent life, from his sporting and cultural skills, to his dorm mates and introduction to girls.
The second book finds Spud a little more "mature" than his Grade 8 year. He's in Grade 9 now, and is looking forward to finally losing his "spud" status. I'll leave it up to you to read the book to find out what a "spud" is.
K is currently working her way through the second book, and a regular chortle from the couch next to me tells me she's enjoying it as much as I did.

Rock, paper, scissors

Right, so we've all played the game growing up, but would you believe that there is a Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) World Championship? Yup - takes place in Toronto on 13th October of this year. In fact, there is a RPS society that sanctions tournaments all over the world.
For those of you who don't know what RPS is, or how it is played, Wikipedia has an article explaining all you will need to know.
The reason I'm so interested in sharing this little piece of trivia with you, is that once a year, we tend to have an RPS stand-off. It takes place on our golf tour when trying to decide who gets the main bedroom with en-suite bathroom in the place that we have rented for the duration of the tour. The beauty about it is that it can be played on the spot, no equipment needed, and is probably the fairest way of deciding on an outcome.
Quick overview of how it is played:
- It is played using one's hands - closed fist represents "Rock", open hand represents "Paper" and extended index and middle finger represent "Scissors"
- Hand is placed behind one's back or head, and on the count of three, it is pulled out with one of the gestures made.
Game is resolved according to the following rules:
- Rock breaks scissors, result is that rock wins
- Paper covers rock, result is that paper wins
- Scissors cut paper, result is that scissors wins
- Same gesture results in a re-match

Gotta love the simplicity in it.

Next trip...

Picked up the tickets for our August trip yesterday - all is in place now.
Here's how it will play out:
- Leave for London on August 14th
- Al and Sam's wedding on August 19th
- Couple of days in Edinburgh. Planning on doing the touristy thing and checking out the Castle, Royal Mile and would like to do a distillery or two. Also discovered that the Boks are playing at Murrayfield that week, so who knows :-)
- Then back to London for 3 days. Will hook up with mates and family.
- Off to Spain for a week in Malaga after that. Plan on lots of sunshine and beach, and hopefully some golf before returning to SA in the first week of September.

K and I have been to London three times and Edinburgh once, but never in summer, so this should be a great change. Also, have never been to Spain before - really looking forward to that.

5 minutes of fame

So, for those of you who read our blog regularly, you will notice the new look. I'm not convinced its there yet, but it was definitely time for a change, and given the fact that I'm relying on Blogger templates at this stage, this is about as much flexibility as I can get away with.
Have also taken the decision to list the blog on Amatomu - a South African blog aggregator. In doing so, I have been listed as the newest blog to be added, as seen in this picture of the homepage. Quick, check it out, before someone else lists...

Battle At Kruger

Amazing footage of a battle between Lion, Buffalo and Crocodile.

Facebook: Social Networking Tool, or Big Brother?

Came across an interesting video, originally found in an article posted on Groogle, but available on YouTube now, on what Facebook is potentially capable of, given the amount of information that they are collecting. Conspiracy theory? You decide.

27Dinner-Jozi, May 2007

Attended my first 27dinner event last night. Wanted to attend the March event, but already had made plans by that stage. Anyway, so what is a 27dinner event you're asking? Well, its kinda like First Tuesday, but its a dinner event. Held on the 27th of each month, alternating between Cape Town and Jozi, the event is open to anyone who wants to attend, but has a special focus on New Media, blogging, marketing, and other tech related trends and topics. The idea is to get like minded people in the same space to discuss ideas and network over food and wine.
The 27May-Jozi event took place at Primi Piatti, The Zone in Rosebank, and whilst I wasn't blown away with the speakers, it was definitely worthwhile attending.
Colin Daniels spoke about the hype surrounding Bullardgate before turning everyone's attention to The Times, the daily paper that will be made available to Sunday Times subscribers from June (or was that July?) of this year. Colin looks after the online strategy for The Times, so he shared some of his vision for how The Times would like to engage their readers in the online space, and then use that to feed back into the paper. We'll see how successful that turns out to be in the coming months.
Next up was Erik Hersman from White African. He spoke about mashups and taking existing widgets/gadgets and other interesting pieces of code, and putting them to good use in web and mobile driven applications.
Finally, Vinny Lingham who runs Incubeta in Cape Town, spoke about some of his new projects, which include setting up a small Venture Capital firm that will fund startups in SA, as well as a product that he has been working on called Synthasite. The interesting thing about Vinny, is that he sits on the Yahoo advisory board, so he's a big deal in the online space in SA at the moment.
I'll definitely be attending the July dinner.