hitting the wire*

it only takes one tag (or 5)...

Amazing how an action, like the well used analogy of the stone lobbed into a pond) can ripple out far into the world - in this case, across the blogosphere.  On a whim, I started a rogue offshoot (Sorry if a I screwed up the exercise for you Jeff, but could not resist) of a game started in another corner of the blogosphere.  According to Michael Jensen at SoloSEO, this branch of the Blog Tag game has now gone beyond 11 levels.  How the devil he has had the patience to track it that far I have no idea - possibly his interest in family trees has been ample conditioning to dogged detective work.  If my own dear brother is anything to go by, genealogists can be the most tenacious of blood(line)hounds.

His "blog tag tree" can be found here.

Most people I see have good humouredly entered into the spirit of the game, and I am now have a slightly better insight into the soul as well as the brain behind the words I read on some blogs.  One person (and I apologise for forgetting who you were) suggested that we find a more constructive objective for such an exercise in future and I wholeheartedly agree.  Suggestions welcome. 

Strange though that of all the posts I have done in my so far in a very brief blog-life, none has elicited more trackbacks and site visits as one so superficially frivolous.  Maybe it is that despite the regular "meeting of minds" we engage in so often here in cyberspace, we always hanker after something more profound and personal.

Enough rambling so very far off topic.  I am on leave for 3 weeks until 8 Jan 2007, and am not sure if I will succumb to the blog-drug during that time, so forgive me if I go silent for a while.  Have a wonderful Christmas-tide wherever you are and whatever you do.

That's me.

blog tag - you're it!

OK, blame this on Jeff Pulver – found this amusing idea on his blog just the other day.

“As a blogger, people may know you, but how good does anyone ever really know anyone? During the past few weeks I've attended a number of charity events in and around New York City and I've run into people who otherwise would be total strangers to me except for the fact that they recognized me from my blog and spoke to me as if they knew me. Most of the time they picked a relevant topic of conversation based on what I had recently blogged about and kept me engaged in an idle chit-chat.

And this experience put me down a path of thinking about some of the people I only know of in the blogosphere and for a moment I looked at them as under developed characters in a novel. And I asked myself, "How would we get to learn some additional information about these characters?" And then I stumbled upon a bubble of people talking about "Blog-Tag."

Turns out there is a game of Blog-Tag going around the blogosphere in which bloggers are sharing five things about themselves that relatively few people know, and then tagging five other bloggers to be "it."

They in turn tag other bloggers, and so on.

Being new to the blogging game, I’m not sure how many of bloggers I know or read will be up to this, but in case you are…

James Enck, Ian Hay, Henk Kleynhans, Mike Stopforth, Avinash Kaushik … you’re “it”!

(if you’re not one of the five poor souls I’ve inflicted this on and wish to join in – don’t let me stop you! ;)

Five facts not that many people know about Dave Gale:

Dave's Christmas wishlist

For those of you who wondered where the "10 things I want for Christmas" that appeared briefly here a month or so back went... it's back today.

I pulled it from the site after having 2nd thoughts, as I'd been commissioned to do it by a local IT publication and felt it was unfair to jump the gun on them.

With just 2 weeks to Christmas (I have yet to start even thinking about gifts!)... I'm reviving it.

That's all from me.

10 things I want for Christmas…

1. Metro Ethernet between our offices. Bottlenecks on long distance links are enough to drive one to the bottle instead.
2. Middleware that integrates all our business systems with drag and drop      functionality. Adine, our new Business Analyst, put up a slide at this week’s Exco meeting listing all the systems she’d identified in Storm. Where did all these disparate systems appear from?!
3. Business analysts who have the energy of 18 year olds and the wisdom of 60 year olds. Oh, and the negotiation skills of Nelson Mandela. Adine? Now where did she go all of a sudden?!
   
4. Elvish software developers that develop code overnight, thus meeting the CEO’s   idea of reasonable project deadlines. The code of course would be fully commented and documented. And it would work.
5. A workflow system that automatically nags the joint CEO’s to approve project      proposals within a week of receiving them. Failure to comply would electronically suspended their golf club membership. Or redirect all calls to book tee-off times to my cell… hah!
6. Desktop applications that work 100% like Microsoft, but run on linux.
   
7. First level helpdesk staff with N+ and MCSE’s and a degree in linguistics to      interpret what users are actually saying.
8. Phat broadband links to all staff homes and multi-media collaboration systems      that enable telecommuting. Either that or a company helicopter shuttle service.
9. An MIS system that generates insights instead of reports, in such persuasive      terms the Board wonder why the hell they did not think of it themselves and double my salary.
10. A remote office in the Seychelles with a backdrop that looks just like my office at work. And a PA who looks remarkably like Jamie-Lee Curtis in “A Fish called Wanda”!
    

Ah well… socks again for Christmas and back to slaying dragons armed with a wet noodle in the New Year I suppose…

That’s me.

Could the disruptive force of IP hit the banking sector?

I’m used to seeing the results of IP disrupting telecoms with VoIP (after all it’s the force that sustains me). I’m used to watching the effects of that same force changing the way the music and movie industry works. The way bookshops work. Just today I followed a trackback from my blog to that of Mike Stopforth who picked up on the Dick Hoyt story… and noticed that another disruption I’ve been expecting Telkom to get into on the back of their DSL offerings – Video on Demand - well, not quite, but nearly that – pushplay.co.za.  I'd hope they would be agile enough to follow  the spread of broadband with an IP delivery mechanism!

(By the way, I followed a link from Mike’s blog to another which is building a directory of South African blogs – nice idea – hopefully you’ll see me there soon! ;)

My vote for World's Best Father

Last night I took Sven, a mate of mine, through the basics of blogging in return for a few beers. As usual when the two of us get together, we ended up discussing business opportunities in the tech space, as well as our amazement at how many people can find the negative side of anything, and so few the positive.

Received this from a colleague today.

This has to be the most inspirational story I have ever heard.

If I EVER complain about my lot in life, someone near me give me an AAK OK?

(AAK = Attitude Adjusting Klap)
(Klap = Afrikaans word for a hard smack - usually against the head)

That's me.  Inspired.

 

Free VoIP handbook

Bronwyn from Sentient pointed me to this article on Tectonic, which in turn gives details of what seems to be a very usable guide to using Asterisk to implement IP telephony particularly in parts of the developing world where one can often get an internet connection more easily than you can get dial-tone!

"The idea of using the internet as an alternative to the telephone network is not new, but the software that makes it possible certainly is revolutionary."

This is according to the authors of a new free book, VoIP-4D primer - building voice infrastructure in developing regions released yesterday.

Funded by the International Development Research Center of Canada, the book's primary target is users in the developing world but it has enough detail and hands-on information to be useful to a broad range of users new to free software Voice over IP (VoIP).

The free guide to VoIP, available in four major languages, is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions.

If it is all just to tech for you, you can always call on the likes of Connection-Telecom to set it for you.  If they can save Metropolitan Health Group (MHG) R4.5 million in the last two years, think what they could do for you? ;)

Key Performance Measures for the South African Minister of Communications

If you were president of South Africa and had to set your Minister of Communications some Key Performance Measures, would they look something like this?

(Firstly, my humble apologies for vanishing off the face of the blog for an extended  period – a trip to Joburg with wall-to-wall meetings with colleagues and business partners was part of the problem; a momentous personal dilemma which is leeching brain-space, another. All in all, I’ve hardly had time to think about the blog.) 

OK, here goes.