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So this has become another dead end on the web, it’s been a battle to keep being motivated by blogging. Some people can do it, others can’t. I obviously can’t. So this site will be retired soon. I’ll keep the domain and maybe revive it as something else at some point.

If you’ve found this site, and before you click away to something else, please do yourself a favour and visit Playing for change. It’s about peace through music, and the music is amazing. Grandpa Elliot is my new music hero. Here he is with Clarence Bekker doing “Change Is Gonna Come”, they did “Stand by me” without even meeting.

I’ve watched both videos so often that I’m going to get capped way before the end of the month, but what the fuck, these people rock. After the disappointments of Obama and Cope I’ve given up on politicians, and people who should be making a difference.

Check out the site, join up and play for change.

The world needs an enema ~ The Joker

In 1988 Toni Childs release her debut album “Union” which contained a track called Zimbabwae. I can remember listening to the album with great pleasure, specially “Stop your fussin” and “Zimbabwae”. Now 20 years later I’m sitting here working on a site when “Zimbabwae” started playing on my iPod and these words struck me as even more relevant:

what you gonna do zimbabwae
what you gonna do zimbabwae

zimbabwae is a man who tried
to teach his children what was right
but then there came a time when war
split the family from inside
he said no fighting no more

what you gonna do zimbabwae
what you gonna do zimbabwae

the old man sits and shakes his head
while the multitudes insist
where is the cause of unity
with just one thought there could be peace
men gathered in silence the same

I ask myself, will they find a cause of unity? Will the leaders of Africa realise that their purpose is not to serve and protect each other but the people who face enormous odds just to survive? I have an ache inside that was made audible by Toni Childs 20 years ago.

Just found this site while doing a Google for "Five Freedoms Forum". South African History Archive seems to be a great project and I find the design and layout very clean.

The South African History Archive (SAHA) is an independent non-governmental organization dedicated to documenting and supporting the struggles for justice in South Africa. It is a registered trust, governed by a Board of Trustees, which appoints dedicated professionals to achieve its mission. Established in the 1980s, its founding principal was to promote the recapturing of our lost and neglected history and to record history in the making.

Worthy project and very informative site. Check it out if you have any interest in our history.

"Anyone else but you" by the The Moldy Peaches came on while writing this post and this line just jumped out at me:

Squinched up your face and did a dance
You shook a little turd out of the bottom of your pants
I don’t see what anyone can see, in anyone else
But you

Amazing stuff. Nothing says I love you like a bit of squinching.

Seems Microsoft Live Writer doesn’t like turd? Oh the irony!! Here are the words it came up with for replacement.

My laptop got infected again so I’m doing the re-install boogy …. again. Before I started I put all the Led Zeppelin I have onto my iPod Nano and am listening to it while I install Windows XP, drivers and patches. The whole exercise has made me realise two things:

One

• Microsoft Windows really sucks the big one. It takes a whole day to get to a point where I can  even start using the machine. The OS install takes 40 minutes. Then the drivers for my particular hardware takes 15 minutes with 8 restarts. Once I’m on the Internet I have to activate and download Anti-Virus software. Then the patches start, 100s of megabytes worth of patches and endless rebooting, and at the end of that the machine is still not good for much. You still have to install all the software you need to do anything.
•  Ubuntu Linux takes 20 minutes to install and I have a fully functional productive computer. All hardware is detected and active. I have office applications, media applications, web applications and utilities up the wazoo. Granted you will need to apply about 200 megabytes of patches and upgrades, but while you are doing this you can setup your email client, chat to your friends on IM, write a proposal, create a spread sheet of why Green Wing is the best damn TV show ever. Download your photos from your digital camera AND edit them. It really is a no-brainer at the end of the day.

So why do I still use Windows XP as on my main workstation OS? Because of Dreamweaver. It’s the best IDE there is for web site development for me. I create and support web sites for a living and nothing I’ve tried on GNU/Linux comes close. And the games, strategy games is my weakness and the ones that I like to play only run on Windows. So till the day comes that I can play any game I want on GNU/Linux and find a IDE that compares to Dreamweaver I’m stuck on this verkakte OS.

Two

Led Zeppelin is truly the seminal rock band of the last 50 years, and I have way too many versions of the same songs. I’ve also "rediscovered" CODA. The blues influence is very strong and I can feel it pulling the strings of my two left feet. The results of my twitching around the office is a promise to Habibti that I will dance next weekend at brother-in-laws birthday party. Oi vey, a momentary lapse in control and a whole group of very nice people have to suffer.

I started ripping our CDs on Saturday and something happened after I’d done number 20. All the mp3s vanished. Poof!! After much cursing and swearing off iTunes I started again and have to date ripped just 100 CDs. The big names in our CD collection so far are Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Led Zeppelin with Bruce still just in the lead and Johnny a close second. The cool thing is that Habibti and I have very similar taste in music, so I’ve had to do very little "censoring".

I’m almost exactly half way through our collection and there are 1559 songs on my laptop, so by the end off the week I should have +/- 3000 songs for us to bop to while we iLive, iWork, iPlay or just iChill.

We really need to broaden our musical exposure and find some new stuff.