Today is Freedom Day, our national holiday. Eleven years ago today we held our first ever multiracial elections, and became a free country. Give yourself a pat on the back.
This time tomorrow, I expect we’ll already have heard numerous complaints from whiny politicians, about how people didn’t spend the day “patriotically” enough. What a load [...]

It was almost the end for the human race. The skies turned black and homo sapiens, or humans, began to die in large numbers. If they weren’t killed by flame, rock, or suffocated by ash, they later either starved to death or froze. The global human population fell to perhaps no more than a pitiful [...]

I’ll say it straight up. I’m beginning to turn against Mozilla Firefox. I know that it’s the rage among techies right now, particularly since using it is both seen as giving Microsoft the equivalent of the finger and blocking adware. It also seems to hitch its banner to the opensource flag, which appeals to many [...]

Nothing interesting is happening in South Africa right now. The Big Story that everyone’s excited about is civil war currently raging in South African rugby circles. Apparently there’s this big debate going on over which team should be allowed to join the “Super 14”, a three-way rugby tournament that we compete in together with Australia [...]

What exactly is a ‘caldera’? It isn’t some exotic type of dish that one enjoys with a significant other at a restuarant. Indeed, it’s infinitely more frightening than the restuarant bill that the waiter delivers at the end of the night and it doesn’t just shake one’s personal world and relationship with a loved one. [...]

File this under “evidence for the decline of British civilisation”. The results of the British book awards have been announced, and they’re not encouraging.
The Da Vinci Code won “book of the year”. I’ve already written about the Dan Brown’s airport novel in the past, so I won’t waste time by further dissecting its faults. Read [...]

Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

Um, yeah. I’ve [...]

Tonight was April the 24th. Evening temperatures continued slowly dropping as the season changes to autumn. Not much different by most accounts for an April night in Joburg – except for the rain and the hail.
Tonight’s powerful thunderstorms combined with the hail would have been unusual in themselves, except for one thing. It’s not [...]

Take a look at this page with maps of volcanoes from around the world. Consider the Indonesian one in particular.
It perhaps becomes increasingly understandable why the recent flurry of earthquake activity after the 9.3 one in 2004 off Sumatra’s west coast is generating additional concern in the South East Asian press about the fault line [...]

Stumbled across another VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) aimed for market launch after being pointed to the Airscooter by a friend. It was featured on Carte Blanche a few years back but is still making progress and is claimed to be nearing completion by 2006.
The Skycar:

It unfortunately looks likely to be at least ten [...]

picks up on how the Institute for Democracy in South Africa failed in its bid in court to force political parties to disclose their sources of funding.
It’s a pity really. Political donations are one of the major sources of contagion between the private and public sector. They can lead to influence peddling or . It [...]