I hate this .. walking and living in fear – South Africa and crime.

Yesterday after attending an IBM Rational Software developers conference (more on this later), I went back to my office and did some work.  I left the office around 6:30 and walked to my car which is parked in a building just across the street.

I normally cross at the robot crossing but on the one corner 3 young guys were standing and watching people.  As I started crossing the street they started moving in my direction. I started moving up the street and so did they.  I just thought that today is the day that I get mugged — had my laptop over my shoulder and cellphone in my hand.  A colleague of mine was already mugged like this 3 times.

Luckily for me a car came up the road and I had to wait for the car.  Another 2 people joined me in crossing the street and the 3 guys must have seen this and suddenly turned around and walked away.

I have just read what happened to Louisa’s brother in Jhb yesterday.  I was not mugged yet but thinking about the fear and mistrust I experienced yesterday, I can fully understand your feelings.  What is happening to this lovely country of hours when we cannot walk freely on our streets and we mistrust every second person?

I love this country and Cape Town in particular, so all you misfits, I will stay and not run like so many people before.

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IBM: Can one patent offshoring of work?

Well, IBM in the US think so. Via Slashdot I found this article.  As far as I know to patent something it need to be original work and no prior art should exist.  Surely IBM was not the first to come up with this concept, whether it be offshoring the work to India and any other country for that matter.

I quote from the patent application:

A method for identifying human-resource work content to outsource offshore of an organization. The method is provided on a computer readable medium and includes the steps of identifying at least one task being performed by an organization; associating each identified task with a functional group within a plurality of functional groups related to the organization; determining information about individual human resources spent on each task; determining task information about human resources spent on the plurality of tasks, the task information based on the determined information about individual human resources spent on each task; using the determined task information to determine a value of each task; and outsourcing tasks having a value lower than a predefined limit to at least one of offshore and to a low cost supplier.

 

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We will win the Rugby World Cup & RSS feed update – 7 October 2007

Next Sunday evening it is us vs Argentina in the second semi-final of the world cup.  By that time we should know already who we going to play in the final.  Yes, I believe we going to win the semi and with the 4 teams left in the RWC, I just cannot see how we cannot win this one.  I just hope that I am not talking too soon but I cannot see either one of Argentina, France or England beating us.  I would love to see us playing France in the final, just for the atmosphere, but that would be the most difficult one in front of the fanatic French supporters.

Onto my RSS feedreader – I am down to below 4000 unread items:

Saguaro Moon:

Credit & Copyright: Stefan Seip (Astro Meeting)

Rugby World Cup – can there be more upsets?

Surely we cannot have a third upset in the Quarter Finals of World Cup?  Here I am talking about Fiji beating us this afternoon.  Both my heart and my head said this is impossible.  Strangely I thought the same yesterday morning about yesterday’s games and we all know what happened.  England send the Aussies packing and France said goodbye to the All Blacks.

At least in my books, the result of the forth game would not be a real upset.  It is already an upset that Argentina play’s in the quarters.  The real upset would come when SA and Argentina meet next week in the Semis and Argentina beat us to reach the finals to play England.  Wow, that would be one for the bookies. Wonder what odds I would get of this happening?

Swellendam Mountains
Image:  Swellendam Mountains by Marius Bock taken with Nokia N80

RSS Feed update – 4 October 2007

Just returned from a business trip to Johannesburg and I have to wade through more than 4700 RSS items in my feedreader.  As you can imagine, I am just going to mark a lot as read and skip over them.

Here is some that I did not skip over.

Today’s photo is an amazing eruption of a volcano:

Credit & Copyright: Patrick Taschler