It must be tough for those who think the ANC is falling apart or is losing support. This is because of the recent publishing of a Plus 94 Research finding that says if people were to vote NOW, it is most likely to get 74% of decided voters; 84% of these are black, 15% white […]
2008
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Tech
Ten tips for travelling with a mobile office
It can be enormously confusing when you first set out to liberate yourself. Having a full-featured office that is not an office at all is a contradiction and a challenge — but also an enormously satisfying goal once it is achieved. The first few times you hit the road (or a restaurant, airline or conference) […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Dealing with www.dodgydudes.co.za
EVER heard the lament: there’s never a cop when you need one? In our, er … well, nation, it’s the second verse of the national anthem. Most of us whiteys don’t know this because we only get as far as the first verse before our tongues look like some old rope in the knot-tying event […]
Posted inGeneral
A risk capital approach to education investment
In 2007/08, the South African government spent R105-bn on education, while corporate social investment (CSI) in education amounted to R1.3-bn. While a significant amount of money, the CSI contribution is relatively small (about 1%). SA spends a higher percentage of its GDP on education than most other countries (that achieve better results in international education […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Tsvangirai is not taking the plight of Zimbabweans seriously
The death toll in Zimbabwe is rising while Morgan Tsvangirai continues to place his personal and selfish ambitions before the plight of millions of Zimbabweans who have been subjected to misery. The ruins of Zimbabwe are nothing to do with Tsvangirai but he has been party to sustaining the downward spiral of the economy by […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zimbabwe: anthrax joins cholera while soldiers run amok
Starvation, Aids and cholera have now been joined by an outbreak of anthrax, which has already killed two children and one adult in Zimbabwe. The killer infection is threatening to wipe out around 60 000 livestock in the northern Zambezi valley thereby compounding the horrific problem of starvation facing five-million locals. An acute disease, anthrax […]
Posted inGeneral
A handful of things to be grateful about
It might seem, from watching the news lately, that it’s the end of the world as we know it. Freakish weather, unexplained acts of violence, political unrest, and a general craziness that seems to have seeped into the ether. But there are still a handful of things to be grateful about. Here are a few […]
Posted inGeneral
WML vs XHTML
A few months ago, an article was published titled Google’s search dominance, stating the following: According to Masie, a sixth of all internet searches in South Africa come from mobile devices, the highest ratio in the world. To ensure that it leads in the mobile search market Google SA launched its universal search for mobile […]
Posted inGeneral
The Dalai Lama: Holy man or gangster?
I have always been deeply suspicious of the way history or current events are conveyed. There is so much opportunity for the entropy of the “truth” from original event to end readers of texts: texts which are inevitably just interpretations and potentially filled with biases. Thus, infamously, a factory for WMD in Iraq turns out […]
Posted inGeneral
Have yourself a merry little Xmas!
Man, oh man, is it ever Xmas time again! Not Christ-mas. Crass, crumby, commercial, crappy credit-crunching Xmas. Today’s Sunday Times is the most eloquent reflection of the sordid, sleazy, gimme-gimme world we have become. And I, for one, am deeply ashamed to confess that my ears and eyes and taste-buds and olfactory sensors are electric […]
Posted inBusiness
In business as in life, failure is everywhere
One of the worst things we have inherited form our British colonisers is our attitude to business failure. The man who was in my lifetime the doyenne of business journalism was Harold Fridjohn, who decided quite late in life to switch from writing about business to doing it. He became a stockbroker, and after a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Cope :The Mbhazima Shilowa interview
I met with Mbhazima Shilowa, former premier of Gauteng, general secretary of Cosatu and now convenor of the new Congress of the People Party this morning and asked him to give me his views on matters of concern to South Africans both here at home and abroad. This was his take. On Cope The majority […]