Centre of the Universe

South Africa is an interesting country, and if you think you know completely it – even as a local you would be severely mistaken.

Yesterday, despite having lived in SA my whole life, I had my first experience of visiting one of our infamous townships (Du Noon), and despite the fact, that I literally live 2km away from Du Noon, it is like an entirely different world than what I am used to.

South Africa is one of the countries in the world with the largest difference between standards of living between the rich and the poor, and that was very apparent to me yesterday.

You have a small rich elite, who all drive snazzy new 4×4’s, BMW’s and Mercs, who all live in big mansions. Then you have the struggling middle-class, who can barely afford to pay rent and keep food on the table (which we are firmly a part of), and then at the economic bottom, you have the working class which mostly live in townships and squatter camps in the most primitive of conditions imaginable. The sad thing is that the majority of our population lives this way, especially when you consider that unemployment sits around 30%, and that even if you do work, most working class jobs pay an absolute pittance in South Africa.

The reason why I had to go to into the township, was because one of Claudias former colleagues lives there, and since we are packing up our stuff in preparation to move to the Netherlands, we promised to give her a few bookcases, and had to go drop it off.

Once you enter the township, all resemblence to anything you know before just disappears. Building materials are anything people can get their hands on, roads are narrow, most people have no other transport otherthan their feet, and houses are tiny. The main street is bordered by little shops selling discount items. A few of the shops even use old shipping containers as their building.

In Du Noon, a house tends to be a little bit of a misnomer. To gve an example, Letitia (to whom I was giving the bookcases) had one of the bigger houses in her street. It was built out cement bricks, unlike most of her neighbours whose houses were made out of corrugated iron.

Her house consists of only one room, with two beds in it, the cooking area, and a tiny walled off section for the toilet. That is all of it. And here I complain about my tiny house with two bedrooms a lounge and kitchen, and her entire house is smaller than my garage.

Letitia’s house was impeccably neat though, and she was proud to show off her house to me – as she ought to be. She has done well with what she has.

Despite the fact that most people who do not live in the townships and squatter camps fear them greatly, since most of the criminal element tend to originate from them, my experience yesterday showed that most of the inhabitants are decent respectable and most of all friendly people who are just trying to make it through life. I did not feel threatened once while I was in there, despite the fact that I was not quite comfortable in these unfamiliar surroundings.

I know I struggle immensely to make ends meet every month, and I earn ten times what these people earn – sometimes even more.

South Africa might be pretending to be a first world country, but until these poor people get lifted out of poverty, we will be firmly stuck in the third world. From first hand observations, I certainly think it is time that South Africa’s politians take out those silver spoons out of their mouths and start doing something to alleviate the suffering of their people.

The pictures are kindly provided by www.capetown.dj

It is now safe to do this, since I have informed the company I work for already, so the latest news flash is that mysef, Claudia and Cole are going to be emigrating from South Africa to the Netherlands in a few months time.

Currently our planned departure date is set at the end of April, largely to give us enough time to get all our passports sorted out before we go.

So, now I am sure the first question you may be wanting to ask is, “Why would a South African want to go live in the Netherlands?”

Well, the reasons are many, but one very powerful driver of our move, is that I have dual Belgian/South African citizenship, and Claudia (and by implication, Cole) has dual Swiss/South African citizenship, so making a move to Europe is very easy for us. Since Switzerland has very close ties to the EU, and me beign an EU citizen, there is no issue at all for us to move over. Very little paperwork to worry about.

This still does not answer fully why we chose the Netherlands though, since most South Africans heading off for Europe tend to centre around the UK. Well, firstly, my mother and brother already stay in Haarlem (near Amsterdam if you are wondering where that is), which gives us a free couch to sleep on until we get settled.

The Dutch are also very easy going, and many of them speak pretty good English to boot, and for an English speaker, I have the greatest probability of success there, outside of the UK.

And in addition to that, Dutch would be one of the easiest European languages for me to learn, as in South Africa, Afrikaans is one of the major languages, which I did 7 years worth of at school. Afrikaans is a closely related language to Dutch, and originated in the early Dutch settlers in South Africa. The pronunciation and spelling are slightly different, and there are a few minor differences in vocabulary, but the two languages are very close to each other, to the point where, based solely on my fluency in Afrikaans, I am able to understand most written Dutch, and spoken Dutch when spoken slowly and clearly.

As to the reasons we are leaving South Africa, well, my entire goal is to provide the best life that I can to my family, and that is becoming increasingly difficult in South Africa. If I start naming reasons, I will start to look like one of the many whingers we have in South Africa. Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved South Africa as a country, but the problems we have here are starting to become too much for me, and it is now time to seek a better life.

There will be many things I am going to miss, but what I am looking forward to is decent public transport, and fast cheap internet, over everything else.
As the move comes together I will blog more about the experience of uprooting ourselves and planting ourselves in a foreign land.

This last weekend, Claudia and I were out on a drive to Fish Hoek, and decided to go and pop in for a visit at an old friend of ours, Andy Schwab.

He runs a great play centre for kids, called Planet Kids, in Muizenberg. One of the best features of this place is that it caters for specifically for kids with special needs, although all kids would have fun playing and learning here.

Part of the inspiration that urged Andy to start this play centre 2 years ago, is his son, Luca, who has autism, and I hear that the centre is doing quite well.

It was nice to catch up with how he is doing, and I hope that his endeavour continues to be a success.

In days gone by, in Siam, white elephants (which were essentially normal albino elephants) were considered sacred. This meant that by law, all white elephants had to be lavishly cared for by whomever owned them.

This little law came in useful for the king. You see, if one of his subjects irked the king, then as punishment, what the king would do is send a white elephant (as in a real live and kicking elephant) to the poor hapless courtier as a gift.

Now, the poor courtier was obliged to accept the gift, as it would be a massive insult to the king to refuse. Invariably, what this meant, is that the man would be reduced to poverty trying to pay for the lavish care required of him for the white elephant. A form of punishment unrivalled anywhere else.

Well, in a more modern version of this, a relative buying your son a Wii for Christmas (despite advice from me that it should be a Playstation or an Xbox) amounts to a white elephant.

You see, the problem is, last night after going to buy a Wii game for Cole, so that he would have something to play, it occurred to me that just about every game requires a special remote to play, which is extra, and if you want to play multiplayer, you would need TWO. At least with the other consoles the standard controller is more than sufficient.

And another problem is that there are far less budget titles available, which means having to fork out full price for games.

All this amounts to quite a bit of bother, especially when the economy is really biting hard…

Stackoverflow must be doing something right. It is beginning to see its crop of imitators starting to flourish. Shapado is one of these.

In terms of look and feel, it closely copies Stackoverflow, although with enough differences that you not likely to get confused.

The reason the team that put up Shapado put it up, is that they feel that they do not want to work with a non-free platform, which to me sounds a bit odd, since, even though Stackoverflow is not quite open-source, anybody is free to register and use the site. There is very little restriction surrounding that. Although, in their favour, it does make sense if you want a local knowledgebase type system based on this format.

The second reason they state is that they feel that Stackoverflow is restricted, in that it only caters for programming, whereas they have made Shapado cater for pretty much anything.

The biggest problem of all though is not really technology related, but rather more social. Stackoverflow has significant traffic, with thousands of users asking – and answering – thousands of questions.

Shapado has very, very few of both questions and users. Maybe it is because the site is still new, or it might be that nobody cares. Only time will tell…

It has been a nice quiet Christmas so far. The shops are overcrowded as usual, but I have managed to stay away for most of that. The rest of the period has been bliss.

There have been a very muted campaign by advertisers this season, TV and radio stations have played a little bit of Christmas stuff, but have not overdone it. But most of all, I have not once yet heard anyone say “I wish people would just remember the true meaning of Christmas”, or “Christmas has become so commercialised”.

That out of everything irritates me the most. So here goes a little history lesson.

First, most people think that the true meaning of Christmas has to do with the birth of Jesus, etc, etc , and not the gift-giving and partying that we tend to focus on these days. History disagrees with this.

The really true meaning of Christmas has a bit more of a pagan feel to it. You see, back in the good old days, when the Roman Empire was still around, they had many gods, and one of them was Saturn. He was the god of agriculture, and his feast day, called Saturnalia, was around the 19th of December, and people used to celebrate it by…..wait for it….gift-giving and partying.

Now, let’s move onto the early church. The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who lived from 272 – 337 AD, was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, and as a result of this, the Roman Empire was converted to Christianity too.

The difficulty is, how do you convince people to change from their usual gods to some new religion, especially when they have been used to having some great parties with Saturnalia and that sort of thing.

Well, the answer to that, is why not keep on partying! You see, before this time, the Christian community were more concerned with celebrating Jesus’ death (ie Easter) than his birth, so the church authorities hit a brainwave. Why not take the old pagan feasts (of which Saturnalia was one) and convert them to Christianity. Strip out the old deity and insert Jesus in its place.

They even kept the date similar. The simple fact of the date is that no-one really knows what day Jesus was born on, and 25 December is really just arbitrary in that respect.

Over the years many other traditions have grown up around Christmas, such as Christmas trees, and Santa, but the true meaning of Christmas…..wait, I should say the original meaning of Christmas had nothing to do with three wise men and mangers, but rather with gift-giving and partying.

I am colourblind, as is around 10% of men and 0.5% of women. Now, before I talk about how this affects computers, let me first explain what colourblindness is and isn’t for the uninitiated.

A normal-sighted person sees colours as they are using 3 different colour receptors in the eye, detecting red, blue and green light respectively. The eye also has receptors which see in shades of grey, which is used in low light levels (which is why you lose colour vision when it is dark).

Many people aren’t aware that colourblindness comes in several different forms and severity, the most common being red-green colourblindness, where the person sees red and green as the same colour. Colourblindness occurs when one or more of the colour receptors does not work as it should, or does not function at all. So for example, in red-green colourblindness, the red and green receptors incorrectly react to the same frequencies of light, or you may find that the receptor does not work at all, in which case that colour will appear black.

Now how does this affect computers? Well, for one thing, often green is used to indicate that all is ok, and red that an error occurred. A red-green colourblind person would not notice a difference. I was just reading that in games too the enemies are often tagged in red and the good guys in green – so then who do you shoot?

A more subtle problem is when the programmer or web designer themselves is colourblind. For example, it is a rather bad idea to trust my opinion on colour. I have a blue-green colourblindness which means that my colours would probably appear slightly off to a normal sighted person. I once painted our bathroom an avocado green colour because I thought it looked nice, much to the horror of my family who thought I had gone mad.

Implied in the problem about choosing colours for computer applications and webpages is also the problem of sites and applications that look great for a normal sighted person, but become useless for a colourblind person. It is often a good idea to either let the colours be configurable or else choose safe colours.

And before I end, a little interesting fact – most colourblind people will not realise they see the world differently until it is pointed out to them. For us, the world just looks normal.