Guguletu has a gem of
a restaurant tucked away off Klipfontein Rd. Directions can be a little
tricky inthe townships, so here is a Google Maps
URL
And for those of you with a GPS that translates to**-33.976415 S
18.569694 E**.
Mzoli’s Meat
Directions
Mzoli’s Meat is a butchery just off the main Klipfontein Rd. If you take
the Modderdam Rd exit off the N2 out of Cape Town, turn left when you get
to Klipfontein Rd, Cross the railway line, pass a petrol station on your
left, and look for a cellphone tower disguised as a tree on the right.
The cellphone tower is too far, but not by much (you can see it in the
pictures below). Turn left, and you will see Mzoli’s meat immediately on
your left.
I have been working at the African Institute for Mathematical
Sciences since December 2006. It is a
pleasant work environment, the work I do has direct applicability to the
work I do withWizzy, and I get to
listen to some really great lecturers from universities around the world.
I have taken an interest in Cosmology and Quantum mechanics, a field that
has changed so drastically in the last 10 years that I can happily forget
most of what I knew before ..
The One Laptop per Child project has
got a lot of attention, has prototype hardware, and a lot of open source
software. What are its prospects in Africa ?
Antoine managed
to get one of these to show off as he is writing
code behind the ‘view source’ button, and
Morgan and Jonathan
of our local Linux uses group have all blogged
about it.
There are a lot of
things to be said about the OLPC project. The first thing to note is that
it is not a new initiative - there have been others, under different
names, for a long time. Seymour
Papert invented
Logo,
a programming language targeted at children, and Alan
Kay was the conceiver of
the Dynabook concept
which defined the basics of the laptop computer.
Recent elections in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa have
been declared flawed by the country’s own monitoring committee.
I travelled to Nigeria in
1992. For all its faults, I recognised it then as a powerful country,
with a strong role to play in sub-saharan Africa.
It suffers a geographical and religious division between the
northern muslims and the southern christians. I saw desperate poverty,
particularly in the north, with people living in the semi-desert as I
imagine they lived centuries before the white man arrived in africa -
with none of the benefits supposed to accrue from the nation’s oil
wealth.
The continent still has a way to go to transition from Kings to Leaders,
and South Africa’s president will change before the 2010 Soccer World
Cup. On Human Rights Day, some thoughts on the process.
Zululand
Zululand has a
King.
He is much respected, the people love him, and nobody will talk of his
successor until his funeral rites are over.
There has always been a scrap over the succession of Zulu kings. The
first two Zulu kings had no offspring, and it is only courtesy of Ndlela
kaSompisi that
there is a blood line at all.
Communication has come a long way in a century - not always at the
customers convenience.
Andy has started a blog. Why blog, when my website is so out of date ?
To answer this, I have to do a review of communication technology of
the last century, starting with the
letter.
I guess I could go back further, but the letter was the first convenient
communication at a distance.
The letter
Greatly enabled by
RowlandHill
and his sender-pays postage stamp, it enabled convenient communication at
a distance. Sender’s convenience - Receiver’s convenience. Latency -
days to a week. Cost - one penny.
Zanu-PF, the ruling party, with all but 3 seats in parliament, including
about 30 guaranteed to them, has seen the spectre of MDC, the Movement
for Democratic Change, an opposition party rise up in less than a year
to become a credible contender for elections scheduled for next month.
Zanu-PF, and its leader and president Robert Mugabe especially, have
been unable to respond in any credible fashion, choosing instead
to use intimidation, violence and assassination to fight back.
The America’s Cup is happening now. It is the 30th challenge for the
Auld Mug in it’s unique history. New Zealand are the current holders,
and are therefore the hosts this year. They also have the luxury of
not having to race until the final, thus they can observe other team’s
tactics without having to reveal their own. There is a Challengers
playoff, where everybody else competes for the privilege of sailing
against New Zealand in the Cup itself.
I am consulting for iTouch, who are expanding overseas now with
their new owners, the media company that owns many of South Africa’s
newspapers, the Independent Newspaper Group.
I anticipate it taking around a month.
I am duplicating our South Africa operation in New Zealand, including
the computer setup that handles our SMS and IVR, and hiring a
technical team to maintain it. The mobile operator in New Zealand
is Vodaphone, now the largest network operator worldwide, while
Independent Newspapers owns the newspapers here - an identical setup
to South Africa. The plan is also to roll out in Australia, however
the network agreement has yet to be worked out.
The Dalai Lama was in Cape Town last week, for the World Paliament
of Churches. The papers reported that he was gently critical of the
parliament, for not doing enough with their position.
He also opened the Festival of Sacred Music, at Kistenbosch Botanical
Gardens, which I attended with some theatre friends of mine. The
setting was stunning - a backdrop of Table Mountain, green sloping
lawns, chattering birds. We were asked to “have compassion” by sitting
down to allow people at the back to see. The South African wicker
hamper brigade were much in evidence, blankets and cloths spread about
and wine and champagne corks popping.
