Windhoek to Perth

My Bush War Story (Part 3)

2011-12-03T22:58:00.001+08:00

As we reached the end of our school career, it was time for our final exams, and once the exams were over we were all on our way to a place called Henties bay – one of SWA’s favourite holiday destinations at the coast. Youngsters were getting drunk all over the place, doing the usual schoolies thing. We drove a Land Rover on the beach and broke off fishermen’s lines in the process – nasty, but lots of fun for a bunch of young hooligans.

The poor little town suffered heavily under the assault of the school-leavers. Drunken people everywhere, mischief being committed all over the place. Those of us who knew we were soon to join the army, were celebrating like it could be our last time. After all, by this time next year we may have seen the pointy end of an AK47 bullet, and there would be no more celebrations. The others were just starting the free life of a student and were happy as can be, but those of us who were destined for greater things were not quite so optimistic about our future. I was never one to drink too much, but some of my mates got heavily sick during that weekend.

The date was approaching quickly – 11 January 1988.

We celebrated Christmas at our house in Windhoek. I think this was probably the last time our whole family celebrated Christmas together – my grandfather, my aunt and cousins, and us. After this everything changed and the family was never quite the same again.

On the eve of 10 January 1988, I slept in my old bed for the last time, wondering what was lying ahead for me. Did I pack enough shoe polish? Am I fit enough to handle this? I had no idea what my life would be like in 2 years’ time, and certainly no idea of how the political landscape in southern Africa and Eastern Europe would also change in the not-too-distant future.

We arrived at Suiderhof army base, and I looked out for my old school buddies. We were all bundled together with our “civvy bags”, listening to some general making a speech. At that time, I wasn’t too sure about what his rank was - he could have been a corporal, admiral or Intergalactic High Commander for all I cared. He was making lovely promises to our parents. He informed us all that there was nothing to worry about – the enemy was basically already on its knees, and we were in the hands of good people. Mommy and Daddy were told to go home with a happy heart, as these little kids would be well looked after. After all, more people died from sickness and disease than from engaging in war-games.

I was actually starting to believe that the modern army of 1988 might be different – these were modern times after all, and we were the cream of South West African civilization. No harm would come our way.

We were bundled into busses, waving at mom and dad, chatting happily, and generally feeling a little better about this whole deal. (Subconsciously we all knew we were lying to ourselves, but we needed something to hold on to…)

The busses took off, with no corporals or sergeant majors in sight. The only military person in the whole bus was the driver, and he didn’t seem to be much of a problem. The boys were having a good time. Some of the Baster boys in the back of the bus were throwing around Coke cans and emptied chips packets.

We were different from the South Africans in this way. In South Africa, different races did not mix. In SWA, we were enlisted together with people from other races. We all shared the same bus, the same toilets and showers and sometimes even the same water bottles. Many South Africans don’t understand this. The SWATF was a multicultural army, not a segregated army like the SADF was. We were not fighting the black man in Africa – we were fighting communism. Sadly, the current government of Namibia also does not recognise this fact.

Anyway, we soon reached a lovely little isolated place called Luiperdsvallei, just a few kilometers south of Windhoek. We were slowly dragging our civvy bags from the bus, when suddenly it felt like the atmosphere changed drastically.

It’s quite difficult to describe the next scene – it’s a little bit like the movie scenes from the Normandy beach landings, where there is this eerie silence, and suddenly all hell breaks loose around you. Or the choppers landing in Vietnam – nothing happens and then suddenly it’s just bullets, explosions and swear words all over the place. This was a little bit like that – only worse.

I was soon realising that something was happening outside the bus. The closer you got to the bus door at the front, the louder the noise became, and the more panic was felt in the air. There was a tangible feeling of trouble in the air.

Once I reached the exit and my feet touched the ground, I realised that I made the biggest mistake of my life. There was no turning around, and apparently I signed up to join the devil in hell.

A staff-sergeant was standing right at the door, and he was the most vile thing I had ever seen in my life. He started swearing at me even before my feet touched the ground. “Go there, get going you useless #&^%!”, he indicated and pointed in some general direction where I could see only a cloud of dust. I grabbed my civvy bags and started running in that general direction. We all had to line up – we knew about lining up in three’s, because we had been doing this since we were 12. Not to mention that I was also in the school’s prestige platoon in my days.

The staff (this is what we called a staff-seargent) and his big massive moustache appeared in front of us, swearing profanely. Apparently, this was the mark of any good staff – his moustache had to appear on the parade ground a few seconds before he did. They would wear them in these long curly fashions – greased up by eating fatty ribs over the weekend.

This man was yelling obscenities that I’d never heard before. At first I thought he was a preacher – he talked a lot about God and Jesus, and mentioned a lot of horrible sinners like whores and prostitutes, but he wasn’t using these words in quite the same way as our dear Reverend used them on Sundays. Mother Mary and a whorehouse featured heavily in this discussion.

I was made to believe that we were fighting the antichrist, and now suddenly the Devil himself was standing here insulting me! I was ready to grab a gun and kill this swine. He was doing all the things that my parents used to warn me against – and more.

The old dog seemed to be pretty upset, too. I was listening to him rambling on, trying to find out what he was complaining about.

It was about the bus – yep, those lovely people who littered all over the bus were not going to get away with it! That was another thing of course – how dare we, mere raw troops, arrive at a pristine military base riding in a BUS? All the “old troops” in the base were making comments about this – why are we being ferried along in busses, are we too scared to be transported like cattle on the back of a troop carrier? (As if this was our own choice – I didn’t want to be here in the first place!)

Staff Swears-a-lot wanted to know who littered junk all over his bus. No one had any idea. He swore a bit more, until one of the blokes mentioned something like “those bloody Basters did it”. The staff did not appreciate the fact that people were talking while he was swearing, and became even angrier. Now he wanted to know who that was? Who talked? – We were all dead quiet by now.

He started chasing us all around the place, dragging our civvy bags along. Luckily I was prepared for this and had a fairly portable bag. Some of these poor idiots were however dragging themselves to death with heavy impractical suitcases.

Fortunately for us, someone else now appeared on the scene. He seemed to outrank the staff and told him to stop harassing us. Apparently we had not yet been medically tested and it was illegal to chase us around if we were not medically cleared for heavy abuse. What if one of us was a wimp and fell over or died during our lovely interrogation session?

The staff was now even angrier. As we entered the door at the big medical shed, he would say “if you’re classified as G1K1 when you walk out the other side, I will kill you today – you’d better pray you’re not G1K1!!”

By this time it was my life mission to be classified as G5K5. We quickly learnt what these terms meant: G1K1 is a normal fit healthy young man – basically qualified to be abused in any way by anyone who outranks him, and used as canon-fodder. Someone who was blind, deaf, dumb and paralysed below the legs might just get classified as G2K2 – if he was lucky.

Once I got into the shed, I quickly realised that things were going from bad to worse. We had to take off all our clothes except for our underpants. One of my school mates had a beautiful older sister who was always very nice to me when I visited their house. She had in the meanwhile gone to a little town called George, where the female army training facilities were, and she was now an officer in the army. Just my luck – here she was in the same shed where I was standing in my underpants like a prisoner of war. I was embarrassed beyond recognition, and my best attempts at avoiding her did not work.

They performed a check-up on everything – they felt the size of your balls, they measured your length, height and width, and looked into every possible cavity that you could present. The dentist had a look in my mouth and declared my teeth as some of the best he’d seen that day. Some of the other blokes were not that lucky – if they found problems with your teeth, they fixed you there and then, and you could hear the bewildered groans from the poor fellas who were being mutilated under local anaesthesia.

What a day. We’d been here for barely a few hours, and already it was every man for himself – survival of the fittest. Except for the fact that you tried to avoid being declared fit. I tried my best at looking like a wimpy geeky nerdy match-stick man who wouldn’t be able to lift a rock from the ground, let alone a gun. But none of this worked – they declared me G1K1, and it was time to face the music.

There was this one bloke who came up to me saying “hey you, does your mother know you’re here?” I was familiar with this phrase, because I’ve always been short and I got this since Primary school, right through high school and now again some jerk tries this with me during my first day in the Force. I was just about to tell him off when I saw he had something on his shoulders. I spoke very nicely, saying “yes lieutenant, no lieutenant”, until he left me alone. This was when my buddy behind me decided to inform me that this dude was actually a captain, and not a lieutenant – a higher rank. I realised that I should have paid more attention to this whole rank-thing in school, because I obviously had no idea what was going on.

By now, I was seriously regretting my decision to join up, and was thinking of ways to flee the country without a passport. I still had 2 years minus half of 1 day left of my National Service, and it wasn’t looking like it was working out for me.

The exit door was getting closer and I could hear the staff yelling at people as they left the building. He would just ask “G1K1?”, and when you confirmed this, he would swear and point in a general dust cloud’s direction and would then tell you to lift up your hind legs and get moving.

After making us run around for a while, the staff pointed us to another big shed, where we were to collect our kit. This is where the army handed out all the heavy stuff.

They issued us with boots that were too big, an army beret and bush hat that was too big, brown overalls that were oversized, and underpants that were way too small. We also received a “varkpan” – loosely translated this is a “pig pan”. It was a piece of metal which you had to use as a plate to eat from. With this you got a dinner set called a “pikstel”, which was a spoon, knife and fork that all slid into one.

Added to this was the famous “spoegbakkie”, which was a round metal cup without a handle. Drinking hot tea from this thing in the middle of winter was pure torture – it had no handle and you had to grip it at the top with the tips of your fingers and try not to burn your fingers or spill your tea. Loosely translated the word spoegbakkie means “spit bucket”. The spoegbakkie fitted into the round holes on the varkpan.

I’ve tried to get hold of a photo of one, but it seems that not one single soldier ever thought the spoegbakkie was important enough to take photos of them. Which is quite understandable.

After we were issued with all of our heavy gear, most of it stuck into a metal trommel, we were bundled onto another bus. We drove and drove and drove while it rained outside, and at one stage I thought we may be going all the way up north to the operational area.

We finally stopped at the famous place called Osona. We had now reached our ultimate destiny in life by becoming part of this well-respected establishment.

It was raining cats and dogs when we got off the bus. The camp was a nightmare – people were screaming at you from all directions – no one knew who they had to listen to, as one person would scream at you to move in one direction, while the other would point you in the opposite direction. You normally followed the directions of the person who swore the most.

I always knew that people were supposed to scream at you in the army, but until then I didn’t realise that they all screamed at you at the same time…

I ended up in what was called Platoon one, Alpha Company. This sounded quite cool, but meant nothing. No one was special because they were in platoon 1 – it was just a random number like all the others. We were however lucky enough to be booked into a bungalow. Some of the other blokes got placed into what we called “tent town”, where a bunch of tents were placed far away from toilets and anything else.

It was raining so hard, you could barely hear the corporal swearing at you.

These poor fellas were still moving into their tents after nightfall; soaked from the rain - mud and water was everywhere. All of a sudden a bloke turned up wearing nothing but his underpants and a web-belt around his waist, sigarette in his mouth.

This bloke looked pretty high up in the ranks and he started swearing at these poor troopers like there was no tomorrow. He made them crawl around in the mud, doing push ups and running around in the dark, until he finally let the poor sobs go to bed.

Everyone remembered this bastard’s face – after all, if you ever saw him again you’d disappear as soon as possible.

When they had to line up for roll-call the next morning, they saw this same bloke standing in line with them. It turns out he was also a new recruit and he was just toying around with them. Needless to say, he was severely dealt with later…

And so ended my first day in the army. We were told that we could expect an inspection the next morning – whatever that meant, it did not sound like we were going to enjoy this...

The Big Aussie BBQ

2011-10-30T22:04:00.001+08:00

Yesterday it was time to greet the queen in a real West Australian way – we had a massive barbeque on the Perth foreshore.

There were 120 barbeques, 120,000 sausages (unfortunately no boerewors), 8000 liters of tamato juice, 130,000 drinks and more than 100,000 people who came to greet the queen.

Public transport was free and we took the train into the city early Saturday morning.

Because we were there early we got into the main stage area, and we got close to the action. This whole area was later locked off and the rest of the common folk had to go somewhere else to look at the queen on the big screens.

This created it’s own problems of course, because my youngest little darling wanted to go to the toilet, and I had to go through what seemed like 7 heavily guarded gates to get out, and had to get stamped to ensure that I’m allowed back in again. The same applied if you wanted to buy sausages or drinks. Security was tight and there was no mercy for anyone without the red stamp.

But it was great fun. I’ve never had the opportunity to see the queen in real life before, and I was surprised at how human-like her Duck was. (I don’t know why this duck is always accompanying her, it must be some mascot or something.)

The crowd was extremely well-behaved, and the WA Police tweeted later:

“about 100,000 ppl/no arrests/1 move-on notice/3 elderly ppl collapsed (fine now)/3 kids reunited with carers #CHOGM”

It was an alcohol-free event after all, as the Premier correctly assumed that good decent Western Australians won’t start drinking at 9am on a Saturday morning…well, not the 200,00 that came to the foreshore anyway.

The national anthem was sung with pride and once again one couldn’t help but notice how much these people love their country and how proud they are to be Western Australians. And that includes me.

We were close to the action, and when we asked my youngest what the queen looked like, her response was “she looks very old!”

Apparently Her Majesty also had a look at my daughter’s CHOGM photo earlier this week, and she was very impressed with this beautiful young girl from Africa. She may even have smiled when she looked at it in admiration:

On the way back we got off at Sterling station to run in to IKEA for a cheap lunch and drank free refill cold drinks till we burst.

So, in one week we met the Premier of WA in person, and saw the queen and her Duck from Edinburgh. What a week it was, indeed!

I need a holiday.

Chatting with the premier

2011-10-24T22:29:00.001+08:00

We had a nice little chat today with my buddy Colin Barnett, the premier of Western Australia. This was at the opening of the Nomad Two Worlds - Portrait of Diversity exhibition at the state theatre, where the original art work for my daughter’s photo is on display.

This was a great moment for us! My two girls went with me, because Mom had to stay home and watch their sick brother while I moved around with the VIP’s (I’m referring to my daughters of course!)

The face of Namibia for CHOGM 2011

2011-10-17T21:18:00.001+08:00

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) is held in Perth this year. This will be the biggest gathering of world leaders in Perth for the last 50 years.

There has been a lot of preparations for this, and amongst other things Colin Barnett (the premier of western Australia) thought it would be a good idea to take photos of immigrants from all 53 countries who live in western Australia– they actually found people from 50 of these countries, which is quite amazing.

These photos are being displayed in the Murray and Hay street malls in Perth, and my daughter's face ended up being a huge poster.

I’m sure her majesty the queen will stop to have a better look at this one:

My Bush War Story (Part 2)

2011-08-24T22:33:00.003+08:00

It was 1987.

It was the era when we wore large square glasses, and we watched the (original) A-Team on TV. Phones with buttons were the newest rage, and began replacing the old round-dial type phones. These were modern times indeed.

I was in Windhoek High School, one of the largest and most prominent schools in the country, with a proud history of achievement and success. I wasn’t old enough to vote yet, but the government already had it’s eyes on me since I was 16. They sent me a letter in my 16^th year, confirming that I was due to report for duty as soon as I left school. (This was enough motivation for most kids to actually finish school and not leave at the age of 16…)

Since we were 12 years old, in what we called “standard 5”, (our first year of high school), we had to wear brown cadet uniforms once a week. Every Wednesday morning we had to line up for parade, and we were taught how to march in threes and salute the officers, who were also doubling as our teachers.

During the first week at high school, we were provided with a brown shirt, brown shorts, and a brown beret. This was to be worn every Wednesday, and you were in serious trouble if you turned up at school on a Wednesday wearing your normal school uniform. “Serious trouble” normally included some form of physical punishment – at least two strikes in the office to be exact. We all accepted this as a fact of life, and our parents wouldn’t even consider complaining about the fact that their little beauties were beaten at school because they did not present themselves in proper military attire.

We also had regular hair-inspections in school, and were unceremoniously taken to the office if our hair standards did not comply with school regulations.

You might think that I was in a private military school, but you would be wrong. This was a normal state school in SWA.

This was the way we were raised, and we all accepted this without thinking twice about it. Our whole way of life was based on survival and fighting for our freedom and our country. Those who questioned this, were frowned upon. (And probably beaten up during recess)

When we went on road trips during the school holidays, we were used to seeing long army convoys on the road – just another one of those facts of life which we endured because we knew these convoys were crucial to our survival. They were delivering logistic support and backup to the troops up North. They slowed down our progress on the long narrow roads of SWA, but they also gave us the assurance that someone was out there protecting us.

I grew up seeing uniformed people everywhere I went, and thought this was quite normal. Windhoek was squirming with military personnel, and even my own dad worked for the army. The yearly Windhoek Agricultural Show was heavily sponsored and dominated by the army. We could see the newest weaponry, and the SWASPES special forces would do shows on the showgrounds where they performed mock attacks on terrorists.

We enjoyed watching the motorbikes do tricks, shooting at targets while flying through the air, and the dogs attacking make-believe terrorists who were hiding in the crowd. They would have smoke all over the grounds and “donderbuis” bombs going off – great stuff to watch from the stands! The baddies would shoot at our soldiers and they would shoot back, killing the enemy in droves.

Ahh, what a joyful time it was indeed. I often dreamt of killing a terrorist myself one day.

There were helicopters and sometimes even Mirage fighters flying overhead, all of them displaying the might and pride of the South African Defence Forces.

Although the war was waged far away in the North of our country, we were all very much aware of it, and accepted it as a normal part of life. We were South Africa’s 5^th province – we had the same Orange, White and Blue flag, and we sang the same national anthem with the same pride.

By our final school year, which we called “Matric”, or Standard 10, the young men all had to make some serious decisions. We received another blue computer-printed notice in an envelope. All of us got one – no one was spared.

In this little blue note, you were informed that you were expected to turn up at Suiderhof Military Base on 11 January 1988. It wasn’t a nice Outlook meeting request or a friendly letter, it was more like a stern command. The only way out was if you applied to go to university after school, but this was just a way of delaying the inevitable.

I tried to convince my parents that it would be better for me if I went to Stellenbosch to start my engineering studies – I’ll deal with the army later. My parents did not agree, and made me “volunteer” to join the army after school. According to them this would be better for me in the long run, because I might get married at University and the army experience is even worse for married men. “Get it over with and enjoy the rest of your life”, is basically what they prescribed.

Long story short: this decision was made swiftly and without further discussion – I was going to the army and that was that.

Once the matter was settled, those of us who made the decision to fight for God and country were revving up each other. We were animatedly discussing how brave we were and how many terrs we were going to kill, taking Caspirs for spins in the white Wamboland sand, jumping from helicopters and throwing around hand grenades all over the place. The army would never be the same after this lot enlisted…

In those days we did not yet have the luxury of the internet where you could research stuff at the click of a mouse. All we had to go on were the stories of the legends, and the stories that were told by those who went before us.

That is, if they said anything at all. Men will always tell about the fun stuff, and the funny stuff, but you don’t often hear about the killing and the fear and the hurt of losing a comrade in battle. Or the feeling of betrayal once it’s all over and people call you a baby killer or an evil racist.

Other than that, we had the propaganda and the embedded fear that these animals will run over our border and destroy our country – enough to make you want to go and massacre the lot of them.

There were all sorts of stories, but none of them unleashed the fear that the word “Osona” unleashed. This was the name of the Military school at Okahandja, also known as 1 SWAMIL.

Osona was where all the Southwest-African kids went for military training, and it was known as a place where kids died and young men were born overnight. There were horrible rumours about a terrible sergeant major who marched a soldier till he literally dropped dead, and about a torturous event called “Vasbyt”. This was where big men cried and the big brown army machine showed no mercy. This was where we were all destined to go – an infantry training school like none other. A place where canon-fodder was prepared before unleashing it to the unsuspecting enemy.

1 SWA Military school, Okahandja. The base is still there today, albeit in a much worse state than it was ever imagined to be during our days.

One Monday morning during our last weeks in school, we were all called up to the stage during assembly. The whole school could have a look at us and see the men who were destined to die for their country. We felt really good – all the girls were checking out the brave young lads who were risking their very lives to protect them. We were the ones fighting against the evil forces of the communists and the antichrist. (Yep, those were the exact words.) You can still see the photo in the back of our yearbook of 1987 – all of us standing there, ready to take on those commie bastards.

It felt great. For a while, anyway.

I had a look around, to get an idea of who my buddies were. It was good to see I wasn’t going to be alone – some of these idiots would have to endure Osona and Vasbyt with me, and this just made everything so much easier.

We were ready – as ready as anyone could have been. But the future turned out way different than any of us had ever imagined back then. And it changed quite suddenly, too.

I’ll tell you more about this in Part 3…

Read Part 3

My Bush War Story (Part 1)

2011-08-22T20:20:00.002+08:00

I have been planning to write this story for quite a while. I have actually already written it - in another language called “Afrikaans”. Translating this story was however quite difficult, as so many of the typical army phrases and events were very classic South African terms, and are hard to explain to “foreigners”, if I may call them that.

After numerous conversations with people who were not residents in Southern Africa during this time - answering many questions about the bush war - I decided that I needed to get this written down. The stories need to be told to those who were not part of this interesting part of African history.

Like thousands of other young white men in South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia), I was enrolled in National Service after my last school year, at the age of 18.

National service was not done on a volunteer-basis. Once you had managed to scrape through high school, you had two options - go to university, and do your national service afterwards, or join the army now and get it over with. There was a third option, but it would earn you six years in jail and a lifelong reputation of being a traitor to your country.

We were born in a country where we had to live with the constant awareness of having an enemy. This enemy was a terrorist group known as SWAPO. They attacked from Angola and would plant landmines on farms and kill innocent civilians. We grew up knowing this basic fact - that there was an enemy, and it had to be resisted. This enemy hated all that we stood for - our white skins, our Christian faith, and our capitalist lifestyle.

This enemy was supported by the Russians and the Cubans, and even East Germans were added to the mixture. It was a battle for survival, right in the middle of the Cold War. Around these parts the “cold war” was a real war, with bombs going off, guns being fired, tanks rolling and planes swooping down on enemy positions.

Landmines planted by SWAPO insurgents took out innocent civilians travelling on remote farm roads, and terrorists would infiltrate farms and massacre white families and their farm workers in the most brutal and inhumane ways.

In school, we were taught to watch out for suspicious items, like boxes or crates. We were taught how to evacuate our schools during bomb threats. And we saw on the news how black civilians in South Africa killed each other in the middle of the street by a cruel method called “necklacing”. A necklace was a primitive torturing machine – a person was stuck inside a car tyre, doused in petrol, and plainly set alight for the whole street to see.

This was our world, and this was our fight – a fight against the communist barbarians who would do anything to break down and destroy our way of life.

My grandmother joined the commandoes and learnt how to fire a rifle – just in case she ever needed to. And I know she wouldn’t have flinched if she ever needed to kill someone – it was either them or us, and we all knew this.

The battle, however, was never fought in Windhoek (central Namibia) or in South Africa, even though we were ready to expect anything. The battles were fought in the Northern regions of Namibia, North of an imaginative line we called the Kaplyn (Cut line). This area was indigenous land, and here the enemy could mix with the locals and infiltrate the country.

This region was heavily militarised, and patrolled by the SA Defence force on a daily basis. Every now and then small “contact situations” broke out, where terrorists in small groups engaged in fire-fights with the army. Other times there were massive conventional battles, where tanks, artillery and air power were all part of the game. South African forces invaded Angola regularly in order to wipe out SWAPO bases in Angola.

Prior to this, events in Angola and Mozambique were an ominous sign to those of us living in SA and SWA. In 1975, the new left-wing government of Portugal “freed” their colonies, and basically abandoned their Portuguese citizens and left them to the mercy of murderous communists. Those who were still alive, fled across the border and had to start new lives in South West Africa. The only property they had, was whatever they could load onto their vehicles when they fled Angola. And they were the lucky ones…

We had heard the horror stories that these people told, and we were certain not to abandon our land in the same way – where would we go, anyway?

My personal story starts at high school – yep, you heard me. You’ll have to wait for the next part of this story to hear more…

Making Biltong Down Under

2011-08-20T21:40:00.001+08:00

When you’re from Windhoek, you can only spend so much time without biltong. I was practically raised on this stuff. I can still remember the first time my granddad got a kudu and we carved it up into little pieces and hung it up in the little room in our backyard. I was still very young, but I remember it fondly – like it was yesterday. I can still taste that kudu when I think about it.

After nearly three years in Perth, and having to buy beef biltong from local butchers at ridiculous prices, I have finally put aside enough time to build a decent biltong drying cage so that I can start making my own biltong.

At first I tried to use a cheap dehydrator, but I will not recommend this to anyone. If you don’t have one that has variable temperature control, it will just cook your meat while it’s drying, and it will taste like bad army food.

The better way to make biltong is the traditional way – air drying. I built myself a nice little cage out of flyscreen, rope and wooden planks, using a staple gun to attach the flyscreen to the sides. The top and bottom covers are removable, to make it easy to access and clean the cage:

I also added some wheels to make it easier to drag this thing around the house:

The meat is prepared by marinading it in vinegar and the basic biltong spices: coriander, pepper, salt and a little brown sugar.

Then these spiced beauties are hung in the cage by attaching little hooks through them. S-shaped hooks made out of normal binding wire does the job perfectly.

Using a fan to help blow-dry the meat makes the curing process a little faster, but is not essential. It does help, however, if you have moving air around the meat.

Look at these beauties – pure nature at it’s best: environmentally friendly, bio-degradable, and extremely good for my heart and emotional well-being:

A good piece of biltong is what makes life worth living.

(No additional animals were killed during the production of this blog…)

The Carbon Tax Fiasco

2011-07-11T15:01:00.001+08:00

The Australian government is currently in the process of introducing a new carbon tax. The purpose of this tax supposedly is to bring down carbon emissions.

They “explain” this in the following diagram:

But I don’t understand how it works. I am just a normal run-of-the-mill stupid taxpayer.

What they claim to be doing, is as follows:

Tax the 500 largest carbon-polluting companies in Australia, (like energy producers). Use half of that tax and refund it to the public in the form of a tax cut or a payment to make up for the increase in costs that will be passed on to the end-user.

Somehow, this will make these large companies reduce their emissions. It will also make the “greener” alternatives more attractive and competitive on a cost basis, and therefore we will all live happily ever after.

What they don’t say is that no one actually has to reduce their carbon output. To me, this looks like a way for the government to collect more tax revenue and pass it on to the tax-payer, creating a more socialist state. Depending on how you position yourself, this could be a good or a bad thing, but actually has nothing to do with pollution!

My point here is that even though things will cost more, the government is supposedly going to hand out rebates so that the average Australian can cope with these costs. Which means that the coal-powered power station can keep on polluting as it always has, and because they now pay more tax, they are justified in increasing their electricity prices, for which the good old government will refund the average household. How easy.

The basic reason for all of this is that so-called greener alternatives are much more expensive than burning coal. The government wants us to get used to paying much more for our electricity bills (and anything else for that matter) than we need to, and they’re forcing up the price of existing technologies just so that green alternatives can become synthetically competitive.

Imagine this scenario: the power generators actually start reducing their carbon pollution footprint. This means that they pay less carbon tax, which means our wise government does not have the tax revenue to pass on to consumers, even though the average consumer will now still be paying much more for almost everything they consume. The government will run into even more debt or will stop the rebates.

Not exactly a win-win situation if you ask me. The logic that is being applied here is based on way too many assumptions. Only politicians can come up with stupid ideas like these. Politicians who only worry about the next election and the current status quo.

Snowing in Namibia

2011-06-09T20:40:00.000+08:00

Apparently these photos have not been photo-shopped or altered in any way. This is not something you normally see in Namibia:

Farewell

2011-05-25T23:23:00.000+08:00

A while ago I had a deep conversation with my son while we spent 24 hours camping alone in the bush of south-western Australia. I told my son how much it hurt me that my own father chose not to love me. Ever since my son was born, it was even more difficult for me to comprehend how anyone could choose not to love their children. Was I so unlovable that my own father wouldn’t want me?

When I was 10 years old, however, another man chose to love me and call me his son. For this I will always be grateful. He changed my life, and gave me one of the greatest things I was longing for. I was a small little boy who needed a strong man to shape my life. A hero, a big strong man who was not afraid of anything.

He taught me that real strength was not just in physical appearance or status, but in how you treated those who were weaker than you.

He always loved children, and seemed to prefer the company of laughing children to that of adults. I’ve never seen children who didn’t love Oom George.

I remember walking down the street with him. He would greet complete strangers as if they should know him, and would make jokes wherever he went. He never considered the possibility that anyone he walked into would not know who he was, and enthusiastically greeted them and asked about their welfare.

My dad would interrupt the middle of any conversation and point us to the nice sound of the clarinet or trombone in the song that was playing in the background.

Music was his life.

This was the language of my dad – scales and notes and melodies. He spoke this universal language and understood it well.

It is a great honour when someone is chosen to be the son of a hero. I was chosen – and I honour you as my father. May you rest in peace.

I salute you, Sammajoor.

Hard life on Cocos island

2011-05-19T18:57:00.002+08:00

I am working on Cocos island at the moment - what a great life I have! Our equipment was left behind in Perth because they didn't have enough room for it on the plane - they are bringing it in tomorrow. So unfortunately we were forced to go snorkeling out at Direction island - one of the most undisturbed beautiful beaches in the world! We'll have to work on Saturday to catch up, but it's still awesome to have the privilege of seeing this place, and being paid to come here!

Have a nice life you bunch of suckers! Haha

Narrogin men's camp

2011-05-15T20:22:00.001+08:00

My son and I went on a Men's camp this weekend, where we spent some time helping a young farmer finish his house.

On Saturday night we also spent some time hunting for roos and other pests like foxes and rabbits.

We built a bonfire out of what must have been more than ten large trees – a lovely sight!

We were not very successful with the hunt, because the area is quite dry and our furry little friends were keeping to themselves. I did have a change to have a go at a fox, but was just too late when he jumped underneath a fence and got away with my shot ringing in his ears.

This was lots of fun – I haven’t had a shot at a living thing for more than 3 years now, and found it quite invigorating. It is not quite the same as hunting for springbuck at 250m distances, as we used a double-barrel shotgun at short distances while the ute was still moving. Would love to do this again.

We also did some skeet-shooting and target practise on tin cans.

My job was to help install insulation in the ceilings. We wore these beautiful orange jump suites which made us look like we were working at a nuclear power plant:

Great story coming soon

2011-05-11T22:58:00.002+08:00

Yep, it's been a while - I'm just too busy (and/or lazy) to come up with more great material.

But there's a great story on the way, it's taking a while to finish it.

Watch this space...

Booger eyes and guttersnipes

2011-04-11T14:10:00.001+08:00

Last night it rained for the first time in 600 years. Or something like that – it’s a record, apparently. Nothing new to me, because growing up in Namibia, which is considered to be one of the driest countries in the world, a few decades without rain never really surprised anyone. We were used to describing a yearly rainfall of 300mm as an exceptionally good year.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about.

The sound of the rain coming down is a pleasant one for desert rats like me – I was raised to always appreciate free water falling from heaven.

But the other noises that go with it – that’s what this story is about.

When I started writing this post, I recalled a funny word from memory – “guttersnipe”. I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but it sounded applicable to my situation. According to the World Wide Library, however, a guttersnipe is “a child who spends most of his time in the streets especially in slum areas…”, which isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

What I had in mind was something more like a combination between a sniper and a gutter, with the two connecting in a violent confrontation with each other.

The gutter next to our bedroom window has this awful way of making a dripping noise when it rains. Not a constant rhythm that you can get used to, but an annoying disoriented pattern of drips and bangs that makes you go nuts.

We had a similar problem back in Namibia, but there my solution was simple – place a flat rock or a sponge in the bottom of the gutter where it bends out, and the problem is solved. But this stupid gutter has no access point – it feeds into the ground and the water is being fed into some unknown abyss where no unauthorised members of the public have access to it.

This house also does not belong to me – I’m renting, so I can’t just start sawing and hacking off parts that I don’t like.

This does not have a soothing effect on my friendly character at 00:30 in the morning. In fact, it drives me insane. I have tried all sorts of nasty ways to get this ghastly guttersnipe to stop guttersniping. (Sounds like something the old seadog in the Tintin books would say…)

The best solution for the moment is to stick a little piece of plastic in there, so it stops the water drops from falling all the way to the bottom of the gutter. The fancy tool was hastily handcrafted from old ice cream containers. I might have added a little colourful language in the recipe too.

Every time this happens, I promise myself that I’m going to get out my electrical drill and drill out all the rivets so that I can remove (or is it snipe?) the bottom part of the gutter in order to reduce the noise pollution levels in my neighbourhood.

To top it off, once I finally got into bed, I felt my eye hurting like crazy. Went to have a look in the mirror, and it looked like I was just returning from a bar fight in a western movie. My left eye was puffed up like a watermelon.

For a brief moment I thought a spitting cobra had attacked me while I was hitting a hammer against its nest in the gutter, but then I realised that this may be a bit far-fetched. Although, at that time in the morning nothing really seems far-fetched, except the idea of getting some freaking sleep.

When I finally woke up this morning, the old lazy eye was still huffing and puffing, and this gave me enough reason to make use of one of my sick-days at work. I rang up the old doctor’s waiting room as soon as possible, but of course there is nothing available until tomorrow.

I later even tried to find a vet that would have a spot open for me. No one would make room for me and my booger-eye.

So, here I am, sitting lazily at home trying to fix up the booger-eye. Later I realised that we have a chemist within 10 minutes’ walk from our house, so I took the time and walked over to get some over-the-counter eye drops.

I’m busy preparing that drill. Today will be the day of reckoning. Booger-eye or not, your time has come my little noisy friend!

Even better

2011-03-08T18:42:00.000+08:00

29 minutes of pure awesomeness

2011-03-04T09:23:00.000+08:00

Minutes from the creditors meeting

2011-02-18T15:22:00.001+08:00

The interesting saga continues with stories of intrigue and the lies and deception unfolding before our very eyes… what kind of a person acts like this, you would wonder?

Life without engineering

2011-02-04T09:14:00.001+08:00

Yikes. During my previous posts I made a few insensitive jokes about Cyclone Bianca, as it did not really have any impact on Perth. But on the other side of the continent, cyclone Yasi has been raging like an angry dictator with bad indigestion.

This mother of a storm was a category 5 cyclone and caused a lot of havoc around those parts.

The amazing part of this story is the fact that no one was seriously injured or killed during this storm so far, apart from a man who was killed by the fumes of a generator in his room.

This is all due to the fact that there was enough early warning and that people had enough time to prepare for the worst. Right across the world everyone was watching expectantly.

Imagine in the old days when the only warning you had was the birds that disappeared and the ants that started going Rambo on you. According to some of my friends over East, on the day Yasi reached the continent, it was still a clear bright sunny morning and you would have thought it to be a great day to hang around the beach.

All this early warning is due to modern technology and the marvels of electronic engineering, combined with a few other sciences of course. Without the reliable instruments and communication systems no one would have known what was coming. Without the satellite footage and the radar images, combined with pressure, wind and temperature measurements this would have been a disaster and thousands would probably have been killed.

Without great communication tools like radio, TV, phones and the internet, people out in the country would have been sleeping with the barn windows open when the cyclone hit. We would have seen a lot more flying cows and a few people would have thought their mother-in-law turned into a witch because she was flying around on a tree trunk.

All thanks to the geeky nerds who became engineers and scientists. Those same geeks who were bullied by the redneck jerks in school now saved those same brainless muscled idiots. They always win in the end.

Unfortunately there was a huge material loss for many people. Farmers lost crops and people lost their homes and cars. People’s jobs and sources of income were wiped out over night. Not a laughing matter at all.

But thanks to engineering, it was not as bad as it could have been.

Unfortunately this also means that these climate change nuts will gain a lot of support with their fear-mongering. They still seem to think that man can actually control weather like this. All of this was apparently caused by my 3.8 liter V6 engine guzzling fossil fuels and spewing carbon dioxide into the air.

I’ll think about that while I drive out to the beach this afternoon.

The day after

2011-01-30T18:36:00.001+08:00

Well, after all the cyclonic hoo-hah, nothing really happened. This morning when I checked the BOM website, the category 3 cyclone had been downgraded to a severe weather warning.

This really had me worried, because the last time we had one of those, it resulted in an event where it was raining golf balls, tree trunks and wheelie bins.

But all that happened today was a warm wind blowing nowhere. It was an awfully warm day.

It turned out kite-flying would have been a good idea, if you wanted to be barbecued by the scorching WA sun. Clouds were nowhere to be seen.

I was in the swimming pool for most of the afternoon, and finally I saw some clouds building up from the west. At this point it was so hot that I suspect people were actually praying for a cyclone to hit.

At least my backyard is slightly cleaner than it was before the weekend. The stuff I left out on the verge in the hope of the cyclone cleaning it up for me, have however been left behind quite unceremoniously.

Hold on to yer hat mate

2011-01-29T21:04:00.001+08:00

Today was one of those days where Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau would say “my, what vundeful wethah we are havink today?…”

The temperature last night was a chilly 26.1 degrees Celsius.

The cyclone also contributed to weather conditions which produced the city's hottest night in 10 months.

The temperature hit 26.1 degrees at 1.57am and continued to climb.

The morning started out pretty hot, and we spent half the day in our little blow-up swimming pool. Suddenly the clouds gathered and it poured like never before, only to open up again and let the sun burn down on us like someone left open a massive microwave oven.

Two days ago the ants started an all-out assault against me and my household. This was not the normal trail of ants that you occasionally see, this was a full-on invasion. By Friday I told my wife there’s bound to be rain on the way, if you look at the way these ants are taking over. “I know these things”, proudly announced…

This however seemed unlikely with the temperatures continually being in the high 30’s, and not a cloud in sight for the last 2 months. Is this what Noah felt like before he saw that small cloud on the horizon?

We’ve also been receiving some disturbing warnings from the powers-that-be.

They are telling us a category 3 cyclone is on the way.

OK, so what exactly is a category 3 cyclone? Should I be concerned?

I’ve been trying to figure out what this means, but could not quite get an uncomplicated answer, apart from some tips as to how you should remove loose objects from your backyard and don’t drive around too much in the rain.

We are asking people to get ready for it and certainly reassess their plans for travelling, camping, boating as Saturday goes on, which could be dangerous” he said.

“We’re asking people to prepare their properties inside and out and check their emergency plan and get emergency kits up to date and make sure they are ready and refreshed with batteries for their torch and transistor."

I don’t see how batteries and torches are going to help me when a howling twister drags me away screaming and kicking?

I did manage to find this pretty picture of Bianca, and it looks like it’s going to be a great day for some amateur photography:

It seems that they cannot really predict her exact path:

FESA State Emergency Service is advising people to start planning for bad weather and listen for further advice about the weather, which it described as very unusual. It could cause significant damage to homes and make travel dangerous.

I have decided to try out our new kite with the kids tomorrow. Apparently these cyclones bring in quite a nice breeze and we should be able to get the kite flying like a dove. I think it’ll be a great day to go to the park, throw something on the barbie and let the kite show us what it’s made of. I’ll take my camera along, maybe there will be some nice cloud coverage – clouds always make great photos.

I’ll also set apart some time to get up on my roof and adjust my TV antenna. Last time when we had the hailstorm the reception was just awful, so this time I’ll be there to fix her up.

I wonder how long these things last? 2 minutes, maybe 3? Who knows. I’ll try to snap a few photos before the sun comes out again.

I’ll keep you posted.

A horror-movie experience at the “New” Esplanade

2011-01-26T12:38:00.001+08:00

This year my wife and I celebrated 15 years of married bliss. This means that I know how to identify her “don’t come hither” look, and she has accepted the fact that my “lean and mean” body may be a little less lean but probably a lot meaner.

During a few of those “don’t come hither” moments, she was dropping a lot of hints about wanting to be booked into a nice hotel for a night. Just the two of us, without kids and TVs and computers and cooking and ironing and gardening.

I, of course, loved the idea – it might even turn that look into a “come hither”, if I played my cards right.

But the logistics didn’t exactly work out the way we thought it would. I googled Perth’s hotels for something “affordable” (which means “cheap-as”, but still worth throwing your money at). In the meanwhile we couldn’t get the kids’ sleep-overs arranged on the right date, so had to change the booking date. I saw adverts for quite a few nice spots in the CBD, and then this one jumped up at me.

It had a special discount just for January.

The cost was $118 for a couple, and offered me a great view on the Swan river. Who could resist?

They proudly stated

“Our standard rooms are spacious and newly decorated.
All front rooms face the breathtaking Swan River. They are located on the floors 1 to 6.”

They also claimed to have the following Room facilities:

» Fully air-conditioned » Colour LCD TV

» Ensuite with bath/shower

» Radio & Hairdryer

» Mini bar

» Refrigerator

» Coffee and Tea making facilities

» International Direct Dial

IDD/STD Telephone

I grabbed my credit card and started booking online. I made sure I requested one of those great rooms with a view on the river.

The email came soon enough – booking confirmed. They also supplied the following information:

Breakfast is served daily in the foyer. Price is $25 for cooked, or $18 for a continental per person.
Car parking is available at $25 / day. Height = 2.1m (7ft 1 in)
extra person is $46 per person / day
wireless internet access. please see wifi pricing (3rd party service)
#check in on the day of arrival is after 2pm. check out by 10am. Reception hours: 24/7

I thought the breakfast was a bit on the pricey side but assumed that this was because it’s such good quality. I never really got to the point of confirming this, however.

The missus was very excited about the whole affair. We couldn’t get rid of the kids soon enough, and finally we were on the freeway on our way to the city. I had a Google map direction to follow, but once I hit Howard Street, the place was nowhere to be found. It turns out Google maps had a little error, but we soon found the entrance around the corner in The Esplanade. We walked up to the 24/7 reception area and found an Asian man who was busy on the phone.

When he finally attended to us we were all too excited about getting to our room. We requested access to the $25 parking bay and moved on to get our car parked.

The attendant who worked at the parking bay gate reminded me of some of the hawkers I saw in Singapore. He gave us a piece of paper that we were to have in the car at all times, and another little receipt that would help us get through the boom gate. We had to park on level C or higher.

Moving a Kia Carnival around a parking bay area is always a chore, but this was like driving a tank through a McDonalds’ drive-through. We finally found an open hole the size of a mini, and I gently forced our 8 seater bus into the little spot.

We removed our baggage from the Kia and started looking for the entry door to the hotel. All we could find was a little dodgy elevator that had buttons with illogical floor numbers on it. If you moved sideways and pulled your luggage behind you, you could barely make it past the door into the lift. It was a little larger than a Barbie doll house, and looked like it was built just before Hitler killed himself.

We pushed a few buttons to see what would happen. All the floors had access doors that were locked, and our keys wouldn’t open them. The car park had an awful garbage smell and reminded me of some of my visits to Opuwo in Namibia. Old smelly puddles of water were all over the place, and you had to tread very carefully. We had to ride all the way down to the ground floor, walk around the dirty dark alleys and enter the hotel through a little side-door, trying not to be hit by any oncoming traffic.

“Phew – finally out of the dirty alleys and into the great luxurious hotel”, I thought.

We walked over to the hotel’s inside elevator and I noticed that the wooden handrails looked like they were falling apart. I thought this was probably just something that happened recently and that it would be fixed soon – these things happen.

We found our room on the 6^th floor and this is where the penny really dropped for me.

What exactly they meant by “newly decorated” is beyond me. What met my eyes was a room from hell. This may have been newly decorated in 1955. The room had a view of the river, but you had to look through the tree branches to see a glimpse of it.

The bay windows were taped up with cello-tape for some reason. The bed felt like it was standing on three eggs, and the linen seemed like it hadn’t been washed for the last 30 years. The air conditioner was like something out of a 1960’s sci-fi movie, and sounded like it was going to tear the whole building apart. It sounded a lot like a Boeing 747 taking off from Luanda airport.

And then I walked around to inspect the bathroom. This is where I made my decision to go back home. Some people might think I’m just a snob, but so be it.

The toilet seat was made of some black material that was probably banned in 1956. The shower was one of those in-the-bath thingies with a stupid shower curtain that would only help the water to distribute more evenly onto the bathroom floor.

By the way, I’ve never seen one of those that actually work. Either they flood the whole bathroom, or they creep up into your bum while you try to catch a drop of water from your creepy shower head. They should be declared illegal.

I gave this beautifully restored bathroom the once-over and decided to get the hell out of dodge.

My wife was still excited about getting out of the house, but I just had it. I apologised to her profusely – this was not what I had in mind. None of the “come-hither” stuff is going to happen on this creepy bed anyway… even I have my pride.

I walked down to “reception”, and when Mr Chong finally attended to me I said I wanted to cancel my booking as I’m not happy with this crappy hole. He informed me that I had to talk to the manager, but the manager would only be in by the morning.

I politely notified him that I would unfortunately not be here in the morning, and that I would be sending a friendly email to the manager. I now ran the risk of still paying $118 for the room plus $25 of smelly parking space, but I decided to take that chance rather than spend a night wondering when a bikie gang would take over our room, or when a snake would crawl out from under the bed to kill one of the rats.

We drove around a little and then decided to go for a pizza and a DVD rental. So we spent a night watching a movie alone at home with no kids around.

My email to the manager included some subtle threats like referring this matter to the ACCC and calling the FBI, the KGB and the hit man from Arizona. They quite surprisingly replied by offering that: ”as a sign of good faith” they would not charge anything to my credit card.

The manager did take the time to inform me that “We are only a 3.5 star hotel, not a 5 star. Hence the reasonable rates quoted.”

I wonder how they got those 3.5 stars? Maybe they got them in 1944 and have been desperately holding on to them since then. What does half a star mean anyway?

Honestly, I’ve stayed in a lot of 2-star rated places all over Southern Africa, and all of them have better facilities than this. Beware of Australian stars – they obviously use a different system than other parts of the world, and they don’t seem to re-evaluate these ratings.

If you want to experience the third world in a first world country, by all means book yourself in at the “New” Esplanade in Perth. Don’t let the word “New” fool you however – it was already old when they bombed Hiroshima.

The ongoing saga of a bad investment

2011-01-12T20:26:00.001+08:00

Fireworks

2010-12-04T12:45:00.001+08:00

I haven’t written a lot lately. I love writing, but at the moment there are a few things happening in my life that I don’t really want to write about. Frankly most of it is just so negative that I would send you into a depro if I wrote about it. And to lose the last few committed readers that still dare to venture onto this blog, would be a fatal blow to my waning popularity.

In short, a friend of mine bamboozled me out of a lot of money, and I am in the process of demanding justice. This process is quite intimidating and complex, not to mention costly, and may in fact not have the required end result, which should be justice.

I’ve always been one of those suckers who continue to believe in the idea of fairness and justice. And I still do. A little bit.

Although I know a few good decent people in the legal industry, I have to say that in general, lawyers are a bunch of blood-sucking thieves, and even when you do have a good case that should go your way, the costs of getting this through court basically reduces your ability to act in any way.

Most of the lawyers I contacted at first, just wanted to go the easy way and create a paper-war. They want to sit in the office being a pen-pusher, in stead of actually taking the matter to court. And they literally charge you in 6 minutes timeslots. When you go over into the 7th minute, you’re out of pocket for another 30 or 40 bucks, depending on the amount of personal debt this lawyer has to cover in order to sustain his expensive lifestyle. They’re worse than engineering consultants.

And why not? These are the folks who end up being judges, members of parliament and other kinds of high-rollers, and they draw up our laws – why wouldn’t they create a system where they are the beneficiaries of other people’s bad luck?

Even though I was totally able to draft and send off my own “final letter of demand” to the debtor, most of the lawyers I contacted insisted that I write a letter of demand on their letterhead, which would apparently have a much better effect than my personally written one, which I simply got off the internet.

For this great service a company like Ah*rns Lawyers (Full Name withheld to protect the innocent) would charge you $440.00. What a farce. Even after I repeatedly stated that I had already sent off a letter of demand, and that I now wanted to proceed with real legal action, M*rc#s Ah*rns still insisted that I first send off another letter on their letterhead. According to him:

“…I recommend a letter of demand from our firm. It will threaten the claiming of costs and interest and carries a lot more weight than your letter as it shows you are serious as you have engaged solicitors.”

There’s nothing in there that wasn’t in my original letter. Except a huge cost to print a piece of paper with their colourful letterhead on it.

This, of course, was after Mr Ah*rns took more than a week to respond to my first request for assistance.

I finally got hold off a legal company who seems to have a lot more integrity. They responded to all my emails in a speedy fashion - they even arranged the first meeting for free. I was free to discuss my whole case with a lawyer, and could then decide what to do based on their advice. If you live in Perth, I would highly recommend Havilah Legal if you ever need to talk to a respectable lawyer. Check out their website.

Anyway, this still doesn’t mean that I’ve received any of the money this scumbag has stolen from me, but at least it’s a start. One day when the whole matter has been done and dusted, I will tell you the exact details of what happened. For the moment, I’ll leave names and details out of this to protect the guilty.

Anyway, last weekend we attended the annual Fireworks at Hillarys, and I took a few nice photos of the events. Fireworks seem to be part of my life for the moment:

Acer 5315 shutting down?

2010-11-17T21:21:00.001+08:00

This is not one of my normal blog posts. This is one of those that you hopefully would come across when you search for the following fault:

“Acer 5315 laptop shuts down out of the blue”, or

“Acer 5315 laptop overheats, causing the system to shut down”.

If you have these problems, then is the post that will give you the easy solution.

I investigated this problem and found that the system shuts down due to the CPU overheating. The computer protects the CPU from frying itself. The question, however is why does this happen? The fan is running, everything else seems to be fine. I tried a lot of different things, but couldn’t really figure it out.

I tried the Acer support centre, who took three days to tell me that this is a “software problem”. Here’s their solution:

Thank you for contacting Acer’s online helpdesk, and for providing me with these details.

The problem you describe can sometimes be caused by an underlying software issue, and so I should like to suggest you run through a system recovery.
I have provided some simple and easy to follow instructions that will help you perform a system recovery, though please note that all personal data will be deleted, and your system restored to its factory default.
I suggest you first backup your personal files to CD/DVD, an external HDD or a USB storage device if possible, and also recommend that you keep regular backups of your personal files.
Here are the instructions as mentioned:
1. Firstly, please ensure that all USB storage devices are removed before proceeding with a system recovery
2. Restart your Acer product; please then begin tapping both the ALT & F10 keys together repeatedly from the moment you see the Acer boot screen
3. Please continue tapping both the ALT & F10 keys together until you are presented with the Acer recovery console
4. Select ‘Restore to Factory Default’ from the recovery options and enter your recovery password; the default password is six zeros – 000000, though you may have changed this at some time
5. Please press enter to continue, and then follow the on-screen instructions
6. The system recovery will be complete within 30-45 minutes, at which point I trust your system will return to its normal operation.
Thank you for your enquiry and I look forward to your response.
Have a great day.”

Got it?

OK, now this sounds like a typical IT helpdesk solution – if all else fails, re-boot, wipe out everything and re-install it – what a stupid suggestion! How will that solve an obvious hardware issue?

I tried to read up on the web, and found people with the most amazing solutions. Stuff like this:

1) Install the script that controls the fan
Download the script in the attachment in the post: http://www.mail-archive.com/acpi-bug.../msg14582.html
I have also attached it below.
2) Unpack the script
tar xvfz acer_fancontrol.tar.gz
3) IMPORTANT Modify the script to match your hardware (It is set up for a 2GB 5720Z as it is).
gedit acer_fancontrol
Pick the memory size which matches your memory size
4) Try it out
sudo ./acer_fancontrol
If you used the slightly modified script attached to this post, you should see that it prints some messages out like "Ignition Off", "Clutch down" or something. These correspond to the fan speeds, and you should be able to hear the fan working for anything above "Ignition Off".
5) If it works you can install the script
sudo cp acer_fancontrol /usr/bin
sudo cp mempat /usr/bin
6) Make it run automatically
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local
Insert "acer_fancontrol" before the final "exit 0"

And all sorts of other crazy stunts like tinkering with your BIOS and installing other operating systems.

go into terminal (or whatever you use) and type:
su root <-- it didnt seem to work with the sudo stuff, it kept saying your not root blah blah blah and thats the only way it didnt complain about it
cd /proc/acpi/thermal_zone <-- This will get you into the right folder.
gedit cooling_mode <-- make sure that its this file your editing.
and then add this into it when it opens up in a text editor:
cooling mode: active
save the file, then restart the computer.

(…What the hell?)

This is all nonsense. The problem is not with the operating system, not about whether it’s 32 bit or 64 bit, Vista or XP - nothing to do with that. It’s a HARDWARE problem, you stupid geeks! Hardware is the manly stuff that actually make things work, like wheels and gearboxes. Not everything can be fixed by updating software!

I saw one bloke’s response where he mentioned something about opening the internal fan and removing the dust bunnies. I thought that I’d been there and done that, having already blown out the notebook with a compressor. But then I read on, and realised that you have to open up the fan, and you’ll see what he means.

All the other wise geeks ignored this bloke’s comments and kept on with the nerdy-talk – BIOS patches, ISO file editors and who-knows-what.

But no one really had a proven solution. Most of these geeks screwed up their computers beyond repair, causing even more problems. Some talked about putting the notebook in the fridge to cool off, some messed with their CPU voltages.

One bloke even took his machine back to Walmart and got a full refund!

I took the advice from the smart guy on the forum, and opened the fan. Now looky here, here’s the answer! At first I thought I was looking at some sort of gasket between the fan and the heat sink block, but when I totally removed the fan I saw that this was in fact a dust bunny that blocked off any air supply to/from the fan:

Note that even if you try to blow the notebook out with a compressor, you won’t get rid of this little sucker without unscrewing the fan cover and removing the fan.

So, this isn’t a virus, it’s not your BIOS patch, it’s not the Acer ePower management software, it’s just a plain old dust problem. You can’t even blame Vista for this one.

Suddenly this old laptop is running sweet, full speed 100% CPU usage at a cool 50 degrees Celsius, in stead of the normal 80-85 when no program was running. Awesome.

Cost to repair: $0.00

Value of this knowledge: Priceless.

Oh, and yes – don’t try the Acer helpline – a waste of time.

Apostles and Notorious Public prophets of doom

2010-10-06T22:49:00.001+08:00

I recently managed to sell my share of a property that I owned in South Africa. I actually made a loss, because I got back the same amount that I paid for the piece of land 4 years ago, but I was just glad to get rid of this dead investment and move on to greener pastures.

My brother-in-law was kind enough to buy out my share, and he transferred the money to my SA bank account. After numerous struggles and hefty fees I finally managed to deposit the funds into my local Commonwealth Bank account – just in time to pay a deposit on a property deal in Melbourne. Don’t ask - but yes, Melbourne - even though I live in Perth... (it’s complicated.)

Anyway, a few days later his lawyers contacted me. We just need to finalise some of the documents, as my brother-in-law paid the funds even though the documentation hadn’t been finalized yet – which was a very kind deed from his side.

So, I owe him a lot – I need to sign these documents and make sure he gets value for his money.

Easy enough. At first, they just wanted my ID documents, my marriage certificate and my bank account details. Everything was going smoothly.

Then came the shocker:

If you sell property in South Africa, and you are not in the country to sign the documents, the documentation needs to be “apostilled”. I’ve never really heard this term before, but believe me - it’s nothing enjoyable. It sounds like some kind of sickness and is in fact worse than one.

I received a list of instructions with documents that needed to be signed. I had to sign these documents in the presence of someone who is qualified to apostille the documents. This person must be

1. Head of a South-African diplomatic or consular mission; or

2. a person in the Administrative or professional division of the public service, serving at the South-African diplomatic, consulor or Trade Office

This sounds easy, doesn’t it?

I jumped onto Google and checked it out. Yep, Perth does have a “South African Honorary Consulate” – good news.

Luckily I rang them up before travelling all the way into the city. “Nope, we don’t do that”, said the lady. “You need to go the Department of Foreign Affairs (DAFT)”.

“Which one?”, I asked - “the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs?” This doesn’t make sense, but the answer was yes.

This morning I jumped onto the train in Leederville and got off at Perth station, on the way to the Exchange Plaza. The DFAT is on level 17. I saw a door with the words “Apostille” written somewhere on it, and was feeling quite happy at finding the right place.

The lady behind the window informed me that they can’t apostille something that I sign in front of them. I need to go to a “Notary Public”, and this person would be able to do it. Then I have to return to the DAFT and hand in the documentation, and it takes 24 hours for them to finalise. It costs $60 for every page, plus $20 for binding it. For my 5 pages this means that this is going to cost me a minimum of $320, plus the Notary public’s fees.

Great.

She gave me an outdated list with names of Public Notaries on it. I saw that some of the addresses were also in St. George’s Terrace, so off I went looking for these Notorious Publicans.

They’re notoriously unavailable.

Either Mr. X is in court, or Mr. Y simply does not do this anymore. Or, “you can call his secretary and make an appointment, but he’s very busy, you know…”

I was referred from the 25^th floor of one building to the 28^th floor of the building across the street – then to the 4^th floor of building Y, and on again to the 23^rd floor of building D. In the meanwhile, the lady at the DAFT informed me that they close at 1pm. So at 1:30pm it was a lost cause anyway.

I finally had to admit defeat, and I crawled into Gloria Jeans for a coffee and a sausage roll. When I finally got onto the train I felt I a bit of a failure after wasting three hours in the city without achieving anything.

Next time I’ll plan this better. Make appointments. Pay huge sums of money. Make more appointments. Pay some more. And then hopefully mail these completed documents back to South Africa at enormous cost.

Or I could ignore it all, do nothing and hope it all goes away while I let my brother-in-law stress it out on that side.

Trip to the Wild Mid West

2010-09-09T20:57:00.001+08:00

I’ve recently done some travelling around the Midwest region of Western Australia.

We got onto the Great Northern highway early in the morning. The only reason the call it “great”, is because of the massive distances that you travel – not the size of the “highway”. It mostly consists of a normal 2-way bitumen road that looks similar to the Trans-Kalahari highway on the way to Swakopmund on the Namibian coast.

An interesting concept around these parts is what they call a “road train”. It’s not a freight train that crosses the road; it’s a massive long truck that can pull up to three trailers, all trailing behind each other.

I saw heaps of kangaroos lying dead next to the road. Over a distance of 60 km l actually counted more than 100 roadkills strewn around the place. (The road trains don’t brake for anything…)

The first part of the route was through the Chittering valley. Once we got closer to a place called Payne’s Find, the region was looking extremely familiar. Payne’s Find is pretty much just like Kalkrand in Namibia – a petrol station with a garbage can next to it.

On the way there, probably about 50km before we reached PF, the area reminded me a lot of the road from Rehoboth to Windhoek, with the Auas mountains in the background. I had to pinch myself a few times just to remind myself that I was not driving in Namibia.

I was expecting a kudu to jump over the road at any moment. All I saw, however, were emu’s, dead skippies and feral goats all over the place. It was a weird experience.

At Mount Magnet I saw two local indigenous people sitting at a table. They got up later, and I watched as one of them walked over the road with one foot totally bare, and the other one clothed with just a dirty sock. With this irregular footwear he was merrily walking across the dusty road. Once again I had this weird feeling of familiarity – I’m not sure why…

There are quite a few of them folks around. There were two blokes standing around the public phones – they just never seemed to be able to get away from the phones. Another bloke was crossing the road every now and again. I have no idea what he was trying to achieve. All of this was happening while we were waiting for our local contact to arrive. I therefore had a lot of time to observe some of the things going on.

One of the defining moments was when I saw an indigenous lady come out of the BP shop, and as they left the shop she gave her poor kid a smack that made the snot fly. I then heard someone in the vicinity saying something about “bloody coons”. Obviously the inter-cultural love runs deep in these parts.

A local bloke told me that in one of the towns in this region, they still had the “black and white bars” until a few years ago. This meant that “black fellas” and “white fellas” did not drink at the same bar. Interesting.

We finally ended up in Sandstone, and holed up in a place that my colleague cheerfully described as a “dog’s house”.

I met quite a few interesting locals at the bar. All of them were wearing leather hats for some reason – even long after the sun had set. One bloke looked like a mix between crocodile Dundee and the Terminator, with a little bit of country music thrown in. I was just waiting for this bloke to present a banjo and start singing country songs, but fortunately this didn’t happen.

I even met a South African here. Yep, out here in the sticks, I walked into a saffer. You can’t go anywhere without running into one of them.

Around these parts people like to dress like cowboys. At the BP in Mt Magnet I saw a bloke who looked like a miniature version of Bob Katter. These two blokes were driving in a Land Cruiser, and when they stopped the driver got out wearing a bright red shirt, black jeans, boots, and of course a massive leather hat. When his hat-wearing buddy got out of the car, I suddenly noticed that she was a pregnant lady, although she looked a lot stronger than the skinny driver. And her hat was bigger.

Well, back in the bar in Sandstone, I met this friendly fella who was wearing a footy shirt with the words “adventure tours” written on it. I asked him about his adventures, and he explained that he took people on all sorts of adventure tours around Sandstone. He’ll do anything you want to do – you can shoot roos, go camping, 4x4 driving, or just sit drunk around the fire – whatever your fancy.

I liked this idea about roo-shooting, and he explained that he provides the weapon and a little bit of training - and live targets, of course. You can start out on tins cans, and once familiar with loading and cocking the gun you qualify to take out some live targets.

I like this guy. When I explained to him that I’ve done a wee bit of hunting myself, he responded enthusiastically by telling me that he recognised my horrible Souf Efrikuhn eksehnt, and that “you guys kill anything over there!”

I decided not to get a quote, cause I might have ended up shooting roos instead of getting the job done that my company sent me over here for. But I’m still keeping it in the back of my mind. Maybe a little team-building exercise?

I love these country towns. They have an atmosphere that you just can’t get in the city. And I enjoyed not having to stop at traffic lights or having to sit on a freeway for half an hour on the way to the office. And I love seeing animals roam around, even if they’re just boring emu’s and skippies. I also saw millions of sheep, feral goats and cattle. Awesome.

The restaurant was another abnormal experience. The chef, who also doubles as the waiter, is a classic. He walks around in shorts and thongs, with an apron covering his stomach. He nearly threw a fit when one of the ladies in the restaurant requested veggies. He handles his guests in a very informal manner, and everyone inside the restaurant was talking to each other, even if they were not seated at the same table. Great atmosphere.

I ordered some dead kangaroo, and he made a good job of it. He mentioned that his roadkills are normally scraped off the road in the early morning, so that it’s still fresh.

The food was really good. This place is great, although the rooms look a bit like a jail on wheels. I had to share a bathroom with the couple next door to me.

How will I sum this up? It felt like a trip to Otjiwarongo , with a detour through Kalkrand and a quick stop at Mariental. I had no idea where I was, but it sure felt like home…

Hooray for Blogger spam!

2010-08-15T18:35:00.001+08:00

Lately I've had a lot of comments from my new chinese friends. It seems that I now have quite a fanclub overseas, with loving fans scrambling to leave links to their pathetic spam-filled websites. They leave these interesting Chinese characters and subtly try to also add a link to some obscure website, as if I would be too stupid to notice.

Or they try to leave an English-worded message with something like "The path to harmony is through love", or some other stupid Buddhist/communist-inspired quote.

Idiots.

I have "comments moderation" on, therefore none of these ever get posted. The fact that this is spam is so obvious that it immediately leads to me clicking on “delete”.

It just gets really irritating.

Until now. Blogger has finally added a “report spam” button, and finally there will be a way to report these chinese scumbags. I hope you little rats get thrown into a filthy overcrowded chinese prison and that you experience the full variation of chinese water torture in it's finest form!

Try your luck now, you creepy terrorists!

Erections, executions and other democratic phrases

2010-07-18T20:02:00.001+08:00

If you’re not from Namibia, you’d probably wonder why I’m mixing these words together. What do erections have in common with democracy, except for Bill Clinton?

In Namibia a common tendency for indigenous people is to mix up their “l”s with their “r”s. So it is quite common to hear a news reporter referring to “national erections”, when actually meaning “national elections”.

Anyway, Down Under we had some interesting political developments recently. A few weeks ago, our Prime Minister was unceremoniously politically assassinated by his own Labor Party. Apparently he is travelling the world to look for a new job, preferably one where people like to listen to long boring spin talk.

Now a redhead with a horrible Aussie strine accent has taken over. It was really not fun listening to Kevin Rudd lecturing to the masses, but this lady is a step in the wrong direction if you ask me. I just can’t get myself to listen to her squeaky narratives.

The redhead has now called a national erection, and on 21 August all “Strayljuhns will be cahstin them votes”.

Experience “New millennium Western democracy” in it’s finest form: two parties logging it out in the media - twittering, tweeting, blogging and facebooking, crapping and belching anywhere and everywhere. Not even your own homepage is sacred anymore. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’m used to electioneering Namibian style, where posters hang on telephone poles, and Kosie Pretorius stuffs people’s mailboxes with his party’s pamphlets. The NBC TV channel would give each party a few minutes on air and they would compete to see who could offer the most pathetic-looking person to beg on their behalf. Normally a previously disadvantaged deaf-mute albino female with only one leg and no teeth is a good spokes-person for your party, as it shows how much you value their contribution to society. The more pathetic your representative is, the better party you are. Apparently.

Of course the ruling party in Namibia always wins with a 75% majority, so why would you tweet, twitter and belch anyway?

But Down Under they do it with style. Technology is used to reach the dumbfounded masses. Everyone tweets, twitters and blogs like a madman. Or woman.

The opposition is lead by a guy called Tony Abbot – a real straight-shooter who constantly needs to explain himself after he mouthed off some politically incorrect comments to the media, while wearing budgie smugglers. His opponent is a godless unmarried childless redheaded welsh-born lady who just knifed her predecessor in the back while he was still PM.

You can just imagine what this contest looks like in the media. The comments and counter-comments border on slander and outright insults on a daily basis. Great stuff!

I love democracy.

The redhead stated a few weeks ago that she did not have any intention of taking over from old Kev. She said the following, among other things:

May 18 "There's more chance of me becoming the full-forward for the Dogs (Western Bulldogs AFL team) than there is any chance of a change in the Labor Party."

May 18 "I know we’ll be welcoming Jessica [Watson] back to Sydney this weekend after her round the world epic feat. I tell you, I think there’s more chance of me going round the world sailing solo a dozen times than this chatter in the media becoming anything more than that."

If "Steven Spielberg rang me from Hollywood and asked me to star opposite Brad Pitt in a movie, would I do it? Well, I'd be a little bit tempted but you know what, I don't reckon Steven Spielberg is going to give me a call."

May 26 "If I exit politics able to look at the scoreboard and say this is what I did as minister for education, this is what I did as minister for workplace relations, that's enough for me. That's beyond the wildest expectations I had for myself when I started this journey."

June 10 "You may as well ask me am I anticipating a trip to Mars."

June 18 "Look, I know there's been all this breathless media speculation about leadership questions. There's not speculation in my mind."

She became PM on 24 June…

The Global Acting Competition

2010-06-23T19:43:00.001+08:00

I’ve never been much of a soccer fan.

Oops, I’m supposed to call it football. Who cares?

The only time I ever watch soccer is when the world cup is on. And once in four years may be just a wee bit too much to my liking.

Most of the games are televised at horrible hours, so I only try to watch the first game of the evening. Or parts of it, anyway – until I fall asleep, or get so angry that I switch over to watch a live dart-throwing competition. Whoopie…

Watching 90 minutes of poor acting is worse than watching national news bulletins on Namibia’s NBC channel. Really.

I try to get excited about this sport, but the openly blatant acting is just too much for me. Two players will run into each other, and both will act like someone just hit them with a baseball bat, or they would act innocent and indignant at whatever the other actor might have tried to imply.

This is not a manly sport. These sissies do a ballet dance all over the field, and throw tantrums like actors in a bad Mexican soap opera.

You never even see a little blood – what good is a sport if you can’t see blood flowing?

Why is this considered to be the world’s most popular sport? Is it because men all over the world have been so emasculated that they like watching fairies dance over a football field?

Beauty and the beast

2010-06-19T22:42:00.001+08:00

World Cup Fever

2010-06-03T21:04:00.002+08:00

(click on picture)

Happy Mother's day, everyone!

2010-05-08T21:26:00.000+08:00

Talk to me

2010-05-04T18:39:00.001+08:00

This is a story about the evolution of the Customer Care Call Centre.

Many years ago, when you had a complaint, you wrote a letter. You wrote (or typed!!) it up in a formal manner, stating your name and address and detailing your complaint. You stuck this letter in the mailbox, and waited two weeks for a response.

Depending on who the company was, they might write or call, if they thought you had a valid complaint. Most would reply with a nice-sounding letter stating that you somehow got it wrong and you’re stuffed.

Then some wise-guy decided to create the concept of the Customer Care number. This magic number would be staffed by a friendly person who was always willing to help.

Soon they found out that these numbers got overloaded due to the fact that most companies suck at service.

So, the next concept evolved. They called it the Customer Care Centre. A whole room full of people who sat there answering phones all day long. Some care-giving companies even started populating them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Unfortunately most of these new employees were somehow not placed in the executive salary-scale, and hardly got paid enough to travel from home to the bright shiny CCC office every day.

So, they just did the auto-pilot thing and acted as if they care, although they actually didn’t give a rat about your problem. Neither were they suitably qualified to really understand your complaint in the first place. They answered in generic codes and gave you reference numbers to frustrate you in your future endeavours to solve the problem – if you had the guts to try calling them again.

And then it got worse.

Some silly nerd decided to get a computer to do the talking. This is all part of what they like to call VAS, Value Added Service. It probably depends on what your definition of “value” is…

The phone rings, and is promptly answered by a male voice. The voice asks you a bunch of questions, offering a series of possible outcomes.

Some companies, especially mobile phone companies, started experimenting with the buttons on your phone. They would request you to “press 1 if you have billing enquiries”, and so on.

What they didn’t tell you is that the term VAS actually means that they add value to their own bank account. While you’re waiting for option number 25 to come up – this is the relevant one – the voice slowly goes through all the other options one-by-one, while your phone bill keeps on ticking over on the not-so-free special VAS number that you dialled.

Mostly your expected option never comes up, and then you can’t remember the other one that was nearly like the one you wanted. Was it 7, or 12?

$15 later you press the wrong button, and have to ring them up again. What a great idea.

The nerds went one step further by forcing you to talk to a computer. In stead of letting you push buttons, this friendly voice wants you to actually talk to it.

Now here’s where I get really frustrated. No one told this computer that half of the residents in Australia are immigrants who have foreign accents. It can barely understand a basic “yes” or “no” reply, and you can forget about it recognising numbers. The poor immigrant ends up screaming and swearing at a stupid computer who cannot even respond to the basic verbal abuse that most human operators would understand.

The only way to get what you want is to keep on harassing the computer until it finally gives up and frantically tries to put you through to a human operator. The music starts playing, and the waiting game is on…

But it still gets worse. When you finally get put through to a real person, it’s actually a guy called Muhamatifupila from Pakistan who is “plentifully assisting” you today. He can barely understand you, and vice-versa. He sits in a cramped office somewhere in the middle East, on a contract with a multibillion-dollar Australian company that turns out to be too cheap and greedy to pay local people decent wages.

It ends with you getting cut off in the middle of your conversation with your new friend Muhamatifupila, too intimidated to even consider starting all over again.

It’s only the die-hard super-beings with immense amounts of patience who finally get any response, pushing up the KPI’s and other customer care indicators to an acceptable level. Acceptable to the multibillion dollar company, that is.

It all gives the word “service” a new meaning.

Ten years ago

2010-04-26T11:58:00.001+08:00

My oldest daughter was born exactly ten years ago.When she was 6 months old, she and my wife were involved in a vehicle accident on a dirt road in Namibia.

After the accident, she seemed to be fine, but a while later my wife noticed that there was a dent in her head. Something must have hit hard against her head – it may have been someone’s elbow, but we’ll never really know.

It looked like a golf ball had been pressed into the skull. The size of this dent was roughly the size of a golf ball, although it did not enter the head that deeply.

She went for X-rays, MRI scans and all sorts of complex and upsetting medical tests.

Here is one of the MRI scans where they virtually “sliced up” the skull and checked different areas of the brain for damage. This is the skull viewed from above:

The dent can be clearly seen at the back of the head.

When babies grow, their skull grows outwards as the brain grows. The growing brain pushes out the skull, which is still very flexible at this age.

This injury could have been fatal, but the inward movement of the skull missed the crucial areas of the brain by millimetres, and did not cause any brain damage or bleeding. Of course, at the time, there was no way to be sure of this. The only thing the doctors could tell us was that the skull is still flexible while it’s growing, and that the brain would eventually push the skull back out as it grows. She did not show any signs of brain damage, and responded well to the huge array of tests that are applicable to 6 month old babies.

It was basically down to a wait and see approach.

It would be an understatement to say that this was a stressful time in our lives. You feel really helpless when your little baby has to go into big noisy MRI machines and no one tells you what’s going on. And no one really seemed to know anyway.

The medical theory proved to be correct, and the skull slowly grew back to the way it was supposed to be, with the brain pushing it back into position. I can’t really remember when I realised that the dent was totally gone, but it’s gone now, and we’ve pretty much forgotten about it.

We are very lucky and grateful today to have a healthy, bright ten year old daughter who excels in all she does, and who bares absolutely no sign of any damage. She’s a great kid, and I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am.

God gave us a gift ten years ago, and when it was nearly taken away, He gave her back to us again.

Happy birthday, my Special!

The passport from hell

2010-04-22T21:15:00.001+08:00

I had lots of fun travelling with my Namibian passport recently.

For those readers who are not familiar with this country: Namibia is a country in the south western corner of Africa. This means that it’s in the left-hand bottom corner, just below a dump called Angola, and just above the Republic of South Africa, with Botswana to it’s right. (That is, if you are holding the map the right side up with North showing up, and Australia being correctly positioned “down under”.)

Namibia is roughly about one third the size of Western Australia.

Namibia used to be a province of South Africa during the apartheid years, and became a so-called independent country in 1990. It was previously known as South West Africa (SWA), and before that it was a German colony known as Deutch Sudwest Africa.

I was born in this lovely dry region, and was therefore born a South African citizen. After independence, however, I became a citizen of Namibia, as this was what my home was now called. We boasted a new flag, a new anthem, and lots of other new things. Among them was a new green passport:

The first time I got into trouble with this passport was in 1992 when I visited Lesotho. Even though Lesotho is situated in southern Africa, the Lesotho customs officials were quite adamant that no such country as Namibia existed. They spent half an hour chatting to their boss and looking at maps before they finally accepted the passport as real.

They were however, very suspicious of the fact that a white man held a passport from somewhere in Africa.

When I recently visited Singapore, I received the same treatment. The official looked at my passport as if it was a fake “Republic of Houtbay” passport or something issued by Disneyland.

He started discussing this with his female colleague, who called someone else to investigate. Finally, they started talking to me, and the lady asked me “this place, what country is it part of?”

How do you explain this to someone? I explained that it was an independent country in Africa, and then proceeded to show her the picture inside the passport of Africa with a little smudge in the left-hand bottom corner. She seemed to understand, and they let me go.

When we left Singapore to return to Perth, the lady who stamped my passport commented that this was the first time she had ever seen a passport from this country.

Strangely enough, the Australian authorities never questioned this funny green Disneyland book. They’ve probably been trained to be more discreet, and pushed some kind of silent alarm button while merrily stamping my documents.

Carrying this passport introduces quite a few obstacles and risks.

At least there’s one benefit to travelling with this goofy little green book:

Mossad couldn’t care less to copy it. They would have too much trouble explaining it when they try to enter a European country on a false German name.

It would, however, be easy to get hold of a fake one – just contact the appropriate corrupt official at the Namibian Immigration department and collect your blank green books for a few dollars and a soccer world cup ticket. Just make sure the name and the face matches up…

A long walk to freedom

2010-04-16T23:32:00.001+08:00

I’m finally back after a trip to Singapore to get my Permanent residence status finalised.

We flew with one of the low-budget airlines, called Tiger airways. They’re so ridiculously cheap because they don’t waste money maintaining their aircraft. They fly on only one engine and deflate their tyres to reduce weight.

Just kidding! But you pay the price for these cheap flights – in comfort. The seats are so small and close together that only the Smurf family would fit in there. I am not a big person, but I couldn’t get my legs to fit in between my seat and the one in front of me.

As we took off around 10pm, I tried to get some sleep, but I only managed to pass out from the pain about 30 minutes before we landed.

We landed just before 4am in the morning. I was amazed at how busy the airport still was, and that even the money changers were still open at that time. We got hold of a taxi and he eventually found our lovely little hostel after I corrected him a few times. As if I knew my way around Singapore?

Or Sauna-pour, as I like to call it.

The place is extremely humid, and just looking at something else move makes you sweat like a pig. Really.

Most public areas like buses, trains, stations, and shopping malls are air-conditioned. But once you’re out in mother nature it all turns evil. You actually go indoors to get fresh air into your lungs.

We stayed in Sauna-pour for ten wet days. Not wet from the rain, but from sweat. We walked a lot, with the three kids in tow, and had lots of fun though.

We visited Universal Studios on Sentosa island – this really is a must-see if you ever visit Singapore. We saw live action shows, interactive donkey shows and lots of other fun stuff.

I had to make the most of this holiday, as I was spending a lot of money on airfares anyway. But the budget was tight, and we got hold of some really cheap accommodation.

It turned out that this meant a backpacker’s hostel with a “family room” that looks more like a prison cell. The website makes it look really shiny and clean, but it’s not exactly the Hilton. At least we had an aircon in the room, which probably saved our lives - but the wife and I always disagreed about exactly how cold this thing should be.

We shared bathroom with tons of other people, and I had a few midnight encounters that ended in me screaming at people to shut up because it’s after 01h00 in the morning.

It’s located in an area called Little India – they call it that, because it feels like you’re in India. Creepy little alleys and weird smells all over the place. Smells of drains not functioning quite effectively, as well as smells of all kinds of food that are quite foreign to my nostrils. And the smell of incense.

A Muslim screamed us awake early in the mornings, and the Buddhists were burning incense at all hours. The Church of the True Light next door also did their part on Sunday.

The little shops in this area sold food that reminded me of some of the stuff I saw in Africa. Many of the shops sell exactly the same items as the shop next door.

There are many small shops that sell little golden Buddhas for some reason, and they keep on burning incense and leaving all sorts of magic potions outside their doors.

It feels like you’re in the middle of one giant hippie colony.

The people are all very friendly, and always very considerate and helpful. This part of their culture is really unique in a way. Nowhere did I ever feel threatened or in any danger, even though this was obviously not the best neighbourhood in the city.

A few blocks away, you walk into massive shopping malls with clean shiny floors and lovely air-conditioning.

We visited the Singapore zoo, which provided a whole day of entertainment and fun. The lovely water playground inside the zoo took up a lot of our time, as the kids were splashing around for more than 2 hours while I was sipping at cold Coke and wishing I also brought my swimming shorts along.

Sentosa island is a lovely area with great beaches, although you get the feeling that everything is synthetic and fake. Even the little islands are man-made. There is, however, great entertainment and fun stuff to do in this area.

This sign was a bit of a bummer – why wouldn’t you allow a bbq at the beach?

This is a fun place to be – the nightlife is never-ending. Coming from Perth where everything shuts down at 6pm, it was quite astounding to see even the small street-markets open at ten pm – not to mention the big supermarkets that are open till eleven. The streets seemed busier at night than during the day.

People live in tiny pigeonholes in the sky, and they don’t go home after work because there’s no reason to cram yourself into a 3x2m area.

This lifestyle is not for me. Give me Dullsville anytime – I love the open spaces, I love the laid-back lifestyle. No worries mate, let’s throw somethin on the barbie...

2000 years ago

2010-04-04T15:11:00.001+08:00

Easter weekend is great. Everyone runs off to some holiday destination, or spends time at home barbequing, watching footy and drinking till they pass out. They look for chocolate eggs in the garden and tell their kids tall tales about the Easter Bunny.

Some of my friends wish me a happy Easter, because it’s a time to enjoy life’s pleasures. Depending on what you mean by that, it’s a great message, but it’s not the real message of Easter.

All of us have to die sometime. Some of us die peacefully in our sleep at an old age, after a life full of special moments and joy. Others die a violent death at an early age. Some are killed even before they’re born. Others die due to their own stupidity, drunkenly ramming their car into a wall at full speed. We don’t know when it’ll happen, but it will happen to all of us one day.

2000 years ago, someone died. He died a violent death at the hands of merciless people. He had a choice to make – he could renounce some accusations that were made against him, and could go free. But he chose to be silent, and died after being tortured for hours. People divided his clothes amongst themselves and mocked him while he was hanging from a piece of wood like a slaughtered animal. He was physically nailed to an advertising board like a plank - like some sort of cheap commercial for the local government.

We all deserve to die. None of us are perfect. Except for this one man, who was without sin, and who no one could truthfully witness against.

There were many witnesses that day who testified to this event. Jesus was crucified on a wooden cross, and they confirmed his death by sticking a sword into his side and seeing blood and water pour from the wound. Four of these witnesses even went so far as to write down an account of what happened.

They removed him from the cross, wrapped a garment around his naked body, and buried him in a tomb. They posted two guards at the door, which was a massive big boulder that one man could not move by himself.

This man was truly dead and buried, and his followers and family wept and mourned his death.

And then something supernatural happened. This man arose from the dead, and walked around for 40 days showing the wounds in his hands and his side to those who questioned his death. Once again, hundreds of people testified to this event, and four of them even wrote it down.

This was not a normal man. He was not just a politician, a military leader or even a prophet. He was the Son of God, and he conquered death.

We all deserve to go to hell – whether you want to believe this or not. But He died for our sins because He chose to. He conquered death and gave us eternal life. It’s a free gift that he gave. You have a choice to accept this and believe it – no one is forcing you to believe or do anything. We all will face the throne of God one day, and if you don’t have this free gift on your side – that was your choice.

That’s what Easter is all about.

Forcing the Storm

2010-04-02T22:27:00.001+08:00

I had been looking forward to this day for a long time – seeing the Stormers play in Perth. The previous time I watched them play was at Newlands, when they beat the Brumbies.

I have to add that I still haven’t experienced anything like Newlands down here. I watched Trinations and Super14 rugby matches at Subiaco last year, and the atmosphere didn’t even get close.

The Western force have recently moved to a new venue, ME stadium, and until today hadn’t won a single game this whole season. The Stormers, on the other hand, were positioned at Number 2 on the log, and were sure winners in this battle. Or so I thought.

But first, the story of my tickets.

I talked to a few mates and we decided to watch the game together. I volunteered to buy the tickets. I logged in on Ticketmaster, selected the game, looked for prices, and contacted everyone again. When I had the final numbers, I selected 6 tickets, and pressed the button. I was in a hurry to get the tickets finalised, and clicked through all the pages until I finally signed off $245 on my credit card and pressed the enter button.

Then I let everyone know we had the 6 tickets, and even sent them all a copy in an email. We were all quite excited about going to the game.

That was on the 19th of March. On Tuesday this week, one of the mates rang me up. His voice sounded a little more squeaky than normal, and I braced myself for the news of a death in the family, or something worse.

And it was worse.

It turned out that I had somehow managed to buy $245 worth of tickets for the Force vs Waratahs game that was played on 20 March 2010. I checked, and checked again, and yes, there it was – Force vs Waratahs 20 March 2010.

I can’t remember ever having felt quite as suicidal as I felt at that moment. Ticketmaster told me that under no circumstances do they refund tickets – not even if you didn’t turn up at the stadium to use them.

Great. Now I had to tell all my mates that it would be really nice if they could refund me for a non-existing ticket. If not, I had just lost $245 plus handling fees.

I told this story to one of my colleagues at work on Wednesday, and he suggested that I send an email to RugbyWA. Turns out that they are extremely nice to spectators these days, because of the poor performance of the team. Maybe they’ll be nice enough to help out.

So, that’s what I did. Sent off an email and hoped for the best. I wasn’t even expecting a response, to be honest.

The response came, however. They told me that, yes, I’ve stuffed up, but if I sent them the ticket bar codes and the order number, they may just be able to pull a few strings.

I sent off my details, and waited until 4pm on Thursday, when I went home from work. Still no news, and the Easter weekend was approaching, so I assumed that I was going to have to watch this game on TV.

And then, when I got home and checked my email again, there was an email from them saying that they managed to get hold of cancelled tickets, and that I could collect them at Gate 3. I couldn’t believe my luck.

We arrived at the stadium – without tickets of course. All I had was a printout of an email from this bloke at RugbyWA, and when I handed this to the ticket lady she sent me off to another ticket lady.

I explained and she frowned, and another bloke who looked like a CIA agent was talking into a little mike and listening to someone chatting to him. I was getting really nervous. After being called “the Legend” because I managed to save our tickets, I seemed to still be in for some serious embarrassment. This one bloke’s father-in-law came all the way from Cape town to see this game, and it was starting to look like I’d stuffed it up.

Then, finally, the CIA bloke handed me my tickets, and the rep from RugbyWA came down to chat me up. Man, I was glad to have those tickets in my hands.

Too bad the Stormers stuffed up big time. At least the Force won their first game of the season. It was a good game, but not much happened down here in our little corner where we were hoping for Brian Habana to execute try after try right in front of our eyes…

The Easter bunny was also there:

The winning point was scored after the final horn had blown, with the Force successfully executing a drop kick which turned the scoreboard in their favour.

This bloke next to us was blaspheming terribly. He took it really hard, and I heard several expletives coming from his general direction…

Billions of blue blistering barbequed barnacles

2010-03-24T18:45:00.001+08:00

I loved reading Tintin when I was a kid. Captain Haddock, a real old seadog, used to swear tremendously without really using swearwords. He would utter awesome streams of words like “billions of blue blistering barbequed barnacles!”

I always found this really funny, although I had no idea what it meant.

Until Monday 22 March 2010, when I saw what billions of blue blistering barbequed barnacles looked like when they came down from the sky.

What a show! The sky turned pitch-black, and the wind started howling like an angry dog. Trees were bending sideways like they were made of paper.

Then came the hail. Raining down mercilessly, it pounded the earth and anything else that dared to stand in its way. The ground turned white, and for a moment it looked like it snowed.

I was up in the office sitting in my newly occupied window seat, watching all this happen. No one really thought it was too serious. Then we saw a massive lightning bolt strike down to the east of us, and the lights went out.

Ten thousand thundering typhoons!

I immediately realised that traffic was going to be a nightmare. When I finally scraped together enough courage to get going, I saw that the road just outside our building had turned into a little dam.

Getting onto the freeway took me more than 40 minutes – this trip usually takes me about 5 minutes, if that much. All the traffic lights in Leederville were down, and everybody seemed to have the right of way. (Except for me, of course…)

Crawling along the freeway wasn’t any better, and half an hour later I saw IKEA on my left. A snail balancing an egg on its back would go faster than we did.

There were two spots on the freeway where three traffic lanes were forced into one emergency lane due to the “small dam” that formed.

Finally getting onto Warwick road, it was obvious that things hadn’t really improved. Trees were scattered all over the place. The road had a greenish colour due to the leaves that were spread all over it. The smell of eucalyptus was heavy in the air.

Most traffic lights were not working, and the normal driver correctly assumed that this meant that the intersection should be considered to be a 4-way stop. But not some of our younger hoons, who sped through intersections as if a dead light was considered to be a “go” signal.

A few words came to mind when I saw this:

"Troglodyte," "bashi-bazouk," "kleptomaniac," "ectoplasm," "sea-gherkin," "anacoluthon", "pockmark, "nincompoop", "abominable snowman", and "freshwater swab" were among the more decent ones – all thanks to Captain Haddock, of course.

Arriving home, I was glad to see the lights burning. More than 150000 other homes were not so lucky. Here is some of the damage that occurred:

Northbridge tunnel

What a way to break a dry spell! We haven’t seen a drop of rain since November. OK, maybe I’m lying: we did see a drop – it rained 0.2mm in February…

Two 20-Year stories compared

2010-03-21T15:22:00.001+08:00

At the end of the Second World War, in 1945, Germany was totally destroyed. Buildings were levelled with the ground, and the economy was down to the basics of scraping around on the floor for a piece of bread.

The country was divided up by the occupying nations, who also took away anything that was deemed valuable.

The Allies confiscated intellectual privileges of huge value, such as all German patents, both in Germany and abroad, and used them to strengthen their own industrial competitiveness by licensing them to Allied companies.^[5]^[6] Meanwhile some of the best German researchers were being put to work in the Soviet Union and in the U.S.

From 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany waged total war. In 1945, the nation faced total defeat. An estimated 3.5 million German soldiers were dead or missing, along with some 750,000 civilians. Millions more were crippled or imprisoned. Food was scarce. Inflation was rampant. Refugees were everywhere. Allied bombs had flattened 25 percent of Germany's available housing. An entire district in Hamburg had to be walled in to prevent the spread of diseases from the corpses piled there.

The country was razed to the ground, and looted by the Allies for all of it’s material and intellectual wealth. Germany was cut up into four occupied zones, and later divided into two separate countries, called West Germany and the DDR (“Democratic” Republic of East Germany).

The joke in the eighties was “if a country’s name has the word “democratic” in it, it isn’t.”

Contrary to popular belief, the Marshall Plan, which was extended to also include the newly formed West Germany in 1949, was not the main force behind the Wirtschaftswunder.^[7]^[8]

Had that been the case, other countries such as Great Britain and France (which both received higher economic assistance from the plan than Germany) should have experienced the same phenomenon.

In fact, the amount of monetary aid (which was in the form of loans) received by Germany through the Marshall Plan was far overshadowed by the amount the Germans had to pay back as war reparations and by the charges the Allies made on the Germans for the ongoing cost of occupation (about $2.4 billion per year).

In 1953 it was decided that Germany was to repay $1.1 billion of the aid it had received. The last repayment was made in June 1971.

In less than 20 years after being declared fully sovereign, Germany had paid back all it’s debt, and ranked number 4 in terms of largest GDP in the world.

On 5 May 1955 West Germany was declared "fully sovereign". The British, French and U.S. militaries remained in the country, just as the Soviet Army remained in East Germany. Four days after becoming "fully sovereign" in 1955, West Germany joined NATO. The U.S. retained an especially strong presence in West Germany, acting as a deterrent in case of a Soviet invasion. In 1976 West Germany became one of the founding nations of the Group of Six (G6).

In 1973, West Germany which was home to roughly 1.26% of the world's population featured the world's fourth largest GDP of 944 billion (5.9% of the world total). In 1987 the FRG held a 7.4% share of total world production.

What an amazing tale. In 1990, after re-unification, West Germany had to also take up the additional burden of rectifying all the damage that communism had done to East Germany. Never once did they wait for someone else to do it. They did not sit around and blame the Allies for destroying their country, and thereby claiming some magical right to foreign aid. They just made their hands dirty, lifted their chins up, and worked.

In contrast to this, there is Namibia. In 1989, still under South African control, this country had an average life expectancy of over 60 years and unemployment of 25%. Even during the long bush-war in the North of the country, the life expectancy rate was climbing steadily every year.

Crime was something that people only heard of – something that happened in other countries. The biggest crime that featured, was in the form of bombings and landmines planted on farms by Swapo terrorists. People parked their cars in the middle of the city without locking them, and no one had burglar bars or alarm systems. Armed response was unheard of because the Police were competent and efficient, and they knew how to take fingerprints and how to do basic stuff like take down sworn declarations and making signatures.

The much hated South African government left behind a legacy of schools, hospitals, roads, railway lines, and an impressive water and electrical supply infrastructure that was considered to be among the best in Africa, if not in the southern hemisphere.

Namibia now celebrates 20 years of so-called “independence”. The government still begs for handouts from Germany (how ironic), the USA and China, to name a few. Actually they don’t beg, they demand.

Some of the state-funded organisations like the national airline and the NBC broadcasting Corporation, had to be bailed out numerous times due to bad management.

The Transnamib railway corporation is considered a joke, and also struggles to keep itself financially viable. Chinese trains stand around doing nothing because parts and competent maintenance staff are not available for them. All over the country old water supply schemes that were built by the “previous regime” struggle to continue providing water, because maintenance and capital spending is insufficient.

In a normal everyday working environment, people address each other as “comrades” during meetings, and those who don’t use this kind of socialist label are frowned upon as racist imperialists.

But there has been progress.

The Swapo government has managed to double the unemployment rate in 20 years’ time. (Before you applaud this as a good thing, it’s actually a figure that you might want to reduce.)

It currently runs at 51%, more than double the 25% that was left behind by the South African government. This ranks among the 10 highest in the world. Not quite something to celebrate.

Life expectancy is below the level that it was when a full-scale war was waging in the country’s Northern areas.

Just like Mugabe’s terrorist government, this government lives in a paranoiac state of confusion, and unseen enemies are always to blame for their failures. They still live in a constant fear that the west will subversively force “regime change” on them, and their greatest dream is to re-instate previously-failed communist systems like collective farming. Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro are hailed as heroes of the “struggle”, and are lovingly entertained as special guests.

Today, a house without burglar bars is unmarketable. Of course, this is only available to the very small elite group of rich and middleclass people, as the gap between rich and poor is growing without mercy.

Without armed response, your alarm system is pretty useless. Electric fences and barbed wire are considered fashionable. You will not be able to own a car without an alarm and immobiliser for more than a day. Even your wheels get stolen off your car if you’re not careful.

When you call the police, they take half an hour to answer, and respond by informing you that they don’t have a vehicle to their disposal. Going to a police station to make a sworn declaration will take at least a few hours of your time, because the police officer first has to scrape around to find a piece of paper and a pen, and then struggles to spell the word “burglary”. Obtaining something as simple as a national Police Clearance Certificate takes at least four months.

On official registration papers, a fork lift is classified as a “fok left”. One can clearly see that the government has created a great national educational system, and an awesome efficient public service.

Twenty years of utter failure and incompetence. It’s not even fair to try to compare these two countries.

One may want to give this government more time – after all, 20 years go by so quickly. But sadly, one cannot see that 10 years from now things are going to be any better. The trend seems to go in the wrong direction.

Dead bodies, toilet paper and other exciting stuff

2010-03-19T17:30:00.003+08:00

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Or surfing, rather. There are some really funny things going on all around the world. One of the creepiest stories I’ve read, was about this woman whose dead body was hidden under a mattress in a motel.

Yuck. Just imagine how the people must feel who used this hotel room in the meanwhile – sharing the bed with a corpse, and not knowing it! Especially the latest visitors – imagine getting into bed, only to wonder what that foul stench is that seems to linger around your nostrils? Imagine getting up in the middle of the night trying to find the source of this aroma. Yikes.

The bed in which the victim was located is a metal box frame which sets directly on the floor and the box springs and mattress set inside the metal frame. The room had been rented approximately five times and cleaned by the hotel staff numerous times since her death.

The next time I check into a motel I’ll make sure I check under the mattress before it gets dark. Who knows what could happen if you don’t check out all the closets and hiding spots before you get comfortable.

Then there’s a cool story about toilet paper. This machine, although inefficient from a financial point of view, does an amazing job of turning your latest newspaper into a nice roll of White Gold at the press of a button:

As one of my mates commented when he saw this – in Africa we’ve seen an easier way of turning newspaper into toilet-paper...

I also found an article where they claim that they can make a car run on laser hydride CD’s. Don’t believe me? Read it here.

The novel approach is to use Laser hydride CD storage. What this means is that a hydrogen car owner will refuel their vehicle at a regular hydrogen fueling station. The compressed hydrogen fuel will flow into the car and microwaves will ionize the H2 onto CD, similar to what we would put into a CD player in which to listen to music.

And much like the process of listening to music, the device would use a laser to release the hydrogen on demand from the magnesium CD as the car needs it for fuel. The CD’s would be stacked in a series and could provide a range of over 300 miles for the average hydrogen fuel cell car.

And then I read about this criminally insane kangaroo who attacked a poor defenceless jogger in Canberra. What’s this world coming to, if even these fluffy little animals turn to crime and violence these days?

In local politics, the heavyweights are insulting each other like it’s going out of fashion, with ex-prime ministers and MP’s joining in the brawl. Some of the words that were slung around this week, were as follows:

…Mr Abbott quickly recovered to accuse the Rudd Government of lying to voters. Forced to withdraw his lying charge as unparliamentary, he accused Mr Rudd of telling “grotesque untruths”.

“What a complete fake,” Mr Abbott yelled across the chamber at the Prime Minister.

"Don't stare at your notes, listen.''

“Not for nothing was he known as Dr Death in Queensland” Mr Abbott said.

Mr Rudd slammed Mr Abbott’s response, claiming he had a weather vane as a moral compass.

“He knows that the weather vane actually constitutes his moral compass. That is, whichever way it blows so then will he take the politics of his position.”

Asylum seekers were next on the agenda, with Tony Abbott blaming old Kev for the death of boat people:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has linked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to the deaths of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat.

The opposition has resumed its attack on the government's asylum seeker polices in recent days, having branded Mr Rudd a "border protection sceptic".

Peter Costello attacked one of his own party members by saying

…Mr Abbott had taken a "Crocodile Dundee approach" to policy - a reference to a scene in the movie of the same name when Dundee was confronted by a mugger with a knife and produces a larger one, saying, 'That's not a knife, this is a knife'

Even the ladies took off the gloves:

When asked by ABC News Online whether she thought female voters would be in favour of a Gillard ascension to the top job, Ms Bishop replied: "I would see her being from the left wing of the Labor Party, truly a socialist who has taken to wearing pearls."

Then Kevin Rudd gave a cold shoulder to one of the premiers, Kristina Keneally, who is the current Labor premier of New South Wales. (This is the same party that Mr. Rudd belongs to). This incident caused headlines all over the country.

And there you were, thinking that Australian politics was boring?

Of course, all of this was dwarfed by a boring story of an elephant who gave birth in a zoo. Puhleaze…

Tsunami watch

2010-03-01T11:23:00.001+08:00

If by now you haven’t heard about the massive earthquake in Chile, and the fact that an earthquake of that magnitude can potentially cause a tsunami, then you probably also have no clue who Barak Obama is.

The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre issued a tsunami warning for Australia’s east coast after the earthquake hit Chile. What did some local idiots do? – they went to the beach to go and see “what a tsunami looks like”.

Some of them actually thought that sitting on higher ground would make it perfectly safe for them to sit and watch the destruction and carnage going on around them. Some of them actually brought their kids along for the show.

Fortunately enough for them, nothing happened.

One bloke defends himself in this manner:

Lets see:

1. The media make a beat-up about tsunami's, without researching the facts.

2. The bureau of meteorology lists the expected wave height at Southport as 0.1m.

3. People in no risk of danger enter the water and are labeled stupid. I reaserched (sic) the danger and decided I could handle the 0.1m waved expected. I think this was irresponsible reporting of the media when there was no actual threat on the Gold Coast. Perhaps it's time to read 'The Boy who Cried Wolf'

This idiot thinks the science is so accurate as to predict waves of 0.1m. Apparently he knows enough – he’s done “research”. Would the sum total of that research incorporate googling it?

Where was he when the Boxing day tsunami hit? One of the most important issues that came out during that event was that we cannot always predict nature as well as we want to.

How many times has the weather bureau had it wrong? If you can’t trust them for a simple temperature prediction or a rain forecast, how on earth can you trust a prediction of a 0.1m tsunami wave? What happens if that wave turns out to be different? The prediction may even change within an hour, and you won’t have time to respond by the time you have done some more “research” on the beach.

The tsunami prediction system is still in it’s infancy. Taking the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre to court after you were killed does not really bring you back.

Guess what’s going to happen next time? There will be more idiot families who turn up for the freak show, and they will pack the beaches. As one commentator said - “not a big loss for humanity's gene pool if a real tsunami had struck”…

Give me another angle please

2010-02-15T21:40:00.003+08:00

I hate these TV shows (and even some movies) where they only use one camera during the whole production. (For example, the series called The Office.) They only use one camera to do the whole show, and zoom in and out like it’s some silly schoolkid garage production.

Although the show seems to be funny, I have never been able to watch it for more than 30 seconds. Why this show is allowed on screen is a total mystery to me. You can get drunk just by watching this crap. It resembles some of the crappy African productions I’ve been unfortunate enough to be exposed to – just without the horribly bad childish acting, and with the presence of a slight plot somewhere in between the flashy zoom-ins and cameras floating across the floor to zoom into the other person’s face, just to zoom out again and swish around back to the other face – out of focus, of course.

How do the editors manage to survive days and days of reviewing this junk? Don’t they get sick all the time? Why are people actually watching this show? Do they put a blanket over the TV and just listen to the dialogue?

I think the government should ban shows that were made with only one camera on site. They can cause serious mental heath issues, and kids who watch this may turn out to never have any hand-eye co-ordination - if they have the ability to focus their eyes at all.

Dodgy sparkies?

2010-02-11T10:09:00.001+08:00

I have been following the whole roof insulation issue with a lot of interest. It’s amazing how people can become focussed on the political arena, and miss the whole point.

Let’s think about this before we blame the government or the opposition. Even though I’m no Labour supporter, I can’t see the reason why poor old Mr Garret now suddenly is to blame for this.

Think about this. Someone threw a few peaces of roof insulation in a roof. I can appreciate that some of these “installations” were done in a hap-hazard way, and that there should have been some sort of regulatory guidelines. Did the government really pay the rebates without doing any quality control inspections? Obviously quite a few people jumped on this gravy train and abused the stimulus package without thinking about the consequences. But this is not the issue.

Here’s the issue: How on earth can someone get electrocuted just because he was in the roof with “poorly-installed foil insulation”? If the electrical wiring in the house was done according to Australian standards, how is it possible that an item can become “live” just by putting it down on the roof ceiling?

Three people were electrocuted while installing roof insulation - how is that their fault? As far as I know, they did not perform any electrical work on site - the insulation is not powered up or connected to the switchboard in any way.

This whole issue boggles my mind. No one is asking the right question here. Where are all the OSH experts? Their first question should be “how on earth can this happen? Who did the electrical work on this site?” In addition to this, why did the RCD’s (earth leakage protection) not work?

And the most daring question of all: If the inside of our roofs are this unsafe, what are we doing about it?

Blaming a minister in government is not the solution to this problem. Someone needs to have a look at the quality of electrical work, and the minster who is responsible for regulating this industry is the one who should be answering the questions. (And plenty of minsters who filled this position before him, as this is not just today’s problem.)

"It's negligent or inappropriate, slack behaviour on the part of a very tiny minority," he said.

For the minster to blame "slack" roof insulation installers is not the answer here. Were they qualified electricians who were consequently supposed to check the electrical system in the house, or were they just roof insulation installers with no specialised knowledge of electrical systems?

Why is nobody asking these questions? The press has just elevated this to another political debate without getting any facts straight. Again. The mud is being slung around, but it’s about the wrong issue.

I’ll definitely think twice before getting into my roof...

Pay your dues

2010-02-05T09:36:00.001+08:00

It has been rumoured that some airlines want to introduce a penalty for carrying obese persons. Obviously, the leftwing human rights greeny bunch scream "discrimination" again.

But no one mentions the fact that the airlines are still screwing us.

From an obese person's point of view, this is a bad idea.

But look at it from the point of view from someone who has always been shorter, smaller and, uh, let's say - not so round as some others might be. (Even though I seem to be catching up lately...)

Mr Little books in for his flight. He weighs a mere 75kg. His hand-luggage weighs 25kg. (Total weight - 100kg.) Under current discriminatory regulations, the airline makes him pay for extra weight. Even if he had been flying with one of the cheapy airlines like Jetstar, he would have the "option" of paying for 15kg or 20kg or 25kg of additional weight. For some reason the luggage may never exceed the limits without heavy penalties being incurred.

Next in line is Mr Big. He weighs 125kg, and his luggage has been trimmed down to 18kg. (His total weight is 143kg.) Mr Big ends up paying less than Mr Little. A lot less, I might add.

Talk about discrimination! We small people have been abused and trampled on by our larger counterparts for many years. I raised this issue with an airline more than 5 years ago - it's not a new idea.

Apart from the weight issue, there is also the additional wear-and-tear that is introduced by these large people. They add additional pressure on the seat that they're sitting on. They cause wear when they squeeze through the passage ways. They take up more room and make it uncomfortable for those around them. They probably even exhale more carbon dioxide and pollute the planet!

The airlines' solution to this problem is to make obese people pay 25% additionally for an open seat next to them. How ridiculous! They are still trying to screw us all. Although I like the idea that they should pay more, this is not a fair solution. All the airline is doing is increasing it's revenue, they're not reaching out to the Little customer who is actually saving them money.

This is how it should work:

There should be a combined weight limit. This would make more sense from a scientific point of view. What is the reason for these limits in the first place? Isn't it because the plane has a limit as to how much it can safely carry, and that the fuel consumption is influenced by the amount of weight the plane is dragging around? Why should Mr. Little pay more, even though it costs the airline less to drag him off to Hawaii? Now Mr Big can have an additional empty seat next to him for the same price as Mr. Little paid for his combined weight!

Air France even continues with this discrimination buy letting fat guys have a free seat next to them. Mr Big can request a free seat next to him at 25% cost, and get a refund if the plane wasn't full. Mr Little, however, can do the same - but without the refund.

Other non-overweight passengers could also book a second seat for a 25% discount, Air France said.

But they would not get the refund if the plane was not full when it took off.

Why are we not seeing some big class-action court-case (on behalf of normal-sized people) because of this? Why are only the Big people complaining and screaming "discrimination!!"?

But alas, most politicians and jetsetters who fly regularly are obese anyway, so the little guys will probably lose this fight. I wonder what Richard Branson's point of view is on this?

Another great day down undah

2010-01-31T19:49:00.001+08:00

We started this day with a trip to church. As usual we tried our best to get there in time, but we ended up being fashionably late.

We met new faces and made a few more friends.

After church we joined the guys in a volleyball game at Floreat beach. I took along my new barbeque trolley – a little trolley containing an icebox, and extra containers and stuff. In stead of dragging along hundreds of loose items for picnics and barbies, I decided to set up this contraption and wheelie all my stuff along.

It worked really well. Much better than our backpacks and other items that we had to carry around Kings Park on Tuesday.

After playing 5 games of volleyball my body was screaming to get out of the sun and into the Indian ocean. This was our next stop, and was a good experience. The waves at Floreat are really big, and I was awfully tired after swimming for a few minutes.

We moved over to the cafe and drank a few cold drinks before taking the road back home. By this time it was already after five in the afternoon. On the way home we stopped at the drive-through at “old McDonalds”, as my youngest calls it, and bought cheap 50c ice creams for everyone.

From here it was time for a quick stop at the petrol station where I filled up our thirsty Kia.

Finally arriving home, we heated up some of this afternoon’s leftover boerewors and lamb chops and had a quick dinner.

By this time I realised that the Men’s Final was on and I switched on the telly to watch Federer and Murray slug it out in Melbourne.

I also painfully realised that I’m forty years old, and my body does not respond well to strenuous exercise without a regular fitness program. I need to get this old meat-box in shape. (Although there may be more fat than meat at this stage…)

I still have sand from the beach firmly lodged in every possible body cavity and the top of my head feels like a sand dune. I may also have a reddish look tomorrow, as I neglected to execute the slip-slop-slap routine and decided to take on the WA sun without any sunscreen on my body.

What a great day. Weekends are the best!

Happy Australia day, mate

2010-01-26T22:53:00.001+08:00

OK, so that was nothing

2010-01-18T21:08:00.001+08:00

Yesterday was a really cool day, compared to today's maximum of 44.1 degrees in the Northern suburbs. (And this is Celsius, not Fahrenheit.)

I am growing quite fond of these warmish temperatures, and I’m quite upset by the fact that tomorrow’s prediction turns out to be a measly 37 degrees. Just when I started having fun in the sun.

We headed to the beach after work, and had another lovely evening out until after eight.

Fortunately I spent my whole day in the office, and didn’t really feel the heat until I left the air-conditioned office this afternoon. Praise God for air conditioners.

Is it just me, or was it a little warm today?

2010-01-17T21:15:00.001+08:00

Today's prediction informed us that we could expect a slightly warmer day than usual, with a maximum temperature of 41°C. Later during the day, the weather website reading was as follows:

We went to the beach this afternoon, and stayed until after eight when the sun was down. It was awesome. One of my friends hit his head on the ground when a wave threw him around, and he just kept on swimming as if nothing happened, with blood pouring out of his head. Everyone was looking at this guy with big eyes, and he was just smiling with the blood streaming down his face.

At one stage I began wondering if the sharks were going to surround us to finish him off...

At 8h30 pm the weather looked like this:

Tomorrow is going to be another big one…

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-26T10:17:00.001+08:00

Every year we have an annual household nativity play. The kids are still small enough to enjoy stuff like this.

The Christmas spirit

2009-12-14T10:22:00.001+08:00

During the Christmas season it’s a great treat to drive around at night and watch the decorations. In some streets there seems to be a rivalry between neighbours to see who has the most lights and little figurines:

What would Christmas be without white kangaroos?

Cheese…

2009-12-12T22:25:00.001+08:00

Every time someone takes a photo, my youngest daughter says: “cheese!”

We’ve just received our first guest all the way from Windhoek, and showed her some of the scenery around Perth.

The young photographer in the family

NgILGI Cave

2009-12-07T18:39:00.001+08:00

We went to Margaret river for the weekend, and visited Ngilgi caves nearby.

‘

Fireworks and Christmas lights

2009-11-30T19:59:00.001+08:00

We had quite a busy weekend, and between vicious attempts at gardening we also attended some parties, fireworks, and went to the beach. On Saturday we went to Animal Farm for a birthday party.

The kids love this place:

( I have no idea what this thing is…)

On Saturday evening we attended the fireworks at Hillaries:

My neighbour has already set up his Christmas lights, and I can’t believe it’s that time of year already…

Seabird

2009-11-18T21:44:00.001+08:00

A few photos taken around a little coastal town called Seabird:

In 1656, 4 years after the first Dutch settlers landed in the Cape of Good Hope at the Southern tip of Africa, the Dutch East India company shipwrecked a ship called the Vergulde Draeck on the coast of Western Australia.

At the time the closest settlements were in a place called Batavia, which today is known as Jakarta, and which was a Dutch colony at the time. Some of the survivors were successfully sent to Batavia in a small boat, but subsequent search parties never found the remaining seamen. An interesting story.

Photos taken on the way back to Perth:

The road to Lancelin:

Memorial Day

2009-11-11T20:15:00.001+08:00

When this happened last year, I still had too many other weird and wonderful things to write about, and I didn’t mention it on my blog. But this year it happened again, and I had to write something about it.

Today was Memorial Day in Australia. It’s not a public holiday, but it is honoured throughout the nation. At just a little before 11h00, an announcement came over the loudspeaker system at work, which informed us that the Last Post will be played over the system at 11h00, and then there would be a minute of silence.

This tradition started after the First World War, and has been honoured in Australia every year since.

While the trumpet was playing the Last Post, it brought back some very real memories. I immediately pictured scenes of wounded soldiers being brought in on stretchers at Ondangwa Air Force Base, after being wounded in contact with Swapo terrorists in Northern Namibia.

This was early in 1989, a few months before the war finally ended. I was lucky enough never to be in a combat situation myself, but I did see my fellow countrymen heavily wounded, being loaded into aeroplanes to be taken away for medical treatment. Hearing that song immediately brought that scene back into my mind, without me even trying to do so.

Another scene that unfolded in my mind was one of a military funeral in Okahandja, in central Namibia. Although I didn’t personally know the soldier who died, I was part of the Osona Prestige platoon. This was during my first year of training in the SWATF (South West African Territorial Forces), and we were there to march in honour of one of our fallen countrymen.

I will never forget the atmosphere outside the church when his family and friends came out of the building carrying the casket of this brave young man - a man who would have been in his forties if he was still alive today. He gave his life to defend our country against murderous animals who would stop at nothing to take over control. Those same terrorists today attempt to govern the country with such wide-spread corruption and incompetence that it staggers the imagination.

Hearing this sad trumpet tune reminded of things that will never be forgotten. About people who died for their country, even though that same country now spits on their graves and their medals.

May this great country, Australia, never forget it’s history and the people who fought to defend it. May they keep on remembering and honouring those who paid the highest price.

It is a high price, indeed.

Fakebook

2009-10-28T22:08:00.002+08:00

I had a very nice chat with one of my hundreds of friends on Facebook yesterday. She initiated the chat, and something was different, but I couldn’t figure out what nagged at me until much later.

After a few sentences she started telling me how bad things were. I couldn’t quite understand what was going on, because she and her family moved to Perth from South Africa a few years ago, and they were quite happy as far as I know.

So she went on and told me someone robbed her in a violent attack in a park in Kentish town. I had no idea where Kentish town was, as I’ve never even heard of a park like that in Perth.
So I asked her where this park was. London, she says. So I ask her what the hell she’s doing in London?
She responded:

i went there to visit a resort
it was a brutal experience, all cash i had on me were stolen and my credit card was collected too

By now I already realised that something was not adding up. See, this friend is Afrikaans and she would not have told me a hair-raising story like this in English. And I seemed to remember that she was in Fremantle as recently as Sunday – it was actually still on her profile statement on Facebook.

So I responded in Afrikaans, which is her first language. She actually responded correctly to the question, but answered me in English, which did not make sense. She also added that her husband was with her – why would she then contact me for help, if her husband was sitting next to her and she did not mention any of his credit cards also getting stolen?

In the meanwhile I got hold of her phone number and gave her a ring. Yep, she’s in Perth all right - happy as can be, with no idea that someone else was busy scamming money off people on her behalf.

Imagine you would be stupid enough to help someone financially, only to find out that they’re actually not even in London, and that your money is long gone? I wonder how many idiots fall for these scams?

So - be warned, if your “friend” contacts you on Facebook and asks for money, make sure it’s really your friend. If it really is one of your real-life friends, chances are they wouldn’t corner you on Facebook for a few bucks. (Not my friends, anyway.)

And remember to change your password regularly so that you don’t end up with ex-friends beating you up about money that you supposedly owe them…

Weird science

2009-10-19T21:31:00.002+08:00

Sometimes I really wonder how science (or scientists, rather?) actually achieved anything during the last two centuries. How did we end up in a world where technology dictates and regulates everything, considering that some of the world’s top scientists are loonies?

Thank God for engineers – those amazing people who abuse science for practical purposes. Otherwise we would all be sitting in our mud huts dreaming of floating cities and flying saucers, and lusting for hairy green women from some fictional planet, while eating raw meat that we killed with a rock.

One can only wonder how some people legally obtain their doctor’s degrees? It must be the same type of doctor’s degree that Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma worked so hard for. (Not doctor, but “doktah”…)

This clown says that “nature” defies the laws of nature and moves backward in time so that it can stop the Hadron Collider experiment from occurring.

This opens up a massive can of worms. (Or should that be “worm-holes”?)

After Obama won a Nobel peace prize for upscaling the war in Afghanistan and making good speeches, this guy probably realised that he would really have to go off the deep end if he wanted to win the Nobel Science prize. What better option than to advocate goofy science fiction? I’m sure the old boys in Norway are already feverishly comparing notes about their next candidate for the Nobrain Science prize.

They’ve got it all in this conspiracy – time travel, Armageddon, awesome catastrophes, a 27km tunnel and great sci-fi words like “Higgs particles”, “paradox”,”particle accelerator” and of course the ever-lurking menace that is called the “opening of black holes”.

One can only imagine what all these things could mean when they’re thrown together in a pot and mixed together in an 11.2 billion dollar machine that also boasts it’s own al-Quaeda spy.

Some of today's scientists sound a lot like the old druids and wizards, mixing a little bit of factual science with a lot of fairy tales and magic.

What is this universe coming to?

Apparently time travelling is not as far-fetched as some of us common folk would believe. Even back in 1943 the US army was able to travel back in time for 10 seconds, and they also teleported a ship 120 miles away.

This has, of course, all been filed under the Philadelphia experiment conspiracy theory archives, along with great stories from Area 51 and the fake Moon landing.

Oh, and then there is the digital television conspiracy. Apparently, “the mandatory switch to digital television is a smokescreen for a Big Brother society because of cameras built-in to set top boxes.”

Yikes, at least I can leave the kids alone at home, because the government will be looking after them while I’m gone. Shopping is going to get much easier from now on.

Maybe I should do some forward time travelling and see if this whole Global Warming thing is true…

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”…

So much for following the rules

2009-10-08T22:19:00.001+08:00

I previously mentioned how I had to struggle to convert my Namibian drivers licence.

Now I see there’s a much easier way.

Just tell the magistrate that you’re from Africa, and have no idea how to catch a bus, and whalla – you’ll get issued with a special licence!

Things like this really irritate me. I had to go through hell to convert a perfectly legitimate licence, even though I’ve never even had as much as a parking fine in WA.

This guy drives under the influence, wrecks a car, assaults a police officer (which, by the way, just the other day was made punishable by going straight to jail, directly to jail, don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200?), but he gets this rap on the fingers and the “poor old sports hero” treatment.

This sucks. I think I should get some legal advice – I’m sure there is grounds for discrimination in all of this. I mean, if they really believe the Hey-Hey show to be repulsively racist, this must be ranked close to genocide on a mass scale.

Nature calling?

2009-10-03T22:49:00.001+08:00

I am one of those weird people who just absolutely hate telephones. I hate ringing up people, and I hate answering a phone. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a landline or a mobile – I don’t wanna talk. My wife says talking to me on the phone is like talking to a rock.

I’ll send off thousands of emails to anyone who is not interested. If you email me, you will get a response. What I hate, is when people don’t respond to my emails. That’s just plain rude.

But try ringing me, and chances are good I won’t even answer. I do like mobile phones because they can tell me who's calling – now I know for certain that I don’t want to pick up the phone. I just love that “silence” button – or better yet, the red one.

But some people are the exact opposite. Some really go off the deep end with the way they abuse the privilege of being able to use Alexander Graham Bell’s invention to it’s full extent.

The other day at work, I was busy washing my hands in the men’s room. I heard this guy’s phone ringing inside his “cubicle”. He actually answered it in there. He started yapping away, like he was sitting on his couch at home or something. And then, believe it or not, I heard him flushing the toilet – still talking happily while he was doing it, of course.

It got worse.

He exited his cubicle, and went on to wash his hands – still yapping away without a care in the world. He moved along to the paper towel dispenser, and somehow managed to dry off his hands while discussing some serious topic.

He finally walked out of the men’s room – still yapping.

Now this is totally uncool. In the first place, how the hell can we be sure he really washed his hands decently? Yuck, I don’t even want to think about it.

I hate germs and anything unhygienic. These blokes who just fire up their barbies with last week’s fat and oil still lying there give me the creeps. I saw one bloke who had a garden snail on his barbie – this thing walked all over the barbeque and left a nice shiny trail all over the grill. This bloke took his BBQ thong, grabbed hold of Mr. Snail, and chucked the old squirming snail into the bin.

He then grabbed a piece of meat and a few sausages, threw them onto the barbie, and with that same snail-removal thong he continued to turn around his meat and sausages.

Needless to say I wasn’t very hungry.

If my phone rings in the WC, you won’t find me answering it. I know where the red button is.

“I only know revolution, …”

2009-09-27T20:17:00.002+08:00

I promised not to use this blog to highlight the baboonistic regime in Southern Africa, but I just can’t keep my big mouth shut.

My readers from southern Africa will know what this is about, but to help those other readers, who are mainly Australians, here’s a little background to explain some of the reasons why I left that swine-infested cess-pool and decided to move my whole family to another continent and adopt a new culture.

This bloke, called Julius, is president of the ANC Youth league in South Africa. This nut does not even fill an official government position, he is just the president of the youth league of a political party. But don’t underestimate the power someone in this position has – it’s similar to the power the political officers had in Soviet Russia.

This guy is well-known for his revolutionary outlook and his hate-filled statements:

“Let me tell you my friend, I have defeated you and your apartheid regime and I'm going to defeat you again, once and for all!"

“All of you combined, you can't do anything. You are wasting your time."

“I am a child of heroes and heroines of the struggle. I am not a child of cowards and oppressors. I am not a child of an imperialist. I have defeated colonisers. I am going to defeat the children of colonisers.”

"Let us make it clear now: we are prepared to die for Zuma. Not only that, we are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma."

This bloke was born in 1981. When he was 13 years old (in 1994) South Africa was turned into a “peaceful democratic rainbow-nation”, and apartheid was abolished. When did he fight the apartheid regime, I wonder?

This dunce finished high school at the formidable age of 21, and received marks that would make even the dumbest kid in Australia look like a genius.

According to Wikipedia, “Malema told students at Walter Sisulu University, in East London, that his role in making controversial statements was that of a decoy, to “distract” the opposition while Zuma “sprinted to the Union Buildings” “

Apparently Julius is very famous throughout the world, and has even received a phone call from Barack Obama. (Hint: it’s worth listening to this one!)

Here is his TV debut:

Although it’s really great to make fun of this guy, it still is an extremely dangerous guy to make jokes of. It’s like making fun of Hitler while the gas chambers were running on full speed.

Old Julius likes to break the law and drive as fast as he can, whilst endangering other people’s lives and property. (I am not too concerned about his life, for some strange reason…)

Like a real banana republic dictator he refuses to pay his speeding fines. Like most of the “revolutionary” figures in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, he is above the law and the cops are too afraid to prosecute him for his criminal behaviour. His response to an enquiry about his speeding fines?

“I only know revolution, I don't know anything about driving.”

With people like this leading the youth of the South African masses, you can only expect the worst. It is clear that the Marxist soviet education that many of the so-called ANC heroes received during the eighties, is still alive in the hearts of these wannabe revolutionaries.

With communist-inspired comments like these, you can only but wonder when this revolution is going to take place, and against whom it will be implemented.

By the way - was South Africa not already “freed” by Mandela more than a decade ago?

A year of living dangerously

2009-09-17T21:30:00.001+08:00

Exactly a year ago we were in Cape Town, squashing a family of five onto a plane. (If you ever want to do something challenging, try an 18 hour flight with a 4 hour stay-over in Singapore, with three active kids and a stressed-out wife.)

I still remember walking along the airport, and realising that this may be the last time my feet touched the African continent.

During my youth I never imagined that one day I would be extremely grateful and happy to leave this beautiful continent.

This was the first time any of us would ever see Australia, as there was no time or money to do spy-trips beforehand. Although I had travelled to many African countries, I’d never been to any other continent before in my life.

We left Namibia on 3 September, and stayed with the family in Cape Town before we finally departed to the intriguing land of the koala and the dingo.

These pictures were taken just before we left Namibia:

( See why we had to leave?)

The family gathering in Cape Town:

Before we made this courageous decision to leave the Motherland, we heard a lot of stories about the strict customs officials at Perth airport, and we were expecting real Nazis with their big dogs sniffing at our pockets to see if we brought in any African soil or seeds or maybe even a little hungry African stow-away in a bag. There were no dogs, and we found the people to be very friendly.

One of the greatest moments in my life was when the customs-lady stamped my passport after a short but serious questioning-session, and finally said “welcome to ‘straylia, mate!”

I was very tired after the long flight, but after finally getting through the long line at customs, I was very excited to get out and experience the lucky country. My new boss Dennis, and an old friend of mine were there to pick us up at the airport:

At this point in time, Dewald and Sumare were the only people in Perth that we actually knew. They were old friends of ours from Cape Town.

Look at those glad-wrapped bags – in South Africa, you can’t trust the baggage handlers, so you have to take extra precautions. We later realised that this is the easiest way to determine whether someone at an airport was from Africa – look at the glad-wrapped bags, it’s a dead give-away!

In these bags we apparently had everything that we needed for the next five months, as our container from Windhoek only arrived at the end of February 2009.

It’s really hard to believe that a year has gone by. On the one hand, it feels like we’ve been living here for a long, long time. On the other hand, it feels like yesterday when we landed, and I can still vividly remember those first days.

We started out with a circle of friends that only included one South African family. In less than a year, this circle expanded to include (the obvious) many other South Africans, but also Canadians, Kiwi's, Zimbo’s, Poms and last but not least – real good down-to-earth local sandgroper Aussies.

And the meat is really good. (This is an important part of my life!)

My Aussie mate Tony cooking at his barbeque in his backyard

I’m looking forward to many more carefree years Down Under. As they say around here:

“She’ll be right, mate!”

The results of the revolution

2009-09-16T21:15:00.001+08:00

I read an article in the Namibian which referred to one of Namibia’s “heroes whose blood has watered our freedom”. (These words are part of the Namibian national anthem.)

Just before Namibia gained it’s independence from South Africa, a man named Anton Lubowski was shot outside his house in Windhoek in 1989.

This man was a SWAPO sympathiser, a man who supported a terrorist organisation and who didn’t bat an eyelid when landmines exploded on civilian farms, or when civilians were slaughtered by SWAPO insurgents in the name of liberation.

For those who missed this part of history, Namibia had a violent past, and the people of Namibia faced a massive onslaught backed by Soviet Russia and Cuba. During the final negotiations for peace, part of the deal was that 50000 Cuban troops had to withdraw from Angola. This was not a small guerrilla army.

Now although I do not condone this (or any other) assassination, the fact is that this was a war, and in a war people on both sides get killed. People on farms were massacred by Swapo “guerrillas”. Innocent civilians were killed by landmines and bombs that were planted by these communist revolutionaries, who turned into capitalist democrats as soon as the Berlin wall came down.

Today their leaders milk the capitalist society while making socialist comments whenever the workers get restless. And not one of them has yet had the guts to take Mugabe on.

There is a saying that goes: “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Let’s leave it at that.

Twenty years later, the people of Namibia are now reminded of this hero whose blood watered their “freedom”. It’s interesting to note this hero’s own definition of freedom more than twenty years ago:

“Lubowski used to say that Namibia is rich and that in a free Namibia there would not be any poor person, Mrs Lubowski recalled.

History has so far proven otherwise, though.”

This leaves you to make one of two conclusions:

The land is not free, or
Lubowski’s argument was ridiculous.

Either way, it seems ironic to honour this bloke. Especially if all the innocent civilian victims of this cruel terrorist war are not also honoured, and the plight of the people who were killed and assaulted on farms in Zimbabwe are completely ignored – even while it still continues.

Forty and still holding on

2009-09-15T21:03:00.001+08:00

Unfortunately I have to admit my age. Sunday was the big day – my fortieth birthday.

I booked a picnic shelter at Whiteman Park on Friday, even though the weather seemed to be like something out of a disaster movie. (During last week I saw wheelie bins take off and fly down the street.)

On Saturday we watched the Trinations rugby match between the Springboks and the All Blacks at a friend’s house. It was still raining cats and dogs, and I was beginning to wonder about this great outdoors event that I planned.

By the way, wasn’t that a great game? It’s always nice to see the all Blacks getting beaten in their own back yard – let’s hope the Wallabies can do the same.

Sunday morning turned out perfectly however, and by the time we got to Whiteman Park we forgot all about rain and severe weather warnings.

I love this park. Even the name of the park makes me feel at home, just because in Namibia this would have been considered to be politically incorrect.

This is a beautifully maintained park, with no baboons or beggars pestering you or looting your stuff.

(After living in Perth for nearly a year, I still stand in awe of such simple things. I will never be ungrateful for this wonderful free lifestyle we have here)

A tram line runs through the park, and one of the tram stops was right next to our shelter. Anica and her grandmother signed up for a nice ride on the tram: At one stage there was a whole convoy of tractors driving through the park. I never knew that there was such a thing as a “tractor enthusiast”, but believe me there are many of them around these parts. Almost all of the services in the park are provided by volunteers – what a great attitude these folks have. They even maintain and operate the tramline.

Unfortunately I neglected to take photos of the tractors, because I was running after Anica in an attempt to deny her the freedom to run right into middle of the road where the tractor convoy was passing. She was not amused, and neither was I. Let’s just say we had a difference of opinion…

Waiting at the tram station:

My oldest daughter also took some photos of her own:

The barbie

Here are some of Yolandi’s great shots:

Natasha is one of Celesti’s friends, they do “Mainly Music” together:

This is one of my colleagues. A really nice Aussie bloke:

Wayne and his family - one of the many families from South Africa who now live in Perth:

Well, that’s it. I’m 40 now.

I’m looking forward to the next forty years. At least I don’t have to spend half of it going to school and going trough puberty.

Who are you trying to fool?

2009-09-09T19:36:00.001+08:00

All my devout followers have probably heard of this black dude from South Africa who dressed up as a girl and tried to run 800m in a girls contest. He broke all kinds of girlie records in the process, and walked away with a gold medal.

The South African authorities have now delivered “proof” that he is indeed a woman:

Please, are you serious? This looks even worse! This looks like a black bloke in drag – something you don’t often see on the colourful streets of Soweto.

I suspect that this bloke could be Robert Mugabe’s son. (Or should I say “his daughter”?)

City of Perth

2009-09-08T21:38:00.000+08:00

We went to Kings Park on Father's day, and I took a few photos of the beautiful city of Perth.

We had a little rain, and while my family were all sitting in the car waiting for me, I took these great shots of a rainbow over the city:

Dining at Bluewater

2009-09-04T23:06:00.001+08:00

I did the right thing today and took the little wife out for a dinner date. After careful research and analysis of all the facts, (which actually means “after intensive Googling”,) I managed to make reservations for the two of us at the Bluewater Grill in Applecross.

The setting looked great from what I could see on the internet, and Applecross looked like it could be a nice bit of neighbourhood, with the river and all that going on.

Now I’m no food critic, but I’ll give you my report. Who knows, maybe this can start a new career path for me, with someone else paying the bills, whilst the pretty wife and I enjoy all wonderful kinds of restaurants all around WA.

This restaurant has the most awesome setting. The river and the city skyline in the background is a sure recipe for success.

Once in a while it’s nice to be in a cultured environment where the down-to-earth “no-worries”, thong-wearing, sleeveless footy-shirt Aussie culture is not too prevalent. Where the background music is just right, and you don’t see obese kids tearing down the place and screaming at their parents.

The food was great, the service was good and the price was probably not too hefty, although I had to close my eyes and swipe that gold card and pray that my limit is still far away.

But it was worth it.

We walked around and took a few photos in the dark, and realised that a fine drizzle was developing all around us. We just got into the car and onto the road when heavens opened and heavy showers came down out of nowhere.

I finally figured out how to work the timer setting on this camera, and managed to take some photos of the two of us.

We took a drive around this lovely area, and were astonished at the massive palaces around the place. The people who live around here must be stinking rich. I hope to join that club someday.

To sum it up, we had a great evening. If you feel like having a great evening with the love of your life in a decent restaurant , then I can recommend the Bluewater without hesitation.

Intelligence

2009-09-04T12:52:00.003+08:00

It’s interesting to hear so many people proudly proclaiming that they are “not religious” people. They don’t believe in God and fairy tales, and evolution explains it all.

Everyone has a right to his or her own opinion. After all, we all have to take responsibility for our own actions and decisions.

Or that’s they way I see it, anyway. You do get people who believe everything is everyone else’s fault, but in my humble opinion that “victim-attitude” gets you nowhere.

What I do not understand is that the same people who will boldly proclaim that they are “not religious”, will hang onto every word of people who “talk to the dead”, or who read tea leaves in a cup. Somehow they believe that these practices are credible, because it’s been around since the middle-ages.

With all the scientific evidence clearly pointing to the fact that Someone out there must have designed this awesome universe, people would still think that believing in God is stupid, but they would rather believe in tea leaves, follow the positions of the stars and listen to gypsies who babble the most unbelievable junk that you can imagine.

I have more respect for fundamentalists, whether they be Christians, Muslims or even devil worshippers, than someone who claims not to be “religious”, but who eagerly follows the idiotic mumbo-jumbo babblings of demon-possessed psychos.

Ridiculing people who believe in a God is a great sport to these types, although they would sheepishly read their star signs in the daily paper. They are scared of ghosts and vampires – and aliens of course.

Aliens have apparently visited us, even though they are only interested in doing anal probes and getting our earth women pregnant. This a fanatic fundamentalist group in a class all of it’s own. It boggles my mind that educated, intelligent people can believe in aliens, even though science clearly shows how impossible it is for these little green monsters to have visited us. Those same people will abuse science to prove that the universe “just happened”.

Amazing.

There are even people who make use of their mobile phone service providers to indicate whether they are compatible with someone else – by typing their names and texting it to a number. If you follow stupid ideas like that, are you not actually a wacky religious fanatic?

What DO you believe? I know what I believe.

Bells Rapids

2009-09-02T21:11:00.001+08:00

During those first two months after we landed in Perth, we made lots of new friends. One couple who invited us over for a barbie at their house in Swan Valley, also took us down to Bells rapids that same day.

This weekend, nearly a year later, we went back there again to show Grandma some new sights and to have some fun.

It’s a beautiful spot in the Avon river, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to take out my camera and shoot hundreds of photos.

Unfortunately, I also noticed the ugly signature of some local idiot:

I’m glad to say that this type of indication of human insanity is not so rampant, and did not steal the moment. But still – what type of scumbag does this? Is it really so much trouble to walk up to the bin and dump it in there? What a jerk.

Trinations at Subi

2009-08-29T23:45:00.003+08:00

What a great game!!

Red Rooster

2009-08-29T15:31:00.004+08:00

One of the things typical Australian is a franchise called Red Rooster. It's a chicken setup, similar to KFC.

They had an advert about this Aussie bloke who was walking around New York, asking everyone where the "Red Roostah" was. The yankees had no idea what he was talking about.

It's become one of my favourite Aussie things. They offer a nice "Real Bacon Burger", with only a chicken fillet, bacon and some lettuce on the bun. No tamatoes, no ghurkins, nothing else that I'd normally have to scrape off just to get a taste of the good stuff. Perfect.

The Drive-thru take-aways concept is "very big" around here.

I cannot remember that we had one single drive-through outlet in the whole of Namibia. We Biltongboertjies are therefore quite amazed and wide-eyed at this whole concept, and it has taken me quite a while to get used to the idea of driving up to a speaker and ordering stuff from someone I can't see.

Fortunately I've driven around with a few other blokes who seem to do this on a daily basis, and I finally built up the courage to try this out all by myself, especially after my son said "oh, we'll just take the drive-thru", when we were in a hurry on the way home after his soccer match.

We used to go to Cape Town during December holidays, and that was where my son learnt all about the Big Yellow M. I always had to take him there for an ice cream and some time to play in the play pen. It was a big treat for us common country folks.

Now that we have plenty of these Big Yellow M's all around, it's not an issue any more. But my son has developed my taste for Real Bacon burgers at the Red Rooster, and it's really hard to resist the temptation now and then.

Before you run off and become an obese over-indulgent couch potato, remember I said "every now and then" - not every day. Even I know it's a bad idea to make a habit of ordering fast food from a speaker on the way home.

But if you do, make sure you try out the Real Bacon Burger at the Red Roostah.