riaan cruywagen in the house!

he's alive!

see he's not just a far-fetched character of some email myth... the "chuck norris" of south africa...

and i have the photo to prove it thanks to stellenbosch writers

happy birthday to martin

today is my blogger buddy martin's birthday... and in true blogger style i thought i'd write him a happy birthday blog... :D

happy birthday martin! hope you have a truly awesome day and a year filled with many of the great things you are working towards... as well as lots of fun inbetween it all! ;)

you are now officially part of "the club".

reunion schmoonion

well this year is my 10 year high school reunion. i cannot quite believe it. ten years. that's a long time... just long enough to forget about high school... and then the reunion goes and reminds me. not that it's all bad... it's nice to think back to some of the friendly faces... but mostly i feel that i have moved on since then... i'm so much of a different person it would just be strange to go back and re-live the experience. it's over i tell you! over or not, i am still considering going. i don't know why. is there really going to be anyone eager to see me again? am i really eager to reconnect, myself? to reach out? hmmm...

~~~~
edit

I just read a businesspundit feed, which i think is rather apt... read it for yourself here.

life's too short...

to add to my deliberations on where my career is going, i received these email jokes recently...

double post

apologies to all who noticed that i had a double posting of "riaan cruywagen: teaching butterflies to fly in formation" (originally posted here) it would seem that blogger.com has been highly unstable lately. *sigh* i struggled with it for two days, and thought that the post had not been published. it's terrible when you can't even load the page controlling your blog...

as it is, i have recently received an invite to try out vox, from my blogger buddy paul over at grouchy blogger. thanks paul! :) (yep, he has many blogs!) and am now considering moving away from blogger. but i will have to see, i quite like my little nest here.

have a great thursday!

riaan cruywagen: teaching butterflies to fly in formation

i have noticed, via analytics, that almost 50% of the hits to my site come from google. of those hits a large portion can be attributed to riaan cruywagen, and more accurately probably to the post i made about the parody on chuck norris jokes in favour of our famous news reader. (on doing a search on google for riaan cruywagen i was rather amazed, and pleased to see that my post comes out first on google's results!)

i remember watching riaan delivering the news when i was just a wee little person. i also have recollections of watching him more recently and being amused by his choice of hair colour and obvious hair piece... riaan is definitely a prominent part of most south african's lives post 1975, which is when he started broadcasting during the test signals. as an aside, i have been told by acquaintances who had newly installed tv's at that time, that they would all gather around the tv with drinks and snacks to watch the test signals... tv was such a new, big thing back then. :)

but how much do we really know about riaan? seriously. a search on wikipedia provides a little insight, but not much at that. then there's the interview in january 2002, published by the sunday times. perhaps we can learn a little more about the legend from his own words... i do recommend reading it, he apears rather candid in the interview... my favourite q & a is posted below... upon reading it, one can imagine how he could be construed as the "chuck norris" of south africa... teaching butterflies to fly in formation indeed...

Are you often asked to speak publicly?

Yes. Although I have enormous butterflies in my stomach before I address an audience, once I'm talking they disappear. Perhaps I have learned to teach them to fly in formation.

one red paperclip turns into one lovely house!

one red paperclip did it! can you believe it? on first stumbling upon kyle's site i wasn't very convinced that he'd get there... but he has proven the power of the internet, and a year since putting up his paperclip for barter, he has a house in Kipling. and a stunning one at that... a 1920's refurbished double storey!

now to find something to barter for one free internet connection... :) anyone game?

annoyed

i am not easily annoyed. i am a rather amiable sort of person. but right now... right now i am annoyed.

firstly with iburst, which is just not performing the way i think it should, dropping the connection every so often, not loading pages properly, and a million and one (okay okay i do exagerate here) other things one would not want to be bothered with when browsing and editing online.

secondly with blogger... oh yes, my very own blog. i want to edit the html in my template. but it will not, will not, load the full template when the page is loaded. this is aggravated by iburst disconnecting me right in the middle of a page load.

urgh. annoyed. and probably a bit too whiney too...

~~~~~
edit 1

i am no longer annoyed, i am furious... turns out that the iburst cutting out in the middle of editing my template actually deleted most of my template. goodbye to all the customisation i had done. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!! grrrrrrrrrrrrrr..... arrrrggggghhhhhh.... *jumps up and down in fury* (23:48)

~~~~~
edit 2

i've managed to restore my blog i think... *yawn*... oh, i am indifferent now. p003y to blogger.com p003y to iburst, i am going to bed. (01:03)

a goose for a gander

i found it! i have been cycling around the lonehill area in search of an entrance to the elusive lonehill dam... and for a long time had given up on the assumption that one could only see it from the lonehill shopping centre, and that was that... well, i found it on a short cycle last saturday. i just happened to veer off into the park just before you get to the lonehill centre off lonehill boulevard, travelling from main, and suddenly came across the dam. wow. it's so marvelous to have nature right at the doorstep of urbanisation...