Thanks to Graham and the crew from Stormhoek, and to Dave for getting it going.

I particularly made sure to gobble up some prize winning Pinotage!

Herewith my very amateur wine review of the 2 wines I had:

I started of with the Pinot Grigio and found it pleasantly bubbly and quite fruity, not too dry, but not sweet. I think it will make a great accompaniment to seafood or a wine to pop open on a lazy summers afternoon with friends.

The Pinotage was fabulous, I have had some pretty awful pinotages that often sport a very unpleasant burnt and overly smokey taste (I hope that comes across right) , thankfully this is a very civilized taste, it felt rounded and smooth and was a very pleasant experience as a whole. I’ll be looking out for this one in the shops!

Thanks again guys!

If I write this, does it really matter? In one hundred years I will be long forgotten, no one will know my name. My life is only a spec in the history of time. Not only that, I am one of billions of specs on this planet. Do I really matter? Do I have a purpose – or am I just waisting my time? *

But wait..

I blog, therefore I am.

We blog.

But who are we?

We are all different but our blogs are all similar in structure, we don’t judge on page design or layout or spelling or vocabulary but we relish in the inspiration of others.

We write about what we love generally for no reward – we share our passions with those willing to lend an ear.

We write so others can listen – and hear our voices drowned out by the constraints of traditional media – take for example our friends at United We Blog! who are carrying the flame for a Democratic Nepal.

Sometimes its a plea for attention, literally a fight for life.

Sometimes we share our joys and good news like the new baby on the way or the photos taking in Rome last vacation.

Our writings are informal and engaging- we love to discuss open-ended topics and comment on the inspired or misguided writings of others,

We are always there available via comments, and email, and boy, do we love to chat!

You can get to know us by our writings, get the meat via the long post or share a short brainwave via a short post.

We Blog-roll our friends and nurture those relationships with the recognition of a link.

We promote exciting brands like certain wines and a coffee shop in Sea-point.

We take our virtual friendships and make them real by attending Geek Dinners!

Some of us are techies in the industry and we make fun of the latest tech news or wallow in the prospects of WWJD or “What Would Jobs Do”?

Some of us are fashion trendies with the iPod as our bible and the latest mp3 our hymn, others are housewives posting about the latest under 9 soccer score.

Some of us , like Jason Calacanis and Om Malik, have or will be making millions from our hobby-slash-jobs.

We are one in a million, 50 million to be exact.

Our time is now, this is the time for the revolution. Are you getting heard?

So back to my question, do I really matter?

Well you are reading my blog, aren’t you?

*Quoted from and inspired by the book: I Blog,therefore I am by “The book of blogs”

The most common anti-arguments are: (followed by my short followups)

1) Its been done before? Sure, but Dave has a way to strip things down to the bare minimum and its a case of simplicity through minimalism. River puts newest categories first which is surprisingly not a common feature and well its Dave Winer and he’s buzz worthy and gives things weird names, so there!

2) Why not just use RSS? Its a pain to research and install the software for your mobile.

3) Why not just read news on your PC? Well from a South African perspective, most people don’t have on not too mention don’t have Internet access, but a phone with a Wap-type browser and a 3G/GPRS connection is commonplace and convenient for most and the sub 80 Kb pages means 12 plus headlines at R2.00 a MB

Some other interesting things coming out of the river is the legality of republishing another’s feed is illegal or not? The argument is that if you provide full public feeds that it shouldn’t be a problem. Others argue that you are removing valuable advertising revenue for those sites.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: In case you dont understand what a River of News is, its basically a simple technique to display a conventional RSS feed in a cellphone friendly, zero setup format. Example: http://nytimesriver.com/

FAUX PAS: Hmm I just realised that the older generation wap browsers wont be able to deal with pages exceeding +- 30 KB, but those with Blackberry’s, 6 and N series Nokias and other higher level phones won’t have a problem. What is the solution? Maybe some paging?

This is the wonder of Second life, one of a number of virtual worlds where you can choose to be who you want to be and do what you want to do with no social restrictions. Indeed it has many traits of a real world, there are mountains, oceans, trees, houses and a real economy. Folks often have “second” careers with fairly lucrative careers in creating virtual assets such as clothing, jewellery, buildings etc.

We are talking real money here, converted to virtual dollars. In the case of Second Life this site forecasts a expenditure of between $50 million to $100 million Linden (the name of the currency) this year. At the time of writing this the Second Life site reports $424,913 US spent in the last 24 hours between the quarter of a million active users.

Are we reaching a new internet frontier, is this the first step to a Gibson-esque future?

Still not convinced? What if I told you that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has a substantial investment in Linden and that Amazon have been exploring a Second Life presence?

Other notable happenings are the recent setup of Podshow Island where you can go and visit the apartment of your favorite show and interact with the podcasters on a different level, also host to interesting events like virtual weddings. Dawn & Drew have setup a virtual farm and there fans have bought up the land all around it, Cali Lewis from Geekbrief TV also has a lot of great interaction with her audience in the second life.

The opportunity’s are literally endless!

Keep an eye on this space, and give it a try – a basic account is free – but beware the time monster!

Technorati Tags: Second Life

Bring some style to your life with this blinged out speedtest from Speedtest.net

Technorati Tags: Speedtest.net, Speedtest

May be doing a talk on it at the upcoming SA Stormhoek Geek Dinner.

I quote:

Pros:

1) Uncapped & Unshapped
2) Reliable
3) Great service desk
4) Far cheaper than Diginet based solutions

Cons:

1) Cost, its far from affordable for end users
2) IS retains ownership of the router.
3) Telkom is still in the loop for the last mile
4) Only 1mbit

In conclusion; this is what a DSL experience should be like, at a 10th of the price.

Where will technology take us within the next 5,10,20 years? What amazing things will we have available to improve our quality of life?

The large-scale deployment of IPv6 will see a world where every imaginable (and sometimes unimaginable device) will be IP ready and jacked into the grid, self-restocking fridges will be commonplace, digital cameras will auto-upload to online storage, our TV’s will receive media off the net and VoIP will be king.

For content providers this means the end of dictated content – `user interactive` and `on-demand` become the norm and `broadcasting` becomes old news, the user will control his own usage, the independent content producer will be able to get his content to a much wider audience now and we will really see the effect of the long tail. Yeah, this all sure sounds a lot like podcasting (which is very “now”), except it will go through a series of changes before ultimately becoming mainstream, podcasting is still very edgy today and it stands out from other forms of user-generated media only because of the time-shifting aspect, i.e. download while you sleep.

I expect that the rapid adoption of municipal WiFi/WiMax/Mesh type technology will accelerate and soon entire cities will be blanketed with always-in internet, this will become an essential service and not a luxury. Blanket WiFi will change the face of technologies like podcasting and devices like the iPod, why have a hard drive if you can just download what you are watching on the fly and it costs next to nothing? Do you even need a hard drive on that device? Already services like Last.fm are hugely popular as they are so well tailored to your taste and it helps you find good content all for the price for a bit of bandwidth.

Another thorn in the side of local storage applications, especially video ones, will be the rapid consumption of disk space, imagine having to cache anything approaching a healthy collection of HD-DVD/TV content on your local machine. Now all of you are going to shout at me and say that disk storage is cheap but history has told us that while the amount of storage on the “standard” drive of the day keeps multiplying (Moore’s Law), the fact is that the number of disk hungry applications also follow that trend and it has really never gotten much cheaper to physically buy that standard hard disk. Example: My 512Mb , 2 Gig, 20 Gig, 40 Gig, 80 Gig etc. drive purchases over the last few years have always been roughly as expensive as the one before it (twice the storage at the same price) and if I need to buy a few of them it still hurts my wallet No, off-site/remote hosting is key.

Our digital persona’s will be irrevocably intertwined with our real lives, already we have seen the rise of the so-called MySpace generation, the next gens, they will demand unlimited access to blogging and social networking sites and to them being disconnected for any amount of time will be like hell.

Most of our personal computing will move onto the grid, take Gmail for example, I already can’t operate without it and to that reason network connectivity will need to become much more reliable with more fail safes and alternates in case something does go wrong.

We will track the movements of our loved ones with RFID and even the traffic department will use RFID to bill you for using a toll-road. Don’t make a mistake, big brother will be able to track you!

All-in-all I look forward to huge changes in everyday of life via new technologies, but I do find myself fearing that in South Africa we will be left behind due to the slow movement of the broadband glacier in this country due to socio-economic complications and plain old greed on behalf of the powers that be.

Luckily there are some people out there with vision! Just this evening I met someone attempting to start up a new WiMax based operator, he really seems to “get” broadband and realises that you cant retain customers by contract but rather by good service.

Lets back our local innovators, lets make our voices heard. Lets liberate our broadband. Recently heard someone mentioning the `Bandwidth Liberation Front` in jest, but seriously, has it become time for the “Broadband Liberation Front”? I already see developed countries like the USA grumbling that they are getting left behind in the high-stake game of Ultra-broadband, jeepers.

Have a look at a portion of Dave and Graham from Stormhoek in the shortest clip which was the only one small enough to jump the 100Mb filter .. (because he ran out of tape).

Stay tuned for an attempt at putting up to Google Video (*thumbs*)

Thanks Shane.

Oh and speak to Shane to get your hands on same Stormhoek wine goodness..