The branch could never really explain why we rarely get any parcel notifications and if we do get them, those are either 2nd or final notifications. I guess today I was again frustrated, as I found a 2nd parcel notification in my mailbox and requested comment from head-office as well as the local branch and also wanted to follow up on my previous complaint in May (for which I still await an answer from head-office).

Needless to say, 40 minutes after this email to the Postnet branch:

Incidently, and following up on all the parcels going missing, I noticed today a 2nd parcel notification (dated 18/08). I have not received a first notification and would really like to understand how PostNet tracks parcels and if anything has changed since May. Back then the Broadacres branch did not carry manifests/lists of what parcel notifications they received when and when those where placed in the post boxes.

In today's case it makes me wonder where the 1st parcel notification has disappeared - this is pretty much in line with all the other theft - either no parcel notification or notifications received so late that the items had been returned.

We will try and pick this parcel up at Bryanston Postoffice, but if it has "disappeared" will now open another case at the Police Station - unfortunately your absolute silence and disregard for any of those complaints is almost a silent admission of guilt.

I get the following response from the Postnet Broadacres branch-manager:

Dear Mr Naschenweng

In terms of our rental agreement with Ms Tascha Els we hereby give notice that we will be invoking clause 2.15 with effect the annual renewal date of 31st January 2011. The box will be locked from that date and post forwarded for a period of 30 days (upon receipt of a new postal address by us forwarded by the boxholder).

Upon return of both keys, the boxholder will be refunded the R50 deposit paid. We recommend that the boxholder begin the process of changing her address in the interim, as, after 28th February 2011, all mail will be returned to sender.

What does this tell you? Although I am still waiting for a formal response from Postnet Headoffice, it certainly appears that their franchises can not cope with customer complaints and stick their heads in the sand by canceling people's rental agreements. I get the feeling there will certainly be a follow-up post in this regard. Department of Trade and National Consumer Forum here we come....

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What is wrong with that? Well, if you click on the question to give your answer, look at the answer block below:

How on earth can (1) only 34 % know the answer and (2) 66% not even notice the answer below?

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If it was not for Desmond Tutu who showed some awesome energy as part of his speech. I shall officially name him DESMOND-POKEMON-TUTU:

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I am always interested in looking out for possible competition, and just noticed today, that Vodacom launched a half-baked classifieds website over at Liveads.co.za. I used to consult for Vodacom in the past and found it rather embarrassing as the website looks like the Wayback Machine came and visited.

It does take a lot to put a website together and score an "F" like Juju:

More so, it takes a lot of disregard and effort to make it to all "F"s, but it is not just the look and feel, but also the performance characteristics of the site:

• It takes 18 seconds to download the homepage which only starts rendering after 11 seconds. On a primed cache it still takes 14 seconds for the page to load which only starts rendering after 8 seconds. This is already bad as Google deems any site rendering above 3,5 seconds as slow.
• Your momma is so fat: I hope not, but the home-page is. Weighing in at a proud 604KB. Even with a primed cache all 30 images displayed are uncached and result in 159KB of data every time. (Perhaps a clever ploy to get extra money from 3G subscribers?)
• Not sure how LiveAds managed to do it, but even a primed cache results in a dreadful long load time --- not to worry, overpaid consultants at Vodies, I provide you a solution for free in the bullets below.
• Turn on compression: This is in the webmasters for dummy, takes about 2 minutes to configure and provides sensational results.
• Cache control: How on earth did you manage to de-configure your server that none of your 63 resources referenced on your homepage has any expiry, last-modified or cache-control settings?
• Javascript kiddies at work: 14 Javascript files referenced, inline jQuery code and some weird Google-tracking code. Minify your JS, include only what is necessary and Google Async Tracking is your friend.
• Deferred loading: All those pretty 14 Javscript files also block all other resources from loading. This costs you over 8-10 seconds as the browser is not able to render the remainder of the page. Combine those 14 JS into one file and place it at the bottom of the body or defer loading altogether.
• ETags: Don't use ETags with a default install of your webserver. ETags consist of the inode which is a unique file-descriptor and this will result in your ETag always to be different in a load-balanced environment. Use proper expiry/last-modified rules and cache-controls instead.
• Amazon cloud: So you use Amazon CDN for image storage and even managed to get no expiry/cache-control on those - how did you make this happen?
• Sloppy site images: Your Grid-images are cute, but if you had applied proper JPEG compression, you would have reduced both images from 80KB per image down to 20KB - quite a difference in load-time (considering that those are not even cached)
• KeepAlive: Your web-server has none. Your sysadmin should know about persistent connections. You site will not scale and ever perform with basics lacking.
• Local is Lekker: Yes, we live in a global village, but serving the site out of Egypt to your local users is just strange. Big data-center with own ISP-services and off-shore hosting? Vote of confidence right here. A DNS lookup exceeds 500ms (should be below 100ms) and it takes on avg 200ms to just establish a connection to those individual resources (14 Javascript * 200ms connect time = 2,8 seconds / download-time for a 42KB-resource = 1,4 seconds).
• Redirects: Why oh why do you have to do a redirect from your home-page to "/en/home" - this is a client-side redirect and costs me another 500ms?

The above should be a lesson to any corporate on how to build websites. I fear that the very same people will also advise on SEO (you do realise that your site has absolutely no SEO value) and it will be interesting to see how long this site will be around. My Internet-death prediction: 2 months (but not without spending lots of more money to beat that dead horse).

To avoid repeats like this: YSlow, Google PageSpeed, Firebug and HTML Validator should be standards tools for any project and no website should go live without good ratings.

Try a visual comparison via which.loadsfaster.com

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Some noteworthy stuff about Google's Pacman celebration last week Friday:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
• $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

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At first, the Disallow for unclesam caught my eye - in essence a customised search across government institutions.

If you look through the robots.txt file, you will also come across the custom-tag which will actually give you back almost the old layout of the old Google search.

BTW: While you are at it, have a look at the links for linux, bsd, and microsoft.

Tick... tock... lets see how long it takes for those links to change the search format.

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The Visual Search is a new search capability we introduced especially for Internet Explorer 8 which allows users to search for items on bidorbuy straight from their search bar without having to leave the page they are on. Click on a suggestion at any time to immediately execute the search without having to type the entire word or phrase.

Our visual suggestions will instantly show you a preview of the results directly in the Search Box drop-down. Where relevant we will display Featured items, Auctions closing soon and Articles & Reviews.

How many steps does it take with your current browser to find a product? Until now it was likely a series of cutting and pasting information from one webpage to another.

Now there's a better way with the bidorbuy Accelerator which helps you in performing your everyday browsing tasks without navigating to other websites to get things done. Simply highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection to display instantly and visually items featured on bidorbuy.

The above pictures do not do justice to how cool our features work and trying them out will hopefully wow you. Installing those enhancements is really simple by visiting Internet Explorer Gallery --- and while you are there, please spend 1 minute to register on the Internet Explorer Gallery site and vote for our enhancements.

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On OS X and Linux this is really straight forward. The example below establishes a SSH tunnel via tunnel.company.co.za into an Oracle server hosted on the network at 10.0.0.10:

ssh -C -p 22 -l myuserid -N -o ConnectTimeout=5 -o TCPKeepAlive=yes -o NumberOfPasswordPrompts=1 -o ControlMaster=no -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey -i /Users/Me/.ssh/id_rsa -L 15211:10.0.0.10:1521 tunnel.company.co.za

Explanation of the above:

• -C: Uses compression over SSH
• -l myuserid: Connects via userid "myuserid"
• -o ControlMaster=no: disables the reuse of connections. Setting it to "auto" increases performance as it allows multiplexing, but might introduce problems. I play safe here.
• -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey -i /Users/Me/.ssh/id_rsa: connect to SSH via certificate
• -L 15211:10.0.0.10:1521: tunnels from local-port 15211 into remote port 1521 at 10.0.0.10

There are different opinions on ControlMaster (read some experience here). Some users say, that setting it to "auto" is reliable and will improve speed significantly. If you want to use it, do the following:

1. Create a directory: mkdir ~/.ssh/cm_socket
2. Add -o ControlPath ~/.ssh/cm_socket/%r@%h:%p to the arguments

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