I happened to stumble upon it again tonight and I’m amazed how much I did this year… out of 25 items, I ticked off 5 items (well, strictly only 3 but I’ve booked and paid for the 2 biggies already)

Wanna know how big my year was? Here goes:

3. Dye and cut my hair like Hayley Williams – TICK!

5. Get a boob job (booked for 24 Jan 2012)

7. Dive with Great White Sharks - TICK!

15. Go to a Broadway show in New York (booked for 26 April to 7 May 2012)

21. Be appointed as a Director at Quirk.

While I’m not a shareholder, my title is Business Director, and I’m on the Exco of Quirk Jozi so I guess… TICK!

Wow, only 20 more to go…. what should I do next?

I have been on a dietician’s diet and gymming twice a week all year… and have just been putting on weight. That was, until I found my trigger: my competitive streak.

7 weeks ago, I was close to giving up and resigning myself to being a fatty forever, then my awesome friend, Elan Lohmann started the Sleek Geek 6 Week Beach Body Challenge, a 6 week challenge where 13 geeks put R500 each in a pot, and the one that made the most dramatic body transformation, won the pot.

Let me put you out of your misery: I didn’t win. I came second though, and I made a great start on sloughing off my Pillsbury Dough Boy exterior and got just that much closer to my ink reward (I’ve promised myself this tattoo when I get to my goal weight of 75kg). The most astonishing thing about this challenge is, although I only lost 5kg, I lost 37.5cm, and 3% body fat! Goes to show that KGs aren’t everything, huh?

So without further ado:

My tips for weight loss:

• Tricks, short cuts and diet books DON’T WORK
• Get a personal trainer, you never gym as hard when you’re on your own, it’s worth every cent
• You dont have to eat tuna and salad leaves and nothing else, just eat a balanced diet with small portions and avoid refined foods
• You can actually get away with drinking a glass of wine or 2 (or 3, or 4) every couple of nights
• When gymming, do weights. Ladies, you won’t bulk up, I promise… you don’t have enough testosterone to bulk up
• If you’re competitive, enter a competition, nothing spurs you on like knowing you’re ‘racing’ someone

I, for one, can’t wait for the next one. This time, I won’t accept second place.

Josh Spear

He started his keynote with a little bit about him: He once told his parents he wanted to ‘sell ideas’. So, in his freshman year of college, he started a blog, within a few months, advertisers came flooding in. This led to an investigation about digital marketing and what success looks like, which in turn led to the birth of his digital consulting company. Undercurrent strives to solve complex business problems with a digital worldview. He’s consulted to some of the largest companies in the world and they listen to him because he believes the Internet is not about technology, it’s about human beings.

He is obviously one of those, he actually danced around the stage to a video of a ginger cat playing a keyboard FFS! Josh taught a room full of Internet geeks about the origins of the memes we spend our days sharing. And then he Rickrolled us.

I, for one, didn’t know just how influential 4chan is. I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it’s done for us. Apart from the obvious LOLCATZ, 4chan represents the zeitgeist of the connected world. And that’s scary.

Spear says that sites like 4chan prove that the web must change the way we communicate and market, that getting excited about a 1% click-through rate on a banner campaign is getting excited about a 99% failure rate.

The average person has so much media being thrown at us everyday that we have effectively become air traffic controllers of information. Are we even absorbing anything anymore? We need to stop and ask “OMG, who am I? Why am I here? What have I become?” Imagine a whole world of people who have grown up taking the technology that overwhelms us today for granted? How should we be communicating to the future captains of industry?

According to Josh, “disruption is the only path to success”. Do things differently, cut through the crap and communicate to people the way they communicate with each other. There are rules and norms of the world that can’t be understood unless you participate. Companies need to realise that people drive culture, not brands or advertising, that digital is about shared interests and people aren’t one dimensional.

I wish Josh Spear wasn’t getting on a plane tonight to New York. I wish he would stay and teach this to big brands in Africa. We need it.

The Tech stream of day 2 of Tech4Africa kicked off with a mind-expanding session on the one thing on everyone’s lips (and some people’s t-shirts); HTML5. The new messiah of markup languages was described by MC, Toby Shapshak, as; ‘a handy thing with which to build the Internet”.

Our speaker was Robert Nyman, who works with Mozilla in Sweden. Mozilla are the champions of the open web and have recently launched innovations like BrowserID, a single sign-on that will work on all modern browsers, including recent versions of IE, and on mobile browsers.

Despite the fact that I’m more of a ‘mouth’ than a coder, Nyman managed to teach even me more about HTML5. He explained that it is spilt into:

1. Semantics
In this version of markup, the tags are more specific, simplifying code and cutting out elements which are not needed to streamline the way browsers render pages.
HTML5 aims to become the ‘one language to rule them all’ by offering standard code for common elements that previously relied on complicated Javascript, things like sliders, calendars etc.

HTML5, at it’s core, is making the web easier, faster and

If you want to know more, go to http://HTML5doctor.com, it lists all the elements within the specification.

2. APIs
According to Nyman, there are over 100 specifications already, and growing by the second.

It was at this point of the presentation that my brain started short-circuiting. Nyman is just too smart. So, I Googled it. Wikipedia says some of the APIs available are:

• The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing
• Timed media playback
• Offline storage database (offline web applications)
• Document editing
• Drag-and-drop
• Cross-document messaging
• Browser history management
• MIME type and protocol handler registration
• Microdata

Since HTML5 is the new darling of the web, there are already hundreds of thousands of resources online. So, who should you trust? According to Nyman, these are the ‘daddies’ of sites to learn about HTML5:

http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/inputs.html

http://wufoo.com/html5

And for the lovers of Flash? Well, don’t worry, you’re not dinosaurs, doomed to extinction just yet. Nyman explains that HTML5 supporters who say “Flash must die!” are shortsighted, we should look to Flash for inspiration, rather thinking that one technology should replace each other.

Despite the fact that the session made me feel a bit stupid, it inspired me and made me think about the possibilities HTML5 offers. I almost want to tell all the devs I work with to rebuild all our sites in it. I must remember the words of Nyman though; “HTML5 is about being pragmatic, about building on top of the things we already have, rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again… what’s important is that you dare to do anything, failing is OK.“

Herman Chinery-Hesse has a remarkable story. He is one of those people that makes you feel like you can do anything with nothing. That’s because Herman believes in African Style Solutions for uniquely African problems. Europe and America don’t have power failures and bandwidth problems, so Africans can’t copy First World solutions and expect them to work here.

After returning to Ghana from America, a young Herman thought he was going to go into manufacturing. The problem was, the only asset he had was an old PC. He had no capital, no connections and no infrastructure to build a factory. However, he soon realised that his PC “was a factory, it could manufacture software.”

Herman started SOFTribe in 1991 after a bet with friends when out at a nightclub that he could get a job in unemployment-riddled Ghana within 3 days. That Monday, he was building software for a travel agency; in front of the client, on the one computer they had in the building. Soon, SOFTribe was the biggest IT Company in Ghana and quickly expanded into other countries.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though; the advent of the Internet nearly closed him down. His clients were insisting on central web-based software, dictated by their European Head Offices, so SOFTribe had to reinvent themselves. They knew that the majority of the economic growth was coming from SMEs, so Herman started BlackStarLine, a company that incubated a revolutionary eCommerce platform. ShopAfrica53 is a virtual shopping mall, allowing vendors a space to sell their products on a global scale. But the really special thing about ShopAfrica53 is the fact that it plans to push intra-Africa trade, selling African goods to Africans who do not necessarily have access to large malls.

However, the platform is a labour of love that has taken years to perfect, so Herman had to roll out interim products that would keep his business alive. One such product line was barcoded cards that allowed delegates access into one of Ghana’s largest trade shows, which meant the show made profit on entry for the first time ever, over 500%! It wasn’t long before the cards were being used for concerts, conference and shows all over Africa.

That was just the beginning. BSL’s next innovation was ‘Quickie’, instant ‘on-demand’ insurance through scratch cards and the cell networks, which allow you to SMS a code to switch on and off your policy. This sort of technology would never work in the developed world but revolutionizes insurance in Africa.

When asked his secret, Herman says “I used to be a techie but these days, I like to think like an end user. Business is not just a programmer’s game. You should always look at the client experience, or your products will fail.”

The audience was spellbound and I left the room inspired and proud to be an African.  Herman says it best: “The African unity that I see isn’t just a philosophy, it unites with business… remember, borders become irrelevant in the Cloud.”

After the phenomenal success of last year’s event, expectations for Tech4Africa 2011 were high, and if the opening by Gareth Knight is anything to go by, T4A 2011 is going to be a cracker.

Who else opens a conference by sending a few tweets on a giant screen, simply because he wants to thank the people who made the conference happen? When he followed this by a slide that simply said <tech4africa>Welcome!</tech4africa> we knew that we were at a  tech event for true lovers of tech and what it can do on the African continent. In fact, since Tech4Africa, it has reached out to over 150 countries in a year. Gareth wrapped up by saying “Tweet for Africa, let your networks know that we’re here and that we’re here to make a difference.”

Next up, the famed ‘Greek Geek of 702’, Aki Anastasiou introduced Derek Wilcocks, MD of Internet Solutions, who admitted that he’s a digital immigrant that is awed by how the world is changing in ways that people are battling to come to grips with.  According to Wilcocks, this year the Internet hit over a zetabyte of traffic. I can’t even begin to fathom what a zetabyte is?! 34GB of content a day is now going into the average US household, which is tantamount to 50 CDs worth of data.

But it’s not just about consumers, the machine-to-machine bandwidth used in the last 12 months exceeded user initiated bandwidth use this year. Companies like Amazon, Walmart, Ford and Tesco are using automated analytics to adapt their stock levels and marketing within hours of a major event that affected their business.

Wilcocks showed the audience how companies around the world are adopting web-based technology to recruit digital natives, sell and market their products more efficiently and better their customer service. What was interesting was that the biggest innovations are not being made by tech companies but by the ‘old-school’ trucking, cement and logistics businesses. I can only hope that the South African corporates in the audience are listening so innovation can start coming out of Africa, rather than being just adopted by her.

As Wilcocks said, “Collaboration, Community and The Cloud are reshaping the world… we really need to think about how they can change consumers, entrepreneurs and the public sector in Africa, now.”

So, I got given 2 copies of some really awesome books. And I want to give away one copy of each to you lovely people!

I am in the process of reviewing both books so will share how good/not they are with you soon but in the mean-time… answer the simple questions below and you could be the proud owner of “Employees First, Customers Second” and “Gareth Cliff on Everything”.

1. “What is Gareth Cliff’s Dog’s Name?”

2. “What company does Vineet Nayar run?”

3. “Why is my nickname Snowgoose?”

So, leave me a comment with your name, your email address and your answer and you could be a WINNA WENA!

P.S. The prize will be drawn randomly on 25 October 2011, the prize will be posted to the winner by regular post, I am not responsible if the SA Post Office loses or damages the prize. Only people residing in South Africa may enter. The Judge’s decision is final and no correspondence may be entered into…. that about covers it.. I hope

• The 2nd will forever be a difficult day. A year has passed and I still miss you Mamma, the pain still has jagged edges, fading slowly
• Pain was mixed with bursts of incredible pride when Tatum started walking on the 4th. So glad I get to share my life with this amazing kid
• Feeling a tad overwhelmed with long hours
• But they’re obviously paying off , I was promoted to Business Director last week. Not sure what that means yet but still completely stoked
• Shaun’s birthday next week, 31. I’m not sure why this makes me feel old but it does
• I’m missing my friends, the reduction in leisure time has meant something had to give and it was time with dear friends, I’ll make it up to you guys, promise
• Despite being a crappy friend, I still got asked to be the MC at Tanya & Peter’s wedding in October. I feel very honoured. I speak publicly at least twice a month but this is different… and I’m actually a bit nervous
• Speaking of speaking (see what I did there?), I spoke at Brescia House about cyber bullying (Thanks Rozz for organising). It affected me and the girls deeply and is a bigger problem across schools than I had thought. I’m hoping to do more talks like this so if you know a school in need, hook me up
• The 4 hour body thing succeeded wildly, then failed miserably as my utter lack of self-control asserted itself again. So, I’m paying someone to be my self discipline and have started going to a personal trainer. Feeling the burn but loving it!
• I have to get back to work now or tomorrow morning will be a total cock-up so inbox, here I come

“I am currently the user of a Samsung Omnia 7 WIndows Phone. This phone frustrates me, delights me, annoys me and excites me all at the same time.

The bright, clear screen is probably the first thing to notice on the phone. That and the fact that it is huge! Ok, maybe not huge, but definitely the biggest phone I’ve had since joining the mobile brigade.

The phone has three face buttons on the front – a “Back”, “Windows” and “Search” button and volume, camera and power lock buttons along the sides.

The main area of interaction however, is the Home screen which is activated by hitting the main Windows button. This takes you to a selection of tiles which show constantly updating information. You can manipulate these by long-pressing on one and moving it around the screen. The large icons are easy to hit but the screen does seem a tad oversensitive at times.

By swiping to the right from the Home a full list of applications will appear. This can get frustrating when you have loads of apps, but I think the focus here from Microsoft was trying to achieve simplicity.

A notification pane at the top of the phone appears when you tap the first centimetre of the phone from the top edge. This is where the signal and battery meter will appear. It’s all part of Microsoft’s attempt to keep the screen clear from clutter but it can be a bit annoying when you just want to have a quick glance to see what’s going on.

Sending an SMS or sending messages online can be a mission, simply because I am not able to type as quickly as I would have liked. The QWERTY keyboard is all good and well, but not too forgiving when in a hurry. Oh,  and the fact that it keeps on changing my words also frustrates me, but I am sure it will go much better as soon as I manage to find where I can switch the dictionary off.

The camera on the phone takes great pictures in the day and can be uploaded directly by the pretty nifty Photo Sharing tool, which allows you to add pictures to Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket to name a few.  At night time the flash is however a bit powerful and close up pictures tend to be a little too overexposed for my liking.

All in all, I think the Windows experience on the phone is enjoyable, apart from the little niggle I have with it here and there. It will definitely keep anyone occupied for hours though and comes highly recommended by yours truly.

Go on then… go and find one to play with!”

The thing with this particular book is it’s a geek’s dream (just ask TechCrunch). Tim Ferriss spent 10 years trying to ‘hack the human body’ so it’s not written with a condescending tone and it never once uses the term ‘become more healthy’ because that’s not measurable. I’m a numbers geek (no, I’m not good at maths, I mean analytics, results etc) so the idea of ‘measure to manage’ when speaking of the human body intrigues me. Tim Ferriss takes numbers geekdom to a new level, he’s used himself as a human guinea-pig so parts of this book are disturbing (the man takes ice baths to test cold’s effect on fat loss!) but I’m choosing to test a few principles contained within and ignore the rest (as I have no desire to get a six-pack or survive on less than 3 hours of sleep a night).

So, in the next few months I’m going to be doing some the things from the book and recording the effects here. I know this is probably incredibly boring to 4 of the 5 people who read my blog so feel free to ignore these posts, I’m doing this for me, to satisfy my curiosity, not for anyone else. I’m going to approach his methods iteratively so I can see how each of them work and refine them for me.

Starting this week I’m trying these 4 things:

1. Publish progress. Take a photo of myself in a bikini and stick it to my fridge, take photos of what I eat and publish them on Facebook, tell you my starting stats.
2. Drink 500ml of ice-cold water immediately upon waking. Apparently this helps to burn fat.
3. Gym for no more than 30 minutes twice a week (10 mins of cardio, 10 mins of kettlebell swings, 10 myotatic crunches, stretch.
4. The “Heidi vs. Liesl” Facebook places check-in challenge. My friend & fellow QuirkStar, Liesl and I will have to check-in to gym on Facebook places twice a week (since we gym at different gyms). If any of us fails to do this, we owe the other R10, payable immediately.

For the 1st month, that’s all I’m gonna do. As I write this I weigh 81kg and the machine at the gym says my body fat percentage is 34.8% (yes, I know it’s probably inaccurate but as long as I only use one measurement tool I’ll be OK, I’m measuring progress, not exact body fat). You may have been a bit shocked that as an overweight woman, I published my embarrassing stats so easily. If I’m going to be serious about this experiment, I can’t hide data.

So that’s it, now you know why you’ll be getting check-ins at the gym, photos of food and my weight polluting your Facebook stream in the next few weeks. I’m sorry if this annoys you, feel free to mute/ignore me, as I said; I’m doing this for me.

Next month I’ll add more tactics from the book and I might discard a few, depending on their efficacy.
This should be an interesting journey; a geek’s approach to a better body.