Suddenly though a complete stranger walks past you and says, ‘*yawn*’ or even, ‘Just realised I’m starving!’ You look at them kinda funny, or shocked. ‘Why did they just say that?’, you think. The next person walks past and suddenly they say, ‘painting my nails’… you’re probably thinking these people have lost their minds. You carry on and a few people go by without saying a word and you begin to think that everything is normal again and you just had two weird people go past you. You notice a guy bobbing his head to music that he’s listening to in his iPod he gets closer as you walk and suddenly says, ‘#nowplaying tiesto – adagio strings’ and just walks on by.

You can see where this is going. Don’t you think Twitter is like one giant shopping mall where everyone inside is wondering around talking to themselves, saying whats on their minds. A lot however are at coffee shops or restaurants @mentioning each other. What if this were real life and people were willing to enter a conversation with someone as easily as they do on twitter. Consider this was happening for real, how many people would you meet on a day out… how many awesome conversations would you have with complete strangers simply because you were easily able to find something interesting to talk about… how many great friends could you make?? Lots!!

Heh, its effectively a big tweetup but where everyone talks loud enough for everyone else to hear!!

I am a positive person… I think so at least, and I think all my friends can vouch for that too. However a few months ago, probably 6-7 now. I joked with a friend of mine saying, ‘I think I have depression! I have all the symptoms from no desire to live right through to no interest in social or physical activities.’ Nothings changed over the last few months, I sit here trying to figure out why I am even considering staying in Cape Town when all it has done is made me depressed… I find myself throwing myself into my work simply as a distraction, to forget, to make the days pass quicker, all aiming to an ultimate goal of getting the hell out of here… 19 more weeks ultimately till I can rid myself of it.

So now the company I am contracting for loves me and has offered me a full time position here in cape town. The career driven male part of my brain gets so excited, its the perfect job, a salary increase and everything I’ve ever wanted in a job/career. The company is awesome… beyond awesome, and I want to take the job, my brain is already telling me to look for a new apartment, or why not buy a place now. I always had a dream to leave joburg to work somewhere like pixar, so I had always assumed that one day I would no longer be in joburg because of work!

My heart, my soul, my emotions, cannot help but sit uneasy… they tell me 19 weeks and this hell is over, you can pack up and get back to a life where you were happy, where your nights were filled with sleep, not unsettled thoughts of everything being wrong. I see those 19 weeks as a light at the end of a tunnel, a tunnel that keeps collapsing as I travel down it… so what do I do… what do I do??? I’m dying here slowly, and this is life, there are no second chances.. this is it, its happening right now!!

Everyone always asks, ‘how can you hate cape town so much’… Easily!! Its not home and if home is where my heart is then joburg is home. I have no desire to live in this city. The sea is cold and the beaches always infested with tourists or people.  (The beach is the reason I originally moved to cape town! To have that coastal lifestyle.) The cost of living is ridiculous because there is mountain tax on everything you buy. You have to drive for miles just to get to a decent shop or restaurant. The road network is twisted just to avoid the landscape or railway line. The sun never sits high and proud in the sky, but skims across the horizon making 10am & 3pm feel like 4pm in the afternoon. The sky never releases its wrath through thunder and lightning. The summers are too hot and the winter wet & windy. People warn me on the left is a ‘dodgy’ area but on the right is nice… the division being a single road. More homeless, poor and unemployed people than I have ever seen, sleeping on every street corner or the doorway of every shop, or begging at robots. No drive-ins. No parking. No space to make a road of a decent width! No decent roads. Litter everywhere that then gets blown around with the wind! No scrooges R9 breakfast. Fashion choices for men here is terrible… I long to spend just a day in a joburg shopping mall.

That brings me to shopping malls… capetonians think joburg sucks coz all we have are shopping malls and, ‘hey look another shopping mall!’ Well in my 1.5years in CT when I ask a capetonian out to do something, guess what the most commonly suggested idea is, after drinking…. yup coffee or a movie at a freaking mall.

I suppose it all just comes down to how people see the environment around them!!

But it still leaves me with a tough choice, do I stay or do I go!!

Coz seriously… suddenly as much as I could live without the world cup invading my life & my twitter timeline… i don’t want it to end becuase I know the traffic will go back to normal!!

I actually cannot wait for the World Cup to be over, then we will really be able to take stock of how much good it has done for SA. I also wonder if I should be stock piling food, due to supposed price increases, like many of my friends (those friends who are not leaving SA) are doing.

On a positive note, the fixing of our roads is awesome! High Five to SA for getting that sorted, but did we really need a world sport event to kick us into gear to fix the roads? What about all these flower beds and trees that have been planted in and on traffic islands through out the country. Who’s gonna continue to look after those or will the flowers just die, weeds grow between all the rocks and the trees grow so big that they actually become a problem.

Yes, I know I am being ridiculously positive about it all!! Actually you know what I am keen to see… the World Cup filmed in 3D!

The initiative is pretty simple and straight forward, setting up what effectively becomes very much like a mini green house but using 50% shade netting. It stands 2m high, 4m wide and 9m long and can be erected within 45minutes. The tents are then filled with veggies that with in 6 weeks, Heart Global claim, will feed approximate fifty people per month. By placing them at schools, aid organisations and the like they assist communities and children.

Not only are the Food Tents producing food and an income (via sales of the produce), but when used in schools they become a great educational tool for teaching children.

These days however those same images are reproduced in modern cinemas using Polarised light thus removing the annoying colour variations.

What is exciting however is setup side by side, these sorts of images can be viewed without the use of glasses, this technique called ‘free viewing’ gives you the exact same results simply by changing the way you look at these pictures.

Two methods exist Cross Eye and Parallel… I consider Cross Eye to be superior simply because Parallel has a major restriction, being restricted to images whose combined width is no wider than the distance between your eyes.

I went searching across the net to find such images and was delighted to find groups on flickr dedicated to this form of photography!

For help viewing these images, click here!

original piece

comparison footage

little behind the scenes

all done with this stuff

Have you started planning your summer holiday? The sooner the better… unless you’re thinking like me to work through the festive season and take your break end of feb! Rates will be a cheaper, places won’t be as packed with hordes of people! Why follow the trend!!

Yes yes I will shut up and get to it…time to reveal the results of the Winter ‘09 Hottest Girls Survey

1. Western Cape = 39%
2. Gauteng = 30%
3. KwaZulu-Natal = 11%
4. Free State = 9%
5. Eastern Cape = 7%
6. Mpumalanga = 4%

Limpopo, North West & Northern Cape were not even represented by a single vote!

So congrats to the Western Cape and runner up Gauteng! We will definitely have to pit the provinces against each other again after summer!