08.31.06
Posted in Personal at 1:54 pm by Christine
Last night Joey and I attended the first Geek dinner which was held at Relish. I was a bit sceptical as to how many people would attend, as Cape Town is (in)famous for the RSVP guest list that never shows up.
I was happily surprised to see that almost everyone that was on the wiki did in fact attend. There was close on about 60 people and many familiar faces from BarCamp.
Of course, since BarCamp we’ve all pretty much been following everyone else’s blog, so meeting up last night was like meeting up with close-nit friends in a way.
Graham Knox of Stormhoek was holding the fort once again with a good supply of Stormhoek wines to keep the conversations flowing as abundantly as the wine. He had brought with him the Merlot, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and the award winning Pinotage. Sadly, I did not get to savour the Pinotage; as to be expected it was quickly lapped up by all who spotted it.
The proceedings went very smoothly under Dave’s watchful eye. I really enjoyed Jon Cherry’s talk and it was good to meet the face behind Cherry Flava. Mike Stopforth (who’m I also met last night for the first time) presented an interesting talk, and Dave managed to convince Rafiq to share a Kahlil Gibran like insight.
After a mighty good dinner, the wines evaporated, the conversations reached crescendo, people exchanged business cards and all said farewell until the next Geek event 
PS: I was informed by a few people that my blog sometimes gives trouble when trying to comment, so I’ve tweaked it a bit, and you should now be able to comment again!
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08.29.06
Posted in General at 4:03 pm by Christine
With the recent controversy of Google complaining that “google” may no longer be used as a verb Yahoo! have eagerly jumped on the band wagon and opened its brand to consumer input. Why would Google want to relinquish the “power of their brand”? Once upon a time they revelled as their mark entered the general consumer lexicon. Then again, perhaps they are now afraid that what happened to “Hoover”, “Kleenex” and “Xerox” may happen to “Google” with excess usage. Not only that, but it becomes a trademark concern. With excess use and association the trademark law says that you have to show an effort to protect your mark, or you can lose it and that is why Google are reacting to anyone currently using Google as a verb.
Google Spreadsheets – was loving this until one of my spreadsheets crashed and all the data was lost. I probably would not have been as upset as I am had it not been my entire wedding planner including all contact details of service providers, budgets and the guestlist! Thank goodness the people at Google are quite compassionate as they replied to my plight and would have been able to retrieve the document – unfortunately a week after I had already luckily managed to gather up all the information and recreate the spreadsheet. Now I backup a “hardcopy” (well I download the XLS version) religiously whenever I make changes.
Google Apps for your Domain – Officially launched yesterday. This potentially brings us closer to the ever elusive Google OS. Although not a “giant leap for apps”, the current available Apps are very basic but a great suite as an option for start-ups. In Google’s words: “Offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization’s website, too. It’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.”
Picassa – You may have noticed that our Durban photos are in Google’s Picassa app. I thought Flickr was slow, but I’ve been really disappointed with Picassa in terms of speed. I found that browsing the photos individually was much faster than attempting to browse the slideshow.
GTalk updates – Gtalk now offers file transfer, music status and voicemail.
Google Base now offers “copywriting analytics” to display impressions, clicks, and page views. I really like this, as it’s a great way to track the effectiveness of your articles.
Blotter is a new interesting gadget for gauging blog popularity. Blotter graphs link stats over time based on Technorati data.
This is quite a cool little gadget I came across on Yahoo! called Yahoo Real Estate. As part of its recent update you can now find up-to-date local mortgage rate information directly within web search. This service is currently only available in the US, although for South Africans I’ve recently found a very similar local South African mortgage calculator that is very similar to this. Just search for your property and you’ll find it when you view the listing itself.
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08.22.06
Posted in Personal at 10:54 am by Christine
It was not too long ago that we had the first BarCamp Cape Town.
In a similar vein Joey and I will be attending our first Geek Dinner for SA Bloggers next week which is sponsored by Stormhoek.
There are already a few familiar people on the list. Mostly its the same people we met at BarCamp and hopefully a few new faces will join us as word gets around. Don’t worry if you’re not a “geek” (actually if this interests you then you are a geek ) or a “newbie” to this concept. We’re all mostly friendly and some people have already said that they’re only attending for the food, and others for the free wine So put on your Geek hat and join us at Relish next Wednesday.
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