My son, not yet four, was invited to a party at McDonalds recently. Now McDonalds as a brand for me sits about as low as you can go. Rainforest destruction? Yep. Extremely unhealthy food? Oh yes. General environmental havoc? Of course. Exploitative working conditions? Goes without saying. Unethical advertising. Yup. So why would someone actually… Continue reading Happy food

The City of Cape Town has launched the Southern Line Tourism Route, which runs along the Southern Suburbs train line. Tourists can hop off at any of six touristy stations – Cape Town, Newlands, Muizenberg, Kalk Bay, Simon’s Town… and Observatory, where I live. I think this is a fantastic idea, and gives us a… Continue reading The Observatory Tourism Route

My list of topics to blog about, just as my list of things to experience in life, is always growing, and I’m always trailing far behind. Which is how it should be. I can’t imagine anything worse than having nothing left to do! I would love to blog more about green topics – there is… Continue reading Rise of the green bloggers

One the social networking sites I recently made use of for the first time is Couchsurfing. The concept is simple. If you’re a traveller, you can meet up with people from the city you’re visiting. Some of them may even offer you a couch for a few nights. People can review what previous visitors/hosts had… Continue reading There’s a stranger on my couch

I got back from the 27 dinner at Relish about half an hour ago. I would have dived right into posting, except for a minor delay in sending a couple of scathing emails to Trafalgar for spamming me. I’m a client of theirs. I don’t expect junk mail. OK, well maybe that’s not quite true.… Continue reading Hot and sweaty 27-8 dinner

Bidding for Wikimania 2008 opened on the 20th. I was very disappointed to miss the recent Wikimania 2007 in Taipei, and not to get a chance to put test my Mandarin to the test, although perhaps relief applies more in the case of the Mandarin. However, a combination of the strike delaying my passport, and… Continue reading Wikimania 2008 in Cape Town?

Thabo Mbeki’s firing of Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge has been the biggest news in local politics since, well, Mbeki’s firing of Jacob Zuma. In all the superficial and simplistic good-bad noise about the event, there’re a few important things that haven’t been said. Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Thabo Mbeki are about as close as two colleagues… Continue reading Murder and mayhem in the firing of Madlala-Routledge

Thursday’s GeekDinner was enjoyable, and as always, some of the best conversation happened outside of the official talks. It was also great to see quite a few new faces, and a growing (although this may just have been the subset I encountered) Ruby presence. Some of the more regular event bloggers weren’t there (Neil and… Continue reading July 2007 GeekDinner

Laurence of Commentary has written two quite interesting pieces on environmentalism and technology (Let’s do the time warp and What’s wrong with technological solutions). Both pieces are worth responding to. Unfortunately, they’ve also attracted the usual utterly idiotic comments. For example, in response to the earlier piece, Colin Pretorius writes I have no time for… Continue reading Technology and the environment