Hijackings in South Africa: Carjack City video

I realise I've been posting too many upbeat things on this blog, so here's a reality check I just stumbled across today.

It comes with a big disclaimer: a video like this will easily leave international visitors feeling as if South Africa is a war-zone, but it's simply not. There IS however a lot of crime, but with sensible precautions and a reasonable amount of luck you can easily live without ever coming into contact with any of it.

As proof of that, I'm 28 years old, have lived in Johannesburg for five years, and now living in Cape Town, and have never personally witnessed a car being hijacked. That being said, my first car *was* stolen out of my office parking lot in Johannesburg, but I was nowhere near it at the time and nobody saw it ... it just vanished.

Similarly, I've never been a victim of a house robbery, but places I've lived nearby have been broken into. The security arrangements where I live are definitely one of my top concerns now, and I pay more than I should on rentals just for that peace-of-mind.

You know what they say about statistics: there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. In this case I'd just ask you to put South Africa's crime figures into the context of the country's scale (we have 50 million people living here - over that probably if you count illegal immigrants) and poverty levels. I don't fear for my life every day and 90% of the time my decisions in life allow me to not have to ... other people, like those in this video, are not that fortunate.

How do we address this problem as a society and even international community? If you consider poverty on a global level, there should be a LOT more crime than there is: the fact that we can still all live relatively normal lives is actually an indicator that the majority of the world's poor people have managed to do the right thing and refuse the allure of crime. I have the deepest admiration for those people: being so poor that you cannot support your family, and yet refusing the easy ways out offered by crime shows a level of determination most people never recognise.

One criminal in the video above justifies his actions by talking about 'survival of the fittest', and that's not true. Being a criminal doesn't make you a better man than anybody else. But being a victim of crime doesn't either, nor does being an unthinking part of a capitalist system that marginalises more people than it uplifts.

This isn't going to just go away until we collectively find a sustainable manner of providing for society's most vulnerable. As for what we do about society's greediest - at all levels ... that's a thornier question. Maybe technology has a solution, and a moderated version of the Big Brother State - where the perpetrators of crime are immediately identified through monitoring and biometrics and held accountable - is the only alternative. Live in fear of Government or your fellow citizens: those are your options. Which do you choose?

I know I promised to not just Content Aggregate, but...

... oh please, just forgive me for posting the two most hilarious videos I've seen in a long time. You know, just to counter all the soppiness. And yes, to build off my last post, this is also part of what I like.

And yes, of course there's a second video:

Oh man, I've got serious carpet burns from ROFL in my mind.

Things I Like, Part Who's Counting Anymore?

I swear I'm getting sentimental in my old age - old age being almost 30 - but I'm starting to realise that who WE are is very much a compilation of everything we like. There's a lot of stuff that we like that we can change, or stop liking, or like even more, but sometimes some stuff will just always resonate with us.

That's what I want to share here, to brighten your day a little. Just look past the cheesy music to embrace the awesome humanity expressed in these videos:

1: Matt Harding's 2008 video:

2: Can it get better? Oh yes, it can. The 2012 video:

3: The full back-story ... click here.

PS: You're never going to enjoy it unless you watch all the way to the end, and see the little nuances. Like how Matt breaks the rigid dance moves in the first video, or where his wife and his kid join him in the second video.

I like this.

Cannot connect to WiFi network? That dreaded 'Cannot Connect' error!

Has your laptop suddenly started refusing to connect to your WiFi network? I've been struggling with this for about the past two weeks without having done anything different on my side ... just one day it was working, then it wasn't. Now I have the solution, and I just had to share!

[UPDATE: It's taken a few extra months but I have a new theory. Read it below.]

A quick Google (from my phone - doh) identified that the problem may be a faulty device driver update, which I'm guessing my laptop helpfully did in the background. The solution, on Windows 7, is just this easy:

Start -> Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Network Adapters -> [Select your wifi adapter] -> Driver Tab -> Roll Back Driver.

One click of that, and everything works like an absolute charm again - no reboot or anything needed. Just in case you'd like a visual cue, it looks like this:

Thank you for fixing my Internuts, Internuts!

UPDATE: 23 July 2014.
I can't tell you how many times I'd updated my Windows software, rebooted, adjusted the power settings, and all the other tricks in the book, before finally stumbling across an all-new solution which really seems to work. I've been using an Android cellphone as a mobile wifi hotspot, and I'd started to suspect that it was the root of both my and my wife's laptops being kicked off the internet and then not letting them back-on. The solution is as weird as it is simple: just unplug the cellphone from the charger! Don't ask me why, but this results in perfectly stable wifi connections. Plug it in again, and bang ... symptoms immediately re-emerge. So it probably is some power-related issue (genius deduction there), but I don't think there's been a how-to written online that explains it. At least now there's a solution, and hopefully it helps you too.

On Marketing and MOOCs

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll have noticed the recent updates to my blog. One of the reasons? I've been studying a free marketing course online through Coursera.

Yes, that's right - the blog now has a new tag-line (friendlier for Google), an About page (complete with e-mail subscription form), a cleaner design (hello white space) and a raft of other minor tweaks. Ok, so it's nothing that special, but it was just a natural side-effect of what's really a fascinating course: Introduction to Marketing

This happened to be my first Coursera course, but it won't be my last! I'm a third of the way through (this course is nine weeks long), and am finding it really fascinating. The lectures are all in video form, and the quality is good - presented by the University of Pennsylvania. Best of all? I took my first quiz last night, and scored 20/20 :D Hey hey ... if you can't brag just a little on your own blog, where can you????

Long story short, I recommend that you give the world of free education a spin. It turns out that there is a surprising range of quality courses available for free, a robust student interaction on the courses' dedicated online forums, certificates to track your achievements (and even list on your CV if you want), and in Coursera's case a biometrically-linked Signature Track they keep trying to sell you for $50 (but which isn't mandatory) which helps to prove that it really was you who took the course (opinion is still divided over whether this is of any value to employers).

My favourite quote about studying: "Reading is how humans install software into their brains." That's so true, and if it can benefit your job - and many of those courses can - then so much the better!

Back to the start, what do you think of the blog updates I've made?

South African Elections 2014: Reflections on 20 years of democracy

For my international readers who might not know, Wednesday (May 7) marks South Africa's next national elections. It's particularly poignant considering that it's 20 years after the country's first democratic elections in 1994, and this is going to be our fifth election since then.

What else makes this special? Well, it will be the first South African elections without Nelson Mandela alive - and being shamelessly used in electioneering by the ANC. It will be the first democratic election where South Africans have been quite as disillusioned by the ruling party ... name your controversy and we've had it recently. The president's Nkandla scandal, e-Tolling in Gauteng, our first rolling electricity blackouts in years only a recent memory, the unfortunate rise of Julius Malema as a political force ... you name it, we have it.

Then you have the 'everyday' South African headaches: rising unemployment, lowering education standards, continuing racial tensions (stoked by Black Economic Empowerment employment policies and various politicians' calls for nationalisation and increased distribution of white-owned assets), the constantly moving crime target, corruption scandals and general maladministration.

On the one hand everybody feels quite sure that the ANC won't do as well in the next election as they'll be hoping - at least by enough to again stave off their getting a sufficient Parliamentary majority to make unilateral changes to our Constitution. It is clear that more and more former ANC voters are finally getting disillusioned: 20 years IS an awful long time to hold onto flaky electioneering promises, and Nelson Mandela has passed on and therefore the insult to him won't be as bad if you vote against HIS party.

On the other hand, however, all of the above isn't exactly the great news that it really should be for South African opposition parties. Consider, for example, that the general consensus is that while the ANC will be losing voters, those voters aren't all going to be rushing en masse to South Africa's largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. Still plagued by being overly 'white' - and still headed up by an elderly white lady who every so often tries to dance on public stages like a black woman, with embarrassing results - the DA isn't the home that it should be for these black voters.

Rather, they're coalescing around other more radical parties, not afraid to make the very same unreal campaign promises the ANC made at the start - and still makes half-heartedly at least every four years. You know the types: more jobs (even the DA is harping on that tune ironically), more wealth (they're vague on how), and ... well, that's about it really. The most radical of these is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and their entire policy is summed up in their name. They're fighting to divide by zero.

For once white South African voters aren't sure whether they'd rather see black voters leave the ANC for the EFF, thereby strengthening the 'opposition' on paper, or stay within the ANC's docile grip! Making it even worse, there's talk about the DA and EFF even considering a partnership in South Africa's province of Gauteng, which would be a massive sell-out to voters for both parties but maybe a Good Thing in the long run (if the back-room squabbling could ever be sorted out). Bearing in mind that the EFF's leader is being tried for tax evasion, and you REALLY don't want a political alliance with the guy ... especially because he's widely quoted as saying he's not against white people, he just wants their hard-earned money equally distributed.

Welcome to South Africa, twenty years on. We're still here, barring what the naysayers thought as they fled overseas in 1994 and later years. Many of us have done relatively ok, others have done a little worse, and really nobody can say that life here is definitively worse or better than in any other country in the world. At least it's not North Korea, or Ukraine, or the Sudan. The only concern, however, is that we don't have any dream that following the elections on Wednesday, we're going to have our 'Obama' moment and everything will be amazing.

There is NO party I as an educated and middle-class South African voter want to vote for, and I'm not alone. Nobody out there is really representing ME or anybody like me (and even those poorer voters who are being 'represented' aren't necessarily being represented in their best interests). The politicians are either corrupt, ignorant or just plain out of touch - and sometimes a combination of the three. South Africa has issues to solve, and nobody to solve them ... yet we're all going to take a day off work (that's the positive side, isn't it?) and dutifully stand in a long queue to make a cross for a party we reckon will be the best of bad options. This isn't the first time, nor the last.

I AM South African. It's just a pity that after 20 years we're not so much Proudly South African any more as Sadly South African, or maybe - slightly more optimistically - Hopefully South African. Here's to the next 20 years, assuming we get that much.

Country Vibes, Anyone?

If you're anything like me, it's a rare joy discovering something beautiful in a world which is increasingly dominated by negative emotions. This blog, to a large extent, is my Happy Place, and you're invited. Here's my latest discovery, after I successfully googled the lyrics I heard and loved as a backing track in a TV series:

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Home

On the topic of songs about 'home', here's a chance to share a Proudly South African song: Michael Lowman's Crayon Boxes:

Now all the best songs have a moment which links to our lives, and the one above has a cool True Story for me. One afternoon while collecting my wife from work, that song was playing on my car's radio. The very second my finger hovered over 'Home' on my GPS to select it, the lyrics burst in ... "All we need is love, and a place to call home." Poignant? Why yes.