Ice Skating
Well it’s Monday morning after Easter and I have slept late and now thinking of getting up (well I have been reading blogs for an hour while laying in bed, laptops are so cool). Because of South Africa’s public holiday law, if the public holiday falls on a Sunday, then the Monday will be a non work day. So that is why I am not at work currently. I really think it is a good rule, cause then you don’t lose out on the holiday, but man is it difficult to implement in code. I had to write a public holiday dll when I was still programming a couple of years ago and there were a lot of rules to build in. When I was finished the thing was bullet proof. It could even calculate Easter based on some moon phases which I can no longer remember. My boss said “Just create a table, we will populate it annually”, but once I was finished I could calculate the entire years public holidays for any specific year in a split second. So my boss wanted to use my dll to populate his table. I think I created a database layer component which simply read from my dll instead of a table, then he was happy :-)
Well I tried the ice skating thing last night again and had absolutly no success. I did manage to get up some speed after a friend and his girlfriend grabbed me by the hands (I protested a huge amount but they insisted), and dragged me into the middle of the rink. It was quite exhilerating but I realised I have a fear of not being able to stop. The evening came to an end when this same friend hit a rut in the ice and went flying into the barrier slicing his elbow open. He is from Germany and his girlfriend is from Spain and they are here in South Africa on holiday so they are really disappointed that he can’t drive properly now. This is where I really enjoy myself though. God has created me as a servant to His people and I really enjoy helping people. So I sat with my friends at the hospital while He was getting stitches (10 internal and 17 external, must be some kind of record 
) and then escorted them home because his girlfriend is very nervous driving on the left hand side of the road (at midnight as well). One thing about driving in South Africa, if you can avoid it, do. There are thousands of unroadworthy vehicles and drivers who have no idea about driving on the road. As an example, for 2006 there were 3 568 road fatalities in the first 4 months of the year. Some countries are outraged by 100 fatalities in an entire year.
Then when I got home I started reading some blogs and found out that Microsoft was dead. It’s been a long time coming I suppose. Google really is trying to take over the world, (Master plan at http://earth.google.com ). I just find Google really innovative in their ideas, products they provide their customers are really great, I mean look at gmail. I have about 95 email addresses. Every time I sign up for a newsletter or at a website that requires an email address, I create one on my domain which is an alias to my gmail account. If that company then sends me spam or sells my address, I simply complain to them and notify them that their address will be deleted and they will no longer be able to contact me.
I stopped using outlook and couple of years ago when gmail came out. The gmail application is faster than outlook even though it runs over the web. And the search capabilities are easy to use and fast. I can also access my gmail from where ever I am (except work now they have decided to block gmail access 
) and never have to worry about trying to get hold of that important email thats at home in my outlook inbox.
Here is an idea, if you have never tried Gmail and would like to test it out, the first ten people that ask via comments, I will send an invite to. Drop a comment saying you would like a gmail invite, then mail your email address to me at jmr#jmrpub*com (#=@, *=.) I will then invite you to subscribe to gmail. If you are not one of the first 10 then you will still be able to join, simply go to http://www.gmail.com and look for their sms me an invite offer (only available to the US and I think Canada). For the UK I think you can go to www.googlemail.com and sign up there. When you email me also tell me whether you are interested in receiving mail from me regarding some offers I am currently working on at the moment. To give you an idea, my current project is setting up a marketing course which will help you learn to market your website or products mostly online but some offline marketing as well. I will definately post when it is completed and link from my blog to the course but people on my email list will get it first, so just tell me, opt-in to offers or opt-out to offers. No mention of offers in your mail will be consodered an opt-out (ie. you are not interested in marketing your blog/website for more traffic and increased profits).
Even if you are not interested in gmail but want to opt-in, then mail me and tell me, no gmail but opt-in to offers. No opt-ins or outs will be taken from the comments.
Well I guess it’s time to get going for the day, hoping to finish a huge chunk of renovation stuff and then tonight might be an ice skating night again, hopefully I make more progress.
l8r, JMR
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April 9th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Nice post, sorry to hear about your friend
I as always will be interested in learning more about marketing
As always loving the blog, enjoy your day!
All the best at the ice skating!
Francois.