Life, the universe and everything - Technical Ambitions

I was fortunate enough to be able to see Antonio Forcione (guitar player of note) in Kalkbay this month. The concert was held in the Olympia bakery and it was quite a show. The setting lent itself quite nicely to a rather intimate show and the other two guitarists, Tony Cox and Saudiq Kahn were ofcourse exceptional as usual. Tony is an excellent story teller and makes everything an interesting experience, Saudiq plays extremely nicely and the guitar he had sounded so phenomenal BUT then, enter Antonio Forcione.

If you ever get a chance to see Antonio Forcione live and in concert, beg, borrow or steal the money for the entrance fee and you will see the show of your life. Apart from being a bit eccentric, I have never seen a more impressive display and guitar mastery in my entire life. I never even knew people who had such talent existed. My styles I have always admired are Merle Travis, Tom Bresch, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Buster B, Marcel Dadi and most recently a gentlemen called
Bruce Keener. However these gentlemen all have a style that sounds pretty impressive and even have some speedy fingering which will blow your mind. Take for example Jerry's Breakdown. Man awesome stuff and difficult as hell. However, enter Antonio Forcione....

I caught myself on numerous occasions counting his fingers to see whether he really only has 10 fingers. Man he utilizes every inch of his guitar and his fingers, hands, palms, back of his fingers in the bass slides (finger under the bass string) and playing like a double bass while all the time keeping rythm by playing the front, back and sides of his guitar and still playing the melody by using harmonics, slides, hammer ons, pullofs and literally any trick you have ever seen in the books or on the net. It is all there. Fingerpicking, blues, rock, flamenco and he seems to have mastered them all.

He will think nothing of stopping a tune because his guitar is slightly out of tune, fix the tuning and then restart. The crowd was so mesmerized that they did not even notice these slight little things. They sat at the edge of their seats and they were listening intently to every little note or sound in some cases that was coming out of that guitar. I have never seen a guitar take such abuse and yet produce such sweet sounds.

I can truly say that it changed forever the way I will look at or think about a guitar.

Do yourself a favor and try to experience first hand the experience that is Antonio Forcione. If you like guitar music in any form you will not be sorry.

This must have been the most enjoyable book I have ever read. I think in part it might be due to the fact that the way James seems to handle life resonates with some sort of chord that resonates in my life as well.

This must be the book that has touched me the most and in some way I think it is due to some of the raw emotions that James puts forward when dealing with his country of origin. The woes of the poor people in that country make me look at my own country and I am busy trying to figure out how it is that I can make a difference in my world.

I can truly recommend James Caan - The Real deal.

I could not put this book down and read it in one evening. It is captivating and the knowledge that James has regarding staffing and recruitment means that his next book on how to find the best job coming out in Jan 2011 shoud be just as excellent a read.

According to a very interesting bit of research that I read a few days ago, it seems that advertisements that feature a QR Code or almost 60% more likely to be clicked than normal ads that have text or just a picture.

It seems that the newness of this QR Code technology is a reason that most people are scanning these QR Codes in ads etc.

Apparently the group (cant remember who they were, sorry) created ads that incorporated QR Codes in their pictures banner ads and they had a hit counter attached to the QR Code so that they could measure how many people viewed the ad compared to other ads on the page.

http://deeptechnology.co.za

Once again I have sunk my teeth into something, this time something so awesome that it gives me sleepless nights due to the excitement and thinking about the whole business every waking moment.

SO what is it that excites me so much? This time around it is affordable housing. My partner John Newman from Deep Technology, (Diverse Energy Efficient Projects) has for a number of years held a number of patents, one of them being a design patent on a modular house that is set to change the way people build homes in the future. Once we have some decent pictures I will place them online for your viewing pleasure.

SO whats so exciting about this project? Firstly the house is cast out of a number of pieces and put together in a short six to 8 hours. The cast sections are transported to the site where using some ingenious designed tools the pieces are put together and voila you have a house up in no time at all.

Take note that we are not talking low-cost housing here, we are talking affordable housing meaning normal average guys such as myself will be able to afford a home at last.

The average house nowadays requires that the family (husband and wife) earn around R59 000 combined income to qualify for a bond. This then affords the couple a modest size house (example in Victoria park 49 square meters Costing R790 000) What on earth can one do with 49 square meters?

The houses we are making will give you a minimum of 75 meters squared and allowing the owner to build on 1.8 meters x 5 meters sections at a time. This effectively offers you the ability to resize your home in next to no time at all.

So YES, I am all excited and will keep you up to date as to how the whole story pans out.

Take just one little consideration here. An average house costs you R1 200 000 currently and you can rent that house out for around R5000 maximum, of course depending on the area where the house is situated, now for a fraction of that cost you can purchase a house and still get the same amount of rent out than you normally would on the expensive houses.

The nicest part of all is that everybody needs this commodity. Even you do! Think about it, soon you too might be staying in one of these homes.

Too exciting for words.

Look for more information - coming soon at http://deeptechnology.co.za

The one problem with the HTC Desire so far for me is that every now and then one installs an application that does somethig weird to the magnetometer or even more weird to the nice pinch to resize in the browsers etc.
I have over 1000 plus contacts which were easily transferrable to my HTC Desire from the Nokia E90 I had before. (Select all and send business card via bluetooth. It takes a while but they all go across in a few minutes.)

However, I have had to reset the HTC Desire a few times now in order to get certain functionality back such as pinch resize or the HTC Desire magnetometer that goes awry.

SO this is my process now. I exported all my contacts to my gmail account contacts list. Its quite easy actually:
You go to the "people" widget on the HTC and then you "Export" / Export to SD Card / Choose the Phone choice and it will create a VCF card with all your contacts in it.

Connect the HTC Desire to your PC via the USB cable, so that you can get to the .VCF card that was just created.

Log into your gmail account and click on the contacts menu choice on the left side. Choose the "Import" menu choice at the top right of the contacts list now and select the .VCF and press Import. This will load all those contacts into your Contact list in Gmail and the next time you reset your phone and you resync with Google all your contacts will be then available again on your HTC Desire.

Have fun. It is the most awesome phone I have ever had and I will not go back to Nokia, iphone or anything else I dont think. I find it hard to believe that something better is still going to come out one of these years. I am extremely excited to see what is going to happen in the mobile arena in the next few years. If the HTC Desire is anything to go by, then we will have wonderful phones in the future.

Around 6 years ago I was in the Netherlands still and had lived and worked there for 5 years or so. I had a great time but there were things that got to me as I wrote about in the book which is also on this blog at Living in Europe sucks.


As I was laying on my bed one night it was in the
sweltering heat so I opened up the window and was just
looking out into the dark thinking about the future
when this came to mind. It must have been weighing
heavily on my mind that night because since then I have
thought about anything again with such intensity. (well
enough intensity to write a poem about it)


I am sitting at my window,
looking out into the night.
My heart is filled with fear,
as I contemplate my plight.

My future is the trouble,
the present is a blast,
my major problem now is,
I am longing for my past.

A fantastic paying job,
I am living in a bubble,
the only problem that I feel,
my past is still my trouble.

There are three in this equation,
my small child and my wife,
and of course there's me,
as I contemplate my life.

After long deliberation,
I come to some conclusions,
I realise that my future,
must be my past without illusions.

So now I have decided,
just what I will do next,
forget the past, embrace the future
and start by finishing off this text.

Forgiving somebody some transgression against you is the best medicine you can ever give yourself.

Having an unforgiving nature will make you sick. In the long term it can cause serious illness.

God is willing to forgive you if you ask Him to forgive you for anything, this means that you have to be able to forgive or He will not forgive you.

This is evident from the parable that Jesus told.

Matt 18 verses 23 to 35 Therefore the Kingdom of Heaven is like a certain king, who wanted to reconcile accounts with his servants. When he had begun to reconcile, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. But because he couldn’t pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, with his wife, his children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and kneeled before him, saying, ‘Lord, have patience with me, and I will repay you all!’ The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. “But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow servants, who owed him one hundred denarii, and he grabbed him, and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ “So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will repay you!’ He would not, but went and cast him into prison, until he should pay back that which was due. So when his fellow servants saw what was done, they were exceedingly sorry, and came and told to their lord all that was done. Then his lord called him in, and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt, because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?’ His lord was angry, and delivered him to the tormentors, until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don’t each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds.”

So forgive others or God might deliver you to the tormentors and this is where you can get seriously ill and many bad things could happen to you. FORGIVE, it is for your own health and benefit. Most of the times people who you feel have transgressed against you, are not even aware that they have done so. Dont hold anything against anyone else as it is a waste of time. Dont forget, lest you make the same mistake twice but most definitely you should forgive.

I never thought that personal branding had any place in the little mans world. However it seems I have been purely mistaken. When starting out with my internet endeavours I thought about it for around 5 seconds and decided to sign everything I do with johnkweber. This I did mostly because I was not really sure of any other cool name to use.

So I started this branding image type thingy and soon found out that if you use a name often enough people will start reffering to you by that specific name (in this case BRAND) so even at work to most of my colleagues I am now johnkweber (spelt more like john kweeber) I dont really mind since I started it all but there are exceptions when branding can do damage as shown below. Specifically mistakes made by others.

In hindsight I guess it turned out ok because the is only really one johnkweber that uses it the way I do. The flipside ofcourse is the problem that I have currently with Google syndicating news articles. Around 1989 there was an article in a newspaper in USA somewhere regarding a certain John R Weber that allegedly raped and murdered his wife Emily Weber. Google seems to have done a scan of the page and the OCR was performed incorrectly and suddenly John R Weber now becomes John K Weber.

This proves to be quite a nightmare to fix since ater having searched in Goolge for johnkweber as I usually do once a week at least (to thank people that have mentioned me in their blogs etc) I saw this article that goes "John K Weber rapes and murders his wife Emily Weber"

In my endeavour to get this fauxpas fixed up I chatted to Google a number of times and it moved the article to the very first page on the google search for johnkweber. This due to the fact that the answers and arguments are open for everyone to see on google answers. DAMN.

Be that as it may I went to JHB to talk to a number of guys about a security product I was punting and when they did a MEMEX search on my name (checking if I was who I say I was) it turned out the Memex took the Google article as its main tagline since it scored so high in Google Ranking that it must be me and nobody else. Try explaining this whole scenario to non internet type people. Man what a time I had. Anyway they all seemed to end up seeing the light and now at least I have documented in one more place (this blog entry) what the real story is.

So when thinking up brand names be careful what you wish for as weird things crawl out of the woodwork when you start owning something, even a name.

Scrum and Agile are two buzzwords that currently rank high on the list of technical jargon. Awesome ideas and methodologies which can seriously enhance the way your staff delivers products, which when implemented wrong could be the biggest mistake you have ever made within your company.

The thought behind Agile is that staff members self manage and self motivate themselves to get products off the shelf. An Agile team basically sets itself up with the mandate to get work out the door. The fact that the project is self managed within the team means that you have an awesome bunch of people that are highly skilled but even more important, highly motivated which are now engaged with what they are doing and therefore churn out amazing results and therefore excellent products.

Scrum masters on the other hand are not managers at all but motivators and their only goal in life should be to assist the team to ensure that there is nothing impeding them to do the best work that they can achieve. So when Scrum masters start saying which work will be done and how long it wil take, then you start facing the problem that once again the team member actually doing the work is not in charge of his own life or surroundings, we all know how detrimental that could be to the IT developer type guy. Don't tell me what to do, then tell me how to do it and then to top it all tell me by when I must do it.

These thoughts have come to mind whilst reading another good book called "Why work sucks and how to fix it - Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson" The book website and Purchase from Amazon

The book describes a way to work called a ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) where every person is captain of his or her own ship. This means that your time is your own, your way of working is your own. You decide how, when and where you wil work. You still work (maybe harder now than ever) because suddenly just being at the office for 40 hours is not what you are being measured on, you now need to produce results that are directly measurable. Meaning this : No results, no job.

I suggest it as an excellent way to start working. Managers, change the way you measure your staff input. Make them excited to go to work for a change. Allow the staff to give you the best hours that they can. Not everyone works well from 8 to 5. Rather let the guy or girl who works best from 22h00 till 04h00 give you excellent results than let them just be in the office from 08h00 till 17h00 and not produce quality. It seems like a no brainer to me.

I am excited about this new year as it promises great things. Enjoy 2010