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I read the article that appeared on My Broadband and think it was a fair and equal representation of the situation of hosting in SA. SA Rocks is hosted locally but not necessarily because it is the best option. I chose to host it here because it is very tough to promote SA in the USA.

I must however comment on this situation, as the original article does. Here is my comment: “It costs me a R100 a month, at the least, to host SA Rocks locally, what a ball ache. Stupid local hosts, ripoffs, mo-fo’s.”

I feel like a Ho, I feel like I am being used and abused, but instead of them paying me, I am forking out the cash. I want to know, more substantially than an a single article, why it costs me, as a blogger, R100 to host here in SA? It is cheaper for me to be hosting 3 sites abroad than it is to host one blog.

Surely there is some sort of intelligent life out there in the world of hosts and service providers that can see the blogging boom occurring here in SA? Surely they can figure that quantity is massive and thus if the hosting price is dropped it might be beneficial in the long run? having 10 bloggers at R50 a month is better than one at R100 a month. Half those exorbitant price for a while, do a test and see what happens. In that test period, make it known to bloggers and webdesigners that this offer is on. Go on, I dare you, take a leap of faith and see what happens?

It takes on company to break the mold. The article at My Broadband sites a vicious circle of selfishness (in my opinion) that perpetuates this situation. Why doesn’t one hosting company/service provided try something new and see what happens, you can afford it, I’m sure!

Ruda Landman is leaving Carte Blanche according to an Iol story. I am not saddened by this. She is an incredible investigative journalist and business woman, but it has been 19 years that she has been a part of the show. Hopefully the show will not suffer but will carry on with some fresh blood.

Carte Blanche needs to take this opportunity to redesign, re-align and refocus their goals and ambitions for the next 19 years without Ruda.

I hope that wherever Ruda goes she goes well and is successful, but thank goodness she is leaving Carte Blanche. Now, anyone got any ideas for Derek?

I love checking out tag clouds. I try to decipher obscure sentences out of them. I do this extremely often and find some hilarious stuff. Occasionally sentences are glaringly obvious and occasional they are somewhat obscure. I’ve been waiting for the right time to start this thread of posts. Recently my tag cloud perusing has been focused on Amatomu so I am sticking with that. The perfect time and sentence didn’t really show itself so I have chosen the first semi sort of sentence to kick off this thread!

I threw in a comma in this sentence to make it slightly more clear.

If you stumble across any tag cloud sentences from Amatomu please send them through to me (nharalambous@gmail.com)! Thanks!

Now maybe I am making a bigger deal out of this than I should. But imagine you went to register one of your sites on MyBlogLog and you were told the following:

Any advice from anywhere would be welcome. Chillibean, got anything?

The 27 Dinner

I love the 27 Dinners. The most spoken words of the evening must be “I need to talk to you,” or “We should really talk.”

I am not going to post in detail about things as I am sure many other bloggers are planning it, when that happens I will point my readers to their posts and everyone will be happy.

Update: There are other bloggers who have said it better than I could’ve: Carly, Tyler, Matt, Groogle, Vincent, Chillibean and just for sympathy read Mike’s post 27 post.

My speech apparently went well, people cheered, some laughed with me, others cried but all in all a good response!

The Police

I ended up leaving the dinner at about 1 am last night. That was fine, but then as I turn left on to the highway to get to rivonia, BAM, the cops. Now I honestly did not think that I was over the limit in any way shape or form. Alas, apparently I was. Here is my list of things to do when being stopped by the cops:

• Be Sober (no shit)
• Don’t be drunk (no shit)
• Don’t talk too much, they’ll know you’re covering it up
• Don’t talk too little, they’ll know you’re covering it up
• Have your license ready.
• After breathaliser test, ask to see the reading yourself (I did not)
• Make sure your ID disk on the car is dated correctly
• MAKE SURE YOU HAVE AT LEAST R40 IN YOUR POCKET

Now, that last point might be incredibly strange to overseas people, but last night it save my butt. After a serious amount of persuasion attempts and offers to get the cop AWAY from a “spot fine” I gave up, there was no way he was taking me to jail, there was no way he was writing me a ticket and there was no way that he was letting me go without some compensation for his hard work.

Lets just say the rest worked itself out, he gave me some drinking advice, “You must eat while you drinking, its much safer like that,” said the wonderful cop. Thanks Mr. Cop-man you’re a gem.

Next 27 Dinner, lets leave before 1am and miss the cops. It’ll save me a lot of trauma.

It is almost that time again. The 27 Dinner!

With about an hour to go, my ’speech’ is still semi-complete and in a bit of a shambles, but I am hoping things will come together. After the Cape Town reviews one needs to be somewhat careful about talking at a 27 dinner. It’s also not like the crowd is small. With over 100 people registered for the event there is much to be concerned about.

I am simply going to try to keep things short, sweet and effective. I am also hoping to capture the crowds with my dazzling wit and incredible looks (uhu).

If you are one of the lucky people attending I will see you there. As Mike mentioned in his post today, I am the dude with lots of facial hair and mostly likely to be sitting by the bar if there is one! Lets hope SA Rocks goes down well.

I recently conducted a Google search for a site that I own (wont mention it, thats not the point of the post). One of the top results, top 5, was for a user on MyBlogLog who claims that he/she owns and runs the site.

Amazed, intrigued and a bit shocked I hopped on over to the profile for one Hecubus. This user has “laid claim” to about 200 websites. One of these sites is mine, however there are much, much more interesting sites that this user claims to own or run, including: Starbucks.com, Xbox.com, blog.myspace.com and xanga.com.

What is this about? I am somewhat confused and a little concerned. Is this some sort of website url fraud? Is this some sort of hacking or simply a “slight of hand” that I have missed?

Now we all know that Teazers is around, and we have probably all heard about the extremely intelligent and entrepreurial Lolly Jackson. However I do think that a LARGE part of the Teazers income is generated by the mail genetic structure and occasionally pure drunken stupidity.

Teazerz Rivonia, Case in point:

A friend of mine sent me this link a few minutes ago. This guy is mind-blowingly-unbelievable-incredible-brilliant at what he does. And what he does is play the acoustic guitar. I don’t need to say any more, his guitar does all the talking.

This video is of Andy playing Africa - Toto.

For fun, check out another video by Andy!

I have just launched a competition at SA Rocks.

Design a new SA Rocks badge and win a South African Rugby Jersey in time for the Rugby World Cup!

If you feel like sponsoring or offering any other prizes please feel free to email me at editor@sarocks.co.za.

Get on over to SA Rocks to check out the specs and the contact details.

Wow, I just saw an advert for both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Now I am an Xbox fan myself (yes, yes Microsoft and all that) so I am a bit bias. But be serious here for a second and look at the price difference between the two systems. This is ridiculous. Any day of the week I will choose a cheaper system with as much to offer as the more expensive system.

This is an incredible “pocumentary” [possible documentary] about what Google could be doing, might be watching and is using to make the entire human race transparent. No secrets from anyone, at all, ever. Scary, but possible.

I have featured Demetri as a Fresh Faced Comic before on this blog. I decided that he needs to be featured more often, so here is, ever funny, every present guitar. Awesome.