Monthly Archives: March 2008

Awesome service: Silver Thread Interiors

It is always nice to come across companies in South Africa which go out of their way to provide exceptional service at reasonable prices. After moving into our new house, we required blinds as well as curtains – while you might believe this should be a trivial task – don’t fool yourself.

Sevens was not interested in sending someone out for measurements, unless we come into the store and commit on selecting fabrics first. A “decor” company in Broadacres sent someone out to measure and provided us a quote equivalent to the annual budget of a small african country.

It was refreshing to come across Silver Thread Interiors in Fourways Crossing. The team came out to measure sizes for blinds and curtains, provided valuable recommendations and delivered within a few hours quotes which did not break the bank.

The wooden ventian blinds are custom-made and fitted and the installation team managed to install all blinds in eight rooms in just under 2 hours. No mess either, since they considerately used a vacuum cleaner to catch any dust while drilling. Over the weekend the custom made curtains and rails got installed – absolute fantastic quality and workmanship.

So if you are interested in excellent interior design service, contact Karrim Noorbhai on his mobile (+27 83 642 6515) or via email.



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PS3 playstation store receives makeover

Sony is finally doing something about their Playstation Network and the new PSN-store is scheduled to launch mid April:

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Emigrating overseas – educational system?

Now who says, that Australia, New Zealand or the UK is sooooo much better:

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Parenting 101: Take your kid to work

’nuff said:

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The Friday Picture: Jailbait

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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Sealedgame Heaven – WTF?

When you think you have seen it all, go and visit sealedgame.heavenforum.com.

What the fuck? I understand the concept of collecting shrink-wrapped comics or stamps or coins – but that there are actually people out there who collect shrink-wrapped games. But clearly there is a strong following of people spending in excess of EUR 4000,00 for games they will never play.

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Iraq explained

If you still have not figured out why the oil-price steadily increases and the large oil-companies still manage to make tens of billion of $$$ profit:

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PS3 2.20 firmware brings Blue-ray profile 2.0

Sony released 2.20 firmware today which includes Blu-ray Disc Profile 2.0 (known as “BD-LIVE”) Internet features and allow you to copy music and photos directly from PS3 to PSP.

BD-LIVE adds interactive features to films, like downloadable bonus scenes, shorts, trailers, subtitles, ringtones that can be sent to mobile phones, and images, as well as interactive movie-based games with online features.

Other features included:

  • Photos and music playlists can be copied directly from PS3 to PSP so you can listen to and view stuff on the go.
  • A new “Resume play” option will enable PS3 to start Blu-rays or DVDs at the point they were stopped, even if the disc was removed.
  • “Audio Output Device” will be a new Remote Play setting, so you can use the PSP as a remote control for music playing on PS3.
  • “Mosquito Noise Reduction” as an AV setting.
  • The Internet browser will allow for streaming video and view webpages more quickly, so hopefully no more sitting around waiting for those pictures of Heidi Montag to download from The Superficial.
  • Support for DivX and WMV videos larger than 2GB. All above board, we’re sure.
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Beta: Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 launched

The Ubuntu developers have just released Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) in beta.

Since the last release (7.10), Hardy Heron sports now:

  • Xorg 7.3 with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration
  • Kernel 2.6.24 which includes many performance improvements and enhancements
  • GNOME 2.22 with many new features and a significant performance boots
  • Firefox 3 beta 4 is bundled and replaces Firefox 2

More information and download details are available from Ubuntu’s Wikipedia.

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Hellkom – lost another customer

I decided to abort my Telkom-science project in the pursuit of getting broadband. Although I had an existing IBurst connection, I thought it would be most patriotic to use our nations broadband service provider. It is just a pity that Telkom does broadband really badly and half of their service-staff and installation teams seem to have no clue what is going on or how to provide customer service.

It is now 64 days after I applied and during that time Telkom did not (as promised) phone me to arrange an installation date. I have now decided to cancel my line installation and stick with IBurst – at least they could provide me with broadband service within 2 hours.

Find the history of this ordeal below:
2008-01-19: Allocated telephone number. Was told that line will be installed within 21 days.
2008-01-29: Phoned for status. Was told installation only available on 28th Feb. Asked to get higher priority.
2008-01-31: Phoned for status. Still end of February.
2008-02-05: Phoned for status. Contact number was missing. Install date 27th Feb. Complex seems to run on optic fibre, might require conversion fee. Spoke to Johann/Springs
2008-02-21: Phoned for status. Installation still on 27th Feb.
2008-02-27: Telkom installation team arrived un-announced. Installation team did not want to wait for 30 minutes and left.
Spoke to Andries (technician 082 373 7586) to arrange for installation on Saturday 1st March.
2008-03-01: Technician did not arrive. Spoke to 10219 and was told that installation will happen on 8th March. Phoned Andries and was told that he is on leave.
2008-03-05: Spoke to 10219 and reconfirmed that installation is on 8th March. Also confirmed that line will support ADSL. (Not given an answer, this can only be established once the line is installed)
2008-03-08: (8:30) Phoned to confirm installation for today. Engineer arrived at 9:00am – no line installed since he did not bring cabling. Got phone-call at 15:30 from head-office that engineer got denied access – confirmed with guardhouse and no-one from Telkom arrived.
2008-03-11: Spoke Johann/Springs and he will follow up.
2008-03-18: Spoke to Leon – still have not received any notification that cabling will be pulled through. Has been escalated as very important – will receive feedback within 4 hours.
2008-03-20: (12:25) Spoke to Mkangeli. Was told that this will be escalated again and I should receive a phone call with order installation by COB.

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