I’ve just seen a post referring to South African Roadhogs. What a load of hogwash.

Did the people that post on this site ever think why the person, they are claiming to be a road hog, behaved the way they did? Where this motorist posing the complaint “hogging” the fast lane maybe, causing the driver to speed past on the left and offend them? As my favorite bumper sticker say: “My driving wouldn’t have offended you if you kept left.”

I think that motorist is a very appropriate term, cause most people on the road are sure as heck not drivers. I will agree that many minibus taxi drivers should be taken off the road, but some of the time they are right. Take the N2 in Cape town for an example. I drive from town towards the airport every morning. I’ve seen many motorists freak out at taxi’s driving up their butt. But then these people are doing 100km/h in the fast lane. If you are not going to keep left, pass right then you deserve the taxi on your butt. These guys drive for a living. I can understand their frustrations. I’m not talking about the guys speeding down the yellow line in rush hour, they are just plain idiots.

Our government should stop wasting time on speed traps. Get those officers to have more roadblocks. Get the unroadworthy and unlicensed drivers and cars off the road. If we spend more time teaching people to drive and not just keeping a car in the road, we’ll have much less people complaining about other people’s driving. See my other post referring to K53….

I don’t want to be another empty bucket rattling away, so here are some suggestions:

* Just a simple thing of keeping left, passing right will go a long way towards reducing road rage.

* Forget speeding fines. That’s treating a symptom. Start at the root and teach people to drive and what to do in an emergency. Most accident damage can be minimized, or even completely avoided if the drivers are taught basic “advanced driving skills.” Here’s an example. We cannot all afford luxury cars with ABS, etc.  Most people will lock up their wheels when they need to stop quickly, rendering their steering useless and they end up smashing into the obstacle they are trying to avoid. Notice the orientation of the wheels doing the steering next time you see a car that drove into something. Usually they are turned away from the obstacle but with straight skid-marks.

* Spend more money on improving and securing our public transport system. I live in the perfect spot to catch a train to work, but I do not dare get on it with my laptop and cellphone.

In summary:

* Stop treating the symptoms by calling people rod hogs and teaching them K53, rather go to the root of the problem and make a simple, 2 hour advanced driving lesson compulsory before obtaining a drivers license.

* Get the officers away from under the trees and bridges and make them have more roadblocks.

PS. For my buddies that are reading this, I know I’m breaking rule 101, “Do not feed the trolls”, but this issue is just to close to home….

I know I’ve been quite for a while now, but I’ve been busy with a few projects and didn’t have much time for anything else but work. Then there is the new Lady friend in my life, so the little free time I have are spent with her. Therefore no more nights falling asleep on my keyboard anymore. (She rocks and are an awesome person by the way… And she thinks open-source rocks!) Anyway, I’ll write more about the projects a bit later. I have learned lots over the past two months, and this post is about one of these things….

I’m busy project managing a permanent LED screen installation at a Casino in Johannesburg. I’m usually only  involved with the technical part of LED screens, but this time I’m looking after the whole project, from the start. Planning, construction, erecting the steel all the way to installing the LED screen.

One thing that amazed me about some of the construction workers was their lack of common sense and basic skills. Some of them are my dad’s age and they do things I would expect from a 16 year old. The one guy really struggled to get a plug into an extension lead. He had his fingers curled underneath the plug and almost shocked himself twice. I don’t need to mention that he was standing in a pool of water at the bottom of the pit dug out for the structure’s foundation. The other one put a grinder, still spinning down on the ground, cutting off the insulation. OK, everyone makes mistakes, but he just carried on working. Seemingly not worried about the fact that the live wire are exposed next to his feet in a pool of water. This made me realize how important basic education and  skill development are to a child. I’m forever grateful and feel privileged that my parents always pushed me to learn and explore new things. I can remember helping my dad overhaul the families VW beetle’s engine when I was 10. The saying, don’t let your schooling interfere with your education is very true.

Since I’m in SA and white, many people might think I’m racist. That is not the case. I’m shocked at the lack of education. I won’t deny that the old SA had something to do with it, but it are also the responsibility of these people’s parents. (Google “Liberation before Education”). I will agree that I might have had an advantage, I was encouraged to build sand castles and army bases with sticks and things. Also to build boats and planes out of paper. You don’t need the best Lego to teach a kid how to build something, you just need imagination.

I really hope that If I’m blessed to have kids that I’m able to give them the most important gift: Education and confidence in themselves to take on challanges and learn from it.

Here is yet another reason why open source (free) software rocks so much:

I’ve been managing the installation and support for our VoIP phone system for the past 9 months. It uses the Opensource PBX software called Asterisk. Admin is made pretty easy by Scopserv, the web based front-end for Asterisk. All of this works pretty well, but we have over 350 employees in three branches, so there is a reasonable amount of support calls. Mostly minor things like a new speed dial request, etc. There is the odd big issue that require immediate attention, like the time some cabling company cut all the lines from the VoIP gateway to the Premicell least cost routers. You can imagine how my phone just does not stop ringing…

I really try, but sometimes I just forget about some calls. Especially if I’m on site. I cannot always immediately deal with a support issue. In order to improve the support I wanted to implement a support ticket system of some sort.

I found osTicket to be the best. It is simple, but yet very effective. I managed to install and set it up in about 20 min. It does not have any real reporting, but I guess this is the perfect opportunity for me to start learning how SQL queries work…