Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

Recently, a friend of mine told me that he and a friend wanted "something nice" to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Cape Town. My response was (transcribed):

Beer in the sun? Or, wait, there's an awesome italian ice-cream shop in Hout Bay, on your right, just before you round the corner that takes you to Chapman's Peak. Drive the long way round though - along the coast as much as possible. I'm not sure that Chapman's Peak drive is open now, but if it is, that would be a win, and it would take you down past Cape Point, and then you can stop in Simonstown and visit Just Nuisance. Then you could go to the jetty in Kalk Bay, then take the Muizenberg Coastal Road, along, ending up in Stellenbosch for supper. You should've started this two hours ago. I think Chapman's Peak drive is closed, actually, but you could still take Ou Kaapse Weg, which cuts across the lower cape, and bypasses going all the way round on Chapman's Peak. You could also go up northish, to Blaauwberg, and walk along the beach there. Go to Blue Peter and have a cocktail while sitting on the grass out front, although that'll probably be a bit crowded. Or go straight out to Stellenbosch, pick up some olives and cheese from the Spar, and go sit on the university lawns and eat them in the sun. Or go up to Rhodes Memorial and have hot chocolate at the cafe. You live in the most beautiful city in Africa, and you come online to ask what to do on a day like this?!

My point was that there are endless things to do in this amazing city. I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

I recently discovered Do Stuff in Cape Town - an awesome site that lets people add activities, tag them, rate them, add photographs and descriptions, and allows you to search for things by a number of criteria. My friend Megan tried to find a similar site for Johannesburg, and did in fact find a site entitled "Things to do in Johannesburg", which basically boiled down to:

• Shopping
• Sun City
• Leaving Johannesburg for a holiday

Now, I don't want to say anything bad about Johannesburg, but... Well, you know... As Simon and Adrianna say, "Dry, flat and perpetually on fire.". But I digress. I come not to bury Johannesburg, but to praise Cape Town.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about wandering around the cape with Megan. Well, she recently returned, and once again, Cape Town didn't let us down.

Starting on Friday night, we had an awesome Mexican dinner at Panchos in Obs, and then went to Banana Jam for cocktails and drinks with some friends. On Saturday morning, after a bit of shopping at Canal Walk, we drove through to Stellenbosch for the Wine Festival. It was a little packed with students, but we had a lovely afternoon of tasting wines and a few other delicacies (oysters, mmm), then picked up some nice wine, and headed back to Cape Town, where we were having some friends over for dinner.

I have to digress here. Oh, Woolworths, how I love thee. I give you money, and you really impress my friends. For dinner, we made:

• Starter: Philadelphia cheese with almonds and strawberries, drizzled with honey, on crackers.
• Starter: Avo wrapped in salmon on a bed of rocket, with a lemon wedge.
• Mains: Fettucine with pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and feta, with a greek salad and garlic bread.
• Dessert: Pecan-nut pie with ice-cream

And while I am a little proud of that, I'll come right out and say that I couldn't have done it without the love and support of Woolworths, who always believed in me.

On Sunday, we went to Pastis - a lovely french restaurant in Groot Constantia - for breakfast with Paul and Kerry-Anne Gilowey, and Deon and tink, and thence to Cavendish for a bit more shopping (I sat in Mugg and Bean). When we were done there, it was still an awesome afternoon, so we drove down to the Radisson Hotel, where we had cocktails in the sun, and walked along the pier as the sun set. Finally, to top off the weekend, we went to Beluga for sushi and more cocktails. (Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding I had with an airport luggage attendant (he must have thought that the camera in my bag belonged to him?), there was no photographic evidence like last time.)

Now, you'd think that I'd just about said all I could about Cape Town. But you're wrong. A week ago was Heidi's birthday, and a bunch of us went to Grabouw for the weekend. To say that it was beautiful will not suffice. We stayed in charming cottages nestled in a clearing in a pine forest, next to a lake in the mountains just outside Grabouw, and it was lovely. Jacques took this incredible panorama:

I don't think I can say anything to top that, so I'll tip my hat, once again, to the Cape, and stop.

If you have any spare clothes (and I know you do), or any spare cash (and I know you do), please, PLEASE, help out. There are thousands of people left with no homes, and nothing possessions but what they're wearing. Most supermarkets should have donation boxes, but for more ideas of how to help, check out the Treatment Action Campaign site, and there's even a facebook group for you.

Thanks.

As I said on the GeekDinner announcement list:

Since the last GeekDinner was held at the end of March, and since we hold the GeekDinners bimestrially, it seems we are due another one at the end of May. This is the eightthhth GeekDinner, and we're calling it "Happy Habanero". What with the habanero being the national vegetable of Azerbaijan, we're going to hold the dinner on Azerbaijan's Republic Day, which, according to wikipedia, is Wednesday, May 28th.

The venue for this dinner is Mel's Kitchen, in Rondebosch Village, just off Klipfontein Road.

As usual, you can sign up, and check on the other details, on the wiki page.

We're now in our second year of GeekDinners, and they seem to be going strong. We have a good model, mostly sustainable, although it is slightly dependent on the core group of organisers to get things moving. We have a solid set of regular attendees that should provide the dinners with enough momentum to continue, though, should anything happen, and I'm very positive about the future of the dinners. We're also managing, for the most part, to keep talks short and interesting to all comers - I know that newcomers always worry that everything's going to be "too hardcore techie", but honestly, it's not about microchips and "ones and zeroes". My favourite talks have been about hippies and the buttons on car radios. So, please, if you haven't been before, why not come along, meet some new people, share some free wine, and enjoy some excellent food.

The slideshow karaoke has become a regular feature of our dinners, and is always one of the most entertaining parts. The way it works is, somebody prepares a set of slides on any topic they want (we've had "Etiquette when dealing with British Royalty", "Common problems with cement tiles", and "A primer on lesser known Norse gods"). Somebody else then presents a talk based on these slides without any prior knowledge of the topic, or of the content of the slides - always to amusing effect. This time, Darb is preparing the slides, and we have yet to find a volunteer to present them. If you're keen, do volunteer. If not, maybe you have something interesting you'd like to talk about anyway - we have no volunteers for speakers yet.

If I've sold you, sign up on the wiki, and we'll see you there!

Last night was the seventh Cape Town GeekDinner, held at Greens in Plattekloof. For all that it was a bit disorganised, I think it went fairly well. Through a bit of miscommunication we ended up with two projectors, and no screen, so Dave and I made a rushed mission to Pick n' Pay, and came back with a roll of ten white rubbish bags, which we stuck to the wall of the restaurant, which actually worked fairly well.

Ian gave his usual stellar performance, talking about the difference in attitude to change and new technology that geeks and "hippies" (green people, ecowarriors, etc) have. He discussed how common it is for people to make a snap decision, and then find facts to back the choice up, and challenged us to try it the other way round.

Bob Meredith then gave quite an interesting exposition of what one needs to do to have credit card certification, after which we had Darb doing an excellent Karaoke Slideshow on problems with concrete, put together by Tania.

The venue was great - very accomodating, with friendly and efficient staff, and excellent, excellent food. And they let us stick stuff on their walls. Thanks very much to Greens in Plattekloof!

Finally, profuse thanks to Tim from Wired Communications and to Perdeberg winery for supplying us with 30 bottles of very nice wine. They came through at very short notice and we really appreciate it. Please support their Clink-to-win campaign, or order some wine from their website!

StarCamp finally happened, and went off pretty well. I was a bit late for the first morning, since I had to move house (again), but the rest of the weekend was great.

From an infrastructure/organisational point of view, things were basically perfect. The large room where the talks were happening was fine for our needs, and there was enough space for everybody, although we had to open up the back to accomodate some more people at one stage. AIMS provided tea and coffee for everybody, and lunch on both days was a huge amount of great wraps from Kauai (generously sponsored by Sentient Communications and CLUG). ProsperIS sponsored computer equipment for the small venue, for the tutorials and sprints - these unfortunately only got set up halfway through the last day of *camp, which is something we must fix for next time. And, of course, there was Neil's Nintendo Wii, which provided some great fun, and was greatly enjoyed by the students at AIMS.

The talks were generally very interesting. As Ian says, the high points were probably the three talks by our foreign visitors - Alex and David from Princeton, on Electronic Voting and Net Neutrality respectively, and Phil Barrett from the UK on User Experience. I did enjoy quite a few of the others, although I'd like lots more non-technical talks next time. I think that in-depth nitty-gritty technical talks should be saved for either CLUG talks, or the tutorials: one can't take in enough from those talks for them to be useful otherwise.

The people were great. It was nice to see quite a few new faces (i.e. not part of the usual CLUG/GeekDinner crowd), although I wish we'd had a bigger turnout overall. This probably ties in with the talks: the nature of an Unconference is that the attendees shape the events, rather than the other way round, which is the norm for traditional conferences. If we had lots of artists, we'd have lots of art-related talks, if you see what I mean. I know that there were a few people who felt a bit trepid about attending, because they didn't think it was targetting them as an audience. This is not how an Unconference works! If you're in the audience, you participate, and you define how it goes.

Lessons learned

Venue, venue, venue: This is not so much a lesson we've learned from organising StarCamp, but a lesson I've picked up over a year of trying to organise this sort of event. If you don't have a venue, all other organisation stalls. You can't pick a date with absolute certainty unless you know the venue will be available on that date. You don't get attendees signing up unless they know what date they are signing up for (and, in some cases, how far they have to travel). You don't get speakers if you don't have attendees. Basically, it all boils down to finding a venue - once that is done, everything else falls into place. In this case, we only settled on AIMS a week before the event was due to happen, and even though everything went off beautifully after that, it was a bit touch-and-go up until then.

Attendees: We blogged the event, and sent out reminders on the mailing lists, and we got a fairly good sign-up rate, but it could have been so much better. Some of the best returns-on-investment in this regard were the personal invitations we sent out: directly approaching a person/group/company and saying "We're having this thing, and we want you to be there". Neil did an awesome job with this in the week before the event, but we really need to get the word out there beforehand, and make sure that people know what sort of event it will be (and that if they come, it'll be the sort of event which they want to attend).

Sponsors: people are surprising willing to sponsor things, if you ask them to. Make a note of that.

Set up: wasting half of the event time on setting up tables/power cables/a lab of computers is really counter-productive, and we lost some valuable presentation time because of this. But, of course, it's all a learning experience, and we know better for next time.

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All in all, I think the event was a great success, and I'm really looking forward to the next one... Which we should start organising NOW.

Once again, it's time for a Cape Town GeekDinner. The next one - dubbed Eccentric Eggplant - is being held upstairs at Ferryman's at the Waterfront, this Wednesday (the 28th of November), at about 7pm. We're getting sponsored wine from Wine23.co.za, and there are some talks which look quite interesting.

Something new that's happening at this GeekDinner is the Slideshow Karaoke. Bryn Divey and I are the victims in this case - we will be presenting two talks based on slides written by Russell Cloran and Jeremy Thurgood. We will not have seen the slides before, nor will we even know what subject they are on, until we start presenting the talk. It should be interesting, at the very least.

And then, of course, there's the *camp coming up. We're still struggling a little bit with the venue, although we have some good offers. Please, go look at the wiki, and come along!

On Saturday, we had the Open Content Party with Jimmy Wales and Heather Ford. I won't say much, since Arno and Christel have both given rather good roundups of the atmosphere at the place, and I can't really top that. It was a great evening, with all sorts of people bring what they could. Photos are up.

See you all at the GeekDinner next week!

The fourth in the new series of Cape Town GeekDinners will be held on Thursday, September the 27th, at Summerville in Camps Bay, at 19:00 for 19:30.

Details can be found on the wiki page - head over there and sign up to the wiki if you want to come along.

We also need speakers - if you have an idea or something interesting that you want to talk about, let us know, or just add it to the wiki. Talks are only 5 minutes long, followed by a few minutes of questions, and everything is very informal.

Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) and his wife Heather Ford from iCommons in Johannesburg have hatched a scheme to hold 50 parties in 50 cities around the world, with an Open Content/Creative Commons/Free Software sort of theme. You can read about it at iCommons or on Wikia, but what I'm most interested in is the Cape Town party, which is happening in a week and a half's time, on International Software Freedom Day.

Jimbo Wales will be here, and it should be good. It's at Deer Park Cafe in Vredehoek - head over to the wikia page and sign up!

Updated - I have no idea why I thought Heather was Jimbo's wife.

Sent by registered mail:

To: Mr George Hegarty,

This letter serves to confirm my position with respect to the termination of the lease governing my residence at 12 Silverhill Crescent, Kenilworth, Cape Town, that we signed in April of 2007.

Clause 8 of the lease states the following:

         8. EARLY TERMINATION
         Resident may terminate this agreement before Expiration of the original term by:
         (a) Giving management at least one month's written notice to be effective only on the last day of a 
         given month; plus
         (b) Paying all monies due through date of termination; plus
         (c) Paying an amount equal to one month's Rent; plus
         (d) Returning residence in a clean, ready to rent condition;
         (e) Paying for advertising necessary to rent residence.

Accordingly, on the 30th of July, 2007, I gave you written notice stating that I wished to terminate the lease effective on the last day of August, 2007. You have accepted this notice, as per your letter to me on the 6th of August, 2007. As a result of this, the lease will terminate on the 31st of August, 2007, contingent on my fulfilling the rest of the conditions of the clause.

As stated in writing at the bottom of page 1 of our lease, I gave you R5000 in April 2007, which covers “the first and last months rent”. Since August 2007 is now the last month of the lease, it is covered by this money. The notice I received from you regarding money for electricity and water was fulfilled immediately, so there are no more monies due from me to you through 31st August 2007, the date of termination described above.

On the 13th of August, 2007, I transferred a sum of R3000 into your bank account, which constitutes “an amount equal to one month's rent” as described in part (c) above. In addition, on the 12th of August, 2007, I removed all of my belongings from the property, and cleaned the room, leaving it in the state in which I found it. I will refund an invoice for a reasonable standard rental housing advertisement if presented to me.

As described above, I believe that I have fulfilled my obligations according to the lease which we signed. However, on the 5th of August, 2007, you confiscated my keys and ordered me to remove my car from your property. As determined by the Rental Housing Tribunal on the 8th of August, 2007, this constituted an act of illegal lockout, and you were ordered to return my keys to me.

Shortly after this, I went out of town on holiday. When I returned, I came to the residence at 12 Silverhill Crescent to find that you had removed my bed and several other items of furniture from the room, and had gone through my belongings and dumped them on the floor of the room. This violates points 4(2) and 4(3) of the Rental Housing Act of 1999. In addition, there was a notice in my room stating that you would be charging me R25 per day for parking on the property, and a notice on the gate control instructing the other tenants of the house not to open the gate for me. These constitute illegal unilateral alterations to the agreement we had between us.

At this point, some friends and I attempted to remove some of my belongings from the property, and you ordered them, with much profanity and a raised voice, to leave the premises immediately, threatening to call the police if they did not comply. Since they were bona fide visitors of mine, this constitutes a violation of point 4(4) of the Rental Housing Act of 1999.

I will be in further communication with you as regards the events described above, but I consider my obligations under the lease to be fulfilled. Accordingly, I will require you to refund me my deposit of R3000, plus interest accrued, at the end of August 2007, as detailed in point 5 of the Rental Housing Act of 1999.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Hitchcock