From Jo’burg to Brighton
I’m leaving South Africa behind for a while. I’m off for a week to Brighton, followed by three to six months in Thailand. Yebo. Back to HDN, to work on improving ovcsupport.net, an online toolkit (that is, a collection of publications), around orphans and vulnerable children.
Can’t wait for the Brighton Rock.
Supposed to leave on Sunday night, after an excellent hash party thrown by Rouzeh, Virgin’s flight to London Heathrow was cancelled because due to some bad planning, no pilot was available in Johannesburg to fly the plane to the UK. Though it’s understandable for people to make the occasional mistakes, only a week earlier the exact same thing had happened when an Alliance colleague (my project is run through the Alliance) suffered from the same mistake.
I finally arrived Monday night, missing the Brighton hash. Sharing an apartment with Felicia, I’ve got a view of the sea from my room.
Brighton is surprisingly affordable.
Meanwhile, after Christo had gone off to Holland for over three weeks, he came back last weekend, meaning we had another stab at winning the weekly quiz at the Keg in Sunninghill. With ‘quizmaster Lloyd’ we hadn’t yet, since my return last year, managed to get a prize but this time, we somehow turned the tables and won. And that was with minimal cheating.
We won foldable chairs with a built in drinks container.
Techie stuff
I’ve been using Xoopit for a while now, which is a handy add-on to Gmail. For example, they list all participants of an email discussion in one handy list and index all your received files.
One thing that was long overdue for Gmail was the linking of your contacts to existing social networks. Finally, Xoopit has done it. Besides the list of contacts from any one conversation, you now also get to see their latest Facebook status updates. Granted, there’s a long way to go (why only list Facebook?), but it’s a start.