Is Eskom the new Telkom?

Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,727 views

Many South Africans are beginning to think so. Like telecommunications, electricity is a basic need for every South African. Even those without an electricity supply themselves, depend on the goods and services that are produced with electricity.

Eskom has already hit South Africans with two massive price hikes: 27% last year and 31.3% this year. Earlier this month, on October 14, Eskom CEO, Jacob Maroga, announced that he wants a 45% increase each year for the next 3 years. This outrageous demand has led to widespread shock and anger.

Today, it is rumoured that the board of Eskom has asked Maroga to resign. Could this be the beginning of a new more rational response to South Africa’s energy crisis?

In September 2009, the Mail & Guardian reported that the reason why South Africa experienced massive power outages and load shedding in January 2008 was because Eskom had totally bungled their management of coal. Furthermore, in an Eskom report dated mid 2007, this problem had already been reported to Maroga by an American consultant, Susan Olsen, but no action was taken to prevent what turned out to be a major national disaster and embarrassment for South Africa the following year.

As Harry Truman famously used, the buck stops at Maroga’s desk and it seems that that buck is now kicking the crap out of him. We can hope.

FURTHER READING:
Eskom board asks CEO Maroga to resign
Eskom board asks CEO Maroga to resign – report
Eskom’s proposed hike ‘a serious shock to economy’
Cosatu outraged over Eskom’s proposed 45% hike
CEO scores R5m amid new claims of incompetence

Tags: Eskom, Jacob Maroga
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The Day of Reckoning for Telkom approaches fast

Posted on October 29th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,693 views

For more than a decade now, South African consumers and business people, and indeed the whole of South Africa have been effectively sucked dry by the parasite we know as Telkom. And now, finally, it seems they are going to have to pay for their abuse of South Africa.

If there is one company which has most held back the economic development of South Africa, it is Telkom. It is the single most hated organisation in South Africa. Telkom has ruined individuals and businesses. It has held South Africa back from developing the cheap telecommunications infrastructure that our country desperately needs to compete in the Internet powered global market. It has contributed to the flight of hugely successful South African business people who realised that they could never realise their dreams in a country so crippled by Telkom. People like Mark Shuttleworth, Vinny Lingham could not soar to the heights they have achieved in a country where Internet bandwidth is non-existent, where it is sold at hugely inflated prices and where the development of additional infrastructure is hamstrung.

Telkom is the dog that has financially depleted the bank accounts of myriads of consumers and businesses, artificially driving up prices for all sorts of things across the board. Telkom has done its level best to impoverish South Africans at every level of society. They are an absolutely despicable evil empire and they must now kneel before the sword that lops off their head.

It is not good enough for Telkom to pay the proposed R3-4 billion fine. All its directors must be imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives without the possibility of parole. We must sink these bastards into the deepest darkest black hole and deny them the ability to ever see a single green leaf or the naked sky again. We must strip from them all their assets, including their pension funds. We must impose upon them and their families the poverty they imposed on the rest of us. Every single asset of Telkom must be sold and the money raised given back to every Telkom account holder for the last 10 years pro-rata. Every person owing Telkom a cent, must be forgiven in full their debt.

It is not possible for us to completely undo the harm that Telkom has done to South Africa over the last decade, but we must try. We must purge this country of their evil, and we must make the severest example of them, lest any other South African monopoly is tempted to follow in their footsteps.

FURTHER READING:
Telkom faces multibillion-rand fine for ‘abusing dominance’
Telkom faces record fine for malpractices
New threat of billions in fines for Telkom

Tags: Telkom
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Quick Restaurant quality fillet steak smothered in a pepper mushroom sauce at home

Posted on October 28th, 2009 by Richard Catto 2,295 views

As a true red-blooded South African male nothing gets my blood pumping like a nice juicy fillet steak smothered in a great sauce. However, eating a fillet steak at a fancy restaurant will put a massive dent in your wallet these days. So how does one create a fantastic fillet steak meal complete with wonderful sauce at home?

Well, you cheat, of course!

Unless you’re some culinary expert at creating wonderful sauces, your best alternative is to find a really great sauce to accompany your home cooked fillet banquet. Which is precisely what I have done.

Now, there are two fillet sauces that I love above all: pepper and mushroom, so I thought, why not combine them and have them both in one delicious sauce? I give you, my solution, which is so easy, even the most challenged stay at home bachelor can manage it all by themselves, with the minimum of fuss.

Here is what you need:

• 1 kilogram of fillet steak (R140)
• Real butter (to pan fry the steak in)
• 200ml Royco Pepper Sauce sachet containing Green & Black peppercorns
• 285 gram tin of Spar Creamed Mushrooms

Method

• Toss a large knob of butter into your pan with the heat turned up to maximum. You want to cook your fillet at maximum heat so that it sears all the goodness in and browns the meat quickly.
• While the pan is heating up, cut your 1 kilogram of fillet steak into medallions (for fast cooking) or larger chunks if you prefer it that way. The larger your chunks, the redder the interior will be. If you like your steak well done, cut the fillet into medallions about 1.5 cm thick.
• As soon as the butter is all melted and it’s reached maximum temperature, dump your fillet steak into the pan and brown your fillet on both sides, turning it quickly to avoid burning it. When it’s cooked to the degree you like it, which should take about 20 – 30 minutes, take all the meat out and place it on a serving plate.
• Turn the heat down to the lowest setting, because now it’s time to create your perfect sauce. Do not discard what’s in your pan, or swop it out for a fresh one – you want to keep all the flavour from cooking the meat in the pan, when you add the sauce to it.
• Empty the tin of Creamed Mushrooms into the pan and stir quickly, because the pan will still be super hot. The temperature will come down very quickly.
• Add the contents of the Pepper sauce sachet to the creamed mushrooms and stir until the sauces are blended together.
• Add your cooked meat back into the pan of sauce, pushing them down into the sauce mixture so that all the pieces are smothered in sauce.
• You can now serve yourself some of the fillet steak drenched in a unique pepper mushroom sauce blend. You can leave the heat on the lowest setting to keep the rest of the meal warm.

1 kilogram of fillet is enough to feed two people or 1 extra greedy person.

Anyway, try this out if you like. It works well with Rump steak as well, if fillet is a bit too expensive for you. If you like steak, and you enjoy pepper and mushroom sauces, you’ll love this meal. If you like potato chips with your steak, you can oven bake some while you’re preparing the steak.

Of course, the best way to round out this meal is with a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, an intimate candle-lit table for two, and good company.

Tags: fillet steak
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DeathWatch – notable web sites that have died

Posted on October 27th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,271 views

Like me, there exist many people who have a morbid fascination with the demise of web sites they once regularly used, read or visited. I recently discovered Archive Team which keeps track of online mortalities. Their Death Watch page, which lists web casualties, makes for fascinating reading. Yahoo features frequently on the page due to the large numbers of Yahoo sites recently shutdown.

What brought this topic on? After a long hiatus, I decided to go back and revisit my old Yahoo 360 blogs that I had created back in 2006, only to discover that the whole of 360 had been wiped out by Yahoo! They didn’t bother to migrate them to my profile, because that was supposed to be done by me. Yahoo did send me an email to this effect on June 30 2009 notifying about this, but they neglected to copy the message to my gmail address, even though I had indicated in my yahoo profile that my gmail address was my primary email address! I have never used my yahoo email address for anything. So all my 360 data is gone for good. Oh well.

Yahoo has recently gone on a crazy shutdown spree, wiping out huge portions of the Internet that they used to control, like GeoCities, for instance. There’s a fascinating article about the origins of GeoCities here. The real story in the article was how badly Yahoo mismanaged that valuable online real estate, and now they’ve just shut it all down, obliterating huge amounts of legacy web sites. The Archive Team tried their best to back it up and mirror GeoCities before Yahoo pulled the plug yesterday, October 26 2009, but guess what? Yahoo refused to assist them in any way to archive the data! Now that’s just mean!

Another site on Death Watch that caught my attention was ma.gnolia.com. Magnolia was a popular social bookmarking site like Delicious or Reddit. It was launched in 2006 and died in a single day on January 30 2009 when all data was lost due to disk failure. The crazy thing was that the owner self-hosted the 500GBs of user created data and had no useable backup. The service is being relaunched now at gnolia.com and is by invitation only. The owner has apparently learnt his lesson and will be using all the data redundancy hosting services that money can buy this time around. This post sums up what went wrong at Magnolia.

One local web site that I used to enjoy reading on and off was tashitagg.co.za. (also tashitagg.com). If you do a search on Wikipedia for tashitagg, you’ll find 6 different articles have a reference link to a tashitagg article, none of which are still accessible, which is a great shame. Tashi Tagg, and her husband, Luke, created tashitagg from their home in Kenilworth, Cape Town. It was originally centred around the first South African Big Brother reality TV show. It gathered a large readership from being ranked high for that show and went on to discuss a whole slew of other reality TV programs, such as The Amazing Race.

Luke wrote a no-holds barred column called The Daily Smoke (link goes to archived site) which was often entertaining reading. As TashiTagg grew, they decided to add blogs to their original site, which also had very active forums. However, I believe the blogs feature proved its undoing as they allowed it to completely takeover the site and ultimately led to a large falling out with their audience over an argument over who owned the copyright to material posted. Tashi and Luke Tagg clarified the issue by telling their contributors that all the content they had added in the blogs didn’t belong to the authors, but to Tashi Tagg, at which point, many blogs were promptly erased and many members departed in anger. That crucial misstep by the owners ultimately led to the disbandment of tashitagg, both of whom now edit tvsa.co.za.

What dead sites do you miss?

Tags: Dead web sites
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