Sunday turned out to be Dangerous Animal day! With my 2 o’clock Sharks Board dissection on the plate, Sandy suggested we continue the theme, so she took me to a Crocodile farm and reptile museum. It was about 30 minutes out of Durban, near Umlali (pronounced Uhm-shlali). They apparently farm crocodiles, which means they had quite a lot of these fellas, around 50 or so that were 2-3 years old and thus ready to sell out to breeders themselves, and quite a few mature (large) ones that were laying around all over the place. They also had lots of baby crocs, and tons of incubating eggs in different areas.

We started off by walking …
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After waking up a bit late on Saturday morning, Sandy (our wonderful keeper) of the Gateway County Lodge invited me along with a fellow guest to visit a Natural Game Reserve, called Tala, about an hour out of Durban. I immediately said yes, and off we were, with a packed lunch and some borrowed binoculars. It was absolutely incredible.

Now, keep in mind, this is a game reserve ….
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The flight left Atlanta at 10:30am on Monday morning headed towards Johannesburg, South Africa (map). After a nice long (17 hour) journey, I arrived around 10:30am on Tuesday (Johannesburg is 7 hours ahead). I didn’t get much sleep on the plane (I never do), so I decided to try to power through the day. I met my contact, Carel from CommerceQuest SA at the Arrivals gate, and we had 2 hours to kill before our flight to Durban. I drank two cappuccinos, and we chatted about South Africa and such — I even learned a little bit of Afrikaans (one of the many languages spoken in South Africa). The flight to Durban was only an hour, on a small commuter plane. While Pretoria is the capital of South Africa, Johannesburg is the largest city, and Durban is known as a tourist destination. It’s on the coast, and it does have a down-town area, but it also definitely has a laid-back feeling to the city.

Upon arriving in Durban, …
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I asked Jodi to marry me! And she didn’t say no….

It’s so hard to keep up with the cyber-joneses, these days. I mean, it’s hard enough to keep your blog’s content fresh with all your day-to-day musings, your completely original political stirrings, and favorite song of the week (it’s my: livejournal’s mood: somber, song: dashboard confessional), let alone make sure your content-management-system of the week (be it, movabletype, wordpress, or any other wiki-type tool) is up to date, with the latest plug-ins, spam-blasters, and tools-you-can’t-live-without. And, lest your php installation falls behind, and have you updated mysql recently, or apache, or (gasp) your kernel? You mean, you’re still using Fedora Core 2? Oh my. Quick, apt-get/yum and force update everything, pray you’re not going to have to read through the logs and join 3 mailing lists to find out why your installation is hung, and then curse open-source (only under your breath though)!

OK, so while you’re updating everything, make sure that you’re fullying utilizing your technorati tags (and pinging technorati regularly), while folksonmizing (ooooh did I invent the verbage form of folksonomy?) and making your bookmarks are available on del.icio.us and oh my gosh, your flickr blog and mo-blog needs the pictures from that party last night! And oh my, all those invites from friends on <insert-Yet-Another-Social-Networking-Site here> are waiting for your approval! Your social networks are waning, your e-mail needs checking, and it’s time to blog-roll all your friend’s blogs….

sigh…. those cyberjoneses!

What if everyone had their paypal-type system? What if, I could intuitively broker a deal with someone, decide to pay him/her a predetermined amount, and then execute the transaction? Before you start imagining all the techno-babble that would provide automatic notification, precise management, and secure transfer of funds, with XML-parsing POST/REST, Service Enabled Architectures on 3-tiered platforms, let’s just assume that it could be done, easily. My question, then becomes, what kind of new relationships between people — partnerships, companies, makeshift organizations, posses, could be built from a system like this? Are we almost there?