Snow is something we don’t see often in Cape Town so when Jackie and I spotted snow on the mountains by Franschoek, we decided to take a road trip. We arranged for Wes and Zelna to meet us on Sunday morning at our place. I had planned the trip - Ceres via Worcester - but had no idea where to drive to get close to the snow. Saturday night I was googling frantically for sites and directions/info on where to go. Here is the Ceres Tourism site (90’s flashback of a site) and the weather site wasn’t very detailed. As for finding a map with directions, I wasn’t holding my breath.

I am not a huge fan of Corvettes but after watching this, I am tempted to visit their website. This video, recently released by General Motors, shows you how it performs at the hands of a pro around the 20.8km Nurburgring. The time was 7 minutes 26.4 seconds:
NOTE: If the video says ‘No longer available, just refresh this page a few times until it works.

The driver was Jim Mero and he was driving the 2008 Cheverolet Corvette ZR1 which looks like this:

We booked to go on the Independence of the Seas in May 2007 so we had been waiting for our departure date of 25 May 2008 for a loooong time. I had also decided around December 2007 that it was time I took the next step (engagement) with Jackie and my relationship. Because we were going on the trip, I thought I may as well wait and make it a little more special by asking her overseas. I wanted to surprise her so everything was top secret, not even her family knew at this stage.

I enjoy cooking, it’s something that relaxes me. I can forget about the code and focus on creating something else.

On the boat we ate quite a bit of ‘Angus’ Sirloin, I also had it a few times in the UK - seems Sirloin is a more popular cut up north. I have never been a fan of pan-fried steaks having grown up around braai’s but they managed to get it tasting pretty damn good. So the other day Jackie and I were shopping and I grabbed a 2-pack of ‘matured sirloin’ (from Superspar @ Paddocks) which looked pretty good. I also grabbed some red onions, red wine and watercrest. I set out making my first pan-fried sirloin. I fried the steaks in a hot pan with a little oil and when we sat down to eat, the steaks were appalling. It was actually one of the worst steaks I had ever eaten and I was horrified that I had produced it. The only other pan-fried steaks I had attempted were rumps and those seemed to come out okay? So what went wrong? How could I have totally destroyed this cut of meat? I had to get this right.

A project I developed at Stonewall recently went live. http://www.eafricacommission.org.

The website is built around Drupal 5.5 and is fairly generic. I find that Drupal works great for rapid development provided the company is not a startup (ie decisions are changing rapidly). I don’t find Drupal flexible enough but for some basic/freelance projects it’s perfect. The Nepad website was perfect for Drupal but I did face a challenge when they wanted to customize their newsletter interface. Certain Drupal Modules are written in a way that they are easy to customize without hacking into the core of the module. The newsletter module is not written this way. It’s an old module and we ended up adjusting the interface to work with it.

I can see myself using Drupal a lot more in future but primarily on freelance jobs. I find the CMS interface and functionality a bit chunky and quite cluttered. I like a CMS interface that is very clean and only has things you use on it. With Drupal this is not the case. I suppose if you are some sort of Drupal Wizard you can strip it down but this would have to be done very carefully so as to not hack the core.

These are quite classic:
http://davidwalsh.name/confessions-of-an-eccentric-web-developer
and
http://reinholdweber.com/?p=26

My girlfriend Jackie started WeddingSA just over 4 years ago. The site is a wedding directory focussing on the Western Cape. WeddingSA also allows couples to sign up and create their own custom webpages. The site has seen a lot of growth over the past 2 years and Jackie decided to expand to other provinces due to demand.

The code behind WeddingSA has been through 2 rewrites and is about to go through it’s 3rd. It’s currently sitting on a hybrid version of the Active Ice framework (PHP4). I have started rebuilding the site on the Zend Framework (PHP5). The upgrade to include provinces took about 2 hours in total with deployment done in 2 mins. I like to think with ZF it could have been even quicker. Jackie is now able to add provinces and then link vendors to provinces. The menu rebuilds itself based on vendors and only shows categories with vendors. If there are no vendors in Gauteng it will no longer show up in the dropdown. Vendors can be linked to multiple provinces so it can scale quite nicely.

I am looking forward to the rewrite and will post once I’m done with that (in 5 months hehe)

I was thinking about things I could cook for dinner and Lamb Shanks came to mind. My dads friend Gilby Samassa used to make a killer lamb shank. He used to grill them in a pizza oven which, unfortunately, I didn’t own So I checked some recipes online. I couldn’t find one I liked but I got the general idea of what’s involved in the cooking process: Create bed of flavour, add liquid, simmer for 2-3 hours. Everything else is just a variation on that framework.

Mine is: Lamb Shanks in port/red wine with rosemary/thyme served on a bed of mash.

First job is to get some nice fat lamb shanks from your local supermarket or butcher. It’s usually 1 shank per person but if you’re a big eater go for 2. Have the size of your biggest pot in mind though Ingredients you’ll need are:

I am very fond of driving. Driving is fun. Driving fast is even more fun. I’ve been looking at the Golf GTi and Subaru (after driving in Barry’s) since last year and finally went for the GTi, largely because of Jeremy Clarkson’s review and that it won Automobile of the Year last year.

The Clarkson Review

Last night we hit @mospheer in Landsdown and watched the legendary Paul van Dyk deliver the most memorable set I’ve experienced in a loooong time. I was a bit concerned about hitting the sweaty/tiger balm rubbing/poppers sniffing/freaks/neck massaging crowds again but Jackie, Warren and Damien and I ended up dancing until our feet were numb - it rocked!