To match these nifty-looking business cards, I today designed and launched a new personal “hub” site to overcome the usability and the not-so-friendly look of the old one.

Going from this:

To this:

My blog shrinks the image, go visit the site, it look much better in reality.

The last thing I wanted to show off is something I should’ve shown off a long time: my formal art portfolio.

Click on the (very modest) title page to view the rest.

However, today a reader posted the following comment:

You mainly get 2 types of hens here in the UK: Caged hens or the free range types:

If you intend to spend your life on earth in a plastic safe environment created by others, don’t stay in SA. You will end up with a 2.5 meter fence, a security system to protect your CCTV cameras from being stolen, a burglar alarm and fire arms to protect you against all possible dangers. You WILL end up frustrated because the government will not look after your “very important” needs.

On the other hand… if you are committed to use your God given opportunities to leave this blue dot hanging somewhere in space somehow better than you found it, South Africa might just be the place for you. There are HUGE things happening, but to discover them you will need to leave your security complexes.

After 8 years in the UK I am on my way back to South Africa just because…… I’m no frieken caged hen!!!
What “kindafa” chicken are you?

-D3aen

And I must say, he does have a very valid point. His point being that just like any other place, South Africa is heaven for some people, hell for others.

While I stand by my previous opinion, and still think that South Africa is absolutely not for me, I now realize that it is perfectly suited for many people, and many people love living in South Africa, even with all its problems.

I myself find myself missing quite a few things from South Africa. Most of all, I miss the great partying. South Africa is home to some of the best nightclubs I’ve ever attended, and it is always easy to find a party.

The second thing I miss is the cheap cost of life. For a cup of Starbucks coffee, I could have a full meal in South Africa. Everything was cheaper, and back there I was living like a rich person. I did not have to watch how I spent my money as carefully, and the propriety I lived in was huge.

On the other hand, many things are better now. South African internet is torture at best. The government is useless, and you’re pretty much always on your own when you need to do anything. No public transports. No public anything, really.

Looking back, I’m still glad the South African period of my life is over, and I’m looking eagerly towards the future.

I left South Africa, thankfully forever just before New Year, headed for New York.

This is a trip that did not start on a good note: I showed up at the airport, all ready and looking forward to it, only to find out I had missed my flight by a full month. I mis-booked my flight from Durban to Johannesburg for November instead of December. So I was stuck at Durban International with only a few hours to get to Johannesburg (400 miles away) or I’d miss my (non-refundable) flight to New York City. Thankfully, I managed to buy a last-minute ticket and eventually got to JFK Airport, NY.

Finding your way around New York at first was a bit confusing. Took me quite a while to find Penn Station. I mean, you’re not expecting New York’s biggest train station (it severs over 600’000 passengers a day) to be this hard to find. But then again, the only visible outside sign of Penn Station are stairs leading into a subterranean complex under yet another of Midtown Manhattan’s tall office towers. On the other hand though, once you get the system, finding a place in Manhattan is really easy. If you can count, you can find what you’re looking for. No needs for maps. Manhattan is a simple grid, and street numbers act like coordinates.

Several hours later (and after missing my train, twice) I eventually got to the kind people who where hosting me about 30min of train away in New Jersey.

The very next day, I went, along with a full million of other people, to see the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop on Times Square.

I had the wonderful (or not) opportunity to wait for 7 hours in the freezing cold (-20°C with wind) for a colorful ball to drop.

After a day of rest, I went sightseeing. New York City is probably the coolest city I’ve ever been in, no exceptions. Especially at night.

Of course, I couldn’t help visiting the Quiksilver store on 5th avenue. And of course that big glass cube, nerdy me.

A few of the bullet points of things I noticed while in NY:

• Pedestrians have a blatant disregard for red lights.
• Street vendors will try to rip you off.
• There’s always a minimum of a 30min line for any restroom.
• The city that never sleeps is rightly named; a pizzeria at 2 in the morning will be more full than a european McDonald’s at its busiest time.
• The one thing to do in NY is eat, and then eat some more.
• A cup Starbucks coffee is more expensive than a full KFC meal in South Africa.
• Having all prices without taxes is the biggest damn pain in the ass ever. I really hate it. When the price tag say $3.50 I want to pay $3.50, not $4.06.
• JetBlue has free WiFi in their JFK terminal. That is like, seriously awesome.

Oh, and lest I forget to mention, I Love New York! Or, rather:

On the 5th of January, I was off from to America’s first to its second most densely populated city, San Francisco.

I landed at midnight and directly made my way to Moscone to wait for the Keynote which was to start 10 hours later.

I spent the rest of the week at Macworld doing cool stuff.

After Macworld, I spend another two weeks visiting the awesome bay area.

I discovered many new cool things like bubble tea and dumplings.

And Indiana Jones’ hat in a fishing store:

The cable car was broken that day. It took them hours to repair it.

Fisherman’s wharf, and a guy making scarily unsanitary crabs:

It was funny, there were a whole bunch of live crabs in a box. Stuck my finger in it, and disappointingly withdrew it still in one piece.

And don’t forget Ghiradelli’s awesome chocolate and sundaes:

That’s me with the son of the family hosting me in San Fran.

And let’s not forget chinatown:

When I went to visit’s America’s former most secure federal penitentiary, Alcatraz, the security guard was kind enough to give me a special behind the scenes tour of the restricted access areas of the prison, which was pretty cool:

The lucky prisoners had the best view:

Eventually on the 21st, my trip was over, and after saying goodbye, I made my way to SFO Airport, only to be refused check-in because I only had a one-way flight into Japan. I actually had to buy a return flight (which I have no use for) at an insane price to be allowed to board the next day. Stupid paperwork. I hate visa problems.

But I am now safely installed in the Democratic Republic of Sushi-land. (By that I mean Japan, or 日本 as they say here.)

So I went to the facility in which we wrote exams. For my school, it was the headquarters of the Department of Education in Durban. On the way there, I was listening to the news in the car. The speaker was telling the story of how some home-schooled student’s teacher forgot to register them for the exams, and in her panic thought it was a good good idea exams papers based on the government exemplars, and trick her students into writing that. Of course, she’s now being criminally charged, and the students all fail by default, which means they’ll have to endure another two years of school. Poor guys.

Oh what irony when I arrived at the venue and found out the principal had forgot to register us for this paper. It was just an optional extra Maths paper, which doesn’t count towards the final report, but does go on a separate certificate. Unlike that other teacher though, he didn’t attempt to forge anything, for which I am grateful. Instead, he managed to get ahold of a copy of the question paper from another school, and an hour or so of waiting later, we were all writing away happily. (Well, not “happily” - the paper was truly awful)

On the way back, I went to the post to pick my freshly renewed passport. Stupid thing is, I get a new passport number with a new passport, which means I’ll have to phone MacWorld, and 4 different airlines to get my tickets switched to my new passport number, because I registered with the old ID.

When I got home, I had the pleasant surprise of finding a small slip of paper from the post office telling me my MacBook Pro (which I ordered just when they were updated - apparently the upgrades held it off, 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM) had finally arrived. If only I had known this just a few moments earlier, when I was at the post office. Went back, got my parcel, and went to have a nice family supper out at a restaurant.

When I got home - again, I promptly unpacked my MacBook Pro, and was faced with the terribly entertaining task of watching a slow progress bar for 3 hours until the Migration Assistant finished copying my data from my iMac. I don’t know exactly why the migration assistant can’t do this by itself, but I had done the mistake of setting up the new MBP before migrating with the same short name as my account on my iMac. I wanted to keep my short name, but it seems the Migration Assistant can’t help me here. So I chose a different short name, and tried to switch them via Terminal, which resulted in me deleting my home folder with a misplaced “rm -rf”, and having to start from zero.

And here I am now, on by freshly setup MacBook Pro, rambling on.

• I suck at making biographies and descriptions.
• I’m the youngest shareware developer I know. This is no longer true. I wrote this about page quite a long while ago, when I must’ve been around 15.
• I’m Swiss, and I love my country.
• I’m a footmen frenzy (from the “Warcraft 3 : The Frozen Throne” game) addict, and I can kick your ass!
• I can talk English, French, and a little Russian and Japanese.
• I love my iPhone!

What I also am:

• A Mac shareware developer (fluent in Cocoa/Objective-C)
• An iPhone developer
• A web developer fluent in xHTML/CSS/AJAX/JavaScript, PHP, Ruby(-on-Rails)
• The guy behind Azure Talon Software