Tim Keller

Matrics across the Western Cape will rewrite Paper 2 of the English Exam on November 23 said a spokesperson for the WCED this morning. This story courtesy of www.iol.co.za [direct link to article]

Western Cape matric students are to rewrite an English paper after it emerged that it was handed out in error in an earlier exam.

The province’s education department said the English first language higher grade paper two would be rewritten on November 23.

It said the paper was mistakenly handed to some candidates at the South African College High School (SACS) on October 10, the day before the exam, and details of it had spread to other schools.

The department had terminated the contract of the chief invigilator at SACS and had issued a verbal warning to the head of the English department at the school. – Sapa

I’d like to state categorically that I think this is a pathetic waste of time. If 5% of the Western Cape students were even aware of the leak it would be a lot, an even smaller percentage of those would be aware of the paper’s content. The “termination” of the chief invigilator’s contract is without a doubt a desperate reaction by the WCED to save face. Surely the invigilator in question made an honest mistake? And a verbal warning to the Head of English at SACS? Hello?! What is this world coming to?

I think New Year’s resolutions are stupid. In fact, I dislike New Year’s Eve in it’s entirety. Why? Well.

First of all no one ever keeps New Year’s resolutions, be it as a result of too much Orange Juice (read Champagne) or just because no one really wants to change the way they do things. Maybe it’s because the beginning of a New Year is always so fraught with *sigh* feelings. It’s almost the end of your holiday, Christmas has come and gone, and you somehow have to summon the energy to face yet another year of work. For these reasons above I move to introduce a new concept: Spring Resolutions!

Spring has sprung in Cape Town, South Africa (I’m told we’re a bit behind the Vernal Equinox due to our longitude and/or latitude) and what better time to set new goals for the year ahead! Psychologists studying Seasonal Affective Disorder (with the ironic acronym SAD) have found that depression and happiness cycles can be triggered by the different seasons of the year. It was first proposed by Norman E. Rosenthal, MD in 1984. He moved from sunny South Africa to New York City and found that he become lethargic and depressed during the cold Winter months. The treatment of this disorder is fairly simple: Dawn simulations (that is, programming one’s bedroom lights to simulate sunrise by slowly getting brighter over a period of 1 or 2 hours prior to waking) have been highly successful… and the usual plethora of Anti-depressant SSRI drugs have also been shown to be an effective remedy.

This means is that Spring – a time when everything is pure, crisp, and new – is the perfect time to start thinking about one’s future plans. Think about how you’ve felt this week, and compare that to how you felt 2 months ago, in the middle of winter. I bet you’ve had a better week this week. That’s because Spring has a major influence on our emotional well-being.

Consider Matthew C. Keller’s research (I’m afraid there is no direct relation between the two of us, to my knowledge anyway)

Happiness is a beach, sometimes.

Matthew C. Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, decided that researchers weren’t asking the right questions. His study, published in Psychological Science, has found that moods do generally rise with temperature—with or without the beach—but only in the spring. That’s probably because people savor the sun after months of deprivation, Keller says.

Even during the spring thaw, only people who spend time outside in the sunshine are likely to find themselves measurably happier. The optimal daily dose: one half hour.

So, here’s what I’m going to do this Spring and hopefully maintain for the next 365 days. These are my Spring Resolutions:

• Spend 30 minutes a day in the Sun. No, the computer screen does not count as the Sun.
• Try to get less frustrated by the annoyances of daily life.
• Understand that Renault are just a terrible car manufacturer and accept that things are going to go wrong with my Modus. No use fighting with them.
• Say Sorry and Thank You more often.
• Only write websites in CSS and XHTML. No more tables.
• Limit Coffee intake.
• Limit SouperSandwhich (the greatest UCT Food place ever) intake.
• Limit Facebooking, Flickr.com’ing, Forum-reading, and Computer Gaming while I’m meant to be working.
• Read the parts of the Bible I’ve never read before.

Hope you’ll take my Spring message to heart and do the same. It’s a great time of the year to set new goals. Apologies to those Northern Hemisphere guys who are in Autumn. I suggest you start programming your lights for Dawn Simulation

-Tim

It’s that time of year… The brightly coloured A3 posters have been pinned to every possible surface, the overly chipper candidates are striding around campus like the politicians they’re hoping to emulate. Yes, its UCT SRC Election time! Now, excuse me if I sound a bit pedantic but I cannot understand the point of it all.

80-90% of the Student Body have never, and probably will never, meet these bright-eyed candidates. How on earth can we as the “little fish” in this UCT-Shaped-Pond hope to elect the best people for the job?

The answer is we can’t, and as a result the University gets a group of people who are elected primarily based on how good their photograph is! These people go on to supposedly take the students’ concerns to the powers-that-be. How do they figure out what our concerns are?

The truth is that I don’t really care: I just go about my day to day life at UCT and generally forget that we even have an SRC. What I do care about are these stupid posters that are covering our normally beautiful campus. There is absolutely no way that their presence is going to make me vote (or not vote) for a particular candidate… especially because I’m faced with a wall of 2 of these photos!

A lot of things in this world have become “cheapened” over the past hundred years, but the Olympics symbol has remained clear, elegant and professional despite changing and modernising theories of design.

You can imagine my shock when I found London’s absolutely disgusting attempt at a youth-relevant, internet-trendy, modern-day-ready logo for their 2012 games. Above is the logo which has been accepted and published on the official site at www.london2012.com.
Oh, and by the way, London paid the logo designer a cool £400 000 to create this monstrosity.

I know… I was surprised as well… because it looks as if it was drawn by the Head of the Olympics two-year-old daughter!

Flip London, you can do better than this.

Does the above photo look like Disneyland? Well its not, and this is no joke.

It emerged today that the Internet-filtering, democracy-hating government of The People’s Republic of China own a Disneyland-like theme park called The Shijingshan Amusement Park. That would be fine if it was Disney endorsed (which its not) or even if they actually admitted it to be a rip off of the real Disneyland (which they don’t). They have renamed versions of Shrek, MickeyMouse, SnowWhite, and other famous copyrights of The Walt Disney Company.

Extract from The Standard…

With its slogan “Disneyland is too far,” Beijing’s Shijingshan Amusement Park features a replica of Cinderella’s Castle, with staff dressed like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and other Disney characters.

None of this is authorized by Disney – but that has not stopped the state-owned park from creating its own counterfeit version of the Magic Kingdom in a brazen example of the sort of open and widespread copyright piracy that has Washington fuming.

The United States announced Monday it would file a case at the World Trade Organization over rampant copyright piracy in China, a practice which US companies say deprives them of billions of dollars each year.

But 31-year-old housewife Zhang Li betrays a typical Chinese attitude on the issue while chasing her young son around the park.

“I don’t understand why that is such a big problem. Shouldn’t others be able to use those characters besides [Disney]?” she asks.

Sigh… what next China!

My parents bought me a Renault Modus in October 2005. All was fine for the first year until my latest service, the 30 000km service. For starters, the service cost me R1400 for labour… which is well about industry standard. Then I was told that my front brake pads needed replacing, that was another R900. Then I was informed that my tires needed to be replaced urgently. Thats were the major issues started.

You cannot get tires for the Renault Modus in South Africa. Even Renault themselves admitted that they can’t get tires! A three week search ensued resulting in 1 tire found in Uppington and another 2 in Johannesburg. Those were joined by my current spare tire and finally fitted today at a cost of R2000. But how can every Renault owner undergo this process each time they need to replace the tires. A friend of mine’s mother has been waiting since April 2006 for a new spare tire for her Renault Senic. Come on Renault.

Next issue… At my service I was informed that my car’s alternator was flawed and had been since it left the showroom, but that they would get parts for it as soon as they good. That would explain the really odd sound I’d heard since day 1 but always thought to be part of the “Modus sound”.

After two weeks I got the new alternator and tension pulley installed free of charge (amazing) and I was phoned at 3pm to collect my car. After work (4:30pm) I had a friend take me down to collect – only to be told “Sorry, your car is out on the road test. Just wait a minute.”

I wasn’t offered a seat, a cup of coffee or anything. I stood on the service department floor waiting for my car to get back. When it did I was just given my keys and shown some control certificate thing. Thats it, no apology.

I drove off and about 10 minutes later realised that not only was the sound still there – but it was far worse than ever before.

I contacted them today to tell them how unhappy I was and was told “okay, we’ll have someone call you on Monday about it”.

Sigh. Come on Renault.

Since I posted my news piece about Mike Wills leaving Cape Talk 567 I have received numerous comments and messages agreeing that he should not have been fired, asked-to-leave, or whatever term you may want to apply to the situation which saw Mike’s contract not being renewed for another year.

I believed him to be the finest host that Cape Talk had to offer and know that Cape Talk has definitely lost a lot of listeners because of their decision. I have not yet found out what Mike is up to these days, I really hope he’s doing well… I do know that my mornings are somewhat incomplete.

Comments on this blog have included:

I agree – my mornings just haven’t been the same since Mike left. And as much as I’ve been trying to give Aiden Thomas the benefit of the doubt, I just don’t enjoy the morning show as much as I used to. I wish Cape Talk had been a bit more open about their reasons for not renewing Mike’s contract. I guess the only logical explanation is that the decision was BEE based. Whatever. At the end of the day, Cape Talk has definitely let one of the better guys go… 

Mike Wills was the main reason I lisened to Cape Talk. I now listen mainly to SAFM, but still switch stations looking for someone like Mike.

Really sad to see Mike gone. It was great to wake up to someone who sounds like just a regular guy, but is really passionate about what he does and what he believes in. Agree, could only have been a BEE decision. The poor fellow they have in his place now brings up frightening memories of Frasier Crane’s colleague Gil, the way he unmelodiously sings his message across. Primedia, do what you have to do, but the day John Maytham leaves you’ll lose a sizable portion of your ‘thinking’ audience. 

Really miss Mike in the mornings. I have also stopped listening to Cape Talk in the mornings now that mike is gone. Do still listen to John in the evenings though. 

These comments are all from people I dont know and that have somehow found my blog while Googling or the similar. If these people can find me there must be hundreds of others also missing Mike. The question is, what can we do about it?