SMS Subscription Services !

I’m quite upset with these SMS subscription services.

My one aunt, which is totally not TECH-literate, saw this cool baby singing on the TV and sent an SMS to receive a ringtone.  After that she received a ringtone each day, costing her R10 per week.  But she says that the advertisements did not say that it’s a subscription.  Then she tried to STOP the service by sending STOP to the number to no avail.  She then phoned me and I had to track down the company which runs the campaign.  And when I tried to cancelled, it took them 2 weeks to cancel.

I personally never use/or am interested in any type of shortcode competition, subscription services or ringtones like this as I just know it’s a massive money making venture for doing nothing.  These guys send you some low quality “content”and charge you an arm and a leg for it.

I found this website, which also makes one think about this industry.  This example, uses the “You’ve won the world” method to get you to interact with their website, “Find the 3 differences”…. and afterwards it says enter your number and subscribe to win (which in small letter at the bottom of the screen indicates it is R30 / week).

I really thought that some type of legislation has already been implemented to protect the consumer with this type of advertising.

New Blogger

I would just like to welcome my wife, Cindy to the blogosphere.

Today we started her Baby blog for her.

At the moment I’m giving her a quick intro about Blogs, Aggregators, RSS feeds etc.

You can visit her blog at MamaBrrm.co.za . (1st post)

Hope you have stacks of fun !

Julius Malema not such a big idiot

Some politics, and this is quite new to this blog.

Earlier this week I listened to 702’s Jenny Crwys-Williams where she interviewed Julius Malema, the ANC Youth League leader.

In this interview I was quite amazed by the way he carried himself in the interview and he sounded quite well balanced, and this makes one wonder about the media coverage done over the last couple of months.

You can also download this from the following URL from 702’s podcasts.

http://www.pod702.co.za/podcast/bestofjenny/20081124JCWBEST.mp3

I also uploaded this as a download from
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Oppurtunity in Java CAPS

Today, a post about my career and personal life.

A few months I posted about ‘Focusing on your Niche‘, where I decided I’m just going to focus on Microsoft Sharepoint technologies as my main focus for the next 2 - 5 years at least.

For the last month or so I’ve had quite a few options to concider, from the possibility to emigrate when I recieved offers for Metastorm work from Dubai and Australia to the most recent one that got me thinking, Java CAPS oppurtunity.

This oppurtunity came from DVT(the company I work for)’s java business unit JCentric, which
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Let’s do something!

I lived in Krugersdorp all my life, which is on the far western side of Johannesburg.

When I got married I moved to Pretoria for a year, which was really awesome.

I then bought myself a house in Krugersdorp, as it is close to all our family and we just love the town.

Back in Krugersdorp, I found that some basic services was lacking, just a simple example the refuse removal sometimes would be 3 or 4 days late and quite alot of other headaches as well. All boiling down to management of the municipal structures and processes.

One example is the tennis courts in Krugersdorp-West ( a suburb of Krugersdorp ).  The tennis courts is part of a whole residential block within the suburb dedicated to recreational activities. The block consists of olimpic size swimming pool, boxing club, bowls pitch, library, community hall and the tennis court.

Of all these facilities only the boxing club and library is in working order. The boxing club is hired  by a private company that provides boxing lessons in the facilities.

The other facilities are infested(strong but it really looks that way) by squatters that live inside the building.  The swimming pool does not have any water in and it is overwhelmed by long grass growing all over.  This all due to the municipality not maintaining the facilities, and thus have seen the diminishing interest in the facilities and also the deterioration of the buildings.

I have recently given the DA representative in the area a call to find out what is happening, and if something could be done about it, and apparently he and some church groups have been investigating possibilities to get the facilities back into shape.  They tried to get an appointment with the Mogale City mayor, but he always tries to duck and dive meetings, always at some indaba,lunch or at a conference.

I also tried contacting other party representatives like the ANC but they just let everything fall on death ears, their response was just, they don’t have any representative in the area so at the end they actually just don’t want anything to do with the area.

I’ve thought about a few plans to get the facilities up and running again, and thought the best one to start with would be the tennis courts.  As you can see from these pictures, there are squatters living in the clubhouse, so that is the first problem, and that would be the biggest challenge, as you can see on this picture, it looks like the people have a baby as well looking at the baby bath standing outside.

What I am considering is drawing up a plan of action and then approaching the appropriate persons to find out what to do regarding the squatters first.

After that if the municipality does not want to have anything to do with it, as all they have to do is cut the grass and maintain the facilities.

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