Justin

Self Portrait

More Fun

Ok, Last one for the day...

Tracing

That was fun!

Painting 101

Ok, here's the deal. I'm going to learn how to paint/draw all over again digitally. I'm starting with baby-steps, so don't laugh ;)

Bought myself a mousepen

Thought I'd spoil myself and get a mousepen, it comes with corel painter 8 so I downloaded the trail for IX.5 from www.corel.com
not quite top-of-the-range but loads of fun, and no need to buy paint!

Some Stats For Your Ass

According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day
due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages
on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the
world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even
more invisible in death.”

That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year. ^{source 19}

Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
Cosmetics in the United States	8
Ice cream in Europe	11
Perfumes in Europe and the United States	12
Pet foods in Europe and the United States	17
Business entertainment in Japan	35
Cigarettes in Europe	50
Alcoholic drinks in Europe	105
Narcotics drugs in the world	400
Military spending in the world	780

And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:

Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
Basic education for all	6
Water and sanitation for all	9
Reproductive health for all women	12
Basic health and nutrition	13

^{source 25}

Number of children in the world

2.2 billion

Number in poverty

1 billion (every second child)

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Changing The Present

So it's christmas time again, and that means all sorts of crowded shopping areas with people fighting to buy absolutely useless gifts. Fortunately my friends over at Worldchanging have a post about another website called changing the present which allows you to buy gifts for non-profit organisations. The real kicker is that the gifts are very specific so it's not like a blanket donation, there are hundreds of different gifts to choose from for things from mosquito nets to cooking stoves to microfinance for villages. I'm super excited because this appeals to my lazy nature, it means I can buy gifts without feeling guilty and hopefully raising the recipients awareness as well.

Update: Arrrgh! They only accept US, Canadian, German and UK credit cards at the moment. Had to resort to kalahari.net e-vouchers. Hopefully they'll get their asses into gear by next year (with gift vouchers as well!).

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Blah, Blah, Bleh

So why is it that the human race spends 1 trillion dollars annually to wage war when the cost of raising everyones standard of living is estimated to be a paltry 5% of that figure?

I don't know, seems sick to me

go to www.globalissues.org and find out more about it..

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Security

What does everyone think about passwords? I think they stink. I loathe the fact that we require so much security because we have made the world such an unsafe place in general. I am slowly coming to the realization of the globalisation of crime which is forced upon developing nations just as firmly as the trade. I firmly believe
people need to have a say in the environment in which they live and centralized power structures don't afford us that. They certainly don't have the efficiency that is needed to solve the problems we are facing. Back to the password... How long is it before some people steal our stuff out in the ether. Do we trust our data with Google or on our own server? On the note of cracking passwords and security, do
you think we'll ever see 'radical ethical hackers' that act like robin hood, 'taxing' the 100 richest corporations in the world of say, 5% of cash and redistributing the capital directly to the poor through some or other means? We spent, as a species, 1 trillion dollars in weapons this year. The estimated cost to buy health, sanitation, food for the hungry around the world? Oh, thats only 50 billion dollars... If only it where as simple as a buyout but i think it requires a refocusing on broader social issues as well. We can choose to rally around issues if
we want, issues like poverty, the environment, health care, education or we can buy in to all this crap, the lies we are told by the masters who rape the world when we could all enjoy a much higher standard of living and quality of life if we had more democratic choice in matters that affect our security directly, we are simply left with no direct say in how the masters use our money, unfortunately we have to live in the resultant unstable world...

Who cares?

No, really, who gives a fuck anymore. Everyone I've met has bought in to this sick system where money means more than life. You see it in criminals 'life is cheap' they say. You see it in the service industry where your life is rented from you at R10 an hour, but the money you are paid can never buy those days back for you. I feel like giving up, throwing in the towel as far as helping humanity goes. The person i
love and respect most has let me down. I feel like cutting my hair, keeping conventional hours and conforming. Giving up any hope that tomorrow could be any better than today. I really hope i feel better tomorrow because today life really sucks big fat hairy balls, and it all seems rather pointless.

Feeling somewhat better

I think what i need is to hear other people that are concerned about similar issues. Not whether the proteas won or lost the cricket, but how we can live in a safer, saner, more family and friend oriented society and be less cut throat and unequal. I care that it is unsafe to walk on the mountain but i also care that it is unsafe in the
townships and on the streets. I care that i can only walk in very small, well defined areas in the city, which are not green, beautiful or as safe as they should be. I see no preparations going on around me for the inevitable water shortage in cape town this summer. In everything there is a compromise between quantity and quality and i
don't think that we should accept quantities of cheap crap goods. Quantities of prisons rather than improving quality of preventive anti crime measures- like food and shelter for the homeless and downtrodden as well as a basic income grant in order to dissuade desperate people from turning to crime.
Just a thought

Give me a fucking rolemodel please.

Anyone out there know of any rolemodels? From where i stand everyone is either corrupt or prejudice. I don't want to conform to corruption. To say that i was just doing my job in light of the atrocities that are perpetuated by the system that affords me a job is to hide from responsibility regarding the destruction of the society and planet
that we are perpetuating.

Are we 'on our own' in the big bad world?

I was chartised by someone close to me about my choice in friends, it really hurt to think that the mentality that still abounds in this capitalist society. you're on your own and only worth what you can bring in. We think we should isolate ourselves from the 'bad element' and create our own little area of paradise in our global sea of suffering. I don't want to accept that our future lies in a short term outlook, unequal quality of health and opportunity society. I want food for the hungry, not bombs for the rich. I want to be free to travel to any corner of a city on foot, in total safety. I want to choose my work, i want to be part of a civil movement that cherishes human rights over corporate rights. Local consideration over corporate
convenience. I think we need to start to expose the failings of capitalism at the levels of global trade. Unemployment globally sits at about 30% which is worse than it was in the usa during the 'great depression'. I feel alone, it seems to me that all the people i know(mostly well off) are conceding that the system will stay the way it always has and there's no real point in trying to change it. They usually concede that yes the situation with millions of homo sapians starving to death is tragic even though we have the technology and food surpluses around the world to feed everyone. It seems no one has the will to leaves their comfort zone which is really just consentual wage slavery, the rat race, capitalism or whatever you call it....
Bleh

We're all in this together

So, I was reading this book by Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power- go there, it's well worth it, there is more material/citations/footnotes on the website than in the book) and he basically answered a question I've had for a while. Namely, what the fuck do we do about all of our environmental, social and other problems, which I see as being inextricably interrelated.

The answer, in a word?
Organise!
be an organiser, there are no movements (or if they are, the mainstream media manages to keep them subdued).
We need movements, and we need them yesterday.
Local movements with global reach and association.
So I've been putting my little hamster to work and I've come up with some ideals I would like to strive for in such an organisation:

• Web & non-Web materials, Pamphlets (in English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, and whatever else people are able to read in)
• Not-For-Profit (our goal is maximum benefit for maximum number of people, anything maximizing profit is diametrically opposed to that)
• Inclusive
  
• Addresses Dissolution and apathy towards government, police, corporations and everything else that we feel powerless against.
• Empowers Civil Society
• Anti-Authoritarian
• Environmental
• Radical
• Tribal
• Democratic

Here are some tools I thought might help spread the word along the way:

• Music
• Email
• Pamphlets that illuminate hidden issues
  
• Parties

I was also considering travelling as a means to spread the word & membership (as well as have fun & meet new people & bodyboard when on the coast :) )
that's all for now folks...

What! You mean the US is Lying to it's people about pot? No Way!

http://inserttitleblog.com/?p=82
Go there, read it.  Take a look at the Propaganda Machine in action and think again about the benevolence of Government (USA in this case, but honestly, all of our policies are dictated to us by them, the biggest Bully this side of high school)

Spam, spam, spam

Wow, it seems the spam masters have really gotten the better of the Bayesian spam blocking goodies installed on gmail. To be fair it does land in my spam folder, but at least 5 a day, and such a simple technique: take random human phrases, attach picture with advertisement, stir..send.  I suppose the next step is to get neural nets to recognize the images as ads, but that's really just an arms race that'll happen between the spammers and the webmasters.  Unfortunately, blocking ranges of IP addresses just encourages spammers to hack unsuspecting users machines in order to send spam from their IPs.  So what is the social engineering solution?

It's information war!

http://piratbyran.org/perspektiv/english.php
Go there... do it now!

here's the synopsis:
A political party in sweden (aligned with the pirate bay - a leading torrent site) is pissed off about some holier-than-thou ISP which has decided to ban allofmp3.com for 'moral' reasons.  Basically the site is urging all webmasters to block this ISP's subnets leading to (hopefully) economic collapse.  Whatever happens, this one will be fun to watch :)
All I know is that the global filesharing community is huge and maybe this is a model we could study in terms of a mass movement using information as a weapon against cor pirations -just like they have been trying to brainwash us all these years. Trying to convince us that the problem is the poor, when in fact it is only their authoritarian, fascist organizations driven by closed-minded, dogmatic dinosaurs...
Lets all give a shout for the pirate bay
Hip Hip Horray!

Email 2 blog

Email 2 blog
Originally uploaded by rob.in.cape.town.

Okay, this is actually the second post of this - just had to get my

settings correct on flickr



If only I had a mobile email client that could attach photos for me...

(sigh)

...well anyway, here's one straight from gmail... an image to think about

ciao for now

It's information war!

http://piratbyran.org/perspektiv/english.php
Go there... do it now!

here's the synopsis:
A political party in sweden (aligned with the pirate bay - a leading torrent site) is pissed off about some holier-than-thou ISP which has decided to ban allofmp3.com for 'moral' reasons.  Basically the site is urging all webmasters to block this ISP's subnets leading to (hopefully) economic collapse.  Whatever happens, this one will be fun to watch :)
All I know is that the global filesharing community is huge and maybe this is a model we could study in terms of a mass movement using information as a weapon against cor pirations -just like they have been trying to brainwash us all these years. Trying to convince us that the problem is the poor, when in fact it is only their authoritarian, fascist organizations driven by closed-minded, dogmatic dinosaurs...
Lets all give a shout for the pirate bay
Hip Hip Horray!

Moblogging

Can i get a hell yeah from all the geeks in the house! Straight from
my cell to you... Still can't attach images, fuck!

Blog directly from email

Woo Hoo! email 2 Blog works,
next thing to get right is moblogging!

ciao for now

No Waves, More Spam

So, went to the beach bright and early this morning (arrived there at 06:45) hoping for decent waves (well, semi-informed hope - the swell height and period on the web looked promising). Guess what we found....
Nothing, flat sea - I hate that. So my buddies and I were thinking about some way to get a webcam/cellphone camera set up so that we could get a picture of what's going on, instead of driving all the way there only to be disappointed.
So I returned to work with my tail between my legs, only to find some new spam in my inbox... the bastards are now sending poetry (really, really bad, might I add) and attaching an image with viagra pricing etc. It seems some clever monkey has discovered how to use a neural network to generate nonsense, but don't take my word for it - here is a selection in all it's glory:

beautiful as that. only love me, dear, and somepublication of this era which most probably hasmight be, for he suggested the idea and gave rose
girls, and whichever way you decide, i'll do my lady, if he does well about the place, and him sew them on himself, and see if his work
she had it in her," answered david, in a

tender pride as she walked away, leaningthe shadowy nomes continued to flit herethe children one day, and it reminded mewhen he studied or talked earnestly. but
spectacle of all, and grif proposed to give a note of it, and further aggravate that hannah had 'dished up' an astonishing
it. "i suppose i 've got to speak to her,

it. "i suppose i 've got to speak to her,us, hey, charlie?" "yes, uncle, onlyf:
hurry the desired day. and the cowardly lion laughed, and said: the others left him before the cage and went
"father told me not to wait for any

has just confided to me that she is engagedsober, and jo to become pensive, at first,to them. right in the middle of a kiss, however,m: susan needs to
that he had mistaken for a copper statue made a great many? would you mind telling ever, flirts awfully with any one who comes
sympathy and love. shall i ever find him?"
i was to take, was already filled, and alike to have them go in the water, and makehow she did it,"you
"what about jo? please say something nice, fact ourselves, and not

I think it's time our anti spam experts start ranking poetry, and honestly if my real flesh and blood friends sent me shit like this, I would want it to be deleted from my inbox... Eish

My friends

Hi all,
Some shameless self promotion again...
meet my friends, outside the bandroom
after practice. If you want to hear any of the music (free downloads available under a Creative Commons License)

Sprinklers on the lawn

So anyway,
I'm driving into work this morning and I see the sprinklers on the side of the Eastern Boulevard (highway), going absolutely nuts! How is it that in a region where we clearly have lots of vegetation that can survive without the help of irrigation, do we need to water and manicure lawn grass? Surely with our impending water shortages in summer we would decide, as a community, that it is better to save conserve water and plant indigenous flora species that handle the climate, than 'subsidise' the foreign lawn grass' water requirements... Eish!

Here's what non-irrigated vegetation looks like on the mountain





....Looks pretty healthy to me.

Work & Play

Ok, I'll admit it... I really love my job. I've got freedom (provided my butt doesn't leave my seat too often) and I'm fortunate to be able to challenge my mind in the field of software development.

It does worry me that the nature of my work consists of totally virtual things which end up having little effect on the majority of South Africans, but at least my mind isn't atrophying, hey?
I like to console myself with the fact that work isn't all that I do. I also play in a band Feedback which I love, and I long to attack the oligarchy of media ownership through setting an example for other indie bands out there, that we can make it big without the "major players": visit DownhillBattle for more info...
which brings us back to the central problem of this blog... namely, if everyone is so concerned about themselves, who is concerning themselves about everyone?

Friedrich Nietzsche - “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”

Welcome

Hi,
My name is Robin
So this is my very first blog.... I've been thinking about a while lot for a little while now, all about how we relate to our planet, our families, our societies. Our jobs give us tunnel-vision, we pursue them at our own expense. Our lives and happiness play second-fiddle to the capitalistic imperative...
I know, I am one
WorldChanging
Why Work?
Anxiety Culutre

Friedrich Nietzsche - “The future influences the present just as much as the past.”