hertenberger.co.za

Whether this is due to the Seacom cable having been connected or simply increased competition is pretty irrelevant. iBurst has migrated my 5GB service to one capped to 8GB. Best of all, the monthly price remains the same and the purchase of additional data bundles will be slightly cheaper. From the press release, it looks like the per GB cost could be as low as ZAR 39.

Though it’s not been in effect on my account, stepping over the boundaries of ones allocated data bundle will no longer incur a per MB charge and no throttling of data will take place.

Though I’d still rather have a piece of wire to connect me to an exchange, until the time that that becomes a reality, I’m bound to wireless Internet access. The lower cost and higher cap will certainly be welcome.

The draw for the FIFA World Cup 2010 tournament has taken place.

Of 200 teams in over 800 matches, 32 teams qualified for the competition. The 32 teams have been placed into eight groups and thus have been allocated their first opponents and venues of play beginning 11 June 2010. In a draw that was performed by a number of celebrities, South Africa has had its first opportunity to impress the world.

Group A

	South Africa
	Mexico
	Uruguay
	France

Group B

	Argentina
	Nigeria
	Korea Republic
	Greece

Group C

	England
	United States of America
	Algeria
	Slovenia

Group D

	Germany
	Australia
	Serbia
	Ghana

Group E

	Netherlands
	Denmark
	Japan
	Cameroon

Group F

	Italy
	Paraguay
	New Zealand
	Slovakia

Group G

	Brazil
	Korea DPR
	Ivory Coast
	Portugal

Group H

	Spain
	Switzerland
	Honduras
	Chile

Some very interesting combinations! Spain seems to have a reasonably easy group, whilst the other seeds are likely to have a tougher time. Now, to book accommodation and a flight…

Though there’s no replacement for actually being there, it’s unlikely many fans will have the opportunity of attending as many matches as they would like to come June 2010. In a rather interesting technological twist, Sony and FIFA have just announced an initiative that will bring 25 matches from the 2010 World Cup to the small screen in 3D. The small screen is the next generation of flat panel displays and a huge drive is underway to develop 3D content and transmission technologies by all companies involved in the production of these units.

Whether or not the matches will actually be broadcast live for viewing in 3D is not yet clear: negotiations and various other considerations will have to be sifted through first. At the very least, the games will be available for purchase on DVD or BluRay for later viewing.

Sony may also host booths to showcase the technology during the period of the World Cup and possibly some games will be shown live.

The FIFA press release is available here.

FIFA has announced the eight seeded teams and the individual pots from which teams will be chosen for the official draw that will be taking place at 19:00 South African time this coming Friday. The 90 minute event will see 32 teams allocated to eight groups designated A through H. Each of the seeded teams will be allocated to one of the groups in position 1, whilst the remaining teams will be drawn from pots and allocated to individual groups. There are some rules: except for teams from Europe, no two teams from any one confederation will occupy the same group. As the host nation, South Africa is allocated to the premier position A1 and starts off in pot 1 together with the remaining 7 seeded teams. The seeding is based on the October FIFA ranking.

Pot 1 (seeded teams and host nation)

	South Africa
	Brazil
	Spain
	Netherlands
	Italy
	Germany
	Argentina
	England

Pot 2

	Australia
	Japan
	Korea Republic
	Korea DPR
	Honduras
	Mexico
	United States of America
	New Zealand

Pot 3

	Algeria
	Cameroon
	Ivory Coast
	Ghana
	Nigeria
	Chile
	Paraguay
	Uruguay

Pot 4

	Denmark
	France
	Greece
	Portugal
	Serbia
	Slovakia
	Slovenia
	Switzerland

The separation of higher-ranked teams means there should be some excitement lined up for matches beyond the first round. How well South Africa fares through the first round will be interesting.

Last night saw the final matches in the 2010 FIFA World Cup qualifications take place. With South Africa qualifying automatically due its status as the host country, 31 other teams have secured their place in next year’s tournament. On 4 December, the official draw will take place in Cape Town to allocate 4 teams per group with 8 groups in total. The draw will dictate when and where individual teams will be playing and enable fans to make final travel arrangements.

Here are the teams, based on their geographic region:

Africa – 6 teams

	Algeria
	Cameroon
	Ghana
	Ivory Coast
	Nigeria
	South Africa

Asia – 4 teams

	Australia
	Japan
	Korea Republic
	Korea DPR

Europe – 13 teams

	Denmark
	England
	France
	Germany
	Greece
	Italy
	Netherlands
	Portugal
	Serbia
	Slovakia
	Slovenia
	Spain
	Switzerland

North America, Central America and the Caribbean – 3 teams

	Honduras
	Mexico
	United States of America

Oceania – 1 team

New Zealand

South America – 5 teams

	Argentina
	Brazil
	Chile
	Paraguay
	Uruguay

A surprise announcement by the Garmap team: a second edition of the 2009 Africa Series maps is available for purchase. Even better, the smaller mapsets can now be downloaded directly from the Garmap website by registered owners of the software.

The second edition 2009 Africa Series sees some improvements with regard to the mapping data, regions covered, points of interest and also some new features added that were not present in earlier releases.

From a point of view of the mapping data, more than 100000 km of new roads have been added, as has Angola and additional detail for Zambian maps. Many more points of interest have been added and updated, including 300 wireless hotspots and the names of complexes and housing estates. Being able to download the mapsets is a major advantage. Only the smaller mapsets are available as a download and these include the TMC version of the South African Streetmaps (160MB in size), topographical maps (1000MB in size) and South African Waterways (105MB in size).

A new feature is the availability of TMC mapsets. Traffic Message Channel mapsets require a newer device to be able to take advantage of traffic information, though I’m not too sure how well this is already supported in South Africa. Another benefit of these mapsets is that they are slightly smaller and more compact, consuming slightly less space on the target GPS.

As always, users of older mapsets will need to purchase a license for the update, but for owners of the 1st edition, updates should be free of charge. I would still recommend buying the ZAR 10 DVD directly from a retailer – that way, you’ll have all the maps on a single disk.

The next president (now pretty much without doubt) of our country has once again managed to slip out of a series of legal charges. These include racketeering, four charges of corruption, a charge of money laundering and 12 charges of fraud related to a multi-billion Rand government arms deal.

To have cleared the charges based in part on fears of a revolt by grass roots supporters is a cop-out, plain and simple. Next, we’ll have murderers walking free based on the number of supporters they can get to campaign in their favour. Pardon me: murderers and rapists don’t even need such support to walk free.

Bottom line: criminals 99:justice system 0. A banana republic that will have a tough time gaining international investment if officials can racketeer at will and get away with it.

The next carrot he’ll give us is during his inauguration.

Spring is already more than a week old, an excellent time to start wearing T-shirts. I like T-shirts. In fact, I have quite a few. Nonetheless, the offer I received in an email offering a free T-shirt if I provided some kind of feedback on an online store’s performance was too good to resist. Now, let’s put that into perspective: the email arrived somewhere at the beginning of June. Of this year, granted.

I placed an order, then waited: June, July, August. Within those three months, I ordered a variety of other stuff online. Not just locally, mind you. No, even international orders were fulfilled in a time way shorter than the three months I was kept waiting. No pilfering at the post office. As an even more astounding measure of the overall time it took springleap to manufacturer and ship their product, an erroneous order that arrived from the UK (ordered at the end of July) was resent and arrived less than two weeks later.

In the end, the shirt I’d ordered arrived during the first week of September, with another one included as a means of apology. Apology accepted, I guess. The shirts are decently made, with good quality prints. Artwork submitted is selected based on popularity, then offered for purchase as a design on a shirt. It’s a model that serves several other T-shirt vendors overseas quite nicely (I like Teetonic). My shirts feature the bees…

and the iPod

The thing is, it’s unlikely I’ll order from springleap again. In exactly the same way I won’t order from Apple‘s local online store ever again, for example. The reason is simple: non delivery of the promise made by the vendor and an overall disappointing experience. It may not have been springleap‘s fault. Various communications with them indicated huge issues with local suppliers and non-delivery of services by those vendors. Unfortunately, those vendors are hidden from the customer and cannot be used as an excuse.

I wish the springleap team better luck with their future endeavours. We need some local, South African retailers online. Except, they need to focus on what’s important: delivery.

The South African Department of Home Affairs is slowy being dragged into modern times. With our planned down-under trip coming up in December, our youngest passenger is in a squeeze with a passport that expires shortly before our trip home. Since we don’t want to leave him behind, I’ve gone through the motions of applying for a new passport. The relevant forms are available online and can be printed out and filled in before one ventures to the still-crappy home affairs branch office in Randburg.

Just in case, I took along four photographs (only two are required), parent’s passports and an unabridged birth certificate. They need copies of those, but thankfully there are many enterprising individuals running budget SOHO Canon all-in-one units off a battery in the parking area. ZAR 5 per photocopy is not cheap, but forgetters can’t be choosers. ZAR 133 for a kid’s passport and a waiting period of roughly six weeks. The process of submitting and paying for the service took less than ten minutes, so there is no reason to complain.

A convenience factor that has been introduced is the availability of an SMS service that indicates the status of an application. Alexander‘s passport is currently being printed, it seems (SMS P followed by the identity number to 32551):

Home Affairs:Passport Application for xxxxxxxxxx:Passport being printed – 2008/07/23. More info:0800601190/www.dha.gov.za. 2003/07/23 05:29:35 PM

The online enquiries were not available when I tried.

We seem to be making progress, if only in small increments…

Thanks to Herman’s heads-up (in this post’s comment) about the National Geographic screening of Ewan McGregor‘s adventure traveling from John O’Groats in Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa by motorcycle.

Long Way Down takes Ewan and his mate Charley through a few European countries before they plunge into the heart of Africa. Along the way they stop to visit various places of interest and meet up with a variety of people. Entertaining and full of interesting facts and visuals, Long Way Down is certainly worth viewing.

For the gadget geek, a show like this provides many additional reasons to finally get one of these…

The BMW R1200 GS. Ewan’s trusty steed.

Watch Long Way Down on National Geographic Channel.