Let’s watch a movie, or lots of little movies

I, like many other enthusiasts, enjoy looking surfing interesting YouTube videos. From the first ever episode of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to a documentary on how to play the bagpipes, you can find it on www.youtube.com.
But I don’t want to have to view it off the website all the time. I want to download it and view it at my leisure, on different computers, without having to eat into my monthly download cap and, most convenient of all - without the jerkiness that can be the plight of the entry level broadband.

I’ve done quite a bit of net trawling and I’ve tested numerous software packages that promise but don’t deliver only to finally hit paydirt. www.dvdvideosoft.com has, amongst various other interesting packages, a program called FreeYouTubeDownload.exe version 2.2.1.1, which clocks in at 5.6Mb. Download it and install it to start your epic collection of YouTube clips.

Launch FreeYouTubeDownload and open up www.youtube.com . Once you’ve found a video clip you would like to download, ensure that the clip is the active clip because you are going to need to copy and paste the cryptic link which you will see in the Address bar at the top. It looks something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xyG0JCtDzU . So highlight the link and press Ctrl+C to copy it. In the FreeYouTubeDownload program, click in the window which says Input URL containing video and press Ctrl + V to paste the link in. Check that the Output format is AVI (which seems to work the best) and that the destination for the output file is somewhere where you will find it again. Other output formats available are MP4, 3GP or FLV files.
Now click on download and wait for the clip to download. Clips are usually short, I think this is because the sound versus video synchronisation goes a bit loopy if the clip is too long. So if a whole episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been uploaded, you might find that they have been cut into two or three bite size chunks to avoid sync problems. You will need to find all the parts and download them one by one.

Back to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the downloaded avi you should now have on your computer. This avi can be played with a media player such as Windows Media Player. Using some of the funky features of the media player, you can create a playlist, in other words arrange a string of avi’s to play in a certain order, thus giving the illusion of a full length and non stop episode.

FreeYouTubeDownload version 2.2.1.1 has the ability to download a batch of youtube video’s, if you want to set a bunch of them going while you run a bath. To give you an idea of how big clips are, electronically: a ten minute cartoon clocks in at 55Mb and takes about 5 minutes on entry level ADSL to download. If you have a cap of 1Gb, you would have used up 5% of your cap to nab this clip. The size versus length of the clip does vary depending on the quality of the clip. Some National Geographic clips have a phenomenal quality, while other clips have very poor quality and are only just watchable on the little window that opens on the youtube website.

You could, technically, burn this AVI onto CD’s and DVD’s but unfortunately it won’t play on your conventional DVD player connected to your TV. I found this out the hard way. The clip needs to be converted, but fear not, a geek article in the near future will reveal how you can do just that. In the meantime, pull up the couch in front of your monitor and view your selection of AVI’s on your computer using a media player.

Other interesting sites you can try for videos: video.google.com, www.dailymotion.com or www.zeitgeistmovie.com . All three of these sites use videos which are Adobe Flash driven. Unfortunately, this means that they do not lend themselves to downloading with FreeYouTubeDownload.

The dvdvideosoft site also recommends that you stay updated with the latest version of the FreeYouTubeDownload program as YouTube change their video files hosting routine from time to time and the downloading might stop working until a fix is available.

If you just need to download one video and do not want to go to the trouble of installing any programs, try this site: http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/online-YouTube-video-download.php . Paste the URL in the window provided and follow the instructions listed. The downside to this method is that the downloaded video will be in flv format which is not yet common enough for every media player to play back. Windows Media Player for example does not understand flv format.

Signing out in Style

I often catch myself saying under my breath: “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” Be that with my four year old son and the licking of knives or emphasising the importance of backup procedures on a clients computer.

I’m not always on top of things. In this way, I have put off figuring out how signatures in emails work, but now I’ve done my homework and never again will a recipient receive a trademarkless email from me.

It’s good business practice to add your name, business name and contact details at the bottom of each email you send out or reply to. What Microsoft Outlook Signatures can do for you is save you time typing.

You can also fancify the signature by using a small picture. For example: you could write your name on a piece of paper, scan it into your computer and add that as your signature along with your contact details. This will give the email a personal touch in this digital age. Or you can insert your company logo. It makes the world of a difference.

Instructions below are for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.

First, open Outlook and click on Tools, Options, Mail Format. The screen is divided into three sections. In the top section (Message Format), check that “Compose in this message format” is set to HTML. This will allow you to write emails in their full glory (including graphics). Also tick the “Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages” option.

If, like me, you wear different hats in your daily life and have several email addresses, you can create a different signature for each email address. In the bottom part of the window (marked Signatures), pick your email of choice in the “select signatures for account” window. “Signature for new messages” and “Signature for replies and forwards” will still be blank, but click on the “Signature” button underneath that.

Create a new signature and give it a name. Once you click on “Next”, you now have the option of creating a text-only type of signature. In the Windows for Signature text you could now fill in: “Andrea Arbuckle, Witness Geek, Geeksville” or something similar. Click on Finish, and then on OK. Now click on the down arrows next to “Signature for new messages” and “Signature for replies and forwards” and choose your signature that you’ve just created and then click on OK. That signature will now be added to any new email you write using that email account as well as any email that you reply to, using that email account.

That is your simplest form of signature. You can repeat this process for each of your accounts (your different email addresses, i.e. work and private) and each one will have its unique signature.

vCards
If we step back through the procedure but stop before we finish designing the signature, we could add a vCard. This will attach a business card to your emails that users can open and add to their address book. If you wanted people to have your correct company name, telephone contacts and web addresses, without them having to add this themselves painstakingly, you could create yourself in your own Contacts, fill in all the details and then attach yourself as a vCard in the signature. Your email recipients could then open this vCard and add it to their address book. In the future, if they want to get hold of you, they don’t need to look for an old email of yours, they need only look you up in their Contacts.

So, just because this is the day and age of viruses, the attachment that would be sent out would look something like: AndreaArbuckle.vcf and it would be about 200kb in size, which is a bit hefty to send with every single email. It would be wiser to send this out once only for each client.

Adding logos or handwritten names
If you want to add your company logo to your signature, you can create a combination of written text and picture by using the “Advanced Edit”. It’s a button on the right at the stage where you can type your signature. When you click here, it will warn you that it is launching an external editor, mostly Microsoft Word. You are now able to beautify you simple text by any means you want to. For example if you want to insert your company logo, click on Insert, Picture, From File and find your logo and insert. Remember that you do not want to insert a huge photograph or a high resolution graphic that will be too big electronically and hold up all your emails going in and out. As a rule of thumb don’t use graphics larger than 50kb. Also, this is a good time to learn what the dog with the lines through it in the Picture toolbar does: Your graphic might push the text awkwardly to one side or another. Click once on the graphic and choose the dog (text wrapping) icon. Choose “Tight” or “Square” to allow text to wrap itself like a blanket around the graphic.
Another important matter to remember here is that a normal “Enter” to separate lines will result in double spacing later on. Instead of a normal Enter, use Shift+Enter to create a HTML friendly line break.
Once your signature is looking perfect, close the editor (use the X in the top right corner if you like) and Save when asked. Note how you’ve created an *.html not a *.doc document.

Don’t worry if Outlook squeals about not being able to find your document at this point, it actually does find it once you click OK. (Windows Bug, me thinks).
Proceed as before (i.e. add it to your “Signature for new messages” and “Signature for replies and forwards”) and now, when you start a new email, you will have a wonderful logo to go with it.

If you want to personalise your email with your signed name (maybe don’t use your official signature to prevent fraud), write it on a piece of paper and scan it in on a scanner. Use an image manipulation program such as FastStone to crop it and resize it (electronically) nicely so that it isn’t huge and proceed as if it was a logo.

If you have one email address only, but you have need to use several different signatures, depending on the email, here is how you insert a signature from a host of signatures you have designed in the past: Once you’ve got your new email open and you’ve clicked in the main body of the email, you can click on Tools, Options, General. Here, choose the E-mail Options and click on the E-Mail signature that you want to insert. Now you have to actually copy the signature presented in the middle window by clicking in it, and selecting all the text, Ctrl+C to copy. Then click OK, and click Cancel to exit the Tools menu. Now click Ctrl+V to paste the signature into your email. This is not the slickest way I can think of, but there you go, it does work. I would have the one signature that is used the most set as the default so one doesn’t have to go through this rigmarole every time.

Note that there is a signature feature in Outlook Express, but it works slightly differently.

Geek says Hello to Peter!

With a nebulous name such as “Hello Peter” and a byline of “your customer crusaders”, this website doesn’t belong to MTN nor to Woolworths, but if you’ve received good or bad service by either of these companies anywhere in South Africa (or further afield), you can post it here.

www.hellopeter.com is the world’s largest customer service website, founded by Peter Cheales. It allows people to leave comments about any company for free. Not for free, companies can sign up to respond, thus enabling them to set the record straight, or take corrective action against each complaint/service listed against them by a customer.

The aim of the site is to increase service levels of suppliers by allowing users to post company-specific, constructive criticism as well as compliments. A yellow smiley indicates a compliment, a purple sad face is a complaint. The site is moderated and hurtful or racial statements are deleted immediately. Companies are initially made aware of comments left on the site by users who forward a comment to a company. Companies can then become a “company who responds”, by signing up and paying an annual subscription fee of R315. An Annual Response Fee is charged over and above this, depending on how many comments are made about them.

I spoke to Peter Cheales, founder of HelloPeter.com last week, and posed these questions:

WITNESS: Hello Peter, you are based in Johannesburg. What is your main line of business?
CHEALES: I’m a motivational speaker and have been in the motivational circuit for 15 years. In this industry, every speaker has his or her particular hook, mine is customer service.

WITNESS: How did the name HelloPeter come about? Are you an agony uncle?
CHEALES: I used to have people come to me after a talk complaining of rude experiences they had with suppliers. This was around about the year 2000 and the dot com crash posed challenging times for any Internet related business. I had this idea of a forum on the Internet, though, and even without any programming background I intended starting a customer service site, but all the obvious names were already taken, and all that was left was hellopeter.

WITNESS: Is HelloPeter a totally new concept or just a first for South Africa?
CHEALES: It is a totally new concept, globally, starting in 2000. Since then copycat sites have evolved which try to replicate my model, but my site is the biggest customer service site in the world.

WITNESS: Please give us some statistics about HelloPeter.
CHEALES: To show you some statistics, visit www.alexa.com, a Web Information Company and check our traffic graph or compare it to various sites.

Also: HelloPeter currently has 518 registered companies who respond and 379 companies who don’t. In the last 12 months alone, there have been 13023 happy comments and 55311 unhappy comments made by users.

WITNESS: Why have a web based interface which limits your reach to computer literate people with Internet access only? Why not just create a call centre?
CHEALES: The point of the medium is to expose truth and opinion. A call centre cannot expose opinion or its stories. I have got 92 000 journalists all writing for me at the moment, they are the customers! They want to expose their opinions, as is evidenced in the explosion of blogs on the Internet. HelloPeter is a glorified blog which was invented before the word blog came into being. It is the web log fielding tens of thousands of customer experiences. Generally customers of the big suppliers across industries (such as banks or cell phone companies) who use HelloPeter are all employed. 98.7% of all comments on HelloPeter are made during working hours, so it is a focused solution.

WITNESS: My sister uses HelloPeter when she needs a response from MTN. She gets answers from MTN via HelloPeter. Doesn’t that almost make MTN’s internal call centre obsolete? What should MTN do in your opinion?
CHEALES: HelloPeter is an add-on facility to suppliers’ existing response mechanism. HelloPeter is not aimed at removing existing corporate service mechanisms. MTN, as a matter of fact, has three dedicated people working specifically on HelloPeter, pretty much all the time and they are excellent, taking their function very seriously. HelloPeter therefore serves as education facility as well for the suppliers, whereby a response to one customer can often educate and inform all the other customers who read that response.

WITNESS: Speaking of companies, they are clearly divided into those who respond and those who don’t. If a new company is complained against, but they have never heard of HelloPeter, does your HelloPeter team contact that company?
CHEALES: No, we don’t ever contact anybody. That company will hear about the comment within a remarkably short period of time. We encourage users to forward comments, i.e. email a comment to a friend. They might then forward it to a company. This “email to a friend” feature currently sees 4000 emails being sent daily. We also wait until a company has received five comments with no response before that company becomes listed as a “company who doesn’t respond”.

WITNESS: Do companies, even those who do respond, ever get aggressive toward what HelloPeter is doing? What do you tell them? Have you had big companies try to bully you to back down? Or calm the website complaints process down?
CHEALES: This debate has been raging for years. First of all there are checks and balances built into the website. One of them is that anybody can report abuse. When you’re dealing with services issues, everybody becomes an expert on customer services. Also, what might be great services to you might be shocking service to me. It’s pure opinion – can one denigrate someone else’s opinion? If someone voices an opinion we have no problem with that. If, however, abuse enters the comment by means of swearing, personal vendettas or racial abuse, we at HelloPeter delete the comment. We are also able to pick up if a company disguises itself as a user and posts many positive comments about itself.

WITNESS: What is the main reason “companies don’t respond” in your opinion?
CHEALES: It depends on the company. If it’s a little company, there is no need to sign up, if it’s a medium sized business, you often get prevailing arrogance with the attitude: “We have our own website and call centre or customer service department.” Large companies like SAA or Telkom don’t actually have a clue who would monitor this.[sic]

WITNESS: If I was a customer with a complaint, in your opinion what should I do first? Call the company’s call centre to see if I can get some joy or go straight to HelloPeter?
CHEALES: I ran a survey asking exactly this question a year ago: It came back exactly 50/50. More and more people are using HelloPeter as first call rather than as a last resort.

HelloPeter has its controversy. It is listed as a company who responds and has currently got 469 happy comments versus 331 unhappy ones. Phew, why so many bads? I dug around HelloPeter looking for an active company who responds with ties to Pietermaritzburg and stumbled upon Hirsch’s Homestore. I contacted their CEO, Allan Hirsch and asked his opinion about HelloPeter.

WITNESS: Why did you join HelloPeter?
HIRSCH: I joined because I had a complaint from a customer. I tried to reply to the complaint only to be advised that to do so you have to pay HelloPeter to reply. This I felt was unfair and a bit of blackmailing, so I chose to ignore it. A little while later I went to one of Peter Cheales’ talks and decided to have the opportunity to reply.

WITNESS: What did you gain by signing up as a company who responds?
HIRSCH: I obviously gained a lot of frustration because many times it has been an abusive relationship. People write abusive things about companies without giving us [companies] the opportunity to rectify the problem. In many cases we are not even given the chance to rectify the problem. I don’t think this is a fair system and I would like the opportunity to qualify people if they have a complaint, certainly allow them to air it, but in many cases it is not so.

WITNESS: Is HelloPeter useful in your opinion?
HIRSCH: No, I don’t think it is. I honestly feel that HelloPeter is an abusive system and not fair. It is a way for him [Peter Cheales] to make money and for people to gripe and complain. In many cases there are genuine and serious complaints and in equally as many cases, it’s just a platform where people think they can air their views and try to abuse companies.

Mixed potpourri of geek snippets

Office 2007 file format converter
So I don’t think much of Windows Vista. It is said that in 2007, Vista was only shipped with 39% of all new PC’s because nobody wanted it. I also heard that in June this year, XP will no longer be available to buy, so anybody needing to stock up on licenses should do so soon, if they prefer to steer clear of Vista. Although you don’t need Vista to run Microsoft Office 2007; it can be run on XP, not too many people are using Office 2007 yet either. It looks radically different from the conventional Microsoft Office 2003 so many believe that if it aint broken, don’t try to fix it by migrating to 2007. The main reason for the reluctance to migrate is the file format change, though. MS Word 2003 and prior versions created documents with an extension “.doc” and MS Word 2007 has “.docx”, the old Excel uses “.xls” vs. Excel 2007 “.xlsx” and old PowerPoint uses “.ppt” while 2007 has “.pptx”.

Users of previous versions of Office can’t read documents created in new versions and the only solution is for 2007 users to back-save before distributing to their older version contacts? Not quite! Microsoft has come out with a file format converter that allows Office 2003 to be spruced up to open 2007 documents. This converter is free to download from www.microsoft.com. Microsoft say you must ensure your system (if an Office XP or 2003 user) is up to date by installing all High-Priority / required updates on http://update.microsoft.com beforehand. Then, in the search window on www.microsoft.com type FileFormatConverters.exe and download this hefty 27Mb executable. Double-click to install and that should take care of opening documents from 2007 in 2003.

Avast outstrips AVG
Next update is on the Antivirus front: AVG used to be the most popular free antivirus program out, but in recent times a new name has made itself felt and people, including myself, have started to uninstall AVG and migrate to Avast. Avast is available free for home users on www.avast.com . I have come across a couple viruses/trojans that AVG did not pick up but Avast did. If you suspect your system is compromised, the thing to do is download avast ( 19Mb), load it, download the latest virus database as per avast menu, restart your computer in safe mode and virus check your system.

Safe Mode
Chances of adware/spyware/viruses loading in Safe Mode are minimal. To boot into Safe Mode in Windows XP, shut down the computer totally (as in power off – keep power off for 30 seconds). Turn the computer on and start tapping the F8 key every second as the white (pre-windows) writing starts coming up on the screen. You will drop into the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Using the arrow keys on your keyboard (the mouse won’t work yet), choose Start Windows in Safe Mode. Virus check your system, then reboot normally to get back into conventional Windows.

Synch it with Google
An interesting addition happened in Google Calendar not long ago. The Google team came up with “Sync with Microsoft Outlook calendar”. If you use the Google Calendar to its fullest, inclusive of free reminder sms’s of upcoming events, but you also want the features offered by Microsoft Outlook, syncing Google Calendar to Outlook (or Outlook with Google – or both) is now possible and easily set up. All you need to do is surf to www.google.com/calendar, click on the new red link at the top that leads to the Sync feature and download, as per instructions, the executable GoogleCalendarSyncInstaller.exe . Once downloaded, double click on it to install it and decide if you want a 2-way sync, or a one way from or to Google Calendar. You are also able to set the interval between each synchronisation. Sweet, this can now easily be incorporated into your existing Microsoft Outlook Calendar, or the one used at work. It only syncs your main calendar for now, which is a downside if you use several calendars in Google.

Load Shedding Info
Focusing on the wonderful world of load shedding, forewarned is better than being caught off guard. The internet has a number of websites dedicated to the power issue. The obviously important one is when can we expect a load shed? Ideally keep an eye on www.eskom.co.za/live and watch that dial they show on TV. If it goes into brown – trouble. Another useful site which quotes more links is www.poweringsouthafrica.co.za and is especially useful to find out what can be done to help Eskom out of their quandary and how to save electricity.

And if you want to take power saving to new heights, use www.blackle.com instead of www.google.com which swaps the white background with a black one, thus saving energy. Or does it? The jury really is out on this one, but hey, blackle sure makes for a change.

Don’t blow your lid
If you need to be prepared, there is a company in Cape Town that specialises in UPS’s (Uninterrupted Power Supply) as electronic equipment not shut off in time can take strain and blow. If you need a solution, maybe www.powerbackups.co.za have it?

The Witness Geek, when not in panic mode of one form or another, answers emails on geek@witness.co.za or you can visit her blog on www.witnessgeek.blogspot.com .

OF FAXING AND OTHER INTERESTING PASTIMES

First off, I would like to thank Ronan Duff for piping the accidentally misspelt URL of Maritzburgs' Blog back to our www.pmbblog.co.za . So drop by and set yourself up on our Maritzburg blog spot.

But if blogging isn’t your scene, maybe faxing is? Read on as I’m about to demystify how to receive and send faxes from your computer.

Before you sign up for a quick and free fax number via some service provider advertising this service, consider if you will need to send faxes, too, or if being able to receive faxes is good enough. Choosing your fax service provider depends on this decision as not all service providers also accommodate the sending of faxes from your PC. Here’s the lowdown:

RECEIVING IS EASY
It is easy to set yourself up with a quick fax number to which you can receive faxes. Incoming faxes will come through on your email and it is a free service which many service providers offer, including Postnet. Surf to www.postnet.co.za and click on their Fax2Email icon and choose a Postnet outlet near you. Then fill in your details, wait for the activation email to come through to you and click on the activation link. You will now already have an 086 fax number allocated to you, but Postnet still needs to set the 086 number up to pipe any incoming faxes to your email provided. They say it takes about 2 hours before it’s activated. When a fax comes through to you, you will see it as an email in your Inbox with either a tiff file (Tagged Image File Format) or an Adobe Acrobat Reader .pdf attachment.

SENDING REQUIRES DECISIONS
If you need to send faxes from the comfort of your computer, here are further options:

If you still have a dial-up modem, and Windows XP or younger, you can send faxes from your computer using “Windows Faxing”, a facility which Windows provides, but which can be tricky to set up.

It involves adding the Windows Component ‘Fax Services’ in the Control Panel. The Windows Component Wizard should be able to set up the rest and you will be able to send a fax by pretending to “print” and instead of using a physical printer, use the Fax option. Read more about this on the Microsoft website by searching for “Faxing” when you’re at www.microsoft.com .

If you have moved onto ADSL, please note that an ADSL router cannot be used for faxing as it is a router, not a modem. I asked Des Ramsay of SAI for a technical explanation: “ADSL modems do not dial into POP's like your old dial up modem does. This time an ADSL modem works like an ADSL router, but connects to a DSLAM port. You can't put a telephone number into a ADSL modem, if that makes sense.” Clear as mud to me, but what I will remember is that if I had an old dial-up modem still connected to my computer, I could plug it into the phone line and use it to fax, even while using the ADSL router to surf the net and get my email.

However, remember that sending faxes this way incurs a cost as it is essentially a phone call you are making.

But, at a reasonable price, you could circumvent this roundabout way of faxing and faffing by asking your Internet Service Provider for a solution.

I asked SAI and they offer VAX Services. SAI, like Postnet, are able to supply you with a free 086 fax number which allows you to receive faxes. The good news is that even if you are not an SAI client, you can get your free fax number from them.

Should you require to send faxes, you can then ask SAI to install VAX Services for you, which enables you to use your email to send faxes. These sent faxes incur a cost, and a monthly premium of R35 covers this service. If faxes sent for the month exceed R35, the cost jumps to R70. Speak to them on 0861 33 22 11 or email them at freevax@sai.co.za.

Once Vax Service is installed, a fax would be sent from your email program with the recipient address showing the fax number like this: 27865183606@vax.co.za

USE IT OR LOOSE IT
Unused 086 fax numbers are recycled after three to six months, so if you rush out to get one just for fun, use it or loose it, dears. They are also not transferable between service providers. This is the geek faxing out the signal. Roger Roger.

Check out the Witness Geek blogspot on www.witnessgeek.blogspot.com or visit www.pmbblog.co.za

Social Networking

Wayne Janneker is a passionate twenty five year old Network Systems Engineer. His involvements range from the Pietermaritzburg Linux Enthusiasts Group to the Lincoln Meade Neighbourhood Watch. His day job includes programming and fixing peoples problems and I should know, he’s helped me on a number of occasions. We started chatting about trends in social networking, especially how the internet has redefined how people connect and find like-minded communities. Janneker has been researching this, and I went to quiz him in “real” life at his office.

When he started looking into social networking, he first asked himself how the average local Internet user had adapted to the Internet as a whole and discovered that the FUD theory is still very much alive and kicking. FUD standing for “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”. People are still scared to give out credit card details online. Janneker found random people he chatted to “horribly shocked” when asked if they would book a flight online. Most people had heard urban legends that they would get to the airport only to find they had been “suckered” into divulging their credit card details, that there was no booking or seat on the airoplane for them and that their details had been leaked to spam engines or even the Russian Mafia for identity theft. Read more on the truth behind urban legends at www.snopes.com. Janneker explains that one needs to be savvy and understand that sites like the online SARS, Discovery Health, Mango Airlines and banks, ranking amongst legitimate sites, may require more personal information and advises users to look out for the golden keypad on a secured website.

Controversially, Janneker says that on social networking sites such as Facebook, users often gladly reveal email addresses, telephone numbers and photos of themselves publicly and thinks that this is where stalkers could have a field day. He draws the line at handing out email addresses on social websites.

“I must state social networking, even from the begin of time, can only be as safe as what you disclose!” philosophizes Janneker.

After these so-so findings, Janneker decided to dig deeper into the aspect of social networking and came to the conclusion that social networking is a culture, not a “thing”. It existed well before the Internet, computers and even telephones and today’s technology has just opened quicker and easier avenues.

“Social networking is really you and a group of people coming together on a common ground and communicating on a mutual level that is fun and easy. The internet just makes it possible for you to communicate with others on a global level.” says Janneker.

Today’s methods of sharing these common interests include blogs (text based journal entries posted on the Internet), podcasts (audio blogs) and vlogs (video blogs).
Immediately one thinks of Facebook or MySpace, which is inherently a social networking site mainly used by the younger “folks”. Janneker discovered a strange phenomena: comparing friends he knows in the “real world” with their “cyber” persona, he noticed that their attitude and personality took on a new shape:

“I noticed, for example, shy friends I knew from school, who are now on facebook looking cool and hip. On a human level they are more timid, but on a cyber level they’ve upped their personality a good deal. They now have a “second life” online.”

“If you didn’t know me in real life, I, Wayne, could portray a new image. It’s almost like a second chance to better their image, nobody knows the true you and you can live what you are missing.”

This led Janneker to find out more on attitude change. He found a survey on www.eweek.com which states that conventional internet dating sites used to find poor responses to posts: around about a 5% match. Then a new dating site offered a “virtual makeover” which reports a 99% success rate. What did they do? They “spruced up” members profiles to make them sound more desirable.

Janneker came away saying: “My personal view is that you have to be true about yourself online.”

These were almost alarming findings, so I asked Janneker to let me come away with something positive.

We discovered a common passion in Pietermaritzburg and its communities:

Janneker has taken his involvement in the Lincoln Meade Community watch online: www.lincolnmeade.co.za is an active and up to date website reporting on issues surrounding latest arrests, incident and information boards. Janneker has linked up with other community watches in South Africa who share tips and even phone to help with issues.

Computer forums are inherently helpful and none more so than PLEG (Pietermaritzburg Linux Enthusiast Group), who have been the trading post for taking unwanted computers off a companies’ hands and redistributing them to the needy communities such as schools, using open source software.

Women in Business and the Pietermaritzburg Chamber of Business use their active cyber community to network, giving it a business spin.

Using a blog to address business issues has been all but totally underestimated by South African businesses so far. Why not create a business blog such as a daily health tip aimed at South African women, or a weekly posting on financial tax tips pertaining especially to our local environment and let people add these to their RSS feeder to keep on top of their business game. This would be a lot more dynamic than a website.

If these blogs are helpful and handy, you are sure to get spin off business when readers have specific needs and hire your services.

Pietermaritzburg gets its own blog site
So during our interview, ever pro-active Janneker put on his thinking cap and went away to create a place where a network of Pietermaritzburg based interest groups could have a common blog or a link.

Not a new idea, but certainly one long overdue in our city, it is an open site to develop social networking in our city.

Surf to www.pmbblog.co.za and set yourself up. It is aimed at common interest local communities having one place to find each other.

“Blogs have a greater response, are read by more people more quickly than traditional ways of getting heard such as standing on a street corner.”

Google Earth – Now Bigger and Better

I decided long ago that buying even a relatively recent encyclopedia in printed form is a waste of money and space in this day and age. No sooner is it printed than it is out of date. Nothing brought this home to me more clearly than re-looking at Google Earth the other day. Now on version 4.2 (beta), Google Earth is an out-and-out wealth of knowledge, and hours of amazement were spent by the entire Arbuckle family. My husband had oodles of fun showing the world to our inquisitive four year old son, who, in return, could not wait to play the “Earth game” again the next day.

I was dumbfounded to learn that in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, there are several man-made structures easily visible from satellite and thus, Google Earth. There are Palm Jumeirah and Jebel Ali, artificial islands created in the shape of palm trees and loaded with luxurious houses, all with beachfront access. And then there is the “World” which is also a man made set of islands in the shape of the world. These islands are for sale and if I remember correctly, Angelina Jolie has already bought “Ethiopia”.

But let’s just straighten up some basics: Google Earth is a virtual globe program which shows satellite images and aerial photography in a surf-able program. The baseline resolution is now so good that I even saw my car parked outside our house. In Europe you are even able to see people milling around the London Tower (which you can now view in 3D, if that floats your boat, er, tower!).

The age of the images vary, they are not live! Most international urban images date from around 2004 (says Wikipedia) but the US images are more current.

Don’t even try to run Google Earth on a dinosaur of a computer, minimum recommendations are from 128M Ram upward with Windows XP or up. Broadband Internet access, unless you are of the most patient persuasion, is recommended. Start by surfing to http://earth.google.com and download Google Earth for free. It clocks in at 12.7Mb.

Once loaded, the Earth itself is navigated using the scroll wheel (the middle button) on the mouse to zoom and the left hand click drag to pan around.

The panels on the left side of the screen are divided into three categories: Search, Places and Layers. In Search, a simple “Pietermaritzburg” followed by the Enter key will take you home. In fact if you zoom in as far as you can, you’ll be parking on the intersection of Langalibablele and Boshoff street.

You are able to save your Favourite Places in the middle panel, “Places”. Start by finding a place of interest and adding a Placemark (a yellow tack) and dragging it over the exact spot. Then you need to name your Placemark and you are even able to give a more thorough description. Google Earth will supply you the Latitude and Longitude. Once you click OK, you can now right click over your Placemark and send directions to a friend. You may even be re-directed to Google Maps, which is a related applications whose main aim is to get people from one place to another and does not require you to download or install Google Earth, even if you can use co-ordinates obtained from it. It’s a happy mappy medium, if you will excuse the pun. I’m sure even your Garmin GPS can interface.

But if you click on “Add Content” next to the Place button, the fun really begins. Now you can add KML’s. (Keyhole Markup Language – the geographic answer to HTML). KML’s are tools for viewing and making interactive highly visual location-specific information. Phew, what a mouthful. Some KML’s I found: There’s one that shows you the World Energy Consumption, another a Rising Sea Level Animation. Nightlights of the World, City of London Timeline, the list goes on and on. Each creates a Layer that is superimposed on top of your view of Earth with the promised information. Some do have programming errors, be warned! These and other, preset layers, can be switched on and off so that you don’t have a total information overload.

The Layers section on the bottom left is basically a whole lot of options you can choose to see or hide at any one time. You may want to see roads or hide them. You could choose to see photos other people (or you) have uploaded around a certain landmark: they appear as blue dots before you click on them and they fall under the piggy back program called Panoramio. Pietermaritzburg has a total of three photos uploaded, what a scrawny shame. I tried to load more by subscribing to Panoramio, but I believe it takes a few weeks for them to reflect on Google Earth. Wikipedia entries are really interesting purple dots (and sometimes golf ball shapes) that pop up a Wikipedia (online free encyclopedia) entry when clicked upon. I even found a stunning panorama view of the Fish River Canyon (yes, I know that’s not in Maritzburg), which was uploaded using Gigapan and people are able to upload videos using YouTube.

But then Google looked up and in August 07 Google Sky was added “en toe het die poppe gaan dans”, as they say in Afrikaans. A little unremarkable black button in the toolbar and, Zzoooop, you suddenly switch your gaze to behold planets, stars and galaxies above. Now you are able to use the Layers to view constellations such as Orion or Leo, follow the planets’ paths and even learn about current sky events such as a brown dwarf eclipse in the Greater Orion Nebula currently taking place.

Google Earth is crammed so full of information and fun things to do, I would not be able to tell you about each feature even if I had all day. Go on, play!