One of my golf theories is that the Nedbank Challenge at Sun City will often indicate who are going to be the form players of the next year. For example, in 2008 Henrick Stenson won the Nedbank Challenge and during 2009 he went onto to win what is probably the biggest tournament outside of the majors, namely the Players Championship. This year’s Nedbank Challenge was won by Robert Allenby and he has already gone on to take a second place at the Sony Open in Hawai recently. If I had to place money on one player who is already rated very highly in the world at position No 7, who I think is going to improve during year that is Henrick Stenson and based on my theory, we can also expect some good form from Robert Allenby. From a South African point of view it would be interesting to see Trevor Immelman get his groove back, particularly in this time of the changes with the grooves for professional players and it is only a matter of time before Retief Goosen actually holds on and wins on the final day. He must have led or being within a shot of the lead in 5 or 6 tournaments during 2009 without winning any of them, and it must be only a matter of time when he has a good final day.

Google has received a lot or criticism in the past for its accommodation of the Chinese authorities in terms of the Chinese version of its search portal, Google. It has basically ensured that certain searches are made, such as “Dalai Lama” no found results are returned. Now, as a result of what they call elaborate attempts to hack their data, and one’s guess is that they are trying to say there may be some Chinese government influence behind this, they are abandoning this policy that has caused a lot of trouble for them in America particularly with the freedom of speech advocates and will no longer censor the search results in China. I think from a democratic point of view that is a great decision or how it affects their business, not that they are doing that well in China in the first place at the moment, but it is a growing market, remains to be seen. There is every possibility that the Chinese government will close Google down in China by effectively banning the blocking of the website.

It was very nice to see Charl Schwartzel with back-to-back golf tournaments in South Africa on our local PGA tour. Winning at Royal Kensington is undoubtedly going to add to his confidence and there can be no doubt that any South African who is good enough to win a local tournament, is good enough to win overseas, and they frequently do. Charl Schwartzel’s home club is in fact the luxurious golf estate currently being built by Dainfern, namely Blair Atholl.

Such are the vagaries of cricket that you can dominate in three tests, but end up winning only one and walking away with a tied series. South African had to win the final test to be able to walk away and say they have had the better of the series, because if we said they were having lost one nil with three drawn tests, it would have really looked like poor sportsmanship but quite frankly England should feel very flattered by their 1 all draw with South Africa as they were totally against the ropes in two other tests, down to their last wicket standing, with each test having suffered from weather issues and a number of overs being bowled ultimately being below the 450 that is required by the rules of cricket in 5 day tests.

It seems these days, the media delights more than ever, in bringing someone down. If it is not Tiger Woods that they really pick on day and night and unnecessarily so in my opinion, it is anybody else who has written a book or recently been in the media getting credit. Of course, it would be wrong to criticise them for simply covering issues when sometimes they are in fact exposing actual corruption and real issues of public importance, apart from nonsense, such as affairs. The allegations about Allan Knott-Craig are that he exploited the company’s resources to benefit his family, awarding marketing and advertising contracts without proper tender processes and allowing his son, who is named after him, and obviously called Junior, to be given office space and according to the Sunday Times, “… millions of rands to build and promote his businesses.”

Google has a website at www.google.org/powermeter/  which is a free electricity usage monitoring tool that allows you to obtain information on how much energy your home is consuming. Like most of their products, this is free, although it does obviously require an advance electricity meter or smart meter.

The Matric results 2009 had come out and obviously we once again have seen a decreased pass rate. After seeing how the accident statistics are manipulated, one has to wonder how these are dealt with, and one wonders what the definition of a pass now, compared to 20 years ago, as well as to the difference between mathematics as we knew it, and the new subject which seems to be a lesser form of mathematics along some sort of numerical skills basis. In any event, I am not an expert one education, but one can only wonder what is going on with the exams that the Universities are now coming up with their own requirements for admission, whereas in the past, they were quite prepared to accept Matric results and grant admission to people that have a University exemption. Does that mean that to their minds the University exemption is no longer what it was? One would have to assume that that is the implication and certainly it is quite frightening for the country that so view people are actually doing subjects such as mathematics and science. On the other hand, there has been a growing field of so-called Universities of Colleges that essentially offer UNISA courses and train and lecture people who ultimately would then write UNISA exams.

It is interesting to follow search trends on the various search engines and in particular to see what people in South Africa are searching on. It appears that the most popular search in South Africa is on Facebook where the details for a Facebook login running at close second. After that, you get jobs, games, Game and Gumtree. Gumtree is of course the free classified service in South Africa – or South Africa’s equivalent of Craigslist.

Search engine giant Google has established a new website at www.google.org/flutrends/  which is based on their finding that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Unfortunately, it is not country specific to South Africa at the moment, although it does have a number of other countries and it would show, for example, that in America the flu trend hit intense in early October and was already down to a low rating by mid-January.