3D Printers are all the rage in America, particularly on the stock market. The shares of one company alone, namely 3D Systems Corporation, were up 400% in 2012. Most people, when they hear of 3D printing are going to believe it is a three-dimensional image of something and not understand that in fact 3D printing is a process whereby a computer scans an object and actually prints out and designs a fully functional copy of that object.

In the YouTube video alongside, you can see how for example a spanner is copied and recreated, so when they talk about 3D printing, they are actually talking about making a fully functional object either from a design that you have made or by copying something else and it is an amazing piece of technology which in its infancy now, is no doubt going to lead to far more interesting developments in time to come, and the video alongside this article is simply a must see if you are not aware of the powers of this technology. Once you have watched it, let your imagination roam!

The Matric results are allegedly a slight improvement over previous years. I was horrified to read that at a number of schools not a single matriculant passed and in fact at one school, with approximately 27 pupils in Matric, not one of them passed. I don’t think it is particularly hard to pass Matric, and if your school has not one pupil out of 27 passing, then it should be shut down, the teachers sent home and dismissed and the headmaster fired.

There is really no reason why, aside from absolutely incompetent teachers and school management, that any school would not have at least a 70% Matric pass rate. A bigger worry for South Africa is of course more people are going to enter the jobless market and we already have an alleged 27% unemployment rate, which is undoubtedly far higher in reality, and there simply is not going to be work for the vast majority of them. Those that do get an opportunity need to work hard, do their best and make sure that they keep their job because in another 12 months’ time, another 200,000 pupils are going to finish Matric and join the workforce!

I am astounded by the lack of hygiene in many restaurants, including extremely well-known ones. I recently, for example, in the butchery section of a well-known restaurant, watched as a staff member carefully took down biltong from where it was hanging with his gloved hand, and then transferred it into his ungloved hand before offering it to me.

It is amazing that even top restaurants cannot get the basics right, which is fresh ingredients handled in a clean way, and your staff members handling something like biltong with their bare hands, is not handling things in a clean way! It is totally unacceptable that people handle foodstuffs, especially foodstuffs that are not going to be cooked at high temperatures whereby any of the germs spread by the hands could perhaps then be killed, without gloves and yet these days it is all too common to either see that or to receive your food with hair in it. My honest opinion is that many of our restaurants, including big name restaurants, would do well with a visit by somebody like Gordon Ramsay, with his cameras in tow and a good telling off for their lack of care and attention to the absolute basics of cooking and handling food.

When it comes to getting hot, America now holds the record. The Climate Agency of the United Nations recently threw out the previous record of a Libyan city as having the highest temperature ever recorded and has now allocated it to Death Valley in California.

The record temperature is 56,7°C and the temperature regularly goes over 45°. The New York Times quoted a Death Valley National Park ranger, Charlie Callaghan, as saying that when it gets really hot, “you don’t want to have jewellery on because you feel the burning on the ears. Your eyes, your eyebrows feel real hot”. Death Valley is also the lowest place in the United States with one part being approximately 90 metres below sea level.

I have written before about trolls and the other types of poisonous people that you get that trawl the Internet and I wanted to write about something I found very useful. There are always those who will e-mail you, with either one complaint after another or typically one abusive message after another, despite your requests to them to stop e-mailing you. I found, the second that I start receiving e-mails from somebody who I no longer want to get e-mails from, that the best thing to do is to create a permanent rule in my e-mail for that person. I tend to do the same if, for example, I e-mail somebody regularly and they choose when to reply to my e-mails and which e-mails to ignore – there is simply no point in receiving e-mails from such a person who only has an interest in corresponding with you when there is something you can do for them – so I apply the same rule to them.

Simply go into your e-mail programme and create a rule that any messages from that person should automatically skip the inbox and go into your deleted items box. That works even more effectively if the backbone of your e-mail system is Gmail (who do a wonderful job of screening out most spam as well) because then those e-mails will not ever be downloaded by the programme on your computer because Gmail will have moved them to the deleted folder that you have with them, which unless you are accessing your e-mails via a web browser, you are unlikely to ever see them in the first place. I found, when it comes to particularly abusive people, that you really don’t miss anything in not getting the next 5 to 10 e-mails from them and one assumes they will stop if they get no reply.

I was sent a link to a YouTube video, illustrating a product from a company called Suitable Technologies, called Beam. Essentially, it is a television monitor on stilts at a height of 1,58 metres and the monitor can be driven around from its dock, where it charges, around your offices. It is used, and this will terrify staff at many companies, to interact with your staff at work, when you are not there and the companies feel it is extremely effective, because it does not mean that people have to go to a computer terminal to be able to speak to the person on the other side – the robot can roam the office and thus you can speak to anybody anywhere.
It has 6 microphones built in with noise reduction, for full audio awareness as well as two wide angle HD cameras to cover the full spectrum. The pricing for now is the only problem with the product, but no doubt it will come down from its current price of $16 000.

Everybody is aware of the tragedy that happened in America on 14 December 2012. American TV stations covered the terrible events, night and day, for more than a week and now they are weighing changes to the law. The NRA or National Rifle Association is of course already jumping to the defence of gun owners saying that it is not the guns that are the problem but the people who own them. However, they seem very sensitive about making any law changes as to what sort of screening process goes on behind the scenes to whoever owns them, with the result that you currently sit with a situation in America where just about anybody can run into a gun fair and without any background screening can buy what is essentially a machine gun or assault weapon! Of course, a mentally disabled person armed with such a gun can do far more damage than somebody armed with a smaller gun, which fires less quickly and has a smaller magazine.

The very first thing that happens, and this happens everywhere, when the government announces that they are going to be looking at new laws is that there has now been an absolute record-breaking buying spree of guns from people who are scared that they may be affected by any changes or restrictions and would rather get their hands on weapons now! Apparently high capacity magazines for guns have seen the prices rise considerably, and are still selling out everywhere. It is a tragedy that a terrible shooting incident ultimately just leads to even more people buying guns in America and obviously the current shooting spree of regular incidences is only going to increase – it is after all only 6 or 7 months ago since the Batman screening shooting and since then we’ve had 20 plus innocent children and teachers slaughtered in a Connecticut school.

Lance Armstrong certainly tends to dominate the front page of newspapers. Confessing what was already a given, to Oprah, seems somewhat desperate but no doubt his advisers feel it’s the best course of action for him. Confessing is obviously a sign of real desperation, when you have no other avenue open to you and one wonders what it is that is scaring Lance the most. Is it the law suits, the threat of criminal action or another issue not yet in the media? The people he threatened, sued and called names over the years for suggesting he was taking drugs have not been impressed by the televised interview.

By all accounts he will remain an extremely wealthy man given he apparently has assets in excess of $100 million and the cases where he is being sued total only about $10 million at the moment. One just feels with this story there is more to come, and we are missing a part of it right now. What are your thoughts? Let’s also see which channel in South Africa purchases the right to show the interview – and hopefully while it is still topical.
 

I do quite a lot of shopping online, and I worked at Pick ‘n Pay as a cashier when I was young. I would probably shop a little bit more with them online, particularly for household goods like chlorine etc which you can’t get from the Woolworths site if it were not for a few problems with their site.

Firstly, it is extremely hard just to find the online shopping portal, and one is essentially placed in a position where, for me to find it I typically have to do a search for a product, it then tells me I need to be shopping on online shopping, even though I am already logged in, and then gives me a link to use. I cannot understand why I would be logged into Pick ‘n Pay unless I was doing shopping because there cannot really be any benefit to me on the website, as it is not a new site, unless in fact I am busy shopping. It does not make sense that you log in, and cannot immediately begin shopping, but instead have to search all over the website for an online shopping link. The website is covered in references to “Smart-Shopper” and yet Smart Shopper is not online shopping, although a part of it appears to involve online shopping.

The website simply lacks the ease of use of a site like Woolworths and is extremely frustrating to use. Many years ago Pick ‘n Pay was a leader in so many ways, and it appears unfortunately that they have not kept up the pace in many respects.

I recently enjoyed watching Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, Lincoln. While the betting will no doubt change, it is currently the favourite to win the Oscar for best movie, and Steven Spielberg is also a hot favourite to win the best director award. The movie also stars Daniel Day Lewis who is an overwhelming favourite to win the best actor Oscar and an inspiring performance, in a supporting actor role, by Tommy Lee Jones. It is a pity that quite a few of the Oscar nominated movies, while shown in America during December already, will only be shown in South Africa in January or February. The favoured movies at the moment are Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miserables as well a movie that has already showing in South Africa, The Life of Pi.

Lincoln is a movie that largely dedicates itself to Lincoln’s achievement in banning slavery and having the 13^th Amendment to the American constitution brought in, supported by what was then the Republican Party, at a time when the Democratic Party, who are now the liberal party, were in favour of slavery! It is superbly acted but it is a serious movie, telling a political tale and certainly will not be to the taste of most moviegoers in South Africa.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in December that a dentist acted legally when he fired an assistant of his. The basis for firing her was simply that he found her attractive and his wife viewed her as a threat to their marriage! The court ruled on a 7 - 0 basis that bosses can fire employees, if they feel that that employee is an “irresistible attraction” even if the employee has not engaged in flirtatious behaviour or done anything wrong!

They said that firing somebody in those circumstances may be unfair, but it is not unlawful because it is motivated by feelings and emotions. Lawyers for the dentist hailed the decision saying that it was a victory for family values because the dentist fired the lady, Melissa Nelson, to save his marriage. She had worked for the dentist for 10 years, from the age of 22, and he said she was an excellent worker but complained that her tight clothing was distracting. I guess all you can say, is only in America!

Canadian research has previously uncovered that the interaction of grapefruit and medical drugs can be quite dangerous. They have now released a list of 85 drugs on the market, for various medical conditions, that have dramatic effects when taken together with grapefruit or when grapefruit juice is drunk.

The medications include cholesterol lowering drugs, anti-cancer agents and psychiatric drugs and even some birth control pills. The typical effect of grapefruit is to increase the potency or strength of the medications considerably, but in some cases it can lead to death. Older people are particularly vulnerable, because you ability to cope with medical drugs weakens with age. The lesson is, if you take oral medication, is to read the list of side effects and see if the medication interacts badly with anything that you are taking.

People are always concerned about fees for lawyers in South Africa, but they lag considerably behind those of American lawyers. A recent survey in America has indicated that the highest billing rate is $1285 an hour with the median rate, for partners, being $500. Those rates would be considered to be outrageous in South Africa apart from for partners at large commercial firms.

Every day of the last month 40 or more people ended their lives on our roads.  The media are paying attention now, but in a week or two there will be new interests.  Forty people a day will continue to die on our roads. 

We worry about aeroplanes but every single week a full jumbo jet of people die on our roads.  Its carnage out there – and we aren’t talking about the “lucky ones” – who just get an arm or leg ripped off or are blinded or suffer brain damage.  This is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to drive in and it’s only a wonder that more people don’t cite our roads when emigrating than crime. 

It is so much easier to protect yourself against crime than it is against reckless and drunk drivers and unsafe vehicles.  Poor driving skills and horribly unroadworthy vehicles have combined in a developing nation to leave blood on the roads – every day and every night, 365 days a year.  The truth is the Government gave up on the roads a long time ago – which is precisely why they cut the the Road Accident Fund benefits – they saw a situation spiralling out of control and the cheapest option was simply to reduce compensation for those injured or left behind without support when loved ones die.  And guess what?  Further changes loom ahead with further proposals reducing even further the limited compensation paid.  I guess government knows the death toll will continue to spiral.