The Citizen had an inglorious beginning, particularly with the Info scandal, but in recent years it has established itself as a must-buy newspaper for anybody who follows horseracing. It has a racing supplement on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as well as additional interviews on a Saturday and as a result, a newspaper that I would not have bought otherwise, is bought every day by me. The racing coverage is superb and I also find that the financial coverage is quite decent and the size of the newspaper makes it quite readable at the breakfast table compared to a larger newspaper like Business Day.

The best way for me to get nervous at a shopping centre is to suddenly find an armoured truck, together with its guards, between myself and my destination. One never feels comfortable around guns, and when it is guards carrying automatic weapons and wheeling out bags, presumably filled with cash, one gets extremely nervous.

I do see that heists seem to be considerably down recently, but I do wish that banks and jewellers and all people that deal with the security companies could try and arrange these drop-offs either earlier or later than they do, perhaps even when the traffic is gridlocked and it makes it harder for criminals to get away, but just before the stores actually open or just after they actually close. That way a lot less members of the public will be put at risk of an injury at a potential shootout.
 

I use speedtest.net quite a bit to check download speeds and in September alone in South Africa more than 250 000 broadband speed tests were done using this service. Speedtest.net is run Ookla and apparently Cell C came out with the best average broadband speeds across South Africa at 3,1 Gb, followed by Vodacom and Neotel. MWeb did not do particularly well in 8th position.

The new Facebook application for the iPad, and which has been much touted, has finally arrived. I cannot say that I find it as amazing as the views alleged, suggesting that it is even better than the Facebook website, but that is probably because to a large extent I am pretty bored by Facebook and I don’t even log into it very often. The one feature that did fascinate me turned out to not be useful to me because possibly I have not added hundreds of friends on Facebook, and possibly because people are a bit nervous about their security.

One of the tabs is marked “Nearby” and simply clicking on that allows you to see a map, in this case of South Africa, indicating where you are, and what friends of yours are in the nearby vicinity. I am sure that is a fantastic feature in a city like London or New York, but I am not sure that in a widely populated country like ours it will be as relevant, but only I was shown on my own map!

Telkom, about a year after I left them, because they would not release such a product, had finally released uncapped ADSL. I think that they made a tremendous mistake in taking so long to release it and they lost a considerable number of their clients to MWeb in that time and also, after they said they would never do it, and have now done it, affects their credibility.

Rumours are that the reason they brought an uncapped ADSL is that they plan to launch video on demand services next year and allegedly they are in discussions with local and foreign content providers. Obviously, the big role player in America is Netflix, but clearly this is what type of service they have in mind.

The English Premiership is under way and this lucrative league once again seems to be set to be dominated by the same teams. Manchester United and Chelsea are the two teams who dominated in recent years and they have been joined recently, after millions have been spent, by Manchester City. The bookmakers again however make this a pretty three-sided league, with only Manchester City and Chelsea having chances of upsetting the hot favourites, Manchester United, who are quoted at 1/1, meaning that essentially they have, in the eyes of the bookmakers, a 50% chance of winning the league.

I don’t think reading and hearing of all the motor accidents that happen on our roads, has ever relaxed me as a driver, and the same is true of all of the personal injury enquiries my firm deals with. Every day we get queries about medical negligence or personal injury matters where people, for example, have been injured at well-known holiday resorts or have been victims of armed robberies at casinos and essentially, one gets to hear a lot of what goes wrong.

Ultimately, I guess that is where attorneys generally make their money when things go wrong – people hardly see an attorney when everything in their life is going fantastically well, but it does perhaps make you more paranoid than the next person when you know around every corner your firm has represented somebody who had an accident at that corner and at the shopping centre you have represented somebody who slipped and fell. Your client went to the hospital to get his injury attended to, developed gangrene and had his leg amputated, etc. It is not very cheerful stuff and it does tend to make you a little bit more cautious in what activities you do. You can read more about the personal injury cases we handle at www.personalinjury.co.za  
 

I see quite a few cars have information as to a number to call if the driver is driving badly, and I came across somebody driving terribly aggressively the other day and called the number once I got home. I think it is very important to avail oneself of those opportunities, to take the time and spend the money to let somebody know that one of their drivers is driving very aggressively, because with our death toll every lecture that somebody gets at their company, about driving properly in future, can only help.

My company cars have our phone number on them and we’ve had calls like that over the years, which as an attorney specialising in motor accidents and personal injuries, I have always found terribly embarrassing, but I have always acted on the information supplied and at the very least given the driver a warning letter at such time. Road safety lies with all of us, and rather than read what awards you will get for injuries on my website www.accidentclaim.co.za, avoid an accident altogether! I wish more ladies, in particular, would tell their boyfriends, especially when it is younger guys, that there is nothing manly about driving around like a complete lunatic and endangering the lives of all the occupants in the car, not to mention other road users.
 

I was surprised when I heard that Groupon turned down the $6 billion offer from Google, and even more amazed when the company was allegedly valued at $30 billion. That had all the signs of a bubble to me, because I cannot imagine that a company that gives out vouchers to the public, for half price services, could ever achieve such value.

There are a number of problems with its model that would prevent many retailers from using it, and those include the fact that people who chase discounts don’t necessarily actually ever become loyal customers. In other words, you pay a lot of money to get in a new client but you don’t retain them. Interestingly enough, Groupon are now talking about trying to arrange financing for their IPO of $3 billion – less than half of what Google was prepared to buy them for a year ago, and which offer they rejected.
 

One of the assets I have always appreciated in staff is honesty. You always very quickly discover who is honest, when you make a double payment to staff by mistake. It appears Nedbank paid 17 of my staff members twice, by virtue of a technical error this past month and it is always interesting to see who tells you first that they have been paid twice as well as the staff members who claim that they did not notice or that they were expecting a “SARS refund” and spent the money or come up with some or other story as to why they thought you were paying that “extra” money to them there and then.

There have been some shocking statistics recently highlighting the problems with the death penalty. In America, for example, the vast majority of all executions take place in just 5 of the 51 States, and with very few exceptions most people executed have two things in common – they are poor and they are black.

That in itself is troubling, as obviously there is some sort of indication, not only of racial bias, but of people not being able to afford proper legal representation. The one compelling argument for the death penalty to be abolished, and let us not forget that America ranks right up there with China and Saudi Arabia when it comes to executing people, is how often they get it wrong. One never knows how many people have been executed incorrectly, but we do know that of those sentenced to death, more than 100 have already been found totally innocent in subsequent appeals of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death and another 25 or so have been found innocent on the basis of subsequent DNA evidence. You simply cannot justify so severe a sentence if juries and judges clearly are continually making mistakes when sentencing people to death.
 

There has been a lot of bad news for Tiger Woods over the last two years, but he has now got a new endorsement deal, this time with Rolex. Previously, he represented Tagheuer, and certainly the owners of Rolexes will say that he is stepping up – given that Rolexes generally cost considerably more than Tagheuer watches. It is nevertheless a positive sign for him that a major, luxury brand is quite happy, some two years later, to tie their name to his.

I am so glad to see that Glenn Beck and Fox News have parted company. Fox News is so virulently anti-Obama and the Democrats that it is surprising that they considered Glenn Beck to be too much for their audience and clearly they have. He is a master of self-promotion, so there is no doubt that one has not heard the end of him. There is no doubt in America, but for now, he seems to be back to radio shows, off TV and mainly on the Internet. My favourite quote regarding him is by John Stuart who said, “Finally, a guy who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking.”

The next question that people have, with Steve’s tragic death, is what is the future of Apple? I think if you take a cynical view you will almost generally be right about everything most of the time – whether it is marriage or the future of a company, because very few companies remain at the top of their game for too long a period.

Apple has been down in the dumps before, and only Steve Jobs’ return rescued them and there is no doubt, having outclassed the opposition for 3 or 4 years with the iPhone and now the iPad, sooner or later another firm is going to step up with a product that is either better or at least an equal competitor. I genuinely don’t believe there is any competitor for the iPhone at this time, and nor has there been for the last 3 years. Nobody knows what the future holds, but on the positive side, Steve Jobs’ influence, the people he hired and the teams he put in place will obviously be around for a good few years to come and should keep churning out the hits. On a negative side, no company can lose somebody of that ability and be the same and as already said, companies don’t generally dominate forever – or for too long.

I would imagine that Apple is far ahead enough in the game that their sales for 2012 will be better than ever before, and that may also be true of 2013, but the real test to me would be what products they will launch in late 2013. You can rest assured they are far enough with the 2012 products that their profits and results are going to be better than ever over the next 18 months or so but after that? I would probably have sold the Apple shares I own in about 18 months, regardless of whether Steve Jobs was still at the company.
 

This is becoming such a big issue that my staff members are asking about it. Normally, questions of economics are the last thing that people generally talk about in an office, but with Greece heading towards, what appears to either be a default or leaving the Euro-zone and all of these concerns leading to the weakening of the Rand it seems that everybody is concerned at the moment. Personally, I don’t think that South Africa has got much to worry about, our debt as a percentage of GEP is closer to 40%, whereas most of these countries that are in trouble have a ratio in excess of 100%.

Economists and financial experts may well describe things differently, but to cut a long story short, in my opinion, most of the problems really get down to people being given far too many benefits, for far too long, relative to the taxes that they pay. In other words, they have not been paying enough tax to all the benefits they allegedly have. They also have uncompetitive economies where huge percentages of the population essentially work for the government, and don’t necessarily work a hard-working 8 hour day either. It is very hard for politicians to get elected by telling people the hard truth, and so I think it is going to take many years for them all to realise that in future they are going to get much less benefits, pay higher taxes, have to work harder and retire later – but that is the reality and it really does not matter for how long politicians sugar coat this for them or they vote out governments and vote in new governments, they are all going to face the same problem.

Whether hardcore austerity measures are called for, or printing more money, and trying to use the power of inflation to reduce some of those debts is the question that most governments need to tackle and there are certainly no easy solutions. It is tremendous pity that South Africa, as an emerging economy, has to suffer, certainly in terms of the strength of our Rand, simply because some countries that we have very little trading with and little in common with, such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy or the so-called PIGS are in a very poor state.
 

I generally work on two monitors at the same time, when I work on my computer, and as time goes by you find that the colour on the two monitors diverges radically – in other words, there is a substantial difference in colour between the various monitors.

Colour calibration, as it is known, is something that is normally quite intimidating for most people, and I found very useful was a programme or a device which consists of a light monitor and software, called Colormunki. Essentially, what you do with Colormunki is to load the software, and once you’ve done that, you perform a number of tests as to the ambient light in the room where you are using the computer and then put the device on your computer screen where it runs through a number of tests and testing the various colours before giving you a before and after setting, which shows you how your computer was indicating colours, and how it is now showing those colours. That is very important for me because I do spend quite a bit of time working on my wildlife photography photographs, not to mention golfing photographs and family photographs, and when you are changing colour settings on photographs it hardly helps if you are doing so on the basis of a setting that is incorrect. In other words, if your monitor is showing pictures much darker than they actually are, it does not help to lighten them if you are basing all of this on an incorrect monitor profile in the first place. It is quite astounding how the colour on your monitor change with time, and my one monitor was substantially darker than it should have been.
 

Gillette is a company that is very clever when it comes to marketing its razors in essentially giving you the latest technology when it comes to manual razors, year after year and at a cheap price – but getting you to invest a lot more money later when you have to buy the blades. Three blades end up costing you more than a razor together with one free blade when you buy it at the beginning and the strategy obviously works, because it continues to dominate shelving space. It is amazing that there has not been an electric shaver invented yet that can do half as good a job as the simple razor and while with Philips’ SensoTouch is clearly the best of the lot, it too cannot beat a normal razor.

This is the few weeks of the year that I always dread, and it seems everybody around me is also sneezing. The problem that I had in recent years is that the allergy quite quickly turns into some or other respiratory track infection, and I end up being ill for a few days. There is no doubt that this is the price we pay for living in Johannesburg at a high altitude and without any rain at this time of the year, but the other 48 weeks of the year, where we are truly blessed with fantastic weather, means it is just something we have to get used to.

The new iPhone was announced, and much to the disappointment of many, it was not a huge upgrade. In fact, it is called the iPhone 4S, and while it is an improvement on the current iPhone, it is not a huge change. Having said that, the camera is apparently far better, it can shoot HD video, it uses the same microprocessor as the iPad, so it is going to be faster and more powerful and it goes on sale on about 14 October 2011.

It would obviously be for sale in South Africa sometime thereafter, but this is not the iPhone 5 that people were expecting, and while it is still better than any other phone on the market, the share price took a bit of a dip when it was announced. I think that is a bit cynical, because Apple only has 5% of the world phone market at the moment, and that is a figure that can only improve.
 

Nic Rabinowitz has to be my favourite comedian in South Africa, and a man of great talent. I particularly enjoy his appearances on the Redi Direko Show, when he presents “The week that wasn’t”. It takes a lot of intelligence to be able to turn so many events into comedy, and I am really looking forward to seeing him live, sooner rather than later. He makes me think of my all-time favourite, and a truly talented genius, Zapiro, but I think he would accept that he is not yet in the class of Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro.

The smaller teams have gone home, having produced very few surprises. The one thing I do notice is that obviously these teams come from countries where they cannot afford to take weeks off for the purpose of rugby, and once they are in a World Cup environment, as the weeks go on, they certainly do get better.

If I had to choose as a coach, when to play the minnows, it would be towards the beginning of a tournament and take the bigger game, such as our game against Wales, later in the tournament. The problem with rugby is that only 5 or 6 nations really play rugby competitively at the top level, and so the tournament only begins when we get to the quarter finals. The fact of the matter is that none of the minnows can actually go on to win the tournament and one would be shocked if they even got to the quarter finals, let alone the semi-finals.

Cricket seems to have more upsets, and soccer, probably because it was played by far more nations around the world, throws up the most. When it comes to the FIFA World Cup, you know from the very first game that shocks and surprises are possible, and no team is guaranteed to get through to the next stage, whereas in this Rugby World Cup, for example, we have all known that Australia, New Zealand and South Africa will automatically go through to the next round already.
 

As much as we want to believe that South Africa is the favourite to beat Australia, and even I believe that they will, the bookmakers have taken a more statistical approach. We have after all lost our two most recent games to them, including at home, and the bookmakers have priced up Australia as the favourite at 9/10 with South Africa at 1/1.

That means they believe it is going to be a close game, but ultimately they do believe that Australia is going to prevail and win the game. Let’s hope these companies, which have to pay out when they are wrong and would undoubtedly prefer South Africa to win, given that Australia, the favourite, will cost them more, are wrong!
 

It is seldom that the death of an individual, especially when that person was not a politician, makes world news. It is the measure of the success that Steve Jobs achieved in his very short life that such tributes have flowed in from around the world and from some of the most important people of the last two decades.

When I was chairperson of the Gauteng Law Council, I ended my speech, in 2005, with one of my favourite quotes from Steve – and one should remember at that stage, the iPhone was still 2 years away and the iPad had not even been conceived. The quote, "Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

He really was a visionary, he has brought out absolutely iconic products and it is a tragedy that such a brilliant man had such a short time on our planet. 

iOS5 - Release date 12 October 2011
The latest version of Apple’s Operating System for its iPhone, iPad and iPod, the iOS5 gets released  on 12 October 2011. No doubt the Apple website and iTunes will be very busy as people try to get hold of the latest version for the 200 plus new features. Worryingly, for BlackBerry, which has had enough problems this year, Apple now has iMessage which will allow Apple users to send each other unlimited messages via Wi-Fi or 3G and to receive photos, videos, contacts or locations. The latest version will also support a dedicated camera button and on the older iPhones you will be able to use the Volume Up button as the camera button. Twitter is now supported, which will make it easier to tweet in future.

New iPhone 4S - on sale on about 14 October 2011
The new iPhone was announced, and much to the disappointment of many, it was not a huge upgrade. In fact, it is called the iPhone 4S, and while it is an improvement on the current iPhone, it is not a huge change. Having said that, the camera is apparently far better, it can shoot HD video, it uses the same microprocessor as the iPad, so it is going to be faster and more powerful and it goes on sale on about 14 October 2011. It would obviously be for sale in South Africa sometime thereafter, but this is not the iPhone 5 that people were expecting, and while it is still better than any other phone on the market, the share price took a bit of a dip when it was announced. I think that is a bit cynical, because Apple only has 5% of the world phone market at the moment, and that is a figure that can only improve.

The smaller teams have gone home, having produced very few surprises.  The one thing I do notice is that obviously these teams come from countries where they cannot afford to take weeks off for the purpose of rugby, and once they are in a World Cup environment, as the weeks go on, they certainly do get better. 

If I had to choose as a coach, when to play the minnows, it would be towards the beginning of a tournament and take the bigger game, such as our game against Wales, later in the tournament.  The problem with rugby is that only 5 or 6 nations really play rugby competitively at the top level, and so the tournament only begins when we get to the quarter finals.  The fact of the matter is that none of the minnows can actually go on to win the tournament and one would be shocked if they even got to the quarter finals, let alone the semi-finals. 

Cricket seems to have more upsets, and soccer, probably because it was played by far more nations around the world, throws up the most.  When it comes to the FIFA World Cup, you know from the very first game that shocks and surprises are possible, and no team is guaranteed to get through to the next stage, whereas in this Rugby World Cup, for example, we have all known that Australia, New Zealand and South Africa will automatically go through to the next round already.

Apple has invited analysts and media to attend a function at its offices in early October and the rumour is that the iPhone 5 is about to be released. This is a major media topic, because we are talking about one of the biggest companies in the world releasing the next version of its best selling and most profitable product. 

Apparently the iPhone 5 is going to have an 8 Mb camera and the processor will be considerably faster.  There is a lot of speculation that it will allow mobile payments by swiping your phone across terminals and if the iPhone 5 does not do that, then it is expected that the iPhone 6 will do that, largely because Apple has hired a lot of staff, from different companies, that have experience and expertise in different payment options.  What is good to see is that whereas for example, the first version of the iPad took about a year to arrive in South Africa, the next version came a lot quicker and we do seem to be getting the latest products, certainly when it comes to Apple, a lot faster than previously.

The hit and drag accident involving advocate Kim McCuscker has been attracting huge media attention. It is in fact one of the breakout terms on Google Search at the moment, and the story appears to get more complicated every day. The driver was arrested, her fiancé has been arrested and obviously something fairly dramatic and aggressive happened on Lonehill Boulevard. It is amazing that she has been dragged so far and has managed to survive, and one can only hope that she is going to make a full and excellent recovery.