The stories about all the refugees trying to make their way into Europe get more tragic every week.  There is hardly a week that passes by where you don’t hear of more deaths in the Mediterranean or somewhere in Europe.  A recent case involved a truck with 71 bodies inside it, which was found, after the blood started pouring out the back of the truck.  Stories like this make me ill.  I cannot believe the depravity of the drivers who leave people in a truck like that and run away to leave them to die.  Honestly at times like that I think of Israeli tactics – their family homes should be demolished in addition to them going to prison for the rest of their lives.  People have to be taught that savagery like this will be punished severely.

The refugees have been abandoned by their traffickers locked in the back of trucks, locked in the holds of ships and in huge numbers all over Europe.  Every day we read of them drowning and in case after case they don’t know exactly how many have drowned other than inevitably it is over 100.  There are massive waves of people trying to get away from their countries, and in particular wars that they are trying to avoid, and coming from every direction to Europe and Germany in particular, and will continue to do so until the traffickers are dealt with.  Some places like Sicily and Italy have become flooded with migrants, who are sleeping in the streets and around corners, and is upsetting as that must be to the local people, one cannot simply ignore them all.  

One would expect, with the trend of the current generation to take selfies all day, and then send them around all over – and not just to boyfriends, but potential boyfriends and friends, that they would come up with a way to defend some of those photos!  I was quite impressed with the whole concept behind Snapchat and how it allows for photos to disappear after a set number of seconds.  In other words, people can send pictures that they may not want somebody else to have indefinitely, and then set it so that that photograph disappears from the person’s phone after, let’s say, 10 seconds.  

It is obviously an application that is available for most phones and I think it is a great idea.  It is unfortunately not foolproof – you can take a screenshot of your phone and it will then snap the photograph at that time or take one frame of a video that you have sent like that.  It does, on the other hand, then sends a notice to the person who sent you the photo indicating that a screenshot has been taken and in that way, they will certainly get the impression that they should not send you any further photographs, because they will know that you are keeping a copy.  It almost forces somebody to then ask, before they do that, as to whether they have the other person’s permission to take a screenshot because it would be extremely rude to take one without permission!  In the ideal world of course, they will avoid that situation as well and I am sure that there are a lot of celebrities, not to mention models and regular people out there, who all wish that they have sent their private pictures by Snapchat instead of via text or e-mail.  Of course, as we all discussed on my blog some time ago, people have long since forgotten Jennifer Lawrence’s pictures and it has not done her any harm at all.  That is not exactly a good example, because her pictures were allegedly stolen from Out Cloud, but it does illustrate the concept in any event.

The one thing that becomes obvious, when you travel a bit, is how we are overcharged for fuel.  We pay 50% more for fuel than some countries, and there are many countries where fuel is in fact subsidised who pay even less.  The good news at the moment is that we are, despite the weakening Rand, heading to a reduction in the petrol price at the end of this month, which could be as much as 66c.  It could be more if the Rand could show some strength – something it appears terrified to do over the last three years in a constant, one-way slide, against the Dollar.  We can be thankful that so far we are not at the R14,00 peak that we saw back in 2014, but if the Rand could only improve and we could have some of the taxes that are added to the petrol price removed, we could give a real boost to our economy.  

I have been very impressed with the options for satellite radio, and I do hope it is something that will be coming to South Africa.  Not only can one hear far more channels that way, even if you are paying a fee of approximately R170,00 a month, but it gives you unique power over music channels, which were commercial free in the first place.  You can use sliders for each channel, for example on the Trance channel to choose Trance songs that have more vocals or, like I prefer, to have Trance music that has no vocals.  You can also choose whether you want more modern Trance music or Trance music from different eras and the second you have done that, what is essentially now a radio station created by you, will play in your car music according to what you like.  Obviously you can do that with whatever style of music you choose to listen to.  I am not sure whether this can actually work in your car through the channel, but it certainly does work on the Internet and via apps on your phone, and of course you could then Bluetooth it to your car radio in any event.  The world’s largest satellite radio broadcaster, Sirius XM Radio, has more than 24 million subscribers and more than 155 channels ranging from purely political discussion channels through to comedy, through to entertainment channels, sports channels including a 24 hour golf channel and of course numerous music channels.

I am sure that traditionalists will feel ill, but Callaway has come out with a new version of their Chrome Soft ball.  It features what they call Truvis technology, which is basically the use of red and white colours to ensure that they say increase focus and visibility.  I am not sure about the increased focus part, but they certainly are, as the picture alongside indicates, extremely visible!  

Most golf players are older, conservative and traditionalists and yellow balls for example have not really taken off in golf, although there is certainly a lot more players who are playing with them now.  I thought I would experiment with these balls and I can certainly say that I noticed it.  I don’t think they will succeed, even though I really like playing with them.  The design is similar to what one finds on soccer balls, and it is on soccer balls for precisely the same reason – to improve visibility.  People believe that anything with the same pentagonal red squares is easier to focus on.  I think golf is just too conservative for these to succeed.  

Many years ago I attended a wedding of somebody who had always been very special to me.  I have to say that I have never forgotten her wedding, because of the song that she and her husband chose for their first dance.  I don’t generally think most pop stars are modern day poets, writing wonderful and meaningful lyrics, because most of what they write is nonsense, but one still has to have some regard to the words of a song before choosing it as your wedding song.  They chose what they obviously thought was a romantic song, and perhaps a very sexy and brave song to put on in front of parents and grand-parents, by Heart called “All I want to do is make love to you”.  The problem with the song though is it is very clearly about a lady who has a night in a hotel with a stranger that she picks up on the side of the road on a rainy night, falls pregnant by him and has a child.  The catch to it is that she is already involved with another man and says that in making her pregnant, he gave her the one thing that the other man could not, so presumably the man she loves is infertile.  

I have to say I could not stop cringing while the song was played and the couple romantically danced around on the dance floor and I have always assumed and hoped that most people did not listen to the words and have no idea what the song was about.  I am not going to go into the other troubling aspects of the song – picking up strangers in the rain and taking them to a motel “I knew well”.  One struggles to imagine why she would know the motel well, unless this was repeated behaviour!  I have repeated one of the pertinent verses below.

Then it happened one day,
we came round the same way
You can imagine his surprise
I said “please, please understand
I’m in love with another man
And what he couldn’t give me
was the one little thing that you can”

There is no doubt that Windows 10, and its automatic update, is going to lead to huge traffic on the Internet.  One would imagine that it might well affect Internet speeds at many companies, if not countries, for a week or so while Windows 10 uploads.  Apparently, Microsoft has reserved up to 40 terabytes per second capacity for multiple content delivery networks and by comparison Apple arranged 3 terabytes for last year’s release of IOS 8.  

One assumes that most Internet service providers are going to limit the speed at which Windows 10 downloads, irrespective of the speed of that client’s actual Internet speed.  Windows 10 is the biggest change in software in nearly three years and one can only hope that it does not adversely affect any existing programs.  I thought Windows 8 was a complete disaster, and I took it off my computers, so I am certainly hoping that Windows 10 is a considerable improvement on that.   Microsoft alleges that it combines the strength of Windows 8, which I never got to see, with those of Windows 7, and it comes with a new browser called Microsoft Edge.  There is also going to be a Windows store, where I guess they are taking on Apple and iTunes and one also gets a digital assistant called Cortana.