I think anybody who has ever been on a cruise ship before, can testify as to it being a very relaxed way to holiday. You don’t have to pack and unpack your bags as you go to one destination after another, and it is beautifully soothing to travel the seas, while waking to different sceneries every day. It does of course terrify one when one sees how quickly disaster can occur as in the Italian case.

The safety drills that I have attended on cruise ships really feel very tiresome and some of them have been done less seriously than others, but there was always some effort. I think passengers will take them more seriously in future and perhaps less begrudgingly. One automatically assumes that the routes you are going on generally involve calm waters and safe routes and that you are on the latest and greatest ship which simply cannot sink, but the latest incident involving the cruise ship Costa Concordia, reminds one of the reality. They are still just ships on the ocean and although they may be a lot safer than those of the last few hundred years, they are dangerous, particularly if your captain is busy wining and dining passengers, instead of checking what is going on with the ship.

I was lucky enough to have an escorted view of the inside of the control of one of the major cruise liners, and it was very high tech, with a number of staff checking out all sorts of different things and one wonders what sort of neglect must have occurred in the case of the Costa Concordia. Either way, I am sure passengers on cruise ships at the moment will probably wake up with more gentle rolls of the ship! Captain Francisco Schettino is obviously never going to work in the industry again, but it still appears to be a case of shocking neglect – or perhaps the complacencies that everybody has about these huge ships and safety.

It is one thing to charge appropriate tax and to pay it honestly, but it is of course another thing to spend it wisely and prudently. Taking three aeroplanes to accompany a State President on a trip to New York is ridiculous, even though one of the three planes only travelled halfway before turning back and the other two travelled the whole distance. It does appear that we seem to have some plane problems, when it comes to our President, but it is one thing to have a back-up plane but it is altogether another thing to have a second back-up as well!

One wonders sometimes whether this was not just a case of bad communication by government. For example, if the purpose was to test the planes or to train some pilots or staff in taking care of VIP’s, that would be easier to explain than trying to say you took two back-up planes! People are sometimes too apathetic about government spending, forgetting that ultimately it is money that was deducted from their salary!

I have spent a bit of time recently recording some shows for Expresso, which is flighted in SABC 3. One sometimes gets the impression that TV presenters have a glamorous and easy life, but from what I have seen, some of them, and certainly those working on the show, are working incredibly long hours. They are at work long before the show goes out at 5.30 am, and they are still recording inserts later into the afternoon. My interviews were done with Katlego Maboe and he certainly understood complex topics straightaway and was able to explain them in simple terms. I said to a friend of mine that he could really do anything he wanted and it was only subsequently that I researched and discovered that he is in fact, in addition to being a TV presenter, a singer and a qualified accountant. We are definitely going to hear a lot more of him as the years go by.

It is the movie time of the year, especially with the Oscars coming up, and George Clooney having already received his Emmy. I recently watched an award winner from last year, a documentary by the name of “Restrepo”, set in Afghanistan. It was a nominee for last year’s Oscars and it won the Grand Jury Prize for th documentaries at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

It is based on one of the most dangerous military bases the United States had in Afghanistan, because they have subsequently closed the base down, and it gives you a good idea as to the lifestyle of the soldiers and what they are going through. Marches through the countryside, up and down steep, rocky hills knowing that the enemy is around, but not knowing where they are, and being shot at basically everyday. The rest of the time it is really just about very young men doing gym and counting the days until they can get home. You never see the enemy and nor do they appear to, but there is lots of footage of them being shot at by unknown assailants, presumably Taliban and negotiations with villagers whose cow they have killed.
The soldiers certainly appear well-meaning in their efforts to capture the hearts and minds of the local community, but the average young man who has become a solder for a living and now spends his days inside a military compound with his fellow soldiers, is never going to be able to command the respect of elders in the local community, let alone have diplomatic or negotiation skills and while they are clearly sincere in their efforts, their skills are so lacking that one wonders how America ever hopes, apart from in one or two communities, to win the support of the local people.

It is hard to believe that robots can be so consistently out of order, at the same time of the year, every year. One would really think by now that the Johannesburg Municipality had some sort of system in place whereby they urgently send out teams to go and repair out of order robots. Sadly, at this time of the year, certain robots such as the intersection of William Nicol and Leslie Road have already been out of order for probably 20% of the month and that surely is unacceptable in a big city. Outsurance, who I understand is back on the job, have not been sighted that often recently either, so am not sure if they are reducing staff or that there are so many problems all over the place, that they are not getting to the routes I typically drive.

I am not an IT expert, but we all need to be. We live in a computer technology dominated world, and people without computer skills are going to find themselves less and less popular. In fact, these days you would certainly expect a staff member to be able to do some basic repairs to their computer, to restart it, and before calling in specialists to at least make sure that it is plugged in, and the printer they say is not working is actually connected!

I tend to get lazy as the year goes on, and do less and less of my own IT, but I spent quite a bit of time during December and January having to sort out problems with 8-ta, not to mention replacing monitors and trying to figure out what was eating all my bandwidth at home. That is when I learnt never to allow a young person to load a computer game on one of your computers because in this case it came with a community, a server and a programme called Steam, which continually downloaded massive amounts of data on my account which unfortunately is not an uncapped account. The game itself – well, I never saw that, but is meant to be very good – Call of Duty: Black Ops.

It has taken a long time for the police to confirm that Chanelle Henning’s husband is a suspect in her murder. It is one of those cases where you kept thinking it was only a matter of time before an announcement like that was made, because of the references to phone calls made.

It is the kind of shocking and disgusting act that really appals one. One wonders how any man, could so lose control of his mind, or be so out of control that he was not already locked up, that he can be paying people to go along and shoot his ex-wife and leave their child without a mother. No doubt we will find out in due course who is behind this and whether or not the husband is involved, and until then, people will speculate.

We only get one chance in life on this planet and it is terribly sad how many people there are out there that are prepared to organise the end of somebody else’s life and how many people will commit murder, for other people, simply for a fee as if it is a job. I don’t believe in the death penalty because there are just too many people who history has shown have been executed on the basis of tainted evidence, police set-ups and lying witnesses, but it is these types of cases that make one waiver a little. The appropriate thing, to my mind, is for whoever is behind it, if they have been caught, to go ahead and do the right thing and spare the State and society the costs of feeding and looking after them in a cell for the next 20 or 30 years.

The main candidate for the Republican Party at the moment, and likely to be the hot favourite to be elected, Mitt Romney, is an extremely wealthy man. Over the years candidates for election in America have typically released their tax records so that everyone can see how much tax they are paying, and whether or not they are walking the walk as the expression goes, or rather just talking a good game!

Mitt Romney, who made a lot of money running Bain Capital, gave the following reassuring answers when asked when he will release his tax records, which he has not done so far, “If that has been the tradition, I am not opposed to doing that. Time will tell.” He followed up the elusive “time will tell” with a “probably” and then another answer, “I’ll keep that open”. It is amazing how politicians can continue to attract so much support when they give such elusive answers and it gives you some idea as to how bad your opponents must be if you are the leader, by a long run, and you can basically avoid giving any information as to whether or not, with all your wealth, you are actually paying the right amount of tax or not.

One of the questions that will be answered, fairly quickly once all of the toll roads begin is whether or not that will increase congestion on the non-toll roads. In other words, will people, instead of incurring the cost on the toll road, now make greater use of roads, for example, like William Nicol and Main Road?

If that is the case, some already fairly serious congestion is going to get a lot worse. I have no doubt that at the beginning things may be more difficult than they have been previously, but to me the answer lies in a clever book written two or three years ago about crowd sourcing and the wisdom of crowds. I believe that some people will move to roads to avoid the expenses, but if too many move, the road will become so intolerable that other people who were not using the toll road before, will move to that road, and some of those who don’t feel that they can afford to use the toll road will decide to use it anyway, rather than go through the torture of a much worse traffic.
In other words, I think the people will sort themselves out and while there may be some initial congestion on arterial side roads that will very quickly subside, and the traffic flow will be back to normal fairly quickly. We will not end up with a situation where one route costing R10,00 takes 10 minutes and another route being for free takes 30 minutes. Some people may have to make tough decisions though and see what other expenses they can cut, hopefully starting with smoking cigarettes!

Julius Malema’s appeal is going to be heard shortly, giving the newspapers plenty to write about, and keeping everybody busy. I don’t believe that it has much prospect for success, but Court decisions recently have had some surprises, and this may be another one of those. Perhaps his suspension may be reduced, from the five years to a more reasonable period like two or three years, but the way he is continuing to apparently organise disruptions of meetings and counter opponents in Limpopo would suggest to me that he is not going to be welcomed back with loving arms.

There are already less than 200 days to go until the 2012 Olympics. Being situated in such a financially well-off city has no doubt assisted with the ticket sales – to the extent that apart from women’s football, all events are sold out. In fact, if you wanted tickets to something now, you would not even have a chance, because when they do release some additional tickets later, it is going to go to the 5 million plus applicants who missed out on tickets in the initial ticket phase a year ago!

In other words, only if you registered a year ago, and never got any tickets, do you even have a chance of getting tickets now! One can only imagine what the resale value of the blue ribbon events, such as the men’s 100 metre final or the closing ceremony will cost.

I think that the stampedes at the University of Johannesburg were fairly predictable and that the University management clearly did a very poor job of managing their registration process. Last year’s newspapers had pictures of crowded streets outside UJ, and whenever there are such big crowds, you need to have proper crowd management in place.

It seems to be something that a country such as ours, apart from exceptions like the World Cup, is not very good at, whereas countries like the United Kingdom have dealt with their tragedies of the past more effectively, and now ensure proper crowd control at all times. If you know 50,000 people are turning up, and you do, because they came last year, you make proper provisions for it. You call in the police, you hire extra security guards and you split the registration between different campuses, depending on what the people are studying and different days depending on, for example, the first letter of their surname so as to reduce the crowds all on one specific day.

On top of that, I really don’t know how backward the registration process at UJ must be, in this age of Internet and technology, where they have to have last minute, stand in the queue registrations for tertiary education for 50 000 people? The vast majority of the applications should be dealt with over the Internet and via the post. After all, all they are really looking at generally is the potential students’ matriculation marks, and whether they get that via e-mail, the post or verify it with the relevant government departments themselves, they don’t need to have 50,000 people all trying to squeeze through one gate on the same day every year. Quite frankly, those who have seen relatives injured or lost should think of taking legal action against the University of Johannesburg.

The South African Golf Association – also known as SAGA seem to enjoy changing the handicap system. The latest changes come into effect on 1 February 2012. Instead of taking your strokes now on the scorecard by the whole ratings you will be able to take a double on any hole if you are up to an 18 handicapper and a treble on any hole if you are a 19 or more.

That means, for example, if you play with a 19 handicapper, and they have a bad day, they will be able to take one extra short per hole – adding about 20 minutes to a game. Games could certainly get slower depending on who you are behind and are playing with. On the other hand it will quickly create a bigger gap between the better players and the weaker players as there will be no hiding behind single bogey rings on scorecards anymore. I think most golfers will see their handicaps drop a few shots fairly quickly by March or April as all the new scores start coming through. When you do make a mistake your scorecard will now show it – regardless of the stroke of the hole you are playing. You will also be able to drop more than one shot a month.

I enjoyed looking at a website launched by Fast Company. Fast Company is one of my favourite business magazines, focusing more on cutting edge and Internet-type businesses, and this website, which you can find at www.fastcoexist.com is one of their projects. It is a daily news website about what they call “world changing ideas and innovations” and would feature, for example, IBM technology that predicts floods and droughts or applications that make it easier for people to pool their cars and share cars more easily.

A friend of mine told me about the Good Fellas service that he uses, and it really seems to have grown quite a lot. Essentially, for a monthly subscription and an additional per kilometre rate, depending on the subscription choice, you can get somebody to drive you home safely if you’ve had more than your legal limit. The legal limit is pretty low these days, so any time you had probably a sip more than two drinks, you are going to go over the legal limit and services like this are actually a good idea. They come around, with two drivers in a car, and one of them drives you and your car home, while the other follows in his car to take the driver on to the next person who they have to fetch. It is certainly the kind of service that I as an attorney involved in accident claims can recommend, rather than the alternative of trying to risk driving with alcohol in your blood and you can find the website at www.gfellas.co.za . Monthly subscriptions start at R91,00 a month.

I am surprised that there are not more blow-up beds for sale in South Africa. This is something you see quite commonly overseas, and they are very handy for surprise guests. Essentially, and they are normally supplied with a pump, it is a mattress that gets inflated by an electric pump, and provides you with an instantaneous extra bed in your house. They actually work perfectly and while they are certainly not as comfortable as a normal quality bed, they beat sleeping on the floor! They are also fairly cheap.

This is a book I read during the December holidays, written by Steven Pinker. It is a fabulous book and its subtitle really explains what the book is about and that subtitle is – why violence has declined. We live in a world where the media continually make a huge noise about the latest crime story, or continued crime stories have in South Africa, and that stops us from seeing the bigger, overall picture.

The overall trend is that our society has, over the last few hundred years, got safer and safer and we now live in more peaceful times than any other human beings have ever been privileged to live in. In certain times in history up to 60% of all people could expect to meet their death either in a war or in violence and dying of old age or ill health or something very rarely even had the opportunity to do. Human rights and the concern for others have taken great strides and the book goes into the various reasons for this and how our society has developed. Those of course are much more complex than one would imagine, which is probably why the book runs to hundreds of pages, but it is always good to understand, in an age of sensationalism, that all is not as bad as we read. People have a much smaller chance now of dying either in a war or uprising or in a violent crime than ever before in history, no matter how dangerous our particular society may seem or how it is reported. Of course, there are farm more safe societies than South Africa, and we have a considerable way to go in terms of reducing violence. Ultimately the solution for us lies in education and reducing unemployment.

I was impressed by the wealth of statistics available in the UK as to the sale of books. That can be accessed online and in South Africa and you can read what book sold how many copies and at what price. That very quickly establishes that the best selling books in England, in terms of money spent, which is probably what an author wants more than anything else, are those of Jamie Oliver.

He had two huge selling books in the last year, and his books considerably outsell all the other celebrity chefs. Some books sell very well, but at low prices and thus don’t gross as much and it seems that the Swedish crime novels still continue to do well and no doubt will even do better now that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has opened in cinemas. I saw the Swedish version of that film, with English subtitles, and it was superb and the American production is meant to be very good as well, although it copies, to a large extent, the Swedish version.

It took my architect and town planner five years to get me permission to build the offices I have now, and another two years to build my offices. The building next door to me was bought and developed in probably less than two years and the actual building part, from start to when the employees moved in, cannot have been longer than six months. Obviously, and I have been told that it is architects who have moved in next door to me, they know who builds quickly and perhaps could design their building around a design that allowed it to be done in record time.

I have never seen a building go up so fast in all my life. I was told, for example, that the sand in Parkwood, particularly on the side of Jan Smuts Avenue where both my building and that of the neighbours is, is very weak, and as a result we had to put in an industrial strength piling to support the second floor and that in itself took three months to settle. When I wanted a fish tank to be built into the wall in my boardroom, I had to get an engineer and that was another few months’ delay. The next time I need quick builders, I do know whose door I am going to knock on!

The National Transportation Safety Board in America has recently voted to ban the use of all mobile devices by drivers. That would include stopping people from using cell phones for talking, sending SMS’s and even from using hands-free kits. They said the decision was a hard one, because it is going to be unpopular for many people and that each State in America will have the option to decide whether or not they want to accept that recommendation. The bottom line is, even with a hands-free kit, a call is a distraction in what is a powerful machine moving at a fast pace and we all know that, however much we choose to ignore it.

This picture, which I took at Sun City during the Nedbank Challenge, is a great example of E-books versus traditional books. The lady is reading an E-book and the man is reading a traditional book.

Nothing beats the beauty of a traditional book, especially when it sits in a library, but the E-book is certainly more portable, it is easier to hold when you are lying upside down in the grass and it is easier to read in bed at night. It will probably produce more profits ultimately for the authors as well, cutting out the printing process and possibly a few middlemen along the way.