I never appreciated my dad as much as I should have when he was alive and there are times I regret it! I think most of us that have lost a parent feel this way and there is no way to avoid feeling like this! The trick is to have someone tell you about the good stuff.
But that isn’t the point here, instead I want to think about the good things.
The thing is that I never realised how much I really did learn from him and how much I enjoyed the times I did spend with him.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I remember sitting and watching rugby with him which was really awesome. He even got me into supporting my favourite team, the Sharks! This is probably one of the reasons why I will never support any other team above them!
However, that isn’t what my dad was all about, far from it actually. No matter what I say in this post, unless you knew my dad, it will never do him justice.
My dad was the ultimate DIY guy. That comes from being in the building industry from his teens. He even had his own company at one stage, but that was way before I was born. In his time he built hotels, schools and plenty more. This was kind of awesome when it came to picking up little tips & tricks, here and there. It wasn’t until he passed away that I realised I should’ve tried to learn more from him, but I’m a geek and I never really appreciated that while he was still around.
The funny thing is I sometimes come across a problem around the house and I then remember a time way back and see my dad doing it and voila, I’m doing it. Maybe not to his strict standards but hey I still am doing it!
The other thing I remember about him is his kind and generous soul. At times he seemed a real bastard if he felt like it, but deep down those close to him really knew the truth. He was always willing to help if he could and sometimes even if he couldn’t he would try. He gave up his own time and would come help out to the best of his ability.
He was also very good husband to my mom for 30 years despite the age difference. He would spoil her rotten and loved her unconditionally. I also learnt a lot from him in this regard. It basically comes down to: What would Dad do? One day when i get married I just hope I can be the kind of man he was to my wife, and even the kind of father he was to me.
I was lucky compared to my half-brothers and half-sisters because I had the pleasure of having him around most of my life. But the best times were when we moved to Port Elizabeth and was no longer in boarding school. It was then that I really started appreciating him.
I also got my love of cooking from him. He was an amazing cook and could cook anything he put his mind to; he would take a recipe from somewhere and make it his own.
I could go on and on about the things that I admired about him, but the most important one to me was his sick sense of humour. He would drive everyone mad and was the master of sarcasm and wit. If you didn’t know him though and met him for the first time, this would be the one thing that you remember.
Lastly I just want to bring up the one memory of him that is stuck in my head the entire time I was writing this blog.
My dad never appreciated my taste in music and there was very few bands that could endure me listening to. The one that he really never understood was Nirvana. One day I was playing their album Bleach and he walked into my room and said that it was really horrible and how could they make music like that. I said to him that it doesn’t matter because their lead singer, Kurt Cobain, had committed suicide.
I will never forget his reply: “Well from the sound of things, he was dying for a very long time”
We miss you Dad and will never forget you! Now stop giving those angels a hard time!
I came across the latest Durex advert campaign via Twitter and it made me think of some of the brilliant adverts they have had over the years.
So I started looking up some of the better ones that they have had and thought I might as well share them with all you folk! So here they are…
I’ll start with the video adverts that they have had and I chose some of my favourites.
Have a look at the Outtakes of the Get it on advert here
But besides the awesome videos above, they have also had plenty of print adverts that are pretty damn good. Click to see the full image 
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He was one of those people who would moan before, after and during the game but I still used to love watching games with him. He had a knowledge of the game and it’s history that to this day no-one I know could match.
I miss those days but I still love the game. We are a rugby loving nation and I hope this will never change. There is nothing like going down to a pub donning you teams jersey and watching the games on a big screen with a ice cold draught in front of you or going around to a mates house and having a braai. Luckily for us South Africans, there are plenty of opportunities for this! From February until the end of May there is Super 14, which for those who don’t know is an interprovincial tournament between 14 South African, Australian and New Zealand teams. Then there is the Tri-Nations, again involving SA, Australia and New Zealand, but involving the national teams, between July and September. The last of the big ones is the ABSA Currie Cup between July and October which is a tournament between several local provincial teams.
My favourite is the Super 14 for a lot of reasons. All bets are off when it comes to the Super 14. Even if you are the biggest Springbok supporter no-one will think twice if you do support a non-South African team. Personally I support the Sharks and secondly the Bulls. I have both jerseys hanging proudly in my cupboard.
But this year I did something I have never done before. I signed up for the Sports Illustrated Super 14 Fantasy League. I then roped two good friends to create the own fantasy team and we created a league with the 3 of us competing. The Fantasy League involves choosing your team of 15 players, which can comprise of any player from any team. Your players then get points based on whether the appear in the match, whether their team wins the match, whether they score a try and several other criteria. You add up all your players scores and then you get ranked. If you aren’t happy with one of your players you can transfer them for other players each week, but these transfers are limited.
What this has done though is make me want to watch more games than I ordinarily would have, so that I can see how “my players” are doing. So for the next 4 months, I plan on watching a LOT of rugby.
GO SHARKS!!
Addicted to what you may ask? Quite simply, I have become a blogging addict. I signed up for my blog about a year ago and after a few posts, I lost interest. I now know why that happened: I was using it as a place to share links. Then last month I thought about starting it off again. This time I also used it to share links and gave my blog the name "Don Charlie V's Links Worthy of Mention" which was quite a mouthful. Then it started evolving; I was no longer just posting links, every now and again I would actually write detailed blogs about the links and sometimes there weren't even links to start with. I looked for links to suit my blog! So I changed the name of my blog as mentioned in previous post at the beginning of the month.
It didn't stop there, I started adding all sorts of fun stuff like the AddThis bookmarking & sharing button & live Twitter feed. I also started joining blog lists like Amatomu, Networked Blogs & Technorati.
Lately I have been contemplating changing the look of my blog and over the last couple of days, I went about designing a proper logo but this left me with a problem. It didn't suit the crappy Blogger template. So I started prowling the interweb looking for a suitable template. Eventually I found one which would suit my logo (with minor changes like transparency). It is a template called Red Light which I found on www.btemplates.com.
In less than a month my blog has transformed so much an I am loving it. I spend nights that i am not out, watching movies & series on one screen and blogging on my other screen. I may even take up to 3 days perfecting a blog post before actually publishing it... not always but sometimes.
Alright I probably don't have that many regular readers yet but who knows, that may change over time and I may even get a proper domain name if it comes down to that.
It looks like an entertaining movie but I'm just worried its gonna be a bit too much like Harry Potter, which I did not like BTW!
It almost made it into my top list except as I said, i just can't decide, but on that note, I thought i deserved a mention anyway...
Check out the trailer anyway...
Check it out by clicking the following link:
Win Stuff in free online competitions
There are plenty of prizes to win and they are FREE to enter!
There are a lot of really good movies coming out, so to make it easier to decide, I sifted through a lot of sites and came up with a list of my top 25.
3 things before you start:
1) The movies are arranged in order of release date - from current to last & the release dates are for South Africa.
2) If you get playlist errors with the videos, just click "Continue" and the movie will still play
3) I may not have included a movie that you think is better, but I'm just recommending, you can watch whatever you want. I won't judge...much...
Halloween II
This is definitely one for the fans of horror movies only! Also you have to see the first one before you watch this one... If the two criteria are not met you will be in the same situation as my friend Alex, who really did not enjoy it!
I thought i would help out and post some of the better ones I've found recently...
1) The Transforminators (by Black20 Studios)
This mashup trailer is absolutely brilliant!
2) The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon (by Richard Gale)
There are no words to describe this video - don't know what it is about it!
3) Phobias (taken from The Sketch Show)
Brilliant clip about phobias taken from a TV series called The Sketch Show
4) Surprised Kitty
Awesome short clip involving a kitten
5) The Burj Birdmen
This is for fans of base jumping. This is the world record base jump from the Burj Khalifa (formerly known as the Burj Dubai which was recently officially opened)
The Burj Birdmen from Jan-Paul Bednarz on Vimeo.
If there is one thing I absolutely loath about Facebook it is Farmville... I don't like most of the other games on Facebook, but not near as much as I hate Farmville
I would rather give up my left testicle if there were a choice between it and playing Farmville again.
Just one quick confession on that note though: I did play Farmville for about a month, but all that this means is that my hate is even more justified.
My name is Charlie & I was an addict. I played Farmville and MobWars and it took over my life. I would spend up 5 hours a day playing these games and would be upset if i missed out on my daily fix. Fortunately I came to my senses one day and deleted every crap game I was playing on Facebook. I blocked every notification from these apps and am better off for it.
I came across an article on Forbes.com about Farmville's expansion to their own website and to MSN. In the article, it mentions that Farmville has over 76 million monthly users! If Farmville users had a country they would be the 17th largest in the world. It would also have a $100 million income. That is how much the developers, Zynga, made last year. Admittedly they have other games, but none nearing the success of Farmville. And companies such as Kwedit which help you get virtual money on games without a credit card.
Even worse is the fact that legit news sites are even reporting when Farmville adds new features. I did a search and came up with a couple of examples to illustrate the point.
- Showbiz Gossips
- Times Asia
I also know that I am not the only one who hates it; a couple of my Facebook friends have made that pretty obvious:
- Dear Facebook Apps Addict, Let me tell you something you already know..... I HATE Facebook Apps. you can EFF right off with your GAWD DAMN INVITES! Kind retards. Pete
- Eddible will start playing Farmville when I can clone sheep, raise velociraptors and grow Triffids.
When I asked for peoples opinions, the one that stood out was:
- FML.com
- Farmvillians (Lamebook.com)
- Framedville (Lamebook.com)
But my opinion is just that, an opinion. All I ask is that you seriously look at your "farm" in the big picture and ask yourself: "What am I gaining out of this?" Other that pissing us off with all the flipping notifications!
For those of you who are with me on this already, consider joining this group on Facebook. Maybe your Farmville-ing friends will get the message at least
If we google the word Geek, and look at some of the definitions, it does not help matters much...
According to Wikipedia, "the word Geek is a slang term, noting individuals as "a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc."
Dictionary.com has 3 definitions... 1) a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, esp. one who is perceived to be overly intellectual. 2) a computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders.) 3) a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken.
If we look at Urban Dictionary, geeks are "the people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult," or "not to be confused with Nerd. A geek does not have to be smart, a Geek is someone who is generaly not athletic, and enjoys Video Games; Comic Books; being on the internet, and etc."
If we truly want to define a Geek, we do not want to look at a strict definition of the word, but look at the cultural definition of a Geek. If you're going "huh" now, then let me explain.
While researching this blog post, I came across paper, Geek Culture: The 3rd Counter Culture, written by Lars Konzack, who has a blog on ludology and game research.
While I may not agree with everything mentioned in the paper, it gave me a lot of different ideas to present you with.
For my fellow Geeks out there, many of us has strange and maybe difficult childhoods - right up to high school even. I embraced my inner-Geek quite late in life (sometime in high-school) as many Geeks do; growing up, Geek was definitely not cool. I am now quite proud to be a Geek.
With that in mind, I don't think I was afraid of admitting it; I was just in denial. Sometimes I wish I had just faced the facts earlier...
Earlier I asked the question; is a Geek the same thing as a nerd and quite simply I think that the answer is no. I think the confusion comes in as there are several overlapping characteristics. Nerds tend to be intellectuals who excel at things academic (especially technological and scientific) and they generally have horrible social skills because they are studious people. They may have similar interests as Geeks but that is where it ends as far as I am concerned.
So what makes a Geek? There is no simple answer really. Is it the (almost) obsession with gadgets? Is it the love of fantasy worlds? Is it their knack with PCs? Are they more introverted than extroverted? Is it their love of gaming? The thing is I could list all sorts of possible characteristics and it still might not be right!
You could also say to me, but lots of people like those things these days or lots of people are like that these days and you would be right, but also oh so wrong!
Think back to the 90's and tell me how many people were on the interwebs? How many had a Geocities page that they called there own? How many people were regularly gaming? How many of them were excited about the Sci-Fi channel on DSTV and were sad to see it go a while ago? Before the movie came out, how many people had read the Lord of the Rings, or many other fantasy series novels? How many could fix their own PCs and knew their way around MS-DOS? A lot less than today I can tell you that much!
If you knew people like that, you probably called them a Geek and ignored them until needed. Unless you were one yourself.
But in our world today with gadgets surrounding us, PC's in our homes, consoles in our lounges, fantasy movies such as Avatar making close to $2 billion already, the Geek has become king.
You may have many of the things that a Geek loves, but that does not make you Geek. It actually just shows that Geeks have managed to affect an entire world culture through his weapon of choice - The Internet.
Thats right the kids you picked on in school are the ones you now silently respect to some degree or another. You might deny it publicly but you can't lie to youself!
What it boils down to is that you know whether you are a Geek or not, but nobody or no-one will ever be able to truly describe it...
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I came across this on popurls and it just made me wanna say "hallelujah!"
When I originally started this blog, i had intended it to be some sort of place to share links, but then it became something else. I still share links, but it has also become a sort of outlet to share my views on the links I find.
So the name was no longer suitable... and for a few days I toyed around with a few ideas and by talking to some people, I decided to drop the name in it's entirety and come up with something all together new.
Then it hit me while I was looking at my recent posts and their content... Are you GEEK?... which is actually pretty accurate!
What do you think?
While on the topic of geeks, I will be doing my next post on the very topic as a lot of people misunderstand the entire concept...
Now and then, you get a link to a site and end up wondering what the hell happened to the last few hours of your life?
That happened to me! I follow @popurls on twitter which posts the most popular links of the hour from their website. They are normally a quick visit kind of site such as news articles or pictures, but today they doomed me with a tweet which said: "Wave goodbye to the next 3 hours of your life http://pop.is/1has"
I thought that they were joking!! Guess not... The game is called Chain Reaction
But that is all that I will say, as you need to discover it for yourself...I will say that there are two versions - Simple and Advanced. Try out the simple version but the real fun lies in the advanced one
When I think of the game Diablo, and especially Diablo II, it brings back many memories. Several months (and possibly an entire year now thinking about it) gone by, playing my way through Normal, Nightmare and Hell difficulty and several occasions having to fork out my hard-earned cash on telephone bills for my 56k dial up, to be able to play on Battle.net... good times! By the time I eventually started playing, the Lords of Destruction expansion pack had just come out (my PC at the time was not good enough to play the game when Diablo II was originally released)
So when I heard about Diablo III in 2008, I was seriously excited about it. Almost two years later there is still no official release date and I am getting very anxious... but my excitement is still there!
For those of you who have not had the pleasure of playing the Diablo series, which is developed by Blizzard Entertainment, who are also responsible for the Warcraft series & Starcraft, it is a fantasy action RPG. The first game was released in 1997, and saw you taking the role of the hero and working your way through 16 levels, eventually finishing up in hell to face Diablo, the Lord of Terror, where you "kill" him with a soulstone. The game received many near perfect scores on several reviews and by 2001 had sold 2.5 million copies. You had the choice of three charcters: Barbarian, Rogue or Sorcerer.
Diablo II was released in 2000, with the expansion, Lords of Destruction, being released a year later, in 2001. The story continues from the first game, but when your adventurer "kills" Diablo in the first game, it actually only made him stronger and he releases his brothers Mephisto (Lord of Hatred) & Baal (Lord of Destruction) from their soulstones.
You take the role of a adventurer, who arrives in the wake of the destruction caused from the first game. You work you way through four acts by defeating the three prime evils, Diablo, Mephisto and Baal. The game recieved several game of the year awards and for a while held the Guinness Book of World records title of the fastest selling game! By 2001 it had sold over four million copies... Your choice of characters increased from the first game; you could play as Barbarian, Sorceress, Necromancer, Amazon & Paladin and with the expansion pack the Druid and Assassin were added.
But enough about the old games, lets get into the juicy details about Diablo III.
According to the official website, the story goes as follows:
Two decades have passed since the demonic lords, Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal, set out across the world of Sanctuary on a vicious rampage, twisting humanity to their unholy will. Yet for those who battled the Prime Evils, the memory fades slowly.
When Deckard Cain returns to the ruins of Tristram Cathedral seeking clues to defeat new stirrings of evil, a fiery harbinger of doom falls from the heavens, striking the very ground where Diablo once entered the world. This fire from the sky reawakens ancient evils and calls the heroes of Sanctuary to defend the mortal world against the rising powers of the Burning Hells once again.
I have lost count of the number of times i have watched the cinematic teaser and the gameplay preview and i am seriously impressed. I think I know the teaser by heart now!
There are some changes to how the game works. Firstly there will be five classes initially, but with the big change being that you can choose the gender of your character. Four of the classes have been revealed to date, namely:
- The Barbarian
I couldn't find a video of the barbarian, but if you watch the gameplay trailer on their website, most of it is about the barbarian.
This is also the only character to be in all three games...strength and brute force is what it's all about
- The Wizard
Watch the Wizard trailer
Total opposite of the Barbarian, while not strong, this character relies on magic to annihilate it's enemies.
- The Witch Doctor
No video for this one either, but once again, it is featured in the gameplay video
Reminds me of the Necromancer. Has "pets" and other spells to kill its enemies
- The Monk
Watch the Monk trailer
I love this character and there is a 90% chance that I will play this character!
Besides the new character line-up there are some changes that i can really appreciate. The health pickups as you kill enemies, the specialization characters & the destructible environments. There is also talk of some net Battle.net features.
Basically i think that there is a lot that we have to look forward to with the new Diablo and I wait patiently!
The other day I came across CNN's 12 most annoying types of facebookers and it made me think of the seven deadly sins for some reason. I wondered if they could apply to types of facebook users & over a couple of days, I jotted some ideas down and this is what I came up with...
Pride
Facebook: This is the kind of facebooker who overcompensates by trying to make themselves seem better. This can be a profile picture pose or trying to sound impressive in their updates or on their info page. They end up just making a fool of themselves though.
Into this category, I will also include those of you who have kids and think we need to know every little detail of their post-larvae stage. I honestly do not care about your kids! Send an email to those that you think will care...
Envy
Facebook: They are copycats. They will imitate their facebook friends in every aspect; this can be by joining the same groups, posting similar statuses and even trying to befriend people they barely know just so they can have mutual friends.
Gluttony
Facebook: In facebook terms this is the almost reversed. This sin is committed when the facebooker posts way too much information.
"I just took a dump" is the kind of posts to be expected by these people. They are feeding the rest of us more than we need to know. TMI...
Lust
Facebook: These facebookers are the douchebags & douchettes of the world. They will most likely have hundreds of photos or albums of their bronzed bodies or in are wearing their ed hardy shirts with other douchebags & douchettes. Fortunately these types of people will flock together and leave the rest of us alone.
Unfortunately they are spamming our news feeds as well as tainting the gene pool with their breeding.
Wrath
Facebook: They tend to air all their dirty secrets on facebook to spite someone. These are extremely malicious people and are to be avoided at all costs. They will attack you everytime you post something.
Deep down they are just unhappy people
Greed
Facebook: This type of person can never join enough groups or have enough friends. never mind that they only spoke to the person 5 yrs ago at some party, they are a friend.
They are social whores, plain and simple!
Try my search engine out!
It's kinda true, but I still don't think it justifies it. The next couple of links are possibly extreme but who is to say you won't get that way. The links show way Farmville affects our real life relationships.