UPDATE: 16 Feb 2010 (13h50 SAST) – click here for details
UPDATE: 16 Feb 2010 (18h05 SAST) – click here for details

Lottery tickets are something I don’t buy very often, in fact, very seldom, and often just on a whim, spend a little if you win you win, if you don’t, well, better luck next time. To those who religiously buy tickets twice a week for each and every draw I feel sorry for them as they’re paying ‘a poor man’s tax‘.

This past Sunday the media announced that only one person had bought a valid ticket with the winning numbers, which meant that one person held a ticket for R91 million.

In a press release Dr Bongani Khumalo, chairman and CEO of National Lottery operator Gidani said: “One incredibly lucky lottery player has finally won Friday’s gigantic R91m PowerBall Jackpot in the lottery game which gripped the imagination of the nation for weeks and weeks while the six winning numbers proved elusive.” – source IOL

Then, early Monday morning the media announced who the winner of the R91 million was (stupid mistake number 1).

… a deaf and mute cleaner at a hardware shop in Wynberg, won over R91m in the national lottery’s PowerBall game, reports an Afrikaans daily.

…

The family are reportedly now staying at an undisclosed location after being approached for money. – source IOL

Why post the name of someone who won the latest lottery? Even less so a deaf mute? From whom did they get the winning ticket holder’s details from? And if he’s a deaf mute, did he even give them permission to publish his details? Then later in the day the following report was published.

The Cape Town family who won R91-million in Friday night’s PowerBall draw has been spirited away, apparently by employees of the National Lottery. – source IOL

It’s no surprise then that all the vultures come out to take advantage of a family who’ve just been named as the winners of a huge lottery win.

Then this morning (mistake number 2 – can you say back-pedal, back-pedal) the media (and the lottery company) announce that the winner claimed by the media is in fact NOT the lottery winner.

… a Cape Town cleaner, isn’t the winner of the PowerBall jackpot of over R91m, says the National Lottery Board, a report says.

…

However, Board chief executive Vevek Ram says that someone else won the prize, and wishes to remain anonymous. – source IOL

Am I the only cynical one that thinks something smells really wrong about this? Why the denial all of a sudden? Is the lottery in South Africa rigged (surely not?), is this a PR/media nightmare that they’re trying to get themselves out of (and failing dismally)? Was there really even a winner? If the family named in the media are not the winners, how long will it be before they’re no longer hounded by the vultures out there who want a piece of their, alleged, financial freedom?

What do you think?

UPDATE: 16 Feb 2010 (13h50 SAST)

It would appear that one or more journalists did not do their job correctly. As it has now come to light that the alleged winner’s winning lottery ticket numbers are indeed those drawn BUT are in fact not for the R91m draw but tonight’s draw instead.

… a deaf man from Parkwood, has a PowerBall ticket with Friday night’s winning numbers on it. But while the numbers match up, the date is for tonight’s draw.

The Cape Argus’s examination of the ticket shows that the numbers match up to Friday night’s winning numbers, but the date at the top of the ticket reads “First draw – 16/02/2010″, suggesting that the ticket is only eligible in tonight’s draw. – source IOL

I guess my media nightmare heading might still hold true because it seems people have jumped the gun in more ways than one as seen here:

[his] rags-to-riches story has seized South Africa’s attention, prompting the Minister for Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities, Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya, to issue a statement congratulating the family.- source IOL

Not sure whether or not the statement has in fact been issued by Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya yet but it would be a media nightmare if it has.

What’s that saying: Don’t count all your chickens before they’ve hatched.

UPDATE: 16 Feb 2010 (18h05 SAST)

Now, almost two days after the fact, it would appear that all the blame lies with the person who claimed to have had the winning ticket (but for the wrong draw day).

National lottery operator Gidani on Tuesday said it was battling to understand why a Cape Town man claimed to have won a Powerball jackpot of more than R91 million.

…

The real winner, a 43-year-old wife and mother of two also from the Western Cape, had the millions handed over to her on Tuesday. – source EWN

And in one of the polls run by IOL today they asked readers whether or not they would want their name made public if they had won the lottery or not. Only a small number voted Yes:

Of the 978 people who participated in the poll; 97 percent (952 votes) said “No” and 3 percent (26 votes) said “Yes”. – source IOL

In related news a couple in the UK found out that they won £56m in the local lottery.

The couple, who would make around &pounds;47 000 a week in interest if they banked all their jackpot, said they were confident that the huge win will not spoil their children.

…

The family plan to move from their £235 000 three-bedroom semi in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, to a six-bedroom detached, ideally with a pool. But they want to stay in the same area where their children enjoy school and have lots of friends. – source IOL

My wife does most of the cooking, merely out of convenience and timing, since she’s at home before I am and kids get hungry before we do. So, more often than not, dinner has already been made by the time I get home from work. On the odd occasion, normally over weekends, I’ll make dinner or lunch.

Inspired by Di’s really tasty looking blog posts of the various meals she’s made, I decided to take a couple of photos (you can click on any photo for a larger version) while making lunch today.

A lot of people moan that they can’t cook but a pasta dish has to be one of the easiest meals to prepare and sans burning something, you can’t really mess it up – and you don’t even need to follow a recipe, just throw in a few ingredients and you’re good to go.

The ingredients I used is as follows:

• Chopped peppers
• Finely chopped onion
• Pitted black olives
• Diced mini Italian tomatoes
• Chopped fresh Basil
• Chopped Cabanossi sausage
• one round of Feta cheese
• a can of tinned puréed  tomatoes
• and, obviously, pasta.

You can always skip the sausage/meat entirely for just as delicious vegetarian option. The Cabanossi can also be replaced by any other meat too but it’s nice to have a nice spicy meat in the meal (the spicier for me, the better).

While the pasta’s on the boil (simply in a pot of boiling water with a little bit of olive oil and salt) braise the chopped onion until it begins to brown and add the rest of the ingredients.

If you’d prefer you can opt to exclude the can of puréed tomatoes, as I said there’s no fixed recipe, it’s all about what you’d prefer. The Cabanossi sausage is already smoked so all I had to do was defrost it, but if you use a raw meat leave it to simmer for a while longer. Ideally you should braise the meat with the onion before adding the vegetables to ensure that they’re cooked well.

Once that’s done you can either mix the ingredients into the pasta and serve or if you prefer dish the pasta onto a plate and then add as much or as little of the rest of the cooked ingredients, add spices, etc. to taste and serve/eat.

I garnished mine with pepper, dried oregano, feta cheese and a few splashes of exta hot Tabasco sauce.

Worried about time? Well from beginning of preparation to serving was 30 minutes. How did it taste? Well I know what mine was like, why don’t you let me know how yours worked out once you’ve tried it.

If you’ve been driving for any amount of time (or at the very least obtained a legal driver’s license, not a lucky-packet one or one you paid the guy under the counter for) you should know this basic concept.

Yet, many, many people (shock, horror) actually don’t or as I tend to believe (and feel at the time) don’t care about.

Just this morning I was almost taken out by a traffic officer (no less) who was travelling into and around one of the roundabouts in town (in the same direction as myself, and to my left). He completely disregarded the use of his indicator lights to denote to the rest of us that he was changing lanes and just eased over into the middle lane (yes there are 3 around the roundabouts in the CBD) which I was actually travelling in alongside him.

This is the one thing that irks me about 90% of drivers that simply cannot comprehend how to drive around a roundabout nor know when they need to exit and how to exit.

More times than I can count, I’ve encountered drivers who are in the left-most lane, who wish to pass an exit to carry on to the next one (or worse, go right around and take the exit they actually entered the roundabout) and at the same time, some idiot in the right-most (inner) lane wishing to take the very exit that other said driver is not exiting on, while in the left lane.

Click image to read the mini-guide

Now, instead of me drilling down into the finer points of navigating a traffic circle/roundabout, I’ll rather lead you to Baldricman’s carefully crafted (and humourous) Traffic Circles for Dummies guide. And before anyone tries to criticise either one of us that these are merely our own perceptions of how one should drive and not the legal ways, think again as he has provided relevant links to these.

Now, where’s my high-blood pressure medication so that I can get my heart-rate down again?

Okay, so it’s not really a surprise, since I knew what was in the package – but it was still painful having to wait for so long.

So, on the 28th of December 2009, I got an email from Jim to let me know that he got confirmation that my gift had been shipped that very day. A week later I hurried off to the post-office (yeah, optimistically) but only found the usual mail. Okay, I said to myself, South African postal services aren’t always the snappiest when it comes to international deliveries.

A week later, still nothing – dejected, I tried to forget about it for another few days. Last Friday, I went back to check again, and still nothing! I couldn’t go through on Monday and got a chance to go this evening – and there it was – finally!

Okay, enough with the rambling, what was inside?

TADA! Finally I’m also the owner of our very own Settlers of Catan board-game! And below, are two pictures of the contents and a fully laid-out board-game. Dina and I had a quick game after supper, and I won (by a hair’s breadth mind you)!

So, a special thank you goes out to Jim Plane and Guido Teuber of Catan LLC and of course Klaus Teuber, without whom we would not have the game!

And remember if you want to know more about the game you can read my first experience or if you’d like to find out how to play online you can read my review.

Just a quick post, at 2 in the morning – to let you know I’m still around. I really bit off more  than I could swallow when I decided to move my blog to my own hosting environment and then I decided I wanted to change the domain name again!

Now after sleepless nights, fighting with mySQL at command-line level, I’ve finally fixed all the broken posts, missing/broken images as well as making sure all the back-links in my previous posts now point to this domain (deems.co.za) and no longer to my old blog domain.

It’s amazing how reliant you become with GUI tools at your disposal and then things get messy, quickly when you need to delve into command-line world (yeah all the Linux folks are laughing at me right now, I know).

To cut a long story short, I’ve been making backups of my WordPress database daily only to find out I had problems importing it after I made changes to it (UTF-8, encoding, etc ,etc) but I managed to figure it out and I can safely say I can restore the WordPress backups now, even after hand-coding changes!

Now that I’m happy with my blog move the next task for me is a new design. A change is as good as a holiday they say. I’ll keep you posted but right now, I… need… sleep, stat!

It took a few hours (late in the evening and early in the morning) to migrate my blog completely to a self-hosted environment, but I’ve done it. Now the hard work comes in marketing my new blog home and ensuring it gets indexed and visited

Thanks to the loyal regulars and welcome to the new people!

Back to work I go in the morning – it’s been a somewhat relaxing week so far between Christmas and New Year but someone has to go back to work to pay the bills.

Catch y’all on the flip-side.

Deems

I know I won’t get a chance to do this later – so I’m preparing this post a few hours earlier.

Thanks to all my loyal readers, you know who you are, and also to the many people that visit my blog from far and wide. It’s been a good year, with many events (good and bad), let’s hope 2010 is even better, for everyone!

Have a blast and be safe!

H A P P Y   N E W    Y E A R ! ! !

Spent the evening last night with family stuffing ourselves and kids opening presents. This afternoon is a repeat of yesterday with the other half of the family.

Here’s just a quick message to all of you hoping you and yours have a wonderful Christmas! Be safe!

Last night, after work, we dropped off the kids at my folks place and went through to friends of ours for a pizza and games evening. They had recently purchased a copy of Settlers of Catan and we were keen to have a go and see what all the fuss was about.

Here’s the description of the game from the official Catan website:

Players are recent immigrants to the newly populated island of Catan. Expand your colony through the building of settlements, roads, and villages by harvesting commodities from the land around you. Trade sheep, lumber, bricks and grain for a settlement, bricks and wood for a road, or try to complete other combinations for more advanced buildings, services and specials.

Trade with other players, or at local seaports to get resources you might lack. The first player to achieve 10 points from a combination of roads, settlements, and special cards wins.

I’d say it’s a somewhat similar to Risk (and maybe a little bit of Monopoly) but a lot more fun and even though there are a lot of rules and options during game play, a lot quicker too. We played two games last night that lasted between 60 and 90 minutes each.

And because of the board pieces (hexagonal map piece depicting a certain resource) being placed randomly to make up the map at the beginning of each game and randomly picking (by throwing a pair of dice) the starting person and direction, each game is very different from the previous one.

And example of such a map is like the one below:

The winner of the game is the first person to accumulate 10 points. Points are achieved by building settlements (1 point), cities (2 points) and getting various other special items like Development Cards that give you points, building the longest road (2 points) or having the strongest army (2 points). But don’t be fooled, just because you won a certain achievement that doesn’t mean it can’t be taken away from you by another player who betters your achievement.

What also makes the game interesting and different each time is the fact that resources (like wood, brick, ore, wheat and sheep) don’t ever have a fixed value to them and depending on which resources are most useful to you at the time will determine how you trade with other players. For example one game you’ll end up trading one for one of different resources and other times you might be willing to give up 2 or even 3 of a resource (or combination) for just one other resource from another player.

You also don’t have to wait to play until it’s your turn as every player gets to do a certain amount of things for every dice roll.

There’s a really nice interactive “How To Play” the Settlers of Catan board game that shows you what the game looks like and how to play it.

It’s an expensive board game so I suggest you play with a friend first to see whether or not you too enjoy the game before investing in your own copy (oh and there are various version and extension packs available too) or why not give it a go online against 2 virtual players.

Thanks for the invite guys – it was a great idea and a lot of fun – we’ll definitely have to do it again sometime soon.

Last week I ranted on about Google’s Chrome browser hanging my laptop and after non-use of Chrome the problem went away. Well, it seems that I had spoken too soon. The very next day my laptop hung again, and I had not used Chrome since before I wrote the blog post.

So, frustrated with the hanging, I did a little more digging and found out that there was a known problem with one of Microsoft’s Windows updates, MS09-065 (969947), which caused hanging of the OS (with mouse movement still working) for users with Nvidia and ATI video cards. Now, I know, it’s an XP problem but the update applies to Vista as well so I thought it might be exhibiting the same problems with Vista so I removed that update as well as the Nvidia driver update and re-applied the Nvidia driver update again.

It was a short-lived experience, as the problem returned.

So, I gave in and restored my laptop back to it’s clean, factory-install version of Vista and began rebuilding it again. Many, many long hours later and about 1.7GB of various windows updates later, it seems I have a usable laptop once again.

And yes, this post is being written and posted using Google Chrome, again my browser of choice!