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?

You know, I’m all for making money, after all I make money too, by offering my services to my employer, as a software developer, for a monthly remuneration. Heck, I’ve had my share of businesses in the past and partnerships and we’ve made money too. Yet, the one thing I’ve always done is give people a fair deal and ask for what is regarded as, market related salaries/rates. 

I strongly believe you should pay for what you’re getting, the better the quality, the more effort involved, the more you should pay for it, and rightly so.

Now, to the crux of the matter and the reason for this post – WTF do florists think makes their flowers so f$#%*ing special on the 13th and 14th of February every frickin year that warrants them ripping off their customers by charging more than 3 times the price they’re normally sold for?

Did they feed them with special gold-laced flower food in the week leading up to Valentine’s day making the flowers grown more expensive than the rest of the flowers – from the same frickin plant – prior to the week leading up to Valentine’s day?

I can almost guarantee they will make the same profit for the month, if not more, if they actually droppped their prices on and around special occasions and more people will buy their products. 

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against Valentine’s day – I love my wife – we went out to a restaurant last night, and this morning I made her breakfast in bed. No, I didn’t buy her flowers and no, I didn’t buy her a card (another pet-hate but that’s for another day’s rant). I’ll buy her two bunches of flowers at the end of the month for less than half what I would have paid yesterday, or today.

Last year we heard that the IEC (Independent Electoral Commission, who oversee our electoral process ensuring a free and fair election) would have their website overhauled so that it was compliant in all browsers, at a cost of R3million!

Now that might sound like a lot of money, it might not. If it was tax payers money (which I’m sure it was partly/wholely funded – then I’m disgusted and I want my share back!

Just look at these two screenshots of the IEC website and even more shockingly the WorldCup 2010 website supposedly promoting the event for South Africa in 2010.

Independent Electoral Commission website (click to visit site)

South Africa 2010 website (click to visit site)

Now, a quick cursory check in the source of the website revelas that the author was proud enough of his work to put his name in the meta-tags. 

Just take a look at this guy’s “resume” – wonder how he got the job? Pathetic!

I’ve been in this industy and business for a long time now and I know you can achieve 1000 times better quality work for 1% of what was spent – truly shocking to say the least!

If you feel the same way, why not go and sign my petition.

Update: 06 February 2009 - News24.com have picked up on the chatter on the various blogs and forums about the IEC website and the costs associated with building it – you can read more here.

Comments re-opened should anyone else wish to comment on this topic.

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You know, back in the early days of the Internet people were left to their own devices and added scrolling marquees, flashing text and TONS of animated GIFs to their pages to “spruce” (sic) them up. And as the Internet became more popular among more people, others too, who weren’t that technically (?) minded, wanted their own space on the Internet too – along came blogging tools and websites offering easy ways to publish your own content online. 

Even though I’ve had various personal, company and group-related websites up since the mid-90′s I’ve only been active on the blogosphere for the past 3 months, and I’m glad I did a little bit of research before starting – especially when it comes to picking a blogging-tool.

I initially was going to go with my own provider’s blogging tool but I didn’t like the templates, features or usability. The same applied to Blogger and MySpace (and boy was I warned about MySpace). I really thought the early days of ugly websites were gone by about 2000 but it seems MySpace has provided a platform for people to create ugly sites again (like they did when they first created and releases MS FrontPage). I’ve been to about a dozen or so MySpace pages of various people I’ve wanted to see profiles of and I’ve yet to see a decent looking page on that platform other than (maybe, at  stretch) the MySpace home page.

So then I finally settled on WordPress.com and looking back, I’m very happy I did.

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