We have just got back from the Diemersfontein Pinotage on Tap festival in Wellington. And that is exactly what it is – Pinotage on Tap.

When you arrive, you are given a wine glass and a picnic hamper, and from then on you help yourself to the new release of the Diemersfontein Pinotage – straight from the barrel.

Pinotage on Tap

The Diemersfontein is famous for it's chocolate flavours, hence its nick-name "the Chocolate Pinotage". It really tastes like rich dark chocolate.

No Imitations!

Aside from the picnic hamper, there is loads of food, including strawberries and a chocolate fountain – all you had to do was to help yourself.

Strawberries and chocolate fountain

Live music was provided, the highlight for me being James Stuart (remember the Usual and Bright Blue?)

James Stuart

It was a very relaxing and chilled out Saturday afternoon, but if you did feel at all stressed, you could go and shoot some paintball.

Paintball!

We were very lucky with the weather. It was raining all week, but Saturday dawned sunny and clear, but the ground was still very wet – just have a look at my foot. I suppose that this is a bit like a more civilized version of Woodstock!

Muddy feet

Lynne, Craig and Lois

Our good friends Rory and Lynne

We went up to Wellington with Rory and Lynne, and we spent the night at a really lovely guest house, ending off the evening with a chilled out braai, and then a well deserved sleep!

Pinotage is a uniquely South African grape.

Tags: Pinotage on Tap wine Diemersfontein Wellington

Don't forget the September 24 is National Braai day (BBQ for the rest of the world). It has been cunningly planned to be on the same day as Heritage day, which is of course a public holiday.

Braai Day – 2005

So, don't forget to invite all your friends, buy some wors and chops, and go and have a letter South African braai (oh, don't forget the beer).

Beer Chicken – Braai Day 2006

Or, you can do what we are doing and have a braai on Tuesday evening, so we can sleep late on Wednesday.

To find out more about braai's, have a look at Wikipedia

Tags: South Africa braai day bbq heritage day

Recently, Lilly, who are one of the major manufactures of insulin, changed  he design of on of their insulin pens. One would think that a major pharmaceutical company would spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that the pens work fine, wouldn’t you? Apparently not! Take a close look at the images below.

Can you see how the needle on the top pen sticks out over the end of the closed en on the bottom? Yes, if you put a needle onto the insulin pen, the needle sticks out by about 3mm, and the cap is too short to fit onto the pen. So, you either have to switch to a shorter needle, or get a new pen!

Here you can see how the cap will not fit with the needle attached.

  Pretty poor design…

Two onions to Lilly!

Tags: orchids and onions Lilly insulin pen

This morning awoke with a hint of what Summer is going to be like. It was a gorgeous, sunny and  wind-free morning. So, I celebrated it by going cycling (since I have just registered for the Argus Cycle Tour next year). I was not the only cyclist on the road – there must have been at least 100 or more enjoying the fine weather.

My original intention was to just cycle to Simonstown, but somehow I was having such a great cycle, that I ended up cycling all the way to Millers Point – about 2/3 of the way to the Cape Point nature reserve. The total distance that I covered was just over 40km – which is the furthest that I have been since my back surgery in December last year.

Looking from Millers Point across False Bay towards Muizenberg – it is only 20km, but it looks much further in the photo!

Well, my back behaved beautifully, in fact the only part of me feeling any pain was my backside – more time in the seat will sort that out! Oh, and my legs are starting to hurt a little!

Being out on the road again was really invigorating, my mind cleared, I felt fresh, and I spent a good two hours enjoying nature (and of course the traffic jam on the roadworks in St James).

I took this while stuck in roadworks – the world’s ugliest train on the world’s most beautiful track

The cyclists were not the only ones out on the road – I also saw several groups of SCUBA divers gearing up; getting ready to  enjoy the clear water.

False Bay – as calm as it gets (it is called False Bay because the ‘real bay’ is Table Bay on the West Coast of Cape Town)

The Cape Floral Kingdom is the smallest in the world, yet is has the most variety of any floral kingdom in the world. The spring flowers are just starting to come out. It is kind of odd – for about 2 weeks in spring, the local bushes burst into bright flowers, and then the flowers dissapear as quickly as the appeared, to appear again in a year.

Fynbos (finebush) flowers

It was a bit of a relief to get caught in the Fish Hoek main road traffic. In a stretch of 500m, there are 4 traffic lights! Fish Hoek is really pretty, but very conservative. They are the only suburb in South Africa (as far as I know) that does not allow the selling of alcohol. In fact, there was a huge outcry when restaurants were allowed to serve alcohol.

Fish Hoek Main Road

So it was great to be back on the road, and I am feeling so inspired to get out there and continue my training!

(sorry about the poor picture quality, that is the best my phone will take)

Tags: Cape Town Fynbos Cycling Spring Fish Hoek False Bay

Yesterday, I watched a technology presentation by Chris Anderson on TED.COM, recorded in 2004. He said that in 2008 (ie: now) you would be able to store 1 million songs on a hard drive costing about $400. Now, assuming that a MP3 is about 4meg big, you will need 4 million meg to store 1 million songs, or approx 4 Terabytes.

So I took this to the test. Currently, you can buy a 1 TB hard drive from BestBuy for $150, so a 4 TB drive will be about $600, so not too far off. In fact, it will probably be spot on by the end of the year. Hey, wait a year and you will probably be able to store 2 million songs.

Locally, a 750gig drive from Chaos is about R1600, which equates to approx R8500 for 4 TB of storage.

But what is really scary is that you can store over 1 million songs on your home computer for less than R10000, which is less than 10c per song! Now just pause and think about that. We can freely share music (mostly illegally) at no cost, and store it at an igsignificant cost. So, how is that going to affect the music industry?

Food for thought…

By the way, if the average song is about 5 minutes long, your new collection of 1 million songs will take about 9 1/2 years to play in its entirety!

Today, the first of September, is supposed to be the start of spring, when you can start putting the winder blankets and clothing away, and to start thinking about going to be beach, sundowners at the Brass Bell, and of course long afternoon braais.

Well, you could have fooled me. Yesterday was one of the coldest days this year (at least it felt that way) – I counted four hail-storms in the afternoon, and it snowed on the mountains – at the end of August!

These pictures of my garden were taken at 12:50pm – in the middle of the day.

While I can't wait for spring to arrive in full force, I think that we are going to need a little more patience before it arrives.