It’s been a while, a long while. This post is a summary of my professional, spiritual, nutritional and personal life over the last 2 and a bit years.

The last serious set of blogging I did was about two years ago before I left Open Box Software (hip south african site, boring international site) to join Information Logistics. I moved from company which had just passed the 50 person mark (busy shifting from being a big-small company to a small-medium company), to a company of 4 (of which I was the fourth). (Re)learning how to work in a small company has been a challenging experience – it’s been interesting to see how the two companies differ and where they are the same.

At the same time, I’ve been evolving spiritually: quite serendipitously I came across the only open ancient mystery school in about October of 2006 (via Caroline, see below if you’re wondering who this is). The Rocky Mountain Mystery School has recently relaunched as the Modern Mystery School and over the last two and a bit years I’ve found that the ideas and teachings they offer have significant value in my life. Towards the end of 2006 I was frustrated that there wasn’t anything important to do in the world, I guess you could phrase it as: What is my purpose in life? Two years later, the answer to that question is not much clearer, but I am more certain about Who I am, and What I am, Where I came from, and Where I’m going. Starting to answer the former question is a lot easier when you can orient yourself with the latter four. Today I’m an initiated Adept, Teacher and Ritual Master, and can offer this amazing life changing empowerment called the 22-strand DNA activation.

In January 2007, I started Kung Fu at the Chinese Martial Arts and Health Center in Obs, Cape Town, and between Kung Fu and Tai Chi (which I’d already been doing for about 6 months with a private acupuncture practitioner in Wynberg) I’m amazed at how much I’ve developed physically and mentally over the last two years. Martial Arts (taught correctly) can give you an amazing appreciation for the human body and it’s capabilities. Traditional western upbringings lack the depth of body knowledge that eastern culture seems to be ingrained with. I grade to Yellow (about ~2.5 years into system) in May

September 2007 saw Caroline and I educating ourselves about Raw Food via the Elements of Health course run by Soaring Free Superfoods. I’d already been vegetarian for about 4 years, so the transition to Raw Vegan wasn’t hard. I found that after going raw, my cravings for protein (about 4 burger patties/sausages per day) disappeared completely. I also dropped about 10 kg in a few months, and settled at about my perfect weight! (No change in exercise, this was only due to change in diet). Recently movies such as Simply Raw and Food Matters are starting to break into the more public consciousness, but it’s a slow process. Raw may not be for everyone, but the sheer number of uninformed people who think that Diabetes, Cancer, Heart Disease, Depression, etc are untreatable is staggering. We now get mostly all of our food from The Ethical Co-op, topping up on essentials from the Wollies organic section, and once a month we visit Pick n Pay for non-food items.

I proposed to Caroline in October 2007 (during our first Kabbalah retreat weekend), and we set the date for November 2008, most of 2008 was spent going up our second Kabbalah tree, and sorting out wedding arrangements. The wedding was held at the picturesque Picardie guest farm in Suider Paarl and was amazing. Honeymoon was a week in Mozambique at the Pestana Inhaca Lodge and was breathtaking (even though the commute there was a little painful).

Looking forwards, there’s so much work to do, that I have to be ruthless in deciding exactly what’s important and what’s not, I have choice and I everything I choose to do I have fun doing! I hope to bring some of that enthusiasm to the rest of Cape Town, and South Africa and the World.

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It’s happening on October 3rd, 4th 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa. So what’s the big idea? Well we’re convinced that there will be web and technology growth in Africa, so we’re getting together leading, internationally respected speakers and thinkers from the industry to discuss what’s happening and what’s possible, with folks that are on the ground in Africa.

Stop by and take a look!

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d@vid tells me that Stormhoek are giving Wine away to bloggers that are willing to blog about it! Well I certainly wouldn’t mind a glass to go with my Macaroni Cheese at lunch

BTW: gapingvoid cartoons are being used as wine labels! Who would have thought?

Update: Lunch was del.icio.us – the Wine was tasty good too. It really make a big difference if you drink it just after you’ve opened the bottle!

Firefox 1.5 is out. I downloaded it a few days ago, but only got around to installing it tonight. Of all my pluings only CuteMenus and Wayback haven’t been upgraded to work with 1.5 (I managed to find ‘bumped’ versions, so they’re working again). I give the Firefox team a 11 out of 10 for all their hard work. The new instant back/forward navigation rocks, the SVG support is cool. Hopefully the browser will pass the Acid2 test soon (Firefox 1.6 maybe? Unfortunatly I guessing we’ll probably have to wait till version 2.0)

I just signed up for a del.icio.us account, so if you want to check out what I’m bookmarking head over to my bookmarks, and you’ll be able to see

Now if only WordPress auto-posted links in posts to your del.icio.us account from your blog using the categories as the tags…. (leave a comment if you know of a plugin that does this as described)

I’ve just been doing some coding for the irc-transport for the xmpppy project (now with vcard/whois and channel listing support!) when I came across Lobby4Linux in a channel topic. I think this guy’s blog is great!

In other news Gareth has been working on the G8 REBOOT site. I suggest you swing by and help Make Poverty History.

I’ve just noticed that Gareth picked up on the Rands In Repose: N.A.D.D. article, and that Mark Shuttleworth is behind Canonical/Ubuntu. I also noticed that Rands links to Joel Spolsky.

Man what a small world!

I’ve been experiencing windows with a OSX Tiger theme for the past few weeks, and recently someone asked me where I got the skin. As I was at home I had to do a bit of searching on Google, but in the process I came across the most amazing transformation yet: Engadget has an article on how to Turn your PC into a Mac.

A bunch of unrelated links (and roughly my browsing history for the last hour):

• gbpvr wiki
• jasonf
• wholinkstome
• Psi (my instant messenging client – where I’m tempted to use daily CVS builds at home)
• hal’s blog
• The Long Tail
• SubEthaEdit (if only there was a non-Mac version)
• Rands In Repose (check your NADD score)

oh and 2^25,964,951-1 is now the largest known prime number.