Nose Meets Grindstone
Very reluctantly.
Been back more than a week now. Last week was spent dealing with website design enquiries, spam and assorted gripes. This week I thought I would be getting on with work.
Joomla - again
I am putting together a website using Joomla 1.5.8 and although the site design is fine, the time it is taking to do simple things is making me tear my hair out - particularly when I compare it with the productivity of static websites.
Chief culprit on all the Joomla sites I have done is page rerendering after editing. You have to go through hoops to get the new page up. Anyone who does websitre design knows that the processis iterative. Make a change - check - make another change etc. Joomla is all well and good but if I don’t get this fixed, I’m going to Drupal or similar although they don’t have all the doodads of Joomla. As long as when you make a change, you can see it. I’ve put a post on the forum but I am not holding my breath. To make matters worse, the error is not consistent - occasionally, the thing works.
Summary of the Trip
Well, now 10 days have elapsed, it’s time to assess the trip. Was it worth it? Of course. Main impressions of India - dirt, noise and intrusive touts. Would we go back? Yes but to a different area - the south. There are other places I would rather visit in the meantime - Cuba for a start. Before the Yanks stuff it up.
I have put 4hrs of tape onto disc and am in the process of extracting stills to flesh out the blog entries. Give me 2 weeks.
I swore I would not bleat about things here after India, at least for a week - and that’s gone so I can whinge and here goes. . .
Orange Juice
Whatever happened to orange juice. We produce thousands of tons of the things but try and find pure 100% orange juice. You’ll find 100% juice, 100% fruit juice blend but I know of only one supplier of 100% orange juice without cheap extender. The other stuff is packaged into Breakfast Punch and Berry Blaze & etc. This means the juice they have left over. If I want lychee juice, I want lychee juice not mixed with deflavoured apple juice. It’s only there because it’s cheaper than lychee juice. I won’t opine on the diabolic mixture of dairy products and fruit juice.
This is another sad example of being dictated to by the big food cartels in SA. I have see numbers of apparently popular food items come and go over the years. Unfortunately they almost always seem to be replaced by junk - or simply disappear.
SA Passports
The news of the day. After warning that chronically unmitigated disaster of the Department of Home Affairs to get its house in order, the UK has clamped down so SA citizens will now add R900 to their travel bill because of rampant, unabated and galactically out of control mismanagement and corruption. Three other countries now also require visas - wonder who they were?
Durban Street Renaming
I see that the ‘black sprayers’ are still spraying the new signs. I’ll donate a couple of cans of black paint. Messrs Sutcliffe, Naidoo & Co. seem to live in the stratospheric layer of society where the good burghers talk with big numbers about ‘development’, ’social upliftment’ and similar. I bet that when gathered together with their pinkies in the air during afternoon numnums that they don’t talk about Metro Police corruption, potholes, the latest score at the Musgrave/Berea Road intersection, verges that would do Umfolozi proud, gutters full of filth and similar.