It was a beautiful day at the lake.
This is my first photo post from my iPhone.
it’s rather unfortunate that these things need to be pushed
little sweet gangster on Flickr.
I may be in the minority on this but I think iMovie trailers are great (at least when choosing a completely mismatched genre for the subject matter haha).
Btw this was all filmed, edited and blogged from my iPhone. Crazy how powerful these things are. I’ve never even edited a video on a PC before!
I’d like to introduce you to George Gianatakis, proprietor of Colonia Barber Shop for the past 28 years. I’ve been a customer for over 15 years and even though I’m now staying on the other side of Johannesburg I always go out of my way to visit him. You just don’t get service like this anymore.
Looks like Lana is going to be walking soon (this is a repost, I accidentally deleted my earlier post, doh).
These are a few of my favourite pictures from Simone and Michael’s wedding that was held at Blandford Manor a few weeks back. Simone looked absolutely beautiful and I suppose Michael didn’t look too shabby himself. They really made it easy for me. I just had to lift up the camera and click :)
There aren’t many options for buying music online in South Africa but I’ve at least been pleased with the Look & Listen MP3 store. They claim to have over 3 million songs available for download and in practice it seems like most new popular songs are indeed available. It is a different case for some genres like house music where I could only find about 1 in 5 tracks that I was looking for and their selection of local house music is particularly sad.
The experience isn’t smooth sailing though. You pretty much need to know exactly what you’re looking for and then use their cumbersome search by entering criteria separately for artist, album etc. (a single search box would greatly simplify things). The other pain I found was that after buying some music I needed to download each track separately. Most other stores like 7digital either use download managers or at least allow you to download a single ZIP file that contains all your purchased tracks.
The good news then is that the typical price of a new song is R9.99 and most albums are sold for R99.99 which is much cheaper than buying in-store. Comically, there are some albums consisting of less than 10 songs that sell for R99.99 but you can get it cheaper by just buying each track individually. The tracks are completely DRM-free MP3 files, the 256 kbps bit rate is great and the metadata is also pretty good. After purchase the tracks are only available for 72 hours though so it’s not like there is an online locker you can download from in case you lose your files later.
Now the best part is that they have partnered with eBucks and Discovery Card. A song costs 100 eBucks and if paying by Discovery Card it is eligible for Vitality discounts which in my case results in a 15% cash back 1. This means I’m only paying about R8.50 per song or R85 per album. This is even cheaper than buying music through the US iTunes store 2.
Overall I think it is a compelling service and I’ll definitely be using it going forward. I also hear that their website is due for a revamp soon. Fingers crossed that they make it a bit easier to use and address the pain of having to download tracks individually.
this 15% cashback is because I’ve made it to gold status with Vitality on Discovery Health and have been with them for more than five years. Check their website for details - diamond status enjoys the benefit of 20% cash back! ↩
yes it is possible to buy music from iTunes in South Africa, see Jason Bagley’s write-up for clear instructions on setting it up. South African credit cards won’t work on international iTunes stores so you will need to buy vouchers separately. While Jason’s recommendations are great you usually pay an extra $3 to $5 per voucher (so you’ll end up paying $29 for a $25 voucher). A recent poster on the iPhoneZa forums discovered a better option. Go to bestbuy.com and do a search for “iTunes voucher” then look for the digital delivery options. Here you pay the same price as the voucher. Or you can save yourself the hassle and just buy from look & listen knowing it is perfectly legal :) ↩
Lana absolutely loved her first time at the sea.
Had a relaxing holiday in Durban. Just a pity the sun was hiding for the last half of it. I’ve become a big fan of the new walkway along the beach. Starting from the Suncoast Hotel and Towers to uShaka Marine World is probably a good 4-5km stretch.
