Aandiebeginwasdaar

The London Met Police today admitted that the man they shot to death on Thursday morning had nothing to do with the London bombs and that it was a case of mistaken identity. I think this is deeply troubling. I wonder if they’re so proud of their “shoot-to-kill” policy now? This is the danger when you follow advice from the Israelis. I’m surprised the UK openly admitted to following this advice after an English journalist was killed in the same way by these very Israelis.

I think this tragedy proves that calm heads are required in the current environment. People are quick to say “split second decisions” and “why run when you’re innocent” etc, but at the end of the day someone lost his life unnecessarily. Who’s to say the guy even understood English. In the current environment any sort of commotion and shouting would sure as hell get me running. It is obvious that something went wrong and sofar I’m not convinced that the police are blameless. I must say that when I heard that they shot him 5 times, my initial reaction was: “why 5 times”? This might now come back to haunt the guy who pulled the trigger.

I just hope that when I start running from loud noises, I don’t get shot. Ah yes, but I’m white so that probably won’t happen. I’m starting to sound like a bleeding heart, which I promise I’m not. All I want is for calm heads. Shooting at innocent people, which is undeniably what happened here, will NOT solve anything.

I’ve finally finished moving my photo site from vsImages.com to adamfoto.com AdamHeunis.com. I actually like the new name (and subsequent domain name) a lot better then vsImages. It roles of the tongue easier and is less prone to typos (from my own experience!).

The structure of the site has also changed dramatically. Before I used Blogger to build a ‘bloggy’ site, but I have now switched to a proper C#/ASP.NET solution. The home page dynamically builds the albums based a folder structure. This is great for maintainability. All I need to do is to ftp a new album up to my server and the rest is done automatically.

I will enhance the site further. At a high level, my roadmap is: user friendly titles & descriptions, rss feed, ‘new’ albums, album sorting, album categories, voting, online purchases with PayPal and finally colour profiling based on an image (waiting on Boerseun). So be sure to watch this site in future.

I must just add that I’ve nicked some of the look and feel from Jeremy Clark’s site. Thanks to Boerseun for pointing me in that direction as well.

Today was such a glorious day here in London that we decided to go to the London Wetland Centre. This is quite a well run setup not far from Hammersmith.

There are all sorts of bird species and you can get quite close to them. There are loads of bird hides all over the places. There is meant to be mammals (Yes Britain has those!), but we didn’t see any. I found it heartening that so much wildlife can flourish in the middle of the city.

The facilities are superb as well. All in all definitely worth a visit. Even more so if you have kids.

As some readers may already know, I am a software consultant in London. If you want to check out my techie thoughts and practices, check out Adam Heunis tech talk. I’ve written some popular articles. The most popular being the MySQL & the Ajax ones.

Any feedback is obviously very welcome.

If you can (they limit downloads per day), try downloading Google’s Earth application. This is an absolutely brilliant piece of software. I suspect it uses a lot of the Google Maps technology, but as a stand-alone thin-client application it provides for a much slicker user experience.

Like me, you’ll find that time flies by when you’re checking out roads, mountains etc in your neck of the woods.

My old man makes documentaries in Africa and he is always looking for maps. They’re normally quite expensive so he’ll definitely find value in this.

As most people will know by now, London was targeted by terrorists yesterday. I am currently working in the city and I get off at Tottenham Court Road. This is 3 stops away from King’s Cross, where the most deaths occurred. I am obviously very relieved to have avoided any of these atrocities.

The funny thing is that we weren’t actually told it was a terrorist attack until about 5 hours after it happened. But with all the police action in the city, I guessed that something serious had happened. The whole city has been affected, but nobody is reacting in the emotional way that the New Yorkers did. I realise that it is not nearly as dramatic, but the Brits are naturally very reserved; even in situations like these. It is something to be admired.

Today there were very few people on my tube and everyone, including me, was highly suspicious. I suspect it will get back to normal pretty soon though. The politicians are also pushing for a “back to normal” attitude.

Yesterday a friend offered me a ticket to go and see Barry Hilton.

Now historically I can’t stand South African stand ups. Eddie Ecksteen bored me to tears. Casper always takes things too far (although my wife literally finds him hysterical) and so it goes on. With this in mind, I wasn’t expecting too much from Barry Hilton. How wrong I was. He is fantastic. He has a very human angle and he is as sharp as a razor.

He made one or two jokes about periods and tampons which I don’t find funny at all, but other than that he was fantastic. It is exclusively for South Africans though. He told us a story about him smacking his kid on the ear in a packed tube station that had us “pissing in the isles”. He is great at showing the difference between cultures.

I would give him a 4/5. Definitely worth the effort to check him out. Check out the Barry Hilton website.

South Africa are now the holders of the U19 and U21 Rugby World Cups. It really makes me proud! Especially if you consider the physical size of teams like our traditional rivals, the Maoris.

What’s more is that both these teams were very “representative”, (politically correct for “black”) of South Africa. I think this says a lot about the infrastructure of rugby at grass-roots (I’m starting to sound like the ANC!) level.

As a Bulls supporter, I am also very happy about the number of Baby Bulls in the U21 side. Hopefully they won’t be lured away so that we can fulfill our destiny of becoming Super 14 champs.

According to a professional sports agent acquaintance of mine, the stars to look out for are Marius Delport, Chilliboy Ralephela, Morné Steyn, Dërrick Kuun (all Bulls, of course!) and Paul Delport (from Province).

These guys beat everyone including England, New Zealand and a classy Australia. The rest of the world should take note!