Keeping up is hard to do

I’ve been negligent recently. In the excitement and stress of preparing for my trip to South by South West (SxSW) in Austin, Texas, I haven’t updated my blog often enough.

Here’s a roundup of my recent writing:

The Mail & Guardian recently published a feature on the Phantom Pass fire near Knysna. I met up with some firemen to “walk the line”, and watched them on a controlled burn to safeguard unburnt forest. These guys work terrifically hard, and it’s dangerous to boot. They deserve our respect. Happily, the editors thought so too, and gave me a full page on page 12 of the over-full budget edition of the paper.

In The Daily Maverick, I wrote another column about the crime FIFA and our government are perpetrating against ordinary South Africans and their businesses, and renewed my call for a boycott, first made here. If you agree, and you are on Twitter, do use the #boycottfifa tag to draw attention to the matter. The marketing hype is deafening. The vuvuzelas drown out the nasty fact that our government spent R80 billion it couldn’t afford on infrastructure, FIFA stands to walk away with a cool R70 billion, but South Africans will have to be content with a mere R20 billion in extra GDP.

I also posted another response to critics of my climate change position, explaining the logical basis for my rejection of the apocalypse hypothesis: Ten reasons to reject climate alarmism. It even has footnotes. Ten of them.

Over on ITWeb, I got to thinking about social media, and how few large companies have dedicated people who can lead product innovation and respond to the rapidly changing landscape online. Heads in the sand, is how I described it.

I’ll be blogging up a storm from Texas, and will make sure this blog gets notified of any updates. I’ll also keep up my regular columns, if all goes well.