Andy's mind

Recently I’ve been browsing YouTube, just randomly stumbling around out of boredom. A couple of videos I’ve watched in the last couple of days have been about the South African accent and how people sometimes struggle to understand what we are saying. Now I have to admit I struggle to understand what some people in my own country, even in my own city, are saying sometimes. But that aside, this got me thinking about some technical video tutorials I’ve watched over the years.

From time to time I’ll come accross a situation where the only way to find out how to do something in a piece of software without sitting through hours of trial and error is to watch someone’s video tutorial about how to do it. People seem to think it would be easier to understand things if you watch a video about it, which is only true if the person watching the video happens to have grown up with the same accent as the person speaking in the video. I’ve watched some videos on Photoshop where the person presenting the information speaks so fast in some American accent that I give up trying to understand after a couple of minutes and just go for the trial and error method instead.

So here’s my advice to makers of video tutorials. Remember that the vast majority of people watching your video are likely to be outside your region, and many will be outside your country. English is a very widely spoken language, and it is spoken in a huge array of regional and national accents. So slow it down a little and try to make it clearer for someone like me to understand what you are trying to say, we want to learn about the subject of your video and don’t still want to learn how to undertand your regional accent first.

Summerstrand in Port Elizabeth has always been perceived as a bit of an upmarket suburb. This image is being spoiled a little by the increasing number of beggars and drunks who seem to be making the streets around Summerstrand Village shopping center their stomping grounds. I live within an easy 2 minutes walk of Summerstrand Village and this trend concerns me.

As an example, allow me to describe the experience of my stroll to Pick n Pay at Summerstrand Village at about 5:30 this afternoon. Walking there, I noticed a couple of scruffy looking people on the shopping center side of the street, so I stuck to the far side of the street as far as possible, one of the scruffy looking men walked to the corner to harass me for money. In the center itself there was a beggar sitting on a bench, when I walked past him without so much as looking at him he started shouting something about being a racist after me. On the way home I again crossed the street as soon as possible to walk home on the side of the street away from the center. Right outside my driveway gate a beggar came running across the street to harass me for money. This one actually looked like he wanted to attack me when I told him I had nothing for him, so I ducked in the gate and closed it in a hurry.

I have in the past, often on weekends, seen drunks fighting and screaming in the streets around the shopping center. Once I nearly had to call the police because it looked like a drunk man was about to stab a drunk woman with a broken bottle.

It’s gotten to the point where I, a 6 foot 2 man, am nervous when I walk to the shopping center on my own. I will most certainly not walk there if my girlfriend is with me. After today’s little trip of “joy” I find myself wondering if I even want to walk there at all, perhaps it would be easier and much safer to get in my car and drive somewhere else when I need to go to a shop rather than running the gauntlet of beggars and drunks in the mean streets of Summerstrand.

As I’m sure anyone who knows me is aware, photography is a hobby of mine (In a way it’s also a form of artistic expression), mostly thanks to my brother Jaap’s inspiration.

So anyway, this weekend the weather was great and I took quite a number of photos. A lot of those photos were at the seaside, since it was such a great place to be. While taking photos as the beach I had a bit of a thought about something…

As a photographer, I record things that catch my eye in time for me to get my camera pointed in the right direction and take the photo. As a heterosexual male, my eye is rather easily caught by attractive women. And here we arrive at a bit of a dilemma, I find it difficult to take pictures of people I don’t know because I always worry a bit that they may object. This means there are many photos I see and never take, because I’m a little weirded out by the thought of taking photos of people I don’t know. There was one lady today I would have loved to have taken an on-the-spot portrait of, she had the most amazing blue eyes, but there’s no way I was just going to walk up to her and ask if I can take her photo. Hell, I even find it difficult to take photos of people I do know without there being some sort of event like a party underway that I’m taking photos of.

So how do I deal with this problem? It is a problem, because I feel I’m missing out of some amazing photographs.

One of my main inspirations for getting into photography is my big brother Jaap. He’s been a great photographer for as long as I can remember (I’m too polite now to say just how much older than me he actually is, but he did take some photos of me before I started school).

Some years ago, after a couple of nasty experiences with criminals in South Africa, Jaap packed up his family and emigrated to Canada. I miss them, I miss them a lot, one of these days I must make a plan to take a little trip to Fort Mc Murray, Alberta, Canada. I gotta thank the internet for making it possible for us to still keep in contact and show our photos to each other though, originally WebAperture, now Flickr and Facebook.

Recently Jaap and Trudy went on a trip to the Yukon and posted some really awesome photos.Little green with envy now…

Maybe some day when I’m big I’ll be able to take photos like his.

Yeah, I’m “Yellow Sports Car Guy”, but that same girl also said it doesn’t count as a sports car because it’s a Mazda. So I thought I’d defend my claim that I drive a sports car that happens to also double up as a potential family car. It’s a 2004 Mazda RX-8 6-speed manual “High Power”.

Firstly, just have a look at what it looks like:

Now let’s have a look at some of the descriptions and facts and figures supporting the sports car claim.

The Wikipedia Article for the Mazda RX-8 summarizes it as “a sports car manufactured by Mazda Motor Corporation”.

Body style is a 4 door quad-coupe.

The layout is a front mid-engine rear wheel drive configuration. This is a pretty important one actually, it’s a mid-mount configuration, the engine is behind the front wheels and the fuel tank is in front of the rear wheels. This gives it a near 50:50 weight distribution, with all the performance handling advantages that come from that.

It has a 1.3 l Renesis naturally aspirated rotary engine that redlines at 9000 rpm. This is a dual 650cc rotor setup that is classed as a 2.6 liter for motor sport classing purposes. Power output is 238 horsepower, which combines with a curb weight for the car of about 1350 kg to produce a car that can do 0 to 100 in 6.4 seconds and has a top speed of 235 km/h.

Weight reduction is a combination of the light rotary engine, light-weight metals for components like the bonnet and rear doors and a carbon fiber composite drive shaft.

It has independent double wishbone suspension in front and independent multi-link suspension in the rear, which combine with a Torsen limited slip differential to make this car a road holder of note. I have yet to feel close to the edge of the envelope going around a corner, it just goes around like it’s on rails.

So I think she’s a sports car, one of many Mazda produced sports cars, such as the very successful RX-7 and the MX-5. As of October 2006 it had won 37 car awards, including the 2004 U.S. Best Sports Car award.

So why do I say it’s also a family car? OK… granted it doesn’t really make a very good family saloon in the luggage space department, but it could still qualify as one.

There are some family car type features that I find interesting.

Firstly, despite the limited size of the interior, the layout of the car does make it entirely possible for four adults to travel long distances in comfort. I have done long-ish roads with three other adults in the car and it’s been fine. The front footwells are very deep, so it’s possible to move the front seats well forward, though for me this results in a slightly uncomfortable driving position.

The interesting rear hinged rear doors make access to the rear seats pretty easy for a sports car, and I feel the fact that they can’t be opened at all while the front doors are closed are an added safety feature for small children in the back on the car.

On the subject of safety, something of importance in a family saloon, this car has a huge number of airbags in it. This combines with a bunch of high technology safety features like ABS and DSC to make this a very safe car to travel in, let’s also not forget about the great road holding. And for those times when you have small children in the back, there are child seat mounting points in the back in addition to the standard belts, there is also a (well hidden) switch to turn rear airbags off because they are dangerous when combined with child seats.