Magic in the Forests of Knysna

Well I am back from a slew of leave, first to the coast and then on a team-build/getaway to Phantom Forest eco-reserve in Knysna.

Phantom Forest has been show-cased on Top Billing as a premier and tranquil respite from the incessant pace of modern life. Built into the forest in an eco-friendly way, the lodge proudly has little impact on the wildlife and ecology of the surrounding wilderness. It boasts a number of impressive chalets linked by walkways, and stunning boma, cocktail and viewing lounge and pools in which to escape the heat of the day.

The rooms are made of wood and the furnishings and décor is exemplarily. Each room has a frontal expanse of glass so the wilderness is never very far from the comfort of your room.

Day one saw us arrive from Johannesburg and dine at the famous Knysna oyster company, a sumptuous feast of oysters, tiger prawns and good wine. After a brief walk around the waterfront area we made our way to Phantom Forest and checked in. A relaxing dip in a stunning mosaic pool left us refreshed and ready to tackle the 5 course dinner in the boma. Coffee and drinks followed dinner on the deck around a roaring log fire and then to bed ready for the next day.

On day two we started the morning early with coffee on the deck and high fives from the simian visitors from the trees. A mammoth breakfast only the most gluttonous or starved could hope to do justice to set the tone for an hour drive to the Tsitsikama forest and the canopy tree-top tour.

Nothing can quite prepare you for the joy and beauty of zip-lining for 2 hours through one of the most beautiful forests in the world; gliding from tree to tree 30m above the ground – the air full of the noise of birds and the smell of water and moss. As the trees are protected, the landing platforms use an ingenious system of rubber stoppers and tension to keep themselves aloft. If you are in the area on holiday then this is a must – I will never again drive through this part of the country without visiting the trees. (Photo’s coming soon)

After lunch we stopped briefly at the Storm’s river bungee – the highest bridge bungee in the world. With over 200m of free fall it is a sight to behold. One of our party was ever hopeful for a rush of adrenaline but there was quite a queue ahead of those ready to throw themselves into the void.

We returned in the afternoon to Phantom Forest to freshen up and made our way down to the Knysna pier where a huge catamaran awaited to take us on a sunset cruise through the Knysna heads. Drinks and snacks were served and the boat set out. The weather was calm and the skipper was able to take us through the heads and briefly out to sea. The Knysna heads are the some of the world’s most dangerous waters and any boat traversing the heads are immediately un-insurable.

After the cruise we returned to the lodge where a breathtaking Moroccan 6 course dinner awaited us at the stunning themed chutzpah room. The food at Phantom Forest is out of this world, my wife and I love dining out (and we do regularly) but the food here was amongst the best I have ever tasted. To have, in one weekend, the best fillet streak and the best line fish is truly astonishing.

Day 3 saw our time at Phantom Forest sadly come to an end. We were collected by Seal Adventures and whisked off in four by fours to the reserve on the Knysna western head. There we did quad biking and the infamous abseil. The abseil is one of the highest commercial abseils in the world and was one of the most amazing experiences ever. To stand on a granite cliff, nothing behind or below you but a seemingly endless void and far below the waves pounding into the jagged knife-edge rocks was a high that will stay with you for many years to come.

From the abseil we returned to the airport and then home.

Thanks to all concerned in the planning and the paying of this unforgettable weekend getaway.

To say it was awesome would be an understatement.

Natal South Coast, St Michael’s Beach

Photo by Stuart Forsyth.

Natal South Coast, St Michael’s Beach

I’m back, however I am not sure how easy it will be for me to switch back to work mode when my mind is still full of waves.

Away, away, to flee the rat-race

Away, away, to flee the rat-race

I am going on much needed leave until the 26th February. This is where you can find me. Take care, see you when I get back.

Disable the VISTA nag!

A ubiquitous and highly frustrating feature in Windows Vista is their UAC (user account control) nag. It asks you all the time, incessantly for the most pointless and idiotic things – are you really really really sure you want to delete that empty text file?

Here’s a little screen-shot to disable the warning Grinch.

Achtung!: If you took your computer back to the shop to be fixed and were told you needed to plug it in for it to work, don’t do this.

Ahhh, administrator quietitude!

LOST the Plot?

Up until the end of season 2, LOST was a cracker of a show. The survival of this band of airplane crash survivors intrigued me, as did this seeming semi-sentient island and the bizarre overtures of Jekyll and Hyde style scientific research centers. The Dharma initiative, run by the mysterious Hanso foundation, was part of an appeal that left the viewer wondering who these shadowy people were and why the interest in the island and survivors.

Season 2 peaked with the hatch implosion and the abduction of Jake, Kate and Sawyer by the “others”. It ended well – season 3 should have wrapped up the show; there was so much story line potential.

season 3 however has been a complete and utter let-down. The producers of LOST, no doubt happy with the prospect of lining their pockets ad-infinitum have put together the most asinine drivel. ‘The others’ live on another island close by and regularly hold book club. Sawyer and Kate are forced to live in rusty abandoned bear cages (except for when Kate wants to climb out for a little Sawyer nookie) and they presumably live on bear treats (yet do not end up looking like bedraggled survivor contestants) – why anyone would have built bear cages on this other island in the middle of no-where is both unanswered and dumb – perhaps they were for the tropical polar bears (right ….). The only character I ended up liking – Mr. Eko – got killed by a big black finger of billowy smoke and every question is now only answered by more questions. The producers feel that if they pose enough questions and kill off a couple of characters every season you’ll remain interested.

Wrong guys – your show has become deadly boring and season 3 is an utter disappointment.

LOST and the decline of Western civilization

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times recently wrote:

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural. A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

By itself, “Lost” may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside “Heroes,” as well as “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Raines,” [let's not forget Supernatural or the X Files] a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

“Lost,” on ABC tonight, is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning. As the third season resumes after a three-month hiatus, nothing about the fate of the plane wreck survivors marooned on a paranormal island (or is it an archipelago?) makes much sense. But the real mystery of “Lost” is not the Dharma Initiative, the Others or why some characters are named after British philosophers (John Locke, Edmund Burke). It’s whether the writers actually have a cohesive story line that ties together all the unexplained subplots.

I am afraid I have to agree with her.

GTD with Thunderbird

I jumped on the GTD bandwagon a few months ago and have found it an invaluable tool in managing my day to day activities. I carry around a moleskin diary which contains most of my daily task processing, it has an inbox, next action, projects and someday section all nicely arranged and tabbed. I have hacked the purist GTD system a little and included relationships and dependencies for my tasks which allow the capture of a cascade of tasks that need to happen in a certain order almost like a mini gant chart.

For my electronic processing I use thunderbird (version 2+). I gave Outlook 2007 a go but it was really too unwieldy for me. Outlook wants me to do things its way, send mails the way it likes with no support for CSS layout anymore since the changing of the rendering engine from internet explorer to word. You also cannot send .exe files or any other suspicious file types which, though understandable, is a little annoying considering I am often emailing software and updates to colleagues. The cataloguing in Outlook 2007 is an improvement over 2003 but is still quite 2-dimensional and Thunderbird leaves it with grit in its mouth since version 2.

So here is a little look at my thunderbird:

I use a wonderful thunderbird plugin called GMailUI which gives me all my favourite Gmail hotkeys including the ‘y’ key for archiving (see the archive folder).

The folders under inbox are all search folders and are blisteringly fast. The search folders can be programmed to look in various physical locations and obey a very nice selection of rules. Once a task is tagged complete for example, it falls out of the action view and into the complete view. I also like to have 3 priority categories for my action tag which allows me to sift through actions in order of precedence.

Combined with my moleskin, thunderbird has eliminated all the stress that comes with managing hundreds of todos.