A dripping tap

A wise man once wrote that a nagging wife and the constant dripping of water are alike. I thank the Lord every day that I don't have the former, however upon taking ownership of our new house five days ago I discovered we have the latter in the form of a dripping tap in the bathroom.

Since I was neither equipped nor ready to replace the washer, I put the plug in the bath and left it. This temporary damming was to figure out how much water was being wasted, and to catch it for watering the garden later. After roughly 5 days of dripping the bath was full!

The almost full bath

A quick web search revealed that a standard bathtub holds approximately 200 litres of water. A simple sum reveals that the previous owner was wasting about 1200 litres of water a month and that just in the master bathroom.

Over the few days we have had the house we have found 3 more leaking taps. Amazingly (or perhaps worryingly) two of the taps have algae growing in the micro river course created by the dripping water. It would seem that the previous owner was DIY averse. When we texted her to find out where the water meter and shutoff valve were I got the impression that she had never turned off the water in the 10 years she lived in the house. I wonder for how many years these taps have been dripping?

According to the Rand Water website, demand for water in South Africa will outstrip supply in 2025. They are promoting various water saving initiatives to try stretch the water the country does have. These initiatives however are unlikely to be enough and eventually South Africa will have to increase supply (perhaps by building more dams or finding alternative sources, e.g. desalination).

In the 80's two economists postulated that increased energy efficiency would lead to an increase in demand for energy. This paradoxical idea is called the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. The explanation for the increased use is as follows (from wikipedia): "Increased energy efficiency can increase energy consumption by three means. Firstly, increased energy efficiency makes the use of energy relatively cheaper, thus encouraging increased use. Secondly, increased energy efficiency leads to increased economic growth, which pulls up energy use in the whole economy. Thirdly, increased efficiency in any one bottleneck resource multiplies the use of all the companion technologies, products and services that were being restrained by it."

Whether this can be directly applied to the South African water situation can be debated, however I think what's clear is that individuals and companies have an obligation to save water where we can while also lobbying local government to increase the supply.

I will be fixing the dripping taps at my new house and installing a tank to collect rain water for watering the garden. What are you doing to save water?

526, 525, 524......

It's clear from the title of this post that I am counting down to something. If I were counting days, 526 would be a lot - more than a year. I am in fact counting down the number of views required for me to reach 100,000 views of my photos on my Flickr photostream.

Flickr is a photo and video sharing site and online community owned by Yahoo. It was started in 2004 by Ludicorp and bought by Yahoo in 2005. In 2011 the site had 51 Million users, and as I write this, Flickr is approaching it's 7 billionth upload. I joined Flickr in May 2008 and currently have 1,178 items on my Flickr photostream.

The site has an interestingness algorithm which ranks one's photos based on a variety of factors - number of views, comments and fav's as well as a range of hidden attributes. Each day the top 500 interesting photos or videos make the Explore pages.

So, you may ask, how long will it take me to accrue the 526 views? On an average day I receive about 70 views. The views often come from internal flickr users or external searchers.

Ironically my most viewed photo is one I took using my cellphone! I took the photo while on a business trip in Uganda. This picture is of my lunch - a whole deep fried Tilapia! This image is viewed on average 10 times a week. Digging a bit deeper into the search term history it seems that most people are looking for a recipe. To help these people out a posted a recipe onto one of my older (now pretty much defunct) blogs. The recipe blog post is also quite popular - over 600 views in 2 years.



Titles can all be deceiving to search engines. The image below must shock some interior design people searching for pictures of purple wallpaper! This Image is viewed on average 8 times per week. The spider is a Flower Crab Spider (Thomisus citrinellus) on a purple daisy.



My most interesting photo according to the Flickr Interestingness Algorithm is also one of my favourite photos I have ever taken. I photographed the bee below in flight using a tripod mounted Canon 50D, with a Canon 100mm macro lens. Focus was achieved manually and photos were shot using a remote switch. I was focussing with my right hand and shooting with my left. The bees were feeding on an aloe. I shot about 700 exposures and ended up with 15 usable shots (i.e. those with good focus, exposure and composition). This photo made it to 12th position on Flickr Explore. Overall the photoshoot has been my most profitable - the photo below is available as a postcard from spressit.com and another from the series won a competition in the South African "Good Taste" Magazine.



Speaking of Flickr Explore. I have 1 photo that has made it to the front page of Explore on the Flickr site. I shot the picture of a Speke's Weaver male is full breeding colours trying to woo a mate at the Nakuru National Park. I was visiting the park with my parents and we had just enjoyed lunch at the Sarova Lion Hill Hotel. For this photo I was using a Canon 50D with a Canon EF 100-400mm lens. The lighting for the shot was near perfect, and a wide aperture created a great soft background.




I could keep going and show you more of my favourite photos and tell you their back stories, although this post is probably already on the long side. If however you would like to see more of my work and also help me to get to 100,000 views why don't you check out some of my photos. Follow the links below to see a variety of my photo collections:

Photos that have made Flickr Explore

White & Yellow Daisy

Masai Mara Safari

Kenya Birds

Starting again!

Ever heard of the 10,000 hour rule? The theory is that the thing that sets an expert apart from a novice is not necessarily innate talent, but rather 10,000 hours of practice. That’s quite a long time. If you work 8 hours a day, five days a week for a year (no vacation or public holidays), you accrue just over 2000 hours a year. 

In an earlier post titled "Habit forming" I discussed the process of habit forming. In this post I described a study that shows a new habit can take over 250 days to become cemented as a habit. I suppose a habit practiced for for over 10,000 hours would then be considered an expert skill?!

I used to take photos every day of my life. I usually tried to spend at least an hour a day with my eye glued to the view finder, or more often studying the screen on the back of my trusty Canon 50D. If you’d like to see what I was photographing take a look at my flickr photostream. There are recurring themes - flowers, spiders and birds feature a lot, interspersed with wildlife and an occasional landscape. 

By a rough calculation, I think I’m between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way to becoming a photography expert. I think some of my work is good. I have entered and won a few local photography competitions and some of my photos are used by a commercial postcard company (spressit.com).

When I left Kenya, my daily photography stopped. I guess it was a combination of factors - change in environment, having the photographic gear scattered between boxes, a different rhythm and pace to my life back in South Africa. Mostly I think it was a lack of motivation and inspiration. In Kenya I was surrounded by wild Africa -  birds, insects, spiders, cool trees and landscapes. In Johannesburg I was confronted by a different kind of jungle - a concrete one!

Today I am starting again, on the photography that is! The picture below was the result of a 15 min kick-start ad hoc photography session. Just before I left Kenya I upgraded to a Canon 7D. I used this camera with my Lensbaby Composer and shot a total of 24 shots. I have called the abstract image “Tools, Tones and Textures”.

I realize that while Johannesburg is not exactly wild, there are still loads of places and spaces to photograph. I have resolved to start taking more photos again (I’m so close to being an expert after all ;-). I have also resolved, bearing in mind the 10,000 hour rule, not to be so hard on myself in my new job where certain functions and processes seem so hard - I am after all only a novice where these are concerned, and like anything in life - practice WILL make perfect!

Some of my favourite things

Bass Pickup Abstract, a photo by jdkvirus on Flickr.

It is often said that you don't know what you have until it's gone. Gone has a certain finality to it. Dictionary.com defines it as departed, left, ruined, past or dead.

This photo is one of my favourite photos of one of my favourite possessions - my bass guitar. I took this photo in December of 2009 about a week before Christmas. I was on vacation at home and needed a red photo for an online photo competition.

Right now my bass guitar is gone. Departed, but hopefully neither ruined, nor dead! The last time I saw it was at the end of September 2011 when it was packed by the removal company. It has been in their safe keeping since then. Five months is a very long time to not have your stuff, but I suppose it's better than them all truly being gone!

Thinking about all my things, I can honestly say that right now the list of my "favourite things" is quite short. There are probably several reasons why this may be the case :-

1. I have forgotten all the cool things I have!
2. Many of my really favourite things came back with me on the plane.
3. I've realized that the important things in life aren't things.

I'd like to think that it's all reason 3, but I think in reality it's a combination of all three.

I hope the lesson I take into the soon approaching future when I will have all my stuff back is that I should share my favourite things more with the favourite people in my life!

Catching up!

At least 8 months have passed since I lasted posted on this blog! It's pretty much dead in the water, it's scant readership absorbed in other people's musings and ramblings no doubt. I just spent the last hour or so reading the 16 posts that make up the blog as it currently stands. In some respects in feels like I am reading someone else's work, but I guess that's what happens when almost a year passes between stopping writing and starting again?

I've titled this post catching up as it feels like I owe it to the blog (and it's readers present or future) to fill in the gap between 9 May 2011 and today 1 March 2012. To say a lot has happened is probably an understatement, it feels like everything has changed!

I suppose it's best to start at the beginning and to take it from there. It started with a business trip to South Africa. I used the opportunity to visit a doctor to check-out a lower back injury that was causing unbearable pain in my lower right leg. An MRI revealed that I had a ruptured disc and a 2nd one close to rupture. My doctor recommended a conservative approach - bed rest with physiotherapy. What should have been a 3 day hospital stay eventually turned into a 2 week stay! First there were blood pressure issues, then some adverse drug reactions and also a persistent chest pain that was eventually diagnosed as a pulmonary embolism.

In the end my 1 week business trip turned into a 2 month trip. I eventually made it back to Kenya at the end of July. I was back, but not to stay. I was being repatriated to South Africa. In the end we left Kenya at the end of September a few days before October 2011.

Getting back into life in South Africa has been a 5 month adjustment that doesn't feel like it's over yet. Not only have I changed countries, I have changed jobs, cities and houses. It also feels like I have changed direction!

I can probably expand each of the changes into a blog post or two and maybe I will in future, but I feel like the blog is "caught up" and that hopefully I can move forward again from here.