Ok, she’s still on the Cabinet, but let us take this moment to say: goodbye from the Health Ministry you awful, stupid, miserable idiot.

Off the The Hague with you. And please return the taxpayer’s liver by midnight on 30 September 2008 or we will send someone to come and take it back.

In what I believe to be a major step forward, Kgalema Motlanthe has been named President of South Africa until April elections next year.

 

I honestly believe this is a great thing, and a major improvement over the stalemate we’ve been living with for the last years. The instability during the transition will be worth it.

Let me be clear: I hate sport spectatorship. It's stupid. Play the sport or go read a book, but don't sit in front of the TV and shout enthusiastically while someone ELSE does all the hard work.

 

Anyway, that's familiar ground.

 

What I have noticed out of the corner of my eye is the sudden rush of enthusiasm for our winning of medals at the "special olympics". "South Africa Redeemed" is the message.

 

Um. No. If we failed (as I understand we did) to win any medals at the REAL Olympics because we are a nation of lazy, second-rate athletes whose performance in Olympic-rated sports ranks somewhere alongside Uzbehkistan, can we just face the fact? Does it REALLY make anything better that people without arms and legs are beating other people without arms and legs to win medals?

 

Sorry to say this, but I really don't think other countries hold up as their most eminent swimmers the ones who have to use their ears as propulsion devices. I'm sure the performance of the disabled at the Olympics is all very heroic and fabulous, and they should get credit for winning and doing us proud. Three cheers.

 

But these are just not REAL medals. Not REALLY. And we all know it, even if everyone gasps at the fact that I'm saying it.

- It's fast (very fast), especially for Javascript intensive pages

- It's clean and friendly and uncluttered (always good)

- It's not IE

 

I still don't understand why Google didn't just put their money behind Firefox though. Or, rather, I sadly think I do know: because they are seeking control of everything. Sure it's Open Source, but they are still going to control the main branch of the code and have the distribution power to make it count. So integration with their own apps is a given and no-one is going to be able to fiddle the source code to change that, open source or not.

 

That said, it's undeniably going to grab enormous market share fairly quickly. The test is whether it provides something superior to Firefox, whose "extension" model along with a lot of enthusiastic users is going to hard (and kind of tragic) to undermine.