Amelia didn’t know that I was collecting the car today, so when I fetched her from work it was a total surprise.

I had some CDs ready and immediately hit the road and drove through to Knysna.

Amelia and I decided to stop at the waterfront and had some awesome pizza, coffee and tiramisu at Caffe Mario. We then took an easy drive back to George.

For the past few years I have been using a combination of Inkscape and Gimp, but I am looking forward to the learning curve ahead of me, getting familiar with some of the awesome tools that I have heard and read so much about.

The new Studio 1558 features, 500Gb 7200RPM HDD, Core i5 CPU, 4GB 1333 Mhz DDR2 and an ATi Radeon HD 4570.

So far battery life is about three hours and the embedded 3G connection seems a lot more stable than that of the 1555.

Right now I have got my eye on the new Dell U2311H as an add on to my workspace.

I have always liked the idea of a notebook with a big external display to be used as my digital canvas and a Dell monitor seems to be the perfect fit…

Microsoft has really come to the party with a higher performance and truly worthwhile business productivity suite.

For quite some time now, I have not been using MS office at all and have been an advocate for Open Office and all things open source, but I have recently grown closer to my proprietary roots and have developed much appreciation for the work and effort that goes into bringing out products like Office 2010.

The new version of the well know business productivity suite, is simply impressive. Office 2010, loads faster, can handle more diverse file types and offers a host of functions and embedded applications, for tasks that one would previously need to perform in external programs.

I have still not managed to pull myself away from using Gmail as my mail management system and I can’t see myself moving back to Outlook anytime soon, unless Gmail and Exchange can communicate with each other directly. Gmail simply offers me the flexibility and scalability I need to manage multiple profiles and access my info instantly from multiple locations on the go.

For business use and from a corporate perspective, I think the new MS Outlook is definitely becoming a player and integrated with MS Exchange 2010, it makes for efficient management of internal work flow and cost effective email.

I am looking forward to playing around with the latest versions of Project and Visio as planning and monitoring seems to take up most of my time these days.

All in all, the new Office 2010, is most definitely worth the spend.

Considering our meeting ended early and we were catching a lift to the airport, we decided to go to the airport early, that way ensuring we won’t get stuck in traffic.

We had some fish and chips and the Keg and Aviator which was pretty good. Herman also spotted Sekoati Tsubane (Kabelo Padi) from 7de Laan. We then headed down to the security check point which was busy as hell. The staff were also hasty as could be and practically threw us through the checkpoint.

After gathering my things together and getting comfortable again, I noticed I had dropped my ticket, fortunately for me it was on the floor underneath the check point.

The wait had only just begun and we heard our plane was going to be about 40min late. I looked for a decent coffee shop but only found the wimpy. Herman, who sits through hours of 7de Laan also spotted Hennie Jacobs(Diederik Greyling) and Christo Davids(Errol Pieterse) who ended up sitting right behind us on our flight to George. He also spotted Nico Panagio (George Kyriakis) who is now presenting on Top Billing. It seems that OR Tambo is the place to be if you want to spot SA Celebs. Now craving a good cuppa, little did I know that I would find I Vida E Cafe on the way to the plane, now why weren’t they placed closer to each other… Well at least I know for next time.

The trip into George felt faster than the trip to Johannesburg, but got really noisy on descent, with a few children screaming, probably due to the change in cabin pressure on their ears.

We landed just around 20:00 after getting to the airport well before 15:00, we truly spent most of our trip at the airport.

What an awesome view, we live in a beautiful country.

The flight from George to Johannesburg was pleasant and when coming in for our landing we caught site of the new soccer stadium, it was already dark and the stadium lights were on. What an awesome sight. I am not particularly excited or enthusiastic about the soccer or sport in general but the view of the stadium from the air definitely gives one the sense of awe.

Herman, Konstant, Eugene and I had supper and Rhapsody in Pretoria, the steak and conversation were great, even though business didn’t leave the table for long.

It would be great to travel without needing to deal with business, or at least being able to bring Amelia with me.

I’m running Core 2 Duo 2.93 Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 500GB HDD – OS, 160GB – Slave, Nvidia Geforce 9800GT 256bit 1024 GDR3 and a 23 inch full HD LG display and Windows 7 64bit.

I’m looking forward to getting into all of the design work I’ve been wanting to, but never had the patience to do on any of my notebooks. Already playing around in blender a bit, I can seriously appreciate the benefits of a dedicated graphics card.

Now to start saving for atleast a 256Gb SSD to use for my OS and apps and then re-purpose the 500GB for storage. I’d also dig to add another graphics card and an additional monitor, but we’ll see, maybe the iPad launches in SA before that.

Buzz is new and will probably take a while to stabilise but already it feels as if it will be adopted very quickly and I presume that it will draw more people to the Gmail platform.

I am glad to see the integration with Google Profiles, this is going to make Profiles more relevant and content rich.

If you’re not on Gmail yet the now is the time to open an account. I recommend Gmail to all of my clients as a system to keep track of all of your various mail identities and manage your digital life. Once you’ve got a Gmail account check out all of the other services offered by Google, most of them are also available directly on your mobile phone which is great.

Welcome to Craig, Ryan, Dereck, Donald, Gerard, Nicholas and Kobus. Gregg and I look forward to working with you.

On a ownership level, MyEcommerce has now restructured and Deon Steyn now holds a 30% interest, Tienie & Gesie van der Merwe own a 10% interest, Gregg and I each own 30%. Welcome to Deon, Tienie and Gesie, we look forward to some exciting new projects.

Once everyone has settled into the new year, we will be rolling out a range of new product offerings.

Well, I did a fresh install and it was super fast. I was a bit frustrated with the fact that Dell didn’t send me a copy of the latest drivers. Windows didn’t natively support my integrated 3G, so I could not get online as fast as I would have liked to, thank goodness, Windows 7 had native support for Bluetooth and I could hook up my Sony Ericsson in a matter of minutes and downloaded the required drivers from Dell’s support site.

I have found Windows 7 to be an absolute pleasure to work with and had all of my programs installed and running in less than a day. I find the performance to be substantially better than that of Vista and it requires far less resources. Will make sure that I have got all the required drivers before I do a fresh install again.

If you have got the option to upgrade or you’re buying a new PC, if you’re not getting a Mac or going with Linux or Solaris, get yourself Windows 7 and be sure you’ll be happier than you were with XP or Vista.