After calming my craving, I hit the road off to centurion, for a short meeting with Marius from Balance Your Debt.

I then began my way towards the head office of the Banking Association of South Africa(BASA), where we were to have a meeting with some of the major banks and credit providers in the country. We had quite a productive session and made quite a few decisions, relating to standardisation within the Debt Review sector.

After the meeting with BASA, we decided to have a short Credit Technology Association(CTA) meeting.

Then for the long drive home in some serious traffic. You never truly understand, what is meant by peak traffic until you sit in it yourself.

I honestly believe that Gauteng people have been gifted with a surprisingly large amount of patience, if they didn’t have it, I am sure there would be far more reports of road rage. The traffic seriously moves at snails pace and a distance that would take you ten minutes to cover during the middle of the day, easily takes up to an hour to cover in peak traffic.

I hope that the Gautrain has the positive impact that it was intended to have as this could not only reduce traffic and frustration, but also reduce the amount of unnecessary fuel consumption during peak hours.

After landing at OR Tambo, I headed to where I stay when I’m in Midrand and was surprised to find Pieter Cloete from inikak.co.za at the house.

We had a great discussion about social media and the web in general. It is awesome to be able to talk someone who is as excited about technology and social media as I am.

Pieter is an iPhone guy and puts his one to good use in keeping his various social media profiles up to date and keeping track of all things digital.

If you are looking for a good laugh and some South African humour, check out inikak.co.za.

The dentist was pretty shocked when he saw what had happened and told me that I might lose the tooth, or need to go through some expensive implants if he could not save it.

He needed to cut some of my gum away to be able to see what was going on lower down and to determine if he would be able to put a crown on. Thankfully, he was able to do a great job and saved the tooth and put on a temporary crown in the interim after doing some core strengthening work to stabilise the foundation of the tooth.

I must admit at one point it was quite nerve wrecking experiencing what I can only describe as having the remains of my tooth broken and scratched out using surgical tools, although I am not totally sure what I was experiencing at the time as I didn’t want to ask.

I’ll need to go back in a few weeks time, to get the official crown done, but luckily it can all be sorted out while I am in the chair. It is good to know that the medical practitioners whose hands you put your health in are knowledgeable and organised to do the things that need to be done to keep you going.

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.

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.