Cry the beloved country
Watch the following videos then tell me that South Africa is a safe country with a great future.
The funniest thing are the people that say that this behaviour is unafrican. heh, as opposed to what??
You don’t get more barbaric than this, this is a repeat of the genocide that has taken millions of lives throughout africa in the past few decades.
Every despot and dictator that wants be a leader has had nothing but this kind of bloodshed on their hands.
It disgusts me no end.
To make matters worse, when a perp gets arrested for violence, he blames apartheid because the arresting officers are white.
WARNING!
User discretion is advised!
But hey, dont this this worry you when you come to visit our fair land in 2010 for the world cup!
how not to play a home poker game
1. Everybody decides to ruin a perfectly good evening of visiting, drinking, Nintendo playing, and lounging about by suggesting a game of Texas Holdem.
2. At least three people exclaim at the speed of light that they brought their poker sets with.
3. Spend 15 minutes in a conference to explain that Texas holdem and holdem are indeed the same game. Confuse everyone by mentioning that there are other holdem games like omaha. Watch everyone insist that there is only 1 holdem and thats texas holdem and thats final.
4. Even though everyone claims to know how to play and plays often, and nevermind that the entire lot makes decent money, suggest we play for $5 each so that it stays ‘friendly’.
5. At least two onlookers need to be dazzled and amazed that some people have their own chip sets. They should say something like, “Damn, you must do this for a living or something.”
6. All players spend ten minutes admiring the 300-piece-Walmart-set.
7. Wait 5 minutes so everyone can go get their sunglasses out of their cars then listen to those without sunglasses argue that those with sunglasses have an unfair advantage and that no one should be allowed to play with sunglasses.
8. Take 20 to 30 minutes to debate how to divide up the chips. Take another 15 minutes to assign values to them. Don’t be afraid to argue 5, 10, and 25 vs. 50, 100, and 250. At least 3 people should point out that the latter is too many chips.
9. Set the blind structure. My personal favorite is to start blinds at 10 and 20 after initially including chips worth 5.
10. Get the dealer button out and everyone looks at you funny when you ask why we need the dealer button when we are all going to take our turns dealing. Everyone tells you its so that no one forgets who was just the dealer. Everyone looks at you even funnier when you says its probably the guy with the deck of cards in his hand.
11. Argue for a further 10 minutes that the big blind is after the small blind to the left of the dealer and not to the right as opposed to what the in house guru says.
12. Its finally time to start so 2 should just now leave to go to the bathroom and 3 others should have already left the table to go chat and do other things. Call a ten minute break and then we start!
13. Get everyone back to the table. Just before dealing someone should insist that some random guy walking by also join the game. When random guy says he doesn’t want to play and also DOESN’T KNOW HOW and HAS NEVER PLAYED BEFORE and HATES CARDS just ignore that and keep insisting.
13. Everyone looks at you funny when you mentions there are no chips left over so we would have to redo chip structure.
14. The two remaining guys who brought chips should volunteer to get their chips at the speed of light.
15. Make room for the new player and find him a chair.
16. Watch 4 players get up to go get more beer.
17. Yell at the 4 players to get back to the table but bring a pen and paper so we can write out the hand rankings for the new guy.
18. All nine other players start hollering out random advice to the new guy. Be sure to use plenty of jargon so he has no clue what anyone is saying.
19. Argue for 5 minutes about drawing for seats.
20. take 10 minutes to take out ace through 9 and hang your head in shame when the dude doing it makes sure its all the same suite. Deal out 1 card per player face up.
21. watch people get agitated when their card is dealt face up because their card is showing and take another 5 minutes to explain that we haven’t started yet, just drawing for seats.
20. Argue for 5 minutes about who deals first.
21. Watch everyone get confused when you suggest that whoever drew the ace should deal, the 2 will be small blind and 3 will be big blind.
22. Agree finally that dealing out 1 card to each player and having highest card deal first is good idea.
23. Deal out the cards face down.
24. Convince the five players who don’t want to show their card to anyone else that its OK, we STILL haven’t started – this is just to see who the dealer is.
25. Take another 5 minutes to explain that what we did earlier was draw for seats, and this is different.
26. Explain to the new guy that this is not the actual game after new guy says that on TV they get 2 cards.
27. Obv new guy is first dealer. Cringe as you realize your 5-year-old shuffles better. Coach him to deal 2 cards to each player – one at a time. Cringe again as you can see every card he deals as he holds the deck straight up and down.
28. Every player must now limp every single hand for the duration of the night.
29. No player may ever post his blind – EVER! Everyone only posts their blinds after you reminds them. You must remind them EVERY HAND.
30. The dealer (everyone not just the new guy) should deal out the flop turn AND river before the action is done every other hand.
31. explain that this is not the way it is done because the reason for burning cards is to discard potentially marked cards and dealing the entire game out defeats that purpose, someone then pipes up “but no one had a chance to mark the cards yet”
32. The BB must never be given the option to check or raise. The very millisecond that the SB’s call hits the table you must deal out the flop. Everyone must Look at you funny when you point out that the BB had the option to raise.
33. After every player limps someone must comment that they think that player is bluffing. This rule applies to every round of betting and you don’t even have to be in the hand to say it.
34. At least one player must make a big overbet out of turn EVERY SINGLE HAND. Everyone looks at you funny when you make them take it back and wait their turn. When it gets to their turn, they defiantly put the big bet back out and say something like, “See, I just made the same damn bet anyway!”
35. Never push any chips into the middle after a round of betting. Leave them right in front of you and stack your future bets and calls on top of your old ones. Also acceptable here is just throwing them towards the middle so they mix with the other chips already in the middle. Everyone looks at you funny when you make them say how much they just bet.
36. The new guy should say this every single time it gets to him: “So how many do I have to put in now?” The table should now bombard him with advice on any and every possible holding he might have. After about five minutes of this he should repeat his question. At this point he should call if its a minbet (which it is about 95% of the time) and fold if its anything bigger. His cards are completely independent of this btw.
37. Have a big argument about whether a flush beats a straight or not after you push all-in on the river after you flopped the nut flush against someone’s straight.
The guy with the straight should quote the hundreds of times he has watched poker on TV and he KNOWS a straight beats a flush.
38. Someone new walks by – have a 20 minute discussion as to why he can’t just buy in and play too.
39. One player must start making huge overbets on 5 or 6 consecutive hands. This player should now start to get really arrogant and some of his friends should comment about how good he is because he won the last $5 drunken challenge.
40. Arrogant overbettor should now start to explain that he’s making the bets because a good player knows to bet out if everyone is checking to him. Only once in a great great while will there be anyone smart enough to lay a trap – it just doesn’t happen in these home games.
41. Everyone looks at you funny when you comment about the trap you just pulled off 3 minutes ago with the flopped nut flush. They STILL didn’t see it.
42. Vomit in your mouth when your aces get cracked. Twice. By king-rag off and 28 suited. Smile politely when donkey says “They were suited, I had you crushed.”
43. Even though the table has played SOOOOOOOOOOO passive all night – when you see 6 limpers and look down at KK and proceed to raise 12X BB – the following action should go call, call, call, fold, reraise all-in, fold, call all-in, fold, call, call. The douchebag overbettor wins with KT offsuit. Other hands are a pair of fours, a couple of ace-rags.
44. A bunch of the players should now comment how good douchebag overbettor is as it is quite evident that no one ever beats him. Comment that he must surely play a lot and probably plays a lot online also. Make no connection whatsoever to the fact that you were the only one who knew the damn rules and procedures.
45. Try explain that a pair of 7′s beating AK is not a bad beat.
46. Try explain that a flush on a paired board is NOT the nuts.
47. Arrogant overbettor should go on to win the game getting heads up with the new guy. New guy loses after limping and folding every single hand down to his last chip. Should be a huge roar when it ends.
48. People who didn’t play or watch should ask who won. Upon hearing this they should concur he won because he is so good – so good that he even has his own chips.
49. Agree with everyone when they say that its all luck anyway.
50. Make a comment about work in the morning and leave to go home and pull out your hair.
Childcare for dummies
Childcare for dummies
Someone emailed this to me, it had me in tears, I may as well share.
No idea where it came from so I can’t even credit to to anyone, nonetheless, whoever you are, thank you
SEO in a nutshell
My apologies for not blogging recently.
Working for a giant corp like Johncom can be a burden on one’s blogging/social life.
Apart from being involved in another massive project, recovering from bronchitis and attending courses my life hasn’thad much thrown at me that I can blog about.
However, Bruce Clay ( www.bruceclay.com )was in the country recently and I was fortunate to attend one of his courses in Sandton 3 weeks ago.
Having said that, a week ago a friend of mine asked me how he could get started with SEO.
The reply I gave him was pretty much worthy of being added to this blog, and I’ll share it with everyone.
Here goes!
www.seochat.com
www.searchenginewatch.com
www.webmasterworld.com
www.searchengines.com
great resources
as a starting point… there isnt really a starting point because there are just so many things to take into consideration but here are the best tips I can give you.
My top 25 or so tips
1 .Make sure you have a site map
2. Make sure your code and css are valid (xhtml transitional or nothing)
3. Make sure your site is hosted on a fast server (surprisingly, hardware & bandwidth plays a huge role in ranking, if your site is slow and the hosting server is taking strain, the search engine spiders will report back to the search engines that your site is sow to respond and will will give your site negative rankings)
4. Keep your pages small in size, use small , optimized images
5. Dont try any smart “black hat” techniques like doorway pages
6. Make sure all your links are valid
7. Keep incoming links high and outgoing links low
8. get links from sites that are associated with your site , a link from a baby food comany’s site wont help your car website
9. make sure ALL pages are linked to each other through a daisy chain effort, 1 links to 2 , 2 links to 3 and so on.
10. stay away from using flash or javascript for menu navigation, flash and javascript are difficult for spiders to understand. instead use text links. Plain old html is still king.
11. create “clusters” of pages that all link to your central home page with relevant information on each page with emphasis on 1 particular keyword or phrase. for instance. you have a site thats dedicated to sweets. have your main home page optimized for a theme : “sweets”, you need to mention the word sweet and synonyms a few times.
Then create sub pages, LINKED TO from your home page . each sub page should then be optimized for “specific” keywords relating to your central theme. Hard boiled sweets, toffee sweets, choclates, makes of choclates, brands etc
the more specific you get the better for your ranking.
this means creating literally DOZENS of pages.
12. your keywords need to appear in the meta tags for both description and keywords as well as in the page title and a h1 header. a lot of people neglect to add a h1 because it is big. Use css to resize it smaller, have at least 1 h2 and 1 h3 . They need to be nested correctly
h3 under h2 under h1
13. do a search for the keyword thats relevant to you, take the top 5 sites and check each site’s code and copy it as best you can.
14. you cant get marked as a spammer if you submit your sites as often as you like to search engines. This is a common myth. If that was the case, your competition would spam the search engines daily with your sites address.
15. DO NOT USE AJAX
on pages that you want to submit
16. submit individual pages as well as your home page to search engines.
17. friendly urls !!! make sure you get this :
http://www.mysite.com/index.aspx?article_i…id=5?submit=yes
into this :
http://www.mysite.com/sports/babyjake_wins_again.html
18. avoid using more than 2 dashes in domain names and urls
ie www.my-totally-freekin-hot-site-rocks.com is a huge no no
19. Avoid using subdomains. http://sweets.mysite.com <– rather not.
instead use directories
www.mysite.com/sweets <– much better
20. spend 2 hours a day reading the sites mentioned above.
21 You need a blog associated with your site. ( www.mysite.com/blog )
You need to link from the blog back to your main site and you need to update the blog at least once a day, Content is King.
This will help the search engines spider your site more often.
22.you also need a video on youtube with links back to your site and links from your site back to the video.
you also need a map and phone numbers
If you see Google’s new SERPS when searching for anything imaginable, you’ll see sites with assocaited videos are starting to come up in the rankings
for instance do a google for “Shakira” 4th result is a video
23. You also need an image gallery, same reason as above.
24. dont bother trying to optimize for yahoo, ask msn or any other Search engine, concentrate on Google alone and the rest will follow, although DO submit your site to as many other search engines as possible.
25. Get listed on the Yahoo directory (not the search engine) as well as on DMOZ.org
it’ll take time but they count as some seriously important links.
26. dont call your home page “home” in your menu and use the anchor tag “home page” or “home”
if you have to, use a small image of a house and change the anchor text and URL to “sweet fantasy” or something thats relevant. linking to home page is not gonna help you.
and avoid using “click here” with a hyperlink on it , instead use something meaningful like “more information on SWEETS”
because why ?
because the search term “click here” JUST happens to point to adobe’s website.
any idea why ?
because 8 gazzilion people all pointed their sites to adobe’s web site with the following text
“click here to download adobe acrobat reader”
27. Make sure your hosting server is not in a “bad” neighborhood. Effectively, a bad neighborhood is one where associated sites that are hosted on the same ip range are link farms/ spam sites.
there are plenty more small tips and tricks but I’m tired and my head hurts.
Good Luck!
oh yeah, make use of rel=”no follow” on outgoing links.
another thing with regard to rel = “nofollow”
( you write a url like such <a href=”http://www.link.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a> )
if you are creating “clusters” of pages
lets say you have 4 sections which are clusters around a central theme of sweets, you need to create a “pyramid” of pages working down, linking down
A = chocolates
B = boiled sweets
C = toffees
A1 = dark chocolates
A2 = belgium choclate
etc
B1 = flavoured boiled sweets
B2 = plain boiled sweets
etc
you get the idea?
when linking to a senior page, like the top page of a category from anywhere dont use rel = no follow
say for instance you are linking from B2 to A, or A1 to A or B3 to B or C4 to A then dont use rel = nofollow
but if linking from A2 to B1 then DO use rel = nofollow
you wanna preserve the pagerank within a cluster and only reserve it for outgoing links to top hirearchial pages.
And that my friends, is it.
Please let me know if this was useful to you.
Getting some Google love – UPDATED
One of the main reasons why I decided to start (yet another) blog was to document my SEO travels and share some of the information which I have learnt as a Search enthusiast.
I do need to point out though that this blog is not a vanilla version of WordPress and has been tweaked up to the max with a number of SEO plugins and a few tricks that I have learnt about WordPress and SEO. Not to mention that I bugged Colin to toss out the original theme and use a totally css and xhtml optimized theme that supports widgets so that I could work my magic.
2 Weeks after this blog was launched I am definitely feeling the Google Love.
So far 28 pages 36 pages have been indexed.
The following terms and keywords are showing up highly in rankings even though this blog should be in the sandbox.
They might dissapear though if I get sandboxed but in the mean time the following terms are doing me justice.
googlebot web2
wordpress vs habari
paul de sousa
27 dinner (less than a day old, I’m loving it)
googlebot frequency
and a few other arb ones which are just plain weird like
accidents on 27 may 2007
In essence this blog is getting crawled as though it were a PageRank 9 which for me and the company, is a great thing.
Ray asked me this morning if I would SEO up his blog to get the same love and I’ll have to either con him into buying me lunch or getting my boss to let me do SEO on the media blogs as a fixed project as well (WHICH IS WHAT I WANT TO BE DOING PEOPLE, IT’S WHAT I AM GOOD AT – HELLO!!)
Reinvigorate is showing me a few more keywords and terms that seem to be ranking
Unknown Soldier Tome
highest googlebot visits – Comes up 1st on Google
and
web2.0 (helluva sort after keyword) comes up in the Top10 in South Africa – I’m nearly done dominating the local scene, next stop : The World! 