Online Learning and Biomimicry

Online learning is starting to become a bigger and bigger platform as time goes by. From free learning platforms such as Khan Academy, that lets you choose to practice a variety of skills, to websites dedicated to various, more specialised courses (such as the CS-101 course I took through Udacity, back when it was free), if you keep your eyes open, you can find the most incredible courses.

At the beginning of this week, I started a one month (free) course offered by an online learning platform called Canvas,  on an introduction to a topic that goes by the name of Biomimicry. This is something that I've been passively checking in on every now and then but is a concept that I really like. In a nutshell, and to use the words of the women who is the primary force behind Biomimicry, Janine Benyus, 

The idea, in the broadest sense, is that that one observes how nature solves a particular problem and then uses the insight gained by this and applies it to the problem that you're trying to solve. The key here, is that you emulate a solution on three different levels - on natures form, on natures process and finally, on natures ecosystem. 

I'm still in the early stages of the course, but I'm really looking forward to learning more about this topic and I thought that, since it's only the first week, if anyone who reads this blog was interested in joining me, you can click on the link here and also enroll for free!

There are so many different online learning platforms, here are a list of ones that I'm familiar with (some of them I've tried out, some of them I've heard good things about), just in case you'd like to check out the world of online learning for yourself!

Udacity
Codecademy
Excel With Business
Khan Academy
Canvas
Coursera
edX
Crash Course

Cape Town At Dusk and Night

Just before the fires that ravaged the Southern Peninsula in Cape Town, my mum, Frosty and I had a dinner at the Brass Bell and I used the opportunity to play around with taking photos at dusk and at night (on the drive home). 

I experimented with a range of exposures, ISOs and apertures - each picture has more detail on the settings I used. As always, I used my Nikon D3100 while taking these pictures. 

Here's a quick reminder of what these 3 different settings mean. Using a combined knowledge of these settings will hopefully help you to improve your photography (it's certainly helped me!):

Exposure (sometimes called Shutter Speed) is how long your shutter is open for. The longer your shutter is open, the more light is let in for a picture.

ISO: This is effectively your sensitivity to light. The higher your ISO, the more sensitive your light sensor will be to light. Also remember that the higher your ISO, the more "grainy" your photograph is likely to be.

Aperture: this is how "open" your lens is to light and it also affects your depth of field. Imagine your eye, where your pupil expands or contracts to let in more or less light. Your aperture is similar to this. A large aperture (f/1.4) means your aperture hole is open wide and things close to you will be in focus while things far away won'te be in focus. A small aperture (f/22) means that your aperture hole is very small and things close and far will be in focus. This post, over at Photography Life, explain it in more detail.

After a bit of editing in GIMP, here is the finished product of these pics - enjoy!

Exposure: 1/30s
ISO: 400
Aperture: F/7.1

Exposure: 20s
ISO: 800
Aperture: F/5.6

Exposure: 6s
ISO: 800
Aperture: F/5.6

Exposure: 6s
ISO: 800
Aperture: F/5.6

Exposure: 13s
ISO: 800
Aperture: F/20

Exposure: 20s
ISO: 3200
Aperture: F/11

Exposure: 10s
ISO: 3200
Aperture: F/11

Exposure: 5s
ISO: 1600
Aperture: F/11

Exposure: 5s
ISO: 1600
Aperture: F/11

How to Rename Picture Files in Bulk Version 1

Development work over the weekend while I was checking that my program worked!

Over the weekend I told you that I had been working on a little project that I was almost ready to share with you and today I'm excited to announce that version 1.0 is finally ready! Now I need your help...

As you should by now know, I take a lot of photos. And I like having photos for a specific event labelled by name. So if I take 500 photos at my birthday party and I want to label them something along the lines of "Caths Birthday 1" all the way through to "Caths Birthday 500". I also want them to be sorted from lest recent photo at number 1 to most recent photo at number 500 (so that I can start looking through my pictures at number 1 and they follow the sequence of photos as they happened). It's also better for blogging to upload more descriptive photos than DSC_0010.jpg. 

I know some photo processing programs do this for you, but I wanted a way to do this by means of a small program dedicated to this. And so I decided to create a program to do this. I've called it "Bulk File Renamer", but if anyone has any better suggestions, please comment below!

I've decided that I want to give you access to this and so I've put this on a public google doc. If you would like to download this FREE program - please click on this link and download the folder named "Bulk File Renamer.zip".

To get started, follow my instructions below:

1. Download the zip file called "Bulk File Renamer.zip" if you haven't done this already.

2. Go to the downloaded zip file "Bulk File Renamer.zip" and right click on it. Select the option to Extract All and when the window pops up asking where you want to extract the files to, specify that you want to extract them to "C:\Program Files". You can also specify "C:\Program Files (x86)" if there is no Program Files folder.

3. Open the Bulk File Renamer folder that is now located in the Program Files folder and copy the file labelled "Bulk_Renamer_App - Shortcut" and paste it to your desktop.

4. Double click on the Bulk_Renamer_App - Shortcut and a screen like the one below should pop up. 

5.1 If you want to rename all pictures in your a particular folder, click the blue "Choose Folder" button and navigate to the folder of pictures you want to rename, when that folder is highlighted, click on OK. The blue button should now say "Folder: <your folder>" where <your folder> is the name of your folder.

After clicking on the blue "Choose Folder" Button
I navigated to my "Test Photos" folder.
I clicked on it once and then clicked on OK.

See my text has changed from "Choose Folder" to
"Folder: Test Photos".

After entering in your details and clicking on the
green "Rename" button, a window pops up telling
you when the action has completed and how
many files were renamed.

5.2. If you want to rename only certain pictures in a particular folder, click the blue "Choose Files" button and navigate to the folder of pictures you want to rename, select the individual pictures (hold down the "Ctrl" key to select more than one picture at a time) and then click on OK.

After clicking on the blue "Choose Files"
button, I selected 3 files I wanted to rename.

Note the text changes from "Choose Files"
to "3 files chosen" since I chose 3 files
that I wanted to rename

After entering in your details and clicking on the
green "Rename" button, a window pops up telling
you when the action has completed and how
many files were renamed.

6 In the "Text Rename" text box, enter in the description you would like all photos to be renamed to. (eg: December Holiday 2014, or 20150201 - Trip to KZN etc).

7. After performing action 5.1 OR 5.2
In the "Starting Number" text box, enter in the number to start at. This defaults to 1 if you leave this field blank. If you decide you rather want to rename these photos start at number 257, then type 257 into the text box.

8. Click the green "Rename" button. Once the program has finished renaming all your files, a notification box will pop up informing you once the file rename has been completed. If there is already a file of a particular name existing in the folder, it will not rename this file and will leave that file with it's original name and move on to the next file.

9. When you've finished all your photo renaming tasks, click the red "Quit" button, or the cross at the top right corner of the window to close the app.

Once you've done all of this, please let me know if it worked or not by commenting below, sending me an e-mail or posting on my facebook page. I would like to improve this, but I can only do this with your feedback. If there are any features that you think would be useful or beneficial, please mention those too.

The renaming facility should work on all files, however I haven't tested the "sort by date" functionality on non-image files. I'll be working on this on my next version of this program. If you test this out and it works, or doesn't work, please comment below to let me know (include what files you tested with - word, excel, powerpoint etc).

Collaboratory Tools - Working Remotely

My job involves quite a lot of interacting with people across multiple cities in multiple continents in multiple time-zones. This is really exciting, but it also means that sometimes traditional working tools just don't make the cut. Microsoft Word is great...until you're e-mailing the same document back and forth multiple times per day with multiple edits, trying to keep track of who changed what. So here's some suggestions on useful tools, websites and cloud-based applications that I use in order to ensure project success.

• World Time Buddy - great for figuring out time-zone differences in order to schedule meetings at times that are appropriate for everyone (or almost everyone).

• Smartsheet - think of project planning tools and you will most probably think of something clunky and difficult to use. Smartsheet is the complete opposite - easy to use and the ability to share it with colleagues anywhere. The plan is stored in one place, but can be edited (or just viewed) by multiple people at one time.

• Google Docs - again, this is really useful for ensuring that there is only one copy of something, but with the ability for multiple editors (and/or viewers). The Google equivalent of MS Word and MS Excel.

• Skype - great for clarifying something with a quick skype message or skype call. And if you have a good enough internet connection, it's lovely to be able to see the person you're talking to's face.

• MS Lync - similar to Skype, which we have used for many of our meetings.

• KeePass - a password management tool. You can have one file and use it to keep track of all your passwords. Or you can have different files for different "categories" or aspects of your personal or business life, that you need to keep track of.

• Color-Hex - When specifying colours in coding, it's often difficult to know what a colour is, this is where this website comes in handy - it gives you "computer-readable" colour definitions so you can define which colours you want to use while you're programming.

Have you used any of these or do you have any other useful tools to add to this list?

Baby, When The Lights Go Out

I read an article the other day on things to do during loadshedding, which I thought was a grand idea!

For those who aren't in South Africa, you may not be aware that we are going through some pretty hectic loadshedding. Some places have it worse than others*, but recently we've been having routine power cuts to certain areas all over the country on a regular basis so that our power distributor can perform maintenance. 

We could get into a whole political argument, point fingers and play the blame game, but the point of the matter is that loadshedding is here for a while, so we may as well suck it up and find something productive to do while we have no power.

Here's my list of things to do when the lights go out.

1. Make fire your friend. Light some candles. Light a fire for a braai. In winter, light a fire in your fireplace. There's something so cozy about a fire that allows you to enjoy your home an a slightly different ambiance.
2. Read a book once you've lit up some candles. Or don't light up candles and use a reading device with a backlight, such as a kindle fire or ipad.
3. Tell a story. Make one up or tell one that everyone is familiar with. To make it even more fun, break out your torches and tell stories next to a fire.
4. In summer, it may still be light enough to enjoy some time outside. So take your drinks, sit on your lawn and enjoy watching the transition from light to dark without the distraction of electric lights.
5. Go for a drive. Just because your lights are out, it doesn't mean lights are out everywhere. So go for a drive and explore your city.
6. Do some sort of exercise. Go for a run, play that game of tennis or squash you've been meaning to play. Even just take a walk around the block.
7. Have a nap. When there's nothing else for you to do, and it's cold and dark outside, you may as well use this as an excuse to catch up on your beauty sleep.
8. Take up a hobby that you don't need electricity for. Knitting or fly-tying anyone?
9. Get a pen and paper out and write or draw. It can be fantasy or true life, abstract or life-like. There's something calming about getting words or pictures on to a piece of paper with pen and ink.
10. Just sit and chat. Use loadshedding as an excuse to chill out with your friends or family and catch up on life, dreams, things to get excited about or your next holiday.
11. Break out the old musical instrument you haven't played in years and make some music. You can go with the old classics, or the more contemporary pieces, but either way, jamming with some people is a great way to spend an evening. And if you can't play anything, why not use it as an opportunity to learn!
12. Take a blanket and go stargazing. When was the last time you took a good long look at the skies and tried your best to find that elusive shooting star?

So, that's my list - what are your suggestions for activities to do when you've got no power?

* I haven't had too many power cuts in my part of the world, but I know that in my folks area they sometimes go for days without power (and sometimes water, but that's another story!)

Art Of The Brick Cape Town

 A few weekends ago Frosty and I went on a date to go and see Art Of The Brick at the Watershed (V&A Waterfront) in Cape Town. I had a vague idea of what to expect, as I had done some research into this exhibit by a guy called Nathan Sawaya. 

After pursuing a career in law, one day Nathan decided that he'd had enough and instead he started to focus on something that he had been doing since a kid: building Lego sculptures. We got to see a great selection of his sculptures in Cape Town and the exhibit was much bigger than I had originally thought it would be. With sections for general sculptures, classic sculptures, art throughout history and more personal explorations, I was amazed by what he was able to reproduce using Lego blocks.

I really thought that he used his platform to expose people not only to Lego Art, but to art throughout the ages was great. It was an awesome way for me to remember all my matric art concepts that I haven't thought about for ages and to give those without much of an interest in art (aka my date) a bit of a taste for art. 

If you still aren't convinced, here is a taster of what you will see as you walk through the exhibition (there are a LOT more than what I've featured here and I would recommend with all my heart that you go and check it out yourselves!). 

Some more details:
Cape Town exhibit: 12 December 2014 - 28 February 2015
Joburg exhibit: 13 May 2015 - 12 August 2015
Ticket Prices: R85 to R140 (depending on the type of booking you make)
Ticket Sales: Computicket (the Archive Building in Joburg and Watershed Building in Cape Town)

Edit: For more information on Nathan Sawaya, you can visit the artsy.net website.

How To Build A Self-Watering Flower System

Remember when I told you I was growing Basil (along with some other herbs)? Well, so far so good, they're all looking healthy and I have even managed to get a jar or two of home made pesto out of my basil which has been delicious!

Just before we went on holiday, Frosty and I decided to build our own "self-watering" plant system in order to (hopefully) to keep our plants from dying while we were away. 

Granted, the first attempt culminated in a completely imploded water container (the plastic was too soft). Our second attempt was a lot better. We're still seeing a bit of suction on our water container, but at least there was some water in the container when we left - now we have to just hope it lasts.

Here's how we built ours: 

So, this is what you'll need:

1. Some sort of water container (we used one of those hard plastic 25 litre containers, but glass or metal would probably be better). It should come with a spare lid that you can use and dedicate to your system.

2. Enough piping to reach all your plants.

3. Female pipe adaptor and "L" connector.

4. Various "T" pipe connectors (depends on how many offshoots you need to make).

4. Some plumbing tape.

5. Something to heat up the pipe (optional, but does help).

6. Your plants all need to have shallow bases.

7. Something to rest your container on, once it's been put together.

This was our first attempt - you can see how the plastic bottle has collapsed into itself. It wasn't particularly successful for a number of reasons. We think we put the bottle too high off the ground and the plastic of the bottle was too soft. Effectively, the water going out sucked the container into itself as the container was too soft to suck air back into the container. 

What is meant to happen is that the container needs to be strong enough to let some water out and then suck some air back in, up the pipe and into the container once the water drops below the level of the pipes in the plant bases.

This was our second attempt, which was a little better (and will hopefully mean the plants survive while we are away!).

We positioned this second container much lower than the first one and also got a container that was made out of slightly harder plastic. You can see there is a bit of collapsing, but not as much as the first container!

We are heading back to Cape Town on Sunday, so hopefully our makeshift water system will have helped our plants to survive while we weren't there. I'll let you know the outcome when I get back!

The Art of the Brick - Cape Town

A while ago, I found out that an exhibition called The Art Of The Brick is going to be coming to South Africa. I'm so so excited for this because by using Lego to create sculptures, the artist Nathan Sawaya has made art into something tangible and exciting for people of all ages (because, let's be serious, everyone loves Lego!). I really think that this is an activity that everyone would enjoy and be excited about - who knows, maybe you'll find yourselves inspired to make your own creations.

The Art of the Brick is going to be exhibited in both Cape Town and Joburg, so if you find yourself close to either of those cities over the following periods, do yourself a favour and take a peek.

---------------------------------
Here's a bit more information:
Cape Town:           12 Dec 2014 - 28 Feb 2015          
Joburg:                 13 May 2015 - 12 Aug 2015         
Opening Hours:      9am* - 7pm
Prices:                  R99 - R145 pp

You can buy tickets at Computicket - they are sold for specific hours every day in order to limit congestion. 

*9am - 2pm from Monday to Thursday are reserved for school tours.

Basil Growing Tips

The weather has been warming up recently, which has been wonderful! To celebrate the start of summer, I decided to start my herb garden again and also plant a few flowers so that my veranda will look happy and colourful (hopefully relatively soon!)

Basil is one of my favourite herbs to use and it's relatively easy to grow. Over winter, my basil died and I was pretty sad. I've since found out that most people generally re-plant their basil in spring every year (what a relief that it wasn't my black thumb green fingers that killed them!). A few weeks ago, I went and got myself a tray of six basil seedlings as well as a packet of basil seeds.

I planted my seedlings in last summer's basil window box. Then I used some leftover seedling trays, filled them up with leftover soil and put a few basil seeds in each pocket. I watered my basil seedlings and basil seeds in the seed trays and I was recently able to pick my own basil for use in some of my dishes!

I wouldn't say I'm an expert in growing basil, but I am pretty happy with my basil so far, so I thought I would put together some beginner tips on how to grow basil:

• To make it easy for yourself, buy basil seedlings and re-plant them into a container (or your herb garden). If you prefer to use seeds - I would suggest you plant seeds around mid-September. (I planted my seeds at the same time as my seedlings - mid October. But I think mid-September, or as soon as it starts getting warmer, would probably be the best time to plant).
• Make sure your basil plants are in a place where they will receive lot of sun. Basil likes the sun, and as long as they have enough water, they'll be happy.
• Water your basil plants regularly - I usually water them on a daily or every other day basis. As long as when you poke your finger into the soil, the soil feel damp, you'll be OK.
• Leave the bottom leaves and pick leaves from the top, often! This promotes growth and the new leaves, so I've heard, are meant to be sweeter and better tasting. It also stops your basil growing crazy tall, which, if you have limited space like me, is a winner!

Good luck with your basil growing!

Global Collaboration

Remember that time I was lucky enough to go to Italy for work? Well, since then I've been working closely with an multi-disciplinary, multi-company team in order to specify and define the requirements for a project that is going to span different continents and use a combination of our system and a system designed by another company. 

This has required a lot of calls. At any one time, there will be people from at least 2 different continents (and usually more) sitting around our virtual table. English isn't always everyone's first language and while the conference calling facility we've used has been generally reliable, we have sometimes run into problems such as the ones illustrated in the two videos in this post.

There are a few things that I've learnt while being part of this project:

• You need to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
  
• Internet calls allow for some great collaboration (however, sometimes that isn't enough and face-to-face meetings are more productive).
  
• Dial in to your calls at least 5-10 minutes early so that, if you have problems connecting, you can address them before the meeting.
  
• The "mute" buttons are really useful, but don't forget that while you are talking with your colleagues "silently" the meeting is carrying on for everyone else so pay attention to what is being said over the connection.
  
• Keep your language as simple and clear as possible, especially when English is not the mother tongue of some of the attendees.
  
• Screen sharing is useful. But sometimes it's easier to just have everyone open up the document being talked about on their own computers.
  
• A single point to save all working documents is important.
  
• Keeping detailed meeting minutes is, quite probably, the most important activity during your calls.
  
• Using on-line collaboration tools is great and can help make work run smoothly.
  
• Have an idea of what needs to happen next (eg next planning stage, other meetings, important activities) and at the relevant time start confirming that these activities have started and time they will complete.

Meeting Minutes Tips

Manual Meeting Minutes

When you're trying to plan something that involves multiple parties and discussions and follow ups, keeping accurate meeting minutes is probably one of your most important activities. 

I know that most people know this. If you're anything like the me-6-months-ago, you would know and understand why meeting minutes are important, but not really have a good idea of what constitutes good meeting minutes and how to go about managing them. 

Luckily, in the last 6 months, I have been able to observe and learn from a pro meeting-minute taker and project manager (let's call him Minute-Man for the purposes of this post). 

Here are things that I've learnt from Minute-Man:

• Not only are meeting minutes important, but so is communicating the minutes to all relevant parties who couldn't make the meeting (either via a separate call and/or including them on the mail of the meeting minutes).
• Use your minutes to track who is responsible for what - then FOLLOW UP a few days later with a mail.
• When you're not sure where the conversation is going, use phrases like "Sorry guys, I'm battling to follow where we are going with this point." or
  "I'm a bit confused as to what needs to be done here. Are there any specific actions that we need to note down or possible follow up discussions that need to take place?"
• Keeping time is important.
• If you see you are starting to go over the allotted time, check with everyone to see if they can carry on for an extra half hour or so, or if another meeting needs to be scheduled for a later stage.
• Refer to previous minutes to check up on previous actions.
• Before the meeting, have a basic agenda and discussion topics listed down and add notes to them as the meeting progresses.
• Use coloured highlights to note attendance and actions.
• Sometimes you need to have the same meeting with a second group of parties if you need their input on certain aspects of the project.
• Label you minutes in a logical way. For example if you have a weekly update meeting label them something like 01 - Update Meeting 18 Sept. Create a special folder where you keep the Update Meeting minutes.
• Lastly, be cheerful and upbeat (and mean it!) - you can hear it in the persons voice, and when the voice is the only thing you can interact with for a person, it makes a huge difference!
• Use words like DONE and OPEN to note the status of actions as you go through them.

If you are needing a place to start - you can check out an example of meeting minutes below. You can also download my meeting minutes template and use that as a starting point for your own meeting minutes. Happy minuting!

Example Meeting minutes: 02 - Planning Meeting
Meeting Minutes template*: Meeting Minutes Template

* If the page tells you it can't display this document, don't worry, it's because it's saved as a Microsoft Office Template file. Download it, when you open it, it will open as a document that you can then save in doc format and not template format.

Defining Decade and Being A Twentysomething

I'm sure by now, you all know that I love myself a good TED talk, so when I came across this talk in my facebook news feed, I thought I would take a look. It seemed relevant to me. I'm a twentysomething. I find the media's my peers general public's trivialisation of the twenties years frustrating sometimes. Every day there's another facebook post popping up about why The twenties are the best times of your life. Thirty things to do before 30. They're entertaining up until a point. Taken with a pinch of salt, they're fun. But not for one second do I believe that they're really true. Take a look at the talk below. 

Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20.

The twenties is a big step up from varsity. You need to start growing up. You need to start thinking about things you didn't necessarily have to worry about before. You have to start dealing with rent. And a job where you probably know nothing. And maybe you will probably paying off some sort of debt, maybe multiple debts. You dive into a world full of unknowns and somehow you need to start swimming before knowing how to float.

For many twentysomethings, even though you have a piece of paper behind your name (degree, diploma, course certificate), you have to start out life on a salary (if you're lucky!) that can barely cover your rent, let alone debt repayments and grocery bills. And if you're not getting paid a salary, you're expected to be appreciative of an unpaid internship that allows you to get experience so that you can get a paid job. 

No wonder twentysomethings don't want to grow up. It's expensive to grow up. But it's more expensive not to grow up! After watching Meg Jay's Ted Talk, I actually went and read the book that her talk is based on - The Defining Decade by Meg Jay. She speaks so much sense and puts into words, thoughts that have been roaming in and out my head for the better part of a year. She also (and this is the kicker) explains WHY twentysomethings sometimes find growing up difficult. She also explains that it's normal for the twenties to be a time of feeling unsure, insecure and uncertain about your future. And it's precisely because you're feeling these things that it's the perfect opportunity for you to grab on, persevere and grow into the adult that the twentysomething years should be moulding you into.

Friends, family, strangers reading my blog for the first time, twentysomethings, pre-twentysomethings, post twentysomethings  - I really do recommend that you read this book. And once you've read it, please let me know what you think.

First Thursdays

The first Thursday of every month, central Cape Town shops,restaurants and galleries keep their doors open until late, to allow people to explore the central city a bit more. This event is called First Thursdays and it's been around for a while, but until a few months ago I hadn't ever heard of it (probably a side effect of living in Joburg and then the southern suburbs!)

An interesting find on our explorings

Last month I went to this event with a group of friends and it was great. It was my first time going and I had such fun! We all met up to say hello and then split into smaller groups while browsing the streets, finally meeting up again for a delicious dinner at Royale Eatery. If you're looking for something fun to do in Cape Town and you're around on the first Thursday of the month, I would definitely recommend this evening out! 

To find out more about the event and how it works click here. 

To see Royale's web site click here (I would definitely recommend their sweet potato fries!).

Orange Kloof Tented Camps

On Saturday I was invited to spend the night away with some friends in the Orange Kloof Tented Camps. This place is a little gem that hardly anyone knows about, but is definitely worth the visit! It's run by SanParks and is part of the 5 day Hoeriekwaggo trail. I found it appealing because it's a 20 minute drive from home and it feels like you are in the middle of nowhere. 

One member of our group brought a hula-hoop with LEDs inside it, here are some of the results of some night time pics (which was a great way to try something different with my camera), as well as some pics of the venue.

Afternoon in the mountains

Peeking through the kitchen windows, you can see some
rather interesting looking light shades!

Nothing better than a crisp winter evening (with no wind or rain),
red wine and a braai on the go!

Fun with an LED Hula-Hoop

Long exposures (ie a shutter speed between 2 - 10 seconds) allowed me to take these pics

This was my second favourite image - I love the suggestion of a
silhouette and the energy of the flowing lines. 

And THIS was definitely my favourite from the time I spent playing around with my camera

How To Get There:

Drive from Rondebosch towards Hout Bay. At the Constantia Nek circle, carry on towards Hout Bay and once you've gone about 1km, start looking for a dodgy looking road labelled "Orange Kloof" on your right. Once you get through the gate, keep right until you reach the accomodation.