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Our proudly unproudly telecoms monopoly believes they are providing their customers a service by making huge profits for their investors.
I am sorry to say, but they priced themselves out of the market. How dumb is this? To make more money you have to charge more? No, let me explain economics 101, make it cheaper, get more customers, more customers will mean more business, more business means greater profits. Is it such a difficult concept to grasp? It must be! for our telecom operator, and them record labels seem to be clueless. That is where companies like google are spot on. They actually "get it". I wish I had some shares...

Last week I decided to get rid of my trusty telkom ISDN line, T3|k0m was charging me R 190 line rental, R 50 for infinitcall, ISP costs were another R 115. So that is close to R350 just to have the ability to have a line for internet access. Then there were normal phone calls, every connection to the net costs around R10 (during off peak) and insanely expensive during peak times. Minimum amount per month was about R450. I basically use my line to check email, read some news, chat on IM from time to time, and now and then I will post something to my blog. Most people use their lines in a similar fashion. Well it is official, using my cell phone is way cheaper! I pay a monthly fee for my contract R170 in total, I get 50 free anytime minutes and internet costs me R2 per MB, the best thing is that a even got a funky phone for free! A horrible month would probably cost me around R250. Sad but true. Plus I have the added comfort of being portable. This means I can in theory take my internet connection along on vacation, the coffee shop etc. be a true geek ;).

The best thing I can do is by spreading the word, if you use your telkom line mainly to check email and chat via IM, maybe check out a site or 2, then you should be switching to GPRS. There are no monthly fees for internet unless you buy a bundle, so if you do not use the internet, there are no fees. When posting to my blog I might spend an hour or two online, the best part that it costs me between 50c to R1. Touch that! Telkom! Next time you touch tomorrow, you might get slapped!

I am never gonna drink again! Damn, I think I overdid it this time. ;) I cannot exactly remember all details but I can remember dancing to the parletones having a ball of a time. I seem to recall I drank 3l of beer, and I have R120 less money in my pocket.
People that know me must think that I have completely lost it, dancing and Heinz was not used in the same sentence. All I can really say is that people change over time. Marilize dragged me along to go dancing at Prezleys. I actually enjoyed it! So hey, people are welcome to think whatever they want. Technically people will do that in any way... but you catch my drift...;)

Next week is Woodstock music festival, and I am suddenly not all that sure that I want to go, the following week I am doing my first energade triathlon so I need to take it easy on the booze.


Roy, a buddy at work talked me into competing, 600M Swimming, 20Km cycling and 5Km running might sound easy, but I can assure you it is not. I estimate it should take about 2 hours to complete(that is if I manage not drown in the first 600M). Today I started working on a tan too, I do not want to blind all other contestants, hey maybe that can be my competive advantage. *evil grin*

Now imagine this, I am lying in the sun, hangover from last nights beer fest. Yeah right! Fat chance! After about 10 minutes I couldn't stand it anymore so I went inside and slept till the hangover was gone (and the sun too). I have a bit of a cough too, please cold, stay away!

(GW - Geek warning) The next post might contain technical references to extreme IT mambo jumbo, and other complex terminology. Read the post at own risk!


I got my SonyEricsson K750i last week. I am very much impressed with the phone. It has loads of features. I got it on a CellC CasualChat anytime contract. Speaking of which, I am a lot less impressed with the service of CellC.

I wanted to get GPRS enabled, so I registered on the website. Clicked the option to enable GPRS, they immediately sent me an SMS to notify me that the next message will automatically configure my phone. It has now been a week, I have not received anything to date. In the mean time I phoned the customer support and they we not very useful either, they did tell me the server was down and their IT people were working on the problem... Yeah right! I started googling around and eventually found these GPRS Settings


APN: internet
Username: Cellcis
Password: Cellcis




The connection from my phone works!
So much for their support!


The next step would be to get my internet connection working via GPRS using the the phone as a GPRS modem over USB. I did find these references for doing just that so I am busy investigating.
GPRS EasyConnect
Gentoo Phone sync howto
Gentoo Bluetooth howto
Article with sample scripts

First I had to get the module compiled in my Linux kernel...The standard USB modem driver works.

modprobe cdc_acm

the device showed up as

/dev/ttyACM0

Next I had to install wvdial (emerge -u wvdial did the trick)

I used some sample scripts found at the above URLs and tweaked them a bit. I managed to catch the first wave... It simply worked. (Technically I had to tweak /etc/resolv.conf too...)

No more t3l$cum dailups in peak times! I can now chat peak times without being charged an arm and a leg. Doh! There is one thing I am forgetting,I don't chat on IRC! From time to time I do log onto IM, and it would be nice to check my mail whenever I want to.

I am very tempted to get rid of my trusty and ex$pensive ISDN line. R 250/month (R 200 line rental and R50 for R7-call...(more like R10 call) in off peak). It will go a long way to buying bandwidth... 125MB! of it, and even more when I start getting a bulk bundle. That way I can stop supporting our (dis)trusty telecom$ monopoly.

My poor gentoo will be a bit behind, but I can always take my laptop to work and use their connection to update my gentoo...