Chris Meistre

It’s so sad to even be writing this.  Yesterday when we checked up on the little lovebird hatchling’s progress, we found him lying still and lifeless in the nest.  On closer inspection it looked like he perhaps snapped his neck somehow, because he was lying very awkwardly and it was red/blue around his neck.

The lovebirds feed the little ones while the little ones are lying on their backs, so somewhere after having being fed, something must’ve happened.

We were so excited about this little one, giving it the name Jojo and planning on how we’re going to hand rear it, even worrying how the dogs are going to react to another pet in the house.

It’s always difficult when stuff like this happens to animals, or when they get mistreated, because I always wonder how they must feel or what must be going through their little minds.

RIP little Jojo

The first little lovebird hatchling is now 5 days old, and we’re still waiting for it’s brothers and sisters to hatch.  It’s amazing how quickly the little one has grown.

It’s wonderful to be watching the parents take care of this little chick.  Every now and then you’ll see them both come out of the nest covered in food.  Then it’s a process of cleaning and washing themselves before they disappear into the nest again.

Yes, we all hate banks.  We all hate going to banks, hate standing in the long queues, hate having to deal with the bank’s support number, hate having to pay bank fees, and generally just hate anything relating to banks.

I have a simple question, and I know that a lot of other people do as well.  Why is it that when you walk into the bank, there are 20 people in the queue, yet only 2 of the 8 tellers windows are operating?  Yes, simple answer, they’re on lunch or a tea break.  But fsck, after years and years of running a bank, can they not just space out tea times and lunches that not everyone takes it at the same time?  Or if you’re going to let everyone in the building take lunch at the same time, why not just close the bank for that hour?

And complaining doesn’t work, because you don’t really get answers, just excuses.

Last night we started with the first 4 movements of the Bagua Eight Section Brocade.  I might have the name wrong here, but I’m pretty sure.

Simply put these are breathing and stretching exercises that help with your Chi management.

So I thought I would come back home and read up on it a bit more.  What did we ever do without the Internet?  I found a lot of information, but with all things on the Internet, you first have to sift out the info you didn’t really want before you get to the stuff you really want.

I found an excellent resource at http://www.egreenway.com/taichichuan/esb.htm, although the movements sound slightly varied from the ones we did.

If there is one thing that really really pisses me off lately, is a website that obviously cost a lot of money to make, but isn’t usable.  We’ve been looking at a few properties, and through this process had to visit a lot of property websites.

Now, these ranged from small 1 person real estate agents with their little websites, right up to the biggest names in real estate.  There must be hundreds and hundreds of websites we’ve visited and browsed to look at properties.  I can recall two of them that were actually user friendly.  Only two!

It has definitely been the most frustrating experience of my life.  And it is not only because I am also a software developer, but Bernadette has mentioned the same thing.  If only they’d take the time to really evaluate their websites and get feedback from people the use the website, they’d be able to make so many improvements.  These improvements are usually quite easy to implement.

People spend between R4,000 and R150,000 to develop these sites, and I wonder if they’re really happy with their result?  Would they be happy knowing that I just simply closed some of those sites, i.e. loss of business for them, because I couldn’t handle not be able to properly search or browse the properties.

And then there is the fact that some of them are so outdated that it’s not even worth spending time looking through it.  I found some sites with properties listed from 2006.  Why spend all that money on a website and not update it?  Surely at this time when there is a not a lot of money going around the real estate industry, why not make use of “free” advertising that you have on your website, instead of spending thousands in the newspapers and magazines?  Perhaps I just don’t understand.

So if you read this and you think you need a report on what can be done to improve your property website, why not check out http://www.cmcs.co.za/, to contact me and we can help you.