More Vodacom RED fail.

After noting the Techcentral post about the new Vodacom rebranding and having seen some of them new advertisements on TV tonight, I decided to give my old favorite — “My Vodacom” a try again.

Just to be greeted with the usual fucking fail.

Of course, I should have realized that CSS changes was not going to change the way their crap works. Same fail. Just surrounded with RED this time.

Then I noticed some of the URL parameters.

“javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken”

I never realized they were using Vignette.  Whomever made that architecture decision – good luck…

So, in the spirit of mixtapes and a tribute to an era gone by (me being the owner of a nightclub for around 7 years, waves at jwz) here is a release of my first ever really amateur attempt at digital mixing.

Listening to it now feels like a blast from the past, similar to Back to The Future and other things from many years ago. I cannot believe that so many years have passed.

In the last 15 years only I’ve transitioned from student hacker-and-demo-coder, stock trading support biatch,  ex-nightclub owner, a dot-com bubble-ee, semi-professional gamer,  co-owner of a  shiny  failed  company, game developer,  broadband activist, linux kernel contributor, start-up panic-ee,  disenfranchised minority shareholder, management-buy-out-ee,  and as of a few weeks ago the proud dad of an 9 year old aspergers geek.

What a trip.

Hence, wayback mixtape v1.

I’m off to the http://www.autismsouthafrica.org/ walk around the Zoo Lake in exactly 6 hours.

Would have been nice if I could get some sleep before then…

I quite enjoyed reading the banter on ISLabs.co.za although some if it was a bit too facebooky and sillyconny for my taste. So I haven’t been there in a while….

However, tonight I came across http://www.islabs.co.za/justinspratt/2010/03/powerful-common-anecdote-startups whilst googling and thought, hey, let me check up whats happing at ISLabs…

And then came across a lot of spam comments about underwear, garden furniture, and shopping cart software. All acclaiming to the valuable “posting” and “fast content” and great information on ISLabs.co.za. And of course with a link to some external website.

So I decided to look around some more and found more comments. All SPAM. “College grants”, “Mortgages” etc etc. In fact, ISLabs.co.za seems pretty much to be a spam comment haven, and not much else…

I guess a site with 6/10 pagerank is just a kind of magnet for these things. “SEO” indeed 😉

Look I get a lot of spam comments on this blog too, but that’s why I akismet them and approve all comments manually. My view is that a website is defunct if nobody cares about spammers posting crap on it anymore, and this seems to have been going on for a while now…

It also appears that not much is happening on ISLabs anymore, and theres hardly been any new content since November 2010. Is 2011 just not the year of clever ideas anymore ? Has the taps run dry ?

Is it perhaps time to shut the labs down ? Or, at least, have a look at revisiting the comment posting policy ?