After checking out http://www.themissingzebra.co.za, I can see why. Those 5 suspects look real dodgy. Out of the 5, Dirk de Wet, the ex police officer is probably the most clean – capturing a zebra out of boredom sounds a little far fetched. However, Jan de Jager Junior and Boontjies seem the more likely of the 5 to have kidnapped a zebra.

If I was Jan de Jager Junior and had a bit of a tiff with Pederberg Winemaker Riaan Moller, I too would get back at him by stealing one of the farms prize possessions – the zebra. But then again, being a bit of a dronkie and a stupid chicken farmer, I wouldn’t be smart enough to steal, nevermind hide a zebra!

Then there is Boontjies – one of those dodgy fruit and veg hawkers that sell “stolen” fruit at the Klapmuts turnoff. His horse pegged a couple of months back and obviously needs transport to get his fruit and veg to market. These hawkers are slimy buggers and could easily make a plan to kidnap and hide a zebra – I wouldn’t be surprised if he had painted the white stripes black to make it look like a horse.

If you help out by answering some of the weekly clues, you could win some wine, so go and give it a shot!

The packaging of the shirt is very neat. It comes in a plastic sleeve that includes a postcard with the design on as well as a pin button.

The actual screen printing of the shirt is of a very high quality. I dig that the name of the t-shirt and artist are printed on the back. Definitely some street cred to be had right there.

The only thing that I could maybe knock is the actual quality of the t-shirt. It does feel slightly thin and when printed in white, it has a very slight see-through quality to it. I’m sure in the dark colours it won’t matter that much.

When I have a little time on my hands, I’m going to try my hand a designing a shirt. Just imagine walking around with “The Bagley” t-shirt on your back. Hell yeah.

How did I manage to organise this? 1 simple blog post.

Anyway, he can build you a house too if you ask nicely, and when one of their friends wanted a quote from my dad for a house that they want built on the farm, he presented her with this:

All builders present you with a nice Excel sheet with all the costs that never seem to end. But my Dad is way too clever for that. Just imagine a builder spent the time to build you a really cool model of your house, with fake grass included! How awesome is that?

So that’s why I say, my Dad is a builder AND a marketer come creative director!

What this actually means is that, you will log into your OpenID account with a password, but never have to remember usernames or passwords on any OpenID enabled sites. You only have to remember your OpenID URL!

A Simple OpenID example

I signed up for an OpenID account months ago, but never investigated how to actually use it to log into some of my favourite web services that use OpenID. Last week, I actually decided to start using OpenID and it really is incredible how easy it is to use.

In this example, I am going to show you the steps I took to getting my Blinksale account to use OpenID.

Step 1: Sign up for an OpenID account.

This is pretty straight forward. There are a number of OpenID providers, and some services such as Wordpress.com, Technorati and Blogspot.com logins are actually OpenID accounts already! But for simplicity’s sake, rather use a dedicated OpenID provider, as the features of a dedicated provider such as MyOpenID.com are more streamlined and easer to use.

View the list of recommended OpenID Providers over at http://openid.net/get/ I signed up at myOpenID.com and you can actually view my OpenID webpage here: http://jbagley.myopenid.com.

Step 2: Logging into an OpenID enabled site.

So now that I have an OpenID, I headed over to my Blinksale account and selected login with OpenID. On most sites that have OpenID support, there will be a link very close to your normal login form. Just have a look out for the OpenID textbox that looks something like this:

What happens the first time I try to login with my OpenID, Blinksale redirects to jbagley.myopenid.com. I then provide my password to login to myOpenID.com, or if I am already logged in (either via a browser session, or a cookie that keeps me logged in), myOpenID.com then asks me to verify if Blinksale can make use of my OpenID account. I have options of either selecting Allow forever, Allow once or Deny. After I clicked Allow Forever, I was redirected to my Blinksale account.

The next time I tried to login to Blinksale, all I did was provide my OpenID url and I was automatically authenticated (all behind the scenes as I was already logged into my OpenID provider and Blinksale was set to “always allow”) and taken to my Blinksale account. No having to remember my Blinksale username or password anymore. So from now on, all I have to remember is http://jbagley.myopenid.com!

Why should I start using OpenId?

There is an interesting article over at ReadWriteWeb about password fatigue. Eventually people start using the exact same username and password combinations over a array of websites because it becomes ever increasingly difficult to remember so many different passwords! By using OpenID (and getting more and more sites to use OpenID), you are only required to remember your OpenID url and password. Changing your OpenID password effectively means you are changing your password for all your web logins too!

With the announcement of Yahoo jumping on the OpenID bandwagon, services like Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo Answers, MyBlogLog etc, are all going to start using OpenID logins in the coming months. For me, that means these accounts of mine will become so much more secure and easier to login to.

Google’s Blogger service also now supports OpenID for submitting comments, and the beta version of Blogger blogs also now supports OpenID. So I am sure you will start to see more Google OpenID logins in the future.

For Developers

There are a number of open source code libraries that one can use to get OpenID setup within your web application. OpenID can be used in many different languages, like PHP, Ruby, Java, C++, .Net (OpenID can intergrate with Windows CardSpace) etc. Visit http://wiki.openid.net/Libraries for more information on these libraries.

OpenID for dummies

So there you have it. A simple, yet detailed explanation on how to get OpenID setup and why you should be using OpenID. For my South African readers, are there any SA web sites that are employing OpenID?

If you liked this post, please Muti, Stumble, or Bookmark it at del.icio.us. Thanks. ;-)

My browser of choice is Firefox, with a couple of neat plugins I can’t live without.

1. Web Developer Toolbar – for any sort of web development, this is a must have.
2. Searchstatus by Quirk – Need I say more?
3. Foxmarks – I use multiple computers, so this plugin keeps all my Firefox bookmarks synced.
4. coComment – This neat plugin ties into my coComment account, which is how I keep track conversation on blogs I have left a comment on.
5. Read it Later – When I don’t want to bookmark a site or blog post, and neither want to add it to my social bookmarking sites, but I want to “read it later”, this plugin comes in handy. Simple, yet oh-so effective.
6. IE View Lite – right-click on page and view it in Internet Explorer. Stupid web designers that can’t code make us sometimes have to fireup IE.

I have been using Twitter since the end of last year and have found it incredibly useful to keep up to date with what’s happening on the web. But using the web interface or my IM sucks big time. So Snitter is how I read and write my tweets.

My social bookmarking site of choice is del.icio.us. Nothing fancy here other than saving bookmarks that I don’t often frequent, but will probably need to reference later in life.

I have a couple of hosting and web development clients that need to be invoiced from time to time. Blinksale is a total life saver. I don’t need some bloated accounting system, and neither do I have the time to manually create invoices, so with Blinksale I email my customers their invoices and can keep track of those lazy and late payers pretty easily. My customers also have the option of viewing their invoices online to print or add notes.

For notes or quick todo’s, I use Ta-da Lists from 37signals. Quick and easy to add, quick and easy to use.

Then there is the host of Google products that I am sure most of you use. Gmail for email, Google Analytics for keeping track of my blogs traffic stats, Google Docs for documents and spreadsheets that I need to share or collaborate with people and Google Calendar for yip, you guessed it, my calendar.

I consume all my RSS feeds using Bloglines. I have used Bloglines from the start, and although I have tried Google Reader numerous times, I still prefer Bloglines. Must be a comfort thing. ;-)

For communication and all my IM needs, Skype and Google Talk do it for me.

My desktop email and document processing is handled with Office 2007’s range of products. Outlook, Word, Excel etc. 2007 is quite a change for those that were used to using Microsoft’s previous versions 2003 or Office XP, but once you are up and running, I would never turn back. The UI changes are huge productivity enhancements.

I think that’s about it. I’d love to hear your comments on what you think about some of my choices, and if you feeling up to it, blog about your tools of choice and I’ll share some link love. :-D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

This is the most amazing wildlife video I have ever seen. It has over 20 million views on Youtube. Watch it and you’ll see why.

(excuse some of the American accents in the video. Bleh.)

This not only would make for a great coffee table book, but is a brilliant birthday, Christmas or even wedding gift.

In 2006, to fulfill a long-held dream, widely acclaimed photographer Michael Poliza and friend Stefan Breuer undertook a helicopter journey across Africa. Skimming close to the ground, they flew over 19 countries. Poliza’s alluring–and often surprising–photographs share this exceptional journey with the world. With a bird’s-eye view, we witness the astounding beauty, scale and diversity of this imposing continent. The accompanying texts give a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the photographs, and brief background to some of the most fascinating subject matters.

Anyway, for those of you that want a copy, hold your breath. At Exclusive Books, it retails for R1200! So I did some digging and found it at Amazon for $79 which is around R513! Add shipping and import duties and you are getting at least R500 off the retail price here in South Africa. Our local “Amazon”, Kalahari.net, doesn’t even sell the book, but they do sell one of Michael Poliza’s other books, The Essential Africa, for R290. I haven’t seen his other books, so I can’t comment on them, but I am almost certain they are just as good.

There are also 2000 limited edition Eyes over Africa books, that are signed by Michael Poliza. The first 300 are specially packaged in a handcrafted wooden box upholstered in ultra-suede, as well as each one is individually numbered. But these are slightly more expensive. ;-)

Amazon MP3

Amazon’s digital music portal features 2 million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels all without DRM. They even include songs from EMI and Universal, which iTunes no longer sell. The top 100 tracks will cost $.89 (Just over R6), with the rest costing $.99.

In order to download songs, you must install the Amazon MP3 downloader, which converts the .AMZ file you download to .MP3 and then automatically imports that song into either iTunes or Windows Media Player for you. So it literally is a glorified download manager.

I downloaded Makes Me Wonder by Maroon 5 to test the service, and it worked perfectly. The screenshot above doesn’t show the downloaded song in the queue, because after I closed and then reopened the application after downloading the song, it no longer listed it there.

The songs are encoded in 256Kbps which is not CD quality, but you won’t be able to tell the difference. It’s those audiophiles that will be the only people complaining. ;-)

So now no more sulking about not being able to buy international artists MP3’s in South Africa anymore, just use Amazon MP3!

Disclaimer: I’m not 100% sure if this is legal from SA, or because I am buying it outside of America causes trouble, I don’t care. The person that made the song is getting paid. ;-) That is all in my mind that counts!

Cassette (listen to a few of their songs here), who opened the evening, were also just as brilliant. I didn’t know they had so many hits on 5fm! I recognised all their songs except for 2, which were equally as good as the rest. The lead singer, Jon Savage is awesome! He, just like P!nk, knows how to play for the crowd.

I’ve posted a couple of pics on my Facebook profile with my new Samgsung U700. The pics aren’t the greatest, but in terms of a cellphone camera, I think they came out quite well considering. Go you 3.2 mega pixel camera!