The only constant thing in life is change, and I’m moving! I resigned on Monday from Travelogic (the tour operator software company where I have been working for the last 7 months) and am joining Younique!

I have been chatting to Tyler Reed for the past couple of months (first started on Twitter), and after working on a few small projects with him, I asked why don’t I start up Younique’s presence in Cape Town? Well that is officially happening from the 1st of August. Perfect timing as Younique also turned 1 on Thursday!

I’m really excited about some of the things Younique has in the pipeline and where we are heading. Tyler is too modest to talk about some of the things we have been working on, so expect me to break the news and “brag” about what we doing. :)

Not only am I changing where I will be working, but also the direction. I’ve been really try to get myself emerged in social media, web 2.0 and the mobile development scene, and by joining Younique, its exactly where I want to be. So enough talking the talk like I do on Twitter, its time to walk the talk.

Exciting times!

I had quite an experience this past weekend that really made me sit up and start taking more notice of crime and safety.

My Fiancé was at the hairdresser on Saturday morning while I was playing a few rounds of golf on my Wii when I received an SMS from her that said the following: “I am in an emergency. Please help me.”. I started to panic thinking the worst - hijacking, kidnapping, etc. and immediately grabbed my car keys and sped out. Just before that I tried to call the cops - who were more than useless. The guy didn’t understand that my Fiancé was in an emergency and that could he get someone to go to the hairdresser in Gordon’s Bay immediately. I hung up the phone after the guy kept on repeating “Ehh, what must I do? What emergency?”.

I then jumped in my car and called her phone - which immediately answered. I could hear her in the car, with the radio on, but couldn’t hear anything else. I assumed she had sent the SMS somehow and was answering the phone in her pocket. This made me panic even more as I had no idea where she was heading - kidnapped and all. I was in a total panic as I was driving to get to the last place she was in Gordon’s Bay. Her sisters also got the SMS and were calling me, but I had no more information than they did.

3 minutes later I spotted her car at the robot, and there she was, looking all beautiful after being at the hairdresser. I stopped in the middle of the traffic and asked her where her phone was - and she opened her bag and showed it to me. It was a false alarm. I was totally relieved to see her safe and totally oblivious to what I had just gone through in the last 5 minutes.

Samsung’s SOS function

You see, she had activated a function on her phone that sends out an SMS to 4 people she specifies and the phone then goes into SOS mode and auto answers calls from only those people that got the SMS.

To activate it, you press the volume key 4 times while the phone is locked.

Yes, the possibility of you actually being able to activate it in an emergency might be slim, but at least you have that possibility. Vodacom have a similar function called Look4Help that you can check out if you don’t own a Samsung.

Consider setting it up, it could just save your life.

I attended my first HeavyChef session last night at the uber-cool 24.com offices in Cape Town. Rui Esteves - founder of Vida e Caffe and CSG Portugal gave a talk about all things branding and how he got to where he is.

We all got given numbers when we arrived and had to ask a question if our number came up during the Q&A session. I asked Rui if he had ever failed at something. There was some hearty laughter from some of the things he tried to sell us as failures, but truth be told, I think almost everything he touches seems to have turned to gold. :-)

Thanks to Perderberg for sponsoring the wine, 24.com for the venue, Mike and Fred from WWC for hosting the event and to Rui for his talk and giving everyone a bottle of Marques.

Next up: 27dinner on Friday 27th of June!

I picked up my Springleap t-shirt yesterday at the post office - and not knowing which shirt was on its way, I was pleasantly surprised to have received Dave Duarte’s - The amazing marketing machine! (Designed by Ryno)

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.

Update: I had a chat to MNet about the voting, and they have implemented stricter control over the voting and have also removed the votes that were not supposed to be counted. Here’s to hopefully a successful end to the competition!

The past 2 weeks or so saw the launch of Seduction101.co.za - a site to submit and vote for pick-up lines and seduction tips. I know some details about seduction101 from behind the scenes and posted a few pick-up lines that did pretty well early on as they got to the top rated list pretty easily. (I was actually just testing the service out in the beginning…)

Then, after a prize of an iPod Touch was announced for the top rated pick-up line by the 14th of July, I gave it a real shot by posting to my Twitter and Plurk streams to garner a few votes from my friends and followers.

Then the mess.

The site runs off cookies and no user registration is necessary to vote up or vote down pick-up lines. You can also vote once an hour.

So by clearing your cookies, using multiple browsers and voting up your pick-up lines, and voting down others, you can imagine the mayhem. I chatted to Wezzo on GTalk about the down voting, and MNet New Media (developers of the site) removed the down voting. That’s half a step in the right direction, except for 1 small thing I came across after all of this - the parameters are being passed via the URL.

http://www.seduction101.co.za/wap/Vote.aspx?d=1&t=60

Change the d to 100, or even -100 and select your pick-up line with t, and you have full control of the site. ;-(

That coupled with the cookie clearing and multiple browser hacks as well, means you could sort of do as you please.

And, I’ll admit it. I did all of that. But, by doing that, I also caught okes cheating just as much as I did - Al, Saiyuuki, Sorceror and Nathan (not 100% of Nathan, but anyone on the top rated list at the moment are cheaters).

I had good intentions of trying to win legitimately (blogging about the competition, Twitter, Plurk and I even wanted to start a Facebook group), but after seeing other cheaters go at it, I stooped to their level and joined in. :-(.

I’m disqualifying myself, but in doing so I want to offer my help. MNet, you can fix this competition and here are my suggestions.

The Long Way

• Users have to register to submit tips
• You have to login to the site to be able to vote

The above method will take a while to code, test and get up and running. It will also spoil some of the hard work that has gone into getting the current pick-up lines submitted etc. But, their is another way of solving this…

The Easy Way

Change the rules of winning the prize!

• a random pick-up line wins an iPod Touch on the 14th of July
• You are able to submit multiple pick-up lines, but it only constitutes 1 vote in the draw

I’d just like to apologise to the guys running the site - MNet and Wezzo in particular - for my cheating. I have to admit, it was somewhat fun being able to manipulate a competition in such a way and cause some of the other cheaters to think I am some sort of god, but, it will go down in my books as one of the stupidest things I’ve done, and I’m apologising for that.

It was a great concept, but totally flawed from the beginning and I hope we can sort it out as soon as possible!