Posts Tagged ‘Cape Town’

Posted on March 5, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Temperature in Cape Town

I know everyone in Cape Town is talking about the heat wave we’re experiencing but I just had to share this with people who aren’t here right now.

This is the time in Cape Town:

And this was the temperature in the City:

Now I’m not a big fan of heat but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place where the temperature was more than 35 degrees. 40.5 degrees is something that is well and truly stifling. There has been a thick haze of smoke all over the city from all the fires and I haven’t been able to see the sea or mountain since 9am.

Come to think of it, without the sea and mountain it kind of feels a lot like Jo’burg!

 

Posted on January 19, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My first Tilt-Shift photo

My good pal Gregor has been posting a series of Fake Tilt-Shift photographs and I’ve been dying to try it out myself. Wikipedia describes Tilt-Shift faking as:

Tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature scale model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is.

I recently acquired a new Canon 55mm-250mm IS lens for my 400D and with new lens in hand I was able to take some cool shots from our balcony at work.

I took a number of different shots and then tried to follow this online tilt-shift tutorial to create my first masterpiece but the results were not fantastic. I was not happy with the output as it didn’t seem to create the miniature effect I was hoping for.

So, I created my own selection band by manually selecting the road, carefully following the natural curve and shadows, as well as other elements like the flags and robots to give it more precision. It literally took me hours to do but I am more than happy with the output.

 

Posted on December 9, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Taxi Protest in Cape Town

Driving to work this morning I heard that about 100 taxis were driving from the N2 into the Cape Town CBD in a protest to the introduction of the government’s Bus Rapid Transit system. Seeing as the Afrigator office appears to have the best position for chaos in the city (see the pics from the bus burning from our balcony) I figured it would be a matter of time before they made their way past us.

They didn’t disappoint. (see more pics here)

The only thing that worries me now is that there have already been reports of cars being stoned by the protesters and with all the riot police around you just get a sense that this is a situation just waiting to explode.

 

Posted on October 20, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Paul Allen and his Tatoosh

Yesterday the family and I shipped off to the V&A Waterfront to pay a visit to the Two Oceans Aquarium. The aquarium in itself was awesome but after the expedition I noticed a yacht in the harbor which I simply had to go and see.

It turns out the magnificent yacht docked in Cape Town’s harbor is none other than Paul Allen’s smaller yacht called the Tatoosh.

For those who don’t know the Microsoft co-founder’s yacht has been here since October 15th and had I not seen the two helicopters parked on the deck (see pic below) then we might have missed this fantastic sight.

Paul Allen paid no less than $100 million for the 92m long Tatoosh and it features:-

• Five decks
• a master suite, a saloon and other rooms on the top deck
• a saloon with a French limestone fireplace, a dining area, staterooms and a ladies’ powder room on the main deck
• a lobster tank
• a shaded 1.8m deep swimming pool
• a movie theater
• facilities to transport two helicopters on the top two decks (see pic below)
• a custom Hinckley powerboat about 12m
• a Hinckley sailboat of about 12m

Paul also owns the Octopus which is the larger of his two yachts at 126m long. This makes the Octopus the second largest super yacht that is not owned by a head of state.

If you’d like to see all the pics I took of the Tatoosh (including a few shots of the great view of Table Mountain for all my Jo’burg friends) then click here for the full set on Flickr.

 

Posted on October 16, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Moving to the Mother City

It’s been 13 days since I shipped my entire family down to Cape Town and what an experience it has been. We’ve gone from this chaos in Johannesburg:-

To this ordered chaos in our new home in Cape Town:-

I have to say that moving to a new city is really not as easy as it seems and proved to be an immense challenge for all of us.

When we knew that we’d have to move it really seemed like an awesome idea at the time. I mean, who wouldn’t want to move to a city with reduced crime, beautiful oceans, mountains and a better overall quality of life?

While I am not regretting the move at all I didn’t/couldn’t anticipate how trying this would be both emotionally and physically to all of us – including the people we left behind. Packing boxes is no fun, unpacking even less, but the really difficult aspect has been the emotional loss of our families and friends.

As adults, Colette and I are able to understand our emotions and deal with them accordingly but what we’ve found with Luke, our five year old, is that this is not so easy to do. While Luke is content about 90% of the time there are moments when he’s tired and run down and it’s then that he yearns for his family and our domestic worker left in Johannesburg.

This is gut wrenching stuff for us but we’ve just tried to make it fun for him to try and mitigate the loneliness and heart-ache he’s experiencing.

On the work front I’m loving every minute of being involved in a startup. These are exciting times for Afrigator and at the moment we’ve been working hard on setting up relationships with people here in Cape Town as well as working on some interesting developments for the website and community.

There is a new and different kind of stress being involved in Afrigator but at the end of the day I’m doing this for myself which makes it very motivating and highly exciting. I really think we’re going to do some awesome things over the next two years.

Finally, on the blog front, I’ve decided to change my writing style and theme somewhat. Moving forward this blog will highlight my experiences running a startup which I’m doing mainly to alleviate some of the stress and I’ll also be writing more about my personal life and the adjustment to life after Jo’burg.

In short this blog is about startups, technology and life and you can expect this to be the core focus moving forward. Not sure how much I can post these days as things are pretty busy but I’ll do what I can when I can.