Ross Brown dot net

You can now see some of our South African photos online. What with one thing and another, I have decided to use the gallery function provided by Photobox, for the time being at least. I may change my mind and upload some to my own gallery at some point, but for the moment the Photobox one does the job. You can even order prints of my pictures directly from them, if you want.
Because of the way Photobox works (50Mb of storage with each order), I now have more storage space available there than I do on this site(!), so it makes sense to use it.

So we are now back after our 3 weeks in South Africa. We had an excellent time - Cindi’s wedding was a blur, we went to Oudtshoorn where the weather was so hot our footwear melted, we went to a few wildlife parks and saw lots of… well, wildlife and generally enjoyed ourselves. Candi’s family were very accommodating and really made us feel at home, it was lovely to meet all of them at last.

I am currently cataloging the pictures I took with the digital camera (over 540!), when I have decided on the best ones I will be putting them online in my picture gallery. We are thinking of getting a calendar printed with our best wildlife shots. That would make a nice souvenir.

We’re both back at work this week and feeling the strain already. The cold, dark weather here has been a bit of a shock to our system - luckily we only had a 2 hour time difference to contend with, I don’t think we could have handled jetlag at this point!

In other news, our friends Joe and Susannah have finally become New Zealand citizens, so congrats to them.

We came back to a threatening letter from cableco NTL - they reckon we owe them nearly £200 for something or other. I haven’t been a customer of theirs for over a year now, and when I was it was probably the worst mistake I ever made - they are the most incompetent company I have ever dealt with*. Naturally, I have appealed and I am waiting to see what they say. If they continue to hassle me I will take a trip down to their offices and give them a piece of my mind.

* If you don’t believe me, Google for NTL customer complaints.

I took this photo yesterday at the Kragga Kamma Game Park. We got lucky and entered the Cheetah reserve at feeding time, just behind the keepers in their pick-up truck. Got some cool pics. The animals were so close, I managed to get some excellent pictures of zebras, rhinos, buck, giraffes and warthogs too. I would love to post all of my pics in my picture gallery but I am borrowing someone’s internet connection and they only have a 56k modem - I don’t want to land them with a huge phone bill. Apparently, broadband is available here in South Africa, but it’s very expensive. I understand the telecom operator here has a monopoly and charges a ridiculous amount for ADSL - I hope they get forced to be more competitive, just like BT have been in the UK. Having cheap broadband at home is really important for me now - and to think, I had to put up with the ‘internet through a straw’ once too. It’s just not the same when you have to connect every time you want to do something or think about how long you’re spending online.

Tomorrow we fly out to South Africa for my sister-in-law’s wedding. It promises to be a blast and it’s the first time I’ve not spend Xmas at home, so it’s definitely going to be different. Apparently, the weather’s good too, which is a bonus

I may post while I’m out there, but don’t count on it. I’ll see you when I get back.

PS. My New Year’s resolution is going to be “don’t use smilies in every post”

My brother had an RTA with a drunk driver last night. It could have been a lot worse, but luckily nobody was badly hurt. The same can’t be said for his car though.

Here are my most recently added bookmarks. This list is dynamic, so it will keep changing as I add stuff. Yes, I am a geek

My cousin’s site is back up, looks like he’s gone for Wordpress too.
I know they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but even the site’s name is strangely familiar to me

We’re back off honeymoon now. It’s quite hard to adjust to the weather here in the UK - it’s so grey. We’re just about over our jet-lag and the bloody clocks go back on Sunday… We’re both back to work on Monday as well, so it seems we really are back to the grind.

It’s late and I’m tired, so I’ll keep this short and to the point. I got married yesterday

If your looking for some photos, I will be putting them up on my gallery site, pics.rossbrown.net. You will need a login to view the pictures.

I am Ross Brown (UK), a young-ish bloke who works in IT. I’m not one of the other Ross Browns, I’m the real deal baby

This site will have some more meaningful content in the near future, so stay tuned. I’m not going to be updating this site much over the next few weeks, but after that….