Aquila pronounced AK-weh-lah, uh-KWILL-uh or even a-kee-laa, means eagle in Latin. Just like the eagle, this blog is my “bird’s eye view” on situations or topics that I happen to come across in my life.
Judging by this live video of Katy Perry’s performance of Last Friday Night – TGIF at her Rock in Rio concert in Rio de Janeiro, the audience should at least have been issued with earplugs. Normally I would give the artist the benefit of the doubt and blame dodgy sound equipment, or more specifically the sound engineer, but not in this case.
There was a definite false note on many occasions [time 00:30] and it seemed as she was forcing it. She also often sounded out of breath [time 01:39] – which could probably be explained by all the dancing and jumping [time 02:53].
On the other hand, the studio produced version of this song sounds so much better – No earplugs required.
**Update: This post was originally drafted on 25 December 2010 – but as we started our baby readiness drills it was never finished. After the birth of our son, I’ve finally had a chance to finish it.**
As we count down the days to the birth of our son, I can’t help but feel slightly overwhelmed at the prospect of fatherhood.
I’m not necessarily referring to the act of changing nappies, feeding a baby or being worried about the pyjama drill. I’m looking forward to that experience and getting completely immersed in all those things and more.
As I look to my Creator as the perfect Father-figure, so too do I want to be the role model for my child. And that’s what sometimes scares me. Am I the role model (with my faults) that I want him to grow up to be like?
Recently two things prompted this thought. A “scary” analysis of my timesheets of 2010 revealed an average working day of 14 hours – 15 if you had to count one particular project into the equation.
No sane man can sustain this, and have a balanced family life. Hopefully 2011 will be much improved.
“Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin…no matter how many times you listen to this, especially if you’re a parent, the onus is on you to not get choked up.
The chorus goes like this:
And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon,
Little boy blue and the man on the moon.
“When you comin’ home ?”
“Son, I don’t know when.
We’ll get together then.
You know we’ll have a good time then.”
Even though these seem quite daunting, I found some comfort in reading Pastor Mark Driscoll’s free e-book Pastor Dad – where he looks at the ways that a father can raise his children well.
One ‘truism’ in this book stands out for me:
Every dad is a pastor. The important thing is that he is caring for his flock well.
Armed with 10 Practical Pastor Dad Tips, some good common sense, loads of love for my son and my wife and by God’s grace – I’ll be able to bring up my family in the best possible way.
Ever had a song stuck in your head and you don’t know the name? It happens to me all the time. Either I know a line from the song, or have some idea of the tune, but no idea who the artist or the song is.
To make matters worse, I always seem to miss the song intro on the radio and the DJ never seems to repeat the song title.
Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon the iPhone song identification application Midomi. Let me briefly interject.
A good friend, Leon Jacobs once said, “The greatest things about iPhone is the potential that every new app has to completely transform the device into a totally new experience.” I have to agree with Leon. Midomi has transformed the way I interact with music.
The premise is simple – open Midomi, press the big orange button, hold your iPhone up to a source of music and voila, it identifies the artist and song title. It even allows you to play back a short clip (from its own database) so that you can confirm if it’s the same song. Just watch out for loud ambient noise though – it makes song recognition a bit tricky.
Surprisingly enough it even recognised my tone-deaf humming of certain songs. Of course, if you don’t want to feel like a dork singing to your phone, you can also search for a song or band just by saying or typing the name.
The features don’t stop there though. You can bookmark and share your song results via Twitter and Facebook. Check out the lyrics, videos via YouTube and obtain detailed artist info. You can buy the song, but I haven’t been able to do so since the iTunes music store is still not available in South Africa.
All in all, this is a great application and at $4.99 (around R38) it’s worth every cent.
My iPhone recently had to go back to Vodacom for an issue with the vibrate button. The thing broke off after only 2 months out the box. Something that’s completely unacceptable. Unfortunately the only thing to do was to book it in at Vodaworld, figuring it will be resolved fairly quickly.
In the initial three days I received a few messages informing me of the progress of the job, until it had to be sent back to the supplier. Around two-and-a-half weeks of silence ensued before I was finally notified that it was ready for collection. As expected (and welcomed), they exchanged the phone with a new unit.
One thing I must commend Apple on is how well the restore function works. Surprisingly enough it restored every setting, archived sms and application back to the last known state. Pretty amazing, considering I’ve never been able to do so with my Windows Mobile phones.
Funny thing about restoring your phone is that you notice how much nonsense you had on there in the first place. I took the opportunity to do some housekeeping and removed some unwanted / unused applications.
Below is a list of some of the more oft used (and mostly free) applications still on my phone.
Unfortunately some of the better apps in the iTunes App Store are still not available to South Africans, so we’ll have to make do for now. But here’s the question, are there other apps out there that I should have on my phone? What do you have on yours?
Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon the 
