A year ago today Elmi told me I was going to be a father. I was very excited, but I had no idea what this would actually mean. A year on and my life has totally changed. It’s weird, I sometimes miss the freedom I had a year ago, but I’m very glad it happened. I’m amazed how much I love Zoë, never thought it would be like this. The last three and a half months with Zoë has been amazing, and I can’t wait for her to start speaking to me and interacting more. She’s growing so much each day, and it’s amazing to watch her develop.
I’m really looking forward to the next year…
posted by willem at 19:52
Discovered Facebook. Seems like everyone joined before I did, but I must say I’m impressed, nice convergence of loads of interesting things. Might try my hand at writing a facebook application.
posted by willem at 18:38
posted by willem at 12:03
posted by willem at 11:50
As you all probably know by now, I work for multimap. We recently updated our public site so have a look. Also if you want to play a bit we have an open API available. Me and a couple of others have also been playing with a new twitter bot, so add multimap as a friend and have a play. More details here and here.
So here is a quick primer regarding address specifications:
If you know what lon,lat is and how to get it please use it as you know it will always be correct. Most people will probably want to use an address string though.
The best way to know if an address string will give you what you want is to try it out on the multimap website. There’s a few things to remember though. On the site you choose a country while with twitterbot you don’t. With twitterbot you can always add a country’s 2 letter ISO code to the end of the address string to specify country (Or the full country name if you don’t know the ISO code).
A good example would be:
street,town, state, pc, country
That doesn’t mean that if you just say Barcelona it wont work, but using “Barcelona,ES” will give you a much better result.
You can also use 5 or 9 digit US zip codes or UK postcodes without adding a country, but these are special cases.
Anyway, we would love to see some feedback.
Read what Colm and Richard did at Hack Day.
Thanks
Willem Basson
posted by willem at 8:22
Beautiful sunhat
Originally uploaded by WillemBasson.
We took Zoë to the beach last week – it is nearly time for the annual sardine run and we saw a bunch of dolphins playing in the surf. The sardines should start coming by the 20th of June and then there will be dolphins, sharks and birds galore. The shark nets have been taken down so it becomes a bit dangerous to swim – but we do it anyway (without Zoë of course!)
More photos of Zoë here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/willembasson/sets/72157594566788294/
posted by willem at 10:09
Goth fish
Originally uploaded by WillemBasson.
Last weekend we went to UShaka Marine World in Durban. It’s a great aquarium and we saw lots of interesting fish. Zoë especially liked the jellyfish.
More photos here
posted by willem at 13:24
Tongue giraffe
Originally uploaded by WillemBasson.
We went to Hluhluwe nature reserve near St Lucia for the weekend. Saw lots of animals, but no lions unfortunately. 
At least we had two close encounters with elephants (a little too close, some might say!) One walked out right in front of our car and the other approached us while we were outside our car at a picnic area…
More photos here.
posted by willem at 18:00
