Camps Bay

Water pump

A very effective water pump.

www.agama.co.za/reeep

This will probably only be interesting to other renewable energy people: but I have been working on a new REEEP web presence (including a news feed) at www.agama.co.za/reeep . Some of my first experiments in web page programming ;-)

Kuyasa

These are pictures from a solar water heating project that Agama did some time ago in Kuyasa, a township near Cape Town. The next project is searching for funding...

Green Market Square

In the centre of Cape Town there is Green Market square: a very touristic and very lively arts and crafts market. It's a great place to sit outside a Cafe and have breakfast whilst watching people go about their business.
There is a guy who walks around Green Market square. The first time I saw him, I though he was a security guard. He had one of those "stun guns" for security guards which deliver an electric shock.

I watched him walk around the square. Then without warning he takes out his stun gun, walks up to a guy and zaps him. The guy jumps, looks a little shocked and then walks on. The guy with the stun gun then continued to walk around and occasionally walked up to someone and zapped them. He would generally chose people who were walking around trying to sell little toys or souvenirs, people begging and the occasional prostitute who wandered through.

What an idiot.

Maybe he is some kind of jobless security guard who occasionally just gets the urge to "clean up the riff-raff" at Green Market Square. I haven't seen him recently. Maybe he zapped the wrong guy...

Me explaining stuff

At the African Utility Week in Cape Town.

squattercity

I quite like this site: squattercity. I draws attention to events that would usually go unnoticed. I found the question of "slum tourism" quite interesting: http://squattercity.blogspot.com/2006/05/irving-berlin-in-delhi.html.

Who farted?

David's bad joke about the biomethane plant reminded me that there is a biomethane plant sitting just 30 metres from my office. Only it runs off someone else's excrement. This is the inlet (sewage pipes from 2 toilets and a bunch of organic waste), the dome is where the fermentation / gasification business happens (you can't actually see it now, because it is buried underground), and the last picture is what comes out: clean natural gas. Now how cool is that. Better than trying to light a fart.



 

Who's the Mexican?

I though some of you might find this amusing. This is where the last hundred visitors to my blog came from. This just goes to show, how little privacy there is on the internet. From the locations, I can usually figure out exactly who was on the blog when. There is me in Cape Town, Scott in Portland, Fabien in San Francisco, my parents in Rio, Fred in Australia and Dima in Moscow. I don't know who the heck those 2 dots in the mid-East of the States is, nor Brasilia or Mexico (?). The European part is alot more confusing. Still, I can guess most of them. The only one that puzzles me a bit is the login from Oslo. The rest are easy to guess (although many of the ones in the UK and Germany are too close to differentiate).