When I first came to Johannesburg, I stayed in Atholl, then after a few months we moved to Parkhurst.  It is quite incredible now to sit in a restaurant and see how popular it is, a huge suburb with lots of small houses commanding prices of R3 to R4 million.  It was anything but popular when I came to Johannesburg and I went to Hyde Park High School.  In fact, I was teased quite often as living in a very poor suburb and I have never forgotten how one boy in my class said to me, “Atholl to Parkhurst!  Talk about a drop in society!”  It was an atrociously bad school academically and if there is one good move I have made in life, it was leaving the school.

I think I was the only person at Hyde Park High School, at that time, who lived in Parkhurst, or at least the only one who admitted it, and so it is quite amazing to see that 25 years later, give or take a few years, it is an incredibly trendy and popular suburb, as it has been for quite some time now.  Personally, I don’t think it is the safest suburb, I don’t think it should command the prices that it does, but I am happy that the “dump” where I living has now transformed itself – even though, if the truth be told, the streets, the shops and the houses really have not changed that much.  It is still pretty much the same place – in fact, all that has changed, is Hyde Park High School and its pupil composition.  

The Hobbit is no doubt going to be a huge smash around the world, it being the concluding movie in the Hobbit Trilogy.  In the initial reviews on RottenTomatoes, it has a 71% rating but that rating will change once more people have seen it.  The initial reviews seem to suggest that it is a movie that is the closest to the actual book, which was my favourite book of my youth, having read it at the age of 12 and being enthralled at the wonders of the worlds Tolkien created.  I would not be surprised to see the rating being higher than that, but I cannot say that I was enthralled by it.  Partially because I think that one book being turned into three movies is way too much, and so there is much less to tell and partially because it was non-stop battles from start to finish.  I did not feel like it was that there was much else to the movie, and to watch a variety of orcs, goblins, etc having their heads chopped off for two hours can become a bit wearisome.  Watching it of course in 3D makes it somewhat better, but it is not a movie that I found to have much substance.  A review which I have read on RottenTomaties, which I probably identify the most was the following, “It comes across like a very impressive video game … it is hard to get worked up about any of it.”

We have recently spent some time at the firm with experimenting with Gotomeeting.  It is a product that allows somebody to make a presentation up to 150 people and during that presentation you can talk to other people, and see them via their webcams on your computer, but more importantly, it also allows you to show your computer screen to all participants.  That allows you to demonstrate, for example products, show pictures or explain to staff how to use a new feature on your E-file system, as in our case.  

The sound quality is very good – probably better than a Skype call, and given that it allows you to have every single one of your staff members on at the same time, it is obviously extremely productive and saves on meetings, meeting spaces and allows for quick training of everybody, all on the same subject at the same time.  I have been tremendously impressed with it, and plan to use it a lot more in the future.  It is not a free product, whereas Skype is, but it certainly can cope with the volumes of participants that Skype would not be able to.

I must say that I am astounded that the postal strike has just gone on indefinitely.  One would have assumed by now that it could have been resolved.  The workers are also taking a huge gamble – they are after all working in a company which is slowly being eliminated by courier services, which are more reliable, if not more expensive, not to mention the Internet. They don’t seem to care, but I do also understand their side of things.  They have basically worked for the same company for years and years, but are not permanent employees – obviously, because the Post Office does not like the government’s own terms of employment, as set out in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and to deal with the CCMA – and they can avoid all of that by having them as temporary employees.  

It is somewhat hypocritical of course, because it is the government’s own policies, that they are now trying to avoid by making those employees permanent and I can only assume eventually they would have to give in on that point.  It is of course a disaster for businesses, including for De Broglio Inc, where we await Road Accident Fund claim forms from doctors, not all of whom we can travel to by car and collect those forms, police reports from police stations around the country, licensing certificates from Licensing Departments and a whole host of other documents that one requires to prove and sustain personal injury claims.  

We have a fantastic update service where we update our clients by e-mail, but unfortunately only 90% of our clients are on that service, which means that for the other 10% of our clients they have received no correspondence from us for about three months, and one wonders if they even know, since they are not getting our e-mails, that our telephone lines have now been out for one month!  The 011 446 4200 number is not working, but 011 788 7273 is working but of course only if a client receives an e-mail or a letter from us would they know that! 

I was quite interested to see that in other countries, and you can find an example on the following link, that sex offenders are registered.  This means that if you move to a city or a suburb, you can look up what sex offenders live in that area, and it will not only name the person, but give you their height, approximate weight, hair colour, eye colour and also give you their address.  In many cases they are not allowed to live, for example within half a mile of a school or a church.  

It becomes a problem for the value of your property if, after having bought, one of your neighbours is registered as a sex offender.  It certainly violates their privacy, but the argument would be that when you have molested children, for example, that you have no entitlement to privacy, even after you have been let out of jail.  It obviously works on the premise that there is no “cure” for such people, and it is better if everybody in the community knows who they are and where they live, so that the community can help watch the person and keep their children away from them.  Most of the offenders appear to be in their fifties and older, and I am not sure whether that is a function of how long it takes for them to be caught, but I do think it is something that South Africa should consider introducing.

The Hunger Games are back on, to huge grosses on its opening weekend and the movie has some lessons for us.  I am not talking about what the movie is about, although dividing a final book into two movies can make things slow – just as you have seen with The Hobbit being divided into three movies, although it was just one book and whereas The Lord of the Rings was actually three books.  We will only see the final episode of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay at around the same time next year, but it certainly does show you that the embarrassment Jennifer Lawrence suffered earlier this year is over.  

I say earlier this year, but it was only a few weeks ago, and in today’s world you are the subject of a scandal today but as long as you hang on in there, in a few weeks the media moves to a new topic.  There is only so much that they can sell out of your dramas – new photographs or embarrassment – and certainly, as we suspected, the pictures have had no influence on Jennifer Lawrence’s career at all or the movies in which she stars.

I think that the Kulula policy of never giving refunds on any flights, no matter what the circumstances, is completely unreasonable.  I book a number of flights with them for my clients, and recently in a personal matter, where a flight was no longer necessary, we asked, with four days to go, if we could cancel the flight.  We were told that all we could get back were our airport taxes and that Kulula will keep the entire amount paid for the ticket – and of course try and sell it again!  

The one thing about flying with SAA is that although it is sometimes more expensive, if you miss a flight they will make a plan for you even if it is at a small penalty, and the problem with booking with airlines like Kulula is that if you miss a flight, even if you notify them days in advance, you will have to pay again and there is no refund.  It is a very harsh attitude, it is not a good way to do business in my opinion and it is something that they should really give some serious thought to.  You don’t always have to keep somebody else’s money in your pocket when you are not rendering a service to them and you can still sell that ticket again and probably will and it leaves you feeling that you have just dealt with a completely unsympathetic company who has relieved you of some of your money.  I cannot for example see what the problem would be if they, at the very least, don’t want to give you the money back, or give you 80% of the money back, why they cannot give you a voucher that you could use on a similar flight at a similar time later.  

In a dramatic turn of events in America, the food and drug administration recently announced new rules relating to calorie counts. Calorie counts will have to be put on menus – and that is whether you are at a restaurant or at the movie theatre – there will be a calorie count, on the popcorn too!  This is to place Americans in a better position to choose what they are eating and know what they are getting when they make a choice from the menu.  Until now, as is the case in South Africa, people are choosing blind, not realising how many calories are contained in the food they are eating.  It will also include calorie counts on alcoholic beverages as long as that drink is on the menu – it would not include something that you order at a bar.  

The new rules will only start at the end of 2015 in America and one hopes that we will learn from this, copy and implement it in South Africa.  You don’t have to invent the wheel when other countries are already leading the way with legislation like this and I don’t think we would pretend that South Africa does not also have its own obesity issues.  It certainly will, if nothing else, eliminate people from having the excuse that they did not know what they were eating and I think we need to have similar laws introduced here as soon as possible.

I must say, as frustrating as I find my own drivers at times, I cannot imagine what goes on inside DHL.  There is not a time when they don’t let us down with documents or papers.  They will forever claim that a driver is on the way to us.  At 1pm on 26 November, for example, the driver was going to be with us shortly, a little bit later he will be with us between 2 to 4pm.  At 3.30pm he was on the way to us and very close to us and after 4pm of course they announced that he will only be able to come the next day and sadly they don’t go directly to where my house is situated.  Of course, they never said that when they took the address from us, and I had similar problems when I have imported goods and DHL has been in charge.  

As a result, I try to use FedEx more often, because they are far superior, the only problem being that their branch is in Midrand which is not as convenient to me as the Bryanston branch of DHL.  I used DHL recently to send an urgent document overseas to America and I tracked it online, and the route it took was unbelievable, but to cut a long story short, a document that is given to their branch on Thursday afternoon, before 3pm arrived at its destination on Tuesday.  In other words, it took an international courier company 5 days to deliver from a major city in South Africa to a major city in America and I really don’t think that that beats the post by very much at all – at least the post in other countries, not South Africa!  On the other hand, as a courier company you should not be comparing your delivery times to snail mail.

After the ridiculous amount of money that Russia, who could hardly afford it, spent on the Winter Olympics, namely R50 billion, the IOC has decided to change how cities bid for Olympics. They will even help countries fit the bill by giving them money.  Already four of the six cities that were competing to host the 2022 Winter Games have pulled out – some of them saying that the IOC’s demands on big cities were ridiculous. Right now, the only two cities bidding for the Winter Olympics are Beijing and Almaty.  If you have not heard of Almaty, it is in Kazakstan.  Amongst the new relaxed rules, they will allow joint bids, possibly even in different countries, as long as they were reasonably close to each other and they will also allow the host city to include a sport in their games which is popular with the local people but not already an Olympic sport.  In other words, if you want cricket, you could have that or possibly Frisbee throwing too.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out – and how they choose, for the host of the 2022 Olympics, between two countries which both have a poor human rights record.  Whether that choice is Beijing with its additional pollution issues or Almaty – things certainly sound a little bit desperate for the Winter Games. 

I was dismayed to see the field for this weekend’s Nedbank Challenge at Sun City.  I think the media has, in many past years, unfairly criticised the field as being weak or weaker than in the past.  That has not always been true with us having a number of the top 10 players in the world, but this year is no doubt in my mind the weakest field in the history of this tournament.  

It is complete with some South African golfers, whose names I never heard of before, and perhaps the increasing of the field from 12 to 30 players has created a sense, in a year especially like this year, of more weakness, giving that there are some fairly lowly ranked players in the world that are now taking part whereas if there were only 12, the lowest ranked player in the world would at least have the higher ranking than if there are 30 players.  With the exception of possibly Lee Westwood, Justin Rose, Martin Kaymer, Tim Clarke and Charl Schwartzel, the rest of the field really are not a “who’s who” of golf, and I am not surprised to see a lot less interest in the tournament this year than in previous years, despite an excellent media campaign running for months by Michael Vlismas on behalf of Sun International.  

Tiger Woods has his tournament on the same weekend in America as he has for many years and this year it has certainly attracted the cream of the international talent with almost all the best players in the world taking part in his tournament and Sun City having picked up the scraps.  Quite frankly, I think that the solution for Sun International is to go back to a 12 man limited field and use the money that they are currently paying compositions 13 to 30^th, possibly to pay some appearance fees – in other words, some of the top players in the world are not going to fly 17 hours from America to South Africa just to get US$100 000,00 or US$200 000,00 for last place – as much money as that may seem to us ordinary people!  If you want a Masters winner, somebody like Bubba Watson, who will bring in the crowds, perhaps you have to pay him an appearance fee, apart from the winnings that he would make and I think US$500 000,00 appearance fee on Bubba Watson would be money far better spent than paying out from 13^th to 30^th, for in many cases a bunch of no-name brands who will not generate any excitement amongst regular supporters over the years of this tournament.

Taylor Swift had a rare media coup recently, being on the cover of both BusinessWeek magazine as well as Time magazine in the same week.  The theme of both of the articles was quite similar and that is that her new album, 1989, which is a pop album and not the country music style she sung in the past, is the biggest selling album of the year.  

Album sales are down so much these days that when she sold 1,2 million copies in only the first week of release, it was more than the second biggest album of the whole year by Coldplay, has sold since May!  Basically both magazines articles wrote about the music business and revealed that she is so far ahead as the biggest selling artist at the moment, that those who are second and third are so far behind her that metaphorically they cannot see her!  I must say that the new album is a completely different type of music, and I think I prefer her old style, and I will not be surprised if she goes back to it in her next album, but either way she is a very talented performer.  Unlike many artists, ,she actually writes her own lyrics, which are normally clever and well thought through and that ability will allow her to remain relevant for years.  For somebody worth $200 million she is surprisingly young – she is about to turn 25.

A lot of experts have been calling for tax-free savings accounts for some time.  This is a country where people have a very poor record of saving money and to turn that around, we certainly need to give people some incentives. At the moment, for those of you who don’t know, if you have money in an account and you earn interest on it, you end up paying tax on that interest at whatever your tax rate is!  

In other words, with interest rates as low as they are, you still end up with less because the interest that you earn still gets taxed as well.  The government has obviously realised that this is not a good idea and so they are now introducing, from 1 March 2015, tax-free savings accounts.  You will be allowed to contribute R30 000,00 a year to a tax-free saving account, without any tax being levied and a lifetime contribution limit of R500 000,00 will apply.  One assumes that with time and inflation in years to come they will increase that.  It is not anything to get particularly excited about, but it is a start and hopefully when they introduce compulsory retirement contributions, that will go a long way to solving some of the problems that people have in terms of not saving at all, and not providing for their retirement.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which they always deny, is really beginning to cost the country and its citizens.  The Russians insist they are not in Ukraine, just some of their army members who are on holiday have gone to help the separatists fight the Ukrainian government.  It is astounding that they believe such nonsense will be bought by the rest of the world, even if it appears that a large number of Russian citizens, deprived of a free and independent media, actually do believe that.  

The sanctions that have been put in place against Russia have however already led to the Ruble slumping 31% against the Dollar this year.  As a result, all foreign goods in Russia are obviously going to cost a lot more now and with oil prices down, that is creating additional problems for Russia because they sell.  It is again a lesson for South Africa and many other countries that if you don’t tow the line that the rest of the world requires you to follow, you will be punished in one way or another, and I enjoyed a quote by a money manager in London, Paul McNamara who said, “I would rather have root canal work than buy some rubles.  I don’t regard Russia as a sensible place to invest.”  The policies and actions of any country can lead to that country being punished by the majority of the countries of the rest of the world no matter what Russia said about ignoring the sanctions, and them having very little impact on Russia, they are clearly causing financial hardship within the country.

The one thing that almost all of us, who live in South Africa, have in common is a crime story.  Many of us have only been victims of petty crime, and others of more serious crime.  I am not sure what to call mine, because I came out of it absolutely fine, apart from paranoia sometimes when I enter certain driveways, but I would like to hear your story and what you think we can do to reduce crime in South Africa.  

If you are interested, you can read more about what happened to me and my family in 2009 at this link and then understand why within a month I moved to a more secure estate and I would never be prepared to live anywhere other than in a secure estate or complex again.