Making A Better World - Milton Louw

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two." -St. Augustine

Did you know? • The fifth biggest “country” in the world is Facebook. That’s right, a country that only exists on the Internet has over 200 million people sharing their thoughts, photographs, birthdays, love lives, interests and causes with one another. In the “Nation of Facebook” your every thought is shared with all your friends at once. They can indicate if they like it, or make a comment. In addition, you or a friend can “write on the wall” if you wish to send each other private messages. The photographs area allows you to upload any of your photos and share them instantly with those you know. The best feature is the ability to tag a friend, and everyone they know will be informed that a photo has been loaded. • In the Twitter application an actor, Ashton Kutcher, beat the news company CNN to having a million users following their “twitting” (Twitter is a service that allows you to send and post SMS messages to a network of contacts.) Kutcher had challenged CNN to the Twitter race,...

The capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 are focused in six areas: • Collaboration • Portals and personalization • Search • Enterprise Content Management • Business processes and forms • Business intelligence Collaboration You can use a SharePoint site to share information and get your work done more efficiently. A SharePoint site offers workspaces and tools that your team can use to track projects, coordinate schedules, and collaboratively create and edit documents. Improve team productivity by using a SharePoint site You can use a site to store routine information for a single department or short-term information for a special project that spans several departments. By using a collaborative workspace such as a team site, your team can become more efficient and more productive. Manage projects more efficiently You can use a site to manage projects and coordinate tasks and deadlines among team members. The Project Tasks list template includes a Gantt chart view where you can s...

Twenty years ago most of us did not use word processing or spreadsheets. Today it is compulsory for all of us to be computer literate and probably be a super user with documents and spreadsheets. WELL, the next thing we must be able to is to collaborate with one another. A SharePoint Web site allows you to easily collaborate with colleagues from across the hall and around the world. The ability to create knowledge bases, online surveys, discussion boards, and chats can help produce, organize, and distribute project information. What is SharePoint Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the plat...

Namibia has gone through various political changes over the past two centuries. One thing however is always constant. Once the political change occurs, there is a realisation that political independence means very little without economic ownership change. When the English ruled over Southern Africa they had the economic might. The Afrikaner took over and had to create state institutions such as the “Eerste Nasionale Ontwikkelings Korporasie” (ENOK or First National Development Corporation) to allow Afrikaner businessmen to get a share of the economic pie. The also created other institutions that should be supported by their people to become as powerful as the English ones, for example banks and insurance companies (Sanlam, Santam, etc.). In much the same way, the black people of Namibia need to become participants in the economy. The first efforts were made in the early 1990’s to unite the two chambers of commerce, namely the Windhoek CCI and Windhoek Business Chamber. This resulted in...

For a period of two years I lived in Ausspannplatz close to the police headquarters. This area was previously the place travellers would stop and leave their wagons before entering Windhoek. (“Aus spann” means to let the cattle free to graze.) There is a small park and two traffic circles in the area. This is the downtown of the city. As in most cities and towns around the world, the downtown has become a night life area filled with bars and casinos. Of course, where there is money and alcohol, there are also prostitutes and drugs. When my forefathers (the Plaatjies family) came to Windhoek, they had a business in the area – opposite where the Ministry of Transport and Works is today. Not surprisingly, I found some of the people still remember my family in the area. But it is the night life that was the most interesting. The area starts to come alive with the “night people starting around 16H00. The first “ladies” start appearing as their customers pass by before heading to their respe...

Crime is a problem. It stretches from petty theft of cellular phones to murdering your own wife. Sometimes it seems as if our Independence has given us freedoms because the punishments have been taken away. The punishments done away with include corporal punishment in schools, the death penalty, and forced labour amongst prisoners. More importantly the shame that went with the crime is no longer there. Bring back forced labour, the Namibian Constitution Article 9(3)(a) allows for forced labour “required in consequence of a sentence or order of a Court”. Allow the prisoner to reimburse the victim and society for the wrongs they have committed.