Tag Archives: me

I witnessed a suicide on Table Mountain

Yesterday evening I was near the top of Platteklip Gorge on Table Mountain when I saw someone fall to his death.

It was an insane moment. I almost literally didn’t believe what I had seen.

It was a little after 5PM and I was about 10 minutes from the top when I heard what sounded like rocks falling above me. I looked up and saw a person tumbling through the air and landing with a very load crack about 100m up the slope from me.

A few more rocks fell, some birds went nuts, and then there was just silence.

Where he jumped on Platteklip Gorge

There was another hiker just down the slope from me and we looked at each other for a second.

He said: “Did you see that?”

I said “What the fuck! Holy shit!” and then we both started walking upwards.

The body landed about 3m from the path but I missed it the first time (luckily it wasn’t easily visible). The result was that the other guy (Michael, a British tourist) and I arrived at the body simultaneously.

It was a surreal moment.

I knew what I was seeing. It did sink in. I’d just seen someone fall to his death and the injuries were truly horrific.

But we were both very calm. No freaking out, no puking or feeling sick. No shakes, or stuttering. Just calm.

I pulled out my phone to call mountain rescue but had no signal so another hiker who had just arrived called from his phone.

Then we just sat down to wait.

I became worried that he was still alive and we weren’t helping, so I went back to check his pulse. I didn’t need to check. His injuries were very extensive and he was very obviously already dead.

A while later two people leaned over the top of the cliff and started shouting down to us. They said that they had found a backpack and a suicide note. That actually made me feel a lot better.

A little later the mountain rescue chopper flew up into the gorge and winched down a medic. I went to help him with his kit and showed him where the body was.

“Victim is blue. Repeat, victim is blue.”

Without going into details, the mountain rescue guy (also named Mike) was extremely professional and took over the scene. He radioed in for more assistance and offered us trauma counselling before sending us all down the mountain.

All of the emergency services guys were very professional and seemed very organised. It’s great having pro’s like that around.

The only exception was that nobody could find a body bag. It was already quite dark and the evening wind had started pumping down Platteklip so the chopper couldn’t go back in there. Consequently they weren’t able to bring him down until morning.

I’ve chatted to the cops this morning and it seems that this was a desperately unhappy old man who was determined to end his life.

Positive thinking works – but only if you believe it

I believe that a lot of life is a big confidence game.

From sport to public speaking, to work, to relationships I have found that self-belief goes a long way. I call it my confidence trick and it’s worked very well for me.

The Economist has an article outlining experimental results that suggest positive thinking can leave you worse off – if you don’t believe the positive thoughts.

Read the article for details of the experiment, but in short the results were:

  • High self-esteem => benefit from positive thoughts
  • Low self-esteem => worse off because of positive thoughts!

The article goes on to suggest that the positive thoughts clash with the self beliefs of those with low self-esteem thereby reinforcing those negative self-perceptions!

Positive thought - works if you believe itSo, positive thoughts do help – but only if you believe them.

Pott’s confidence trick has experimental support!

Incidentally, I think that this is the reason that religion is beneficial to many. Religion is a positive thoughts believability engine. The problem is that it so often gets co-opted into ignorant or political ends.

Defeating the News24 daily vote

Beating the News24 pollEvery day the News24 site has a user vote. I recently decided to take a closer look at their system – perhaps I could defeat the vote security. It would be fun (who says I’m a geek?) and I could learn something new.

I used a combination of Firebug and Python to watch their voting system in action. Pretty soon I realized that the security is very simple.

This is the process that News24 uses to record votes:
Flowchart showing how the News24 vote process works

  1. Show the user the vote (question and options) and get their choice
  2. Go to a page that checks if the user has already voted
  3. If the user has NOT voted yet:
    1. Save a file showing that the user has voted
    2. Move to another page that counts the vote
  4. Move on to the results page

It’s a pretty simple process and it works as long as nobody messes with it…

The problem is that it is very easy to derive the URL of the page that counts your vote (3b). So you can skip all the checks and go straight there as many times as you like!

So I wrote a very simple program (34 lines in Python including copious comments and whitespace) that:

  1. Fetches the vote details
  2. Asks which option to vote for and how many times
  3. Hits the vote counting page X times

As simple as that!

And no, I don’t use it. That would be pretty lame. The fun part was figuring it out and defeating a well known site. Not screwing up the polls for everyone.

I recommend Loot.co.za for online book purchases

I regularly buy books online. It’s much cheaper and often easier than buying books in stores. The best site for buying books online in South Africa is Loot.co.za. Definitely better than Kalahari.net.

I still browse book stores all the time. This is my process:

  1. Find interesting books in a store. Take a photo with my phone to remind myself later
  2. Look up all interesting books on Amazon to read reviews
  3. If I want a book add it to a wishlist on Loot.co.za
  4. When I have a few books on the wishlist I put through an an order

This process helps to ensure that I get great books. Using Loot ensures that I get EXCELLENT prices. I highly recommend these guys – they run an excellent operation.

Price
Until recently I would always shop around the find the cheapest prices before buying books. I soon realised that was a waste of time – Loot is always the cheapest. Every single time.

Take my latest book order. I saved R116 (about 20%) by ordering through Loot.co.za!

Item Kalahari Loot
Out of Africa
(Karen Blixen)
R173 R113
A History of South Africa
(Leonard Thompson)
R153 R140
The pig that wants to be eaten
(Julian Baggini)
R105 R93
Tales of the Unexpected
(Roald Dahl)
R105 R93
Overnight delivery* Free R8
TOTAL R563 R447

 

Delivery
Loot has several delivery options and they stack up well against Kalahari. On my last order overnight delivery to me costed R8! Post office delivery is normally free.

I’ve had no problems with deliveries from Loot.co.za

Disclosure
I highly recommend using Loot.co.za. In the process of writing this blog post I found that I can get vouchers for referring Loot. I thought it only reasonable to disclose that if you click the Loot.co.za links in this post (and make an order) then I’ll get a R8 voucher… Trust me, that’s not why I wrote the post.

Devils peak fire – a little too close

Fire burning above Vredehoek on Devils Peak

Last night was pretty exciting/intense. We woke up at 01h30 to hear sirens outside. I got up and went out onto the balcony to see what was going on.

Chaos!

There was a huge fire raging on Devils Peak behind the house. The police were driving up and down the streets using a loud-speaker to tell people to evacuate and move away from the fire area.

Cars and people were streaming down from the higher blocks. There was stacks of smoke blowing down the hill and even burning embers landing in the street.

We cruised around for a while but the smoke was too hectic to stick outside for long. At one stage it looked as if the Western most of the Disa Park towers might burn down.

Thank heavens the fire fighters managed to beat the flames off and by this morning the choppers were making sure that everything was out.

An exciting evening indeed.

Bat Run 2009

There are many great trail running events in Cape Town – we must be one of the best cities in the world for trail running.

One of my favorites is the Bat Run – a mad race that I took part in this Saturday evening.

The Bat Run is run in the mountains at night (hence the name) and includes running:

  1. Up and down Devils Peak
  2. Up Table Mountain, across the top and then back down again
  3. Up and down Lions Head

That’s over 2000m of climbing and descending and a total distance of more than 25km – in the mountains and at night. Mad.

It’s a tough event but it favors the good climbers – like me. Last year I surprised myself by coming in 6th position and finishing in under 5 hours.

This year I went even better and managed to come in second at 4:03 which is under the old record. I just managed to hold off the guy who came in second – he was only about a minute behind me near the top of Lions Head so I had to push my body a little too hard.

Leo Rust set a new record at 3:46 which I won’t ever come close to.

This picture (by Eric Tollner) shows me reaching the top of Platteklip Gorge on Table Mountain. Real deer-in-the-headlights expression – I was pretty tired and quite surprised.

bat-run-09-deer-headlights

First run with my Garmin Forerunner

I tried out my new Garmin Forerunner heart rate monitor last night. I went for a quick run around the neighborhood and then uploaded the run onto my laptop. Pretty impressive.

I purposefully ran along the same road twice but on different sides of the road. The results easily show that my route used different sides of the road.

I started my run at one end of our ‘driveway’ and ended it at the other end (about 15m apart). Not only did the results show a clear difference between the two points, but also that there is an altitude difference of a couple meters!

This morning I uploaded the route onto MapMyRun.com and was pretty pleased with the results. You can view an interactive version of the map on their site (no heart rate and speed information though).

The route of my first run using the Garmin Forerunner

Can’t wait to get into the mountains this weekend.

Apologies about the gap

The guys at work blocked alistairpott.com so I’ve been locked out for a while. Sorry…

I’m working on a way around the block but until things start happening again you can check out:

  • My FriendFeed. This is basically a single page that lists all of my online activity – Flickr, Facebook, blogging, and general interesting links that I share. Make sure to check that out.
  • Do Stuff in Cape Town. A wiki like site that I set up for sharing information on activities in Cape Town. There are now over 170 things to do in Cape Town loaded onto the site.

Birthday graphs

Today is my birthday – an event that is becoming increasingly scary! Quarter century down…

Anyway, graphs always cheer me up so here we go:

From today I am closer to 30 than 20!

From today I am closer to 30 than 20 years old

But I still have 1 year to publish a paper like Einstein’s relativity or 21 years to beat Obama to a presidential nomination!
My age relative to a few other things

Do Stuff in Cape Town – my new project

If things have been a little slow on this blog lately it’s because I have been working on something new. It’s a site called Do Stuff in Cape Town and I have described it as an encyclopedia of activities in and around Cape Town.

The cool thing about it is that it works like a Wiki so anyone can contribute to it. I have developed it so that anyone visiting the site can easily:

  • Create new activities – there is a simple form for adding new activities
  • Update existing activities – say there is some detail or tip that you would like to add to an existing activity
  • Rate activities – it’s as simple as clicking on the star rating you want
  • Browse/search activities – I have put quite a lot of thought into making this as simple as possible
  • Subscribe to new activities – Get updates when new activities are added to the site

I have tried to make everything as simple as possible, but please give it a try and let me know what you think. Add an activity, or browse through those that are already there. I think that the site is almost ready, but I would really appreciate feedback!

Some of the activities that have already been loaded: