Jeffothy’s Keyings

Hello from Cape Town.

We arrived last night at about 7pm. After a bit of a kafuffle (ie forgot which rental car company we went through…) we managed to find our car and our hostel in Cape Town. The car is a VW Polo - we both think it’s pretty sweet, wouldn’t mind trading it with our Jetta (:

Today was fantastic. Cape Town has certainly lived up to my high expectations thus far. It is a lovely city - maybe not the “prettiest in the world” as some have told us, but on the Top Five for sure. Today we took a cable car up to the top of Table Mountain which allowed us to see the whole of Cape Town from 1088meters. We took a hike down (Platteklip Gorge) which was quite nice (but we missed all of our hiking buddies from Canada!). About half way down this storm just flew in. The top of the mountain was covered in dark angry clouds, we’re glad that we made it down before the torrential downpour. After the hike we took a drive trying to get to the Cape - but the rain was coming down too hard, we’ll go another day. Now it is beautiful, clouds have rolled away.

We have quite the trip planned for Cape Town. Tomorrow we go wine touring in Stellenbosch. Tuesday we reef dive in False Bay. And Wednesday we will tour Robben Island (the prison that kept Nelson Mandela) and the jackass penguin colony near Simon’s town.

We’ve posted some pictures from Kruger National Park - more to come over the next several days.

We spent 2 days in Kruger National Park here in South Africa with Sarah’s parents Dave and Donna. It was very cool, saw lots of wild animals including: leopard, elephant, zebra, rhino, hippo, and hundreds of impala. We’re at the airport going to fly to Cape Town where we’ll base from, with a rental car for 5 days. No time to post photos right now, but watch for them soon.

Thanks for the comments, keep them coming! It’s always great to hear from you guys at home.

Cheers.

Guten Tag!
The first leg of our travel to Africa is nearly complete. We arrived in Frankfurt yesterday morning at 11:00am local time. After several laps around the airport we found the baggage storage and the train station. We hopped on a standing room only bombardier (200km/hr train!) and made our way to Heidelberg via Mannheim. By the time we settled in to our room at the Kranich Hotel we were ready to go to bed, unfortunatly it was only 2:00pm (6:00am MDT). After a short nap we walked into the town and had a delicious meal of schnitzel and spetzel - of course with a hearty German beer!
Today we checked out the 250yr old Schloss castle along with the Apotheke museum. With all the walking we’ve done, we’re all tuckered out for our flights to Dubai and then Jo-burg.
Stay tuned for more later!

I thought I’d share with you some good technical experiences that I’ve had recently.

I have moved my domains to new registrars, so that I could renew them for a full 10 years.

1. I moved my “.com” domains to DomainsMadeEasy.com

2. I moved my “.ca” domains to NamesPro.ca

I also started using a paid service for my DNS configuration. At first I was looking for a cheap domain registrar that included a very flexible DNS management tool, but I ended up using a separate service provider for the DNS stuff.

3. I now use DNS Made Easy for all my DNS configuration.

1. Domains Made Easy

I get 2 major benefits from Domains Made Easy over my previous registrar.

• Cost is only $7.85USD per year, which is about $9CDN per year.
• I was able to renew the domain for a full 10 year period.

There are a couple detriments that I can list too:

• The phone support has only a US area code, and no toll-free option.
• The services do not support “.ca” domains.

2. NamesPro.ca

I have been very impressed with the services from NamesPro.ca

• .ca domain registration is only $12.88 per year
• The transfer of my existing .ca domain took about an hour (seriously!), as opposed to a few days for the transfer to Domains Made Easy.
• I received a real person’s response to an electronic support request within minutes, even late in the evening.
• I was able to renew my domain for a full 10 years.

3. DNS Made Easy

I purchased the Small Business Membership for $29.95 a year, and I can configure 10 domains with their tools:

• The interface for creating, changing and removing DNS records is very easy to use, and it’s nicely layed out. It’s even got some cool record templating functions.
• They support SRV records so that I can allow the users of my domains to use federated chat networks with Google Apps (For You Domain).
• Their name servers are redundant and use a fancy IP Anycast system that gives them a 100% uptime guarantee.
• I get wild card sub domain support, which I didn’t have before
• I get Dynamic DNS support for any/all of my domains’ sub domains, which I didn’t have before.