Posts Tagged ‘vredehoek

06
Sep
11

SlickTiger And The iPad2 – the Saga Continues

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: SlickTiger and the iPad2
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redneckHi and welcome to the second instalment of a series of posts I’m planning on writing about my new iPad2 from the perspective of a complete tech retard.

When we last left off, your trusty narrator and host SlickTiger had just fired up his shiny new iPad2 3G for the first time when he encountered his first major hurdle – no micro SIM card.

Micro SIMs are identical to normal SIMs, only about 2 thirds the size. Not too sure why Apple decided you need these irritating little things, but apparently it’s the same for iPhones.

The good news is you can actually cut a regular SIM card to make it fit, but be sure to read this blog post first so you don’t fuck it up because I know you, all gung-ho, a meat cleaver clenched in your fist, just itching to cut your SIM cards up.

Be cool daddy-o. You own an iPad2 now, you’re better than everyone so start acting like it.

I decided not to go the SIM card cutting route and instead investigated getting an iPad2 data package through 8.ta because I got a tip off from my main man Callegari that they are the only network that currently have official iPad data packages and their data rates are pretty cheap.

 

 

Fast forward to Saturday morning and I’m sitting at the 8.ta shop on Adderley Street, iPad2 in hand with all the RICA docs the website said to bring only to be told that they can’t help me when it comes to anything iPad related because no one in the store has done the training yet.

Brilliant! You offer a product that no one in the shop is qualified to sell! Sheer genuis!

Even better than that is the fact that the sales dude then asked me where we lived so he could check what the coverage in our area (Vredehoek) is like which I’m really glad he did because there is none.

 

Next stop was the 4u Vodashop in Gardens Centre where my main man Ahmed hooked me up with a micro SIM (R210 on contract) and 1.5GB monthly data package for R249 in no time.

He said to try the data SIM in about 4-6 hours as they take a little while to activate. Twenty hours later, my iPad was still saying “You are not subscribed to a data service” every time I tried to fire up the 3G which was driving me fucking nuts.

Turns out all I had to do was get into “Settings”, select “Mobile Data”, hit “APN Settings” and enter the word “internet” in the APN field.

I hard boot the iPad and next thing I know, BOOM! I got the whole wide world in my hands.

From there with two touches I was in the iTunes app store, browsing the top free apps. Moments later I was downloading Zombie Highway and that’s pretty much as far as I got because if there’s anything radder than owning an iPad2, it’s using it to smash zombies against cars whilst popping round after round into their soft, brown skulls.

 

 

NEXT UP: SlickTiger reviews Zombie Highway and reveals the first downside of using a 3G connection on an iPad2.

-ST

17
Jan
11

SlickTiger:1 Moving:0

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
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They say that moving is right up there with the most stressful things life can throw at you like losing a loved one or getting fired. They’re all supposed to be on the same level which I always thought was a little over dramatic.

I mean moving ain’t that bad right? Load up a bakkie with all your stuffs, drive from A to B, offload, rinse, repeat.

 

 

So Captain Albatross and myself borrowed a bakkie from a buddy on Saturday and got rolling.

We loaded up two couches, a bookshelf, the washing machine (FAHK those things are HEAVY!), a couple of boxes, a heater or two, and tied it all down so tight you could pluck the ropes like guitar strings.

We nailed the drive from Stellies into Vredehoek and everything was easy breezy. We get to the other side and started unloading stuff and taking it upstairs and even that was going well until we hit one major fucking snag.

My one couch is fucking HUGE.

It’s the Triple H of couches, nearly two and a half metres of soft, maroon leathery goodness that is the most comfortable basterd I’ve ever had the pleasure of passing out on. I mean, I’ve written some of my BEST posts lying utterly inert on that radass couch. Through the good times and the bad, that couch has always been there, it’s like a long, large maroon extension of myself.

(That’s what she said.)

 

 

Anyway, you think we could get that couch up the narrow, twisty stairwell leading up to our flat? Not a fucking chance. We wrestled that thing, we twisted it, we pushed it, we tried to walk it up the stairs one goddamn step at a time and eventually all we managed to do was wedge it in there so tight, we couldn’t get it out.

Which was when we came up with our killer idea of removing the sliding doors to our flat and hoisting the basterd up the balcony with ROPES!

I love rope. I’ve always loved rope. The old-school hemp kind is the best. Soon as I get my hands on that shit I just wanna lasso a fucking horse or climb a mountain or hang a guy. Ropes are the answer to EVERYTHING!

 

 

So we set the couch down the way it would normally sit, made two loops around each side of the couch, went upstairs and got hoisting.

CHRONIC fail. Don’t try that shit without gloves yo! What the hell were we thinking?! Also the couch kept twisting and turning and refusing to cooperate in any way, so we set it back down and had a beer.

Second time around we got the bright idea of standing the couch upright to do the hoisting and tying ropes around it like ribbon around a Christmas present. Right about then, the dude who lives downstairs arrived home and offered to help us, which I found pretty hilarious considering he looked like about 70 kgs of cookie dough and admitted to having just come back from Ratanga Junction where he smoked a joint and went on all the rides by himself.

We told him to go upstairs with J-Rab and to hoist for everything he was worth while we pushed from the bottom. At this stage, drenched in sweat and tired from taking all the other stuff up the stairs, I was pretty convinced the couch was going to kill us all. Soon as J-Rab and the Ratanga Junction Stoner yoinked it up, the weight would pull them off the balcony and they’d end up landing, couch and all, right on top of me and the Captain.

“RIP SlickTiger. His favourite couch killed him.”

All I remember after that was dicking around with the ropes, checking they were all alright before we commenced the yoinking and then BAM! the couch was halfway up the building and into the lounge!

I bolted upstairs, grabbed a hold and helped the Ratanga Junction Stoner and J-Rab get the rest of it in and stared in total amazement at the RJS who had basically single-handedly pulled our entire couch up a second story balcony and into the flat faster than I could blink.

“Babe,” I said triumphantly to J-Rab, “whatever that man is smoking, I want some.”

 

 

I tell ya, you haven’t lived until you can honestly say you’ve yoinked a couch up to a second story balcony with ROPES!

SlickTiger:1 Moving:0

Next week we haul the final load so that’s the bed, fridge, other couch and TV cabinet, so stay tuned for the next enthralling update because you know as well as I do that there’s nothing better to do on a Monday morning back at work than read stories involving stubborn couches, Ratanga Junction Stoners and ROPES! 😉

-ST

29
Mar
10

The Nuns Of The Antarctic

By SlickTiger 5 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
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When I was younger, I fancied myself quite the budding poet and used to scribble out random and garbled verses that were mostly really shit, but hey, at least they rhymed.

In highshool I got published in a collection of poetry compiled by the poetry institute of Africa called ‘Shadows and Silhouettes’ which got me pretty excited until the thing finally arrived and I realised they’d pretty much published EVERY SINGLE POEM THEY GOT SENT.

To get published I think you just had to bang a out a verse or two and be in highschool, that was about it.

I tell ya, life is shitty sometimes. My buddy Barbarian fucking nailed it on Saturday night. We were sitting in his flat in Vredehoek and talking about some random thing or other when he said the funniest thing I’ve heard in months.

‘Christmas food,’ he said, ‘is crap.’

 

 

That simple sentence nearly had me in tears because he’s fucking right. The turkey is always way too dry and stringy, the Christmas pudding gives you the runs and mince pies are severely overrated.

You put your knife and fork down after eating Christmas food and you feel like your internal organs are dangerously close to rupturing.

No matter what anyone says, at that stage, you’re glad Christmas only comes once a year.

See, the magic of a thing is in the anticipation of it. The moment I found out I was going to get published, my adolescent mind filled up with all kinds of hallucinations of grandeur and I was pretty sure fame and fortune were close at hand.

 

 

Needless to say, over the next few years I wrote less and less poetry and became more and more sceptical of other ‘poets’. I started to suspect that really what they were doing was using poetry as a guise to write a pile of wanky shit that means nothing to anyone, including the person who wrote it.

This is especially true of the so called ‘poets’ who used to haunt open mike nights in varsity.

Pale, frail and nervous looking people, they would always go up there and read something that sounded like a confession about how their uncles fiddled with them when they were young and now they spend their alone time in their granny’s knickers listening to Anthony And The Johnsons.

 

 

I got drunk one night at such an event and wrote some poetry of my own on a serviette. After a particularly heart-wrenching performance by a guy who only just barely managed to keep his shit together onstage, I decided to jump in there, bar serviette in hand, to recite a poem I called:

Untitled

He drank until the day he died.
He drank to dull the ache inside.

He smoked until his lungs caved in.
All he ever knew was sin.

After what happened, he just gave in.
After what they did to him…

Dopey fucked a penguin.

Boy. Did that go down well.

-ST