I needed to go to Sandton today (Saturday) to drop something off with a friend who lives directly across the road from Sandton City. I decided, having heard so many positive reviews of the gautrain, that I would take the train to see for myself.

I arrived at the Rhodesfield station in Kempton Park at about 08H00. The first thing which struck me was how helpful everybody was, from the moment I arrived at the boom gate to enter the parking lot. I asked the guard about the payment method etc, and he was friendly and helpful.

Once I got into the building I was greeted by more friendly staff who help you with the purchase process. I have no doubt they are not permanent fixtures, being there only to aid and assist in the initial periods. But they were so friendly and very helpful.

I got my card and went to wait on the platform for the train. Either through sheer luck, or efficiency of the service, the train arrived within about 2 minutes of me having arrived on the platform (the same was true on my return journey).

The stations as a whole are very clean and neat. The trains even more so. Carpeted isles and padded seats. The only problem is that it does not have overhead hand rails if you want to stand. I guess they don’t want people to stand, but if you’ve been on other undergrounds during peak times you’ll know that that’s not really practical.

The view is certainly different. Its not exactly a beautiful view, we’re still just in Johannesburg, but its a view that you wouldn’t normally get to see, particularly at the Marlboro Station, being raised as high as it is.

Having arrived at Sandton a few minutes later I got off the train and headed to the exit. I try to stay fit, so I try to avoid escalators and lifts. I didn’t however realise just how deep the station was. Its not that deep that I’d discourage you from taking the stairs, its just that you shouldn’t start at the bottom of the stairwell in a sprint like I did. By the time I got the the last level I was just about dragging myself up by the hand rail.

From the station its a 5 minute walk into Sandton City.

On the trip back, the driver announced that we were traveling at a speed of 160Kms/hours (100 Miles / hour if my conversion is anything to go by). It honestly felt more like 80kms / hour. The ride is just that smooth. When I arrived back at Rhodesfield just after 10H00, the queue for tickets was really long,  going right out of the door. Good thing I’m an early riser!

The trip was really amazing. I’ll certainly be using the service more, particularly when the Pretoria lines open. Also, with SANRAL now tolling just about every piece of highway the can lay claim to, I’m sure it will be far more economical than road travel. Of course, the 5 or 10 minute walks to and from stations will do your health the world of good too.

Gautrain Improvements I’d Like to See

In spite of it being an already great service, I think there are one or two small thing they can do to drastically improve the service.

1) Allow users to register online. If we could register online, and enter the gautrain card number on our profile, we could view our account balances, add funds online etc. This would be a great feature. When I got back to Rhodesfield at about 10H00, they queues for people loading funds were out the door. If I could add funds myself online, I could avoid the queues and walk straight to the platform

2) Better signage. The signs at Gautrain are a little lacking. Its not obvious when you get onto the platform where you need to stand for which line. Its also not very clear which cars you need to get into (some cars are reserved for airport use). There are loads of gautrain employees to assist at the moment, but in peak times they can’t help everyone.

3)The Sandton station should have clear signs to get to Sandton City. It would in fact be much better if they could add an entrance directly opposite to the current one as I suspect (without having done any investigation), that that would put you onto the road running directly past Sandton City.

4) Better travel plans. Their weekly pass is not really cheaper than their daily rate. The reason I say that is because their weekly pass gives you 14 trips. I know that that is 7 days return, which is a weekly pass, but they should consider having a weekday weekly pass. Its quite conceivable that people would want to travel to work, Monday to Friday, but not over the weekends.

Quotes Overheard on the Train

I overheard one or two comments on the train (not that I was trying to listen in…. ok, maybe a little).

• One person was taking his family (mother, father, uncles, whatever) to Sandton. He works in Sandton and now uses the train to work. He was so proud of the service that he was bragging about it like it was all his idea. At one point he said, “dit maak my so trots op Suid Afrika” (“It makes me so proud of South Africa”). Ditto!
• Another lady was there with her husband and the two cutest little girls. The one girl was so excited when we went “under the tunnel”, and even when we were “over the tunnel” (the ramp up to the Marlboro Station). At the Marlboro Station, there was a train next to us on the other line. This lady looked at some of the people in the next train and said, “Oh, look, they’ve already got the London Underground look on their faces!”. I guess the novelty has worn off for some, or, perhaps they just express their excitement in a different way. (PS, her husband had a decent looking camera and had taken a fair number of pics. I asked him to mail me some which he said he would do, so I’ll post them here once I get them).

Advice for First Timers

The best advice I guess is just go and see it for yourselves. As I mentioned, at about 10H00, the ticket queues are long, so get there early, before 08H30 if you can. Even if you don’t use the service then, just load money onto your card so when you do use it, you just walk in.

Listen to the comments on the train. I know, I know, its kind of rude to listen to people’s conversations, but this is not exactly a private environment, and I think the positive vibe is well worth getting involved in!

If you have any pics, stories or comments / improvement suggestions, please feel free to post here.

See you on the train!

Gautrain Arrival

Rhodesfield Gautrain Station

Gautrain Rhodesfield Station Platform

Kempton Power Station

Rhodesfield Station

I have a growing DVD collection, and this consists mostly of series, or related movies, eg, I have most of “The Sopranos”, “Friends”, “Godfather” and other related mobster films.

So, because my DVD’s are mostly series or related, I prefer to burn the original disc to my laptop. That way I can watch it where ever, when ever.

Here is what I do:

1) I burn the DVD to an iso image on my hard drive using DVD Shrink. DVD Shrink is an open source package that rips DVD’s to iso images and supposedly shrinks them too. I say supposedly because the resultant file is still just under 5Gb. In any case, it does a brilliant job of this!

2) I use VideoLan to watch the iso image as if it were a DVD in the drive. VideoLan is maybe one of the best media players I have ever come across. Its simply brilliant. It is also free, open source. This will play movies and mp3′s equally well.

Ok, so that’s all simple enough, but I ran into a problem the other day. A while back I bought the BBC’s Planet Earth series, but I bought it from the USA, so the region encoding on my DVD player is different to the regional encoding on these discs. DVD Shrink was unable to read the disc because of the DVD Region Encoding. VideoLan on the other hand had no problem playing the disc, they seem to automatically bypass the DVD region encoding. This was pretty cool and I was really impressed once again with VLan, but not surprised.

The problem here is that I don’t want to carry my disc’s with me every where I go. Besides being bulky, they’re also expensive. I read about the regional encoding schemes and I was led to believe that there was probably not a great deal I could do. BUT, this did not deter me and I let logic prevail. Logic dictated that the encoding (or rather the result of the encoding) was not purely at the hardware level. There had to be a software level involved, because if it was purely a hardware issue, then not even Vlan would have worked.

After searching around for some time (and even trying to check the registry for the DVD Region Encoding), I came upon DVD Decrypter.  DVD Decrypter allowed me to bypass the region encoding of the DVD’s and rip them to my hard drive as an iso image.

Now, I am able to once again use VideoLAN to watch my DVD’s straight off my laptop.

Next, I will test what happens when I burn those iso images to DVD. Will it have the same encoding as the original disc, or will it be encoding free? Don’t know yet, but watch this space

Ok, so Christmas is over, and new year’s is approaching rapidly. This is the season that we all make our resolutions (you know, the same ones from last year!).

So, what are mine?

1) …..

Ok, so I don’t really make resolutions. BUT, that doesn’t mean that I am not resolved. Or resoluted. Or whatever the word is.

The new year is a great time to try new things. If you’ve been thinking about starting that new business of your own, now may be the perfect time. What evidence to have to this claim? Absolutely none, just a gut feeling.

According to me the new year is a good time for a new business because many people will be thinking along these lines. So, what does that mean for you? It means that there is a potential market that may not be there (at least not in the same numbers) at another time. New businesses require services and products, maybe yours.

This leaves the one eternal question? How will I fund my new venture. If you’ve come here to have that question answered, I’m afraid you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

The most expensive thing if you’re in a service industry is probably advertising. Rates are REALLY Expensive. Just today I got a quote from a daily national paper. A full page ad PER DAY = R100 000! Not bad work if you can get it!

Another area of advertising is in the online arena. This is where we can really help you. If you need a website, we can make a killer one for you. We can do it all; from static, simple pages to CMS to shopping carts to database driven to…. well, we think you get the idea.

If you need web hosting, for your new site designed by us, or an existing site, look at our cheap web hosting packages.

Of course, once you have a website you need to consider online advertising. The best online advertising at this stage? Google Adwords. If you need help with your google adwords advertising, give us a shout. We are currently looking into Microsoft’s online advertising, but we’ll wait until they’ve answered our questions before we say anything else (don’t hold your breath).

Happy new year, let this be the year we make our millions!

John