For a long time now people have been debating about form versus function. Sometimes the most functional way of building something is not the most beautiful. More recently fashion has also entered into the mix and to be honest the debate is considerably more exciting than Obama vs McCain.

Enter the M-Dress. Yes that is right it is a mobile phone that you wear, or is it a dress that you use to make phone calls? It works with a standard SIM card. When the dress rings you raise your hand to your head to answer the call. Incidentally if your mobile phone rings you do the exact same thing to answer the call. Its produced by a firm in the UK called CuteCircuit.

So is it a phone-dress or a dress phone? I don’t know and being a male quite frankly I don’t care.

However it does raise the question again when is technology useful and when is it completely unnecessary. I mean honestly who is going to use this thing.

However having said that the guys at CuteCircuit are worth a look. Their ideas may be somewhat fanciful but at least they are trying to push the envelope of finding some sort of common ground between form, function and fashion.

That time has come again. Yes, you guessed it, upgrade time. So I thought let me go and have a look at what might be available. I have an iPhone so where do I go? I mean let’s be honest it doesn’t get better than that. I decided that I would try to get something new or different. Recently I have used a Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. I will never get another Nokia ever again, that’s a given (although I would consider trying something from their communicator line). The Sony Ericsson was nothing but trouble and I was highly disappointed from day one, bottom line is that I am not in a hurry to go back there. The Samsung though not impressive had both good and bad points, but I was at least happy with it.

Having said all that I have never had a Motorola. Variety as they say is the spice of life, so I decided I would do some research and maybe give one of their phones a go.

The first port of call was to see what offerings there were at the online stores of Vodacom and CellC.

Guess what? They don’t have any Motorolas, in fact in the drop down menu you cannot even choose Motorola as a brand.

So here it is: Has Motorola pulled out of South Africa and if they have why?

We’ve all seen the sunset, and this post was inspired by my two boys, Joey and Nathan who saw their first sunset last week. I thought I’d highlight some of the more spectacular sunsets, you might be sick of them already, but still worth a look.

So you’ve seen the movie, you’ve got the t-shirt, not get the tutorial on how to create your own Batman Wallpaper.

The detailed tutorial is here.

Driving home now, I saw this. Took 2 pictures of the road completely flooded. Also a google map of the location.

I’ve been watching a few bloggers use comment competitions on their blogs to increase comments, and interaction on their blogs. So I thought I’d do the same.

For the month of October and November we’ll have a little comment competition. All you need to do to enter is leave a comment on Eliteblogger.net.

I’ll do a random draw at the end of November, and send the lucky reader an iPod. I’ll ship anywhere in the world as long as you have a postal address

I’m not sure what to make of this yet. It’s very cool, but very weird at the same time.

Here’s what the site says:

There’s a school of thought that says that plants, like higher animals, have thoughts and feelings. They have an inner voice, and can tell you their life-stories, if only you could speak “plant.” It’s not a difficult language to learn, actually - there are only a few words to contend with, since all they seem to care about is how much water they’re getting. There are no masculine or feminine nouns. Plus, there are no verb tenses, because plants have no concept of linear time.

The original breakthrough was made just a few months ago when the chief scientist at CERN, attempting to converse with a patch of catnip translated through their Milliard Gargantubrain computer, was able to discern “I CAN HAZ TWITTER?” The scientist didn’t quite understand that gibberish, but his granddaughter did, and the Plant Twitter Kit was born.

Once the kit is assembled, connect it to the Internet through the built-in ethernet jack, jam the leads into the plant’s soil, and subscribe to the plant’s twitter feed. It will tell you when it needs watering, or scold you if you’ve overwatered it, and report its status in between. The DIY Plant Twitter Kit comes unassembled, so you’ll have to break out the soldering iron and get to work. Don’t worry, it’s not that difficult to put together, and the satisfaction you get from building your own translation circuit.

Details

* Do-It-Yourself Kit includes everything you need to understand what your plant is saying

* Connects to Twitter over the Internet to report its watering status

* Some soldering skill is recommended but not required

* You’ll also need a soldering iron, solder, needle-nose pliers, small snips, masking tape and a flat-head screwdriver

…for a day. But it seems that it is so popular that it’s taken their site offline.

If you have a Mac or you run Linux you might want to grab a copy of crossover office white it’s free.

Crossover office is a nifty application that lets you run Windows application on a Mac or Linux machine without having to run Windows in a virtual machine like VM Ware. Very useful if you have one or maybe two apps that need to run in Mac, but are only available for Windows.

Gumtree have announced that they are now selling ads, in the form of top ads. I’m not going to go into too much detail on what they are, you can go to gumtree.co.za and have a look for yourself.

What’s interesting though, is that they are number 11 on Alexa for South African traffic. That means they get a few million hits a month, thousands of ads are posted, and if only a small percentage of those turn into paid ads, at R150 each they are set to make a ton of cash.

Monetization of websites is a very interesting topic, with as many ways to do it as there are websites to do it with. But what gets me about Gumtree is that they have found a monetization method that enhances the site, and benefits the users. I suppose that’s a good combo, and one that will most likely result in them being very very profitable.