Hello! I hope you’re having a good day out there wherever you are!
This is my first post on Ecency/Hive, so let’s try and summarise who I am in an Introduction Post. I think the easiest way to do it will be to expand on each bit of the little “About Me” blurb on my profile:
“Jasper Dick. South Africa. Renewable Energy Development. Husband and new father! Singer/songwriter + guitar, surfing, martial arts + self-defence, politics….” … well, after that I ran out of space! Please skip ahead to the part that interests you most, I guess! 😊
Jasper Dick
Yes, that’s my real surname! It made for an interesting time in school, but they were always going to tease me about something, hey? Now that I’m an adult I just go along with the joke:
- “It’s not everyday you see a 74-inch Dick” – I’m just shy of 6 foot 2, or 187cm tall.
- “I’m probably the biggest Dick you’ll see today” – a safe guess as my immediate family members are smaller than me and it’s not a very common surname in South Africa! I believe there are more Dicks in Ireland and Scotland where some of my ancestors originate?
- “I’m a Dick with a capital D.” – Actually, I’m pretty nice! 😊
South Africa
I am writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa. I believe some sides of my family arrived to escape the potato famine of the 1850s and at least that side has been here ever since. Cape Town is an undeniably beautiful city that has spoilt me - I find it very hard to imagine wanting to live anywhere else (although the only other place I’ve lived for a spell was a factory town that resembles Mordor so that didn’t help the comparison).
We have beautiful beaches and the iconic Table Mountain, so it really doesn’t take a long drive or hike to feel like you’re not in a city at all. It’s a place that everybody should visit once if they can. I’ve heard of foreign visitors who got stuck here at the beginning of the Covid lockdown in 2020 but have since found homes and decided to stay forever!
With that said, Cape Town is not immune from South Africa’s problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment, poor education and crime, but more on that later…
These pictures are taken in the middle of Cape Town… believe it or not…
Renewable Energy Development
Five years ago, I got lucky and managed to move from a career I hated, to one I actually enjoy at a company that finds and develops new sites for potential utility scale wind farms or solar farms. This is particularly important as South Africa regularly has rolling blackouts (we call it “load-shedding”, where various suburbs take turns going without electricity). Several independent studies have shown that the cheapest solution for our electricity supply to get back on track includes building a significant number of wind and solar farms because South Africa has places with some very good wind and very good sunshine.
The newest round of wind and solar farms that are about to be built after winning Round 5 of the Government tender will be able to sell their power to Eskom, our power utility, for significantly cheaper than Eskom could make the power itself through new coal or nuclear plants. The benefit to the planet is just a bonus, but definitely what got me involved in the first place! 😊 There are challenges to renewable energy development, but at least they are varied and keep me on my toes.
Spinning Out: Myself (the tall one in pink) and three colleagues stopping to admire an operational wind farm somewhere in the middle of South Africa before going on to check for new potential development sites – you need good wind or sun, as few environmental issues as possible, and access to a part of the grid network with available capacity. Finding all of these in one place is tricky!
Husband and New Father
I met my beautiful wife Julia when we were both very young, about 19 and 20. It meant we could enjoy dating for about 9 years before we actually felt old enough to get married! We’ve continued to take it slow and our first daughter, gorgeous little Madison Alexa, has only arrived recently about 7 years after that. I’m sure all fathers think their daughters are beautiful, but check the pictures if you don’t believe me – I think I’m being objective! As I write this, she’s about 8.5 months old and crawling, and the first tooth is breaking through… it really does feel like all the changes are happening so fast now.
Our wedding ceremony back in 2014 at a wine farm in Cape Town. If you love wine, Cape Town is the place for you… it will take you years to visit every farm!
Maddy as an unusually pretty new-born… aren’t they supposed to look a bit like geckos?
… and 8 months later she just keeps getting cuter!
We are also proud parents to Bunny the white cat and Mr Pickles the brown cat. We hope to add a small dog one day!
Singer/Songwriter + Guitar (and harmonica sometimes…)
I used to do open mics and little showcases to play my own original songs quite regularly in my early twenties. I also love interpreting covers in my own style. More recently, I feel like the only songs I’ve written are ones that I think little Maddy will enjoy when she’s a little bit bigger!
I do seem to notice that despite not playing nearly as often these days, that I really enjoy it when I do. It also seems I’ve improved with age… There seems to be some serendipity happening at the moment – an old music club I used to help organise 10 years ago asked me to come play again out of the blue, and another bar venue keeps asking me to come back too and is even willing to pay a bit!
I am also helping my old school friend @clairemobey record and add layers to her beautiful original songs recently. I’m so glad that she’s finally ready to embrace her talent after all these years – it’s wonderful to watch. We don’t have much equipment to accomplish this besides a 2-track loop pedal for the recording, and some free software for the mixing – but it’s been a lot of fun! Both her and I should be sharing music on the communities that we can find on Ecency/Hive in the weeks to come.
Sing Dicky-boy sing! Did any of you guitarists notice my two-capo trick at first glance?
Surfing
If I am allowed to say that I am good at music, then I will have to admit I’m mediocre at surfing, but I’m passionate about it, and despite becoming a father last year I actually feel like I’m making time to improve at surfing for the first time in ages. Part of it has to do with making some new friends who are good surfers and are pushing me a bit.
Cape Town is a surfer’s dream. We are located on a peninsula that is nearly an island, and so the wind is always blowing offshore somewhere, holding up the wave face and making the conditions clean instead of choppy. There are exposed places to get the most of a small swell, and there are sheltered places to escape from a massive swell, and everything in between. The water is cold but you get used to that!
Compared to places like California and Australia, we don’t really have a crowd problem. Of course, there are a few places that are consistent and convenient like Muizenberg, Long Beach, Llandudno and Big Bay that do get crowded as a result, and I really like to avoid crowds hustling over the waves when I can – so my goal is to find what conditions suit the many other places all around Cape Town and have a more adventurous time trying them all out. I hope to blog about these surfing adventures, and somebody has lent me a cheaper version of a Gopro camera that I can take out into the water with a mouth-mount to help with that. In true surfer’s code I may try and give rough clues about the spots, rather than blatantly name some semi-secret where a few clever guys who bother to go the extra mile usually have everything to themselves! There are unwritten rules in surfing!
Surf Dicky-boy surf! I probably could name this place up in the Eastern Cape without feeling too bad as it’s a very famous point, but let’s start as we mean to go on! I was lucky to get it uncrowded because the swell was raw, and the current was strong. The clever locals knew that it would get even better in the next day or two, but I didn’t have time to wait and just grabbed the biggest board I had to help me catch a couple.
Martial Arts + Self Defence
If I am allowed to say that I’m good at music, and mediocre at surfing, then it’s best to admit that I’m horseshit at martial arts! I know this, because after dabbling in some forms of Kung Fu and Tai Chi that were more about theory than practice, I took the step of moving into the kinds of martial arts where sparring to test yourself against a non-compliant partner is an important part of each class.
On the empty-handed side that would be boxing, that later included kicks (kick-boxing or Muay Thai depending on the gym I could find at the time). I find this a real challenge because I am not an aggressive person at heart… at all! In soft sparring, if I manage to hit someone, I usually apologise and my partner hits me three times while I’m busy apologising! As such, I don’t think I will ever get in the ring and go at it 100%! I’m lucky if I remember to keep my hands up and breathe!
More recently, I have also taken up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ). Wow, is it humbling! People of all shapes and sizes can have you tapping in submission in no time as you are completely lost in a game of physical chess! A bit emasculating really… A few months have passed and some of the newbies are tapping in submission to me, and so it is obviously a grappling system that works if you stick through the exhaustingly humbling beginnings and accept that there will always be higher belts than you, giving you that tappy-tappy experience. I actually can imagine competing at BJJ one day, unlike boxing, because hopefully the loser knows to tap before he/she is hurt, and so that suits my personality a bit more.
I also do a bit of running and strength training to complement these sports (and surfing).
Self-defence? I used to do another class that I hope to go back to when I have time. Similar to Krav Maga, it would try to teach us how to defend against a knife attack, but then it added the layer of honesty by showing how if you are the guy with the knife, what you would do to keep the knife and keep attacking, and basically how impossibly hard the empty-handed person’s job really is. Eventually the system admitted that it basically wanted to teach you how to survive long enough to get your own tool (baton, knife or even a gun) into your hands, and then what to do from there. That last part was often taught through blade-on-blade sparring (with rubber knives of course!).
The instructor of this last class was a champion Kempo kick-boxer in his youth, and coached grappling as well. Basically, he is as dangerous with his bare hands as a person can possibly be, and yet he still carries a gun and a knife… This instructor was kind enough to take me to the shooting range for the first time to show me the basics and how to be safe, which was a whole new world for me – up to that point I had never held a gun before and was generally pretty scared of them.
It all got me thinking…
Yes, if the criminal only wants your possessions, hand them over and get away unharmed. Unfortunately, in South Africa, some criminals are violent. There are violent gangs who have to kill as gang initiation. There are drugs like Tik that turn people into mindless berserkers. There have been groups of hikers stabbed for no reason. My own friend (and my boss at the time) was killed in a hijacking gone wrong, and he was not the type to fight back. He had just got out of the surf, and I could have been with him that day.
I have noticed that all of these classes have made me more situationally aware in looking out for trouble and avoiding it entirely. None of it has made me cocky or over-confident. If anything I have learnt that there are many good fighters out there, and some of them could happen to be criminals. Whatever happens will be traumatic at best, and by far the best solution is to take steps to set up your life, and to watch out, to avoid being a victim in the first place. The classes teach that too. Because you can’t avoid everything in life, they taught us how to comply properly as well…
Box Dicky-boy box! A fun event where we got split into teams to softly spar for points against a classmate of similar skill. Thank goodness it was soft sparring because the guy in blue outweighed me by 10kg/22lb of extra muscle! 3 Rounds felt like a very long time, and would have been an eternity if we were boxing at 100%! Professional boxers are insanely fit!
Politics
When it comes to the news from somewhere like the USA, South Africa typically only gets the CNN side of the story. The people who vote Democrat are good, and the people who vote Republican are bad. Simple. We could never imagine why it was such a close race every four years or so based on the news we get fed.
If you read the last section of this blog about self-defence, you will know there came a day where I joined my self-defence instructor at the shooting range. This led to me thinking “if I were to get a handgun, which one should it be?”, which in turn led to a bit of research on Youtube.
My Youtube algorithm decided alarmingly quickly that it must have classified me wrong, and if I’m researching guns then I must be a Trump-supporting redneck somewhere in the middle of the USA. It quickly started suggesting videos from Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Turning Point USA, and I started watching some of them.
Now I think I understand – to simplify, half of the USA watches CNN (or similar media), and the other half watches FOX news. CNN spreads fear porn about what would happen if things get pushed too far to the extreme right. FOX news spreads fear porn about what would happen if things get pushed too far to the extreme left. Both stations lie about actual facts to suit their narrative.
The people who watch CNN hate the Republican voters and stay in an echo chamber where they only speak to fellow CNN viewers, don’t debate with the FOX viewers, and essentially reinforce each other in the thought that the other side are crazy and dangerous. The same goes for the viewers of FOX… and this political polarisation is getting worse. It has actually been studied that since the 90s, the left are moving more to the left and the right are moving more to the right – where will this ultimately lead?
For everything else in life, moderation is key. You’ve got to be assertive without being an asshole. You’ve got to be kind without being a doormat. Politics is a horseshoe, go left enough or right enough, you will land up in the same place – some form of Fascism.
My opinion is no better than anybody else’s, and I’ve never studied politics… I’ve just been lucky enough to watch both sides of the news lately, and to speak to many different kinds of people. It would be nice if we could head back towards trying to understand each other and finding common ground. So… lately I seem to be trying to find out where I stand in various topics and to understand both sides of the argument. I think most of us are probably a silent majority watching awkwardly while Uncle Donald is having a shouting match at Christmas dinner with Uncle Bernie, wishing we hadn’t invited either asshole to the party.
So there you have it!
That’s me in a nutshell as of April 2022. I am definitely going to try and share music. I may also blog about surfing, especially if I go somewhere unusual. I may blog about being a new dad. Who knows, I may find time for other hobbies like skateboarding, hiking and rock-climbing!
So, what would you like to read about? Please let me know