Ti Point Tork

Dear Boosted: Surprise Me and Succeed

March 20, 2013 – 3:49 pm
The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted, a way to crowdfund arts projects. Now, if you're like me, you're probably wondering "don't we already have several ways of doing that? I mean, Kiwi artists have already used Kickstarter and PledgeMe to fund projects." Boosted's key point of difference is that, being operated by a charitable non-profit, your donations are eligible for 33% tax rebate. So everyday punters like us can enjoy the tax advantages of philanthropic donation, the same way that the millionaires do. To get that tax rebate, however, you can't receive anything for that donation: no tickets, no hip flask, no signed postcard, no posters, no "flown to Austin for lunch at a fancy hotel with me and my artist friends", and all the other rewards that Kickstarter and Pledgeme and other crowdfunding sites are built around. Your only reward, so far as I can ...

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Easily Creating Twitter Lists From Lists of Twitter Users

March 4, 2013 – 7:27 pm
Kiwi Foo Camp just ended. This year, I collected Twitter handles as part of registration and I wanted to create a Twitter list. Twitter doesn't provide an easy way to do this: you're supposed to visit each person's Twitter page and then add them to the list. Many clicks, many hours, no way is that fun. 1) ttytter to the rescue! Follow the website's instructions for installation and tying it to your Twitter account. If your experience is like mine, this will be the most time-consuming part of the process. 2) Create the list, either in ttytter (with /withlist mylistname create Public descriptive text about the list) or from your favourite Twitter client. 3) Then you need to take your list of @names and turn it into a set of command for ttytter: /withlist mylistname add name /withlist mylistname add othername ... or multiple on one line /withlist mylistname add name othername thirdname ... I used ...

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Copywrongs and Katherine Mansfield

February 28, 2013 – 10:25 am
Katherine Mansfield is New Zealand's literary icon: feminist, bisexual, incredibly gifted, part of the Bloomsbury circle of clever people pushing literary form before she died of tuberculosis. Her short stories are as moving today as they were when she wrote them almost 100 years ago. Her papers, and those of her husband John Middleton-Murry, are held at the National Library in Wellington as part of more than 50 years of dogged collection by that organisation. Mansfield died in 1923. Scholars have pored over her papers ever since. The most recent acquisition of KM papers, from the estate of her husband, has surfaced at least one formerly unpublished and unknown work. Beyond stories and essays, the collection has many letters she wrote (and never published). Under NZ law, her published works returned to the public domain 50 years after her death (1973). Unpublished works return to the ...

Posted in New Zealand, politics, Technology | No Comments »

Things You Learn

January 10, 2013 – 1:16 pm
Things I learned while I was too busy to write week notes: if you don't do it, it won't get done ("delegate" qualifies as "doing"); learning to delegate is as hard as learning to do the task itself was, and you've got to learn to delegate NOW; (related) setting it up so it can be done without you is much harder than doing it yourself; it's great to watch lines tracking up, unless they represent debt or complaints; you'll get the first sale to a friend because you're you, but in general repeat business only comes from giving actual value; high-touch enterprise sales needs people inside the organization who see the value and make your case for you at the internal debates when you aren't in the room; know what you want, know why you want it, and then ask for it -- shouldn't be hard, yet it is; "it is a good thing and should happen" is ...

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Week Note 3

November 22, 2012 – 10:02 am
(belated) Monday was a big day: I confirmed the hiring of my first employee, and gave a seminar at Auckland University on open research. The employee is my sister (getting back into the workforce after five years out with son; has been helping me out as book-keeper during that time), she's part-time (four hours a day), and our goal is to have her help me scale the business. I know the events inside out, but Jenine has been much better at process definition and automation than I have. Bree's job is to help me do for my side of the events (definition, promotion, sales, registration, hosting) what Jenine's already done for her side. The seminar is on Slideshare (see the slides here; not recorded, alas). It's based on a presentation I gave to the University Research Offices of New Zealand earlier in the year: start with open source, ...

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Week Note 2

November 8, 2012 – 6:14 pm
Ok, so it's been a while since my last week report. Sorry, habits are hard to form. Family flew back from our Colorado trip, landing Sunday morning. The great thing about "computer work" is that one can do it anywhere, so I was able to work while I was away. The bad thing about "computer work" is that one can do it anywhere, so I was working while my family were on holiday. This is really hard to do in a satisfactory fashion: work outstrips available time, one is not with one's family while THEY are holidaying, and the resulting conflict between what one must do and what one should do leads to stress. At least, it did for this one. (Bitterly amusing: was easier to take calls while on the road in Colorado than when 10m from my home in New Zealand; the Vodafone coverage at Goat Island ...

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Delayed Broadcast of International Programs

September 9, 2012 – 5:07 am
It's always seemed strange to me that local broadcasters would hold off broadcasting Dr Who, Mad Men, and other high-profile shows. Viewers chatter about it as soon as an episode airs in its country of origin, so regional fans either have the episode ruined by net spoilers or disconnect until the episode airs locally. The situation has improved enormously from the days of six month or multi-year lags, but the experience is still a bit shit. So when the new season of Dr Who launched in the UK last Sunday, and an Australian broadcaster announced they'd offer online streaming (to Australians) of the first episode as soon as it aired, everyone looked to Prime to see what they'd offer New Zealand. Their press release: we'll show it "less than two weeks after it airs in the UK". (queue record scratch) Rather than join in the online whining, I ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | 1 Comment »

Judge Harvey, Kim Dotcom, and The Press

July 18, 2012 – 11:25 am
Judge David Harvey has stepped down from the Kim DotCom case. At NetHui last week, he led a discussion of copyright where opinions from the floor were variously thoughtful, passionate, and novel. He was careful to watch his words, at one point saying "I'd better not say anything about that" when other trials he has came up. He didn't mention Dotcom, and the conversation never turned on the Dotcom case. Harvey's throwaway "we have met the enemy, and he is U.S.", was in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement: the American negotiators have repeatedly pushed for longer copyright terms, no parallel imports, removal of format-shifting exemptions, and much more. If you like parallel imports, turning your CDs into MP3s without having to buy the music again, and the growth of public domain culture, then the enemy very clearly is the U.S. So why the hell is he stepping down? Because newspapers ...

Posted in InternetNZ, New Zealand, politics, Technology | 4 Comments »

Schools and Belief

July 12, 2012 – 11:22 pm
Most of us have a case of "you don't know what you don't know": we don't know the range of what's possible, so we continue doing things as we've seen them done before but with slight improvements. I think of it as being in a dark room: by looking at other schools, talking to other teachers, and meeting other school boards, we can shine a torch into the darkness to see where there are walls and where there's unexplored territory. I'm more fortunate than most parents and school trustees, because I've been able to meet several impressive teachers and principals: Pete Hall at Upper Harbour, Mark Osborne at ASHS, Tara TJ in Wellington, Claire Amos at Epsom Girls Grammar, and others. They're passionate, they're doing different things, they're articulate, and they really care about their children. The natural tendency, when we see things is to want those things. I see this all ...

Posted in Education, New Zealand | No Comments »

Education and Technology

July 2, 2012 – 3:52 pm
I've been in the position of being a geek talking with teachers for a while, and I've found it best to approach the whole area of education with humility. In education, as in business, you can't just thrust technology into a situation and magically get the best possible result. So the answer to "how to do I use technology to help kids achieve?" is not a laundry list of technologies that the successful schools are using. Every school is a unique and beautiful flower, thanks to the Tomorrow's Schools structure. The NZ Curriculum, a marvelously broad document which encourages a focus beyond "the three Rs", is remarkably unprescriptive about how the teaching happens. Each school has its own set of strengths, its own priorities: some personalise education, some focus on inquiry, some are closely integrated with their local community. I've seen schools who use technology powerfully. ...

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