Te Reo and Kiwi Culture Links
December 31, 2005 – 7:00 pmSome things I've found while surfing: Basics of Maori, Maori pronunciation, Interactive Maori conversations, Maori Language NZ Anthem, Background and recordings of the NZ anthems.
Some things I've found while surfing: Basics of Maori, Maori pronunciation, Interactive Maori conversations, Maori Language NZ Anthem, Background and recordings of the NZ anthems.
Looking Ahead to 2006
December 31, 2005 – 7:00 pm[I wrote up these thoughts for the NZ-2.0 list, but thought you might be interested] I've been thinking lately about Things To Do In 2006, and trying to figure out where technology will go in the coming year and where there are opportunities to ride that wave and win. I've come up with eight broad areas, each of which I could easily build a company (or a half-dozen companies!) in. First, voice. Internet voice applications are hard to do in New Zealand, because of the piss-poor upstream bandwidth in standard broadband offerings. However, there are two ways to bypass that: through the phone system (as aangel.co.nz did) or by simply making intranet applications. Clay Shirky's fond of saying that once a group gets Asterisk, their workplace practices are forever changed. Every meeting can be recorded, every Internet service can be given an extension, everything online can be accessible offline. New Zealand (and, in general, the world) has not realized ...
Weather, School, and Ditch-Digging
December 20, 2005 – 7:00 pmIt's been an adventurous week, weather-wise. Being away for so long, I'd forgotten the misty mornings that are classic New Zealand fare. We had a front parked over us for four or five days, with what the weather forecasters discreetly refer to as "scattered showers" but which really means occasional heavy rain and light spitting the rest of the time. Useless for drying laundry, but not an impediment to getting out and about. I've been nervous about how much to write about our dealings with the local school. I'll err on the side of honesty. We've had meetings with teachers and principals, and seem to be "in the same waka, paddling in the same direction" (waka is Maori for "canoe"). The school's digging itself out from the reign of a crappy principal who was ejected at the end of 2003. They've made internal and administrative ...
Boat and Land
December 10, 2005 – 7:00 pmI'm reading Russell Brown's collection of other people's essays, Great New Zealand Argument, and at the same time I'm reading The Nationbuilders by Brian Easton. Both tackle the subject of what it means to be a New Zealander. I'm reading them in bite size pieces: Easton's in the bedroom and Brown's in the bathroom. Uh, so to speak. They're fascinating. Lots of things I'd never thought about, such as the fact that we're the only country where our national day is always (and has been since the beginning) an occasion to question why we even have a national day, whether it means anything, what we might do instead, and what we'd celebrate if we had such a day. And also things I'd always wanted to know, like who Bill Sutch was. The coolest thing so far has been realizing that I'm a Kiwi. Time and time again, when Kiwis are polled for what they think defines them, "the ...
VCs and Contacts
December 7, 2005 – 7:00 pmToday I went to Auckland to meet Russell Brown of Public Address, to my uncle's work, then finally to meet with some VCs. Russell first. He's an interesting guy, very articulate (as befits a good on-air personality!) and full of background for all the things that are puzzling me about New Zealand: why is the DSL so shit? Why does nobody just grab Telecom by the regulatory balls and squeeze? etc. He's a Mac user, his son plays Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft, and he's fighting hard to open up sound archives for free use and reuse. He'd fit in with Cory Doctorow, Paula LeDieu, and Ben Hammersley in England. So I introduced them via e-mail. This should be fun! My uncle, Jeff, runs a Windows software development company. He had just got back from Microsoft, where they were chuffed to learn he'd written his point-of-sale app in their latest and greatest suite of dev tools. ...
Schools, Rats, and Parents
December 5, 2005 – 7:00 pmIt's been hard to balance life and work here on the other side of the world. Some days the work consumes me and I ignore family (bad Dad!) and other days I'm burnt out and can't face the keyboard. I dug in a garden last weekend with my uncle Les and that made me feel like I was doing something constructive, with a purpose. Thinking in timescales longer than a week or a month is oddly reassuring, and I'm slowly realizing that I didn't do this at the other places I've lived. Our battle with the rats is over. The last rat succumbed not to traps but to the four bricks worth of poison that he ate before he died under the bed in the games room. We discovered this after he stank to all hell. I had the joy of removing the rat, and Jenine had the pleasure of vacuuming up the maggots ...
Day 13: Love of a Small Country
November 29, 2005 – 7:00 pmToday I sent email to, and got replies from, the acting CEO of New Zealand On Air, and the general editor of Te Ara (the Encyclopedia of New Zealand). I love that these people are so accessible. Today's accomplishments: moved the dead cars out of our garage so the emptying of the house can begin in earnest; planted more plants; cleaned windows. I'm throwing myself more into this house and property than I have ever done with any house before. I think feel this one is important. I learned that New Zealand has a Digital Strategy, which fittingly has its own website. There are some interesting case studies there, including Te Ara and CommunityNet Aotearoa (a kind of civic action site). I eventually found Matapihi, a single search box that queries a lot of digital archives. There's a big push as part of the Digital Strategy to get interop between all the archives of cultural artifacts, which is nice to ...
Day 12: Rural Schools
November 28, 2005 – 7:00 pmToday Jenine helped out at William's school, and we learned that there's quite the gulf between the grouchy old woman teaching his class and the sweet old woman who taught him in Colorado. This one is bullying, dismissive, and belittling. This puts us in the awkward position of being new to the school, yet dissatisfied. Jenine will talk to the head of the PTA and to the principal. I do not want my son to have three years with an inadequate teacher. I found some online Maori classes while surfing to find out how long it would take Jenine to be able to teach (answer: one year of classes). I need to take the Maori lessons so that William doesn't beat me. He came home with the Maori vowel pronunciation on Friday, and today he's singing a song I remember singing in Primary school. I'll post it as soon as I can find its name ...
Day 10: Rural Power
November 26, 2005 – 7:00 pmI'd forgotten how amazing New Zealand's weather is. We're just a thin strip of island in a lot of water, close to Antarctica. The weather's always shifting: some good stuff, some crap, some good stuff, some crap. A strip of concentrated crap floated in last night and dumped a ton of rain on and blew 60 knots. The wind howled in the trees, the house shook, the rain rattled on the tin roof, the kids crawled into bed with us, and the pounding continued today. Dad took the kids in the morning, but only got William. Raley was still asleep: she'd crawled in with Jenine, scared by the noise. I had to humbly admit that I too had been rather worried by the force of the wind. I take consolation that the house has been around for forty years and hasn't fallen down yet, so it can probably take anything the elements throw at ...
Day 9: First Computer Conference
November 25, 2005 – 7:00 pmI think I'm probably doing it a favour calling it a conference: Convergence Oceania was a Wireless Forum sell shop, an expo hall with a room featuring the biggest exhibitors. Everyone's Powerpoint deck was focused to their own product story. Good thing it was free :-) The expo hall was interesting, though. The usual big boys were out in force (I missed the Telecom and Vodaphone Big Name Speakers because I arrived after they did their thing) but there was an interesting mix of independents, VARs, and importers. I was particularly taken by AnyData, Aangel, and Minimax. I'll write them up on my Radar blog. I started to get a feel for the business dynamic here, too. With only 4M people, >shitty broadband penetration means that net-based apps are going to struggle for an audience. Even in mobile, where penetration is 80% (putting NZ 9th in the world), companies are looking to overseas markets. Obviously they ...