Ti Point Tork

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 ...

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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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Holiday Road Toll

January 2, 2012 – 10:02 pm
Every long weekend we hear how many people died, as though it means something, but there's never any analysis beyond whether it's more or less than last year's number. It doesn't help me know what's going on: are we better drivers or worse? What's the point of measuring if you don't analyse? After all, I just kissed goodbye to my wife as she set out for a 100km trip to Auckland to see a friend. Should I have encouraged her to stay at home? Comparison to last year's number is largely useless without knowing what the variation is. Is a 50% increase within the bounds of normal, or does it represent a nation of speeding drunks, blearily passing out behind the wheel and mowing over toddlers as we tow our boats back from the bach? If you want to make sense of the holiday road toll (as I write, we've had 17 ...

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2011 in Books

December 31, 2011 – 4:03 pm
I've been conscientiously using Goodreads to review every book I read. I've used the Goodreads API, some Perl, and some Javascript to boil down my year's reading. Without further ado, I present ... My Year in Books$(function() { $('.bookspermonth').sparkline('html', { type: 'bar' }); $('.starspermonth').sparkline('html', { type: 'bar' }); $('.bookspershelf').sparkline('html', { type: 'bar' });});Books: 100 Reading Rate: 3.6 days/book Monthly Breakdown: 8 books/month on average 11,9,12,5,6,6,7,1,9,15,6,13 Busiest Month: Oct (15 books) Slowest Month: Aug (1 book) Total Reading: 29,696 pages Shortest Book: Your Business Brickyard: Getting back to the basics to make your business more fun to run. at 64 pages Longest Book: The Crimson Petal and the White at 900 pages Average Book: 309 pages All Reviews: 47,905 words Shortest Review: No Dominion (Joe Pitt, #2) at 9 words Longest Review: The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World at 3,467 words Average Review: 479 words Average Quality: 3.3 stars Quality over time: 3.7,3.3,3,2,3.3,3,3.3,4,3.6,2.7,3.3,3.8 Best Month: ...

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National Standards, Charter Schools, and a Pint on the Future

December 5, 2011 – 12:03 pm
tl;dr: Charter schools aren't a panacea, they don't appear to be compatible with the emphasis on National Standards, and this seems like the top of a slippery slope which will result in us all being as stupid as Americans. Background New Zealand introduced "National Standards" last year. In the past, the curriculum talked about competencies and learning areas in general terms and defined stages through which children would pass. It didn't say "at this age, children should be able to do X". That was the gap that National Standards filled. The debate has been around timing (too fast) and how those standard age-based skills were arrived at (not soundly). It's important to note that National Standards is not standardised assessment. That is, it's not the same test taken by every child once a year to determine what the child can do. Instead, teachers use their professional judgement to assess ...

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

Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong

November 23, 2011 – 10:07 am
It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in libraries for a few years now, and am always humbled by the expertise, hard work, and dedication that librarians of all stripes have. Yet it's no revelation that libraries aren't the great sources of knowledge and information on the web that they were in the pre-Internet days. I wanted to push on that and challenge the National and State librarians to think better about the Internet. I prefaced my talk by saying that none of this is original, so it shouldn't come as a surprise. I merely wanted to bring the different strands together in a way that showed them how to think about the opportunities afforded to libraries for the digital ...

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | 16 Comments »