Jenny Morel is raising a $100M NZ VC fund. That’s good news, in that NZ needs smart angels and VCs. I’ve had a number of NZ friends making the rounds of US venture capital firms and angels looking for investors, and the message has always been “not while you’re in NZ”. Of course, it’s rarely stated quite so bluntly (VCs never want to close the door!), but it’s always quite clear that it’s much harder to invest in something that’s on the other side of the world than something you can drop in on regularly.

I’m impressed by Budget Hero, a game from the American Marketplace radio show. It lets you see the effects of the various spending possibilities (bring the troops back home, raise the social security eligibility age, etc.) and see the long-term wealth of the nation. I played it once or twice, but I struggled to find it satisfying.

I think what we need is a SimCity-esque program for the nation. Want to pump money into healthcare? Fund private schools? Cut taxes? Allow private roads? Shut off immigration? Provide free tertiary education? Institute tougher prison sentences? Let’s see what those actions would do to not just the economy but also the wealth distribution, health, and general happiness of the nation. I note that SimCity has been open sourced and that Treasury publishes a lot of its research. Just add software developer!

I had a thought on Saturday that wouldn’t let go. Here’s the brief pitch: let me know what you think.

I see in Rod Drury’s blog that National have released their first real economic policy and it’s to do with funding fibre-to-the-home in NZ. It’s good! Anyone who travels knows how dire the bandwidth situation is here, and it’s worse on the ground.

For me, bandwidth = productivity. I don’t buy Rod Drury’s productivity maths; productivity is the increase in value added by a process, e.g. for manufacturing the value of outputs over the cost of inputs, labour, and land. I could add more value (earn more) if I have faster Internet access to the rest of the world. I’d be able to read more, write more, and create more billable outputs if I wasn’t constantly waiting for web pages to load or Ajax apps to update.

A client made the decision to use Telecom as their web site host. I argued against it because the price differential was so great between Telecom and, well, anyone else. The client’s management decided to go with solid blue chip Telecom. The service we’ve had from them has been such unmitigated shit that I’m astonished Telecom is still in business.

You’d think the premium would get you better customer service or at least efficiency, but it doesn’t. I’ve been on hold for, let’s see, 18 minutes so far (listening to “come together … right now … over me” every 3 minutes) with nary a human in sight. If your choice is between Mad Ken’s Shonky Web Hosting and Telecom’s business packages, turn to Mad Ken every day–you’ll get the same shitty service but at least you won’t be paying through the nose for it.

Julie Starr faced an interesting problem recently: how to explain RSS, aggregators, even Twitter to a room full of journalism students … without slides or a net connection. In attempting this, as she says, she “found a new respect for teachers this week”. As a recovering teacher (or, as we’re called when companies pay the bill and we have no pedagogic qualifications, trainer) I thought I’d give it a go.

I often joke that Foo Camp (“Friends of O’Reilly”) should be Font Camp (Friends of Nat Torkington) in New Zealand. I love typography and was delighted to find “The Font Scene in New Zealand”, a list of typographers and fonts made by New Zealanders or by New Zealand companies. My favourite so far is Feijoa (PDF), made by Kris Sowersby who was also featured in the latest Idealog.

Congrats to Sue Tyler and the Ponoko team, and all the others who were interviewed by Peter Griffin for the Idealog issue focusing on craft. The article (which will be online in a few weeks) has photos of various Ponoko-made goods, including a necklace of sheep which looked awfully familiar—Sue had given us one for our daughter when we were in town for Webstock! I hadn’t realized at the time that it came hot off the presses from the Ponoko team. Good on yez!

I haven’t blogged in a while. That doesn’t mean things are bad. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. Something happened around September, the end of my last trip away for 2006–something good. We just clicked. We went from feeling like strangers in a strange land to feeling like we were home.

It’s weird, I can’t point to anything in particular. It’s just that suddenly it became easier. We had friends, we weren’t unhappy, we were actually enjoying ourselves. At that point we lost the drive we’d had to connect back with the people we’d left behind: Jenine stopped mailing her friends amusing stories, and I stopped blogging.

About two weeks ago, my uncle Zom got a little carried away with some repairs in the cabin and drove the family fishing boat (“Foam”) onto some rocks. Getting it off damaged the propeller and keel, so ten days ago he and I took advantage of the time, tide, and weather to put it up on the sticks and effect some repairs.

For the next two days (during low-tide only, when the boat was out of the water) he bogged the keel with fibreglass while I painted. It was fun! I painted the bum of the boat all by myself, scraping off barnacles and working on the thick viscous antifouling paint. I did one side each day, the first with roller (rollers make it much easier) and the second without (because we only had one roller and it was well trashed by this stage).