I just got back from a week in the US for Foo Camp, where I had a great time shopping two ideas around:

• New Zealand can be a hub of innovation, and
• Kids aren’t being turned onto science and technology as careers

Re: the first idea, this interesting CNet news article talks about how the 1980s and 1990s saw Indian and Chinese technologists imported into Silicon Valley to fuel the great tech booms then. Now those technologists are returning home to create startups and build the local version of Silicon Valley. Ben Nolan and John Clegg from ProjectX are examples of this in New Zealand.

Before I left for my last trip to the US, I went to a school board meeting where a program called Super Kids was discussed. It’s a kids Christian program that wanted to use the House Of Learning (aka “library”) at our local primary school after school hours. I voiced my objection, asking why they would want to use the school when there was a perfectly good church and Sunday school one block away. The meeting ended with the board deciding to ask the program for more details.

Great news! The house in Colorado is under contract, they inspect tomorrow morning, and then hopefully it’s smooth sailing to closure. This is it: if it falls through, I’m renting it out. But if it sells (even if for much less than we were hoping to get) it’s the end of monthly nightmares (the financial monthly nightmares, anyway!) for us.

Kids are doing great. Tonight Jenine had a meeting of the preschool board, so I was Daddy alone. We played poker with a bag of the 10c coins that New Zealand is removing from circulation. Raley’s getting the hang of how much you should bid for each type of hand—it’s amazing to see her able to identify pairs and threes-of-a-kind by herself now, because a year ago she was struggling to do that. Now she’s figuring out when to bet 2 and when to bet 4. William’s just passed that, and has been taught bluffing by his grandpa. He’s going to be dangerous. I look forward to the day when his Uncle Jon teaches him card counting and takes him to Vegas.

Back in New Zealand after nearly three months away. What a lot of culture shock there was, both in leaving and returning.

Leaving: it’s so easy to return to the US, yet so hard. The traffic was incredible: it takes as long for us to get from our US house to Old Town Fort Collins as it takes us to get from our NZ house to Warkworth. The difference is that one is 5 miles away, the other 20km.

NZ Herald reports the government wants at least 47,000 skilled immigrants and will recognize skills in applicants from India and China for the first time. I love that the desired professions include “IT professionals, plumbers, and engineers.”

Six months back in the country, I’ve formed some opinions about where NZ is lacking. I was interested to see how the budget would address what I’ve identified as the country’s shortcomings. Now the budget’s out, I give them 1/2 marks.

I only had two priorities. They hit the first one out of the park: broadband. We are, as one commentator pointed out, a small country at the arse end of the world. We have a great opportunity to compete through products that don’t have to be shipped across an ocean. But while Telecom gives us a broadband stream worse than that of a geriatric with a swollen prostate, we’re as competitive as the Natural Law Party.

In the past month or more I’ve been working hard on making sure William had a good experience at school. I talked to his teachers to make sure that they were keeping their eyes open for bullying (and to ensure that they knew I had very high standards for them and for the school). I got involved in the schoool board’s charter discussion, doing the bulk of the writing of the new vision and mission statements. And I spent a lot of time at the school.

There were 1.24 million active internet subscribers in New Zealand between March and September 2005 (NZ pop = 4M, remember)
70%, or 869,300, were modem users
Total residential internet penetration was around 30%
Business uptake of internet connections increased by 17%
66 ISPs compete for the 1.24 million customers
Dial-up access increased 4% from March to September

Figures from Statistics New Zealand quoted by Computerworld, found via a blog post by Mr Dee.

Today was unsatisfactory. I worked a solid 8 hours, packed in the email, made a coworker laugh, and made significant progress towards a goal. So why, at the end, do I feel blah? I was so knackered after the day of full on email and phone calls that I had no energy for the kids. And I realized, as I was doing the dishes, that a day when I don’t connect with the kids, is a day that I feel I’ve wasted.

We took William out of school for the day, drove down to Auckland, and went to Kelly Tarlton’s World (like the Monterey Aquarium) and then to a buffet for lunch. Very luxurious, but you have to be on the ball when it’s the missus’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. The kids had fun, but all that driving (90m down, 90m back) took it out of them.

I realize it’s been a while since I blogged. We had a bit of family drama over Christmas, when Dad’s business burned down in Colorado. Lots of stress there, and ongoing visits to America for Dad to pick up the pieces. I’ve had to think hard about what I want to do in August when I stop working on conferences fulltime–I may have a lot of dependents!