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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This post is about my 3 March 2011 appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script. In particular, this week I ad-libbed about the Christchurch Recovery Map project.

Something new this week: I solicited topics from my Twitter followers, and got some great story ideas that I wouldn’t otherwise have covered. Go team! Thanks to Don Christie, Bernard Hickey, and Daniel Spector.

This post is about my 17 February appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script.

NOTE: An alert reader wrote to RNZ after the show and pointed out that Moore’s Law is only “eerily accurate” if you ignore the fact that it is restated and revised whenever facts contradict the current predictions. He pointed me to this mythbusting.

I resumed my Nine to Noon radio segments on Radio New Zealand. I’ll be on every other week, beginning 3 February 2011. MP3 and OGG available.

Below are my notes, made as I researched the topics for the 3 February 2011 show. We often depart from the notes, so they’re not a reliable substitute for what aired.

Nat Torkington will cover: * is Google getting less useful? * how do we keep something forever?

Text of notes for a talk given at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the New Zealand Computer Society in Rotorua, 17 September 2010. I will link to video when it’s posted by the conference organizers.

Hello everyone. Thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you to the New Zealand Computer Society for having me here.

Let’s get nostalgic for a bit. It’s the 50th anniversary, we can afford to be nostalgic a little.

Haegwan is interviewing famous and interesting people to talk about what they do and advice they might have to people wanting to be successful. He interviewed me earlier this month. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m flattered by the company I keep: racing car drivers, famous technologists, novelists, and astrophysicists.