Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today. Forgive me if it’s old news to you.
You have three options to make more money:
In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can’t catch more fish because you don’t have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell.
There’s a trend now to question the value of a university education. It used to be that simply possessing a university degree gained you access to a Better Class of Job. That is no longer the case; now you have access to The Same Class of Unemployment Benefit. Even degrees in subjects without immediate business application (classics, art history, etc.) were valued as a sign of studiousness, discipline, etc. at least in so much as they put the possessor into the class of People Who Have A Brain. These days so many people are emerging with degrees that a degree alone isn’t enough to separate you from the herd.
A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins. I did, however, manage the Mix and Mash judging and a trip to Wellington for the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), and managed to informally acquire a new project (codename: Bagley).
Bagley is for a large international company, and will be delivered offshore. I’m helping a friend with it, and it promises to be both large and fun. So far we’ve passed through the “oh my god, it’s going to happen!” stage and are pondering the myriad of details that we will be bringing together. We’ve started the conversations of how many of which type of person we’ll need, which is the fun fantasy part of the project. In the next few weeks we’ll nail down the specifics and budget.
Our band has two gigs coming up in Auckland and we’d love to see you there!
We play The Thirsty Dog on K Rd on Sunday, and the set is shaping up to be a good ‘un: the songs we were playing last year have really bedded down nicely. We are, if I do say so, getting good. That gig is Sunday Oct 2, and we’ll start playing around 4 or 4.30. It’s a 45m set, daytime, easy to get to if you’re in Auckland, just $10 at the door. The setlist features songs from Gillian Welch, Tim O’Brien, and Claire Lynch and some beauties I don’t want to tell you about just yet.
I love BERG London’s weeknotes and have resolved to follow suit myself. I’ll do it for the rest of this year and see how it goes. So, onto it!
Monday was when I wrote the talk I gave on Tuesday to Orion Health. They have regular hackathons (though they don’t call them that, it’s the idea of setting developers and other coal-face makers loose to build things for a few days, then report back). I was their first speaker for this hackathon, and was given a very wide brief—every topic I raised with the development manager there seemed to work. So I worked backwards from what I wanted to accomplish (firing people up at the start of a hackathon) and decided that I had to point out how awesome and important software people are (they are). I had been listening to an In Our Time episode on The Dawn of the Iron Age, was still struck by Ben Hammersley on Moore’s Law, and so I mashed up some O’Reilly-esque themes of early adopters and unevenly-distributed futures with these things on the surface of my mind, and came up with 50 slides.
New Zealand has, for a long time, marketed itself as 100% Pure. In the last year, this slogan has taken a beating. The climax seems to have been when BBC Hardtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur gave Prime Minister John Key a colossal roasting over the discrepancy between reality and the slogan. The slogan was watered down to “100% Pure You”, and the pressure on politicians eased off. “Whew, our international PR slogan is saved!”
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?
I was honoured to give a talk of career advice to the 2010 Summer of Tech students. I appear to have let a few f-bombs fly, so don’t watch if that sort of thing offends you. (In fact, you should probably stop reading my blog if that sort of thing offends you. For fuck’s sake.)
No transcription, as my notes consisted of a scrawled mindmap. Talk embedded below.
What do you want to do when you grow up? with Nat Torkington from SummerOfTech on Vimeo.