Umamiblog

How many of you have signed up for Kiwisaver? If yes and you’re willing to divulge, what contribution rate did you opt for and which fund provider did you choose?

If no, why not?

I wish I had this article on blasting the myth of the fold earlier. I think it’ll be useful to anyone working in services and gets that common request from clients to cram all the “important” stuff on the page above the fold.

The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer really all we can offer them?
- Milissa Tarquini on Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Now I just need a similar article for why you don’t want a liquid design for your website. (No, its not wasted space, it’s called design.)

Three – nil
Originally uploaded by aitchbee

Went to see the Wellington Phoenix play their first home game at the Stadium yesterday. It was cold but great fun. The quality of the soccer was better than I expected (same can’t be said of the refereeing) and 6000 other punters turned up to watch.

Best part? THREE – NIL! Take that Sydney!

Having a professional soccer team in town with a season that lasts until January? Love it.

Phoenix in “not crap” shock – Wellingtonista
Stuff article

I was in Auckland yesterday for work and bumped into a University friend who I hadn’t seen for ages. As we go to part ways he says “Are you and S on Facebook?”.

What’s more interesting? The fact that he asked or that I said “yep!”.

P.S. Auckland keeps growing on me. The more time I spend up there, the less I dislike it.

Went to see this guy at the Opera House with S on Saturday night. He was brilliant! I was in pain and tears for most of the evening.

If you get a chance to watch him, go.

I have been neglecting my blog lately, and there really isn’t any excuse. Maybe we needed a little space from each other for a while…

Well, hopefully, that time is over and I’ve got back around to thinking of things to post about. Not that my lack of posts seems to have affected my visitor numbers or Technorati ranking… odd.

Last month I took the time to upgrade from Movable Type to WordPress (I was probably the last person in Wellington still using MT…). So far I’m reasonably impressed but I still feel like Movable Type is a more polished product. Anyway, I need you to please update your feed reeders to my new RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Umamiblog

If you’re subscribed to any of my older feeds, this is the last post you’ll receive. C’mon, you know you want to update it right now

Thanks!

2 and bit years ago I started my journey with Intergen. Today, this particular part of that journey comes to an end. Today is my last day at Intergen.

I’ve really enjoyed my time here at Intergen; the work I have done, the relationships I’ve made, and the opportunities I have been given to develop. I know and can recognise how much I’ve grown personally in my time here.

I’d like to give a big shout-out to all the people at Intergen, past and present, for making it the experience it was. I looking forward to see what you crazy cats get up to!

So where am I going?

About a month ago an opportunity came up to work with the crew at Ponoko that was too good to pass up. This means getting to work with one of my most favorite persons in the world again, Miss Sally Coe, as well as getting a chance to work with Dave ten Have (aka Dave5).

If you haven’t heard of Ponoko, do check out the website (or the blog). Next week I’ll post a bit of an intro on it.

Otherwise, changes are afoot.

My father popped up on MSN today to ask this question:

Craig says:
Hey there is a Tui adv up here that says “We just spooned” Yeah right.
Craig says:
What the hell does that mean?
john.lewis says:
LOL
Craig says:
I have no idea
john.lewis says:
you know what spooning is?
Craig says:
Nope. I am 54 soon…..
john.lewis says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spooning

This looks intensely cool and intensely fun. Flickr are running a “24 hour of flickr” event whereby you:

join us in 24 Hours of Flickr, a day-long global photo project. On May 5 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures.

You just need to join the 24 hours of flickr group and take some photos on Saturday. You can upload them from 6am Pacific Time on the 5th of May. For us in NZ, that means 1am on the 6th…

So, Jeff, Trey, Dave, Ari, Marksy, Pablo – you guys keen?

A couple of things have been happening lately I’ve wanted to blog about. I thought I’d combine the lot of them for good-measure.

My most important value in life?
We have a stock-standard normal old land phone line at home. The only reason we have one is the historical legacy of Telecom forcing you to have a landline if you wanted to get DSL/broadband. S and I both live from our cellphones so we almost never use it and only two people ever call us on it, S’s parents, and telemarketers.

I have a habit of saying “thanks for calling, I’m hanging up now” to any telemarketer but I’ve been putting up with a few calls lately to listen to the odd survey and how they’re conducted (there is an ulterior motive). Last week the New Zealand Chamber Music Society called and from what I gathered they’re trying to work out why no one cares about chamber music and consequently why no one (except themselves) ever goes to their concerts.

Now for whatever reason they thought relevant, they asked me a number of questions about my values. Such as:

• How important is world peace to you?
• How important is it for people to like you?
• How important is it to you that you reach your potential in life?

Uh, quite important… but it doesn’t mean I’m going to spend any of my over-taxed dollars to watch chamber music. I felt like saying “Go fish!” as they were asking the questions. Maybe they need to read Seth’s “I’d ignore him too” post.

Why don’t they advertise this?
Air New Zealand’s grabaseat promotion/feature is pretty cool. They update it daily with some very low fares to and from domestic and internation destinations – today I could have booked a ticket to Taupo for $39.

Their offers are always getting emailed around the office and it stuck out to me as a sitter for an RSS feed, it’s incrementally updating content! It is in Flash, I thought to myself, so it wouldn’t be that easy to scrape the page for that days offers to mash into an RSS feed. Hmmm, I wonder if the Flash app imports the offers as plain text or XML from somewhere. I pondered deeply.

I ‘Right click…View Source’ to see this staring back at me: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”…blah blah>. Cool! Why didn’t I see the wee orange logo in the address bar? Why don’t they advertise they have an RSS feed for this!?

Direct link if this would be helpful for you and you didn’t know about it (like me).

Somehow this code feels more comfortable that the other one…
There has been lots of debate (and locally even) about the Blogging Code of Conduct brought on as a direct result of the attacks on Kathy Sierra. And yet the Blogging Anti-Code of Conduct seems more honest.

Resistance is futile!
I wanted to start a new Word document today. I almost got as far as opening up MS Word only to find myself closing it and going to Google Docs instead.

Read the rest of this entry »

People use statistics as a drunken man uses a lamppost; for support, not illumination.

If you needed further proof of Andrew Lang’s quote you needn’t look further than reports in the media this week proclaiming “Christchurch traffic worse than Auckland’s?”

The basis of such a statement? The statistic that Christchurch drivers average 36km/h during peak time versus Auckland drivers who enjoy an average speed of 39km/h.

What a load of complete bollocks if you’re not going to take into account any other factor. How about the average distance that each city’s average commuters have to drive during peak times at average speeds? I bet Christchurch’s drivers spend less time in their cars each day compared to their Auckland counterparts.

We could (moderately unscientifically) compare the journey from each city’s airport into the central city. For Christchurch you’d travel roughly 10kms, for Auckland you’d travel roughly 18kms.

Average time travelling at average speeds would bring you to an almost 17 minute journey in Christchurch versus a 27 minute journey in Auckland.

Media people! Please please please explore an issue with just a tiny bit more balance. Especially when you’re dealing with one-eyed Cantabs!

I’m more than a little giddy to see this appear on the Celsias blog:

Carbon Labelling is Born into the World
A humble packet of crisps has apparently become the first product in the world to have a genuine CO2 label.

In December I posted about food labelling with regard to the environment and so I’m very happy and encouraged to see it happening. This is huge, I hope we see more of it!