Umamiblog

My first April Fools Day in Wellington and I was a little disappointed to pick up the DomPost only to find there was no joke on the front page. The ODT down in Dunedin every year runs a fantastic joke that every year manages to fool scores of people in Otago. I’m sure this year will be no different:

Hue and cry expected over bird agreement

Update: Heh, found last year’s ODT gag while trawling through old docs on my comp.

“Really? I’m buying it as a gift for someone who has been through this before and I don’t want to buy it if its not true.”

- Girl trying to buy James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, responding to sales attendant’s caution. Melbourne International Terminal.

Bwhahahaha. I was happy man that day…

Some more piss take references:
Banterist: A Million Little Explanations
Mashup Mansion Tom Cruise on Oprah As It Should Have Been

• Someone at work sent around this photo of the real Firefox mascot. Cute.
• Firewheel Design has I Heart Rootkit T-shirts for those that want to show Sony their love.
• Tom of WellUrban fame is pitching Wellington to Gridskipper. Wellington is going into battle against Baku, Azerbaijan. Get voting!
• Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users shares something with us that we probably all know but are in constant denial about: Multitasking makes us stupid
• Phil Cockfield continues this theme by asking How many messages each day?
• Mike Davidson instead asks us Who Would You Be? Interesting to note in his comments most people would be Leonardo Da Vinci or one of Jesus’ disciples.
• AdverGirl presents us with a brilliant ad peice – advertising to advertisers.
• Have just been registered for Webstock, earlybird registration closes tomorrow at 4pm.

Sometimes things just work, and this is one of those times. Shortly after St Paddy’s Day ends I’ll be on a plane to Sydney for about 9 days, and I can’t wait.

Friends from the South Island who has missed out on tickets to the Auckland U2 concert decided it would be a good idea to get tickets for the Melbourne concert instead. And who can blame them, the airfares would’ve been about the same or cheaper and Melbourne is far more interesting than Auckland. As it all worked out, sadly U2 had to postpone their concerts which put Russ and Greg in a bit of a tough spot. Credit to them, they’ve decided to go anyway.

Anyway I was talking to Russ yesterday and he mentioned they’d still be heading over and I thought “Heh, maybe I could go as well…”. Didn’t take it all that seriously and mentioned it flippantly to Sarah who insisted that I should do it. Apparently I’ve been working too hard and am too stressed out and holiday would do me well.

Ok, thats all good and well but the reason I’m busy at the moment is because I’m invested heavily in a few projects at work. Would I be able to get a week of leave at such short notice given that it would be a significant risk to those projects. Well, my CD didn’t seem to think it was a horrible idea and was happy to entertain it for me. After checking with all the PMs I’ve been working with it seemed that it could be possible…I’d just have to work my butt off a bit this week (no problem, I was going to anyway).

So I’ll be taking in Sydney, Newcastle, and Melbourne starting on Saturday, great. Will hopefully get to see some of the Commonwealth Games madness Melbourne will be in starting from tomorrow.

Shot by: Richie
Where: somewhere in Thailand

Have a look at who gets a tiny wee sound byte in this night’s news item.

Cool idea also!

Yep, you’re guessing right. That is a rather grainy shot of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983, in Iraq. Stumbled on it while trawling Wikipedia in an article on the Iran-Iraq War.

Today I purchased 37signals’ new book ‘Getting Real‘.

I’ve been reading Signal Vs. Noise for a while now and I really appreciate the approach these guys have to a number of areas; application design, development, running a biz, project management, and so on. We do have their first book, Defensive Design for the Web, in the studio at work but I haven’t spent more than 5 minutes glancing at it so that wasn’t really a factor in deciding whether or not to fork out the USD$19 for the e-book.

It looks like an interesting book and stealing from their sales pitch: “This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it’s a book of ideas.”

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve finished.

SvN has a humourous little article on comments made in a Mac forum when the original iPod was released all those years ago…

An example:

“…it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time…and it’s not really functional…”

Obviously, 20/20 hindsight vision shows us how short-sighted these comments were but do you think it was really that unreasonable to say/think that all those years ago?

But, can you imagine how different the world would be if Apple had listened to those people? In many ways this is just a reinforcement that if you honestly believe in your creation, your idea to not listen or let yourself become influenced by people who cannot understand the true nature of it.

In saying that, there is ALWAYS a balance. Apple probably didn’t listen too much to to people when they created the Newton. And then it failed…

So who is the VIP in town that needs to travel in a 7 car entourage with 2 police cars and needs to shut down intersections when travelling?

Sarah saw them last night at about 7:30pm, then I saw them on my way to work (running late at 9am) parked outside the Duxton waiting to pick up the entourage (I assume).

So who is it and why hasn’t there been anything visible in media? Could it be Bill Clinton? He was in Auckland last weekend for some junket thing.

/me goes to kick myself for not taking a photo…

Apparently there are none. As many of you will know, on the 7th of March we’ll be having the 5 yearly census. Everyone who is in the country on that date has to fill out a form. There has been a little bit of debate recently in that us honkies can’t identify ourselves as New Zealanders. My family has been NZ-born for the last 6 generations, we’ve pretty much been here since the treaty was signed. Only, Statistics NZ ask that we identify our ethnicity as New Zealand European.

I agree that we should be able to identify ourselves as New Zealanders, heck, even in Australia we can call ourselves New Zealanders (where we form one of the largest groups of overseas born persons). But the thing that incensed me the most was Human Rights Commissioner Joris de Bres comment on why things shouldn’t change:

We need to know the demographic make-up if you like of the population…the ethnic composition because we need to be sure that people of different ethnicities are receiving equal treatment

To me, if you want to ensure different ethnicities are treated equally then you stop focusing on it all.

Richie, my bro who has spent the last X amount of months in Sao Paulo, sent through an email with this image titled:

“Me and the quadruplets”

I can only count two.

UPDATE: Ok, maybe I get it now…