Umamiblog

Hi to all the ALGIM folk who’ve made it to my blog. I really enjoyed presenting to you yesterday and found the Auckland and Northland case-studies very interesting. If you are here in search of my slides, you have two options:

You can download the (very large) PDF here [8.6MB].

Or you can view the slides on Slideshare.net (or here on my blog):

Thanks again for the chance to talk to you all about Web 2.0. Good luck with the challenge.

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.

Introducing ActionThis. Fun, exciting, stressful and interesting times. :o)

More to come soon.

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?

Tomorrow (Wednesday May 2nd) we’re running a user experience and usability twilight session at work. Speakers include Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability, Natasha Hall from Trademe, and our very own Eamon O’Rourke. The details:

When: 4.20pm, Wednesday 2nd, May
Where: Ground Floor Theatrette, 20 Customhouse Quay, Wellington
More info | Register me!

See you then!

The question of who cares is easy to answer: anyone who has complained about the general shortage of developers. If we want to increase the number of capable developers out there, not cutting out half the population is probably a good starting point.

Jo Chapman, Intergen developer, pondering on “developing girls” in IT

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!

Today a project manager said something to me that I didn’t think I hear (from a project manager) in a thousand years.

What do you think it was?

Win: A random prize to the person with the first correct answer (NZ only).

Update: Winner announced!

As much I wish it was Stu’s remuneration (I could do with the moolah) or follower’s “realisation” (too funny) or sal’s fries (now I’m hungry) the award goes to mase for his “don’t worry about the budget”.

Yep, it’s true. It took a moment to sink in when they said it, and then register what that actually meant in terms of the mouth it came out of… shocking!

Prizes?
I had a loose idea in my brain about what the prize could/would be. If you were Wellington based it was going to be my shout at some local establishment. If you were elsewhere in NZ it was going to be some random conference schwag I’d picked up, maybe a t-shirt, maybe a laptop bag, maybe even a thermos..

So Mase, you’ve won a drink with me at some stage bud! Cash it in when you want. To everyone else who left a comment; thank you! I laughed uncontrollably reading them as they came in.