Lunn Ave sucks

Lunn Ave is another completely unnecessary piece of new strip mall that is surrounded by plenty of existing shopping alternatives. This development is completely rapacious and makes no consideration for the spectacular clifftop views that are available on the site.

2011 - another crap year for Kiwi wage slaves

2010 sucked for public holidays, and it was a terrible year for a lot of Kiwis. Coincidence? I think not.

And look out, 2011 sucks just as bad - with the added cruel irony of Anzac Day not falling on a weekend, but the same day as Easter Monday! I predict a plane crash and a volcanic eruption in Auckland...

Heavy bank presence at Onehunga Christmas Parade

Every second float was a bank. Is this the only sector able to sponsor anything these days? The delicious irony is that Scrooge was in the vanguard, telling everyone to go home and save their money to bail out more banks!

Dearth of decent graphics and data for NZ local elections

The papers have made little effort and are mainly sticking to articles. The worst use of a map that I have seen for a long while can be found at http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/local-elections-2010-map

The only site that makes any effort is the official elections2010.co.nz site. Unfortunately it has some serious flaws. No effort is made to explain how many candidates in a ward or board will be elected, which makes the results fairly meaningless. The elections for a particular region are presented in one enormous page full of photo thumbnails that takes an eternity to load for populous regions - this is particularly bad for Auckland.

Hobbit and Actors Equity

I'd say that NZ Actors Equity has a strong case for a better deal on American productions. The producers are looking for the best balance of value and psychic distance, and NZ is the cheapest place in the world for a good supply of white native-English-speakers with developed-world mannerisms in a not excessively exotic natural environment.

If you wanted to find cheaper mobile scenery than this, where would you go?

Africa, China and South America are out unless you're doing a movie with a specific cultural theme.

Eastern Europe has whities who could do a good elf (and they have pointier ears), but these days you'd have to go really far east to escape the worker-enfranchising attentions of the EU - think Serbia or Ukraine. Good luck getting any of them to step up to fill out the gaps - you'd have to fly in anyone with a speaking part.

Kiwibank as a NZ model for government owned businesses

Kiwibank - NZers should love it. It's profitable, has reduced banking margins in the market by several percent and is singlehandedly saving NZ Post from death by precipitous collapse of snail mail.

To me this represents a fantastic model for government to influence mature, margin-rich "incumbentopoly" markets for the benefit of consumers.

My next targets: the main spends for NZers. Groceries, power, phone, petrol, insurance.

Kiwipetrol

It already looks like petrol is being dealt to with the acquisition of Shell NZ by Infratil and the NZ Superannuation Fund.

Kiwiphone

Phone has been addressed with Telecom in a regulatory stranglehold.

Kiwipower

Power is already dominated by government owned companies. It actually needs divestment and a change of philosophy for whoever is left.

Kiwigrocer

To me the grocery market is the top candidate for intervention. The Warehouse, our largest retailer, had to abandon its foray into groceries after a ferocious double-team by Progressive and Foodstuffs. With two players there is little to prevent collusion, and between them they're certainly squeezing the life out of their suppliers.

Post the recession there are acres of vacant light industrial space that could be easily converted. Being shopping destinations in themselves, supermarkets don't have to pay over the odds for sought-after space in malls or high streets.

Kiwisurance

The bottom end of the insurance market is full of restrictive fine text and slothful claim processing times. A provider of basic, cheap, non-nonsense policies is needed. This could be an offshoot of NZ Post/Kiwibank.

Kobo 100 preloaded books list

Picked up this list at Whitcoulls. Not sure I'm familiar with item #33... 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2. Dracula - Bram Stoker 3. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott 4. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 5. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 6. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 7. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 8. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (Pere) 9. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 10. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 11. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe 12. White Fang - Jack London 13. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 14. The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde 15. The Art of War - Sun Tzu 16. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse 17. The Romance of Tristan and Iseult - Joseph Bedier 18. Grimm's Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm 19. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 20. Doctor Faustus - Chris Marlowe 21. The Odyssey of Homer - Homer, translated by Alexander Pope 22. Treasure Island - Robert Louise Stevenson 23. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 24. The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper 25. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle 26. Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey 27. Prufrock and Other Observations - T.S. Eliot 28. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James 29. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins 30. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky 31. On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin 32. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Pere) 33. Alice's Adventures in Whitcoulls - Lewis Carroll 34. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad 35. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 36. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle 37. Cyrano de Bergerac - Edmond Rostand 38. Japanese Fairy Tales - Yei Theodora Ozaki 39. Ulysses - James Joyce 40. The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy 41. The Iliad - Homer 42. Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery 43. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe 44. Aesop's Fables - Aesop 45. The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole 46. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 47. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 48. Emma - Jane Austen 49. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving 50. Irish Fairy Tales - James Stevens 51. English Fairy Tales - James Stevens 52. The Arabian Nights Entertainment - Andrew Lang 53. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 54. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne 55. Moby Dick - Herman Melville 56. The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux 57. Paradise Lost - John Milton 58. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle 59. Beowulf 60. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Samuel Richardson 61. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 62. Peter Pan - James M. Barrie 63. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen 64. The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle 65. Persuasion - Jane Austen 66. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 67. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli 68. Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne 69. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche 70. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon 71. Book of Nonsense - Edward Lear 72. Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum 73. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen 74. The Island of Doctor Moreau - H. G. Wells 75. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne 76. Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll 77. Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 - Andrew Lang 78. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 79. The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie 80. The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems - Geoffrey Chaucer 81. The Man Who Knew Too Much - G. K. Chesterton 82. The Lady of the Lake - Sir Walter Scott 83. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 84. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka 85. The Princess and the Goblin - George MacDonald 86. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau 87. The Call of the Wild - Jack London 88. The Sea Wolf - Jack London 89. The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. du Bois 90. Tales From Shakespeare - Charles and Mary Lamb 91. Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 92. The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling 93. The Republic - Plato 94. Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maugham 95. Middlemarch - George Eliot 96. Twenty Years After - Alexandre Dumas (Pere) 97. The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 98. Four Arthurian Romances - Chretien de Troyes 99. Dubliners - James Joyce 100. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

What is the best trademe user name for buyers?

The advice for people buying a house at auction is to project confidence with the intention of intimidating or psyching out more inexperienced bidders so that they don't bid. This can be achieved by wearing dark clothes and glasses, bidding assertively and hiding any worry or stress you might be experiencing.

Online auctions may feel completely different from a physical auction, but a lot of the principles remain the same. In theory there is much more bidder info on an auction site than you can discover by observation at a physical auction - with a few clicks you can view their complete trade history. But in practice, you can't guarantee that other bidders will be impressed by your extensive trade history, either because they can't be bothered viewing it or don't know how to.

So the key place to try and stamp your authority is within the auction itself.

On the face of it, intelligent questions to the seller could be thought to achieve this. However my experience is that questioners are not viewed as a threat because they're often just kicking the tyres and aren't serious bidders.

Perhaps a confident bidding pattern would help? Without the body language, I seriously doubt it.

This leaves the user name as your only weapon. I think the name is worth a bit of thought. You want to use it to convince others that you are a serious buyer, won't let others take advantage by being distracted from the auction, and are sufficiently web savvy to avoid screwing up.

This rules out names such as tyrekicker4life, harriedmumof3, newbiegrandad, etc. On the other hand, there is very little to fault with names such as topgun, trading247 and webwhiz.

I wouldn't put too much effort into naming. Consider that once you have done a few physical auctions then your body language will be on a par with the other experienced bidders and their advantage will be cancelled out. There is no point in hamming up the body language to try and outdo them - they will not be fooled.

Similarly, a good online name brings you up to the same level as other experienced bidders, but the world's greatest name ever is unlikely to give you any meaningful advantage over them. The goal is merely to minimise entanglement in bidding wars with beginners.

Incongruously wild celebration of totally dominant sports teams

Why is it that the Australian cricket team celebrates victory and game milestones so passionately when playing against the likes of the West Indies, who are completely outclassed?


I can understand it in football where goals are comparatively rare and worth getting very worked up about. But not in cricket.


These contests aren't close, so I doubt they're experiencing the kind of excitement that you or I would experience at winning a huge lottery payout.


Some might say that they have such competitive spirits that they can't help themselves.


My opinion: it's become the favourite way to express dominance over your opponents and try to psych them out. They're saying "Look at us, we're celebrating. You can't do this."

Flying Panties to Buzz Tokyo Skies

File under “Only in Japan”. On March 6th, if you are in the Akihabara district of Tokyo and you look up, you’ll see hundreds of pairs of girls’ panties. No, you haven’t shrunken into a tiny, homoncular, up-skirt pervert. Instead, you will be “enjoying” the launch of a thousand ornithopters fashioned from underwear.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/flying-panties-to-buzz-tokyo-skies/

Life Game Project looking for volunteer gamers and developers

http://lgp.org.nz/

Life Game Project's Purpose is: Supporting New Zealand as a place where everybody is safe and loved by harnessing the power of immersive games technology to foster the development of life skills and positive lifestyle choices.
We believe that collaboration and leadership occurs naturally in an environment where everyone feels safe and loved. We do this by:
· living life with a sense of play
· acting with integrity and for the highest good of all
· learning and improving
· seeing people as the best they can be
· encouraging action
· being open and inclusive

The LGP has some BHAGs – Big Hairy Audacious Goals – burning away:
1: Create a self managing framework for the New Zealand IT Industry and Educationalists to engage with and connect New Zealanders with today’s immersive games experience to teach skills in fun and sustainable ways.
2: Learn from delivering pilot LGP Projects.
3: Measurably impact the lives of 2,000 Kiwis, their families and friends through the delivery of immersive games technology by establishing:
· 12 active LGP projects by end of 2010; and
· 50 active LGP projects by end of 2012.
4: Commissioning 2 immersive games for our Communities and for sale

Plenty of Listener readers are fed up with Joanne Black, who seems determined to play the role of one-dimensional Don Brashian mainstream cypher. But I can't bring myself to despise her. Like a pit bull or Trevor Mallard, she is merely doing the bidding of her editorial master.

Like I said, I can't despise Joanne Black any more than I can despise a dumb animal bred for fighting. But I wouldn't show any hesitation in putting either down humanely.