WebWeaver's World

The day it snowed in Wellington

2011-08-15T20:37:00.025+12:00

What a great day it's been!

Actually, what a great couple of days - snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow! In Wellington! How crazy is that?

By the time we finished band practice last night it was snowing in downtown Wellington - big fat wobbly flakes of snow that reduced most of us to 6-year-olds as we pranced around outside enjoying every cold moment of it.

Hazel and I went to Alice's house for tea (we threw snowballs at Hamish on the way which was very funny) and when it was time for me to drive home it was a veritable blizzard. It was completely surreal driving carefully through the quiet streets as the snow whirled around my car like a swarm of angry white bees - something I don't think I've experienced since I was a student in the UK about a million years ago.

Here are a couple of pictures taken from my house last night:

Street lights illuminating the whirling snow

A wider view of the snow-clad valley

Yesterday's MetService 3-day snow warning for Wellington - saved for posterity

This morning I was very excited to see that some of last night's snow was still there - not much - but it was definitely snow! Too cool....

I thought that was snow on the hills last night - but it was too dark to tell - daylight brings clarity, and I never imagined I'd ever see our little hills with a dusting of the white stuff!

A teeny bit of snow in my back garden this morning

Snow on the Rimutakas

I was in town today - and I'm so glad I was because - not content with giving us a bit of a blizzard last night - it decided to do it all over again today!

Obligatory picture of me in the snow

Snow on Taranaki Street

@stephenfry tweeted about all of us going nuts in the Wellington snow:

And then he tweeted that the whole country was losing the plot:

Bless!

And someone called Ro Tierney made the most beautiful video of snow on Cuba Mall (and how happy it makes people feel). LOVE IT:

Snow on Cuba Mall in central Wellington (HD) from Ro Tierney on Vimeo.

I love the way that weird and wonderful natural events bring out the best in people - our inner child was on full display today.

The girl waiting at the bus stop this morning gave me a huge smile as I approached and told me how much she loved my coat (crazy purple felted hippy coat from Sweden).

When it began to snow this morning everyone raced to the windows to look, and then raced outside to take photos and dance around catching snowflakes on their sleeves.

The bus driver this evening was giving us all a running commentary and making sure he told everyone the route had changed 'cos the hill up to Karori was too steep and snowy for the buses to get up.

By the time I got home it was nearly dark, but I got a few shots of my street in the dusky snow-light. Lovely!

Snowy street, snowy cars

Snowy street looking down the valley

Winter wonderland

Snow-clad cabbage tree

My back garden - with somewhat more snow than there was this morning

Yup - for a once-in-50-years experience - this one has been pretty special.

Maybe it'll do it all again tomorrow! Fingers crossed!

Technorati tags: Wellington, snow, New Zealand, snowing, Ro Tierney, video, Vimeo, YouTube, Stephen Fry, @stephenfry, twitter, tweet, weather, snow at sea-level, photos, pictures, winter, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 - Snape's true character

2011-07-17T01:21:00.006+12:00

I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 on Thursday (opening night). Woweee! Completely awesome - there were tears pouring down my face for a full half-hour during the movie.

Talk about epic! I HAVE to see it again on the big screen real soon.

Snape's "revelations in the pensive" scene reminded me that I wrote a post on a message board on 25 July 2005, the day after I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. You'll recall that Dumbledore dies at the hand of Severus Snape at the end of that book. This is what I wrote. I reckon I was pretty close, don't you?

Oooh ohh! I just finished reading it last night too! I cried at the end too. I just didn't see that coming at all. Oh boy.

OK. Here are my thoughts. Apologies in advance at the length of them. Once I got started I just couldn't stop.... It's mostly about Snape ‘cos I find him fascinating.... *g*

I don't think Snape is a Death Eater. I think he's DEEP under cover and he has to stay that way. Voldemort is the most powerful dark wizard evah. He's equal in power to Dumbledore - pure evil vs pure good. Dumbledore wouldn't have been able to defeat Voldemort - of course, that's Harry's job - but I also think that he decided long ago that a double agent - a hidden enemy - would be much more likely to be able to weaken Voldemort in some unexpected way than he (Dumbledore) ever could. Thereby allowing Harry to finish off Voldemort at the end of book 7.

Did you notice when Snape was talking to Bellatrix and Narcissa about Malfoy's task that he never actually said anything specific until they had already mentioned it? He talks in very general terms - or says nothing at all - and lets Narcissa spill (some of) the beans herself. This makes me think that he doesn't know what the plan is at that stage, but wants to find out - and needs to keep under cover, whatever the price. That's why he agrees to the Unbreakable Vow - and why he twitches his hand when Narcissa puts in the final bit about doing the job should Malfoy fail. Because obviously he doesn't want to agree to that, but has to, or his cover will be blown.

So throughout the book we have Snape trying to find out from Malfoy what his task is - and Malfoy refusing to tell, thinking that Snape wants all the glory for himself. Snape has figured out that Malfoy has to kill Dumbledore - Malfoy says that Snape guessed it was him with the necklace and was angry about the fact that it could have "blown everything". Dumbledore also tells Malfoy that he had figured out he was trying to kill him. But Snape doesn't know details, and I think it's these that he's been trying to get out of Malfoy. I think that Snape and Dumbledore would have discussed it, thought through all the consequences of the Unbreakable Vow - and would have come up with a plan. The problem was, Malfoy never told Snape about the Vanishing Cabinets, and so Snape would have had no way of knowing that there would be other Death Eaters at the school that night - which kind of complicated things for him.

And once again Trelawney sees it coming in the cards. Cool.

OK. So they both know Malfoy has to kill Dumbledore. They both know that he may not be able to do it. In which case, Snape will have to do it for him. If he doesn't, his cover will be blown - oh, and he would die anyway, for breaking the Unbreakable Vow. Dumbledore believes that, in the end, Snape will be of more use to Harry than he (Dumbledore) could be. He's always looking at the bigger picture, and I reckon he knows he must sacrifice himself in order for ultimate good to triumph over ultimate evil.

Dumbledore makes sure that he gets the whole story from Malfoy before he dies - and that Harry is forced to stay where he is so he hears it all too. There's obviously stuff in there which Harry will need to know in book 7. I think Dumbledore is telling the truth when he tells Malfoy that he couldn't have spoken to him about his task, in case Voldemort used Legilimancy on Malfoy. But I think that's as much to do with maintaining Snape's cover as protecting Malfoy.

Having said that, I think Dumbledore's very keen to "save" Malfoy - to bring him back from the dark side - which means ensuring that Malfoy does not kill him. I think this is partly because Dumbledore has an abiding ability to see the best in people and to believe the best of them - and also - from JK Rowling's point of view - because I think she actually wants Malfoy to redeem himself in book 7 - for her readers' sake maybe? Bad boy turns good - "hey kids, you can stop bullying your mates and be a good guy instead" kind of a thing. Maybe?

The pleading with Snape just before he kills him wasn't to spare his life - it was to take it - something which Snape would have obviously not wanted to do (assuming I am right about Snape, of course! *g*). Snape's look of "revulsion and hatred" just before he does Avada Kedavra could be read as being towards Voldemort, and because of what he has to do, rather than towards Dumbledore. I think it's also possible that Dumbledore either knew he was going to die soon anyway from having drunk the potion in the cave - or, that he knew if he stayed alive, there was something in the potion which would allow Voldemort to read his thoughts or something (remember how he tells Harry that he didn't think the potion would kill right away, because Voldemort would want to know who had drunk it and whether they knew about the horcruxes). So he has to die before Voldemort gets inside his head, otherwise Snape's cover will be blown - and Voldemort will know that Harry knows about the horcruxes.

It's interesting also that Snape could have killed Harry as they race for the front gates - but doesn't - and that he stops one of the other Death Eaters from doing it too. OK, he says it's because he needs to be saved for Voldemort - like a mouse for a cat to play with - but then why doesn't he take Harry with him right then? Or he could just have gone against Voldemort's orders and killed off the only real threat to Voldemort's power. End of problem, Voldemort rules the world. OK, he might be a bit pissed off that Snape spoiled his fun, but still, he'd rule the world....

Did you also notice that Snape stops Harry from doing the Cruciatus curse - that's one of the Unforgivable Curses - in fact he says that to Harry as he parries away the half-spoken curse. Is this because he needs to ensure that Harry stays "pure", stays "good" and isn't sullied by the speaking of a Dark curse? [It occurs to me that this might also be why he's so angry with Harry for using Sectumsempera (which he describes as being Dark magic) on Malfoy - as well as, because, you know, he nearly sliced him open!]

And his mighty over-reaction in the chase to the school gates when Harry calls him a coward - he goes nuts! I think Snape truly dislikes Harry - can't get over what Harry's dad and his mates did to him at school - so imagine how he would feel if this upstart kid - whom he has sworn to protect at all costs - including just murdering his good friend Dumbledore for the greater good - just called him a coward when actually he's nothing of the sort. No wonder he freaks out!

And I think Dumbledore is definitely dead (much as I'd like to think otherwise). The fact that the Freezing Charm lifted from Harry once Dumbledore fell, and that Fawkes sang the lament and then flew away, makes me think that. Although, Harry does think he sees a phoenix rising from Dumbledore's funeral pyre, so maybe........ we shall see.

I think from a plot/storyline point of view, Dumbledore had to die - it is the classic Merlin/Arthur, Gandalf/Frodo pattern, isn't it? Wizard/mentor/father-figure teaches star pupil all he can, and then has to die off so that the boy hero can become a man and fulfil his destiny. (As far as Frodo is concerned, Gandalf is dead, so that still fits, even though G is resurrected.) In the end, Harry has to do it by himself. The fact that (if I'm right) Snape will help him somehow, which slightly spoils the classic storyline, is mitigated by the fact that Snape and Harry truly dislike each other, and that Snape can in no way be seen to be playing the father-figure/mentor role.

Interesting that Hogwarts may close next year, which means that Ron and Hermione are free to go with Harry on his quest with no regrets (which Hermione might otherwise have had) and that we have no regrets about missing school either, because there is no school. I also agree that Ginny isn't going to get pushed away quite so easily. It's a crap argument anyway – “I can't love you because then you'll be a target for Voldemort" I mean, Harry loves Ron and Hermione as much if not more as he cares for Ginny, so they'll be obvious targets anyway. Mind you, again going back to the "classic storyline" - the hero generally does have to kill the dragon before he wins the fair lady.... But I just think JK spent much of this book building Ginny up into a strong, no-nonsense kind of girl, who in the end won't allow the others to go off into danger without her.

And of course Ron and Hermione will get together. How could they not? She's been building up to that one since book 1!

So there you go. Did I fill a whole page???? I used to love English at school. I had a crush on my English teacher in fact. Sigh.

Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, HP7, Snape, Severus Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, plot, character, good or bad, literature, JK Rowling, movie, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

On the British class system and travelling First Class

2010-12-25T00:45:00.008+13:00

It's an odd thing travelling First Class on Britain's trains. For a start, hardly anyone else does it, so you'd be virtually guaranteed a seat even if you didn't reserve one. The rest of the train can be completely packed - and has been on all the train journeys I've taken so far - and First Class remains more than half-empty, its passengers sitting in splendid isolation at the front of the train.

What I find most interesting is the attitude of those travelling Second Class (or whatever it's called these days). It's as if there's a barrier between First and Second which almost no-one is willing to breach when holding a Second Class ticket. They can be standing in the aisles in Second - and frequently are - but it's as if First doesn't exist, or has been rendered invisible for the duration of the journey.

When I lived in England I would never have dreamed of going First Class on the train. First class was for other people - not that we knew any, or expected to. Those other people were posh people, rich people, probably upper class people.

Being middle middle class myself, I don't think I ever met anyone who went First Class. We all crammed into Second like sardines, and if we didn't win the mad dash to get on the train first and grab a seat we'd be standing up for the duration of the journey or sitting on our suitcases next to the doors and trying not to get bowled over as people got on or off. No question of transferring to First though. Crikey! The very thought!

I think the fact that I've lived in New Zealand for nearly 20 years - where the class system is virtually non-existent - means that I have finally overcome my inbuilt (inbred?) inability to consider travelling First. But old habits die hard, and even now it does feel a bit odd.

Bringing mum down from Birmingham to Cambridge on the train yesterday was an illuminating experience. "We're in First Class" I loudly proclaimed to any and all railway officials who came within earshot - as if this would somehow bestow special powers or privilege on us - which perhaps it did. Or maybe all British Rail employees are as kind as the ones we encountered - or possibly it was mum's influence that inspired them all to be incredibly helpful and thoughtful.

Mum was a bit horrified that I'd bought us First Class tickets. I could almost hear the unspoken commentary. "We don't travel First Class! It's not for the likes of us!" But Oh My God how much better it is to travel First with a reserved seat. No need to panic about having to fight for somewhere to park ourselves for the duration, we just make our way down to the front of the train. Once there the kindly station attendant helps me to leap mum across the yawning gap between platform and train (it's HUGE in Birmingham) and there we are - seats with our names on, and nothing to worry about.

I found it fascinating to watch the other passengers stuck just outside our door in the entrance to Second Class. Out of the hundred or so people jammed into Second, only two decided to upgrade to First. With much apologetic mumbling two people ventured into First and sat down. "Gosh the train's so full.... I hope it's not too expensive to upgrade.... I'll pay...."

It was as if one is only allowed into First if there's absolutely no possibility of a seat in Second - and then only on sufferance - because of course they are most definitely not supposed to be there - not being the Right Kind Of People.

You'd think that more people would do it. It's so infinitely better in First - simply because of the space and guarantee of a seat. But they just don't. One other enterprising person was brave enough to stow their suitcase on the luggage shelves in our carriage - and would pop in now and again to get stuff out or put stuff away - but everyone else just stuck it out in Second - beyond those magical automatic doors.

For some reason no-one came to check our tickets - maybe it was the bad weather, or maybe they don't always have a ticket checker on this particular train - which meant that the two brave souls in First with their Second Class tickets didn't even have to pay extra to sit there. Happy Christmas!

I wonder if those two people will learn from the experience and do it again next time they travel by train. They say once you try First you never go back to Second - and because you're allowed to upgrade on the train if there's room in First - with the added bonus possibility of not always actually having to pay - I can't see any reason why they wouldn't.

Except for the fact that We Don't Travel First.

I wonder if my loud proclamations on the station platform at Birmingham were my subconscious talking. I wonder if, even now, I feel the need to explain why I've risen above my station (pun intended) and moved from my place in Second, up into somebody else's First Class seat. I may be the equivalent of upper middle class in classless NZ (if that makes any sense), but in England, maybe I'll always be middle middle, and therefore never truly be entitled to travel First.

Technorati tags: train travel, first class, second class, Britain, British class system, human behaviour, holiday, Birmingham New Street station, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Pike River

2010-11-24T18:16:00.002+13:00

Philip Larkin - The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead.
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

Technorati tags: Pike River, Pike River disaster, Pike River mine, explosion, Philip Larkin, poem, New Zealand, West Coast, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Why I will be attending the Rally of Hope to support filming of "The Hobbit" in New Zealand

2010-10-25T02:45:00.007+13:00

I'm a strong believer in Unions and workers rights in general. Many of the rights we have as working people today are thanks to the sterling efforts of Unionists around the globe who fought for better conditions and better pay. We have a great deal to thank them for.

However, I also believe in having a decent strategy when you're fighting for change, and I think it's vital to pick your battles carefully.

Choosing to use the nuclear option at a very early stage by attempting to hold a multi-million dollar corporation to ransom when you have no aces in your hand is a risky strategy at best - and at worst (as we have seem with the whole Hobbit debacle) it can come back and bite you in the ass - hard.

It can also put the jobs of many of your fellow workers in jeopardy - and if you're on the side of the working stiff, as the Equity actors claim to be - surely that should also include the film crew, the pre- and post-production teams, the extras, the support staff and everyone else involved in or affected by the trickle-down effect of shooting (or not shooting) a $500 million movie in New Zealand?

Tomorrow the Warner Brothers executives will be here to hold emergency talks about the future of The Hobbit in New Zealand. They will be deciding on whether to spend their money here, whether to employ our incredibly talented and experienced film crews here, and ultimately they will be deciding whether or not we will be able to keep our unique title of "Middle-earth".

Do I wish that they didn't have that level of power over so many Kiwis' livelihoods? Yes of course - but the fact is, they do - and I'm hoping that a strong turnouts at the nationwide Rally of Hope to support filming of "The Hobbit" in New Zealand will serve to show Warner Brothers how much the people of New Zealand support Peter Jackson's wish to film The Hobbit here, and how hard we'll work to make sure that it happens.

I hope you'll join me.

Facebook Group here - Rally to support filming of "The Hobbit" in New Zealand:

RALLIES FOR ALL NEW ZEALANDERS, Industry & public on Labour Day Monday, 12.30 for 1pm-2pm!

These POSITIVE rallies of support are timed to coincide with the visit of Warner Bros. movie executives to discuss moving The Hobbit away from NZ. We're going to show them that we like them, we want The Hobbit filmed here and we SUPPORT Sir Peter.

These rallies will also emphasize the points other groups like film techs intend to make in the national media to influence Warners.

They are NOT protests against certain groups.

Invite ALL of your friends!!!

"Is the movie going to come or go? We don't know. Warners are coming here next Monday and we've got to fight like hell,"
Sir Peter Jackson.

Here are my placards:

LOTR Oscars: 17

Premiere of ROTK: 120,000 people

Awesome NZ locations: 268,021 km2

Skilled & experienced crew: thousands

Keeping The Hobbit in NZ: priceless

New Zealand
is
Middle-earth

...these are cool too - people from all over the world are sending in video messages of support - if you can't make it to one of the rallies, you can do the same. More info on how to contribute a video here - Calling for Video Support! and view all the videos here - videosforclip's Channel.

Excellent series of questions and answers from actor Yvette Reid here - A NZ actor emailed me asking some questions about the Hobbit situation, here are my answers

The most recent Hobbit thread on Public Address - Hard News: Anatomy of a Shambles

Hope to see you at the Rally of Hope!

Technorati tags: The Hobbit, Warner Brothers, Rally of Hope, New Zealand, movie, YouTube, Facebook, Public Address, Yvette Reid, Tolkein, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

The demise of Paul Henry and the rise of racism in New Zealand

2010-10-11T13:24:00.013+13:00

When I first arrived in New Zealand 18 years ago I felt I had found the most beautiful place on the planet. And not just beautiful on the outside, but beautiful on the inside as well. The people were warm, friendly, and helpful. It was like walking into Paradise.

Kiwis would pick you up on the site of the road when you were hitching and sometimes drive miles out of their way to take you where you needed to go, or they'd invite you back to their place to stay the night and take you to your destination in the morning. At the dairy when you asked for an ice cream cone you'd get at least three scoops of ice cream instead of the mean little half-scoop one would expect back in the UK, and they always served you with a smile and a bit of friendly conversation.

I always used to say that New Zealand felt like it was set back in time by about 50 years. Back to a time when people had enough time to be nice to each other, where the pace of life was slower and where attitudes were positive, enthusiastic and generous.

I spent the first few years of my new life as a Kiwi bathed in that same kind of positivity. I joined an African drumming group in Wellington, and when we decided to branch out and start our own percussion-based world music ensemble, Many Hands, I was amazed at the number of people who thought it was a fabulous idea and were only too happy to get involved and help us make things happen.

"That'd never happen in England" I used to think to myself. "In England they're all 'ooohhhh no, can't do that, more-than-my-job's-worth, never been done before', whereas in NZ it's all 'wow cool idea, can I get involved, can I help, let me be a part of this'. It's wonderful!"

Same thing happened when I started organising dance parties and then got involved with The Gathering. All these amazing creative people jumping on board to help, people doing stuff for free because they loved the concept, all of us working together on TheG to make magic out of nothing, and all the Gatherers becoming the best that they could possibly be the moment they entered the sacred space of Canaan Downs.

But over the years I've seen I've my rose-tinted specs becoming more and more battered and damaged. The horrific levels of child abuse in this country, the anti-smacking bill backlash from Kiwis who appeared to feel it was their God-given right to hit their children, the awful statistics related to domestic violence of all kinds, our casual and brutal propensity to torture animals for fun - all these things have puzzled and deeply saddened me in this beautiful country I now call home.

The last couple of weeks have only served to damage my rose-tinted view of New Zealand still further.

I come from a country where racism was tolerated, where for many people it was the normal way to be. My dad was racist, and my sister and I spent many years fighting with him, arguing with him, and swearing at him across the dinner table (it was the one thing guaranteed to get a reaction from my parents). The level of intolerance shown by many people in the UK towards those different (in any way) from themselves was one aspect (out of many) that I despised in my fellow countrymen, and was one of the reasons that I eventually decided I no longer wanted to be English.

Somehow I thought it would be different here. That the intolerance and casual racism I saw in the UK was not a part of the Kiwi psyche at all, and that (for the most part) it didn't exist in New Zealand. I thought we were better than that. How wrong I was. How naïve.

It's bad enough that TVNZ has appeared to encourage Paul Henry's spectacularly offensive behaviour over the last however-long he's been on Breakfast for the sake of ratings.

It's bad enough that the man has been able to get away with offensive remarks about women, the elderly, homosexuality, Hispanics, Indians, Susan Boyle, families in the developing world, the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan - always people "different" from himself, always when they're not there to fight back, very often people of a different nationality, ethnicity and/or skin colour to himself - all without TVNZ lifting so much as a finger to rein him in.

It's bad enough that this pathetic small-minded bully has been paid to disparage and offend pretty much anyone he likes by our state-sponsored public broadcaster - paid for by you and I - a public institution that in some ways represents us all, commentates on our behalf, brings us news and entertainment and everything in between and that is bound by the Code of Broadcasting Practice which, amongst other things, requires that:

Broadcasters should not encourage discrimination against, or denigration of, any section of the community on account of sex, sexual orientation, race, age, disability, occupational status, or as a consequence of legitimate expression of religion, culture or political belief.

It's bad enough that nothing was done to limit Mr Henry's ridiculous schoolboy-like behaviour until he managed to offend the Governor-General with what is, quite clearly, a racist comment.

It's bad enough that John Key was so "relaxed" about Henry's comments that he didn't make any attempt to point out during his interview that what Henry had just asked: "Are you going to choose a New Zealander who looks and sounds like a New Zealander this time... Are we going to go for someone who is more like a New Zealander this time?" was racist and offensive. A politician, especially the Prime Minister, needs to be able to think on his or her feet and respond appropriately. Not lamely laugh it off with a joke about whether the questioner is after the GG's job.

It's bad enough that it took John Key many hours (and with reference to urgent polling data I expect) before he managed to say anything that remotely resembled displeasure at Henry's racist comments. I'd have expected better than that from a Prime Minister, whatever his or her political hue.

It's bad enough that TNNZ's first comments about Paul Henry's GG questions were from their PR person Andi Brotherston, who said

The audience tell us over and over again that one of the things they love about Paul Henry is that he's prepared to say the things we quietly think but are scared to say out loud,"

Um, no Andi. NO NO NO. He does NOT speak for me. I do not "quietly think" anything remotely similar to what comes out of that man's mouth and I'm appalled you think I do.

It's bad enough that Henry's first "apology" was one of those classic passive-aggressive non-apologies so beloved of those who've been made to apologise but really aren't sorry at all.

"I sincerely apologise to the Governor-General, Sir Anand Satyanand, for any offence I may have caused. If my comments have personally offended Sir Anand, I regret it deeply."

Of course what that really means is:

"I sincerely apologise to the Governor-General, Sir Anand Satyanand, for any offence I may have caused [IF I caused any offence, which I don't think I did. I'm definitely not going to admit that my comments were in fact offensive, I'm just going to blame my victim for being offended]. If my comments have personally offended Sir Anand, [actually they were funny and therefore he obviously he has no sense of humour / is far too sensitive / is clearly demonstrating Political Correctness Gone Mad and therefore his feelings mean nothing to me] I regret it deeply."

It's bad enough that Henry's comments about Sir Anand Satyanand "not looking and sounding sufficiently like a New Zealander" were not only offensive to the GG himself, but to every single Kiwi out there who resembles or sounds like him - in other words, absolutely everyone whose skin is brown.

In Paul Henry's considered opinion, there's a certain group of New Zealanders who are "New Zealanders" and a certain group of New Zealanders who are not "New Zealanders". The determining factor in terms of whether you are acceptable to PH as a Kiwi is the colour of your skin and the way you speak. And that should offend all of us, whatever the colour of our skin or political persuasion.

It's bad enough that even after TVNZ had finally come to their senses and realised that the least they could get away with was to give PH a slap on the wrist and stand him down for a fortnight, the video footage of him laughing hysterically about his deliberately incorrect and deeply offensive pronunciation of Sheila Dikshit's name stayed up on the TVNZ website for at least two days:

"The dip shit woman. God, what's her name? Dick Shit. Is it Dick Shit ... it looks like 'Dick Shit',"

"It's so appropriate, because she's Indian, so she'd be dick-in-shit wouldn't she, do you know what I mean? Walking along the street ... it's just so funny."

...and of course his final comment - about her name being so appropriate because she's Indian is the icing on the bigoted cake.

Yes, all these things are bad enough, but it's been the response of some of my fellow Kiwis that has shocked and saddened me the most.

In Paul Henry's resignation statement he said:

I do not want to be the lightning rod for racial disharmony in this country

...which, quite frankly, I find disingenuous at the very least.

What this racist, bigoted man (and those at TVNZ who not only enabled, but encouraged him) has unleashed is an outpouring of racist comments from some New Zealanders that has shocked and horrified me, and that has rocked my love of my adopted country and my fellow countrymen and women to the core.

Some recent comments from Paul Henry's Facebook page:

Did you know indians fuck cows? that why they are holy in india . But can you really blame them. look at there women.

*Breaking News* NZ family of 3 evicted from 3 bedroom house in south auckland so 40 indians can move in!!!

If an indian baby was on fire how hard would you stomp the flames?

I would put it out with petrol

i would use bricks and a curry petrol blend.

October the 29th is international run down a rag head day all Indians killed or maimed will be eligible for points 1 point per male 2 points for females and 3 points for kids.

Paul henry is a breath of fresh air. His aura he has captivates veiwers in a way where all can laugh at what he says. NEW ZEALANDERS that is, so why is it that punjabi's are aloud 2 watch our television and make comments half way around the world on what we kiwi's want 2 watch. If they spent half the time worrying about whats in their own back yards then in others then maybe their wont so much poverty there and maybe our kiwi born television presenters wont mistake them for looking like dickshit.

India is like a sewer and the people are like turds floating in the sewer.

Im sure incest is common in india?

your goat fuckers who wipe there arses with there hands you sick fuck

naaargi buudbuud rat eating monobrow looking raabi infested povertised ridden cow and goat hailing low life monkeys ! PAUL HENRY said exactly what i needed to make me laugh that morning and i thank him. DICKSHIT OR IS IT DICK'N SHIT

I'm sorry, that's only the first page and I'm feeling sick already. I'm not going to read or paste any more. You get the picture.

I'm ashamed to be a Kiwi right now. Completely ashamed. I didn't think New Zealanders were like this.

Paul Henry may be gone from our screens (thankfully, for the moment anyway - I'm sure he'll be back unfortunately), but he's left the nasty dark underbelly of intolerance and racism in New Zealand exposed, encouraged, and out there for all to see. It's appalling.

Technorati tags: Paul Henry, TVNZ, Sheila Dikshit, Sir Anand Satyanand, Governor-General, New Zealand, racism, bigotry, WebWeaver's World, webweaver

Wellington Batucada at the All Blacks game

2010-07-24T18:46:00.004+12:00

It's very industrial underneath Westpac Stadium - all concrete pillars and not much lighting to speak of.

Somehow, when I was imagining us playing at the All Blacks vs Springboks tri-nations match last week I was picturing it being quite dimly-lit on the field as well, so it was a bit of a shock as we walked around the corner and could see the far end of the player's tunnel in front of us, with the field and thousands of yellow seats beyond. I'd forgotten there'd be floodlights! It was brighter than a very bright thing out there! Crikey!

We gathered in formation on the edge of the field just in front of the tunnel, Tim gave the signal to begin, and we began our parade.

The next 30 minutes went by in a flash. I remember concentrating my entire focus on Tim and on my caixa. I was dimly aware of players warming up on the field next to us, but I barely looked at them - I was so engrossed in the music and making sure I was playing my patterns properly. I remember the slightly muddy grass beneath my feet (it had been raining all day), and trying not to trip over the myriad of TV cables spread across our path. I remember the crowd (not massive an hour before kick-off, but not too shabby) and how much they enjoyed our playing, and I remember the beat of our drums echoing around the stadium.

As we finished each piece with a flourish, the crowd near where we were playing cheered and clapped (and we cheered and clapped back at them), and then we'd be onto the next piece, marching in time to the music as we played.

At one point a commentator placed himself and his camera crew directly ahead of us, the big camera light was switched on, and he began to talk to camera. At the time I couldn't believe that his mike would be able to pick up his voice at all - we were only about 10 feet behind him, and boy, were we loud - but sure enough through the wonders of modern technology they were able to hear him loud and clear - and see us as we marched behind him, big grins on all our faces as we passed by.

OK so he called us Batucada Sound Machine (our director Darren's samba band) instead of Wellington Batucada, but never mind - at least he referred to us!

Here we are:

We continued on our merry way as a fine misty rain began to fall, and made it around half the field in half an hour, leaving by the tunnel opposite the one we'd come in on. A final flourish, played exclusively for the guys hanging out having a fag on the upper walkway, and we were done. It seemed like only 5 minutes since we'd begun playing.

As we were driven back out of the stadium in our bus we passed by the thousands of fans still arriving at the gates - and we were so energised that it was pretty hard to stop ourselves leaping out and playing an impromptu gig for them all.

What a great night!

When I got back home and watched the match build-up on MySky I was amazed how loud we were. The poor old commentators in their glass box up in the Gods seemed to be having a bit of difficuly concentrating on what they were saying half the time - I think we must have been marching directly beneath their commentary box - and I really hope we didn't put them off.

Maybe next time (crossing fingers that there's a next time!) they'll get us to march around the opposite side of the field so our drumbeats aren't carried quite so effectively into that little glass box. We shall see...

Oh - and of course the All Blacks played an absolute stormer of a game and hammered the Springboks by a pretty wide margin for the second time in a row - Phew! Glad we didn't hex 'em with our playing! Go the All Blacks!

Technorati tags: Wellington Batucada, Batucada, All Blacks, Springboks, tri-nations, rugby, Wellington, Westpac Stadium, samba, caixa, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Government backs down on mining our National Parks

2010-07-20T22:21:00.009+12:00

WE DID IT!

I'm doing a Snoopy Happy Dance here at home, after the government today announced they were backing down on their plans to mine our National Parks.

Looks like I'm not going to have to chain myself to the bulldozers after all. Well, not right this minute, anyway.

Thank God there's someone in the National Party who's able to see that they got it really, really wrong - and that it would be political suicide to continue with their plans in the face of such enormous opposition.

Mind you, that person is most definitely not Gerry Brownlee - spinning the announcement madly this evening by saying that this is nothing less than a mandate from the people to go ahead and mine the shit out of the rest of the country instead. Just go ahead and try it, Gerry - and I think in many places you'll find the opposition is just as strong as it was for the Schedule 4 areas.

I emailed Gerry Brownlee, John Key and Kate Wilkinson when this whole thing blew up. This is what I said:

I am outraged. How dare you???

Our National Parks and conservation areas are our taonga. They are what makes us special, and unique, and what many of the tourists who spend $9billion a year here come to see. Not for nothing do our many visitors call New Zealand "the most beautiful place in the world".

And you want to dig them up and destroy parts of our precious heritage for ever - in the name of profit - most of which will go to the mining companies? Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation from a mining industry consultant - and without seeking any advice on the impact of mining on our tourism industry? Unbelievable.

You selfish, small-minded, greedy bastards. Yes I'm angry - I'm downright furious. I'm currently listening to Ms Wilkinson ranting on in parliament. My God. If she's the Minister for Conservation, then God help the environment.

"Surgical mining"? Is that like 'scientific whaling' by any chance? Don't lie to us - some people may be fooled, but the majority are not - and for many of us, me included - this is our line in the sand.

I'm sending you this message from the Forest & Bird website. I joined the organisation yesterday - I've never been a member before - specifically because you are trying to prevent DoC staff from discussing mining with F&B. How pathetic. What are you afraid of? They've revealed nothing that isn't true.

In the space of just a few months you have turned me back into a political activist - after 20 years of relative political inactivity. Good for you. I suspect I am not the only one. I also suspect that the passion you have unleashed in those of us who care about our environmental heritage will be far stronger than the vague feelings of greed you have stirred up in those poor deluded fools who actually believe your lies and spin.

National and ACT - the parties that know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Prepare for a fight, because that's what you're gonna get. We're not going to let you do this.

Back when I wrote that email I didn't know just how much opposition there would actually be. I was hopeful - I knew yer average Kiwi was proud of our beautiful National Parks, and I knew there would be many people who were, like me, outraged at the prospect of parts of them being destroyed for 30 pieces of silver - but I wasn't 100% sure that there'd be enough of an outcry to make them stop.

I knew we had to hit them hard and hit them fast - it's much easier to stop plans like these at an early stage than it is to try and stop them when you've reached the chaining-yourself-to-the-bulldozers stage.

I will be forever grateful to the Green Party, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace and all the other groups who joined forces under the banner of 2precious2mine - and who all utilised the power of the internet, social networking, online organising and online submission-making to get 47,000 signatures on the Greens' anti-mining petition, 40,000 people demonstrating against the proposals in Auckland in May, and 37,552 New Zealanders making submissions, the vast majority of which opposed the government's plans. Now that's people power in action.

I was banking on something I mentioned in my email - I suspected that the passion felt by those who opposed the mining would be much stronger than any vague feelings of greed in those who either didn't care about our environmental heritage, or who believed the government's spin that mining was the only possible solution to our economic woes.

From that perspective, I felt that even if we were in the minority, we'd work until we dropped to make sure the mining didn't happen - and that we'd be able to win through sheer force of will, even if we didn't quite have the numbers.

Turns out I underestimated my fellow Kiwis just a bit - and that a majority were opposed to mining anyway, which is awesome - and that a HUGE number of people felt passionately enough about it to get off their asses and make themselves heard - which is extremely awesome.

I think in retrospect, the tipping point was probably the sheer number of National supporters who were also horrified by their party's plans. (Well, that and John Key's desperate need to retain his Mr Popular image). I don't think Brownlee et al saw that coming at all - although, honestly, if they couldn't see the NIMBY vote coming out in full force in Auckland to protect their beautiful playgrounds in the Coromandel and Great Barrier Island, then they're more stupid than I thought.

I was struck by a conversation I had with a friend of mine who is generally "All National, All The Time". We rarely talk politics these days 'cos we never agree and we'd rather stay friends than fight - so I was completely amazed to be discussing the mining proposals with her and to be hearing her say how outraged she was, and how untrustworthy she feels her party has become, and how she doesn't believe much of anything they say any more - and how if there was an election tomorrow she might not be able to bring herself to vote for them!

Holy hell! For me, that was huge. I have no doubt that National's pollsters were well aware of the backlash from their party faithful, and I'm betting that that had a major influence on their decision to do a 180. It's one thing to stir up anger and protest in a bunch of lefties and greenies who are never going to vote for you anyway - and quite another to offend your own party members to such an extent that they begin contemplating not voting for you any more...

I see two dark clouds on the horizon of this otherwise sunny day of celebration.

The first is that the government is changing the rules so that the Energy and Resources Minister will now be included in decisions regarding access to conservation land. Currently those decisions are made by the Minister for Conservation alone.

The fact that the guy trying to promote mining now gets to influence decisions made by the woman who (in theory at least) is supposed to be standing up for the rights of the environment is a big concern, and one which has not escaped the notice of environmental groups, including ECO (Environment and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa New Zealand):

The Government decision not to take areas from Schedule Four is welcome, but the Government decision to give the Minister of Energy and Resources effective control over mining access to conservation land was a major step backwards, the Environment and Conservation Organisations (ECO) said today.

ECO co-chair Cath Wallace said the decision on schedule 4 protected land is a victory for all those who made submissions, marched and signed petitions against the proposal to open up further conservation land to mining. “The government deserves credit for listening to them.”

“The Government should now listen to those submitters and not include the Minister of Economic Development (Gerry Brownlee) in making decisions on other conservation land.”

Ms Wallace said the process showed that neither Gerry Brownlee nor his Ministry understood the real values of conservation areas and the attachment New Zealanders have to it.

The second dark cloud is the direction in which Gerry is already spinning this:

"From my perspective this has been a valuable exercise. I suspect few New Zealanders knew the country had such considerable mineral potential before we undertook this process, and I get a sense that New Zealanders are now much more aware of that potential and how it might contribute to economic growth.

"Essentially the discussion process identified where the minerals industry can and can't go. As many people have pointed out, around 85 per cent of the country is not protected by Schedule 4, and a great deal of that land has mineral potential.

"New Zealanders have given the minerals sector a clear mandate to go and explore that land, and where appropriate, within the constraints of the resource consent process, utilise its mineral resources for everyone's benefit," Mr Brownlee said.

The government has also decided to undertake a significant aeromagnetic survey of non Schedule 4 land in Northland and on the West Coast of the South Island to learn more about which areas have the highest concentrations of valuable minerals.

"I am delighted to announce that the aeromagnetic survey in Northland will be conducted as a partnership between central government and the various agencies of local government in Northland.

"It is our expectation that when that data becomes available there will be an escalation of mineral exploration and extraction in those areas, which will be of benefit to the economies of both regions."

Only a politician could spin an outcry against one thing into a "clear mandate" in favour of something quite similar but not exactly the same.

It was completely obvious to anyone with half a brain that the government never had any intention of mining in the Coromandel or Great Barrier Island - they'd have lost Auckland and therefore the election if they'd pursued that goal - but at the time I figured that these were just a smokescreen.

I figured they'd back down with great fanfare on one or both areas, "Hey look! Aren't we democratic? We listened to the people!" and then go quietly away and mine somewhere else instead while people weren't looking.

Which is essentially what they are planning to do, if Gerry's spin is anything to go by. I thought they'd go away and mine another bit of Schedule 4 land (Paparoa or Stewart Island) so I'm massively pleased that they've also backed away from those plans - but I'm VERY concerned about the "85 per cent of the country [that] is not protected by Schedule 4" which Gerry already has his beady little eyes on.

Northland and the West Coast are definitely at risk now - and I see it as cynical in the extreme to target areas of the country where the population is under-employed and economically vulnerable - and therefore less likely to examine the true economic cost of allowing mining to go ahead in their backyards.

We won the battle today - but we didn't win the war. I don't think we'll ever win the war, to be honest, because there will always be greedy bastards out there anxious to rape and pillage our precious lands, and there will always be greedy shareholders looking to increase their dividends at whatever cost - but we have to keep on fighting - for ever - to protect what's important to us.

To me, that's always been the underlying truth of environmental activism. We fight because it's the right thing to do, not because we know we will always win. We won today, but we return to battle tomorrow.

Useful links

2precious2mine

A big win for people power

Brownlee mining dream in tatters

Forest & Bird welcomes Government's mining decision

Government decision on Schedule Four Welcomed But Conservation Areas still at risk especially with Minister of Economic Development a decision maker

Greens celebrate a victory for common sense

Is the mining decision a backdown for John Key and the National Government? (approach with care - NZ Herald Your Views)

Mining backdown - Nats split?

Mining our Top Conservation Land

No land to be removed from Schedule 4

People power forces Govt u-turn on mining

The people win on mining

Technorati tags: mining, mining National Parks, Schedule 4, Gerry Brownlee, backdown, Kate Wilkinson, conservation, environment, 100% pure NZ, greenies, Greenpeace, Green Party, Forest & Bird, 2precious2mine, protest, environmental activism, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Glee flash mobs

2010-07-12T03:28:00.003+12:00

I've had a bunch of episodes of Glee piling up on the MySky for ages, and this weekend I've finally gotten around to watching them. I'm almost caught up again. Yay!

I don't know how they do it, but I reckon Glee is pretty much the only show where I can be guaranteed to laugh out loud and shed a tear or two in every single episode. It is, simply, delightful.

And then I found Glee flash mobs on YouTube. Such fun!

Official Seattle Glee Flash Mob Video - Seattle, Westlake:

Glee Flash Mob - Grafton Street - Dublin, Ireland:

Flash Mob at the Ohio Union 5/3/2010 - The Ohio State University:

GLEE - Il FlashMob in Rome:

glee flash mob Tel Aviv:

All School Assembly Flash Mob (not all Glee, strictly speaking, but I love this cos it's the teachers flashmobbing the students):

Technorati tags: Glee, flash mobs, Seattle, Dublin, Ohio State University, Rome, Tel Aviv, All School Assembly, music, musicals, TV shows, YouTube, video, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Matt Smith & Orbital - Dr Who theme, Glastonbury 2010

2010-07-01T23:26:00.006+12:00

I'm such a slacker.

I haven't written in my blog for a month - being self-employed really does reduce my life down to a single purpose if I let it. Must.do.better.

Anyway, having been to a total of nine Glastonburys in my time (those were the days!) I have a soft spot for anything related to the Worthy Farm Annual Shindig - so here's my vote for awesomest Glastonbury video evah - Matt Smith & Orbital doing the Dr Who theme, Glastonbury 2010.

Enjoy! It's friggin fantastic!

And if you want a bit more Glasto Goodness - check out these stunning photos from The Big Picture.

Technorati tags: Glastonbury, YouTube, Matt Smith, Orbital, Dr Who, Glasto, 2010, Dr Who theme, video, The Big Picture, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Cuba Street Carnival

2010-06-05T00:09:00.006+12:00

I remember discussing the Cuba Street Carnival with Chris Morley-Hall, back when it was but a twinkle in his eye.

Having been involved with The Gathering for a few years by that point I knew how much effort, blood, sweat and tears it took to create a "happening" out of nothing - how much it took out of you and how long it could take to turn that twinkle of an idea into something real and tangible and successful.

I just want to say how much I admire Chris for having taken up the challenge and making the Cuba Street Carnival into the 150,000-people success it had become by 2009.

I'm not going to speculate on exactly why the Carnival has hit this bump in the road - the stories and reports don't make sense at the moment - there are obviously some big pieces of info missing, and I hope we get the opportunity to find out more soon.

Wellington Batucada, for example, probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Chris and the Cuba Street Carnival. We originally formed in November 2001 to perform in the Carnival, and we've been a part of it ever since - and in the process have become a part of Wellington's culture in the same way as the Carnival has.

Events like the Rugby Sevens, the Cuba Street Carnival, the Wellington Festival of the Arts and the Fringe Festival are some of what makes Wellington such a special place to live. All those wonderful events bring colour and a little bit of magic to our city, and make it a place to be proud of.

Each of these events also creates its own little set of ripples in the Wellington pond which further enrich our city. Just as The Gathering inspired a whole generation of DJs and makers of electronica to come out of their bedrooms and into the light of live performance, so events like the Cuba Street Carnival provide a huge number of creative people with a wonderful, joyous, fantabulous excuse to push their creativity and their showmanship to new levels every two years.

The Batucada crew, for example, worked every day for two months on our float and our costumes for the 2009 event, and we start rehearsing our performance pieces months before the big day. It's always been a huge part of who we are and what we do.

Being a part of the Carnival (and winning the Supreme Award) has positive spin-offs for us too - our beginners' course that followed soon after the Carnival last year had more than three times as many participants as normal, and we've continued to get big numbers to our courses since then as well. We continue to grow and improve, and love what we do - and a lot of that is due to our ongoing participation in the Cuba Street Carnival.

Chris can be proud that he has made such a huge contribution to our performing arts culture over the past 10 years, just as we can be proud that our membership of Batucada brings colour to many events in and around the city throughout the year.

I'm completely gutted that there won't be another Carnival next year. I'm crossing my fingers and praying that this will be a temporary hiatus and that we'll all be back again with bells on in 2013 (if not sooner!)

Technorati tags: Cuba Street Carnival, Chris Morley-Hall, Wellington Batucada, Batucada, samba, carnival, Wellington, carnival cancelled, funding, street party, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

The sweetest little kitten

2010-04-11T18:46:00.006+12:00

Angela and Alice dropped me home after bookclub on Wednesday night, and as I got out of the car I heard a cat miaowing and miaowing. I looked around under the bushes and saw a little tabby kitten in considerable distress. I hadn't seen him around before.

I coaxed him out from his hiding-place and picked him up. Poor little thing. He seemed very happy to see me, so I carried him up the path and before I knew it I was taking him into the house. He was far too young to be left out all alone at night.

We went into the laundry and I gave him some of Winnie and Bailey's food, which he devoured with great enthusiasm. It looked as though he hadn't eaten for a while, although he was in very good condition (perhaps a little thin, but his coat was lovely and his paws weren't at all damaged).

After he'd finished his dinner I took him into the living room to show him to Winnie and Bailey, who were both sitting on the sofa looking extremely unimpressed by our new visitor. I decided to put him down after a while, but Bailey immediately jumped down and began stalking him, so I picked him up again. This wasn't going to be easy.

Eventually I decided to put him in the cat basket, and took him with me into my office while I checked Pets on the Net to see if anyone had lost him. No joy. Winnie and Bailey were hovering around, and every time they came near him he hissed and growled - as did they. He was safe in the basket, but he really didn't like them being near him.

After a while it occurred to me that I could let him explore one room, and lock the other cats out so he'd be safe, so I set up food, water and a litter tray in the drawing room and took him in there. He was so sweet. He had a great time exploring, checking out the furniture and looking out of the window, all the while purring like a crazy thing. His purr was bigger than he was!

Every so often he'd come back to me and nuzzle against my velvet coat, and then he'd go back into the basket and curl up and purr and purr and purr. I fell in love instantly.

I decided he should definitely stay the night, and in the morning I'd canvass the neighbours and see if I could find out who he belonged to.

On Thursday I took a bunch of photos of him and then doorknocked in the neighbourhood, looking for his owners. There were lots of kids home for the school holidays - and if anyone knows the location of a wee kitten it's kids - but no-one knew whose he was. So strange. I rang the local vet to see if anyone was looking for him, but no-one was. They suggested I bring him in to see if he was microchipped, so after a fruitless search for his family amongst my neigbours we went for a drive to the vet.

No microchip, but they offered to take care of him until his family came to claim him. After Winnie and Bailey's complete lack of enthusiasm I reluctantly decided this was probably the best option, so I left him in their capable hands. That evening I put his photo and description on Pets on the Net, and called the vet to see if anyone had called about him, but no-one had.

Since then I've called them every day to see how he's doing, and I popped in for a visit yesterday. Yesterday I also went round the neighbourhoood pasting up FOUND - TABBY KITTEN notices. I figure if anyone's lost him they'll be out looking and a poster is a good way to get their attention.

It's so weird. He's the sweetest, friendliest little kitten in the world (the vet reckons he's between 3 and 4 months old). He's in good condition so I don't think he's wandered far from home. He loves people and has obviously been well taken care of so far - so where is his family and why aren't they looking for him?

If he was mine I'd be completely frantic by now. It's Sunday night and he's been away from home since Wednesday at least. Maybe his family's on holiday and they've got a catsitter feeding him and they haven't realised he's missing (although if he's an only cat you would have thought by now they'd have figured out he's not eating his food).

Or maybe there's a flatmate who's supposed to be keeping an eye on him and they just don't care much whether he's around or not. Or maybe (for whatever crazy reason) he was abandoned by his owners near my house and they simply don't want him any more.

Thank God I found him. Imagine how frightened and cold and lonely he'd be if I hadn't.

If I could, I'd adopt him if his owners don't come forward. But that's not really a possibility - Winnie and Bailey would be most put out and it wouldn't be fair on any of them.

Fortunately, he's such a darling that more than one of the vet staff has their eye on him - and I don't think he's going to have any trouble finding a new home.

Technorati tags: found kitten, tabby kitten, lost pets, Pets on the Net, Kelburn Vet, cats, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Farewell Malcolm McLaren - and thank you

2010-04-10T18:23:00.002+12:00

For me, a teenager living in England in 1976, punk was an entirely British phenomenon at the beginning. We weren't really aware of any American punk bands back then - it seemed to us as though it started in London with the Sex Pistols - and that Malcolm and Vivienne's Sex shop provided (in a massively important way) the "look" that went with the sound.

All the bands we loved and pogo'd to and spat at at innumerable gigs in those first two or three years of punk were either English, Irish or Scottish (our discovery of American punks such as The Ramones and Blondie came a couple of years later) - and for us, the clothes were almost as important as the music - and the attitude was equally important.

It was the classic teenage rebellion "fuck you if you're over 25" thing - but in addition (and this was something we'd certainly never come across in popular music before) - it was the DIY ethic. The idea that any one of us could pick up a guitar and form a punk band and that it would be good, and joyous, and wonderful, and angry, and rebellious, and political if we wanted it to be - this was an entirely new concept, and one which we all embraced with great enthusiasm.

I think Malcolm had a lot to do with fostering and developing this ethic, whether he did it deliberately or not.

He lit a fire in those of us at the perfect age to appreciate and adopt all the aspects of punk culture - and what a blaze it was! I'm so incredibly grateful to have had punk as my seminal musical influence. It was a wonderful time to be growing up, and a wonderful soundtrack to my teenage and University years.

I can see shadows of that same DIY ethic coming through at many other times of my life - like travelling to the far side of the world straight after University when no-one we had ever met had even considered doing such a thing; eventually coming to live in NZ even though I didn't know a soul when I arrived; forming a world music band in Welli in the 90s; organising dance parties and eventually getting involved in The Gathering; making our own documentary about TheG; even the freelance and contract web design/dev work I do these days - it's all about making things happen yourself and not relying on anyone else to do it for you.

I learned when I first went travelling that "you can make anything happen if you want it badly enough" - and although I thought I'd figured that one out for myself, in retrospect I think it was a concept that was already sitting in my brain, planted there by all the punk bands I ever saw, and ever loved.

Malcolm McLaren introduced me to the very first of those punk bands, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Technorati tags: Malcolm McLaren, punk, Vivienne Westwood, DIY ethic, rebellion, Sex Pistols, tribute, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

No Mining protest - printable placards

2010-03-29T22:43:00.027+13:00

I've been having a play around making a few placards for tomorrow's No Mining in NZ's National Parks protest.

The protest will be outside Parliament from 12.30 to 1.30pm - Tuesday 29 March. Please come if you care about our National Parks.

Hope you like the placards. I've put links to the downloadable PDF versions at the end of this post.

National: Selling our heritage for 30 pieces of silver:

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John Key: Why didn't you mention mining during the election campaign? [edited 30/03/10 to add the "John Key" bit at the beginning]

No mining in our National Parks:

Brownlee's postcard on Eden Park (with a side-by-side comparison of Waihi goldmine and Eden Park):

Surgical mining is a big lie - like scientific whaling: [edited 30/03/10 to make BIG LIE bigger]

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children:

Downloadable, printable placards

Each PDF consists of five A4 pages - the first is the full slogan so you can see what you're getting. The other four contain a quarter of the slogan each - with an overlap. If you print out all four you can trim them and put them together to make an A2-sized placard. Enjoy!

National: Selling our heritage for 30 pieces of silver (PDF, 288KB)

John Key: Why didn't you mention mining during the election campaign? (PDF, 388KB)

No mining in our National Parks (PDF, 388KB)

Brownlee's postcard on Eden Park (PDF, 4.5MB)

Surgical mining is a big lie - like scientific whaling (PDF, 260KB)

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children (PDF, 372KB)

Technorati tags: No mining, National Parks, protest, demonstration, placards, printable, No Mining in NZ's National Parks, environment, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Save Radio NZ! No mining in NZ's National Parks!

2010-03-23T17:25:00.007+13:00

Or... How National And ACT Turned Me Back Into A Political Activist After Many Years Away...

In my dim and distant yoof, when I was still English, I was very politically active. I lived in the UK for most of Thatcher's 17-year reign, and my God it was a tough time to be a leftie.

I protested on behalf of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament); marched for Save the Whales; opposed the government's anti-gay legislation Clause 28; cheered Bishop Desmond Tutu when he spoke out in Hyde Park against the South African apartheid regime; welcomed Nelson Mandela to freedom at the huge concert in his honour at Wembley Stadium; demonstrated against the Falklands War and the first Gulf War; and was a local organiser in the Anti-Poll Tax campaign (I was at that riot in London - scary times indeed!).

One of the reasons why I finally left the UK was that I was just sick to death of banging my head against what seemed like a brick wall at the time. The day the British people voted the Conservatives in for yet another term (after John Major's coup that dethroned Thatcher as party leader) I was sitting on a little yacht in the Bay of Islands reading the paper and thinking "That's it. I resign. I no longer consider myself to be English. The British people are obviously too bloody stupid to be trusted with any kind of a vote on anything that means anything - and I quit." I've considered myself to be "formerly English" ever since.

Fast forward through the last 17-odd years as a New Zealander - I stopped travelling, settled in NZ, made friends, found a job, found a place to live, found another job, became a web designer/developer, moved house a few more times, eventually bought a house with a garden, got a couple of cats, worked my ass off - and somewhere along the way I lost my political activist streak.

I think it's partly because I was so involved in settling in a new country, which took up a lot of my energy, and partly because Kiwis on the whole are much more laid back and a lot less politically active than yer average pom. Or at least that's been my experience. Don't get me wrong - I still follow politics, I still have great political discussions when I get together with my mates, I'm a member of the Green Party - but in terms of actual activism I seemed to have pretty much given it up.

Until now.

I have National and ACT to thank for that. Yeah - thanks guys! You rock! Not.

I've watched with growing concern as they attack and dismantle one important part of my adopted homeland after another. National Education standards and closing down night classes, Paula "I used to be a beneficiary but now I'm not and you losers can all just GET FUCKED" Bennett's attacks on those least able to fight back, increasing GST when they specifically said they wouldn't, tax cuts for their rich mates and to hell with the rest of you, the Auckland Super City undemocratic debacle... the list goes on and on and on - not to mention pushing through a whole raft of new and potentially unpopular legislation under the cloak of "urgency" so they don't even have to discuss it in Parliament and no-one gets the chance to oppose it.

The final two straws that broke this particular camel's back have been their attack on Radio New Zealand's funding, and now - most egregious of all in my opinion - their plans to mine in our National Parks.

I'm so outraged by their mining plans I can't even begin to express how outraged I am. Talk about short-sighted! Do they not have children and grandchildren to whom they'd like to leave the few pieces of pristine wilderness we have left? Apparently not - or at least, if they do, they apparently don't care about them too much.

There are not many things that would get me to leave my nice comfortable life and go chain myself to a bulldozer in protest - but this is certainly one of them. This is our taonga, our heritage, it's what makes us special and unique, and it's what brings in billions of dollars a year in tourism - AND YOU WANT TO DIG IT UP???? You greedy bastards. How dare you???

I actually began my reawakening to political activism by joining the Save Radio New Zealand Facebook group a month or so ago. What a cliché eh? Join a Facebook group and do your bit for the protest! Except that... the group grew so quickly and became so motivated to get up off the couch and actually do something, that the media began to take notice. And the politicians, I think, have also begun to pay attention.

Whether this is because yer average pollie doesn't really "get" social media like Facebook but secretly thinks they should, and they hear that Web2.0 is the Next Big Thing and think they should show some interest so as to get down with da kidz - or whether it's because they also know that for every person who actually gets off their ass and joins a Facebook group (easy though it is to do), there are 100 others standing behind them, agreeing with them, but not actually ever getting round to pressing the blue "join" button, I don't know, but it does actually seem to be having some effect.

Anyway, whatever the reason, people-who-count started taking notice and the Facebook group grew and grew. Hundreds and hundreds of members made comments on the group's page (and continue to do so). Gaining 20,000 members in a little over a month is pretty impressive for our small country, even if it is "just" on Facebook.

It soon became clear that the Save Radio New Zealand people weren't all pointy-headed liberals from Wellington like they said we were - we come from all over the country - the world, even; we come from all kinds of different backgrounds and age groups; and perhaps most importantly for those politicians watching, we come from right across the political spectrum. There are many people in the group who voted National and are now wondering what the heck they signed up for. And they are not happy.

Some interesting things start happening when you join a group of any kind. Firstly you realise you're not alone, and that there are tons of others from all over the place who agree with you. That feels good! It gives you hope! Then someone comes up with an idea for more direct action - and all of a sudden instead of trying to persuade a couple of your mates to demonstrate outside Parliament about this thing you care about, you've got hundreds of people to get motivated with - who already care about the same thing that you do. It's brilliant.

As I walked back to work after the Protest Picnic outside Parliament a few weeks ago, my portable transistor radio still switched on, trailing RNZ's music and words behind me like a stream of bubbles in the breeze, it occurred to me that I felt pretty good having got out there and taken the time to stand up for something I believe in. The last time I did that was the massive protest against the War on Iraq, but that was a long time ago.

It also occurred to me that as I'm a web designer/developer, I have a skill that might be of use to the campaign, and that as part of my activist re-awakening, I could actually do something more to help. That night I registered saveradionz.co.nz and offered my services to the campaign organisers. I've spent the last couple of weeks on WordPress finding and re-styling a suitable theme and writing the first 30-odd pages of the website, and we did a soft launch of the site at the weekend. It's getting a lot of hits already.

It's good to be a part of something, and it's good to be back fighting for what I think is right.

Last night I found Metiria Turei's No mining in NZ's National Parks Facebook group, and all day I've watched the number of members creep up. There's a lot of cross-fertilisation that can happen in a social networking environment (hence the term "networking"), and I know there are many people who, like me, have joined both groups. I know, because I invited a whole bunch of 'em myself! That's another awesome thing about Facebook - the "invite friends to join" function. Talk about helping groups to go viral! It's brilliant!

One of the things an online group can do is to help members fight in all the range of legal ways possible - again it's about getting the information out there and the motivation that comes from being part of that group. The No mining in NZ's National Parks group will be helping us to make submissions to the innocently-named Schedule 4 Stocktake discussion paper, and I'm most definitely making a submission with their help. This is too important an issue to sit by and hope someone else does the protesting for me. I have to do it myself, and I have to make my voice heard in every way I can.

I'm hoping the NIMBY vote will kick in in Auckland, especially about Great Barrier Island and the Coromandel, but there's the risk that (assuming this isn't the most politically stupid move ever) they're announcing these two places first so that they can then "back down" in the face of massive opposition - "ooh look we listened to the people!" - and then quietly go and mine somewhere else like the West Coast or Stewart Island where they think the opposition won't be as strong. We need to stop that from happening, and that means we all have to do our bit - including me.

I renewed my Green Party membership today (and gave them a bit of a donation to help the cause) and I also joined Forest & Bird today. Hey government! You want to stop the Department of Conservation from talking to our oldest and most well-respected conservation group? You want to start gagging people like that? Oh yeah - that's really going to work well. In fact - just because you've done that - I think I'll join them. Go check out the banners on their homepage - they're really cool. I particularly like "Forest & Bird. HYSTERICAL about nature since 1923". Ha!

It seems to me that an issue such as freezing (and thereby in reality, cutting) funding to our only remaining public broadcaster and then expecting a change of mindset at said broadcaster in order to live within those diminishing means - or an issue such as opening up our pristine(ish) wilderness to foreign mining companies so that they can rape and pillage te whenua to their heart's content - has to be shut down fast, shut down hard, and shut down now.

If we don't get off our collective arses and force the government to back down fully on both these issues, then elements of our country, our heritage, our culture and our landscape will be lost, and gone for ever.

As Oscar Wilde once said:

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

...which seems to sum up our current government's mindset pretty well.

...and as Joni Mitchell famously said (or, rather, sang):

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Technorati tags: Save Radio New Zealand, No Mining in NZ's National Parks, Facebook, conservation, mining, National, ACT, protest, political activism, Radio New Zealand, Forest & Bird, Green Party, environmentalism, social networking, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

"Would you like to take part in a 60-second survey?"

2010-03-08T18:09:00.005+13:00

"Would you like to take part in a 60-second survey?" is the opening line from many of the unsolicited phone calls I receive these days. Being less than enthusiastic about strangers trying to sell me shit or ask me intrusive questions over the phone, my response is usually something along the lines of "why, what are you selling?"

"Oh I promise you we're not selling you anything at all - we're just doing a quick survey about the economy" says the girl on the phone this afternoon. "Oh," I reply, "do you want to know what I think about the economy? Are you doing an opinion poll?" - because I don't mind opinion polls (I think quietly to myself).

She edges round my question without giving me a straight answer, and when I ask her what her company does, she tells me they provide financial advice for businesses - or something along those, lines, anyway.

So I say OK, because I figure, well, what's 60 seconds out of my life? I can handle that. I'm waiting for the next two questions because I know exactly what they will be. The first is my age bracket. I fall within it so I answer in the affirmative.

The second question is the kicker. It is always - and I mean always "do you own your own home?"

Hmmm. Why would they want to know that? Gosh, really - I wonder why?

I lie and say "no" because I have realised it's the single most effective way to get these people off the phone.

I have never ever had to continue with one of these "surveys" when I tell them I'm a renter. Goodness me! Don't they want to gather the opinions of people who rent along with those who owe hundreds of thousands to whatever bank was kind enough to give them a mortgage? Apparently not. How very strange.

Could it be because they're actually planning to sell me something further on down the line - if I give them the right answers of course - of which the most important, apparently, is "do you have enough income to get a mortgage and therefore potentially have sufficient income to be tempted by whatever shit we're really planning on trying to sell you?"

Of course they are. They'll either store all my details away for a cold-call later on when they finally reveal whatever it is they're really selling - or perhaps they'll put my details together with the contact details of hundreds of other people and sell them in bulk to some company that wants to sell me whatever it is that they sell.

Which means - goodness me - the girl on the phone wasn't exactly telling the whole truth, now was she? OK so she wasn't trying to sell me anything right that minute, but her response to my "no I don't own my own hone - I rent" answer couldn't have been clearer.

"Oh well, that lets you off the hook, then! Thanks very much - goodbye!" and with that cheery farewell she's off to hassle the next poor sucker dumb enough to have their name and number in the phone book.

Yeah thanks a lot cheery girl on the phone. I've changed my mind - that's 60 seconds of my life I'll never get back. I'm so over people lying to me on the the phone to try and get useful info from me that they'll use against me later on. Thanks very much - goodbye!

Technorati tags: consumer surveys, cold-calling, intrusive phone calls, do you own your own home, things that annoy me, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Happy centenary, house!

2010-02-22T23:51:00.013+13:00

100 years ago today, my house was conceived by A Stubbs, Architect. It's there in black and white on the architect's plan I got from the City Council.

22 February 1910. I'm not sure when exactly it was "born" (built), so we'll have to go for conception instead.

It's amazing when you think about it. Imagine what my house has seen over the past century!

My house was the first one built on the hill. Back then it was surrounded by ugly bare earth up and down the hillside, and a rough road (track) below. These days it's surrounded by trees and bush and other people's houses. Except for in front. We have a great view across the valley in front. I rather like that.

I wonder if there were as many tuis and keas in the valley when my house was first built, as there are today? I bet there weren't. Living near the Karori Sanctuary definitely has its advantages.

My house was built for one JS Rutter, Esq., and it has the nicest vibe of any house I've ever lived in. People always remark on how welcoming and friendly it feels.

Winnie and Bailey often focus quite intently on the ghosts in the room, and I get a strong vibe that we have good ghosts living here.

It needs a bit of TLC at the moment - the garden's a bit of a mess, the window frames urgently need painting and the weatherboards'll need doing in a couple of years, but it's doing pretty well for a place that's been standing for a hundred years.

I love my house. I have been known to stop and hug the doorframes in passing, on more than one occasion. It's pretty much my favourite place in the whole world.

Happy birthday, house! May you have many, many more.

Technorati tags: house, home, centenary, Wellington, New Zealand, wooden villa, JS Rutter, A Stubbs, architect, 22 February 1910, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Well, we didn't win an ONYA this year...

2010-02-21T23:56:00.004+13:00

...but that doesn't mean we can't continue our great work and win one next year!

During his introductory comments at the ONYAs Che quoted someone-or-other who had said that you should never enter your work for an award because you'll get discouraged if you don't win, and you'll stop doing the good work you're already doing because you'll think it's not good enough. Che disagreed with this sentiment, and so do we.

At WebWeaver Productions we love doing what we do - we love designing and building beautiful accessible websites - and we know we're doing it pretty well - both because our clients love our work, and also because we were nominated four times in three categories for three different ONYAs.

Our Environmental Protection Authority website was nominated for Best Accessibility and Best Use of HTML/CSS, our Optimation website was also nominated for Best Use of HTML/CSS, and my website The Gathering archives was nominated for Best Content (Personal).

We were disappointed not to win - but completely honoured to be there in the first place, in such illustrious company.

Radio New Zealand won both the Best Accessibility category and the Best Use of HTML/CSS category - and it couldn't have gone to a nicer group of people. They've been under siege from National this week, and a huge cheer went up when they won their awards. It's great to see such a large organisation striving to keep their website as accessible as possible, creating the best quality code they can create, and working hard to maintain their high standards over time. Well done guys!

If you want to express your support for keeping Radio NZ commercial-free and out from under the thumb of political or commercial influence, you might like to join the Save Radio New Zealand Facebook group. As I write this I see it's almost at the 10,000 fans mark - not bad for a group that's only been in existence for four days. I think National might have a fight on their hands if they pursue this...

My dear friend Zef Fugaz ended up winning the Best Content (Personal) category for his fantastic blog, zef[a]media - which he's been writing for years and years. It's completely brilliant - and shows very clearly just why he's one of New Zealand's most experienced and most well-respected user experience web professionals. Great job, Zef!

Being nominated for an ONYA (or four!) is especially thrilling because the judges are pretty much like superstars in our universe. It's rather awesome knowing that Alex Wright (New York Times), Amy Hoy (Slash7), Bek Hodgson (Etsy), Brian Fling (pinch/zoom), Donna Spencer (Maadmob), Jason Ryan (State Services Commission), Rachel McAlpine (Contented Enterprises), Russ Weakley (Max Design), and Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us) might have taken a look at our work...

It inspires all of us to keep working, keep learning, keep on striving for perfection, and keep on doing the best job we can possibly do. Our websites are made with love, just as Webstock and the ONYAs are made with love.

projection mapping + visuals: thedarkroom.tv audio + sound design: jeramiah ross aka module wellington town hall new zealand / 19.02.10 (larger version here)

Thank you everyone involved in both Webstock and the ONYAs for an absolutely wonderful week. You really do rock! WE LOVE YOU!

Technorati tags: ONYA, ONYAs, web awards, Webstock, WebWeaver Productions, Che Tamahori, Environmental Protection Authority, Optimation, The Gathering archives, nominees, finalists, winner, Best Accessibility, Best Use of HTML/CSS, Best Content (Personal), Radio New Zealand, Save Radio New Zealand, Facebook, Zef Fugaz, zef[a]media, thedarkroom, module, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Reason #567 why I love Webstock - attention to detail

2010-02-13T21:38:00.006+13:00

So there I was, thinking about what to wear for the ONYAs - and wondering where the heck I was going to stash my ONYAs clothes during the conference on Friday.

Should I wear my ONYAs outfit all day? Not such a great idea - it'll get all creased and diminish the fun of dressing up for dinner.

Should I plan to go home in between and get changed? Not enough time really.

Am I going to have to lug it around in my bag all day? Bad idea - it'll be a pain to have to carry it around and it'll get all mashed up in my bag.

Or should I ask the lovely dudes at Shift if I could stash it there and hope they haven't all gone home by the time I want to retrieve it? OK as long as they don't all go home early that day, leaving my clothes behind locked doors and me with nothing special to wear.

Turns out the Webstock crew really have thought of everything. In addition to blogging about what geek designer formal actually means, they've very kindly arranged a place where we can store our outfits during the day, and changing rooms for us to use between the time Webstock ends and the ONYAs start.

I love a team that pays attention to the details! Thanks, Webstock crew! You rock!

Technorati tags: Webstock, web conference, ONYAs, geek designer formal, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

IE8 bugs in Windows 7 but not in Windows XP?

2010-01-25T21:27:00.003+13:00

In the space of the last two days we've come across two completely different IE8 bugs (one in a Facebook app and the other on a new website) that occur in Windows 7 - but that are not happening in IE8 on a Windows XP machine.

Oh my lawd. Not only do we have to continue bug-fixing in IE6 and IE7 (when will that ever end?), but now we're seeing IE8 bugs that didn't exist in XP, but are showing up in the supposedly newer and better Windows 7. Microsoft really are deeply, deeply crap, aren't they?

I was able to fix the Facebook app bug (sight unseen because I don't have a Win7 machine) by applying the same bug fix to IE8 that I used on IE6 and IE7. In this instance it was a HasLayout issue, which is normally fixed with zoom:1 - and which I fixed with the old Holly Hack in Facebook cos Facebook returns errors for zoom.

Anyway, in this case a) the fix for IE6/7 worked for IE8 and b) it was the kind of fix that you can include for IE8 in Win7 that won't break IE8 where it's not needed in WinXP.

But what if I'd needed a fix for, say, the duplicate characters bug that requires a negative margin of -3px on the opposite margin to the direction of the float? If you include it in a compliant browser like FireFox it can break the layout in some situations, which is one reason why we put IE fixes in conditional stylesheets. But how do you include a conditional stylesheet for IE8 in Win7 without also including it for IE8 in WinXP? As far as I know that's not possible. I smell trouble!

The second instance of the Win7-bug occurred in a website we're building that has a bunch of jQuery in it for sliding images. At the moment I have absolutely no clue why it's happening, nor can I see it because it's not happening in WinXP. My first approach will be to see if I have any fixes already in place for IE6 or IE7, and add them to the conditional stylesheet for IE8. Maybe that'll work. I just hope it doesn't break IE8 in WinXP, assuming it works at all.

Has anyone else come across this IE8/Win7 issue?

Technorati tags: IE8, IE7, IE6, Internet Explorer, bug, Windows 7, Windows XP, conditional comments, stylesheet, CSS, HTML, bug-fixing, WebWeaver Productions, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

A CSS/jQuery solution for creating multi-column lists

2010-01-09T20:04:00.010+13:00

I seem to have found a solution for one of those front-end developer "Holy Grail" challenges - getting an unordered list to rearrange itself into two (or more) columns if the content of the first column gets too long.

Before I explain how to do it, I should point out that the vast majority of this solution is already out there in the form of a neat jQuery plugin called Columnizer jQuery written by Adam Wulf. I had nothing to do with the creation of it - I just stumbled upon it when I was googling for a solution, and wondered if I could adapt it for my particular layout problem. I added a bit of additional jQuery so it would do exactly what I wanted, and to my complete astonishment - it worked. Amazing!

There are a bunch of CSS-only solutions for multi-column lists which kinda sorta work - as long as you have a static list and can attach classes to various individual <li> tags. They generally work on the principle of moving some of the list items to a different position on the page using CSS - so that the list remains intact within the HTML, but appears to be broken up into multiple columns when viewed in your browser.

The CSS Swag: Multi-Column Lists article at A List Apart is one of the best examples of this, and in fact shows a whole bunch of different ways of achieving this goal.

However (and it's a big "however") - none of these solutions will work with a dynamically-generated list where you don't know from page to page how many items will be in that list, and where you can't add your own individual classes or IDs to each <li> in advance.

A perfect example of this situation - and the one I was wrestling with - is when you're building a set of templates which will be integrated into a CMS, and the unordered list in question is the subnav - which has to fit into a fixed-height space.

Here's what the subnav in my design normally looks like:

But... I do not know how many pages the client will end up creating within each subsection of their new website. What I do know is that the number of list items in each subnav menu will vary from section to section, and will be generated automatically by the CMS (which means I can't add classes or IDs).

So this is what I want it to do when the number of items in the list gets too long for the fixed-height space to contain them all:

One thing to note: you need to be sure that your client isn't going to use massively long names for their pages, as these will generally translate into massively long links in the subnav, in which case you will soon run out of room - especially in the 2-column layout. You can pre-empt this by training them to use short page names and/or re-name them for the subnav. Most CMSs will let you do this - Silverstripe, for example, which is what we're using for this site - has an additional field in each page where you can define the text you want to be used as the subnav link. Very sensible.

Adam Wulf's plugin is designed to automatically lay out your content in newspaper column format. You can specify either column width and/or height or a static number of columns. I noticed that one of the lines of code in his jQuery was

$('li').addClass("dontsplit");

...which made me think he might have included something to ensure that lists which get split into two different columns still work properly - and he has! Clever man. We're 90% of the way there already!

I have nowhere near the technical expertise required to write my own jQuery plugins - or even to understand all the code within a plugin - but I do have enough of an understanding of jQuery to be able to utilise what others have created and adapt it to my own requirements - sometimes.

I'm not even going to try and explain how Adam's plugin works - because I don't actually know - I'm simply going to highlight the bits you need to make this list do its thing, and then show you the bit of jQuery I added which makes the list do one thing when it's short - and another when it's long.

Here's how I did it...

I began with Adam's Sample 5 page. He describes this example as one that:

Shows fixed width and height columns scrolling horizontally

...which seemed to be what I was looking for.

I viewed the source of his example page and created a copy for myself - test-columnizer. Then I replaced his example text with a simple unordered list, exactly like the subnav code I'm going to be using. You can see my test example here - test-columnizer2. Because his columns were initially set to be 400px high I put a whole bunch of list items in my test list to make sure it was working properly.

In the jQuery function I removed

$('h1').addClass('dontend');

because I didn't need it, and replaced it with

$('li').addClass("dontsplit");

The class "dontsplit" is built into the plugin and prevents individual list items from being split into two columns. The jQuery now looks like this:

$(function(){
     $('li').addClass("dontsplit"); 
     $('.wide').columnize({
          width : 300,
          height : 400
     });
});

I also removed the <div class="thin"> </div> in the HTML (you can see it towards the end of the page in test-columnizer) because, again, I don't need it. This "thin" div in the plugin can be set to contain any overflow from columns created within the "wide" div - you can see an example on Adam's website - Sample 4 page. Because I don't intend to have any overflow in this design, it can come out.

The next step was to style the list so that it looked more like my design, and to place it inside my subnav div, which is a fixed width, fixed height container. You can see an example here - test-columnizer3.

I altered the jQuery to this:

$(function(){
     $('li').addClass("dontsplit"); 
     $('.wide').columnize({
          width : 90,
          height : 150
     });
});

...which tells the plugin to make each column 90px wide by 150px high.

In addition to my specific CSS styling for the subnav box and the list items, you'll also notice I made a couple of changes to Adam's existing CSS styling. I set a specific width on .wide, like this:

.wide { 
     clear: both; 
     width: 190px !important;
     }

Without this width setting, the total width of .wide is calculated by the plugin, and ends up as 180px (2 columns at 90px each = 180px). I wanted a gutter of 10px between the two columns, which meant that the .wide div needed to be 190px wide in total. By adding !important to the style in the CSS I can force it to override the plugin's calculated width.

Adam has very helpfully coded the plugin to add a class of "last" to the last column in the div, which meant I could then add this style to my CSS:

#subnav .wide .last {
     float: right !important;
     }

...to force the last column to float right - so creating that gutter of 10px between the first (left-hand) column and the last (right-hand) column. Again, by adding !important I can force it to override the plugin's default float: left.

Here's the example page again - test-columnizer3 - in case you missed the link earlier.

OK - so now let's look at what the subnav does if the number of items in the list is quite small - test-columnizer4.

Hmmm. That's not exactly what I want. If there are just a few list items, and we don't actually need two columns to fit them all in, I want a single column that stretches right across the subnav space - like this:

...not like this:

In other words I need an if... statement in the jQuery that will trigger the columnize plugin only when the number of list items exceeds the space available in the first column.

Firstly I defined a variable maxHeight of 150px, and then created my if... statement which basically says "if the height of the .wide div is greater than 150px, then run the jQuery plugin." The whole thing looks like this:

var maxHeight = 150;

$(function(){
     if ($('.wide').height() > maxHeight)
     $('.wide').columnize({
          width : 90,
          height : 150
     });
});

I decided to set my variable as a maximum height rather than by counting the actual number of items and setting a maximum number of items in each column because a) individual list items might sometimes wrap onto more than one line - which would mess up the calculation and b) if you're viewing the website in an older browser like IE6 or IE7 and you've increased the font size, it will again mess up the calculation (although I guess I could have overcome that issue by using ems).

You can see an example of the completed solution here: test-columnizer5.

And here's the same solution with a few more items in the list to show how it rearranges itself into 2 columns when necessary: test-columnizer6.

Perfect! Now the subnav list spreads nicely across the whole div, unless there are too many list items to fit into the fixed-height space, in which case it splits into two separate lists in two columns, with each column only half the width of the original single column.

I've tested the solution in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera and Safari on both PC and Mac where appropriate, and it works just fine. Incredible.

Thanks a million to Adam Wulf for coming up with an awesome plugin that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted with just a little tweak at the very end. It's a great piece of work!

I hope that by blogging about it I'll flag it as a solution for the multi-column list problem, which will make it easier to find for those googling for a fix. Let me know if it works for you.

Technorati tags: multi-column list, 2-column list, css, jQuery, jQuery plugin, Adam Wulf, Columnizer jQuery, Columnizer jQuery plugin, break a list into columns, fixed height, fixed width, unordered list, ordered list, web development, web design, WebWeaver Productions, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

The Gathering archives website - and the ONYAs

2009-12-06T13:48:00.007+13:00

WOOHOO!

The Gathering archives website is a finalist in the Best content (personal) category of the ONYAs!

Crikey!

I'm completely thrilled. It took me a year of working on the site to get it to a state where I was ready to put it online, and it's grown quite a lot since then.

The ONYA judge's comment about the site cracked me up. It's so funny, and also so true...

A multi-media mashup of memoir, fractured histories and anecdotes from a series of events that erased the memories of many that were there. Alison's site is a public service...

New Year 2006/07 marked the 10th anniversary of the first Gathering dance party on top of Takaka Hill near Nelson. The last Gathering was held over New Year 2001/02, and as I had been involved in the organisation of four out of the six Gatherings, and had created the original Gathering website, I felt sad that there was virtually nothing remaining online about these iconic events.

In October 2006 I set about creating, designing, building and writing the Gathering archives website, with the aim of becoming the authoritative source of information on the history and background of The Gathering. The site is divided into different sections for each of the six Gatherings, and includes facts & figures, media coverage, Gathering artwork, photos, video and film footage, Gatherer stories and maps of the venue for each party.

It will always be a work in progress, because each party was so vast and complex that it would be impossible for one person to have a complete overview of what went on at even a single event, let alone six. Although I had a whole lot of "official" archival material (including media coverage, Gathering artwork etc), I wanted the site to be much more than that. I wanted it to reflect the memories and stories of the many thousands of Gatherers who took part each year, as well as the hundreds of crew members and organisations who supported us in putting on New Zealand's best-loved dance parties.

I haven't had much time this year to add new stuff to the site, but I've already spent time improving the usability of the homepage as a result of my ONYAs nomination (see what a bit of good news does to kick-start me into action once more!), and I plan to do quite a bit more on the site before February when the winners in each category are announced.

The other two finalists in this category are Jared Gulian for Moon over Martinborough and my dear friend Zef Fugaz for zef[a]media. Those of you who know your Gathering history might remember Zef - he was our very awesome assistant producer/BetaSP-Cam/graphics guru for The Gathering documentary 97/98.

The ONYAs celebrate those who design, develop and create New Zealand's best websites and applications. They’re awards by the industry, for the industry.

It's a real honour to be nominated for the award, and to be a finalist in such esteemed company. Good luck guys, and may the best website win!

Technorati tags: ONYAs, ONYA, web awards, finalist, best content, The Gathering archives, The Gathering, dance party, rave, New Zealand, Canaan Downs, web design, web development, website, Zef Fugaz, Jared Gulian, The Gathering documentary, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Thrilled to bits with the ONYAs

2009-12-03T22:20:00.004+13:00

A year ago things looked pretty bleak job-wise. Sue and I had just been made redundant from our dream web design company, together with Rosie and Rene from the Welli office and four others from the Auckland office.

My first thought when I heard we were losing our jobs was that I would lose my house because I wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage. My second thought was that maybe I wasn't good enough and that that's why I had been one of the ones selected to go.

It was a pretty rough end to the year, to say the least.

However, you have to play with the cards you're dealt, so after a few days feeling sorry for myself I picked myself up and started looking for work.

I've been doing contract and freelance work as WebWeaver Productions for about 13 years now, off and on, so that's what I went back to. Tom and I had done a few little WebWeaver projects for various clients since we met at Shift and I love working with him, so I had my programmer already in place, and we invited Sue to work with us on projects where we needed another designer.

We've done a mixture of freelance work as WebWeaver and contract work for various web design companies over the past 12 months. Here's (some of) what we've achieved this year:

WM Bamford & Co Ltd - a WebWeaver Productions project - design and build by me, CMS integration by Tom
Tourism Exchange - an Origin Design project - design by Jason at Origin Design, build by me, CMS integration by Tom
Cavalier Bremworth - a DNA project - design by DNA, build by me
Round Peg Recruitment - a Shelley Masters/WebWeaver Productions project - design by Shelley, build by me
Pike River Coal - an Origin Design project - design by Jason at Origin, build by me
Expedia Flash banner ads - a Badger Communications project - design by the Badger crew, Flash animation by me
Telecom Global Roaming - a Shift project - design by Shift, build by me
Ministry for the Environment - a WebWeaver Productions project - design by Sue, build by me
Master Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Inc - a WebWeaver Productions project - design and build by me, CMS integration by Tom
Environmental Protection Authority - a WebWeaver Productions project - design by Sue, build by me
Optimation - a WebWeaver Productions project - design by Sue, build by me, CMS integration by Tom

Oh - and...

Created a baby - a Sue&Jon project - design by Sue, development by Sue, integration by Jon - congratulations you guys!

It's been a great year!

I think one of the best things about being a freelancer is the immediacy - and the range - of the work you do. When we create a website as WebWeaver Productions, we know we've personally won the right to work on that project, because we've pitched for the job, written the quote, done the IA, liaised with the client, managed the project, designed the website, built the HTML and CSS, integrated the site, and tested (and sometimes even content-loaded) it.

No-one else won that work and then employed us to do the design, build or integration - we won it, and we worked on it in its entirety from start to finish. It's a great feeling. When the client likes our work they tell us directly - and if they really like our work they tell other people and we get to do it all over again. It's awesome.

So you might have noticed that in recognition of all that beavering away we've done this year we decided to enter a couple of WebWeaver Productions websites for the inaugural ONYAs web awards...

Yesterday they announced the Best Accessibility category -- and there was our website for the Environmental Protection Authority of New Zealand - we're one of the three finalists, together with Radio New Zealand (for the Radio New Zealand site) and Springload (for the New Zealand Rehabilitation Association website). Crikey! How completely cool is that?

We knew the EPA site stood a good chance - it's completely accessible and passes all the WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements - and needless to say we're completely thrilled to be selected as a finalist, especially as we're up there with such very excellent company. Gosh.

This is a seriously big deal for us. We're such a tiny little company - in fact we're not exactly a company at all - we like to describe ourselves as "an informal co-operative".

We all work together on projects when there's a need for us to each have a role (for example on the Optimation website), and sometimes it's just me and Sue, (for example on the EPA website), or just me and Tom (for example on the Plumbers website), and sometimes it's just me (for example, a website I'm currently completing for a government agency I've worked with in the past). It depends - and so far this year we've all been able to dovetail our various WebWeaver roles very neatly with design agency contract work (me and Tom) and producing babies (Sue!).

For the ONYAs we're potentially up against every one of the big NZ web design companies (assuming that they entered), and so to get nominated as a finalist in one of the categories we've entered is EXTREMELY exciting, and very gratifying. We absolutely LOVE what we do, so to get acknowledgement from the industry itself that we're doing good work is satisfying to say the least (and that may well be the understatement of the year!).

But wait - there's more.

We knew they'd be starting to announce the finalists in each category on Monday, so when we heard about the Best Accessibility category on Wednesday I was still rather butterfly-tummied from the anticipation I'd been building up all week. Today I was somewhat more blasé. I'd sort of gotten over the excitement a bit - and I almost didn't spot the second email that came through from Mike this afternoon...

I read it and virtually fell off my chair in shock.

Oh

My

God!

The three finalists for the Best use of HTML and CSS category were announced today - and WebWeaver Productions has not one but TWO websites in the top three!!!

Our website for the Environmental Protection Authority of New Zealand is once again a finalist, as is our website for Optimation. We're up against the Radio New Zealand website in this category as well.

How can I explain how much this means to me?

I love my job. I ADORE my job. I love designing and building websites just as much (if not more) today, as I did 13 years ago when I first started out. It's the best job in the world, and I feel so lucky to have found it.

I'm also a perfectionist, and very single-minded when it comes to doing stuff. I want to be the best I can possibly be, and I want the work I produce to be as near-perfect as I can possibly make it. I know that HTML/CSS is my core skill, and dammit I wanted to see how my work compared to the work of my peers. I thought I was pretty good, but I didn't know for sure. I really really wanted to see one of my websites up there as a finalist in this category. I mean I REALLY wanted it.

And I got two. I still can't quite believe it.

I keep on wanting to run round and round yelling "I did it! We did it! We rock! EEEEEEEE!!!"

Actually I did do a bit of that this afternoon at Optimation. It was fun!

It's funny how things come full circle, isn't it? There we were a year ago wondering what we'd done wrong, and trying not to take the redundancies personally, and yet still feeling like we mustn't have been good enough to keep - and now here we are as finalists for the ONYAs. It's bloody awesome actually.

And the coolest thing? Our dream web design company, Shift, is the major sponsor. Thank you Shift, thank you Mike and Tash and the rest of the Webstock crew - you rock!

As I said earlier, it's been a great year.

Technorati tags: WebWeaver Productions, ONYAs, ONYA web awards, web design, web development, Sue Quigley, Tom St George, best accessibility, best HTML and CSS, category, finalist, Webstock, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Working with the Ministry

2009-11-22T19:29:00.004+13:00

Earlier on in the year we were given the opportunity to pitch for a re-design job on the Ministry for the Environment's website, which we won. Sue and I were completely thrilled - it's the first Government client that WebWeaver Productions has pitched for (although I've worked on over 50 government websites as a contractor and/or employee), so to win it was pretty darned cool.

Our primary contact was Dee Guja, the Ministry's senior adviser, Stakeholder Engagement/Publications, and we worked on the project with the Ministry's webmaster, Jennifer Geard. Both Dee and Jennifer are very good at their jobs, and as a result the Ministry has become one of our favourite clients - they absolutely rock!

The brief was tricky, to say the least. The Ministry's website is huge - somewhere around 13,000 pages - and the old site was based on a set of Dreamweaver templates which were pretty old and had a bunch of table-based layouts to contend with. Over the years many different MfE employees have added content to the Ministry site, and in some cases the code used to display the same 'look' has been achieved using a variety of techniques - some of which are now out of date and no longer validate.

Our job was to design and build a new set of e-government compliant best-practice Dreamweaver templates which would seamlessly replace the old ones, together with a stylesheet that would not only control the new template HTML, but would restyle all of the old legacy code within the subnav, main content area and feature column so that it would display properly in the design without the Ministry web team having to rewrite the HTML.

Oh - and it needed to be sufficiently robust and all-encompassing so that Jennifer and her team could be confident that all 13,000 pages would display as expected - without having to check every page before go-live.

Sue worked her magic and produced a beautiful new design which was light years away from the old design. I built a set of 11 HTML/CSS templates which I then converted to Dreamweaver templates, matching the editable regions as closely as possible to their existing ones so that when Jennifer came to do the global 'find and replace' that would replace their old templates with our new ones, the site would hold together.

Our test list consisted of 16 different browser/OS combinations (the number has been somewhat reduced since then), which meant I had to get on TradeMe and buy a bunch of old PCs so that I could get the full range of PC operating systems I needed for testing. The completely awesome standalone versions of IE6 and IE7 no longer work properly when you've got IE8 installed, so I needed separate versions of the same OS in order to test all three versions of IE. Oh joy.

The project began back in April, and the site went live in June, which is not bad going for such a large website. Jennifer and her team are working through the site to remove the worst (legacy) examples of non-compliant code, and the new templates were tested for e-govt compliance by Bruce Aylward of W 3 A. He's an expert on website accessibility, and taught me a bunch of new tricks, which I really appreciated.

All in all a great project to be involved with, and a very satisfactory result. We hope you like the Ministry's new website as much as we do.

Technorati tags: Ministry for the Environment, MfE, website, web design, web development, HTML, CSS, WebWeaver Productions, Sue Quigley, Dee Guja, Jennifer Geard, Bruce Aylward, W3A, e-government, accessibility, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Entering the ONYAs

2009-11-09T23:07:00.004+13:00

I've spent the weekend completing multiple entries for the inaugural ONYAs web awards, which are being organised by the very wonderful Mike and Tash who also bring you the equally wonderful Webstock.

The closing date was today - originally 6pm this evening, but they've extended it until midnight. You have less than an hour, folks!

Actually, having said that, you might have some trouble making a submission between now and midnight - the site's down. Wonder if we knocked it out with the sheer volume of last-minute entries?

WebWeaver Productions have entered two of our most recent sites - the Environmental Protection Authority website that went live on October 1, and the Optimation website that went live just a few hours ago.

We're very proud of both sites - we think they represent some of WebWeaver's best work this year - and we think we've got as good a chance as anyone of winning an (already coveted) award.

We've entered the EPA site for Best use of HTML & CSS and Best accessibility (both in my name), and the Optimation site for Best use of HTML & CSS (me) and Best visual design (Sue). I think Amanda might also be entering the Opti site for Best content (corporate) because the writing she's done for the new site is really good.

We were only sad that there wasn't a category for Best integration into a CMS, because poor old Tom's the only WebWeaver(er) who doesn't have a category to enter. No fair! I think we would definitely have entered the Opti site for that category too if there had been one.

Oh - and I also entered The Gathering archives in the Best content (personal) category - just because I can. And also 'cos I think it's a pretty cool site.

Now all we have to do is keep all our fingers and toes crossed until February 19. Crikey!

Technorati tags: WebWeaver Productions, websites, ONYA, ONYAs, web awards, categories, entries, Optimation, EPA, Environmental Protection Authority, Tom St George, Susan Quigley, Amanda McVitty, web design, web development, accessibility, HTML, CSS, WebWeaver's World, webweaver

A quick fix for the 1px rounding error

2009-10-01T15:10:00.015+13:00

[Here's the quick solution if you can't be bothered to read this whole post: stick a border on the div that's causing the 1px rounding error].

Now let me elaborate, because there's actually a bit more to it than that...

We (like many other web design companies) generally design our websites as fixed-width, centered in the browser window, and optimised to 1024px wide with no horizontal scrolling at 1024. When you take the vertical scrollbar into account that means the maximum width for the outer container div is 1004px.

Sue likes to design websites with quite substantial dropshadows on either side of the outer container, which makes the whole graphic wider than 1004px. No problem - I just create the dropshadow as a single graphic which I style as a background image on the body tag in the CSS, centered in the browser window by setting the width of the graphic to 50% - like this:

body {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 62.5%;
text-align: center;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
color: #595959;
background: #009ec7 url(../img/bg-page.jpg) no-repeat 50% 0;
}

#container {
width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
padding: 0 0 10px 0;
text-align: left;
background-color: #fff;
}

The example above is for a site where the shadow starts off fairly narrow at the top, gets a lot fatter for a couple of hundred pixels, then gradually gets narrower again until it disappears altogether. It makes the page look like it's rising off the background for a while near the top of the browser window.

Here's the shadow graphic (click to enlarge):

With a design where the shadow is a consistent width all the way down the page, you would take a narrow strip of shadow and save that as a vertically-tiled background image instead - and the CSS would look like this:

background: #009ec7 url(../img/bg-page.jpg) repeat-y 50% 0;

The problem with this solution (whether you use a single or a tiled background image) is the mixing of the fixed-width #container div together with a percentage-positioned background graphic. Exact pixel widths don't play well with percentages in CSS, and the combination of the two is likely to create a 1px rounding error in many situations. It's why we generally stick to one or the other and don't use both together unless we absolutely have to.

In my example, this is what you get when you view the site in Opera or Safari on my Mac (click to enlarge image).

This is a screenshot of the right-hand side of the page within the browser window. You can clearly see a 1px-wide white "border" to the right of the light blue header, and you can also see a distinct "step" further down the page, which marks the bottom of the dropshadow background image on the body tag.

Interestingly enough, the 1px rounding error on this site only showed up in Safari on my Mac and Opera on Mac and PC. Firefox was fine (of course) and amazingly enough, IE6 and IE7 on my test PC also handled it just fine - not a rounding error in sight!

But that's not good enough. My sites get tested in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera and Safari (at a minimum), and if it's not perfect in all browsers on all platforms I'm going to do my damnedest to try and fix it.

The 1px rounding error is one of the few bugs that gurus such as Holly and Big John at Position is Everything have reluctantly assigned to the "annoying bugs that can't be fixed" basket, but because I initially didn't recognise my bug as a 1px rounding error, I tried to fix it myself.

...and found a workaround for this particular example that works pretty well...

It took me ages to figure out that the "step" was actually the bottom of the background graphic in the body tag. It didn't seem to match up with any of my divs on the actual page when I tested it with Firebug, and for a while there I was completely stumped. What's causing this step???? Arrrrgggghhhh.

I tried a bunch of things to get rid of that nasty little white line to the right of the light blue header. Maybe the white is showing through from the white background on the #container div that's wrapped around the header div? Could I add a light blue background to the top of #container so the line is light blue (matching the header) instead of white? Nope. Doesn't work. And even if I had been able to fix the header issue using that kind of solution, the step would still have been visible lower down the page.

Think again.

The fact that the white line appeared to be behaving more like a 1px-wide border than a background showing through a 1px-wide gap (because I couldn't fix it by adding a coloured background to #container) made me wonder what would happen if I tried adding a border of my own to #container instead.

Here's my first test - a variation on the classic "border: 1px solid red" that I use whenever I'm bug-fixing to identify the div I'm working on (click image to enlarge).

This example uses "border-right: 1px solid red;" on the #container div.

Awesome! The step is gone! How crazy is that?

Now we have a consistent red border all the way down the right-hand side of the #container div, instead of the bug-created white border-like line that only goes down as far as the bottom of the page background graphic.

From this point, it's easy to see how to make the border almost disappear - to a point where I can live with it as a "quick fix", anyway...

By selecting the hex value of the light blue header background at its farthest-right point (which in this case is #b2e2ee) and applying it to #container div instead of the red border, like this:

#container {
width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
padding: 0 0 10px 0;
text-align: left;
background-color: #fff;
border-right: 1px solid #b2e2ee; /* fix for 1px rounding error bug */
}

...I get this result (click image to enlarge).

Now the right border blends seamlessly into the light blue header to its left at the top of the page, and further down the page it blends nicely into the darker blue page background to its right.

It's a bit of an optical illusion, because if you look very very closely where the light blue header meets the white content area of the page, you can see the light blue bleeding into the white, but hey - I can live with that. It's much better than a white border and a white step, anyway.

Wait, I can't live with it! That bit of bleeding blue's annoying me. Yes I know I've already delivered this particular website to the client, but I can always get them to tweak the stylesheet for me...

Here's an even better colour choice for the border:

Grab a representative darker shade of blue page background from your photoshop file. I've used #00a1ce. Use that instead. This what you get (click image to enlarge).

OK, this optical illusion is better than the last one. No bleeding blue, because we're not using a colour that appears in part of the actual page (the light blue) and then stops (where the white content area begins).

By choosing a colour that matches the page background, rather than part of the page itself, the border blends outwards rather than inwards, and the edge of the page appears to be completely uniform. If you have a shaded background like in this design, just pick any pixel from close-in to where the background meets the page, and you should be fine with whatever shade of blue you end up with. It's an optical illusion, after all.

To achieve the neatest possible result, it's probably a good idea to replicate your border on both sides of the #container div:

#container {
width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
padding: 0 0 10px 0;
text-align: left;
background-color: #fff;
border-right: 1px solid #00a1ce; /* fix for 1px rounding error bug */
border-left: 1px solid #00a1ce; /* fix for 1px rounding error bug */
}

In Sue's design for this particular site, the header starts off white on the far left-hand side and gradually shades to light blue as you move right. My original light-blue border fix wouldn't work on the left of the container, as it contrasted with the white header on that side, but having the blue match the darker blue page background works fine, because the background is consistent on both sides.

This solution can also be adapted for a design where the background color changes dramatically as you progess down the page. A background colour that fades vertically into white or another colour entirely, for example. Or a drop shadow at the top of a white background that fades away as you scroll down the page until it eventually disappears into the white.

All you need to do is experiment with the colour of the border until you find one that both you and the designer can live with. It might be white, giving you a 1px white frame on both sides of the page, between the container and the dropshadow. It could be a shade of grey, as long as your designer can live with their fading dropshadow eventually becoming a 1px grey border instead of disappearing completely into white. Whatever works for your particular design.

Yes, I know this means you may have to go back and get the designer to tweak their design because you can't make it work (which is pretty much always a no-no as far as I'm concerned), but we are dealing with the dreaded 1px rounding error here, and even Holly 'n' John haven't found a complete fix for it...

Yes, it's a workaround rather than a complete fix - in that it doesn't remove the 1px line, it simply overwrites it and then disguises it - but I reckon it's a good solution to the particular visual problem we had in our design - and one which I think might be useful to other designers and developers out there.

It even provides a fix for Big John's Rounding error test page, without breaking the layout - even in IE6 - which is rather amusing, because if anything's guaranteed to break an IE6 layout it's adding a border to a percentage div where all your combined percentages already add up to 100%...

Change John's style from

#wrapper div {
position: absolute;
background: black;
width: 20%;
height: 20%;
}

to

#wrapper div {
position: absolute;
background: black;
width: 20%;
height: 20%;
border-right: 1px solid black;
border-bottom: 1px solid black;
}

...and you'll see what I mean.

The reason why the 1px border fix doesn't break John's example layout, even in IE6, is because the divs have space in which to spread out - they're free to sit nicely next to each other because they're absolutely positioned which takes them out of the flow - rather than being floated. In John's example, if I float the divs by changing his styling to:

#wrapper div {
float: left;
background: black;
width: 20%;
height: 20%;
border-right: 1px solid red;
border-bottom: 1px solid red;
}

...the placement of the divs breaks and the last div ends up in a new row (I've coloured the borders red so you can see 'em - click image to enlarge). This is because the addition of the 1px right borders means that the total width of all the divs in a row is now more than 100% - and with floated divs this matters. It breaks in all browsers, including compliant ones like Firefox.

John's original example (without my borders) also breaks in IE6 and IE7 if you float the divs instead of absolutely positioning them (although it looks fine in Firefox). This is because the 1px rounding error also adds additional width to the divs, making them too wide for their container. In the case of IE6 and I7 this results in a horrible break/not break bounce to the page as you slowly increase or decrease the browser window width and as the rounding error comes and goes. This is presumably why he decided to build his example as a series of absolutely positioned divs instead of floated ones :)

The reason why my 1px border solution doesn't break our website in IE6 and IE7 is because of the way in which the website is built. The #container div is the outermost div on my page, and although it isn't absolutely positioned (or floated, for that matter) there are no other divs wrapped around it to constrain its size in any way. This means that adding a 1px border on either side (so increasing its overall width by 2px) isn't going to break anything by making it too wide. It just spreads out a bit, ending up 2px wider than the original page design.

The only time this would be an issue is if your design is already 1004px wide, which is the maximum it can be to avoid a horizontal scrollbar at 1024 on pages that have a vertical scrollbar. In this instance you would have to decrease your page width by 2px in order to stay within the maximum once you add the 1px border on either side.

So - to summarise:

If your div structure will allow you to do this without breaking it, a fix for the 1px rounding error is to add a 1px right border to the div where the rounding error is occurring, and colour it to match whatever colour you've got wrapping around that div. The border will overwrite the rounding error and the colour will camouflage it to match its wrapper so that it becomes virtually invisible.

By careful selection of your border colour, and by tweaking any wrapper div widths to allow for the width of the border without breaking the layout, this solution will work with a range of layouts, providing you with a controllable border instead of an uncontrollable 1px error which, in older browsers like IE6 and IE7, comes and goes as you increase and decrease the browser window width.

I was pretty thrilled to stumble upon this solution, and I hope it's of use to someone out there. I know it's not the perfect answer in all situations, but hopefully it's flexible enough to help in a variety of layouts - and in a wide range of browsers. It works in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Opera. I haven't tested it in earlier IEs or any other browsers - let me know what happens if you do.

Let me know how you get on!

Technorati tags: CSS, HTML, 1px rounding error, fix, workaround, solution, border, stylesheet, Position is Everything, Big John, IE6, IE7, bug, hack, browser, page layout, web design, web development, WebWeaver Productions, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Do I know you? You look vaguely familiar... (face-blindness, or prosopagnosia)

2009-08-21T15:21:00.001+12:00

Recently I was doing some contract work in an office where I've occasionally spent time over the past year or so. I was coding up a bit of HTML/CSS when a co-worker paused at my desk and asked me how it was going. We had a bit of a chat, and he went on his way. It wasn't until the following day when I overheard him in conversation with my project-manager, that I realised he isn't a co-worker at all. He's the client.

When we'd been talking at my desk, I had recognised his face enough to know that we'd interacted before, and that he was a member of the set of "people who spend time in this office" - but I had no more knowledge about him than that. I did not realise, for example, that on at least two occasions over the last couple of months we'd had hour-long meetings where I sat opposite him at a small table, presented my designs to him and discussed the project in detail.

And if I had seen him "out of context" - in the street, for example, or at a party - I would most likely not have recognised him at all - or at best I might have had a vague inkling that I knew him, but would be completely unable to place him ("I think I know you but I don't know how I know you"). And as for attaching a name to that face that I'm not sure if I recognise or not? Not a chance.

As the publicist for The Gathering from 1998-2000 I became somewhat well-known within the dance community (being pushed around The Domain in a shopping trolley while being interviewed by Havoc and Newsboy will do that for you!) - and as a member of The Gathering's organising crew I met hundreds of dance party people over the years.

The problem for me came when I was expected to recognise and remember the names of any of those people I'd met only once or twice (or even a few times), or anyone who I hadn't seen for a while.

As 'the face of The Gathering' I was recognised in the street fairly regularly, and occasionally I would be accosted by someone who would throw their arms around me and cry "thank you thank you - you changed my life!" (in which case I'd think "oh this is probably a Gatherer and I probably haven't met them before").

But sometimes they'd stop me in the street to have a conversation about The Gathering, and I would have absolutely no clue who they were or if I ought to know who they were.

Have I met this person before? Did I crew with them at TheG? Are they a DJ I really ought to know? Or have they recognised me from the telly and feel that they know me a little, which is why they're talking to me like they know me, even though I don't know them??? How confusing. How embarrassing on occasion, when I didn't recognise someone that I really should have been able to recognise.

It appears that I need to meet and interact with someone at least three or four times before I can get at least some of their physical characteristics fixed in my head enough to recognise them. Even if I spend an entire day interacting with you at a conference, or a party, or a meeting of some kind, if I pass you on the street the following day, I probably won't know that I know you - or I may have a vague idea that you are familiar, but I will have no idea of the context in which we've met.

Parties are very stressful for me, because unless they are filled with people I know very well, I have a hard time working out who is who and whether or not we've been introduced. The short intro provided by the host "this is so-and-so, we work together - webweaver is a friend of mine" is too short a time for me to get anything much about your appearance fixed in my head - let alone your name. I'm so busy trying to smile and shake hands and say hello-nice-to-meet-you that once I move on to meet the next person, virtually everything about your physical appearance is gone from my mind.

If we end up chatting at the party later on, it is a virtual certainty that I will not remember your name, and very likely that I will not actually know whether or not our host has introduced us already, or if this is the first time I've laid eyes on you.

I use a bunch of different tricks to try and get a fix on people I've recently met. Your clothes, the way you speak, the way you move or walk, the things we talk about (I can recall conversations word for word, even days after they have taken place), your hair, your body shape and size. But not really your face, unless you have strongly unique or extreme facial features of some kind.

Imagine that we're at a costume party and I interact with five new people. At the end of the party, everyone changes back into street clothes and we gather round to say our farewells. Because your clothes are now different, I probably won't have any idea which five new people out of the 20 at the party I have actually spoken to. My main initial clue about who you are - your unique costume - is gone, and I'm lost.

I remember one time looking at two photographs with a group of friends. In both photos was a guy we knew, with a girl that we didn't know. Or was it two different girls? As my friends discussed whether or not he was pictured with the same girl in both photos, I stared and stared at the faces, trying to figure it out. Yes, both pictures showed a girl with long brown hair, but they were taken at different times, she was wearing different clothes, and her face was shown at a different angle in each photo. I realised that I had absolutely no idea if it was the same girl or not. I was completely unable to identify common characteristics of the two faces, in order to decide if it was one girl, or two.

If you recognise me and stop me in the street for a chat, unless I know you well, I may not know who you are. I say if you stop me because it's highly unlikely that I will stop you. This is because it takes me much longer than most people to even vaguely recognise someone I don't know well. 'Normal' people apparently recognise each other within a second or so. It takes me ten times that amount of time - if at all. By which time we're fifty yards apart heading in opposite directions, and the moment is past.

So assuming you've stopped me, and we're chatting away on the street corner, I will be feverishly trying to find you in my mental database, while at the same time trying to carry on a conversation with you. "Who is this person? Do they look familiar? Where do I know them from? And what the heck is their name?" (yeah good luck with that last one!)

I'll try to direct the conversation in order to glean clues about who you are:

"Gosh it's been a while... what have you been up to?" (frantically hoping that it has been a while and that I didn't actually get introduced to you just yesterday).

"Where are you working these days?" (frantically hoping you're not one of my new co-workers with whom I've been sharing an office space for the past three days).

"Crikey my memory's going," (I lie) "when did we last see each other?" (praying as I say it that this is an appropriate question to ask within the context that you know about how we know each other, and about which I have have no clue as yet).

Even if I get the answers I need, and am able to locate you in my mental database, I am extremely unlikely to use your name (unless you say it to me first), and certainly you will almost never hear me say "Hi [your name]" if I bump into you in the street, because it will take me quite a while to connect up your name with your face, even if I know you quite well.

If I've just spent the last five minutes trying to figure out who you are, even if I'm 99% sure I've worked it out and I'm lucky enough to have some recollection of your name, I'm so unsure of my abilities that I probably won't risk saying your name in case I've got it wrong.

"Oh we must do coffee sometime soon and catch up properly," you say. And I say "cool, that would be great - do you have a business card?"

I can't say "Hey let's exchange phone numbers" because if I haven't recalled your name I won't have any way of identifying you in my phonebook! If I see your name written down on your card I can try to attach that word shape to something about your appearance and maybe I'll remember you next time - and I'll also have a name I can stick in my phone memory next to your number.

I dread bumping into someone I only know vaguely if I'm with someone else - because I cannot introduce you to each other. By the time I've figured out who you are (and assuming a miracle has occurred and I've been able to recall your name as well), the moment is long past when I should have introduced you to my friend, so I just have to keep going and hope that you introduce yourselves to each other, or continue the conversation knowing that both of you must think I'm awfully rude not bothering to do any introductions. God how embarrassing.

Afterwards I can apologise to my friend and confess why I didn't introduce them to you, but you will have gone on your way wondering why I left my friend out of our conversation, and you may well be thinking that I really am rather socially awkward, weird and impolite.

This lack of ability to recognise faces or put them into some kind of context of "how I know you" actually has a name, and an official-sounding one, at that. It's called prosopagnosia, or "face-blindness" and until quite recently it was thought to be extremely rare and very little research had been done about it.

Then in 2004 researchers used fMRI scans to monitor brain activity in subjects being asked to recognise famous faces, where one face (eg Marilyn Monroe) was morphed into another (eg Margaret Thatcher). Crazy combination, I know!

From How the brain recognises a face:

The brain goes through three separate stages to decide if it recognises a face, scientists claim.

A team from University College London says the first assesses a face's physical aspects.

The second decides if it is known or unknown. If it is a recognisable face, the third part puts a name to it.

To be specific:

It was found that the inferior occipital gyri at the back of the brain were found to be particularly sensitive to slight physical changes, such as wrinkles, in the faces.

The right fusiform gyrus (RFG), appeared to be involved in making a more general appraisal of the face and compares it to the brain's database of stored memories to see if it is someone familiar.

The third activated region, the anterior temporal cortex (ATC), is believed to store facts about people and is thought to be an essential part of the identifying process.

This area was more active when volunteers knew the celebrities well.

The researchers say that if even one of these steps breaks down - as can happen in some forms of dementia - people can lose their ability to identify others.

Knowing how the process works means it may be possible to intervene when the it breaks down, as in dementia.

It may also help people with prosopagnosia or 'face-blindness' - a rare condition where the brain is unable to process faces normally and people may not even be able to recognise their partner's face, or their own image in the mirror.

Having done a serious amount of reading over the past couple of days about this strange phenomenon (which is not so strange to me!) it seems as though I have trouble with the second and third steps in the process, especially if I don't know someone very well, or haven't seen them in a while.

I'd be the absolute last person you'd want as a witness to a bank robbery. If I had to do an identification line-up thingy I'd be completely hopeless - especially if they picked people who looked remotely similar to the suspect.

This can extend to people I know very well, if they change their appearance in some way. If you walk past me on the street and you're wearing sunglasses or a big floppy hat, don't expect me to say "hi" because I really won't know if it's you under there or not.

A more extreme example is my experience with male friends who have shaved off their beards or other facial hair.

Years ago, my friend John (who was my workmate and best friend at the time) decided to go clean-shaven, instead of the rather substantial beard and moustache he usually sported. So he turns up at my house and I literally have no idea who he is. Remember this guy was my best friend - I hung out with him almost every day. So I'm standing there at the door wondering who the hell this guy is, and he opens his mouth and starts speaking, and I practically fall to the floor in shock.

It is the most bizarre experience, to hear a completely familiar voice coming out of the face of someone who is suddenly completely unfamiliar to you. It took me at least a week to get used to John's new face and to come to terms with the disconnect between voice and visage.

Can you picture someone's face in your mind? I can't. I can't even picture my own face. When I think about a person I know, I can visualise their body shape. I can see a fairly strong image of their hair, especially if it's striking (Lou's long red hair, Ben's greying bouncy hair for example). I can picture their stance, how they walk and move (Ben again, waving his arms around as he talks). The type of clothes (or even individual items of clothing) they wear. I can conjure up an echo of their voice in my head without too much difficulty.

But the face? I can recall nothing but the very vaguest, blurry outline - as if someone drew a picture of the person's face with coloured chalks, and then rubbed a cloth across the drawing, obliterating virtually all the detail. The only exception to this is if someone has a striking or unusual facial feature that I can latch on to. Bright blue eyes with dark eyelashes for example, or a scar, or a big nose. Apart from that, your faces are all a bunch of amorphous blobs in my mind's eye. How sad is that?

I think one of my problems with recognising faces, especially when I've only met someone a couple of times, is that I tend to watch people's mouths very closely when they're speaking, and I rarely look someone in the eye for any length of time - if at all. Do I? If you're reading this and you know me - do I make eye contact less than most people do? I'm pretty sure that's the case, but as I have nothing to compare myself with, I'm not entirely sure.

Anyway - as far as I'm aware I don't look people in the eyes much, and I know I tend to focus on the mouth. I think this may be partly because I find it difficult to follow a conversation sometimes, especially if we're in a noisy, crowded room where lots of other people are also talking. I think I may actually be lip-reading to some extent in this kind of environment, hence the need to watch your lips closely when you speak to me.

Because of my narrow visual focus on only one part of your face, I don't give myself much of a chance to note what the rest of your face looks like. I won't know what colour your eyes are, for example, or whether you have freckles, a turned-up nose or apple cheeks. I'll probably remember the colour of your hair, and perhaps even your hairstyle (hair is easier, for some reason), but with only a mouth and hair to go by next time I meet you, it's probably not surprising that your overall appearance won't jog my memory into realising that we've met before.

It can also work the other way around. One time I popped in to say hi to my friend who is a video editor, and found him hard at work with someone I didn't know. "Oh hi webweaver," he said, "this is [other visitor's first name]". "Hi there," I said. "You look very familiar... have we met before?" I asked. "I don't think so" she replied.

It wasn't until a few minutes after that, as I watched them working together and discussing the footage they were editing, that I realised why she looked familiar. She was a TV presenter, and I'd just asked her if we knew each other. Aaargh. Embarrassment!

I've also been known to totally embarrass myself by attempting to talk to one acquaintance about stuff I did with a completely different acquaintance - thinking that they are one and the same person. It's true! At least ten years after I first met these two guys I know, I finally copped on to the fact that they were actually two different people, and not the same person at all.

I realise now that there's a range of tricks and techniques I've developed over the years to help me recognise and remember people. Because my face-recognition abilities are so limited, I have compensated by developing my abilities in other ways.

A couple of months ago there was a piece on the news about a guy who had hidden a diamond ring somewhere in Wellington. He was going to leave clues to where it was, so people could try and track it down. If they found it, they could keep it. They interviewed another guy who had decided to try and find the ring, but who didn't want to be identified because he was planning to ask his girlfriend to marry him - and he wanted it to be a surprise. They interviewed him with his back to the camera, but they didn't disguise his voice.

No more than two words were out of his mouth before I leapt to attention from my place on the sofa and exclaimed "oh my God! That's [name of my friend]!" Heck - I even came up with his name instantly, and I don't even know him that well.

So it appears I'm pretty good at voice recognition. Certainly when I lived in England (land of a thousand regional accents) I could identify any accent at twenty paces - and if it was a Midlands accent (where I lived) I could probably tell you which small town they were from without too much trouble.

If you call me up on the phone and you don't identify yourself, I'll know who you are pretty much instantly anyway, which is good. Could be confusing otherwise! I assume that most people can do the recognise-the-voice-on-the-phone thing - because otherwise everyone would always identify themselves, wouldn't they?

But this whole recognising my friend on the telly by his voice surprised me - because of the number of times I've seen people interviewed (on crime shows or whatever) who have asked not to be identified. So they have the person's face in darkness, sometimes there's a light behind them so you're not just looking at a dark screen, which means if they turn their head slightly you might see a bit of their profile - but their voices are not disguised at all.

If I was a mob boss and I heard one of my minions confessing all on the telly and dropping me in it - I'd know instantly who it was by their voice alone, and I'd probably send one of the boys round to have them dealt to.

...which made me think... am I better at voice recognition than the average bear, and is this an ability I've developed to compensate for my face-blindness? Or are there dozens of whistle-blowers being offed all over the place after spilling the beans in darkness on telly because everyone can do it as well as me - and it's only the TV producers who don't realise that fact?

This is the thing with face-blindness if you've had it all your life - you have no 'normal' baseline to which you can compare your abilities (or lack of them). So for years and years you struggle on, getting embarrassed because you can't remember who people are, and inadvertently offending acquaintances who think you should recognise them when you don't - and the whole time you have no idea that everyone else can do this stuff ten times better and faster than you can.

One time my workmates and I had a bit of a problem with a guy and we had to call the police. We were standing on the street talking to the cops when I looked across the road and saw the guy (he'd run away initially, but goodness knows why, he'd returned to the scene a few minutes later.) "That's him!" I cried, "I recognise his hat!"

Silly boy. If he'd only removed his beanie I wouldn't have had a clue that it was the same person. It was the hat that gave it away, because one of my coping strategies is to focus on people's clothes when I'm talking to them - and your attire will stick in my head far more quickly and effectively than your face will.

Most of us with face-blindness find uniforms extremely difficult to deal with, because when everyone is wearing similar outfits, we are denied one of the important pieces of data we use to identify people we know - the type of clothes we know they like to wear.

At my secondary school all the girls wore uniforms - the 'uniformity' of which was pretty tightly controlled. I used to play a game with myself when I was walking up the steep hill from the bus stop to school in the morning. Which of my friends can I see walking up the hill ahead of me?

I was easily able to recognise someone from behind, who was wearing a standard school uniform, and from quite a long way away (a couple of hundred metres or more) just by the way they walked. I assumed everyone could do this - but perhaps I'm more skilled at this than most people - because I have developed this ability to compensate for my face-blindness.

Interestingly enough, although my ability to do steps two and three of face-recogition is somewhat impaired, I think I'm pretty good at step one - recognising subtle differences and slight physical changes, such as wrinkles, in the faces of those I know well.

If you've had your hair cut, for example, I'll notice it straight away, and I'll probably comment on it. If I haven't seen you in a while, but you're someone whose face is very familiar to me, I'll notice if you're looking tired, or a bit older than when I last saw you, or if you've lost or gained weight.

Some people develop prosopagnosia as a result of a stroke or brain injury - and because these people suddenly lose the ability to recognise faces - and they're probably already under a doctor's care -- this form of face-blindness has been more well-researched than the form displayed by those of us who were born with it.

The mildness or severity of a individual's face-blindness varies along a continuum, in much the same way as Autism or Aspergers does. My face-blindness is by no means severe (I would not mistake my wife for a hat, for example), and I can pretty much guarantee I will always be able to recognise my own face, and that of my close friends and family, but it's still somewhat of a handicap in many social and work situations.

You might be wondering if I have trouble recognising or remembering other things, and I have to say no - I'm pretty good at most things, it's really only faces I have trouble with.

Like a lot of people with prosopagnosia, I like to sort and categorise things, perhaps because it helps me with the categorising I need to do in order to try and remember who someone is. I can still recognise and name pretty much any tree in the English countryside (even in winter with no leaves on the tree I can recognise it by its shape alone), or any flower growing in an English hedgerow - because I learned these for fun when out for walks with my family as a kid - and I have never forgotten them.

The categorisation that face-blind people do is important when trying to identify someone, because it narrows down the vast range of characteristics we need to remember. If I want to identify you in a crowd, I'll be thinking of ways in which I can do that - you have long brown hair, your skin is pale, your ears stick out a bit and you like to wear T-shirts and jeans, for example. That narrows down the number of people I have to focus on in order to find you.

If you stop me in the street and I'm not sure who you are, part of my inner process is to identify which of my "type" categories you fall into as I desperately try to figure out how I know you, and what your name might be. By categorising you in some way, I reduce the number of entries I have to sift through in my mental database before I find someone who fits your description.

It also explains why it's so much harder for me to recognise you if I meet you "out of context" - that is, outside the place where I normally interact with you. If I have a context for you, I can eliminate everyone in my database who isn't part of that context, or that mental "set". Without the context, there's a much larger number of sets to sort through in my mind.

For face-blind people, I think pattern recognition and characterisation is so important because we need to use these types of techniques far more frequently than most people do. So, for example, my visual memory for word shapes verges on the photographic, by which I mean that an incorrectly-spelled word will jump off the page at me when I'm reading, without me even having to look for it. If you ask me how to spell a word, I'll be able to visualise it in my head and spell it out to you faster than you can write it down, and I'm almost never wrong. Was I born with this ability, or has it developed as a result of my need to identify patterns and characteristics in people? I don't know.

I mentioned earlier that I have a good memory for conversations and can repeat back to you, word for word, a conversation we had weeks ago - especially if it was important, heated, or emotionally charged in some way. I'm also a pretty good person to have on your pub quiz team, because I have a pretty good memory for all kinds of useless and random facts on a fairly wide range of subjects. Lord knows how I know half the stuff I know, or why it sticks in my mind, but it does. Again, I don't know if these skills are as a result of me compensating for my face-blindness, or if I had them all along.

I think perhaps the most frustrating thing for me is the fairly dramatic contrast between my intellectual and memory-based abilities in almost every area of my life - and my complete lack of ability to remember your face and your name (a skill which most people take for granted).

I can remember whole soliloquies from Shakespeare, and poems by Catullus in the original Latin that I learned mumbletymumble years ago at school - and I can often answer more than half the 5-minute quiz questions in the paper without even raising a sweat - so why the heck can't I remember this person's name I only met five minutes ago - and why is it so hard for me to recognise a face when everyone else can do this without even trying?

In the office where I mistook the client for a co-worker I did an unprecedented thing soon after that happened. I described my disability to my project manager and to a new co-worker he introduced me to, with whom I was going to be working.

"I'm not very good at recognising faces, so it will take me a few days of working with you before I get your face fixed in my head. When I come in tomorrow I may not be able to work out which is you, or if you come and talk to me and I don't notice which desk you were sitting at, I may not realise that you are the person I worked with today. And it's definitely going to take me a few days to remember your name. So please bear with me - I'll get there eventually."

They both thought this was highly amusing - especially when I described my confusion with our client - but as far as I could tell they didn't judge me for it - they just gave me a bit of help over the next few days, reminding me who my new co-worker was and re-introducing us at meetings.

It was pretty cool actually, and it sure beats looking like an idiot because you don't recognise someone and no-one knows why. I think it might have even improved my ability to recognise and remember him more quickly - perhaps because by being honest I had taken the pressure off myself, and no longer had to worry about whether or not I knew which one he was.

So if you know me - or you know someone like me - and we bump into each other in the street, you can help me out enormously by reminding me of who you are and how we know each other. You can also introduce yourself to my friend if I don't do it straight away.

And in return I think I might start doing what I occasionally already do - which is to 'fess up right away and explain that "I think I know you, but I'm afraid I don't know how I know you". It certainly beats the embarrassment of trying to fake my way through a conversation with someone I can't identify - and now that I have a name for this strange condition, somehow it doesn't seem quite so threatening as it used to.

I'm just a bit face-blind, that's all.

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Technorati tags: Prosopagnosia, face-blindness, faceblind, face blind, face-blind, face recognition, I can't recognise faces, can't remember names, do I know you, memory, recall, pattern recognition, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Cadbury's and me

2009-08-18T17:44:00.008+12:00

Last time I went to the supermarket I bought a block of Whittaker's Fruit and Nut chocolate, instead of the block of Cadbury's I normally buy.

Not an enormously significant act you might say, except that the Cadbury brand has been a very important part of my life ever since I was born, and as far as a person can be wedded to a particular brand, I've been wedded to Cadbury's. The Whittaker's chocolate in my shopping basket was the first I had ever bought, and the first time that I have ever chosen a chocolate brand other than Cadbury's.

Let me explain.

I was born and brought up in Bournville, Birmingham, England. The original home of Cadbury's. The factory is still there, and still makes chocolate. Until I was eleven and ventured outside Bournville to go to secondary school, Cadbury's was suffused into every aspect of my world.

I went to Bournville Infant and Junior Schools, which, we were often reminded, were originally established by George and Elizabeth Cadbury at the turn of the century to "provide education of the highest quality" for the children of his factory workers.

Every Saturday, the music of the 48 bells of the Carillon played by Mr Workman the carillonneur would drift across our garden from its home in the tower on top of the Junior School - and every fifteen minutes of every day we'd hear the bells chime the hour, the half and the quarters.

Mr Aldington, the scariest teacher in the school, had his classroom in the tower, directly beneath the carillon. He was Mr Workman's assistant, and one of the biggest treats of being a pupil at Bournville Juniors was the trip up into the tower during the summer term of our final year to meet Mr Workman and see him play the carillon.

The carillon was (and still is) the sound of Bournville, and as it was housed in George Cadbury's school, we always thought of it as being George Cadbury's very own music.

Our house was a 10-minute walk from the Cadbury factory, and when the wind was in the right direction you could smell the chocolate wafting through the parks and tree-lined lanes of Bournville. It was wonderful. Every afternoon when the hooter sounded to mark the shift change we'd pause and picture the workers streaming in and out of the factory, and we'd wish that we could somehow sneak in with them and be surrounded by that delicious, mystical, magical entity - chocolate.

Every spring for at least three months all the girls in the village would practise and practise to perfect the ancient English art of the maypole dance; and in the summer we'd perform at the Maypole festival which was held once a year at the Cadbury factory recreation ground.

The Queen's Basket, The Gypsy's Tent, The Barber's Pole and (trickiest of all) The Chain - I can still remember the steps to each of those dances, and can clearly recall the excitement of performing them in front of hundreds of people. We were all dressed in white, with garlands of flowers in our hair, and the beautiful turn-of-the-century architecture of the factory was itself a somehow fitting backdrop to the show.

Every Christmas the whole school would be invited to the Cadbury factory cinema to watch a hand-picked movie - and apart from the year when the staff unfortunately selected Old Yeller which had three-quarters of the school in hysterical tears by the end - the visit to the Cadbury cinema was another highlight of our year.

I have so many powerful memories of my childhood, much of it spent playing with my friends in the many parks of Bournville. My dad teaching me to ride my bike in a single day in the park at the end of our lane, and later teaching myself to ride it no-handed along the pathways that criss-crossed the yaching pool park. Watching the old men sail their little model boats in the yachting pool, and the great adventure we had the day of the torrential rain when the whole pool flooded and the entire park became a great brown sea of fast-moving water.

Catching stickle-backs in the stream that ran through the park alongside my friend Tania's house, and climbing the great willow tree next to her house. Falling out of another tree a few years later as I put my full weight on a rotten branch, and having to be rescued by my friend Leslie's mum as I clung upside down from a lower branch, too terrified to move.

Building dens and playing make-believe from dawn to dusk in the vast areas of woodland and fields near Leslie's house, watching the cows in the fields between her house and the yachting pool, and learning to ride horses there too.

Marvelling at the display of pink blossom that covered the dozens of ornamental cherry trees along Woodbrooke Road every spring, loving the mass of crocuses that appeared at the same time each year in the park next to our school; the song of the blackbird in the twilight trees that to me will always be the sound of summer; looking forward with great anticipation to the autumn when we could fossick through the fallen chestnut leaves all the way down Oak Tree Lane from our house to the Bournville Village Trust building, searching for the elusive and much-treasured conker; and loving the strange white-light muffled silence that would herald an overnight fall of snow in winter.

For a place that, by the time I lived there, was essentially a suburb of the big industrial city that was Birmingham, it sounds like an idyllic childhood stuck in a time-warp sometime earlier in the century, and in many ways it was. We knew that outside the confines of Bournville village the rest of the world was not like the place in which we lived, and fundamentally we all knew that our peaceful and tree-lined existence was entirely due to the generosity, character and far-sightedness of the Cadbury family.

The whole of Bournville was, and still is, a conservation area (of which we were very proud) because George Cadbury did such a bang-up job of creating a model village for his workers at the turn of the century.

George Cadbury himself, as we all learned at school, was a Good Guy. A Quaker who built a factory on the outskirts of the big city and determined that the houses he would build for his workers would be a hundred times better than the dwellings most working-class people lived in at the time. Indoor loo, plumbing, hot water, semi-detached (not terraced), and each house had a garden with 6 fruit trees planted in it. Parks throughout the village, a village green, recreation grounds adjoining the factory so that the men and women who worked for him could keep fit, no pubs allowed within the village boundaries (to this day!)... quite amazing really.

This wonderful environment in which I spent my childhood was inextricably linked with Cadbury's, and so it was inevitable that I would maintain my loyalty to that product and brand throughout my life. Until now.

I (and everyone else who has ever lived in Bournville) am more Cadbury's than the individuals who now own the international Cadbury brand will ever be - and it's why the other day in the supermarket I chose not to buy Cadbury's any more - and why I felt sure that George Cadbury must have been turning in his grave at the thought of how far from his original enlightened ideals his products have strayed.

Although New Zealand still makes its own Cadbury's assortments and box chocolates in the Dunedin factory, a restructure in 2008 meant that the manufacture of all our Cadbury chocolate bars was shifted to two Australian factories. For a while we had our own combination of ingredients, different from (and better than) the Australian version, but in order to save money, Cadbury's recently made what I think was a very stupid decision.

I'm sure you know that a couple of months ago Cadbury Australia made three very significant changes to their chocolate - each of which in its own way has had a very negative effect on the quality of the chocolate itself, and on the image of the brand in the eyes of me and many other Kiwis.

Firstly they reduced the size of all their chocolate blocks, with the family block going down from 250g to 200g - and disguised this fact by changing the traditional paper and foil packaging to a cardboard casing which mirrored the old size exactly, while containing 50g less chocolate. You can see it here:

Secondly they reduced the cocoa content from 26% down to 21% - which is only one percent more than the minimum required to still call the product "chocolate"; and thirdly, they replaced the traditional (and many would say essential) cocoa butter with vegetable fat including palm oil.

Not a good look, especially when you find out that palm oil is a big big no-no if you care about the environment, global warming, or the threat to the world's few remaining habitats in Indonesia for endangered Sumatran tigers, Javan rhinoceroses and orang-utans.

In April 2008 Greenpeace launched a campaign in a number of countries to push companies at various points along the palm oil supply chain into supporting measures to protect rainforests from further plantation expansion.

From Greenpeace: Palm oil:

Demand for palm oil is growing and fast. At the moment, most of it ends up in hundreds of food products - from margarine and chocolate to cream cheese and oven chips - although it's also used in cosmetics and increasingly, for use in biodiesel. But the cost to the environment and the global climate is devastating - to feed this demand, tropical rainforests and peatlands in South East Asia are being torn up to provide land for oil palm plantations.

When Cadbury's switched to palm oil in their chocolate they claimed that, being a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) meant that they were only using sustainable palm oil, but Greenpeace refutes that claim. They say:

The RSPO was established in 2001 as a market-led initiative to reform the way palm oil is produced, processed and used, with clear standards on the production of sustainable palm oil. Members include companies all along the supply chain, from big name companies such as Unilever, Cadbury's, Nestlé and Tesco, to suppliers such as Cargill, ADM and Indonesian-based Duta Palma.

As it currently stands, even though member companies are paying lip-service to forest and peatland protection, the reality is very different. The existing standards developed by the RSPO will not prevent forest and peatland destruction, and a number of RSPO members are taking no steps to avoid the worst practices of the palm oil industry. Some like palm oil processor Duta Palma, an RSPO member, are directly involved in deforestation. Worse still, at present the RSPO itself is creating the illusion of sustainable palm oil, justifying the expansion of the industry.

The destruction of rainforests and peatlands to make way for palm oil plantations in Indonesia has a devastating effect on the already shrinking habitats of a number of endangered species, and also contributes to global warming. As Greenpeace explains:

The manufacturers of these products - Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever - are sourcing their palm oil from suppliers who aren't picky about where they site their plantations. As the volunteers at the Forest Defenders Camp in Sumatra have seen, this includes tearing up areas of pristine forest then draining and burning the peatlands.

Indonesia's peatlands act as huge carbon stores so replacing them with plantations them not only threatens the amazing biodiversity, including the rare Sumatran tiger, it also releases huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They only cover 0.1 per cent of the land on Earth, but thanks in part to the activities of the palm oil industry they contribute 4 per cent to global emissions. If expansion of the palm oil industry continues unabated, that figure can only rise.

It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I read today that Cadbury's has decided to bow to consumer pressure and will stop using palm oil in its Dairy Milk chocolate. Hooray! Apparently they were inundated with emails and letters from disgruntled Kiwi customers, and if the 3,517-strong Facebook group Take Palm Oil out of Cadbury chocolate bars! is anything to go by, feelings were running pretty high out there in the world of chocolate lovers.

When even the sluggish old mainstream media gets in on the act and starts laying out the case against palm oil, you know you've lost the battle.

Whittaker's brilliantly-timed ad didn't help Cadbury's cause much either:

Especially once it was featured on Campbell Live:

I don't for one minute believe that Cadbury's suddenly went all "Greenpeace" on us (although I'm sure Quaker George would have been a quiet supporter if they'd been around back then). I'm quite sure they didn't suddenly develop a conscience about the fate of the orang-utan or climate change.

No, I think it's pretty clear what changed Cadbury's mind - you only have to read the comments on any of the Stuff articles or YouTube videos I've linked to, to see what's been the driving force behind their abrupt about-turn. It's economics, of course.

But is it all too little, too late? Has Cadbury's lost market share to Whittakers for ever? Here are a few examples from Stuff:

patty
too late, i have become addicted to whitakers

Lizbeth
I may now consider purchasing Cadbury again - MAY consider! It has been 3 months since my last 'fruit and nut' thick and chunky! lol

Julie
That is great to hear - the chocolate just did not taste the same. I wonder if they will also address the fact the pack sizes shrank considerably, meaning we paid the same for not only an inferior product, but we also paid the same for a far smaller size. As soon as I noticed the changes Cadbury had made, I started buying the Kiwi brand Whittaker's... I think I will stay with them for now, as the product is amazing.

Michael
This will not change my mind on buying the product. I used to enjoy my block of Dairy Milk but since production moved to Australia it has not been the same in both texture and taste. Whether this was the palm oil I do not know. I now and only will ever buy Whittakers as firstly it is made in New Zealand, and secondly is a far superior product to what Cadbury's is now.

Rob
Their decision to use Palm Oil, which only became known via Fair Go so appeared underhanded, single-handedly bombed their position as NZ's most trusted brand. Good decision to now cease using Palm Oil but it will take a very long time to regain the TRUST they once had with the NZ public.

Only time will tell whether Cadbury's will regain the trust of yer average chocolate-loving Kiwi. But one thing's for sure. As Coca Cola also discovered when they changed their recipe - don't mess with a beloved brand. It'll only lead to tears.

As for me, well I have to say I really quite liked my bar of Whittakers Fruit & Nut. I think I might try their Dairy Milk next time - just to see. Cadbury's may have taken the palm oil back out of their Dairy Milk, but they don't say anything about any of their other products in today's press release - and when you compare Whittaker's 33% cocoa with Cadbury's pathetic 21% - well, there's not much competition really is there?

I may be a Cadbury's girl born and bred, but it doesn't mean that at some point I can't explore the world beyond the confines of the village of Bournville...

Technorati tags: Cadbury's, Cadbury, chocolate, Bournville, palm oil, Whittakers, orang-utan, global warming, habitat, rainforest destruction, ethical consumerism, consumer protest, New Zealand, YouTube, video, WebWeaver's World, webweaver

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See

2009-08-18T01:11:00.003+12:00

How come I've never seen this before?

Whether you're someone who believes that Climate Change is happening and that we're the cause, or you believe it's a load of old hogwash cooked up by rabid greenies trying to take over the planet - you should watch this.

Thanks to Richard Llewellyn who posted the link on Public Address - where a very interesting debate about John Key's new Chief Science Advisor, Peter Gluckman is going on as we speak.

Pass it on....

Technorati tags: global warming, climate change, The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See, Greg Craven, decision matrix, logical reasoning, row, column, debate, YouTube, video, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

So what's it worth to ya, then?

2009-08-12T19:13:00.005+12:00

Alice responded to my latest tweet very rapidly the other day, calling me almost as soon as I posted it. My tweet read, in part:

Bad: $1000 to get my car thro its WOF. Ouch!

My car is about 11 years old, which means it has to have a check-up once every six months. Last time it sailed through with no problems, but a year ago I had to have a teeny teeny tiny rust spot fixed on each sill and it cost me nearly $1000. Nightmare!

So here we are, a year later, and I'm faced with another $1000 bill. Ouch indeed!

Alice reckons I should sell my car immediately and get a new (second-hand) one. Her logic is that, as I'm now regularly having to spend as much each year on getting the car through its WOF as it's actually worth, I should get rid of it asap, and buy one that's not going to cost me so much to maintain each year.

She's got a point - on the surface it makes perfect sense. Why keep a car that costs me a grand a year (at least) to keep on the road - and for which, if I were to sell it, I would probably not get much more than that?

Alice and I think somewhat differently about this though, because I reckon my car is worth between $10,000 and $15,000 - to me.

What I mean is, if I were to buy a new (second-hand) car, it would cost me somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. I bought my current car for $12,000 eight years ago, when it was 3 years old, and I'm sure I'd have to pay at least as much if I bought another one now.

I'm not one of those people who worships their car. Half the time I can't even remember the licence plate number, and I certainly couldn't tell you the engine size (although I do know the make and model!). It's just a useful thing as far as I'm concerned, and there are many other things I'd keep in preference to my car (like my computer and internet access for example), if I had to choose.

I don't use my car very regularly - once a week down the hill to Batucada rehearsal and on to the supermarket every fortnight, maybe once every six months taking the cats to the vet, the occasional visits to friends, maybe the garden centre every month or two - and that's about it. It gets me from A to B when I need it to, and the rest of the time I walk or take the bus, so it's not as if I need it to take me long distances every day - or even every week.

I keep a log book where I record my petrol purchases, and a couple of years ago (before I joined Batucada) I realised it had been 12 months since I had last bought petrol for the car. I filled up the tank yesterday, and my last purchase was in January, so there you go.

I'm very much my father's daughter. Dad was extremely careful with money - miserly even - and he taught us to be careful with money too. He had a credit card, but he (literally) only used it to buy ferry tickets for the family camping holiday to Europe each summer. The rest of the time he didn't buy anything unless he had saved up enough money to buy it outright. No mortgage, no HP, no borrowings at all.

I'm not quite as pure as that (not by a long way), but I do do my research very carefully before I spend my money, and (apart from my house) I don't buy stuff unless I have the money to pay for it either. I paid for my current car with cash, which probably disappointed the salesman who was eager to tie me into a deeply costly finance agreement as quickly as possible...

Dad also never threw things away if he could fix them himself. He was an engineer, so he did all the maintenance on our cars, and never had to pay anyone else to do it. He only ever bought second-hand cars, and always bought Ford Escorts because he reckoned they were the best in those days. Funnily enough, I have also never bought a new car, and my current car is also a Ford Escort. Told you I was my father's daughter!

Fundamentally, I can't just throw away my car because it needs a bit more maintenance these days. I'm just not wired that way. Like my dad, I'm planning to drive it until it falls apart - and if it costs me a thousand bucks a year to make that happen, it's worth it as far as I'm concerned. It's certainly better than forking out 15K to get myself a new one before the old one's quite finished...

PS - I owe Justin at Capital City Ford a very big thank you. Instead of sending off to Auckland for a new headlight (there was moisture inside the old one, which meant it was failing its WOF), he took the time to take the old one apart, dry it out and put it back together again. My bill ended up being $400 less than they'd quoted, and my knackered old headlight got a new lease of life. A man after my dad's heart for sure!

Technorati tags: car repairs, car, spending, saving, WOF, twitter, tweets, WebWeaver's World, webweaver

Why so quiet on the blog front, WebWeaver?

2009-07-13T23:12:00.003+12:00

I'll probably jinx it by writing this, but the reason why I haven't been blogging much lately is because we (WebWeaver Productions) have been very very busy. Recession? What recession? (Ha! Now I've really gone and done it!)

In fact, we're so busy right now that I've actually stopped taking on new work until September at the earliest - and depending on a couple of proposals we're currently waiting on, it may end up being October before we can take on anything new. Crikey!

I never in my wildest dreams imagined we'd be doing this well. Which is why I keep on looking over my shoulder waiting for all the work to suddenly dry up. But so far, it hasn't. Hooray!

I really miss my blog, but I'm so busy right this minute that I'm working during the day and in the evenings as well in order to keep up with everything. That's not normally how I like to work - I think it's really important not to take on too much at any one time - but sometimes it can't be avoided.

Projects do run over sometimes - external forces being what they are - and occasionally projects come up unexpectedly that you really have to do straight away, and I like to be able to accommodate clients if I possibly can. It's only for a couple more days anyway, and then I can get back to concentrating on one thing at a time, which is how I prefer it.

A few people have suggested that, seeing as we're so busy, rather than turning down work we should take on a few more people and expand the business.

I've thought about it, and decided not to.

I'm an information architect, designer, developer, Flash animator and writer. I'm also the project manager and client liaison person for all our projects, and right this minute I think I have the balance just about right.

That is to say, if I took on more people it would end up with me doing more admin and project management, and less design and development - which would sadden me, because that's where my passion truly lies. I'd hate to be giving away HTML/CSS work to someone else to have fun with while I got stuck with all the writing of proposals and stuff!

Plus I'm just a tiny bit of a control freak (and that's just a tiny bit of an understatement), which means that I do actually like doing the proposals and the project management and client liaison for our projects - so I wouldn't really want to give that away either.

We're doing OK right now, and I have no wish to be Master of the Universe, and no plans to create a WebWeaver Productions empire. I like us just the way we are.

It's interesting that every project I've worked on this year has come through my networks, my contacts, and friends-of-friends. We still haven't had to respond to a single cold call for submissions in order to find enough work to do.

I'm fully expecting my list of people who know people to eventually run out - at some point surely we'll have built beautiful websites for everyone - but right now there are no signs that this is happening - in fact it seems to be getting even busier. Crazy! But in a good way.

My strike rate is pretty high in terms of winning jobs with the proposals I write. I'm not sure what a good success rate would be for the average web design company, but I reckon mine is somewhere over 75%, which seems pretty good to me.

I'm not entirely sure what our magic ingredient is - whether it's the way I write, or our winning personalities (!), or maybe it simply boils down to cost in the end - but I know that for most of our more recent pitches we've been up against a number of other web design companies, and more often that not, the client selects us. Hooray for us!

We're able to keep our costs down because Tom, Sue and I work on a co-operative basis - collaborating when the project demands it, and doing our own thing in between times - and we all work from home which means we don't have the overheads that come when you're a larger company with offices and support staff and stuff. It does mean we work about twice as hard as you do when you're working for someone else, but hey - that's what being self-employed is all about.

I get the feeling that being a small company is working in our favour on a deeper level too. I think that, as well as the obvious financial benefits in choosing a small company over a larger one with larger overheads and higher costs, there might be a bit of psychology going on as well.

Seems to me that in a recession there's a need to feel that you're really getting your money's worth - and that unconsciously it might feel as though you're doing your bit for the company if you choose the good quality reasonably-priced option rather than the larger, more luxurious and more expensive option. That might mean picking us over a larger, more high-profile and more expensive company.

There's certainly also a definite down-sizing of projects this year - more re-skins, more temporary solutions - and as budgets come down, more of them fit into our price range, which means there may well be a bit more work out there for companies like us this year than in a normal boomier year. Whatever the reason, it's all working out well for us so far.

I'm loving it. I still miss Shift - but every once in a while I get to go back and do a bit of contract work for them, which is awesome. They are such great people. It's nice because the projects we work on are about one-tenth the size of an average Shift project, which means our client bases are completely different. This is a Good Thing. I wouldn't really want to be in competition with my old workmates, after all!

It's funny how things turn out, eh? When I was writing Eulogy for my job at the end of last year I didn't imagine things would be going so well for us six months later. Long may it continue. And please Karma Gods don't jinx me for actually putting pen to paper (keyboard to screen?) on this very delicate subject!

I just think it's good to celebrate the fact that in the midst of tough financial times, you can still make a living if you work hard to get the work - and then you work hard actually doing the work :)

Technorati tags: WebWeaver Productions, WebWeaver, work, employment, self-employment, success, finding work, freelance, contract, web design, web development, website, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Iran protests and MJ mashup

2009-06-28T13:49:00.001+12:00

Technorati tags: Michael Jackson, Iran protests, They Don't Care About Us, mashup, video, YouTube, protest photos, Iran, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T22:48:00.008+12:00

His death brought the internet to its knees.

For half an hour this morning, Google responded to what it believed was a denial of service attack - as millions of fans around the world Googled to find out if the rumours of the death of the King of Pop were true.

Twitter ground to a halt and went down as the rumours flew, and the gossip websites TMZ and Perez Hilton crashed under the weight of requests.

I wandered over to Amazon while writing this blog post, thinking I should get a Michael Jackson DVD to add to my collection, and it's pretty clear that rather a lot of other people have had the same idea. His DVDs currently hold the positions 1 to 7 in the Bestsellers in Movies & TV rankings.

From Wikipedia:

In the hours following Jackson's death, his record sales increased dramatically. His seminal album Thriller climbed to number one on the American iTunes music chart, while another eight have made it into the top 40. In the UK, where Jackson would have performed less than three weeks after his death, his albums occupied 14 of the top 20 places on the Amazon.co.uk sales chart with Off The Wall topping the chart. In the UK iTunes store on June 26th, 25 of Jackson's songs were in the Top 100 best selling songs list.

I was never what you'd call a massive Michael Jackson fan (although I do confess to having a bunch of Jackson 5 tracks on my iPod), but I've spent this evening watching his top 15 music videos on MTV, and I've developed a new-found respect for the man and his art. Perhaps it's having the rare opportunity to watch so many of his videos together that brings home just what an incredible talent he was.

I remember how awed I was when I first saw the video for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on Top of the Pops in 1975, and how that one video defined the music video genre for an entire generation. It was clear to me this evening as I watched one MJ video after another, that Michael's work redefined the genre in a whole new - and extraordinarily creative - direction.

There are so many common themes and emotions running through his videos, and I felt an enormous level of pent-up tension in all of them - it was like watching a tightly-wound spring ready to explode.

Bad is a perfect example...

It's not just the subject matter, it's the choreography, the sound effects, the snappiness of the moves... everything. Amazing. ~~The video featured 18 professional dancers and 35 real gang members recruited for authenticity~~. UPDATED 28/06/09: Oops got my facts wrong - the video for Beat It featured 18 professional dancers and 80 genuine gang members (from the Crypts and Bloods, apparently!). Anyway, even without the authentic gang members of Beat It, Bad is still a very cool video.

Michael at his most beautiful (IMHO) - if only he'd stayed at that point and not continued his journey into self-parody under the surgeon's knife.

Here's the very wonderful Billy Jean performed live at Motown 25 - including the moment when MJ unveiled the moonwalk for the first time (listen to the screams!):

...and here it is again re-created (to the uncontrollable delight of the audience) in 2001 for Michael's 30th anniversary special. This one made me weepy, for some reason:

I found myself thinking back to Fred Astaire at his perfectionist best, or Gene Kelly dancing round the lampposts in Singing in the Rain. Perhaps it isn't until you see all the videos together - and particularly right at this moment - that you realise what an incredible body of work Michael created, and what a genius he really was.

The choreography is stunning - and I can only imagine how long it took and how hard the dancers worked to get every move exactly spot-on. The massed dance section that characterises so many of his videos just blows me away, every time.

There's a level of intensity and aggression in many of his later videos which goes beyond the simple subject-matter. The sexual moves are more overt, and in some, The Way You Make Me Feel, for example, there's almost an underlying sense of anger within the sexuality.

But there's also an innocence too. At the end of TWYMMF, when Michael gets the girl, they don't dive into a passionate embrace, tongues akimbo - instead she walks into his arms and he simply holds her.

The street fighting themes of Bad, Beat It, The Way You Make Me Feel or even Thriller to some extent, are so reminiscent of the dance sequences in West Side Story, and the contrast with the sheer joy and exuberance of the earlier Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough is quite striking:

It's hard to reconcile the many different facets of Michael's life. The obsessive perfectionist blessed with a beautiful singing voice and stunning dance and choreographic abilities doesn't jibe with the Peter Pan "Wacko Jacko" that many in the media and beyond preferred to focus on, and yet they are found within the same man.

This is a man who has given away millions of dollars over the years - and was listed in the book of Guinness World Records in 2000 for his support of 39 charities, more than any other entertainer or personality. He's also a man who can blow $6 million in one shopping spree in Vegas on tacky oversized pots, gewgaws and sparkly tat that no-one would ever actually need (and which, by the look of them, only he could ever like).

How do you get your head around understanding someone whose relationships with children, and young boys in particular, certainly raised many eyebrows, and may well have been inappropriate on occasion; and how does that relate to a man so obsessed with his appearance and so lacking in understanding of how others perceive him that he spent 20 years having bits of his face lopped off and re-sculpted in an attempt to - what? - become someone else?

Knowing what we now know about Michael's early life, and his abusive relationship with his father, helps to put his childlike behaviour as a man into perspective, even if it does not excuse it. Perhaps he was attempting as a grown-up to recreate the childhood he never had - and as a re-created child, he related most easily to other children.

Perhaps, as at least one psychologist who testified at his trial believes, the man was so damaged by his father as a child (and by 40 years of living in the intense spotlight of superstardom) that as an adult he regressed back to being a 10-year-old boy, complete with the emotional and developmental limitations of a child of that age.

Here's Michael with the Jackson 5 when he really was a child in 1969, with I Want You Back. I find it delightful and sad at the same time:

Here's another couple of variations on a theme. The first is the official "Brazilian" video for They Don't Care About Us, which I absolutely ADORE because it was filmed in a favela in Rio and features the completely awesome Brazilian group Olodum front and centre, accompanying the song with a strong samba reggae groove. - and you'll know if you read my blog on a regular basis that Batucada is something that's very dear to my heart.

I also love this video because it's obvious that Michael is having the time of his life making it, and again I think it gives us another glimpse into two contradictory aspects of Michael's personality. Look at how strong and self-confident and aggressive he is in this video - and then think about his shy retiring breathy press conferences where he looks like he'd fall over if you sneezed on him. I find it fascinating to compare the two:

And here's another version which also kind of sums up the dichotomy of Michael Jackson. It's a (much faster) remix of They Don't Care About Us, with a remixed video to go with it. The video is a mashup of both the controversial and violent "Prison" video and the exuberant and joyful "Brazilian" video - and it's completely awesome.

Let's close with something that again epitomises the weirdness that was MJ - or perhaps the weirdness he inspired in others - the famous Cebu Prisoners version of Thriller - where 1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines, do the complete dance routine from the video. 23,633,154 views on YouTube - and counting...

I would absolutely hate to be famous. I wouldn't last 5 minutes in the spotlight, and I'd no doubt end up becoming an eccentric recluse somewhere. Imagine what Michael's life has been like the past 40+ years. No wonder he ended up so divorced from reality.

Rest in peace, Michael. I think you deserve it. Thank you for everything you gave us. You'll be sadly missed.

Technorati tags: Michael Jackson, death, dead, King of Pop, music videos, YouTube, dichotomy, Bad, Billy Jean, moonwalk, Motown 25, The Way You Make Me Feel, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Singing in the Rain, Beat It, Thriller, West Side Story, Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough, They Don't Care About Us, Olodum, Cebu Prisoners, music, pop, WebWeaver's World, webweaver

Poem for the rooftops of Iran - June 19th 2009

2009-06-20T23:38:00.005+12:00

Poem for the rooftops of Iran

Friday the 19th of June 2009
Tomorrow, Saturday
Tomorrow is a day of destiny
Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar
are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place?
Where is this place where every door is closed?
Where is this place where people are simply calling God?
Where is this place where the sound
of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds
will get louder and whether the number increases.
It shakes me.
I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place where
so many innocent people are entrapped?
Where is this place where no one comes to our aid?
Where is this place where only with our silence
we are sending our voices to the world?

Where is this place where the young shed blood
and then people go and pray?
Standing on that same blood and pray...
Where is this place where the citizens
are called vagrants?

Where is this place? You want me to tell you?
This place is Iran.
The homeland of you and me.
This place is Iran.

Tehran Street Photos -- On the Brink

Technorati tags: Iran, protests, Mousavi, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, vote, where is my vote, election, rally, twitter, YouTube, poem, supreme leader, opposition, politics, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

No hot water, oh my!

2009-06-17T00:43:00.005+12:00

Crikey! We're halfway through June already and I haven't written a single blog post this month yet. Time for a catch-up...

A couple of weeks ago I'd just arrived home from bookclub, and was doing a bit of washing up when I heard the sound of flowing water in the laundry. "Weird," I thought to myself, "I don't remember hearing that sound coming from there before... maybe it's just the hot water cylinder re-filling..."

...went outside for a cigarette a couple of minutes later and could hear running water outside as well. Uh oh. On investigation, I could see water pouring out of a overflow pipe coming out of the wall from the hot water cylinder cupboard - which was flowing out all over my back yard as the pipe didn't actually point down the drain. Doh!

Ran back inside, opened up the hot water cupboard - to see water absolutely POURING out of the bottom of the cylinder, all over the cupboard floor, under my lovely wooden tool shelves - everywhere! EEEK!

It being 12.30am by this point I thought twice about calling the very wonderful Marcus the Emergency Plumber, but I rang him anyway. Well what would you have done? He was awesome (even though yes I had woken him up!) and talked me through how to turn the water off (and the gas to the cylinder) and gave me the name of a gasfitter to call in the morning.

Turned out my hot water cylinder (which was about 17 years old) had rusted through and a great lump of cylinder had fallen out of the bottom of it, causing the flood. No way to fix it, have to get a new one - or a new something else...

Bugger!

Marcus mentioned this thing called an "Infinity" water heater - as something I could ask Mike the gasfitter about, and which I might like to investigate as an alternative to replacing the cylinder.

So I did - I love The Google - and I liked what I saw. This particular piece of technology has completely passed me by until now, but I have to say it's pretty awesome.

Instead of having a massive hot water cylinder which has to heat up 150+ litres of water and then tries to keep it hot until you use some (or until the water temperature goes down below a certain level), at which point it fills itself up again with cold water (if you've used any) and then has to heat all the water again (VERY energy-inefficient!), an Infinity is a brand of Gas Continuous Flow Hot Water systems made by Rinnai, which doesn't use a cylinder at all.

When you turn the hot tap on it sparks up the heater (which is a small metal box attached to the outside wall of your house), the gas heats up the water inside the box and hot water flows through the pipes and out of the tap. When you turn off the tap, the heater stops heating and the energy expenditure ceases.

Much more efficient - in fact they reckon the Efficiency model (which is even better than the standard Infinity) delivers 95% energy efficiency! Crikey! Great for the environment and great for your power bill, too.

Did you know that water heating can account for about 40% of your household energy costs? And that if, say, your old cylinder cost $496/year to run, the Infinity would cost $120 and the Efficiency a mere $102/year? Wow - that's a big saving!

OK - I'm convinced - I need to get me one of these things.

It turns out that getting an Infinity is about the same cost as replacing a hot water cylinder, which is good - but of course being such a greenie I had to go with the even more efficient Efficiency, which costs about $500 more. No worries! I'm saving the planet one appliance at a time! :)

They don't keep stocks of the Efficiency in Welli, so Michael the gasfitter had to send off to Auckland for one, which meant that I had a day or so longer without hot water. 5 days in all - and the lack of it certainly makes you appreciate hot water when you finally get it back. Probably makes anyone you came into contact with during those stinky 5 days with only one shower (thanks a million Ofer for the use of your hot water that day!) quite relieved as well...

Three and half thousand dollars later (ouch!) I could finally take a shower in my own bathroom again (hooray!), and it's really rather nice.

It's not instant - how could it be? The water has to heat up from completely cold, after all - which means I have to run the shower or the hot tap for a few minutes longer at the start than I used to do with the cylinder hot water - but really, that's a small price to pay for water heating that's almost five times as efficient as the system I was using before.

I'm just mightily relieved that the cylinder decided to do its meltdown act when I was actually home, and actually awake! Imagine if it had been a couple of hours earlier, or a couple of hours later! I would have returned home (or woken up) to a flooded laundry at best, a flooded rest-of-the-house at worst. Shudder!

Thanks a million to Marcus for being woken up in the middle of the night and for still being nice to me, Michael and his brother Lance for fitting the Efficiency so - efficiently - and thanks to my lovely electrician Bruce for coming over at short notice to wire the whole thing up. You guys rock!

And thanks also to Rinnai for inventing the thing in the first place, and who say on their website:

Inspired by Kyoto

The inspiration for Rinnai Efficiency came from perhaps the most famous environmental forum ever.

In 1997, following the conference on Global Warming in Kyoto, Rinnai Japan dedicated its Research and Development team to creating a new and better way to produce hot water for both commercial and domestic customers.

The focus was on energy efficiency, cost savings and reducing overall environmental impact. Now the Rinnai Efficiency delivers on that vision and brings greater performance and environmentally-friendly features that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and electricity demand.

Technorati tags: Rinnai, efficiency, infinity, gas continuous flow hot water, hot water cylinder, gas, electricity, energy efficiency, hot water, water heating, greenhouse gases, greenhouse emissions, Kyoto, environment, global warming, reducing your power bill, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

John Key, you confuse me

2009-05-26T00:43:00.004+12:00

OK, so that's not really much of a surprise, seeing as there's very little that John Key and I would be able to agree upon. But his latest announcement has me even more confused than usual.

Seems Mr Key wants to encourage loads of expat Kiwis to come home and "plug the brain drain" in order to help us out of the recession.

Call me stupid, but - um - where exactly are the jobs for all these people going to come from? John Key seems to take great delight in booting as many public servants out of their jobs as possible (why do you hate public servants so much, Mr Key?), and has been known to make more public servants redundant in a single day than the total number of jobs saved by his much vaunted 9-day fortnight plan - and yet he now seems to be saying that there are tons of jobs out there for all those highly-educated Kiwis who've left EnZed for pastures new.

I hate to break it to ya, John - but I think you'll find that many of those jobs are either filled already, or no longer exist.

Take my field of expertise for example - the New Zealand IT industry. A year ago it was definitely true that we needed more IT professionals here. I could have walked out of my job a year ago and found 5 great positions within a week. Today that's definitely not the case. I've said before in my blog that if you apply for an IT job these days you'll more than likely be up against hundreds of other people (no exaggeration - apparently a webmaster position advertised at the Ministry of Justice recently garnered 300 applications!).

These days you're lucky to even get an interview in my experience - I've stopped bothering because it's just not worth my time and effort - I'm doing much better with contract and freelance work - but that's not what Key's talking about. He's talking jobs and Kiwis coming home to set up new businesses and suchlike, and I think he's dreaming.

He's certainly not talking about public servant positions (see above!) - by the time he's finished there won't be any of those left at all - and yet it's where a heck of a lot of highly-educated Wellingtonians end up. I know a bunch of ex-public servants who've gone to England to work, and I think some of them do want to come home - but they won't find many openings in Government right now.

So what's he talking about? I think you need to be a lot more specific John - are you talking nurses, teachers, doctors, police etc? I don't think there's much of a chance of persuading expat Kiwis in those professions to come home - you're freezing (already crappy) pay for most of those jobs "in a spirit of working together to help NZ ride out the recession", and I can't imagine many people would give up a job they already have overseas to come home and battle for one here.

Personally, I'd rather all those IT professionals didn't come home right now. There's enough competition around here already, without having to compete with a whole bunch of web designers fresh off the plane from London. Call me selfish, or call me realistic - but I truly don't understand where he thinks these jobs are hiding, when more and more job losses are being announced every week.

Redundancy sucks, but I've found out it's not the end of the world - it can be a new beginning if you're prepared to work at it. But persuading Kiwi expats to leave good jobs overseas to come home in the middle of a recession when they'll be up against all the usual applicants here PLUS a whole bunch of recently-made-redundant job-seekers - I think that's unrealistic, and dishonest, and pretty short-sighted.

Think again, John. This expat Kiwi plan ain't gonna fly.

Technorati tags: Kiwi expats, brain drain, come home, IT profession, redundancy, jobs, public servants, recession, pay freeze, skilled professionals, John Key, politics, New Zealand, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

A sad farewell to Dymocks

2009-05-25T23:58:00.004+12:00

If I hadn't found the career of my dreams as a web designer/developer, I'd be the owner of a bookshop. I love bookshops. I love books, so that's not really a surprise I suppose, and some bookshops are definitely better than others.

Wellington has a wonderful selection of second-hand bookshops - my favourites being the two Arty Bees at the far end of Courtenay Place and in the Oaks Complex near Manners Mall - and I have to say I frequent them probably more than any other bookshops in town.

But when I want a new book - for book club, say, or as a present, or a gardening book as a treat for myself - I go to Dymocks. Or at least, I used to go to Dymocks.

I couldn't believe it when I read that they had gone into receivership and were closing down. Nooooooo! Not my favourite new bookshop! What will I do now?

Every single new gardening book on my shelves came from Dymocks. I've bought a lot of new kids books there over the years - and new books for myself - and cards, and wrapping paper - and all sorts of stuff. How can the bookshop with the ultimate best window displays of any shop in Wellington go into receivership?

Where will the lovely man with the ponytail go? Where will his world's best collection of Tolkein and other fantasy books live from now on? Where will Weta get to display their fabulous LOTR models? Who's going to light up that corner of the street?

The warm and welcoming red and gold that I always associate with Dymocks is darkened now. The shop is closed. The books are gone. I felt so sad when I went past on the bus today and the lights were out, no-one home.

I should have bought more books at Dymocks, and done more to help them stay afloat. We all should have. I knew when Borders opened up down the street that it spelled danger for Dymocks, but I hoped fervently that the competition wouldn't be too great.

Sadly it was, and the result is that a bookshop owned and run by lovely people who adore books and who are passionate about literature gets eaten up by a great big soulless multinational chain. It's like "You've Got Mail" - without the emails, romance, Tom&Meg or the happy ending :(

There's one thing for sure. I will never ever shop at Borders. You can trust me on that. I'll be at Unity Books if anyone wants me.

Technorati tags: Dymocks, book shop, bookshop, receivership, closing down, favourite bookshop, Borders, Arty Bees, Unity Books, Wellington, books, recession, chain, multinational, competition, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Woah! SERIOUSLY windy Wellington!

2009-05-15T00:59:00.004+12:00

Bloody hell!

The wind's blowing harder than I've ever seen it blow in Wellington. It freaks me out big-time. I'm shaking like a leaf here, people!

It's 1.00am and there's no way I can go to bed with the wind this bad. I just went out for a cigarette (protected by my house from the worst of it) and watched the cabbage tree at the top of my garden completely freaking out from the strength of the wind. My house faces north-west, and so we get completely mashed when there's a north-wester, and this one's a doozy.

Here's a video of the same cabbage tree (and my shed, which was distinctly wobbly in those days) taken nearly three years ago, the last time I can remember it being this windy.

An hour ago the weather watch for the Wellington (Kelburn) weather station was giving a wind speed of 30km/h, now it's up to 46km/h but that was measured an hour ago at midnight. Goodness knows what that last massive gust was. Way over 100 I should think.

I love Wellington and I adore my house, but sometimes - like tonight - I wish I lived on flat ground instead of on the side of a hill, and I wish my house was protected from the wind. I hatessssss it.

Mark the hedge guy came over today to start trimming the massive privet hedge in my veggie garden, and he's left piles and piles of loose clippings behind, ready to be picked up on Monday. I laughingly said (this afternoon when it was a perfect, beautiful, sunny day) I hoped it didn't get too windy between then and Monday or I'd have bits of hedge flying all over the place...

Now I'm just praying the uncut parts of the hedge will protect the loose bits from the worst of the wind. I just went outside to check and it isn't too bad, but I'm not looking forward to being woken in the middle of the night by flying garden debris hitting my windows. Ugh.

Technorati tags: Windy Wellington, wind, gales, weather, Wellington, New Zealand, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Reported Attack Site! (only not)

2009-05-12T23:42:00.003+12:00

What a complete nightmare.

If you've visited my website since this morning, and you're using the very wonderful Firefox as your browser of choice, you may have gotten the same shock I did when I went to check it today...

Instead of my lovely welcoming homepage you are currently subjected to a greyed-out screen with a big red box in the middle that loudly proclaims "Reported Attack Site! This web site has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences."

WHAAAATTT????

I read the auto email from Google again (which is what had prompted me to check my site this morning) and follow the instructions. Check the source code for injected weird blocks of code or anything that shouldn't be there etc etc. Absolutely clean and pristine, nothing wrong with my source code at all. What's going on?

I call my ISP and they sheepishly admit it's all their fault. Someone who has a website hosted on the same server as mine has found a way of randomly (and only occasionally) intercepting a Google request for other sites on the server (including mine) and has been able to redirect the person Googling for my site to their own (malware) site instead. So now Google thinks I have malware on my site which I don't. I'm not a happy bunny right now.

I find it incredibly frustrating because I now have to request that Google remove me from their "no-fly" list (which I shouldn't be on anyway) and in the meantime all my clients and potential clients will think I have a dodgy site and am therefore a dodgy person to do website dealings with.

I've done the requesting-a-review-from-Google thing, but have no idea how long it will take for them to clear me - and meanwhile my reputation is potentially heading rapidly south as potential clients see the warning page and race off in the opposite direction!

Nightmare!

Technorati tags: Google, malware, attack site, Firefox, ISP, incorrectly labelled, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

The Karori Nature Reserve BLOODY CAR PARK

2009-05-07T01:01:00.009+12:00

Heh. Apologies for the SHOUTING CAPS in the post title, but I'm a wee bit miffed right now.

A couple of months ago they started dumping piles of earth and gravel at the far end of Appleton Park. There was a digger there and a couple of lorries, but nothing much seemed to be happening, and I wondered if it was being used as a temporary storage area for building materials or something.

Then about a month ago the temporary fence around the dumping area suddenly expanded quite dramatically, and they pulled out a couple of the baby pohutukawas that they only planted there a couple of years ago. "Not good" I thought.

Hmmm. What's going on?

I noticed a big sign had gone up on the fence which said "Any enquiries, please contact the Karori Nature Reserve", which reassured me somewhat. "Oh phew" I thought. "If it's the Nature Reserve it can't be anything bad - they're Good People."

I was wrong, sadly.

I called them up and asked them what was going on and was told that they are building a BLOODY GREAT CAR PARK there! It's going to be overflow parking for the Nature Reserve, plus a Park & Ride facility, also for the Nature Reserve.

In an attempt to divert my pissed-off-ness (I was not a happy bunny when I found out) they breezily informed me that it's Road Reserve (this almost one-third of Appleton Park that they are going to cover in bloody tarmac) - as if that would make me feel better!

I don't care whether it's 'officially' a Road Reserve (What's that anyway? Space reserved to build a road, should they want to?) or a park or a Conservation Area or anything else they want to 'officially' call it - to me it's a lovely green expanse of grass and trees that I can see from my house and which I enjoy enormously - and now it's going to to be turned into a bloody great car park. With attendant noise, fumes, cars, buses, people coming and going, rubbish, screaming kids... Great.

Moan moan.

It just seems so ironic that the wonderfulness that is Karori Nature Reserve is now ruining my view (and not theirs, as it happens) by concreting over a perfectly nice piece of open grassy space, just so that more bloody lazy people can drive there and park (and it isn't even very nearby - hence the Park & Ride I suppose).

Why don't they encourage more people to catch the local bus (which plenty of people do already) and then stroll down to the Reserve (which plenty of people also do already) - rather than having this wussy Park & Ride facility - or walk all the way there, or cycle? All much greener, much healthier, much more in keeping with the aims of the Reserve in the first place - and much less of a blight on MY VIEW.

Grumble grumble grumble bloody car parks. Bloody Telecom tower nearby as well.... grump grump.

I bloody hatesssss "progress".

Technorati tags: Karori Nature Reserve, car park, Appleton Park, Wellington, Park & Ride, buses, cars, overflow parking, environment, WebWeaver's World, webweaver

OK Universe, you can slow down a bit now

2009-05-04T15:24:00.006+12:00

So you remember how I was having a little freak-out in March because I had one or two days in a row where I had no work to do?

I realised I hadn't actually Asked The Universe To Provide for a wee while, so I asked - and now I have work coming out of my ears.

How funny. I certainly won't be signing on for a little while longer, that's for sure.

I see the feast or famine thing time and time again with contracting and freelance work. Happens all the time. I guess that's because there's only one point where "too much" and "not enough" are perfectly balanced, whereas there are many points where one side of the seesaw is heavier than the other, but still - it can be somewhat exhausting, this not-knowing thing.

I guess that's made up for by the fact that you earn a little more per hour when you're freelancing or contracting, but then again, there's a heck of a lot of preparation work involved too - especially when you're doing all the pitching for jobs and much of the project-managing, like I am.

I spent the entire week last week either at planning meetings, presentation meetings, or writing proposals and drawing up website wireframes. All prep work really, but when it goes well, it's a very worthwhile investment.

Sue and I won an awesome contract a couple of weeks ago which we're completely thrilled about, and she's working on the designs as I write this. Can't wait to see them - I know they're going to be lovely.

Tom and I are working on another website for a freelance client at the moment - I've been working on the design for the last couple of days and it's really coming together nicely. Hope the client likes my colour palette. We shall see.

I'm definitely feeling very positive about being a contractor and freelancer at the moment (probably because I've got heaps of work on!) - and I do like the freedom of it, even though writing pitch proposals isn't my favourite thing... This morning for example I was able to watch the ATP tennis delayed coverage before I stared working - which I certainly couldn't do if I were an employee. Heh.

I do miss being in a team though. I did a couple of week's work at Shift recently and OHMYGOD it was so nice to be back there again. I love those guys! You might think it would feel weird to be back there, but it wasn't at all - it was just really nice.

I think I'm turning into a crazy old lady though - because I'm spending so much time working from home I've noticed I've been talking to myself rather a lot (or the cats) - there being no-one else around to talk to. I just have to make sure I don't do it in public too much, or my secret will be out!

OK, back to work - wrangling logos into a tiny space is always fun.

Later!

Technorati tags: work, contracting, freelancing, web design, web development, the Universe will provide, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

I just love Susan Boyle

2009-04-18T00:56:00.005+12:00

Susan Boyle singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from the musical "Les Miserables" on "Britain's Got Talent". 19,233,462 views in 5 days... and counting.

Amazing.

I cry every time I watch it. Completely fabulous.

Then have a listen to her singing "Cry Me A River". Woah. What a voice!

Susan, I think you're completely wonderful.

Technorati tags: Susan Boyle, Britain's Got Talent, I Dreamed a Dream, Les Miserables, Cry Me A River, YouTube, Scottish singer, voice, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

It's not what you know...

2009-04-11T20:35:00.008+12:00

...it's who you know - of course.

Well OK, what you know is important too - but you can be as skilled and knowledgeable as you like - and still not find work because you're either only applying for jobs once they're advertised, or you're relying on recruitment agents to find you work.

Useless.

Or at least - that's been my experience so far this year.

I have come to the conclusion that in these tough economic times it's really quite hopeless applying for advertised jobs. A year ago in IT it was a workers' market - we could all be pretty sure that we would be able to walk out of one job and straight into another - but boy, how things have changed. Now it's an employers' market, where every job ad receives applications from dozens and dozens of eager web dudes desperate for work.

In the past I don't think I've ever applied for a job that I didn't get - now I'm not even getting as far as the first interview - and for some jobs they haven't even had the grace to tell me I've been rejected - I simply never hear from them at all.

Tom applied for a job the other day with some web design company we'd never even heard of - and they told him they'd had tons of applications and they might get back to him (but then again they might not) - so it's not just the ones I've looked at - I think it's happening all over.

And recruitment agents - don't get me started on recruitment agents (too late - I've started!)

My experience is as follows. You send them your CV in response to a job they have advertised. They call you, wildly enthusiastic, and arrange a meeting. You turn up for an interview with them, they take lots of notes, wax lyrical about your CV, maybe introduce you to one of their colleagues. You leave feeling pretty good about yourself, certain that a new job or contract is virtually within your grasp.

And then you never hear from them again.

Alternatively, they call you excitedly with three completely unsuitable jobs within the first week ("oh I didn't realise 'programmer required with .net, C++, and PHP experience' was different from 'front-end developer wanted with HTML/CSS and jQuery skills'...")

And then you never hear from them again.

There's only one recruitment agent who's actually found me work this year - and I've known her for years. Ironically enough, if I had reached out earlier to all my networks I'd have scored the same contract without needing her at all - it was with a company I used to work for.

OK - so applying for advertised jobs is no good because by then you're competing with half of Wellington. Recruitment agents are crap (unless you've known them for ages) because they don't seem to know what they're talking about half the time, and they rarely follow through.

In my experience, the secret to finding work these days is via your networks.

Let's look at the facts. So far this year...

January:

Building a website (which Tom integrated) for Origin Design, where I used to work. Score 1 for the recruitment agent (hi Michelle), and score -1 for me because I should have called Alex at Origin myself (hi Alex).

Finishing the build with Tom for WM Bamford & Co's website (hi Noeline). Score 1 for my WebWeaver Productions website, where Noeline found us.

Contract work with Optimation, advising them on HTML and CSS best practice. Score 1 for having worked occasionally with them on various projects over the past year or two. Score another 1 for having been introduced to them by a colleague (hi Lulu) in the first place.

Building the Round Peg website, designed by my best friend's dad (hi Alice and Shelley). Score 1 for best friends with designer dads.

Building a major commercial website as a contractor at DNA. Score 1 for keeping in touch with ex-colleagues (hi Felicity).

February:

Finishing the Round Peg website.

Finishing the DNA website.

More work with Optimation.

Building a second website for Origin Design. Score 1 for a new contract.

March:

More work with Optimation.

Contract with Badger Communications (hi Matthew), building Flash ad banners. Score 1 for best friends (hi again Alice) with brothers who own communications companies.

Finishing the second site for Origin.

Alterations to the Bamford website.

Fix to the Office of Film and Literature Classification website. Score 1 for former employers passing on a little bit of work to me.

April:

More work with Optimation.

More work with Badger Communications.

Looks like I have some work coming up with Shift (hi guys). Score 1 for maintaining good relationships with former employers.

Potential of some work coming up with an old colleague from years back (hi Brenda). Score 1 for keeping in touch with former colleagues.

Potential of two new clients for WebWeaver Productions. Score 1 for recommendations from existing clients.

Potential of some work in the future with a former employer who sees me as a web evangelist - "Web 2.0 before there was Web 2.0" (hi Jill).

Job lead from a former colleague (hi Sally) about a potential contract with a former client.

Number of different contracts I've had since the beginning of January: 9

Number of these contracts that have been advertised: 0

Number of contracts obtained via a recruitment agent: 1

Number of contracts gained via my WebWeaver website: 1

Number of contracts obtained through personal contacts and my network: 7

Number of additional potential contracts obtained via my network: 5

Number of advertised long-term NZ contracts applied for: 3

Number of interviews secured from these applications: 0

Number of thanks-but-no-thanks emails I have received in response to my applications: 1

Number of contracts I have applied for where no-one has bothered to contact me at all: 2

See what I mean?

If there's one thing I've learned in my 12 years as a web designer and developer, it's that if you work hard and always do the best job you can possibly do, people will remember that - and they'll come back to you when they have spare work that needs doing - as long as you let them know you're available. That's all I mean by "networking" - it's just the people I know, the people I've worked for and the people I've worked with. It's not rocket science.

The other thing I've learned is to never burn your bridges. Never ever. You must always leave a job on good terms - even if it's a job you're totally fed up with (or a job you wouldn't have left if you'd had the choice).

And it's a good idea to remember that former colleagues can have as much influence on your future employment as former employers. You never know when you're going to come across an old colleague in a new position of authority or influence. Wellington's a small town, and the web industry is a small and close-knit industry.

March was a pretty tough month work-wise. I think that's what's hardest about being a contractor - the up and down, all-or-nothing nature of it - and the total lack of predictability. But things are looking better so far in April.

I realise now that much of my February work was a continuation of stuff I'd sorted out in January - and that I didn't really take the time to hustle for new work which would fill my calendar once the other work was done.

It's tough to find the time when you're working really hard, but you have to do it, you have to keep on revisiting your networks, just to ensure that the work keeps on coming in.

And in my experience so far this year - it's your networks that will keep you going through these tough times. I hope they continue to work their magic for me.

Technorati tags: work, jobs, employment, networks, networking, personal contacts, how to find work, interview, recruitment agents, job applications, economic downturn, unemployment, contract, freelance, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

(Not the greatest) customer service at WINZ

2009-04-07T23:25:00.007+12:00

So March wasn't a great month, work-wise.

January and February I was going gangbusters - heaps and heaps of work on, and some weeks I was actually doing two jobs at the same time - one project during the day and a different project in the evenings. It was good - and I figured I needed to accept as much work as I could handle, because you never know when it's all going to dry up.

And in March it (almost all) dried up. Thank goodness for Matthew at Badger Communications who kept me out of trouble for at least some of the time, building 64 Flash banner ads for Expedia in Oz.

In addition to getting so bored I thought I was going to go MENTAL, I spent a good deal of time updating my (already up-to-date) website CV, endlessly reviewing TradeMe Jobs, Seek and NZ Govt jobs (and even applying for some) - and sorting out my Australian Business Number so that I can do telecommuting work with companies in Oz.

Absolutely no luck there so far - I don't even think the Australian recruitment agents are bothering to put my CV forward, which is a total bummer cos I could do all the contracts I'm applying for standing on my head with my eyes shut, but there you go. Nothing ventured, and all that. Maybe it will be easier now I actually have my ABN. We shall see.

As a result of all this non-job-getting I got a little freaked out and started worrying I would never find work ever again. Silly I know, but when you're looking at the same job site over and over and the only jobs you can find to do are ones in another country where they won't even look at your CV, it does get a little dispiriting.

I finally decided last week that I should swallow my pride and look into signing on for unemployment benefit. I have never ever done this in New Zealand before - I've never needed to - but I figured I should be practical, face facts, and accept help from the government if and when it gets that bad.

Herewith, my experience so far... I'm not very impressed at this point, sadly...

Last week I went onto the WINZ website and found a section all about this thing called ReStart - a "package of payments and employment and job services to help if you’ve recently been made redundant from full-time work. You may also be able to get this if you're self employed and entitled to Unemployment Benefit."

Kewl! I'm both of those things - guess I should call them up and find out more...

So I did, and spoke to a very nice man who asked me all sorts of questions about my income and job prospects and outgoings and stuff - and determined that yes I would be eligible and yes I should come in for an appointment on Monday morning at 9am. Note that he said "appointment", and that the word "seminar" never passed his lips. This will be important later, dear reader.

I asked him about the list of stuff it says you have to bring to your first appointment - passport, driver's licence, 26 weeks' worth of bank statements, and a whole host of other things - should I bring all that on Monday? Oh yes, he said.

On Monday I turned up at WINZ at about 5 to 9, lugging this massive folder with all the stuff I needed to bring (as well as all the things I needed for my day's work at Optimation - hooray! I'm doing some work at Optimation this week!) and joined the queue at the front desk.

"Are you here for the blahblah seminar?" they asked. "No," I said, "I have an appointment at 9 o'clock". They looked my name up on their list and told me to take a seat. At 5 past 9 some guy came over and said "Everyone here for the blahblah seminar please come this way" - and most of the people waiting got up and headed off to the seminar. Not me of course, because I had an appointment.

You can probably guess what's coming...

Of course I was there for the seminar - I just didn't know I was there for the seminar. So I missed it.

In the 15 minutes I was waiting (before I/they figured this out) I was treated to the spectacle of the extremely bad-tempered lady at the front desk shouting at this poor Asian man (whose English wasn't great) who was late for the seminar - "No you can't go to the seminar now! You've missed 10 minutes of it and the facilitator can't be expected to wait for you to arrive - you have to be here ON TIME like EVERYBODY ELSE. No you don't have a one-on-one appointment! [aha - see I'm not the only person who made this mistake!] - it's a GROUP SEMINAR!"

Poor guy - I felt so sorry for him - how humiliating to be talked down to and shouted at like some errant schoolboy. What a welcome. Not.

Eventually a very nice smiley WINZ man came over to see why I was still waiting, and he figured out that I'd missed the seminar. Then I had to wait in line to speak to the ANGRY LADY AT THE FRONT DESK again. Fabulous.

Ahead of me in the queue was another Asian dude (whose English was also not very good) trying to explain something and asking to see someone for an appointment. He got through his whole request and was treated to "I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU JUST SAID! What do you want??? You can't just turn up here - you HAVE TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT to see someone!"

Bloody hell. What's this woman got against Asian men? I imagine that he may not know you can't just turn up - I didn't know that, I just randomly called them first because the number was on the website. Plus, if his English isn't particularly sophisticated it's a lot easier to communicate in person than it is over the phone, isn't it? Anyway, eventually he got sent on his way with an appointment and it was my turn.

I was grumpy and pissed off, she was sarcastic and condescending. It was a discussion full of warmth and mutual respect. Or not.

So now I have to go back again another day - this time without my massive file full of personal info because THIS IS A GROUP SEMINAR. We get told our rights and responsibilities, then apparently we get a massive pack of forms to fill in, then if we're lucky we might be able to book an appointment and THEN we might be allowed to sign on. Whooppee! Welcome to your friendly and supportive government agency!

As a self-employed person I think I can sign on and then if I get work I just have to tell them and then I don't get any benefit that week, but if I didn't find any work, then I get my benefit. I think. I haven't found that out yet. Because I missed the seminar :)

Afterwards I staggered under my load of personal info down to Optimation and it was so heavy I pulled something in my back and had to go see my lovely acupuncturist John Xu to get it readjusted. Fantastic.

I HATE not working. It really does my head in.

Technorati tags: WINZ, Work and Income New Zealand, government, benefit, unemployment benefit, customer service, self-employed, dole, signing on, finding work, ReStart, redundancy, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Earth Hour by the light of the Dark Side of the Moon

2009-03-28T22:20:00.005+13:00

Oh boy! That was soooo cool!

With about half an hour to go before Earth Hour I realised I needed candles, so I spent a frantic few minutes scraping old bits of wax out of my 24-tea-light candle holder and putting in new tea lights. Got it all done just in time, and went racing round the house switching everything off, and then lit the 24 candles with great ceremony. Pretty!

The first 10 or 15 minutes of Earth Hour was spent wax-proofing everything around the candle holder - covering the bench seat, window sill, storage area and carpet with newspaper because the tea lights kept overflowing with hot wax which would then cascade down through the sculpture and onto the floor/window sill/bench seat. Doh! Bit of a breeze going on round there I think!

At one point I went out for a cigarette but in the dark I'd rolled the paper the wrong way round so it came unstuck and I was too nervous about those crazy candles to leave them alone for any length of time, so I gave up and sat in front of the window instead, watching the flickering candle flames in a kind of a trance. It was quite nice actually.

I tried to figure out if any of my neighbours across the valley were taking part - at first I didn't think anyone was, because there seemed to be a whole heaps of houses with all lights blazing away merrily (boo!) - but of course it's much easier to see houses where there are lights on than houses where the lights are off, so I wasn't really sure. I reckon, by the number of lights that came back on again after it was all over, maybe a quarter to a third of the homes I could see were taking part. Not bad. Could have been better, though.

Anyway - once I had calmed down with the whole candle/hot splashing wax/ohnoit'sgoingtosetmyhouseonfire thing I decided that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon would be a fitting accompaniment to my musings about the perilous state of the planet, so I allowed myself to switch on one electrical item - my stereo - plugged in my ipod, turned up the volume, and away we went.

Oh wow - talk about awesome - it was perfect!

How about this:

Time
(Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour) 7:06

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

Or maybe this:

Money
(Waters) 6:32

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay.
Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it's a hit.
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit.
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.

Money, it's a crime.
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it's no surprise that they're
giving none away.

Or perhaps this one:

Us and Them
(Waters, Wright) 7:40

Us, and them
And after all we're only ordinary men.
Me, and you.
God only knows it's not what we would choose to do.
Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
moved from side to side.
Black and blue
And who knows which is which and who is who.
Up and down.
But in the end it's only round and round.
Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
The poster bearer cried.
Listen son, said the man with the gun
There's room for you inside.

Down and out
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about.
With, without.
And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?
Out of the way, it's a busy day
I've got things on my mind.
For the want of the price of tea and a slice
The old man died.

...and finally this one:

For Brain Damage I flung open the french doors and stood outside on the deck, watching the stars with the music pouring out into the night. Awesome.

Brain Damage
(Waters) 3:50

The lunatic is on the grass.
The lunatic is on the grass.
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs.
Got to keep the loonies on the path.

The lunatic is in the hall.
The lunatics are in my hall.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

The lunatic is in my head.
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane.
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.

And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

"I can't think of anything to say except...
I think it's marvelous! HaHaHa!"

Eclipse
(Waters) 2:04

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."

---------------------------------------------

I think it's pretty cool that these lyrics still have such a powerful message all these years after they were first written - but God what a crazy world we live in. Here we are on the edge of an environmental disaster, and in the midst of an economic meltdown - and we still can't seem to agree on anything at all.

In my more pessimistic moments I believe it's either already too late, or that mankind won't get off its collective ass to actually do anything meaningful about climate change until it's too late.

When I'm feeling more optimistic about things, I believe there's still time and we still have the opportunity to turn things around and save our beautiful world.

Whether or not we choose to do so, is up to each and every one of us.

This evening has given me a chance to think, and it's reawakened my passion for environmental issues.

I've been worrying about losing my job and having no work and blahblah what if I lose my house - when what I also need to be thinking about and doing something about is losing my planet.

It's a little more important in the grand scheme of things.

Technorati tags: Earth Hour, earthhour, global warming, climate change, environmental issues, saving the planet, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, Pulse, YouTube, video, lyrics, Time, Money, Us and Them, Brain Damage, Eclipse, voteearth, New Zealand, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Lights off at 8.30pm tomorrow! Vote Earth!

2009-03-27T23:26:00.008+13:00

Earth Hour is happening tomorrow. From 8.30-9.30pm your time, wherever you are in the world, you can vote earth by switching off your lights for an hour - Earth Hour. Beginning in my part of the world and moving across the planet as it turns, the lights will go out.

Listen, we know that global warming is a reality. It's happening already, it's been happening for years, and in some parts of the world like the Arctic and in Antarctica it's progressing far faster than the scientists' worst-case predictions.

When I was at University a million years ago we were studying global warming, and at that point pretty much anyone who knew anything about science agreed that climate change was beginning to take place, and that it was our fault.

And then at some point the oil companies got involved in the discussion and things changed. Instead of a common agreement that this phenomenon was real, and very worrying, and something that we had to stop before it was too late, suddenly there were people questioning the scientists, and muddying the water, and sowing confusion and dissent.

The oil companies (and others who had a vested interest in such matters) spent millions of dollars on bogus scientists and focus groups and phoney research to convince enough of us that the theory of global warming was at least in question, and that we didn't need to change our habits or do anything about the way we burn fossil fuels, or destroy forests, or run our cities, or drive our cars.

When people who aren't scientists spend that much time, money and effort trying to discredit a scientific theory that's backed up by a huge amount of scientific research and observation, you know something's going on. You'd have to be stupid not to.

The global warming discreditors did a pretty good job for a long time. For many years environmental groups like Greenpeace and WWF were fighting an uphill battle just to get people to listen to them. But slowly, slowly, things began to change.

I think the tipping point in the direction of global awareness and acceptance of climate change was Al Gore's movie - An Inconvenient Truth. So many people saw that movie around the world, and it was a very powerful film, putting forward a clear and effective case for global warming being a reality.

From WWF-NZ:

On March 29 2008, more than 50 million people around the globe united for one hour and switched off their lights to show that they care about our living planet. With growing concern about the effects of global warming, Earth Hour demonstrates that collectively people can make a difference. More than 370 towns and cities took part including San Francisco, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Rome, Copenhagen, Manila, Bangkok, Santa Cruz, Christchurch and Chicago.

Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby. Earth Hour is a message of hope and action.

I admit I wasn't really aware of Earth Hour 2008. Christchurch was the only big city in NZ to embrace it, and it simply passed me by. I obviously wasn't paying attention if 50 million people around the world took part last year.

Anyway, this year I am paying attention - and I'm VERY pleased to see how many other people are taking notice as well. There have been loads of ads on telly, I've received emails from both WWF-NZ and Greenpeace reminding me about it, and there was a nice big piece on the news this evening. Hooray! Apparently the organisers have had three times more cities pledging to take part than they had hoped for - which is completely brilliant. Hope it can be seen from space!

It's particularly important that we in New Zealand take part in Earth Hour, and that we encourage our friends and neighbours to take part. Our enthusiasm as a nation in taking a leading role in the fight against global warming seems to be waning a little - probably due to our current focus on surviving the economic downturn. John Key certainly isn't helping by pandering to ACT's demands that the Emissions Trading Scheme be reviewed, especially considering his (and his government's) very dodgy attitude towards global warming.

If Earth Hour can raise people's awareness about global warming and climate change, that's a really good thing. If we can use that hour as a global vote to let politicians around the world know that we as a planet want to do something to stop global warming, that's a great thing. If we can save a wee bit of energy in the process, that's very cool too.

It can take a heck of a long time for a movement to gather momentum. It takes energy and commitment and determination to keep on plugging away until you get a critical mass of people taking part. I'm hoping that the massive leap in the numbers planning to participate in Earth Hour this year marks the tipping point for this particular movement into the mainstream. As a planet we need to work together to combat climate change - and we need to start doing it immediately, before it's too late.

Global warming and climate change has been described as "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism". A very large number of very credible scientists around the world agree that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities. You don't have to dig deep to find out who's been funding the climate change deniers all these years.

The way I see it is this: even if you're not 100% sure that global warming is a reality, you can see that many scientists believe the consequences of climate change would be utterly devastating to life on earth. Even if it's only a possibility in your mind, wouldn't it be sensible to take steps now to prevent it - just in case? Aren't the potential consequences of doing nothing far far worse than the changes that scientists believe we need to make in order to combat climate change?

Don't we owe it to our children and grandchildren to take this seriously and DO SOMETHING?

Turn off your lights tomorrow between 8.30 and 9.30pm and join us for Earth Hour. It's a small thing for each of us to do as individuals, but because millions of people will be doing it, together we make it into a very big thing. And at the very least, it's a start.

Further Reading:

Technorati tags: Earth Hour, earthhour, climate change, global warming, WWF, Greenpeace, environment, IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, global warming deniers, Exxon, oil companies funding climate change denial, Bush denying global warming, John Key, switch off lights, science, scientists, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Of dead mice and memories

2009-03-25T13:10:00.011+13:00

I spent hours searching for it in every cupboard and corner I could possibly think of. An old cardboard box with "Box of Memories" written on it in green felt-tip pen. I hadn't seen it for at least eight years - and I knew I hadn't opened it in at least twice that time.

The box is full of sunshine - hot, blazing, tropical sunshine - and red earth, and miles of unsealed desert roads. It contains the smell of eucalyptus baking in the heat, and the feeling of "elsewhere" we experienced so strongly when we arrived in Sydney all those years ago. It's also full of love and a sense of overpowering need to be loved by the other. Which is, I suppose, why I had sealed it up and hidden it away somewhere where I wouldn't easily find it again.

It's amazing how many dark and hidden corners my house contains - and I must have looked in every one. Inside cupboards, on top of wardrobes, high and low on every shelf, under desks, inside window seats... but I could find no Box of Memories.

Part of me was being very grown-up about my search. Doggedly determined to find it - so much so that when I wasn't actually looking, I was thinking about possible locations - going through every room in my house in my mind, looking in every corner.

But there was also a part of me - the 21-year old me - who knew that the box, when opened, would drag me back to that place, that time long ago when I was a different person, when life stretched out before me and contained many more alternative futures than the one I now find myself living. However grown-up the reason for finding it, I knew it wouldn't matter once it was opened. "Now" would fade from view, and I would find myself transported back to "then" - whether I wanted to go there or not.

My reason for the search was pragmatic enough. Trying to get web development contract work in Australia is made difficult by the firewall of recruitment agents standing between me and my potential employers. Having an Australian Business Number might help me breach the wall - but in order to get one, I need my Tax File Number.

And in order to get that (because I cannot find any record of the number), I need to provide the Australian Taxation Service with the address I was using when I first got it. Then they can verify that I am who I say I am, and will tell me what my Tax File Number is, which I can then use to apply for my ABN.

Numbers, acronyms, employment. All very grown-up. All those years ago, when I wasn't quite as grown-up as I am now (ha!) it apparently didn't occur to me to keep official letters with official numbers on them. At least, they weren't in any of my travel diaries. Maybe there would be a useful bit of paper in the Box of Memories - or at the very least perhaps I could find the address I registered with.

Ah yes - the travel diaries. Lined up on the bookshelf in my bedroom, gathering dust, rarely visited these days. Open one at random and the memories pour out - flying halfway around the world and arriving in Bangkok in the middle of a tropical thunderstorm. Waves of homesickness washing over me from all directions. The fear of the unknown - and the security of having Andy by my side. Three months later (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia) feeling like old pros we arrive in Sydney and walk along the harbour's edge in the cool of the evening.

If I concentrate I can almost feel the way I felt back then - the sense of excitement, the wonder at actually being there and seeing the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge for the first time, the smell of the air, the thrill of being the first to make the vast journey since my Grandpa (a ten-pound Pom) came here years before I was even born.

Exploring Sydney, finding a job for a while, then hitching down to Canberra (searching for redbacks in the garden) and Melbourne (a koala up a tree, fairy penguins on Phillip Island, a terrifying bicycle ride home in the dark), and on to Adelaide. A season picking grapes in the Barossa Valley - the heat so intense you had to go into a zen-like state in order to handle it - having day-long conversations in my head with all my friends back home, as my fingers automatically selected and cropped the endless bunches of grapes.

Finding two English travelling companions (with a big old station wagon - hooray!) and spending the next few months driving through the outback with them. Near-misses with road trains on deserted highways. The complete breakdown of the car in Coober Pedy after hours of driving at a snail's pace on dirt roads - if we'd turned the engine off during any of our photo-opportunity stops out there in the middle of nowhere we'd have been stranded for sure.

Alice Springs, Ayers Rock in the heat of the midday sun (we were mad dogs and Englishmen that day), the Olgas and the long straight road-that-goes-on-for-ever up to Katherine Gorge and Darwin. And then the long drive eastwards, back to the coast.

Diving on the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns, driving north through more dirt roads, fording swollen streams to reach Port Douglas and then further north to the magical rainforest campsite at Cape Tribulation. Riding horses through the surf, exploring the coastline and the tropical jungle. Andy always by my side. Mine, and yet never really mine.

I stop reading. The heat, the flies, the red dirt, the smells and sounds of the Lucky Country fade away, and I'm back in my bedroom, sitting on the floor, part of me still halfway there, reluctant to return to my everyday life once more.

Those months and years with Andy are so long ago now - I've lived so much life, done so many things since then, added so many more layers of experience (as we all do) to my multi-layered self. And yet, and yet - it takes so little to transport me instantly back to the girl I was then, standing together with the boy he used to be. I know he's no longer that boy, but in my mind, in my memories, in the fantasy of him that I have created and nurtured for all the years since we parted - he hasn't changed.

Late in the evening I finally locate the box - at the very top of a high stack of stuff in the furthest corner of the highest shelf at the very back of my wardrobe. I manage to get it down without falling off the stool on which I'm precariously balanced, and I gently place it on my bed and take a deep breath. Here goes.

Inside, carefully stacked in rows are dozens of letters, written to me from friends and family back home. Some are packed inside old paper bags, or held together in bundles by the remains of long-perished rubber bands. There are postcards bought but never sent, and even some half-finished letters I never got around to completing.

It feels so strange stepping back in time in an instant. It feels as though the very essence of Australia, and Andy, and how I felt at the time and who I was, is all packed up inside the box, just waiting to be released. I feel sad and nostalgic and happy and grateful all at the same time.

There's an old tissue or serviette or something on one side of the box, which seems to be all chewed up. "Weird," I think. "Maybe it was a bookworm. Hope it hasn't eaten anything else."

About three-quarters of the way through the stacks of letters I find the source of the chewed-up paper. A poor little dessicated baby mouse, lying all alone beneath a couple of envelopes. And then the rest of its little family - a whole nest of dried-up ex baby mice tucked within the curling pieces of old tissue paper, starved to death in my precious Box of Memories.

Oh god - it's like some desperate and tragic metaphor for my life with Andy. I have an overly-dramatic vision of young and hopeful love that accidentally got hidden away in a place where it could not sustain itself - and which died long before it was ever found. Preserved unchanged for years in a place remembered but never visited - preserved and yet gone, lost for ever.

I feel so sad, and so alone. I cry for the poor wee mice who got trapped in the box and who died there, worn out by hunger and thirst. I cry for what we had back then, and what I lost - what I still feel should have been mine, and which can never be. I cry for every comparison I ever made between some guy who liked me and the impossible perfect fantasy of The Love of My Life.

How can someone I knew so long ago still cause me so much pain?

At the very bottom of the box - under the old letters and the dear departed mice - I find a large brown envelope. Curious, I pull it out carefully and peep inside.

Here at last, after all this time, and as if I last saw it only yesterday, is the priceless set of my favourite photos I took of him - and for which I've been half-heartedly searching for years. The embodiment of the fantasy, the base on which I have carefully sculpted the dream of him. I recognise and remember every photo instantly. Where we were when it was taken, how I felt, what we said.

And at the bottom of the pile of photos, there are letters. Letters from him to me, written when we were apart for the summer holidays before we went travelling together. Letters which always contained a subtle reference to how he truly felt about me (in stark contrast to how he always said he felt about me) - but which I didn't fully comprehend at the time.

PS. I really miss not having anyone to kick out of bed to go and make the toast!

PPS I miss you a bit (well quite a lot actually) - look after yourself. This last bit is excessively wimpish but so what.

I miss you quite a lot but just think, soon we will be together for ages and ages (what a nice thought). See you Friday.

A lock of his hair tied up with ribbon, and old Valentines cards which he sent under protest but which always contained a million kisses ("please collect on these!")

The very last letter I open is the last letter he ever sent me. It's strange - a mixture of formal and informal, practical details ("can you look after my plant for me - it really will die in my cold house") and heartfelt pleas ("I'm sorry for the last couple of days, I've been behaving like a kid; I hope I haven't lost any of your respect and please don't judge me on it, you know it's not the real me.")

At the end of the letter is this:

Anyway all the best, I'd hate to think you'd never let me hug you again, and I really mean this:

I BLOODY WELL
LOVE YOU

[in green felt-tip pen, underlined thickly in red]

It was the first time he'd ever written those words to me, and only the second time I'd ever heard him say them - and it was too late.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I found him a couple of years ago, after years of searching for him online. It took me 12 months to pluck up the courage to call him, and when I did, I was shaking like a leaf. We arranged to meet up for coffee later on in the year when I would be over in the UK visiting my sister - and I was so excited that I sent him a card with all my contact details on it, just to make sure we wouldn't lose touch again.

A couple of weeks later he called and cancelled our meeting. "The past is the past, and I think it should stay that way." I wondered (still wonder) if his wife (my ex-best friend) saw the card and made him cancel, or if he did it of his own accord. Perhaps it's best that way. Definitely best for him, I should think. Maybe not best for me. I still have the fantasy and the memory of the perfect boy, and it remains unsullied by the reality of the man he's become.

I know I'll never really get over him, and I know that by holding on to my memories of him I've allowed many other relationships to slip through my fingers since then. I know that - and yet somehow, even now, I can't let go. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps we never truly recover from the loss of our first love - or maybe it's just that for some people (like me) that love overshadows all others - and no-one else can ever quite match up.

All I know is - those feelings are all still there - in the diaries, in the Box of Memories, in my own head - and they have been strengthened and deepened over time, while at the same time they have been re-created and re-cast again and again until they have become something at once real and yet not real at all. They can be awakened in an instant, and they still cause me pain and deep sadness, even after all this time.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I re-sealed the box and put it back on the high shelf, out of reach. The mice are still in there - I didn't have the heart to disturb them any further.

The envelope of letters and photos is no longer in the box - it's somewhere more easily accessible now. I know that's stupid, and that I should follow Andy's lead and let the past stay in the past, but I can't.

Maybe one day I will. Just not today.

Technorati tags: love, loss, memories, love of my life, travel, Australia, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

Fat baby rat

2009-03-20T00:06:00.004+13:00

There's a certain type of call Winnie does when she brings a "present" into the house for me. It's a cross between a purr and a miaow, and hearing it puts me into an immediate state of alertness. Time to rescue another little creature!

Winnie's pretty good at not killing things before she shows them to me - although there was that one occasion where a full-grown rat bled to death on my kitchen floor while I watched in frozen horror... but we won't go there right now.

This time it was a very plump-looking large mouse - or was it a baby rat? I wasn't too sure, but - having caught Winnie's rats in the past and learned from the first painful experience - I was definitely going to put some leather gloves on before I attempted to grab it.

I managed to get Winnie to drop it after a couple of attempts, then I shoved her out of the living room, closed both doors and went looking for my rat-catcher gloves. By the time I got back with hands fully protected the mouse/rat had disappeared from its little hiding-place under the TV, and was nowhere to be seen. Dammit!

I spent ages searching the whole of the living room with torch in hand - under the sofa, under the chairs, under the bookcases and behind the curtains - but I couldn't find it anywhere. Eventually I gave up and settled back down to watch TV. I knew Winnie and Bailey would help.

Later on in the evening, as I was having a cigarette outside on the deck, I noticed Bailey getting very interested in the flower basket by the back door. Aha! I threw down my cigarette and raced inside and - bingo! There was the rat/mouse, trying desperately to hide behind the curtain. I grabbed my gloves again - by which time Winnie was in hot pursuit.

She and I both managed to get it at almost the same moment - it squeaked like crazy and ran up the table leg. Ah - it's definitely a rat. A fat baby rat. With its teeth biting hard into my leather glove I managed to grab it by the tail, pushed Winnie out the way, and escaped out the back door with my prize. I let it go in a flowerbed at the end of the garden. Phew!

Ecologically-minded readers may ask why I allowed a pest and an enemy-of-native-flora-and-fauna to go free and fight another day. I confess - I can't kill things, and I can't watch them being killed either. I just can't do it, so I have no option but to rescue them from my cats and liberate them - whatever the species.

Hope Winnie doesn't catch it again though...

Technorati tags: cats, rats, mice, cat behaviour, a present from my cat, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.