I played rugby when I was in primary school. The geek in me won out by age 11, all that running around a sports field in mid-winter just couldn’t compete with curling up at home with my funky new ZX81.
I guess I started watching again in my late 20s, mainly because my Dad is a rugby fan and I like hanging out with my Dad, but also because it’s hard not to become at least a little bit interested in rugby when your local team is the equivalent of Manchester United in the Football world [1]. The Crusaders aren’t playing at the moment, it being the International party of the rugby season, but tonight is Canterbury vs Auckland in the NPC, and the All Blacks vs Romania in France, so a big night and I’m up in Kaikoura with my parents to watch it.
It’s about bloody time we won the World Cup again, given that we supposedly have the best team on the planet, but come Cup time we keep, er, choking[2]. To give you an idea of how important this thing is to our national psyche, and how much kudos will go to the guys who bring it home, the only All Black captain to actually hold it aloft, has now risen up to become CEO of Fairfax NZ, the biggest media conglomerate we have - they own piles of newspapers and magazines, and after their acquisition of Trademe they probably receive about 85% of all pageviews from Kiwi browsers. In this country at least, Murdoch don’t got nothing on David Kirk.
So without further adieu, I give you our new National Anthem: “God Defend the All Blacks”
…because I’d hate to be the last Rugby watching Kiwi Geek on earth to embed it.
Trivia 1: My favorite agile development methodology is Scrum.
Trivia 2: TV3 has the games in a format suitable for importing into various calendar programs.
Trivia 3: Check out the Kiwi Architectural Invasion of Paris. Interclue got reviewed in Le Monde a couple months ago, I hope they don’t figure out we come from the place that inflicted that on them, they might never mention us again. On the other hand apparently the All Blacks are very popular in France right now so maybe it’s ok after all.
Trivia 4: I’m definitely expecting the All Blacks to win it this time, but I’m far from this confident. In fact, if it wouldn’t mean backing the team we all love to hate, I’d go the Aussies instead at the better than 10:1 odds offered on them!
[1] On the other hand, most Kiwi’s like a decent match-up as well as actually winning, so it’s been noted with some dismay that Christchurch fans can’t really be bothered going down to JadeAMI Stadium these days unless it’s, say, vs Auckland or Otago, or a Test match.
[2] And every time they have to deny that they choked, and talk about how it was just bad luck, the ref, or the other team played a blinder, or whatever.
Update: Well, so much for that. Knocked out by the French in the Quarter Finals! Just goes to show nothing is ever a sure thing. I guess the good news is that apart from a few inevitable whingers, the team, coach, and most the country took it on the chin. Sure, the ref had a bad game, but so did the All Blacks, they should have been winning by enough that poor ref calls wouldn’t matter. It helped that the Aussies got knocked out as well. Ah well, like Henry said, that’s sport. At least rugby is no longer distracting me from work! Could barely give a toss who wins it at this stage.
BarCampChristchurch was very cool. Already looking forward to the next one! I’ve had this post under construction for a while now, just been completely flat out for the past couple weeks.
I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn’t completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.
A few notes on some of the presentations:
Ben didn’t quite manage the Steve Jobs effect since we couldn’t make the air-pointer driver work with Powerpoint 2007, but it was an excellent presentation on SaaS nonetheless, probably the best of the day from my perspective. And he thought he wouldn’t be geeky enough!
The lads from SLI definitely had the best schwag. Actually I think they had the only schwag. They also brought their projector which came in handy. It’s good to know there are some well financed web companies in Christchurch - hopefully Interclue will join them in that regard sometime soon. They’re hiring, by the way.
Marek showed off his new OpenID provider. OpenID was very much on the menu at BarCampWellington as well. There was some good debate about the pros and cons at both. I think it’s definitely an important standard, but it may take a while to catch on with the users. I hear that they have taken it off the menu for Firefox 3 which is a shame.
We chatting about hardware gadgets in an open session, with Phil telling us about Arduino and Eric Woods mentioning his recent investigations into the world of smartphones, and his conclusion that the best value to be had right now was importing a new Treo 650 from the states, for about NZ$300. I have a Treo 650 and I can confidently say it’s excellent value at that price, but the two things that really irritate me are the lack of 3G data - GPRS ping times are awful - and the camera being a poxy 640×480 that doesn’t work well indoors. The photo I’ve used here is an example of that. The sound recording for video is also pretty poor. Also if you want to use it as an alarm clock you’ll need to install an app, and most of the cost money. Google Maps works moderately well on it tho, and doesn’t cost money.
Near the end we remembered we hadn’t done the 3 word intro’s! A week later, the same thing happened at BarCampWellington! You’d think if anyone would have remembered to point it out at the time it would have been me, but my memory is reasonably atrocious at times. At Barcamp Christchurch we mixed 3 word intro’s with short talks by the people not wanting a half hour slot. Eg Isaac from Wowza gave us a bit of a chat about user-centric data modelling that he expanded on here.
As a Finale, Roger Bays gave us a demonstration of his phenomenal augmented reality artwork, Semaphore. He was able to demonstrate using a monitor rather than using a headset like he did when he one the People’s Choice award at a recent exhibtion featuring 50+ artists (I think). I’m really looking forward to the day when they get this sort of thing working with descrete, affordable, non-bulky, wifi enabled dataglasses.
All in all, although I think in retrospect we should have given ourselves a few more weeks to prepare, and done it over a weekend, it was a really good day for the Chch tech scene and I hope it inspires more gatherings of it’s like as soon as we can organise them. Don’t forget to sign up to the TVIC mailing list to find out more about geek gatherings in Christchurch.
Julian has been LiveMindMapping instead of liveblogging, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it. Here’s a link to the topics he’s encountered so far during the BarCamp.
Marek is talking about OpenID now and whether every Kiwi should have one. He’s been working on his own OpenID Provider recently. Fascinating.
I’m in Wellington for BarCampWellington, focused on Government 2.0 in New Zealand. There have been some really fascinating discussions and presentations, with many different viewpoints being expressed.
Currently sitting in a presentation from Julian Carver, one of the Christchurch based attendees who’s well known in Wellington from his consulting work on Knowledge Management. He’s discussing the imporance of interop between the various agencies charged with protecting and enhancing the environment in New Zealand. This is the sort of thing going on behind the scenes which really makes a difference, but a lot of people will never hear about. Here’s an interesting site he pointed us to where the public can interract with the agencies relevant to this.
The last week was a bit of a whirlwind as I tried to tie together my thoughts about how Web 2.0 could enhance the policy process, on top of getting various things done for Interclue, and wanting to write more about the great time we had at BarCampChristchurch last week. Since getting here I’ve been having some fascinating conversations around this, particularly with Jayne, who has a wealth of experience in the New Zealand policy process from her pre-entreprenurial days. We’re going to be talking about it in a session later on in the day.
Tim offered me use of his flat but I ended up staying with Jayne and Glynn because Marek is staying there as well and we’re all going to Barcamp. They have a really nice place, with excellent connectivity.
I’ll be in Wellington till Tuesday night, if anyone wants to meet up, please get in touch.
About 40 of us have gathered in the CII Building for BarCampChristchurch so far and more are expected later. I was surprised how many folks turned up on time. Steven made the nametags, Nic and Terry set up the Wifi, and it’s all going rather well.
I failed to get my talk on Browser Addons into shape. I brainstormed a hundred things I wanted to talk about and didn’t manage to get it down into a presentable set of slides. I talked more about Web 2.0 again instead.
Everyone else has given a great info packed half hour. Loving it.
We need more beer. Anyone bringing beer would win much kudos.
