Elijah: 11 years blogging in Europe

11 years old that is – Elijah was blogging about his family’s trip around Europe. My favorite post was from Berlin:

My Parents dragged me out to the country side to the 1936 Olympic Village, where they made me walk around the ruins in the hot and dry sun….

Although Elijah clearly saw this as a bit of a chore – it’s fascinating to see Europe from his perspective. It’s not about the walled city at Carcassonne – it’s about the frog:

Carcassonne
2-05-2008
Did nothing, it rained.

After tea Dad took me for a walk/run to have a look at the walled City. We went down a dark path between the trees and a stream. There was a frog that came right up to me and nearly jumped on my foot. The walls of the castle were lit and and were pretty cool at night. We saw a plastic bag hanging off the wall that I thought was a bat

The frog and the plastic bag make it real – well written Elijah.

More photos would be good though – e.g. google Carcassonne and you’d get this, and from there these pictures look pretty cool:

wikipedia

Wikipedia

Yale’s expansion is great for foreign students

Each year 5300 or so people attend Yale College – the 4 year undergraduate part of Yale University.

For the 2007-8 undergraduate class, there were 19,323 applicants – and a huge porportion of them deserve to go to Yale, or a similar institution. However only 10% got offers and 7.1% make it to the first day at Yale. 9% of that the class are international students.

yale

To get in to a place like Yale College, you will have aced pretty much everything in your life, and probably faced a lot of adversity as well. You”ll need to get crazy marks in the SAT’s (glorified IQ tests), but more importantly have ridiculous school transcripts (results) and be  amazing at several things -and I mean really setting  records playing for the national team amazing. Meanwhile you’ll be doing your bit for politics and the planet.

Now I would never have been accepted at Yale College, but there are plenty of New Zealanders each year that have a shot. In my era we had no idea that going to a great US school was even a vague option, but now these schools are actively reaching out to the rest of the world. They want to be global schools, and great foreign students are in demand.

yale

Yale is going even further. An endowment of $22.5 billion (28% return last year) and operating costs of around $2 billion adds up to being able to at least partially fund 42%  of students (the rich ones get nothing), to buy a massive second campus for medical and science research and now to add 2 more residential colleges.

Here’s the (existing) Timothy Dwight College:

yale

Not insubstantial. Two more colleges means 15% more undergraduates – and that could be someone you know. Of course these new colleges only open in 2013, so that someone you know would be about 13 right now.

But you don’t need to wait until then – the thing about Yale and other great schools is that it is easy to apply – go for it.

Fairfax’s WAToday launches – if you can find it

Fairfax’s long- awaited Western Australia site is here.

This, and the BrisbaneTimes are important as they show, or do not show, whether a major media company can enter a competitors market by launching an online site. Like say NZ Herald entering Wellington, or Fairfax NZ entering Auckland, or the WSJ entering the UK.

This will be monitored closely for sure.

So without further ado, here it is: WAToday.com.

watoday.com

news:

news search

Whoops – let’s try WAToday.com.au

watoday.com.au

First rule for a new site – secure the .com domain name! As well get the .net, and the key country domains such as .com.au and .co.nz.

Seb managed to get into trouble with TimeXchange, but Fairfax Digital Australia should know a lot better than this. (I’d expect this from Fairfax Business Australia, but that’s another story)

Incidentally – the watoday.co.nz url does not resolve – so perhaps it is still available.

The site takes a very long time to load.

watoday

New servers not configured right? Traffic overload? Poor database design? Overly heavy pages? Server located in Uzbekistan?

I know it can’t be Slow Internet Connection – ADSL 2 is still swoopingly fast for me here in Perth.

I also didn’t appreciatethe pop-under. Of course that may have come from the .com, but the ads seems so local..

popunder nastiness

Sorry Woolworths – even less chance of me shopping at your stores now.

So that home page is a staggering 1.4mb worth of download, and it took Safari 3.5 seconds to load it. However I tested that speed after I’d already loaded it several times, so clearly a huge chunk was in the cache.

So I then tried an article – even that was huge:

safari

and it took: 9.42 seconds to load. Far too slow. Oh – and that was the second time around for that article as well.

Content – well I’ve just started looking at it, and will add the site to my daily reads. I won’t promise anything yet, as I tend to give very delayed responses to my promised articles. (For those still reading – I do remember them, it is just slow… )

There are some entertaining snippets inside the CSS – after the break

Continue reading “Fairfax’s WAToday launches – if you can find it”

Timeexchange: really not the best name

timeexchange.co.nz it seems, as noted already in comments by ACTUS Technology’s President Joe, already exists as timeexchange.net, and he is not happy:

Name: Joe P****
Email: ***@******.com
Website: http://www.timexchange.net

Lance,

In reference to your post “A Trade Me Spin off – timeexchange”, I would like to ask you to have it removed or to note to your post that the site referenced is violating a copyright by using the same name as is already in use by a competing site. TimeXchange.net has been in operation for several years offering a very similar service to TimeXchange.co.nz.

Your cooperation is appreciated.

Joe Piekarz
President
ACTUS Technology | http://www.timexchange.net

Sorry Joe – reporting on a site isn’t violating any copyright. However that doesn’t make timexchange.co.nz any smarter for having the name, or for being in a market which is looking pretty crowded:

google search for timesheets

Welcome to the wild West. Perhaps a quick name change – to  dot com, but I guess you also need to trust in your ability to out execute or out niche everybody else.

Apple: What we really need on Monday

It is a sure thing that the iPhone will be updated from Tuesday, and will even be available in a bunch of new countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

I know this for sure not just because of the persistent rumours everywhere, but also as I couldn’t even follow Rowan’s advice and buy an iPhone when I was in the USA 2 weeks back – they were out of stock at Apple stores.

There are certain to be other product launches, but what I’m really (forlornly) looking for is a jolt of globalisation from Apple.  Their beautiful products are geo-centric, and often uesless to those that run around between countries. Meanwhile I’m also struggling with keeping two active computers and a back-up drive in sync.

So here are the 5 things that I believe we really need to hear from Steve on Monday:

1: Buy one iPhone, use it anywhere. Global Roaming is now here, and your iPhone will come with local numbers for each markets where the iPhone is on offer. Calls to any of your numbers will be directed to your phone where ever you are, and callers and you will pay local fees only. Meanwhile you will be able to call out at local prices from and to any of the supported countries. If you call a US number from  Australia, then the receiver will see your US number pop up on their caller-id, and will be able to return your call as a cheap local call.

2: Global data roaming for one price: That’s right – forget about $30,000 per GB pricing, from now on it’s all you can eat data anywhere in the world, for the price you pay at home. Vodafone is offering global roaming for all it’s customers (regardless of their phone), while iPhone owners can also roam to any of the other iPhone providers.

3: Preloaded iPods at a reasonable price: We at Apple have teamed up with the MPAA and RIAA to offer you pre-loaded iPod iPod Classics, Nanos and iPod shuffles, right from iTunes. Want the top 100 tunes from April 2006? We have them. How about all of the Beatles hits? Yup – we have those to along with the top 20 movies of 2008. Buy preloaded and you pay just 30% of the regular price.

4: Globalisation of iTunes: That’s right – no longer do we have one iTunes store for every market, offering a crippled selection of video and music in some territories. Now everybody will get the same content at the same time and at the same price. We call it “Fair Trade: Apple everywhere” approach. We’ve worked with the RIAA and MPAA and industry and will never release new music or video unless we have secured the global rights. It’s the right thing to do for artists, and it simplifies the music industry.

5: iHome: Tired of multiple iTunes and Mail libraries? How about iPhoto albums in 3 different places that are out of sync? Now with iHome, the Mac Server for the home, you can load photos, music and email onto any of your computers, iPods, iPhone or iWhatevers and they will be automatically synced with everything else.
Don’t have much room on that MacBook Air or the Nano? Simply set the maximum amount of space you allocate to photos, music, videos and mail and iHome will automaticaly reduce the size of the files to fit. You can select whether iHome does this by reducing picture or song file size, by setting the number of months of email to keep and by selecting which iTunes, iPhoto or Mail folders you want to copy.
Of course it will all be automatically and intelligently backed up using Time Machine  – no need for three back up copies of a file that is replicated three times – Time Machine will back up the master file and you can rest easy

The WWDC Apple show – how it got so big

It’s the annual Steve Jobs speech at the WWDC – (Word Wide Developer Conference) on Monday morning US Pacific time.

While we wait for the new iPhone, Snow Leopard and a host of other rumours, check out the history of Steve’s “just one more thing..” at his WWDC speeches. That link (do check it out)  is to an interactive timeline which will show you video excerpts from product releases like the first iBook:

The original iPod: (note the very business oriented rationale for launching the iPod)

and the latest one – the MacBook Air. This is worthy just to see how Steve Jobs has imorived his technique, from a chatty conversationalist to a real star holdin thr crowd.

The WWDC speech has turned into essentially the major events in the consumer technology and consumer computer industries. It has done this by being the vehicle to launch a a succession of beautifully designed and innovative products that have almost always been wildly successful.

Today Apple sets the pace in consumer computers, music players and phones.

We can imagine a host of manufacturers just hoping that Apple doesn’t launch an uber-cool product into their space. Right now the GPS players are very nervous – there is a persistent rumour that at least one model of iPhone will have built-in GPS. They deserve to be attacked – GPS’s are far too expensive for what should now be a real commodity product.

Camera manufacturers should feel OK for now, but at some stage Apple may put a decent lens and CMOS into that iPhone and steal some market revenue from the point and shoots. They may even come out with a stand-alone (video) camera at some stage. Why cameras? It’s the last portable electronics niche that Apple has not addressed, and it is also a key way for people to get information on to their mac and online.

Next post – what I really want on Monday.

Best before, ok afterwards – food safety

Brilliant dailymail  about best-before dates. The writer, Jonathan Maitland, from the Daily Mail has written an excellent article on the supposed perils of eating food past it’s best-before date. Jonathon  is someone that wields a certain flexibility on “best before” dates, figuring if he is careful (usually by cooking well) then he can eat pretty much anything. His wife demurs.

So he embarked on a 14 day experiment, eating increasingly out of date food every day. Of course nothing happened.

Use by dates are a bit of a con really – erring well on the side of safety. So I agree with Jonathon’s take:

I am not suggesting everyone eats food past its Use-By date. That would be irresponsible. Children, pregnant women, ill people and pensioners may be especially susceptible to the bacteria in it. What my experiment does show, however, is that a lot of that food may be safe for the rest of us to eat.

.. we should, arguably, never waste food simply because of the Best Before date. As the FSA guidelines acknowledge, it almost certainly won’t make us ill, it just won’t taste as good. Even if it is (relatively) ancient.

FIFO and relationships – not so good

The West, Perth’s only newspaper until Fairfax launches its’ much anticipated online effort, has an amusing yet sad article on the perils of working in remote mines.

FIFO (Fly in, fly out) means workers get several days of constant work (say 8) followed by several (say 6)  days at home. Mileage can vary – with some gigs operating for much longer on and off.

It is big business – Perth Airport on a Monday or Tuesday morning is appallingly overcrowded, yet amusingly empty during the early evening (when the direct flight to NZ departs). Indeed it’s so hard to find people to work out here in Western Australia that some people will even fly in from the Eastern states or beyond.

The side effect of the FIFO culture, however, is apparently the increased use of Private Investigators to check out whether one’s loved one is being faithful during those nights apart:

One Port Hedland brothel claimed it was turning away up to 60 men on Friday and Saturday nights because sex workers could not keep up with demand.

It seems that the PI use is split evenly between wives checking up on husbands to see if they are using prostitutes, and husbands checking up on wives to ensure they are not filling their boring days with some extra excitement.

It is amusing, and yet very sad.

The FIFO lifestyle is really a tough one – those 6 days in a row on a break may seem fun, but the constant grind of 8 days at 12 hours a day is pretty tough. Accommodation at those remote sites is generally pretty spartan, although some effort is being made given the recent dearth of people.

However the biggest impact is on relationships:

Relationships Australia WA director of clinical practice Marian Affleck said yesterday she had noticed a conspicuous number of couples seeking advice having found their once-stable relationship on shaky ground now they were spending time apart.

So yes – the money can be great, but watch out for that lifestyle. On the other hand – if you really need work, then there is plenty on offer in booming Western Australia.

Welcome to the Asylum

AOL has launched a new site downunser – Asylum.com.au

aslylum au

It’s aimed at “men”, and so covers such vital news as “world’s sexiest weather girls“, “10 worst tattoos ever” and as they say it:

If you’re looking for Weird Legos or elaborate sex toys — we’ve got it.

So it’s not the thinking man’s website, and sadly a New Zealand ad features on the front page:

What I’m missing by missing TV….

They also have some work to do – I clicked on the “science” link and got:

aslylum au

Actually I’m not sure whether that is just a teething issue or whether, as I suspect, nobody in the test market has ever clicked on that link.

Regardless – asylum, like a few other sites, is a localised version of a US site. I won’t be adding them to my reading list, but there seems to be a lot of call for this sort of thing.

A Trade Me Spin off – timeexchange

We are starting to see a few more spin off from Trade Me staff that are launching websites on their own.

The first significant start up founded by someone working at Trade Me was Findsomeone which was created by Nigel while he was pulling a day job at Trade Me, and which was then bought back into the Trade Me fold.

The irrepressible Nigel and a couple of pals then went on to start Starnow.com was the first, and very successful startup launched outside of Trade Me. Starnow matches actors and models up with TV shows and the like, and is very big in the UK in particular.

Now Sebastian, who left Trade Me 9 months ago, has pushed Timeexchange out of gestation. Timexchange  is aimed at contractors and contracting agencies, and will make it simple for  agencies to get and manage approved  timesheets from their contractors.

It looks pretty good, and it’s a nice simple solution to a lovely niche. Good luck guys!

(oh – and you may want to think about intro pricing and letting us have a play with a sample contractor/agency user)

There’s also another one out there – still in stealth phase as far as I know.  Let’s hope that we see a bunch of these – the great people that helped give Trade Me success deserve their day in the sun.

What to do next? – crazy idea number 2

The next option for ludicrous post-June plans is to go for a bicycle ride.

My brother and family are driving around Australia starting from July 1 and going North from Sydney. Therefore I could start from Perth around the same time and rendezvous with John and co. somewhere between Broome and Darwin. After the rendevous why not keep going for a full circle?

Or I could fly to Broome, and meet them, well somewhere between Broome and Darwin. Given that the road from Perth to Broome is apparently characterised by featureless nothingness, I’d be plumbing for that option.

I have a bike, and I recently invested in some toe clips, which look really cool:

crankbrothers

I used them for the first time yesterday, and they are awesome – especially as it was my first time in clips. I managed to avoid the dreaded low speed crashes, finding them really easy to get in and out of. Riding up hills was suddenly a whole lot easier, and my average speeds increased.

So much for the clips. I’ll also need a more robust bike, a bit of luggage (less is more) and so forth. None of that is too hard – as a friend of mine Jodi, who has cycled around the world 1.5 times says – “just get on the bike and ride.”

As an aside, Jodi is pretty amazing – She once accused  Investment Biker Jim Rogers of being relatively soft when he motorcycled around the world, and when he challenged her back by asking “Have you ever been kidnapped?” she skewered him by saying “Yes. Twice”. I was siting next to Jodi at the time, and while there have been accusations that I was egging her on a bit, there were also about 20 others hanging in on the conversation….

Anyway, the other issue with bicycles, aside from my lack of fitness (which a bike ride would solve) and desperate boredom is, well, I’ll just let the photo below tell the story, and leave you with the thought that there are a lot of trucks on those long Aussie roads…

CNN

What to do next? crazy idea number 1

I’m finishing up a couple of contract at the end of June, wondering what I shall do next.

Being in Colombia sure made me miss South America, and so is it purely coincidence that I came across the route for the 2009 Dakar race?
Dakar

dakar

That’s some pretty fun terrain on that map – I’ve been over a bit of it. The Dakar has moved from the Paris-Dakar route I guess because the credible terror threats from this years aborted race are still out there.

dakar.com

how hard can it be?

OK OK – the Dakar is an insane event, especially for the certifiable warriors that
ride on motorcycles. It’s also a wildly expensive thing to do. It’s 9000 km’s off road at max speed, 6000km’s of which are “special” stages (i.e. medieval torture with a very real chance of death)

I also suck at riding on sand, am unfit, have never ridden an enduro or any other off-road event, don’t own a motorcycle that is able or allowed to do the race, and… and..and… oh whatever.

what could go wrong?

[Maybe I can tour around during the race time – though I’m sure I won’t be able to match Tiffany, who finished her round the world adventures by riding through the Dakar finish – she arrived on the same day as the rally and was waved through.]

Departure tax going, but a bad job doesn’t help

Thank goodness. Auckland airport’s embarrassingly poor departure tax system is for the trash heap – and rightly so. For example – what can’t you see in this photo of the departure tax place next to the immigration entrance?

Auckland airport

That’s right – the price. You can’t see the price. A simple sign saying “Departure tax – $25” would speed the queue up substantially, as customers can ave their money ready to pay before they get to the counter.

When I asked about the prospect of a sign (and I was polite) I got a really aggressive “don’t you fly often” and “there is a sign (“A” sign) downstairs. My answers, which I didn’t give as I noticed the person stopped working when talking, would have been 1: yes – I fly all the time and damned if I can remember every piddly airport’s tax and 2: one sign is not a communications strategy.

Travelex seems much more interested in their pushing their useless money changing services rather than accepting the $25, and their marketing reflects that. A more competent system (e.g. why not provide kiosks) would have given them a longer lasting franchise, and I suppose meant more forex business.

Oh – and why is the the forex service useless? The exchange rates offered by these places are usurious when you take fees into account, and the breadth of currencies is insufficient. Foreign ATM’s are the way to go.