I love japanese stuff. Design, food, technology, scenery, snow, people and engrish. Now you can recharge these batteries using your own urine! I especially love that they are named NoPoPo. Well yes, using urine is better than using PoPo. Work with what you got I say.
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Just a wee story I’d like to remember:
While having a conversation with an Australian about New Zealand’s complete lack of native animals (you may not have noticed that NZ has some native birds, but no animals) when the conversation naturally turned to the similar lack of dangerous creatures. No sharks, no crocodiles, no snakes, less spiders, no scary ants… much safer. A nearby rubbernecking kiwi (who shall remain nameless and, for the record, is not blonde does not have blonde hair) piped up saying “we have pigeons!”, which are neither native nor particularly dangerous. Good one Jaz.
Ben McConnell hypothesizes that having brilliant thoughts in the shower has something to do with bathroom design. Although I agree 100% with the notion that thoughts are clearer when ceilings are higher (or nonexistent), I think it might be simpler than that.
My feeling on this is that as you’re standing there naked and wet you can’t race off and action the first thought you have (no doubt getting distracted by another anyway). Taking a shower also presumably consumes very little brain power; there’s usually no-one else around, no email, no mess, so you are free to think without boundaries.
I actually have a magna doodle on the wall in my shower so that I can draw pictures or write down my ideas as I have them. Inevitably it gets used for entertaining diagrammatical conversation with other shower users, but from time to time it has saved me from forgetfulness.
Great point on Duct Tape Marketing about not spending time doing things that others could do when you (I) should be marketing:
if you can get the neighbor kid to mow your grass for anything less than $100/hr, therefore giving you 3 hours to write a killer sales letter - it’s probably a steal
So I’ve had one of the new iMacs for a couple of weeks now and it is still growing on me. This evening I decided to make a very quick video for my brother’s birthday. Sure its a crap video (my first ever), but the latest iMovie was AWESOME. So simple to use. A real education in good design. An excitingly fluid experience to create a simple movie; used GarageBand to make some country music, and uploaded to YouTube right from within iMovie. Apple could have filmed me in one shoot to make a sales tutorial. Outstanding.
My palm treo 750 synchronises over bluetooth using The Missing Sync effortlessly. Something I couldn’t get to work on the laptop running XP, even though the phone is also running Windows.
VMWare Fusion is great too, really simple, amazingly powerful. From what I’ve read it is substantially faster than Parallels which I’ve heard a lot of great things about too.
This sexy new keyboard is great too. Just makes me want to keep on typing…
Last night some bastard stole our two lambs. Why would you do that? The offender came in to get the quadbike but not being able to get it started (after pushing it into the paddock further from the house and cutting through two previously useful fences on the way) they obviously decided to run off with our orphaned lambs instead. I imagine the innocent lambs would have just excitedly followed the [ugly, smelly, stupid] intruder off the property - but they would have had to lift the little guys from the pen first. They’re only a few days old. THEY NEED FEEDING! LOOK AFTER THEM!! 
So I have the Lego NXT robotics kit and I’d love to find a way to make use of it at work, like having a robot that brings me a coffee, wherever I am in the office at the time.
Just saw this video of a bartender robot, I guess this would be just the first step toward my lego slave above.
It never fails to amuse me slightly how economists in general do not appear to consider ethics or the environment unless using them to explain a strange statistic. Its almost like to have an economist on a board or in a group means you need an old fashioned hippie to provide balance. Nonetheless, I really like how potentially controversial data can be presented by an economist absent any emotion, just the facts please. Check out the price of cocaine around the world. It seems that if you’re in NZ and get the urge, you’d save a bunch by flying elsewhere for your binge.
Of course it doesn’t quite happen like this, but still, I’d like to see the Economist interviewing all those drug lords to collect their stats!
Jump on over to the Spikefin blog (or email us) if you know any good Practice Managers or Testers who might like to come and work with us.
I just tried out Yahoo Answers, asking the above question. What a useful service! Had an answer in minutes that turned up info I hadn’t seen in my cursory searches on Google. In addition to knowing a little more about the Spikefin fish, I now have a new dive holiday destination, Mabul. If only the local fish shop would show some interest in finding a Spikefin to put in my fish tank… do you know any exotic fish importers?
