Author: Robyn

The Wellingtonista visits Snapper

Some of us at the Wel­ling­tonista are rather fond of the old Snap­per card. We worked through its teeth­ing troubles and are now hap­pily tag­ging on and off as we bus about the city.

So when Miki Szikszai, CEO of Snap­per, asked us if we’d like to vis­it Snap­per HQ and learn a bit about what’s new in the world of the magic­al talk­ing fish box, we (well, Alan and I) jumped at the chance.

After the jump – what we found at Snap­per.

Cold Train

Wel­ling­ton’s Tranz Metro trains have lately been known for cer­tain car­riages with broken heat­ing. It’s hor­rible enough being (rel­at­ively) young and only faced with a 30-minute chilly com­mute. I would­n’t want to be a Par­a­param gran mak­ing the hour-long trip to Wel­ling­ton in an unheated car­riage.

But it seems that while the car­riages are slowly being fixed, Trans Metro are also pay­ing atten­tion to, you know, being nice to cus­tom­ers. This morn­ing when I was wait­ing for my usu­al train, a fel­low came up to me rep­res­ent­ing Tranz Metro and asked me a few sur­vey ques­tions about the cold car­riages.

One ques­tion was the toss-up between remov­ing car­riages with broken heat­ers from ser­vice and there­fore hav­ing more crowding in the usu­al train ser­vcies.

But most inter­est­ingly, it seems that Tranz Metro will be offer­ing pas­sen­gers a 5% dis­count on monthly train tick­ets for July, or else a couple of free Fri­days in July if you use a daily tick­et.

The sur­vey asked if this was adequate compo. Well, for me it might be, but prob­ably not for an arth­rit­ic seni­or.

Let’s hope that Tranz Metro gets their heat­ing prob­lems sor­ted out before the end of winter.

Paint that bus!

One of the high­lights of this year’s Cuba Street Car­ni­val was the paint­ing of a GO Wel­ling­ton bus by some of New Zeal­and’s top graffti/street artists and Ger­man artists Via Grafik.

The fin­ished product looked great, the bus took pride of place in the Night Parade, and can still be seen in nor­mal use on Go Wel­ling­ton’s routes.

 
So when the inde­pend­ent Academy Cinema in Auck­land planned to get some loc­al graf­fiti artists to paint a Dar­gaville High School bus out­side the cinema to help pro­mote new graf­fiti doc­u­ment­ary Alter Ego, you’d think the Auck­land City Coun­cil would be as sup­port­ive as Wel­ling­ton was for the bus paint­ing.

But no! Find out the Auck­land City Coun­cil’s bizarre reac­tion after the jump.

Win a Nokia 5800 worth $899 (still)

This com­pet­i­tion is now closed.

Ok, we still have a super sweet Nokia 5800 smart phone, worth $899 to give away, cour­tesy of Voda­fone, so it’s time to mash up this com­pet­i­tion to make it easi­er to enter and there­fore easi­er to win. Yay.

To enter, all you need to do is vis­it www.Vodafone.co.nz/easy and watch the video called “Inter­net Access Easy ANYWHERE” and answer this rather easy ques­tion: What is the occu­pa­tion of the mobile inter­net user in the video?

Email your answer to info@wellingtonista.com with the sub­ject ‘Voda­fone Com­pet­i­tion”.

I espe­cially recom­mend enter­ing this comp if you like doing cool stuff online but you’re labour­ing with a crappy old cell­phone. Cos mobile inter­net is one of the best things about 3G.

The com­pet­i­tion closes at mid­day on Fri­day 15 May and the win­ner will be determ­ined by a ran­dom draw. You must be a New Zea­l­and res­id­ent. Righto.

UPDATE

We have a win­nar! Con­grat­u­la­tions to Brent Dick­ens who will very soon be get­ting a lovely new Nokia 5800.

Thanks to every­one who entered!

 

Win a Nokia 5800 worth $899, courtesy of Vodafone!

EDIT: We’ve changed the entry cri­ter­ia to make it easi­er to enter. Details over here.

 

Thanks to our pals at Voda­fone, we at the Wel­ling­tonista are giv­ing you the chance to win a super sweet Nokia 5800 smart phone worth $899.

First, some back­ground:

Voda­fone plans to com­plete its rol­lout of 3G cov­er­age to 97% of the places New Zeal­anders live work and play by 31 May. With 3G cov­er­age it means Voda­fone cus­tom­ers can do heaps more with their mobiles – includ­ing mobile inter­net, video call­ing, music down­loads, mobile broad­band and more.

To get people excited and involved in 3G, Voda­fone has set up a mini site called 3G made easy www.Vodafone.co.nz/easy

Voda­fone has also cre­ated some tutori­als on how to get to know your 3G mobile. But they think that their cus­tom­ers could prob­ably do bet­ter, so for every video that gets pos­ted on the Voda­fone web­site, Voda­fone give that per­son $10 air­time cred­it and the top 5 most viewed videos will also get a Nokia N85 and $500 cred­it. The most viewed tutori­al will also get a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and 1 year free mobile broad­band (1gb/month plan).

So that’s a lot of ace prizes already up for grabs over at www.Vodafone.co.nz/easy, but a Nokia 5800 smart­phone could also be yours if you give it a Wel­ling­tonista twist.

What do you need to do to win? Find out after the jump!

Reggaeton on a boat

Jine­tero MC is a loc­ally based Cuban reg­gaeton artist (yeah, one of those) and part of Olmecha Supreme.

But as a solo artist, he has a new song called “Wel­ling­ton”, his dance­able ode to the city.

Sample lyr­ics:

I say thank you, thank you very much.
 Wel­ling­ton, you have give me lotta lotta luck.

But more import­antly, the video is AWESOME. It man­ages to trans­form this windy city into a sub­trop­ic­al para­dise, includ­ing a sticky car­ni­val parade, hot city streets, and the high­light – Jine­tero dan­cing with booty girls out in the har­bour on a mother­truckin’ boat, y’all.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKwwEq0xtlM]

One lap Dick Johnson

The Nis­san Mobil 500 may be a dis­tant memory, but it still has made its mark on the city – check out the way that Jer­vois Quay feels more like a chute designed for cars to hurtle along at high speed than a pleas­ant har­bourside city street.

But those wish­ing the relive the glory days can do so over at You­Tube, where pet­rol­heads have uploaded a selec­tion of choice clips. My favour­ite is “One lap Dick John­son” from 1990. While this would be a per­fectly good name for a porno, it’s actu­ally a dash­board cam of driver Dick doing a lap of the cir­cuit.

It ends up being a really good snap­shot of Wel­ling­ton’s water­front envir­on­ment before the big regen­er­a­tion of the ’90s – no Te Papa, the Museum Hotel is still down by the water, Wait­angi Park is full of ware­houses, no Meridi­an build­ing, no Kumutoto stream reviv­al, no City to Sea bridge, and no lovely pleas­ant har­bourside walk.

Vrrm vrrrrrm:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWx4sljvFVI]

Auckland, Wellington and televisual debate

This week’s epis­ode Media 7 looked at the Auck­land vs Wel­ling­ton cul­tur­al debate sparked by the Metro magazine art­icle (as pre­vi­ously covered here).

Rus­sell Brown roun­ded up Simon Wilson – the art­icle’s author; with Tommy Honey rep­res­ent­ing the arts in Wel­ling­ton and Simon Prast rep­res­ent­ing Auck­land.

It was a lively debate, and did­n’t resort to much “us versus them” bull­hunky, but they man­aged to slag off both Palmer­ston North and Hamilton. Heh.

They basic­ally con­cluded that Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil sup­ports the arts bet­ter than Auck­land City Coun­cil does, and that there’s nowhere near Auck­land’s Maid­ment Theatre to get a drink.

You can watch the epis­ode here. The Auckland/Wellington dis­cus­sion starts in part three (part one looks at the death of advert­ising, part two at – ooh – holo­grams).