Links for Monday, 9 October 2006

‘Pocket-city at the Edge of the World’

The Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald fea­tures a rather rave write-up on Wel­ling­ton on their web­site today:

After years of rel­at­ive obscur­ity, the city is blos­som­ing. It has rein­ven­ted itself as an eleg­ant, mod­ern place without the arrog­ance that often accom­pan­ies such devel­op­ment.

Okay, maybe we could have done without the ‘years of rel­at­ive obscur­ity’ part.

Library Blog

photo of Wellington Central Library courtesy of TaniwhaWel­ling­ton Lib­rary has gone and got itself a blog!

And it’s a good’un too. From latest releases and staff picks, and the occa­sion­al look at what’s pop­u­lar amongst the pat­rons, such as the latest post: Evid­ence of Good Taste among Wel­ling­to­ni­ans.

Wel­ling­to­ni­ans, appar­ently, are a fairly lit­er­ate and intel­li­gent buch of read­ers, with Alain De Bot­ton’s ‘Archi­tec­ture of Hap­pi­ness’, Irene Nemirovsky’s ‘Suite Fran­caise’ and ‘Hard way’ by Lee Child being the most sought-after items of the moment.

And remem­ber, if you haven’t already, sign up to the Lib­rary Elf ser­vice to get lib­rary remind­ers sent to you via a per­son­al­ised RSS feed.

[photo cour­tesy of Tani­wha]

Grid time

I’ve been so busy the last week, for reas­ons that Hadyn can explain bet­ter than I, that I’ve got a bit behind on my Grid­skip­per read­ing. In fact, I totally missed the fact that not only did Wel­ling­ton beat Baku in the “Pitch Your Burg” con­test, we now have our first offi­cial Grid­skip­per post! It has all the oblig­at­ory Wellytown ref­er­ences, includ­ing Fat Freddy’s Drop, the ‘Canes, Wait­angi Park, the fact that we’re all so over hob­bits, and of course, a mis-spelling of “Court­ney” Place. It also some­how man­ages to men­tion pretty much every Wel­ling­ton blog in exist­ence. And only one ref­er­ence to P!

Gene pool deletion in progress

gene pool dele­tion in pro­gress, ori­gin­ally uploaded by max­ch­erry. Could­n’t help but draw more atten­tion to this par­tic­u­lar photo, spot­ted in the Wel­ling­ton Flickr Photo Pool today. Says max­ch­erry, the photo-taker… noth­ing wrong with tow­ing a motor­cycle – can be safely done. The rider has winds just one coil around the bar, and grips the […]

If the Earth were a Sandwich…

…our sand­wich part­ner would, give or take a few miles, be Sala­manca, Spain. We’re not sure if this is the rationale behind the nam­ing of the Kel­burn road that shares the name (a quick Google reveals that Lord Wel­ling­ton fought a fam­ous battle there – in Spain, that is, not up Kel­burn way – in […]

Miserable Jafas?

Today’s Domin­ion Post car­ries an insuf­fer­ably smug art­icle head­lined “The lonely misery of liv­ing in Auck­land”. Like all good journ­al­ism these days, this story is based almost entirely upon Google: in this case, the news that a Google Trends search for the word “misery” shows that Auck­landers search Google for this word more often than […]

The Library Elf

library elf shown is not representative of actual library elvesHere’s a handy online ser­vice for those of you who use Wel­ling­ton’s excel­lent Pub­lic Lib­rar­ies. Cre­ate an account over at Lib­rary Elf, enter your lib­rary card details, and they’ll cre­ate a cus­tom­ised RSS feed that tells you what books you’ve got out that are near­ing their return date. Very handy for those of us who man­age to lose the paper issue slip some­where between the lib­rary exit and home.

The Hutt and Pori­rua lib­rar­ies are also on the sys­tem, as are a few oth­er NZ-based lib­rar­ies.

[hat tip: fraser, via chch-changes.]

Nicest City in the World

Our post on Wel­ling­ton’s 12th pla­cing in the recent Mer­cer HR Qual­ity of Life table has had the pleas­ant side-effect of cata­pault­ing Wel­ling­ton (and the Wel­ling­tonista) to the top of the Google rank­ings for a search on ‘nicest city in the world’. We’ll take Google’s word over Mer­cer­’s any day.

The odyssey of Mr Reasonable

Loc­al blog­ger Mr Reas­on­able plans to com­bine his whizzo geek toys and dan­ger­ously obsess­ive love of cof­fee into an caf­feine fuelled odys­sey of live blog­ging from cafés in the besuited end of town: I am going to vis­it a dif­fer­ent Wel­ling­ton Cafe every day next week, order a decent Lat­té, take a photo of said […]