Category: Uncategorised

A ray of sunshine in a wet and windy July

It’s time for the Craft 2.0 Winter War­mup. Wheth­er you want fully-formed hand-craf­ted gifts and home­ware, or the sup­plies and advice to make ’em your­self, all your craft essen­tials are avail­able under one roof when the most pop­u­lar craft fair in town hits the Hutt at The­New­Dowse on Sat­urday 25 July.

Join New Zeal­and’s homebased hand­made revolu­tion and shop loc­al. Why? It helps the envir­on­ment by redu­cing your car­bon foot­print, and it keeps your hard-earned money in the com­munity.

Same old

The Graf­fo­graphy and Wgtn Wall Street graf­fiti blogs noticed that the Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil’s anti-graf­fiti posters (you know, these ones) had illus­trated the evil graf­fiti by using a photo col­lage of actu­al non-illeg­al graf­fiti.

Wgtn Wall Street says:

My man over at Graf­fo­graphy first aler­ted me to the work by Dryp­nz and Ran­dom being used in the cam­paign, art­work that broke no law and was now put under a neg­at­ive spot­light by the Coun­cil.

So then Wgtn Wall Street emailed the coun­cil with his con­cerns.

They were apo­lo­get­ic and appar­ently the ‘pho­to­graph­er’ did­n’t know that the work used in the cam­paign was deemed leg­al. They agreed to remove the work from future cam­paigns but god knows how many posters, stick­ers etc that have already prin­ted and not to men­tion the amount of money wasted on a poorly researched scheme.

It does­n’t reflect so well on the coun­cil. Their anti-illeg­al-graf­fiti cam­paign seems to demon­strate that they don’t actu­ally know what they’re fight­ing.

Snapper, re-visited

It’s been a long time since we’ve men­tioned Snap­per in these pages.

In the mean­time it’s become so much of an every­day part of life in Wel­ling­ton now that it hardly seems worth men­tion­ing any­more. Or is it?

Recently we got an email from Snap­per ask­ing us if we’d like to come and see what they’re up to. It seems they’ve had a few oth­er things on the go as well as the recent Val­ley Fly­er con­ver­sion and they’d like to let us know about them.

Sounds good. But it does­n’t have to be a one way thing. Now’s our chance to ask Snap­per what they’re doing to bring some of our pub­lic trans­port “most needed” items into real­ity:

• fully integ­rated tick­et­ing across all pub­lic trans­port pro­viders in the Wel­ling­ton region, and
• our bus stops equipped with real time bus inform­a­tion – we may not want much, but we want the best, and at the moment we have to admit that Christ­ch­urch, at least in part, Has It.

What about you? If you could ask the Snap­per people a ques­tion, what would it be? Is there some­thing you’d like changed? Is there any­thing about the present sys­tem that bugs you?

Let us know, below, and we’ll pass it along.

Wellington reclamation animation

From the ‘Reclam­a­tion of Wel­ling­ton Har­bour’ Wiki­pe­dia art­icle, here’s an anim­a­tion by Matt Lane that shows the vari­ous stages of the city’s expan­sion sea­wards over the last cen­tury and a half.

The reclam­a­tion of Wel­ling­ton Har­bour was a phased approach (start­ing in the 1850s) of land reclam­a­tion from the Wel­ling­ton Har­bour. The ori­gin­al goal of the reclam­a­tion was to increase the amount of usable flat land for Wel­ling­ton City. The motiv­a­tion of lat­ter reclam­a­tions in the 1960s and 1970s was as a response to con­tain­er ship­ping (con­tain­er­isa­tion) and new cargo hand­ling meth­ods. Today, reclam­a­tion has added more than 155 hec­tares to the Wel­ling­ton

[Via Mir­ar­mar Mike]

Award Season – “Chappy” Nominations Announced

As Hadyn rightly points out, it is “Award Sea­son” and the Wel­ling­ton theatre com­munity is no excep­tion. The list of nom­in­a­tions for the annu­al Chap­man Tripp Theatre Awards was announced yes­ter­day and they demon­strate once again that live theatre in Wel­ling­ton is in very good shape.

The judges (crit­ics and review­ers from The Domin­ion Post, Cap­it­al Times, Theatre­view, Sali­ent and The Lumiere Read­er) all watched more than 90 pro­duc­tions dur­ing 2008 and the nom­in­a­tions are spread across 29 of those.

[Details of the nom­in­ees, and a spe­cial oppor­tun­ity, after the jump]

snapped? (wha)

It’s been a couple weeks since we last checked in on Snap­per.

The Snap­per rol­lout has con­tin­ued apace, and some of us haven’t used our old ten-trips for two whole weeks! (Well, we were excited about this, any­way.)

More and more people are board­ing buses armed with the cards; and more and more buses (and their drivers) are ready to take them.

And in the mean­time we’ve learnt many things. (Read on for more.)

snapped? (toru)

Today, read­er Dav­eK let us know that Snap­per cards have finally gone on sale at a couple of retail­ers in town, at least. They’re also avail­able, along with the card read­ers that allow WinIE types to do refills at home, from the Snap­per web­site.

Of course there’s been a few more teeth­ing troubles repor­ted; dif­fi­cult ques­tions haven’t been answered; not all buses (or drivers for that mat­ter) seem to be enabled for the new tech­no­logy; and retail­ers still don’t seem all that fussed. Mean­while, as Poneke has repor­ted, the 10-trip tick­ets will be with­drawn from sale from August 29.

But while the whole thing seems very much a work in pro­gress, we’re just glad they’ve star­ted on the rol­lout to us, the pub­lic trans­port punters. It’s the Future™, you know.

So in the spir­it of the week we’re in, we’ll offer some words of encour­age­ment:

He ika kai ake i raro, he rāpaki ake i raro.

snapped? (rua)

So we can con­firm that yes, the new Snap­per cards do work pretty well in the buses (based on the small sample of one attempt earli­er today using our tri­al USB snap­per pic­tured). One would expect so, giv­en that the tech­no­logy comes from the giant T‑Money install in Seoul, where their mega-city sized pub­lic trans­port oper­a­tion will have smoothed all the rough-edges out of it long ago.

But WTF is hap­pen­ing with Snap­per?

First, the Dom Post reports that the rol­lout, due for Monday 14th, has been delayed again (ori­gin­ally the rol­lout was sup­posed to be in June). Then we find that at least some buses are run­ning with live, lit-up and useable Snap­per read­ers any­way – such was the one we caught this morn­ing. And to con­fuse the mat­ter fur­ther, no retail­ers appear able to sell com­muters the cards until the end of the month… well, those retail­ers that actu­ally have agreed to sell the things in the first place, that is.

But… we wants it!

So what might have caused this Clayton’s delay? In the absence of any­thing use­ful from Snap­per them­selves we can, of course, indulge in wild spec­u­la­tion (after the jump):

snapped?

So maybe it’s been easy to escape, but next week the new Snap­per cards come into cir­cu­la­tion.

Any­one who travels on a Wel­ling­ton Bus can­not have failed to notice the newly installed orange and black fish logo-ed teardrops at the front and side doors. These are the read­ers for the cards. Just wave the card over the read­er, and value is deb­ited from them to fund your bus trip. You can recharge them over the ‘net (but only if you have a Win­dows PC and a mas­ochist­ic will­ing­ness to sub­ject your­self to Inter­net Explorer) and at any of the sup­port­ing cafés and former 10-trip tick­et sellers.

It all sounds pretty good really: no more being stuck for the right change; nev­er a click short on your 10-trip; and nev­er even hav­ing to think about how much extra is stop past your usu­al. And then there’s the pos­sib­il­ity (as some of us, tri­al­ling Snap­per, are doing now) of put­ting the first cof­fee of the morn­ing on it as well.

And it’s cool. We like the logo; the dif­fer­ent form factors; and just the sheer techno-geekery at play.

Oth­ers have been pos­it­ive, too; Poneke has had a reas­on­able time with their card. So here at Wel­ling­tonista we’re all really look­ing for­ward to it.

We do have a few ques­tions though, (after the jump):

Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn

I’ve just moved to Wel­ling­ton, but before I did a prop­er move, work sent me up for a few days to get acquain­ted with things, and while I was there I stayed at the Hol­i­day Inn on Feath­er­ston Street.

I was kind of excited because over past 25 years, there have been many hip hop songs with men­tions of excit­ing things that hap­pen at a “hotel, motel, Hol­i­day Inn”. What extra­vag­ances would await me? Per­haps a party that did­n’t stop till six in the morn­ing…