Books, books, books as far as your eye can see

Tomor­row sees the start of Wel­ling­ton’s most favour­ite book event, the Down­town Com­munity Min­istry Book­fair, which is being held at the TSB Arena on Sat­urday and Sunday.

Thou­sands of books have been sor­ted by volun­teers for months all ready to make book shop­ping easi­er on the week­end.

My hot tips…

• Set a buy­ing budget
• Get there early on Sat­urday to get the books you really really, REALLY want.
• Pop back on Sunday and take advange of the hourly spe­cials for books, vinyl and magazines you mostly want.
• Don’t haggle at an event like this. All the prices are cheap­er than at second hand book stores and every cent go towards help­ing those most at need in our city.

How good is this event? In the words of one of our favour­ite Wel­ling­ton blog­gers 

The event itself is so awe­some that even if  they told me that they used the money to crush kit­tens, I’d still attend. Okay, maybe not … but still – it’s fab­ulous.

And this year’s book fair is all about Twit­ter. Fol­low the #dcm­book­fair tag for updates over both days of the Book­Fair. Simply Tweet about your Book­Fair exper­i­ence and include #dcm­book­fair to let oth­ers fol­low the fun.

DCM Events Coordin­at­or Dav­id Cross says…

The Book­Fair provides an ideal event for people on Twit­ter and oth­er social net­works. I’m excited to see how it all unfolds. Per­haps we’ll get people tweet­ing about find­ing the per­fect book or that long lost vinyl record, who knows

The Book­Fair hours are from 9am – 5pm on Sat­urday 4th and 10am – 4pm Sunday 5th of Septem­ber. Money raised from the Book­Fair goes towards Down­town Com­munity Ministry’s work amongst people in need in the city.

Twitterplaces: impromptu tweet-ups ahoy!

At SXSW 2007, the cool new thing that got every­one talk­ing was Twit­ter, and we know how that ended up. This year’s cool new thing was foursquare, a loc­a­tion shar­ing social net­work­ing app with gam­ing ele­ments, and many people wondered when it might come to New Zea­l­and.

 

Well, it’s not here yet. But recently, loc­al dev legend Ben Nolan dropped us a line to let us know about Twit­ter­places, an open-source vari­ant on the foursquare theme that he’s been work­ing on.

 

(When we last men­tioned Ben he’d just put togeth­er one of the first ever Face­book applic­a­tions. This was of course many months before we all got col­lect­ively tired of being pir­ates and throw­ing cows at each oth­er; thank­fully, Ben’s applic­a­tion con­tained neither.)

 

classy family dining

What to do when one’s par­ents come to town and want to take you out to din­ner? We usu­ally quiz our fel­low Wel­ling­ton­istæ around the office water­cool­er: there’s always an opin­ion or three on a sub­ject like this.

Giv­en we had to cope with a not ter­ribly adven­tur­ous (in the culin­ary sense) older bloke, and two small kids, where could we go that was classy yet sat­is­fy our vary­ing require­ments? There were many good sug­ges­tions:

• Zib­ibbo – classy, plus PIZZA for small people;
• Roxy – quiet, tasty;
• Joe’s Gar­age – newly opened chain res­taur­ant in Tory Street;
• Por­tofino – anoth­er newly opened chain res­taur­ant, in the Meridi­an build­ing;
• Le Met­ro­poli­t­aine – French, and known for a good steak;
• Osteria del Toro – Medi­ter­ranean for every­one;
• Crazy Horse – for a meat frenzy;
• Gusto Bis­tro – Petone’s finest;
• the Lido – an old standby, great food for the price.

Wellington is a good place to get shipwrecked

We’ve writ­ten before about the fire at the Maranui Surf Cafe, and how bloody sad that was, but it’s kind of bloody lovely to see the way that this city can be all small-town-like and good-hearted, with yet more events planned to raise money for the cause.

Ship­wrecked! Maranui Staff Bene­fit Con­cert Party is hap­pen­ing this Sat­urday Septem­ber 5 at the Tug Boat, and $20 will get you in to see the Eggs, Lone­some Cow­boy and oth­er bands, as well as chances to win prizes from Madame Fancy Pants, Real Surf and Joug Design

And if that’s not quite enough party­ing for you, there’s also the after­party at SFBH where koha on the door will get you a free shot.

Safe Passage

Today delivered a bright and cheer­ful blue-dappled day in the city but there were dark forces abroad.  Three grim reap­ers were seen around town this after­noon com­plete with scythes and flow­ing dark hooded robes.  They were spot­ted at the begin­ning of their jaunt in the dank, dark alleys of Left Bank; then again at the lib­rary hit­ting the romance and murder mys­tery sec­tions; later at New World doing a spot of shop­ping; and tak­ing some air on the water­front at dusk (photo cred­it Domin­ika Ziel­in­ska).

They were har­vest­ing more squeals and smiles than souls and seemed to be a hit with the tour­ists.

To what do we owe this psy­cho­pomp?

Google Maps

A couple of cool new fea­tures have arrived at Google Maps.

First, the images used in the satel­lite tiles have been updated, and with images of a high­er res­ol­u­tion so you can zoom in right down to the smal­lest click on the slidey thing.

The old images pre-dated the bypass, so it’s good to see more up-to-date images.

Also, the images appear to have been taken on a bright sunny day and the city looks abso­lutely gor­geous.

View Lar­ger Map

Second thing is Google Trans­it, which lets you plan jour­neys using pub­lic trans­port (click on Get Dir­ec­tions in Google Maps).

Wel­ling­ton is the first city in Aus­tralasia to have Google Trans­it, as repor­ted in this envi­ous art­icle in the Her­ald.

Alan’s already had a bit of a play with it:

 

Wellington on a plate on the web

We’ve been par­tic­u­larly lax in not cov­er­ing Wel­ling­ton on a Plate, in my case because I am drastic­ally short of funds and if I wrote about it I’d just get sad that I can­’t eat every single thing on offer. But luck­ily, we can out­source the work to a third-world coun­try instead. My favour­ite food blog­ger from Sydney – Helen at Grab Your Fork – has been in Wel­ling­ton as a guest of Wel­ling­ton Tour­ism, and she’s been doing some fant­ast­ic posts about what she’s been eat­ing, along with tak­ing some very tasty pho­tos like the one at the right of the bak­ing class at Florid­it­a’s. You should check her out, and also check out the fest­iv­al itself. If you’re short of a din­ing com­pan­ion, feel free to extend an invit­a­tion to me…

Review: Whero’s New Net

Wher­o’s New Net, by Albert Belz, is a play inspired by The New Net Goes Fish­ing, Witi Ihi­maer­a’s 1977 col­lec­tion of short stor­ies look­ing at the exper­i­ences of rur­al Maori mov­ing to the cit­ies.

This play takes the idea for­ward to the next gen­er­a­tion, look­ing at Whero (played by Bree Peters), a young Maori woman liv­ing in Lon­don and try­ing to make a break as a sing­er-song­writer. She’s rather good, but a little nervous and some­what over­shad­owed by Red, her con­fid­ent, glam­or­ous music­al part­ner.

Whero is sup­por­ted by her Irish man­ager and his boy­friend, also urb­an Maori. All is going well, when Whero meets a mys­ter­i­ous stranger – an East Coast Maori fulla who has the diary of her deceased fath­er.

And it’s there that things get inter­est­ing, with Whero hav­ing to deal with aspects of her fam­ily’s past, her present and the pres­sures of the future.

Monsters attack!

Remem­ber when Abel Smith Street was full of mon­sters recently? Here’s the ad that was the cause of it all.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3O-dMD4-U8]