Listening to: Just Because - Jane’s Addiction

New Zealand, like most of the English speaking world, has a super heated housing market.
It has been a constant niggle for me because the quality of the building is attrocious
(and I generally have a huge beef about the way money is invested here in NZ)… and
now it seems to be biting
the poor schmucks at the bottom of investment foodchain:

Vacancy rates in Auckland’s inner-city apartments are rising and rents are dropping,
leaving some investors’ family homes at risk.

About 1500 of the city’s 11,500 units are empty, unable to draw tenants even at rock-bottom
rents, says a report by property-market analyst Kieran Trass of Hybrid Group and Leonie
Freeman of Interactive Property Management.

Sounds a bit like the bubble popping to me. 

Listening to: BBC Radio 1

This is an article
on spending money building a community, rather than buying ad space. It is another
one of these thought provoking articles. You might not agree with the extreme end
of what is be advocated, but there are some interesting ideas:

I’ve worked for companies that spent their entire ad and marketing budget on making
their existing users deliriously happy. Let’s say your marketing and/or ad budget
doesn’t have the same legs it used to, or that you’ve just decided to make a change.
Or maybe you don’t even have a marketing budget. Is there something you can do that
might be more creative and, in many cases today, at least–if not more–effective?

I guess one of the things that I like about building a community of users is that
it might be a very effective way of combating counterfeit copies of your
product. If you’re able to build a strong community around something and you’re able
to foster the right attitudes then people are less likely to accept stolen versions
of the product… because entry into the community might require ownership of the
genuine article (I’m thinking of car collectors clubs where kit cars are seen as being
less than the genuine article (the kit cars have their own clubs with their own value
systems… and I don’t consider kit cars as being counterfeits but it’s the closest
analogy I could come up with)).

Listening to: Beautiful People - Marilyn Manson

Gizmode has another great article from the people at frog
design. This article addresses the value
of sound in design:

[A]ural aspects are key to establishing the identity, character, and emotional
resonance of products. Yet sound too often remains a secondary consideration for designers,
overshadowed by visual and tactile concerns. Unless sound is more fully understood
and integrated into the design process, we risk ignoring its tremendous potential
to create rich and meaningful user experiences.

Listening to: not too sure… this was computer generated.

RIMG0012

>

Originally uploaded by flash5.>

I have been experimenting with stencils.

Listening to: Robot Love - Jor El

I have sky dived and honestly I could take it or leave it (I’ve had bigger buzzes)
but when I did it I jumped with a guy with a bird man suit. These guys are at the
extreme end of the line… maybe even a little certifiable. Here is
even more evidence… a guy straps jet engines to his boots and jumps out of a hot
air balloon (it will take some time to start playing, the movie is about 9Mb in size).
Maintains 2000m for 30 secs. Things to look out for:

• The test firing in the trailer

• The hot water bottles he uses as fuel tanks

• Oh… and the fact that he maintains level flight

As mad as it looks… it is definitely Big Dumb Grin material.

src: CJ

UPDATE: Some commentary.

Listening to: Sarah prep for Monday morning meeting

Here is a very, very
interesting thought:

Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year
for the next 18 years, because that’s what is going to happen. Some of those people
will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they
were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd
always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.

Listening to: Cloudkicks - Rhombus

It has been a wonderfully slow Sunday… so I have been able to catch up with the
presentations I have been meaning to listen to:

Intelligent
Reaction by Adam Bosworth

This is the presentation that Adam Bosworth made a the resent Salesforce.com conference.
It’s a fascinating 15 mins about how companies use operational data to determine the
directions to take their apps. The collection of operational data is one of the great
strengths of the framework we’ve developed at Provoke and in that respect this has
real relevance for me.

What
Business Can Learn from Open Source by Paul
Graham

Paul Graham shares his thoughts on what business can learn from blogging and Open
Source software… big scary ideas that, while you might agree with them, will definitely
cause you to think. If you like this then I suggest you go out and buy Hackers
and Painters…
his wonderful book of essays. Hat tip: phil.

Listening to: Walking On The Moon - The Police

Here are a bunch of NewScientist articles that have caught my attention over the past
week:

• The
  latest nanotech device: Venetian blinds
• US
  drops nuclear “bunker buster” from budget (thank god! these things
  have the same sort of “atomic energy improves all life” hubris we saw in the 1950’s)
• Vast
  array of tiny antennas could talk to spacecraft
• Space
  elevators stuck on the first floor (Hopefully we’ll see the same sort of improvement,
  over time, that we’ve seen in the Pentagon robot race… )

Listening to: ITC.OSCON05-PaulGraham-2005.08.02 - Paul Graham

The Mojave Weblog has a
set of great shots of the White Knight doing touch and goes:

>

Man that airplane is just plain sexy.

Listening to: Two More Years - Bloc Party

I was very lucky (I mean that… there was a very long queue and people missed out)
to listen to another presentation by Richard
Taylor from Weta. This was part of the Designers
Speak series that was hosted by The
City Gallery here in Wellington.

Again it was a hugely inspiring talk about passion and risk taking… the take away
statement was:

Innovation is the process of throwing yourself at failure and missing.

There is a delightful counter logic in that statement that tickles my funny bone.