Sunday afternoon. You're walking home after getting off the train from Zürich, and you're carrying your bag in your hand instead of over your shoulder, because you're carrying all your stress in your back right now and the weight of the bag is killing you. In your left hand, you're holding the small potted cactus that you made your boyfriend buy you yesterday for your desk, which you're almost dizzy with the significance of, because your parents used to say that your sister was like a delicate flower, and you, tough, proud and stubborn, were like a prickly cactus.

Smiling, you remember how you told your friend Chris about this, and he insisted that you were more like a hedgehog, you suspect because under their spikes, they're actually quite cute, and you remember being infuriated by this because you didn't want anyone to actually see past the spikes. Secretly though, you harboured a hope that Chris might buy you a small hedgehog for your keyring, because you are always amused by the significance, real or imposed, of inanimate objects. He never did of course, because it didn't occur to him, and asking him to would have ruined the gesture.

An old man is sitting drinking a beer on the steps leading up to a storefront, and he's noticed you, walking down the street with your cactus, smiling to yourself, and he's looking at you expectantly. Not staring, just slightly puzzled, wondering what your story is. The woman sitting beside him is talking animatedly, but you can tell he's not paying attention to her anymore, because he's looking at you, and you feel guilty about this so you smile at him. Satisfied, perhaps because he expected you, this girl dressed in black with huge sunglasses, tattoos, and a cactus, to glare at him, and you smiled instead, he looks back at his companion, and you leave them behind as you cross the street to Rue de Lausanne.

Because it's a warm Sunday afternoon and you're not ready to go inside and work, you wonder if you'll see anyone you know, perhaps sitting having a beer in the sun, but then you remember that Rue de Lausanne is not Cuba Street, and the chance of this happening is extremely low, and you close your eyes for a moment, feel the warmth from the sun on your skin and try to mentally place yourself walking down Cuba Street instead in the sun on the weekend. In your mind, you're walking past the entrance to the Matterhorn, past the statue by the bucket fountain which nobody can ever agree on, as to if it's a frog or a tuatara, which is quite bizarre, you realise now, considering how utterly different they are. Walking on, passing Plum's outside tables, in this block of Cuba Street, you are sure you would have met someone you know to have a beer with.

But the people around you are speaking French and you realise how misguided it is to walk down the street, even a pedestrian street like Rue de Lausanne, or Cuba Street, with your eyes closed, especially when you're carrying a potted cactus in one hand, because if you fell over dirt would go everywhere, and you would draw attention to yourself. And here in this foreign city where you hardly know anyone, you don't like people to notice you, really. So you open your eyes.

You're thinking about the word Solitude a lot at the moment, which is odd because juxtaposed with daydreaming about bumping into friends on Cuba Street, it's a concept that you feel strangely calm about. But you find that when you go home after work in the evenings, and sit by yourself in your garden, drink a beer, and read your book, you do feel calm, and for some reason this reminds you of the title of the essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, which you bought but never read and didn't survive the move to Switzerland. You always had the idea that A Room of One's Own has something to do with Solitude, but struggling to recall a conversation you had about it with your friend Michelle, who is a writer, you think she might have told you that it's actually about the necessity of writers having the means to be independent, so that they are able to just concentrate on writing. You suppose Solitude is a subset of that.

As you walk past the cathedral, you ponder the relationship between Solitude and being driven, or able, to work all the time, and even though you're on your way home right now, to turn on your laptop and work, you feel almost no motivation to do so at all, and since you're thinking about Michelle, who is a writer, you decide instead to turn on your laptop and write......

Is that it comes and goes... and it seemingly just takes one single thing to propel it into the foreground. I haven't really been homesick much this year, but I just watched this video by the amazing New Zealand band Minuit which was stupid because it made me so incredibly homesick last year:



And it was like a tidal wave of NZ iconography and homesickness and argh. But I can't help watching it anyway!

I gave a presentation today and I think it was one of the worst I have ever given. This confuses me slightly, because I was talking about a subject I have talked about probably a hundred times over the last 3 -4 years. So I'm thinking about the best talks I've ever given, and the worst, and what the difference is between them.

Slide layout

I used to do the bullet point slide thing. I think that slides like this are boring to watch, although they leave behind a much richer record of the presentation, although this is not so important anymore with most conferences having videos. However, over the last year I have gradually decreased the amount of content on my slides. While this means that I'm much happier with the slides, it generally means that I find it harder to stay on subject exactly, and tend to wander a bit. While not so great to look at, I have to admit that the bullet point slides provide a much needed structure to the talk.

Subject matter

People say that you give better talks when you're familiar with your subject matter. This is certainly true, but it's probably a misnomer for me, because I don't actually tend to give talks about things that I'm not familiar with.

Familiarity with your audience

I used to be much more worried about giving presentations in front of people I knew. I remember one of the first talk I ever gave at a conference (LCA 2007), and I forbade anyone from Catalyst from attending. This is the opposite from how many people feel I think, which is interesting. It's because I generally feel that when I'm doing a presentation in front of people I know, I have much more to lose, if I do anything stupid. If I'm talking in a room of strangers, I can walk away at the end and never see them again.

Language of the audience

This is an interesting one. Something I really noticed today was that because I was giving a talk in English, in a room of people whose first language was either French or German, I was forcing myself to speak much slower than I normally would (even slower than I normally try to talk when presenting to native English speakers), and using different language than I normally would too. This is very problematic for me, because it means that my brain is much further ahead in the planning of what I'm going to say, than what is currently coming out of my mouth, which means I lose track of where I am.


I think the two most important things that I need to take away from this experience are the first and last. In a situation where there's a language barrier, either with me speaking in English, or if I eventually get proficient enough to speak in German, I really need to have a better structure than I have now. When speaking in faster English, to an audience I feel confident can follow along comfortably, I can freestyle much more and don't need prompting with bullet points. However, in a situation like today, I really need them.

I'm still determined not to put bullet points on my slides. So I think the best thing to do is prepare two sets of slides. One with what I want to say, in a structured fashion, and the other containing what I want to present, whether it's full page images, or single words on a screen, or whatever. This sounds like a lot more work, but it's actually not, because I need to go through the thought process of what to say for each slide when I'm preparing them either way.

At LCA this year, I was extremely impressed with all the keynotes - not just the content and styles of the presenters, but more importantly the slides. I gave a techtalk at Liip when I returned from New Zealand, "what I learned in New Zealand", trying to follow the same slide styles, and I was really happy with it. I did notice that at LCA, some (maybe all) of the keynoters had written speeches to go along with their slides, and were reading from them on stage. That seems like far too much work for me, partially because I do like the free speaking approach, so preparing a bullet point version seems like a happy middle ground.

As a person who has lived in Switzerland for a year, I have become extremely reliant on public transport. This means, that when I went back to New Zealand for 2 months over summer, I was horrified at the stark contrast between the two countries, and as a result, have become rather outspoken and opinionated on the subject (surprise!)

There are two main problems, as I see it, with public transport in New Zealand. For the purposes of this blog post I am purely going to talk about commuter public transport in Wellington, not intercity transport, which is so bad it's almost non existent.

The two main problems are:

1. The public transport system is substandard
2. As a result, people don't take it, which makes it less likely to receive much improvement.

Obviously, this is a circular problem. The worse it is, the less people will use it, the less money will be spent on it, and so on forever.

So let's examine the first point in further detail.

Why do I think the public transport system is so bad? Well first, I must of course reiterate that I have been living in Switzerland, which has an exemplary public transport system. But even so, I think that Wellington's system is appalling. Here are some of the high (low) lights:

Lack of integrated ticketing.

I need a separate ticket for the bus, train and cable car. Yes, there is the snapper card now, which can be used on all the different buses. Can you use it on the trains? I don't think so but I could be wrong. Certainly you need a separate multi card or prepay card or whatever on the cable car. I didn't try to take any boats while I was in Wellington, but I doubt that is integrated as well. I know that ticket integration is a hard problem to solve, but the fact that other cities have integrated ticketing means that it's not insurmountable.

Why does this matter? People are less likely to take public transport if they have to remember to carry multiple different cards with them, or have to buy a ticket each time they travel. In Switzerland, I am one of the lucky people to own a "GA" - this is a year pass for all trains, buses, trams, boats, in the whole country. Even before I had that, I had a "Halbtax" card, which got me reduced ticketing on all these services, even when I had to buy a ticket before I travelled.

Unreliability.

While there are certainly some good bus routes in Wellington, the majority are extremely unreliable. This is not even to touch on the trains, which are in an awful state (I was stuck in Tawa (Tawa!!) for two hours on a Wednesday night until a kind soul drove me back to Wellington). The timetables are frequently laughable. I remember getting on a half hour service to Gracefield a few years ago, which had come 25 minutes late, and I asked the driver whether he was 25 minutes late or 5 minutes early, and he didn't know. He literally didn't know what route he was supposed to be on, but was just driving in a circle while his shift was on.

Aside from the unreliability of the timetables, I could also complain about the infrequency of the buses. The number 20, for example, finishes very early during the week. I have become quite used to buses and trams coming every 5-15 minutes, so a half hour service seems extremely long to me.

Car culture.

This is really the killer for me, and the hardest to combat. I really think in New Zealand, the car is still seen as a status symbol by many people, and public transport is seen as something for the lower classes. I believe this comes from an American influence actually. I was waiting for a bus in rush hour traffic in Kelburn to go into Wellington, watching car after car drive past with a single person in it, only to get on the bus when it (finally) arrived, to find it almost empty, with only 4 other people on it.

Before I moved to Switzerland, I was completely against the segregation of classes in public transport, but I have come around to believe that it's actually a positive thing. We have a first class and second class system on the trains here - so people that want their status symbol can still travel first class, and everyone else who doesn't care (and doesn't want to spend extra money on it) walks a bit further down the train to the start of the second class carriages, and pays less. It gets the status symbol people out of their cars and into public transport, and helps subsidise it for the rest of us.


I still feel a deep love for New Zealand, and Wellington in particular, but I find this issue so depressing. I wish that New Zealand was being more forward thinking on sustainable (or at least, less unsustainable) transport, and investing in public transport infrastructure, instead of building more roads for more cars. I hate to see the country I love so much falling further and further behind in this area.

It's widely acknowledged on the internet at the moment that Android is suffering from a serious fragmentation problem. The different devices have different Android versions, some without promise of an upgrade, some with pure Android and some with vendor specific versions. I'm only an Android consumer, so can only speak about this from personal frustration, but the situation must also be pretty bad for those developing Android applications for such a fragmented market.

I used to be a reasonably happy owner of a HTC Hero. When I bought it, it was running Android 1.5, with the HTC Sense UI. Soon after, there was an upgrade to 1.6. That was a long, long time ago now, and large chunks of the rest of the Android community have different phones, with newer versions. HTC have been promising an upgrade for months to Android 2.1, and it keeps getting pushed out and pushed out. The latest announcement yesterday was the end of June, which is interesting considering that Android 2.2 is supposed to be released in May already.

Someone asked me a few days ago why I was looking forward to the upgrade, when the phone worked perfectly well already. This is surely a valid question and there are a few different answers. Some of the applications I use aren't being developed further for the 1.x series of Android, and new versions are only being developed for 2.0. The 1.5 to 1.6 upgrade improved performance a lot, and I was hoping that the 2.1 upgrade would as well.

At any rate, the most recent delay was the proverbial last straw for me, and I ended up putting a custom rom on my phone. I would actually really like to run pure Android, for philosophical reasons, so first I tried a pure Android rom. Unfortunately, it is just really nowhere near as nice as Sense. The most obvious difference that would affect me is the exchange support (against Liip's Zimbra set up) - in pure Android, I could not find a way to specify what to sync, and I couldn't make it include Calendars. In Sense, I can choose between Mail, Contacts and Calendars (I sync the latter two but not the first). Calendar support is by far and away the most important for me. There were a few things I liked better in Android - the keyboard was much more responsive (although uglier) - one thing that has been driving me crazy about this phone is the lagginess of the keyboard.

Anyway eventually I decided the calendar support was a deal breaker for me, so I put on a 2.1 Sensish rom, and so far, I am very happy with it (although the keyboard is still laggy). They fixed the annoying issue of not being able to see the arrival time of messages older than a day (they just say "Yesterday"), but not the problem where switching to mobile network after a long wifi connection doesn't work until you turn on and off Airplane mode (interestingly, I was not affected by this with Vodafone in NZ, only with Sunrise in Switzerland). I'm not sure whether this will be fixed by the eventual Sense 2.1 release. The custom rom I'm using doesn't have the zoom out display of the home screens that I saw in the pure Android rom, and neither the ability to rotate the home screen, both of which were really cool, but again I don't know if they're in pure Android and not in Sense, or they were added on to the pure Android rom I tried, or if they will be in the final Sense release either.

The moral of the story for me is intense frustration. I don't want to support Sense and I would rather use pure Android, but it's really not as nice. I haven't looked into the licensing model of Android yet (and am writing this offline), but I assume it's some sort of BSD-ish license that means that HTC are not obliged to distribute their changes, which is incredibly annoying, both for me, and I guess any pure Android users who are aware that their phone OS is not as good as those of us with Sense.

The obvious solution is for me to start doing Android development, switch to pure Android, and write Open Source apps for the phone. It would take a lot of learning of new skills, but sounds like it might be fun, and then I would be in the happy position of being able to hack on the software that runs my phone, which sounds pretty ideal to me. So I'm thinking about it.

So it occurs to me that it's been a long time since I wrote about how much I love New Zealand music, and this seems rather neglectful. This is somewhat precipitated by the fact that I saw The Black Seeds play in Winterthur on Saturday night, but also because I was talking about New Zealand accents last week, which led me to recall that even my amazing boyfriend with his excellent grasp of English, had trouble watching Goodbye Pork Pie without English subtitles because the accent was so thick, and that led me to Rhombus because of their Clav Dub video, and anyway I still spend an inordinate amount of time listening to Fur Patrol, Fat Freddies Drop and of course The Phoenix Foundation, not to mention all the others as evidenced by my last.fm profile. So I thought a blog post about how awesome New Zealand music is must be long overdue.

Here are some of the videos on youtube that I've found that make me go, "arrrrggggh!! New Zealand!! Homesickness!"

The Phoenix Foundation / Bright Grey:


The Phoenix Foundation / 40 Years:


Fat Freddy's Drop / Wandering Eye:


Fat Freddy's Drop / Roady:


Rhombus / Clav Dub:


Salmonella Dub / The Love Of It:


The Black Seeds / Slingshot:


Hollie Smith / Philosophy:


The Woolshed Sessions / Stringing Me Along:


Bic Runga / Sway:


And of course, Fly My Pretties / Fly My Pretties:

Living in Switzerland, I would have thought ANZAC day would pass rather unceremoniously, but in fact I attended an ANZAC day BBQ at Lake Zurich yesterday, which was actually really good - I always underestimate how relieving it is to hear familiar accents amongst other things.

However, the most poignant thing for me about this ANZAC day was this poem I found over on Tumeke, by James K. Baxter:


The Gunner's Lament


A Maori gunner lay dying
In a paddyfield north of Saigon,
And he said to his pakeha cobber,
"I reckon I've had it, man!

'And if I could fly like a bird
To my old granny's whare
A truck and a winch would never drag
Me back to the Army.

'A coat and a cap and a well-paid job
Looked better than shovelling metal,
And they told me that Te Rauparaha
Would have fought in the Vietnam battle.

'On my last leave the town swung round
Like a bucket full of eels.
The girls liked the uniform
And I liked the girls.

'Like a bullock to the abattoirs
In the name of liberty
They flew me with a hangover
Across the Tasman Sea,

'And what I found in Vietnam
Was mud and blood and fire,
With the Yanks and the Reds taking turns
At murdering the poor.

'And I saw the reason for it
In a Viet Cong's blazing eyes -
We fought for the crops of kumara
And they are fighting for the rice.

'So go tell my sweetheart
To get another boy
Who'll cuddle her and marry her
And laugh when the bugles blow,

'And tell my youngest brother
He can have my shotgun
To fire at the ducks on the big lagoon,
But not to aim it at a man,

'And tell my granny to wear black
And carry a willow leaf,
Because the kid she kept from the cold
Has eaten a dead man's loaf.

'And go and tell Keith Holyoake
Sitting in Wellington,
However long he scrubs his hands
He'll never get them clean.'


James K Baxter
1965