Dumbing down the culture

I fear that the leveling tendency of Reformed aesthetics has brought about a “dumbing down” of discernment and cultural engagement. And that, without question, is a loss. We’ve spent so much time valuing popular culture, it has come at the expense of the riches of “high” culture. We’ve devoted so much ink and energy to convincing students that God shows up in the frames of American Beauty or the lyrics of Johnny Cash that they’ve stopped looking for him in the genius of Bach’s motets or the romance of Rossetti’s poetry.

James K.A. Smith
“Dumbing down discernment?” in catapult magazine

Ranting about parking machines

I’m puzzled about one thing to do with parking machines. I don’t mean the parking meters littered along practically every road in Dunedin, but the machines that are installed in parking buildings. Most particularly the one in the building in Moray Place that was only opened up for parking less than a year ago. Firstly they installed a machine that takes coins and notes. Notes, you say – that’s pretty radical. Well, it would be if it was effective. One morning I stood beside a young fellow trying to put a five dollar note into the machine over and over and the machine just wasn’t interested. But the machine was installed not long before the advent of our new coinage, which the Treasury decided in its wisdom would be as different from our old coinage as possible. Thus the machine was out of date as soon as it was installed.
All that would be okay, but whenever I go to park in this place I have the problem of whether I have any change or not. I barely ever carry change, since I pay most things with my Eftpos card.
Why on earth wasn’t a machine installed that would take cards rather than coins? It would have been twice as cost effective in the first instance, and not only that there must be a lot less wear and tear on an Eftpos style machine than a coin-operated one. It’s not as though the machine is stuck out in the street where access to phone lines would have been an issue.
Most of the other parking buildings in town still have humans operating the system. I don’t want to put anyone out of a job, but again, Eftpos would be far more satisfactory. Heck, I can even go to the tip (sorry, the transit station, I think it now is) and pay by Eftpos.

Bookkeeping for small businesses

Late last year I started using MYOB for keeping track of payments and receipts in the small home business I’m doing. (When I say, ‘small’, by the way, I mean small.) I’ve had some accounting experience, more on the bookkeeping level, so I found my way around it fairly well, although there some moments when I could have done with someone sitting at my elbow telling me what to do next. They have an efficient email help service, but to keep that up month after month would have cost me more than the (very small) business was worth at this point.
One of the small business ideas I had, and have temporarily put on the shelf, was to do bookkeeping for clients who find this a pain in the course of the ordinary work, or who just don’t have enough time at the end of the day. Someone else has had the same idea, and is obviously doing a good job with people like those I was thinking of, people who’d prefer to get on with the hands-on tasks rather than the paper chase ones. This guy does small business accounting using QuickBooks rather than MYOB, and has a number of tips on his site to help people using it - and his rates are pretty good. It’s given me an idea of how much I could charge, if ever I pick that idea up again from the corner I’ve stowed it in!

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