More on AGYG

Another blogger left a comment about Annie Get Your Gun a couple of days ago, saying that it was originally made in black and white and that people don't watch b&w movies and thus miss out on many good films.
Well, I don't have any doubt that AGYG was made in colour, not b&w. It has no hint of being a 'coloured' movie. And I've watched black and white movies as often as colour. It's only in the last few years, however, that b&w has come back into its own. And, thank goodness, the idea of colouring movies has gone out the window pretty much. It was always an awful approach, and seldom truly successful.
Another blogger informed me that there's a huge website devoted to Judy Garland, called The Judy Garland Experience. Seems that everything you ever wanted to know about Garland is available on this site - I'm still to check it out - and there are people writing on it who actually knew her well.
It's a great experience to watch Garland in a musical. There's such life in everything she does - and she not only had a unique voice, she had a unique way of expressing herself as a person. The tragedy of her life won't be forgotten in a hurry, but the legacy of her movies will eventually overshadow it, I think.

Dressing up Online

Back in the dim dark ages, little girls used to be able to buy books of cut-out dolls – they usually came as part of the cardboard cover (the dolls, I mean, not the little girls – we all know little girls are made of sugar and spice, and a bit of curry) – and then inside the book would be a host of ‘dresses’ that you could fold over the doll, so you could dress her up as you pleased. From my recollection they weren’t entirely satisfactory, as the little paper folds were never quite substantial enough to hold onto the dolls for long.
How do I know this, being a bloke? I have no idea – it’s possible in my non-bloke childhood I actually had something like this. But who can remember so long ago? Being an only child I wasn’t beholden to any brothers or sisters as to what I should or shouldn’t do, so it’s possible I dressed up little cardboard dolls. Or maybe I just saw them somewhere. (This ain’t confession time!)
Anyway, these days, things being what they are, with the Internet an’ all, you can do the same sort of thing online. It all looked a bit complicated to me, but no doubt my nearly-seven-year-old granddaughter would take one look at it and have it sussed in a matter of minutes. You can use these pixellated dolls for dress up games or become your own ‘dollmaker.’ I’m addressing that last sentence to little girls, by the way, little girls who are very with it when it comes to using the Net. My granddaughter is into something called Bratz – we have to stop her printing off every screen she comes across – and that’s very fashion conscious, with most of its games centring around fashion. (The characters all strike me as rather unlikely, but then, am I a seven-year-old girl?)
Or if, you aren’t seven, and you’d like to make use of these, you can turn them into avatars. Yes, you all know what avatars are. I talked about them in a post on the 8th of January. Go on, have a look. If you get lost, I'll tell you in the next post.
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Annie Gets Her Gun Again

Watched Annie Get Your Gun on DVD last night....it was the first time I'd seen it since the movie came out around 1950. (When I was a little lad.) One of the reasons it's been invisible, apparently, is that the film has been the subject of some dispute between Irving Berlin's estate and the film company.
It's a great DVD transfer: the colour is excellent, and the copy is very clean. The music has survived untainted, from the sensuous songs, The girl that I marry, and, They say that falling in love is wonderful, to the full-on-vocal-argument: Anything you can do I can do better, which is performed with such energy you wonder the two of them make it right through. The two of them being Betty Hutton (a replacement for Judy Garland, who took ill) and Howard Keel (who looks as though he was never ill). Hutton is full in your face - well, mostly in Keel's face - but you still wish that they'd made the movie when Ethel Merman was young enough to still do the part on screen. What a loss not to have a record of her performance in the part. You can't quite imagine her hopping around the stage with a rifle swinging, but nevertheless....
The music is what holds the piece together: the storyline is pretty thin, although the cast do their utmost to make sure we don't notice. But the male chauvinism of Frank Butler (I was almost going to write Rhett Butler) is never addressed; in fact, he's given leeway to maintain his arrogant male attitude because Annie lets him in the end, in order that they get together. You don't imagine it would be much of a marriage though; eventually she'd sock him one because he was so thick-skinned. Even Keel can't do much with a character who one minute is all gooey-eyed over Hutton and the next mostly gooey-eyed over himself.

And then there are the Indians. Shuffled around the background of the movie until Chief Sitting Bull makes an appearance, and even then mostly treated as bullet fodder. Sitting Bull at least is given some wisdom stuff to spout, and pulls the end of the story together, but his Sioux tribe are a pretty odd lot when they get a-dancing...! Supposedly Busby Berkeley was due to direct at one point; it's probably just as well he didn't. Whoever did the choreography wasn't much into Indian dancing, I suspect. These guys are a bunch of clowns without being funny.

The Players Go Wild!

Not long ago I saw a short clip on the Prime sports program, The Crowd Goes Wild, showing a couple of ice hockey players slugging it out while all the officials stood around on their skates waiting. Apparently they can’t interfere while the players are fighting. That’s probably a understatement, or shows a lack of knowledge, but to my amazement, fighting in hockey is actually allowed and there are rules relating to it!
The two guys who host the program, Andrew Mulligan and Mark Richardson, thought the standing-aside of the officials was pretty odd – but then it really would be in our national game of rugby. According to a long article on Wikipedia however, fighting in ice hockey has a whole host of rules which take quite some learning. Just goes to show that gentlemanliness is well and truly out of the sports arena, in terms of hockey anyway. And by hockey, by the way, I mean only ice hockey, since that’s what ‘hockey’ means in the States, I’ve now discovered. I don’t think anyone in the States plays what we here in NZ call hockey– at least not at the professional level of ice hockey.
There’s a whole site devoted to discussing the game online called NHL Forums, and it’s jam-packed with people talking about the game. You open it up and there’s no end of discussions, right there in your face. No fancy homepage, no pretty pictures: this is Ice Hockey with a capital I and H, and they’re aiming to reach 8 million posts pretty soon. This site’s been around for 5 years, which probably isn’t bad in terms of Internet life. Each of the posters appears to have a picture of their own on the left side, and there are the usual arguments and comments (how did he get number one post when he posted a reply to himself?) that have nothing to do with the topic in hand. Looks like there are quite a few video clips too – which I won’t watch since I just got told by my ISP that I’m nearly up to my limit for the month. Which seems incredible since I have a gig of usage and don’t really download anything large. Ce la vie.
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Steve Reich

The other evening coming home from work I was listening to a Steve Reich piece, one of those duets of his where two pianists are playing exactly the same phrase over and over, and then one gets out of synch slightly, and changes the sound of the rhythm, and then gradually they get further apart and slowly come together again. At first I just wanted to switch it off – there’s nothing more annoying than sheer repetition, but the subtle differences gradually got to me, and appealed. And really that’s all there is to this music: it’s like listening to something extremely mechanical that can’t quite stay in sync with itself, such as a large machine. There’s an odd fascination with it, and an irritation. I don’t know that you could call it music, as such, except in the broadest Charles-Ives sense.
At the moment, as I write this, there's something similar on the Concert Program. I don't know what it is, though it must end soon, because the requests section is due to start. It's more orchestral, but still has that awe-ful repetition going on, only here there's a bit more variety because there are more instruments. I'm not sure that I'd want to build my reputation on music that consists of tiny repeated phrases. I've just remembered that I've heard the Clapping Music recently too: that must be exceptionally difficult to do. Two musicians doing nothing but clapping, first in sync and then gradually out of sync. But in the end how is that particularly different from the piece I heard the other night? Or the thing that's on at the moment - which still hasn't come to an end?
Wait, it has come to an end, and it was Reich. But the announcer unhelpfully hasn't told us what it was exactly.

A J Hudson footnote

In some of the posts I do, I’m restricted from including other links, which is okay. Them’s the breaks. But sometimes it’s nice to add links to topics that get mentioned. So this is a kind of footnote post where you can click on the word, Dreamgirls, to find out more about the movie I mentioned in the last post. There’s also a very good bio of Jennifer Hudson at this link.
One thing I love about IMDB, the movie site (for those not familiar with those initials) is that you can find out all sorts of irrelevant things – well, they’re not irrelevant for the people involved, but in terms of what you start out searching for, they are. For instance, there are four other Jennifer Hudsons listed: the girl who sings in the movie is not a stunt artist, a member of the miscellaneous crew on Full Disclosure, an actress who doesn’t sing, nor someone who works in the Art Department. Now, didn’t you not want to know all that?

Are you listening?

Does a program like American/Australian/NZ Idol work? Is it of long-term benefit to the person who wins? For some people it obviously is, and sometimes it isn’t the winner who benefits. Jennifer Hudson made the finals of the show and then not only got slammed by at least one of the judges, but was ousted late in the proceedings. Nevertheless, she went on to play out the ‘American Idol’ summer tour, and followed this up with two years’ worth of concerts on the road. Perseverance was the key. In the auditions for the movie, Dreamgirls, she went on to beat the very American Idol she had performed with, Fantasia Barrino. for the part of Effie Melody White, the cast-off member of a group that was similar to the Supremes. Now she’s being touted as performing more powerfully in the movie than Beyonce Knowles, Eddie Murphy or Jamie Foxx. Since the movie appeared, she has already received the National Board of Review (for "Breakthrough Performance"), New York Film Critics Award, Phoenix Film Critic's Society Award, Golden Satellite Award and a Golden Globe nomination. That’s all just for starters.
In another area of music competition is a company called We Are Listening. Checking out their staff is intriguing. They’re based in London, but the Managing Director is Israeli by origin, the Marketing Manager is Italian, the Production Manager is Bolivian, the head of the Production team is another Israeli, the manager of business and creative development is Indian, the Web Developer is German, and the company solicitor is Spanish. Oh, yes, the Office Manager is a Brit – and the only woman on the team. (Is this what life is like now in the European Community? LOL)
The company’s goal is to create professional opportunities for singer-songwriters in particular, and with that in mind they host the Singer/Songwriter Awards to enable people to have their music evaluated by the music industry.
You can listen to the We Are Listening song contest winners, finalists and runners up. Their music (both the original recording they sent in, and the arranged version done with Steve Williams) are available on the website. Unlike streaming radio, I found there was a bit of interruption when I tried listening, but it might be that my broadband is a little slower than some. (The thing’s got to travel 12,000 miles, for crying out loud!)
When you’ve listened to the various artists, you can vote for your favourite, and if you like what you hear, you can download a range of podcasts that consists of the site’s indie catalogue - for free (!) Ah, the joys of the internet, and how much time you can spend doing things on it….
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L'Engle

It must be a long time since I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, because I’d forgotten most of it. I’d remembered it with some fondness, but a re-reading in the last few days shows that it starts off a lot better than it finishes. The first two thirds of the book bustles along at a great pace, but somewhere in the last third it loses momentum, and the ending is quite weak. I was reading along, thinking ‘this is going to lead to a great climax’ and then realised there were only half a dozen pages left. Meg’s rescue, on her own, of her precocious little brother, hinges on her being able to love him more than the strength of the darkness can brainwash him, and it’s over in a few sentences. It’s rather like the ending of the first Harry Potter book, where, after an enormous effort to get there, Harry seems to manage to deal with Voldermort in a matter of seconds. (The scriptwriter for the film realised this problem and gave a lot more room to the climax).

Still, L’Engle’s famous book has lots of charm, and, when it was published, was no doubt quite a wind change in the children’s publishing industry. It expected children to cope with long words and interesting concepts, including something that it took the general adult market another decade or more to deal with, in Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

I don’t know that I ever quite believe in the little brother, Charles Wallace (he’s called by this double-barrelled name throughout for some reason); he’s too perceptive to be true, and considering that his father only knew him as a toddler, and then was away for one or two years, the child can only be three or four. In spite of that, L’Engle gives him wise things and almost-adult things to say, and it’s hard to get a picture of him in your head. In fact, apart from saying that when he sits on a chair his feet dangle six inches from the floor, we’re not given much indication how big or old he is. Which is helpful to L’Engle, but a little annoying to the reader. Precocious children seem to delight some American authors. They’re not very true, and rather indicate that the author hasn’t looked lately at the average three or four-year-old. I have, and they ain’t much like this! Half the time you’re lucky if you can understand what it is they’re trying to get at, and I’m talking about the intelligent ones. In the end you get a picture of Charles Wallace in your head that makes him about seven, and you have to ignore L’Engle’s insistence that he must be a lot younger.

I still like L’Engle as a writer, though she can be annoyingly waffly at times. I read a much later book of hers a couple of years ago. The romance aspect of it was plain awful, in spite of the book as a whole having some very good writing. Think the book was Troubling a Star and it was about a girl going to Antarctica on a boat with a number of rather suspicious people – rather too many suspicious people, but never mind. Her autobiographical books suffer from a bit of waffle too, but there are so many gems amongst the waffle that you can accept the waffle and ignore it.

Buying up in Bulgaria

Rightly or wrongly, when I think of Bulgarians, I think of comic characters in operas, violent villains in movies, and other such negative pictures.
But Bulgaria, now that it’s been freed from Communism, is on the rise. You might even say it’s on the high rise, considering the number of apartment buildings that have been going up. And the image of the Bulgarians is altogether different to my stereotype.
Furthermore, a large number of Brits are buying up in Bulgaria, seeing it as the place to go for holidays. It’s still relatively cheap to live there, the air fares are good, and, most of all, the property values, though they’ve risen, are still economic by British standards. A few years ago you could buy a rural property for £5000. Though the price has tripled, by comparison with many other holiday spots, this is still a bargain.
There’s even a British real estate firm that specialises in Bulgaria Property. Someone got in on the act pretty smartly there!
And of course there are lovely coastlines and sunny beaches. Bit far for me to travel, but maybe one day….just like that maybe one day…Hawaii.

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Collaboration

Collaborating on writing a book has taken a new turn with the world of blogging.
Justin Patten, a solictor from the UK, has his own blog called Human Law, in which he posts recently about the way in which collaborative writing is becoming more frequent. He quotes an article from Computing Business: Wiki technology, for example, is now being used for knowledge management. ‘We’ve had people talking about knowledge management in the enterprise for decades and out pops Wikipedia.’"
Patten himself is writing a collaborative style book on blogging and the law. He’s set up a wiki (a website on which anybody can add to the content) to open up room for bloggers and writers in general to comment on what he’s saying and add to his mine of information.
And Greg Sandow, one of the bloggers on Arts Journal.com, has been writing, chapter by chapter, a book on the future of classical music. Bloggers have been critiquing this for some time and he’s now up to Book 2: Episode 16.
It’s a bit of a misnomer to call it ‘classical’ music, by the way. You might want to check out what I have to say about this, in a very introductory sort of way, in the box to the left, under Classical Music Isn’t Always Classical.

Washed by Soaps!

Soaps. You love ‘em or loathe ‘em – and a few of us sit somewhere in the middle, slightly uncomfortable on the fence, avoiding them one day, glancing at them another, and then getting totally involved in an episode – usually against our better judgement because we should be doing ‘something more important.’
It’s pretty scary to think, for instance, that Coronation Street has been running as long as I’ve been working: 46 years. Even scarier to think that William Roache, who plays Ken Barlow, has been working in that show, in that one part, for that same amount of time.
Even Shortland Street has been running 14 years. 14 years!
An article on Wikipedia talks about the regurgitating of stereotypes on these shows: as one character is killed off, another character turns up (not always straight away) to replace the now-missing stereotype. It’s perhaps more obvious in Coronation Street, but Shortland Street has its own stereotypes as well.
All these Soap Operas have their own sites, of course, but for the last five months or so a new US site has been up and running called, not surprisingly, soaps.com. It focuses on American soaps, particularly the daytime ones, and gives you just about all the info you’d ever need, from daily updates to news about characters, from comings and goings to spoilers, from weekly polls to a ratings race. There are nearly 100 links on the main page alone.
Don’t check it out when you should be doing ‘something more important.’
The home page is a little oddly laid out: one long column down the left, joining up eventually with another long column down the right. And a lot of it is pink. Hmmm….pink? Does this suggest that only women watch soaps?

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Wild Man

Watching Bruno Lawrence in Smash Palace again, after a number of years, I’m struck by how much he epitomises the ‘wild man’ so beloved of Robert Bly and his contemporaries. He rages, he lusts, he argues mightily, he gets angry. He has enough confidence in himself to offer not only the shirt off his back to his wife’s lover, but every other piece of clothing as well, until he stands naked in the street. He can pull the door off his wife’s house with his tow-truck if she won’t open it to him.
But he’s also gentle with his daughter, warm, and very loving. There’s only one scene in the movie where he gets angry with her, and at first we can’t tell whether he’s merely playing or is truly angry. His anger lasts for a moment, and he apologises to her, a seven-year-old child.
It could be said that these are all aspects of the character Lawrence plays, but this film would never have been what it is without Lawrence. He fits the role like a glove – or perhaps, the role fits him. Lawrence, in real life, was a wild man, thoroughly masculine, full of energy, crazy, often at odds with polite society. A bit scary even.

Using the money in your house

I met a man in the street once whom I’d worked with years before. I asked him, "What are you doing these days?’ ‘Oh, I’m practically a millionaire.’ What a hook line. What could you ask after that, but: ‘HOW?’
Turned out he’d got into the property market when it was at a low ebb. He bought up houses, rented them out, did them up, sold them on – all the sorts of things property people do. And because he’d started at the bottom of the wave, he made a lot of money.
What he didn’t tell us (we went to talk to him with another couple not long afterwards) was that the housing market was then closer to the top of the wave. In our enthusiasm for the subject, we missed out understanding this, and it was a major error that bugged us for a number of years after.
However, what it did do was give us insight into the idea of a Home Equity Loan.
The first house we bought this way turned out to be a dud. We rushed into it, as people with lot of enthusiasm and no experience (and maybe too little wisdom) do, and, after painting it more than once, and putting a new roof on, and attending to its various problems as the years went on, we finally got rid of it, for far less money than we needed to get.
However, when a situation arose where my daughter needed to move into town with her family, we knew the deal with Home Equity Loans, and had no problem hunting out a house and putting a deposit on it with the equity in our home. Long term we made enough on that house (thanks to our son-in-law) to cover all the losses on the other place.
When more recently my son and his wife needed extra cash to get off the ground with their new home, we were able to do the same thing. Learning about equity has been great. However, going into the property market is another thing altogether – and something I’d only recommend to people with nerves of steel!
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It's true, I tell ya!

Here’s a true Trade Me story. A woman bought a fridge off someone on Trade Me, and in the course of several emails back and forth finally asked, Whereabouts are you, as a matter of interest? The other woman gave her address. It was right next door.

On the coattails of fame

My wife pointed out to me an interesting fact a few months back when Kiri te Kanawa, Ana James, and Anna Leese sang together at Twickenham.
Here’s the paragraph that appeared in the newsletter of the Kiri te Kanawa Foundation.
Jonah Lomu's recent return to rugby, following his kidney transplant, was marked by a charity match at Twickenham in honour of former English Captain Martin Johnson. The match was televised throughout the world. Jonah asked Dame Kiri to sing at the opening ceremony and she in turn requested that two of the young singers she had been working with, sing with her. Ana James (first recipient of a Foundation grant) and Anna Leese joined Dame Kiri for an unforgettable experience which also gave them both invaluable experience – and exposure.
What my wife pointed out was that at various points in time I’d accompanied all three of these singers. Nothing like swinging on the coattails of fame!
Kiri te Kanawa was in her second year of study at the London Opera Centre when I went there (for one year) to do the Repetiteur’s course. This was back in 1967/8. I worked with her as a repetiteur a number of times, because that’s what the singers and repetiteurs did, but on one occasion also accompanied her at a very unmemorable concert in the depths of Surrey – or somewhere! It was one of those concerts put on for a select group (a rather wealthy select group, I seem to remember) and they were probably as interested in music as I am in making money on shares – that is, marginally. Kiri drove me down to the concert and home again, a longish journey, and I have no idea what we talked about.
I accompanied Ana James quite often when she was in her early singing stages. She was always a wonderfully focused young singer, and had a voice that was a gift. We performed at local concerts and competitions (where she usually won). And then suddenly, she was moving into the big time, and no doubt has a long career ahead of her.
Anna Leese and I had much less to do with each other. We had one practice together for a concert put on, I think, by the Dunedin Opera Company at the Mayfair – one of their perennial Sunday afternoon concerts, if I recall. I seem to remember there was a pianist of some note there too, who played souped-up versions of popular classics. Anna knew her song without any help from me, and all I did was keep up with her. She was also another very focused young singer with a remarkable gift of a voice, and is proving that by the way she’s forged ahead so early in her career.
Photos from The Newsletter of the Kiri te Kanawa Foundation

Online Shopping

I’ve just been watching an online video for the company, Magnet Commerce, and it was very tempting to sign up for their 15 day free trial! The only trouble is I’d probably want to go further than the trial, and at the moment I really don’t have the justification for opening an online shop.

Magnet Commerce offers the software to get a shop online for someone who wants to sell online but doesn’t have the means or expertise to get the thing off the ground. You don’t have to download anything – which is always a plus. Everything is provided online, even graphics if you don’t want to upload those yourself. It’s like having a database, catalogue, invoicing system, and admin all on tap.

There were several times when I debated doing this kind of thing with OC Books when I was there, but we never quite got to a decision on the subject. (When I say ‘we’ I mean I never persuaded myself that this was the way to go…at that point.) If I’d come across Magnetcommerce ecommerce software, I might have gone for it. It’s not hugely expensive (the price depends on where you’re working from) especially when you compare all the costs of setting up such a thing yourself.

At OC Books, the suppliers who had online databases were the ones you tended to go back to more readily than those that would reply when they got round to it. With online databases you could tell at the drop of a hat whether the company had something on hand, or how long it would take to get it. That’s my kind of system.

Magnet Commerce also supports multiple languages and multiple currencies on the same store. That’s pretty effective: I could start a shop that sold to people in countries as widespread as India and Indonesia, Ireland and Iran. You don’t have to have a separate ‘shop’ for each location: you just manage them all from the one application. Ah, you say, but would they support all sorts of languages? Well, according to their site: "Any language you want to enable can be supported. Simply contact us and let us know which languages you want to use!" You can deal in multiple currencies too.

Another advantage, they tell me, is that their system is built on the latest ASP.NET 2.0 technology also using Microsoft SQL database. Unfortunately I don’t exactly know what that means, but it sounds impressive. I recognise SQL, because my son and I have talked about it a few times – it means Structured Query Language, if that’s any help. It’s a way of getting information from a database, and updating the database in return. (That’s putting it somewhat simply!)

Being of a curious nature, I checked out Microsoft ASP.NET on Google. It’s a free technology that allows programmers to create dynamic web applications, and can be used to create anything from small, personal websites through to large, enterprise-class web applications. You can see I’m pretty enthusiastic about Magnet Commerce. Good!
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Re-Viewing Smash Palace

I've just watched Smash Palace again after some twenty plus years. It stands up well to the test of time, and though I remembered certain scenes quite well, others had gone completely – including the ending, thank goodness, which, when you think about it, is borrowed from Buster Keaton’s The General.
It has the feel of an ‘art’ film, rather than a commercial one – though it was a commercial success. (The Piano was also an art film, and borrowed heavily from the moody and gloomy 60s/70s European art films, borrowed without somehow taking up their intellectual depth.)
Smash Palace has the great advantage of starring Bruno Lawrence – and Greer Robson. Their scenes together are a delight (apparently she regarded him as a kind of a second father, her own father having abandoned his family sometime before she made the movie), and the film would never have been the success it was without these two. Anna Jemison (these days, for some reason, known as Anna Maria Monticelli) is good, has a kind of glow onscreen and is effective, but doesn’t receive the sympathy she perhaps should. Donaldson himself was having some marriage problems at the time he wrote the script and these are reflected in the way he treats the characters. You root for Lawrence much more readily than for Jemison, who comes across as being rather selfish.
In a documentary on the DVD version, someone notes that American actors such as Jack Nicholson greatly admired Lawrence for his absolute honesty and openness on the screen – and the raw emotion he could bring. The same person comments that while actors such as Nicholson have those same sorts of qualities, it’s unlikely any of them would ever do the scene in which Lawrence divests himself of all his clothes – except his gumboots – and stands there shouting (‘with his dick hanging out’ says the person) at his wife and her ostensible lover. The scene could have been ridiculous; somehow with Lawrence it’s believable. Even the kidnapping of the girl in the chemist’s survives – although it’s absurd – because Lawrence makes it work.
And there are a couple of wonderful lines connected to this scene: as Lawrence is dragging the girl out of the shop she weeps that she can’t go with him: she’s got a hair appointment at three o’clock. It’s so ridiculous in the middle of the tension that it works. Later, as Bruno lets her go, he says, ‘Hurry up, you’ve only got a few minutes.’ She turns to look at him, terrified that he’s changed his mind about letting her get away. ‘What for?’ she asks. ‘Your hair appointment.’

Smaller and smaller cellphones

My kids and my wife have always been enthusiasts for the latest in cellphones – and they’re constantly taking pictures on them, as well as short videos. I’m still in the basic cellphone mode, because it’s taken me a while to be bothered with having a cellphone, and all I really need one for is a bit of communication now and then. Such as when the car stops in the middle of nowhere, as it did when we were travelling to Christchurch the other day. One minute going fine, next minute going nowhere.
My daughter tells me the Motorola Z3 is commonly called The Razor (based on the initials RIZR). It’s razor thin, amongst things, and it has – well, I don’t know what it doesn’t have. A click flick through the list tells me there’s Bluetooth wireless technology, colour screen, data capability, email connectivity, handsfreeability, MP3 player usability, and voice dialability. Why would you go anywhere else? as the ad (for something else) goes.
And of course, most important of all – for some people – you can get stylish ring tones, and groovy screen tattoos. (Screen tattoos? Oh, will you get with it! They’re like tattoos that you’d have on your body except that you have them on your screen. It’s obvious.)
Ring tonability and screen tattooability. And did I mention it’s razor thinability, too?

You can buy the Motorola MOTOKRZR online, wherever you are.

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godunedin

I mentioned godunedin.co.nz a couple of posts ago. At first it appeared not to exist, but it does, and the helpdesk at gopromotions has just informed me that it "is currently Dunedin's busiestwebsite with half a million pages viewed each month."
I've just had a proper look at it - now that I've found it - and it's certainly a lively site. If you want to know anything about our fair city, check it out. It's even got a webcam going - you can move across eight different locations and see what bits of us look like.

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.