Intentions and Wheely bins.

I've been meaning to write more here. But I have been too damn busy. Exciting projects, a beautiful baby girl, getting the house ready for winter and today: a rotating clothes line!

But to start a bit earlier on...



GetReal kicked off on .. and we were instantly caught in a whirlwind of media attention. We seemed to have judged the collective mood well that the mainstream was developing an interest in plastic bags and our first campaign nailed the issue.

We quickly decided to amp up the campaign a bit and decided we needed a stronger analogue team to compliment the digital one. My part of the project was to provide Angus with a prop that gave him some street presence as he signed people up.

This version has an internal desk, hanging shelf inside and a display board that props the lid open. I wanted to lie it down and have it work as an emergency activist sleeping shelter but Angus wasn't that keen :-)

I also sorted out a laptop charging system using some gel cells from Wastebusters but in practice having people squint at a laptop in the street doesn't work. Bring on ePaper..

Get Real Kiwis - www.getreal.org.nz

Part of my work last week was creating a project scope around the idea of moving the excellent lobbying work being done from the Wanaka Wastebusters HQ into a national conversation with interested people.

What we are looking for is a mandate to be a bigger actor in the decision making process around the creation of waste and recycling. The work that is already being done would be all that more powerful if we had a documented constituency behind us.

There are many precedents for bringing ideologically close people together through the Internet to support campaigns, the likes of Get Up Australia and more politically partisan the recent Move On campaign in the USA.

I put a lot of thought into the possible manifestations and decided that to maintain any momentum the presence has to be more a conduit than a single issue site, a rolling maul of campaigns around issues which we can offer high level research and action. It could also act as a vehicle for other activists who share our leanings and are looking to connect with a broader voice.

Of course we have to be careful (thanks Phil) of asking questions with out a context and only ones we can actually deliver results on with the right support. What is exciting about Wastebusters is we have the resources and the skills to do this, we are not starting from scratch.

Once the idea crystallized I started mapping it out in a database data structure - I find this can, strangely, be a good logical test of what is a social idea. A bit of tuning, a re-presentation, a fortuitously available CakePHP collaborator and we should be live in a couple of weeks.

Insulation - Round 2

My house is the first house I designed and therefore comes under the 'allowable mistakes' section I guess. I mistake is only a problem if is not assimilated into future practice, and of course remedied.

One of the biggest was not sealing the strawbale wall top adequately, combined with the curved and therefore gappy nature of the surfeit it resulted in way too mch air movement through the rafter cavity. The roof is insulated on the exterior of the waterproof membrane so the dew point can not be inside but with the rafter cavity running some brisk natural air-con the insulation never really got to do its job.

So, the problem sat in my draft addled head for many years. How best to inject insulation with the least amount of work and maximum impact.

I found Paul Kennets house insulation project very inspiring but I didn't really want polystyrene inside the house where it could rain down through the micro gaps in the T&G ceiling. But the method made sense.

My belief is that an unwanted singular thing can be a problem, waste I guess - but a lot of an unwanted thing is normally a resource I started looking for insulation options from the wastestream. It didn't take long to find bedding grade polyester fibre insulation offcuts through the Christchurch waste exchange Terranova. Toby and I needed a shipping container so as it was travelling empty I took a day to fill it with free insulation in Christchurch and ship it down.

So the last few months has been the occasional session of ripping up 30m3 of insulation and blowing it into the roof space with a Ryobi leaf blower on suck (over 200kmh muzzle velocity!). Kinda noisy and mindless work but it already seems warmer.

Activism is Farming - And why the the Maniototo should have wind farms

I just watched a TED talk, yep another amazing human doing great things. This time Willie Smits applying what I would call 4d farming or something - basically just doing the right thing. Thinking and acting in more than his own interest.

What really struck me was how much the failed land in the video looked like the New Zealand farming estate. Mono culture, dry, ugly. Actually Otago is more ugly as it is covered in high straight wire fences.

It is a real shame we do not have Orangutans, otherwise we could get some public support and rehabilitate our land to be productive and fertile too.

Being Green

I went to the Green Party meeting in Cromwell on the weekend and it got me riled up again about how, for me, the Green Party even thought my natural colour does not sit easy in my stomach.

It kinda goes back to something I wrote in Germany last year which is here..

Anyway to clear the mind I made a wee advert and sent off an email. Thanks to Mark for the photo, love that Mark. And Nico to for the biceps.

New job!

I started my new job at Wanaka Wastebusters world HQ yesterday, two days a week - Tuesday and Wednesdays. I'm not sure of my title yet but I am gunning for Chief Disruptor. I am perfectly qualified for the post anyway.

And what will this entail? Well it is a mix of moving the office processes forward into the 2000's based on what worked at Cactus and making some of the more esoteric projects reality using what I have learned with Cooreea. Very exciting.

I feel extremely lucky to be in this position and I am pretty sure it is going to work out..very well.

Displaylink - Finally

I went looking to buy a new monitor today - and ran into something interesting. I rarely get excited about new hardware...but...I imagined something like this four years ago and now it's here!

I always thought monitors would ultimately be a similar resource to a computer as a webcam, keyboard or mouse. Imagine getting rid of the annoying cables and being able to chain them together USB style or use small 2.4ghz wireless connectors. Your monitor could be on the other side of the lounge and you could play your movie to it from your laptop with no string connected. Ah bliss - they are here.

http://www.displaylink.com/

There are only Asus ones in NZ so far I think, and surprisingly Dell doesn't show any. I think I'll have to wait till there is a bigger range...

Ubuntu, VMware and Graphics applications

I have had an excellent experience running Ubuntu under VMPlayer on XP as my development webserver. It's faster than WAMP and easily transportable.

So, when it came to rebooting Merles Dell 1330 which has had consistent networking issues with Vista I thought, hell, we could have Ubuntu running on the wee guy and Vista running as a guest under VM.


This would have the benefit of the guest being easily back-up-able with the apps installed and transportable across computers.

Turns out that is good in theory and not in practice, mainly because running graphics apps is so ram hungry (I think). Vista with apps took up over 20gb and was crazy slow.

So it is back to Vista, a shame because Ubuntu 8.10 was amazing. It recognised all the hardware first go and was a fast joy to use.

Darwin and Spark

One of my current projects with Merle is doing a brand and graphic scheme for "On the Road Recycling", an initiative of CBEC through Remarkable Recyclers.

The challenge is to, in a positive light, make people on holiday want to engage with the recycling system: buy a pre-paid plastic bag, fill it as they travel and deliver it to a participating recycle centre.

I do not like the word 'waste' and if I had my way it would be replaced with 'resource'. In our brainstorming and sketching I have been playing with portraying the items you may recycle as something that has it's own will, it's own journey it wants to go on.

Bernina 730 - Finally

I have been holding a mint Bernina 30 series in my 'wanted' list for a few years now. I thought it was going to arrive at the recycling centre but in the end it was a Trademe job, a present from my Grandma Gee through my Mum, Mum has had hers since the late 1960's and it is still going strong.

The Bernina 30 series are famous and this 730 was originally purchased in Hokitika on the 28th Feb, 1964 (it still has the manual and warranty), and I reckon since then it can not have had more than a few hundred hours running.

Like all machinery that has been sitting around it needed a good oil. The top access door wouldn't open, and I discovered a capacitor in the motor that was broken. I posted questions to the BerninaThirtySomethings newsgroup on Yahoo and within hours had expert advice from around the globe, problems fixed.

It still has a slight drag in the action, but it sews well so we'll see over th enext few months how it goes. First up? Curtains for winter and a skirt for Merles growing belly ;-)