• Jamestown
• Bit.Trip Runner
• Super Meat Boy
• Shank
• NightSky HD

Pay more than the current average to get Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+!

Cave Story+ and Super Meat Boy are seriously good games, and each on their own is worth the price of admission. And you get to decide that price! I’m not kidding. Go buy these great video games NOW, even if you don’t have time to play them right now. Support some really good charities while you do.

UPDATE: five extra games were added this morning: VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves, Hammerfight, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Cogs. And every game in the bundle also now comes with its soundtrack for you to add to your music collection. Only seven days left!

• @vodafonenz: Now official – Twitter coming soon to a TXT near you: [url] at 9:16 AM May 12th
• Vodafone NZ’s press release says they will use the shortcode TWTR (8987) and says “The service will launch in the coming weeks.”
• Twitter have yet to post on their blog that they now support New Zealand. I speculate that they will not do so until the service is actually live to customers.
• @telecomnz: We have partnered with Twitter to bring you Twitter to your Mobile via TXT msg from May 29! at ~3:00 PM May 12th
  
• @telecomnz: Telecom Mobile Customers from May 29 can msg 8987 (TWTR) to update their twitter account or receive tweets via TXT at ~3:00 PM May 12th
• Yet, Telecom’s media department doesn’t back it up: no press release has been made at Telecom’s Media Releases page as of yet.
• National Business Review fails at journalism and provides more proof that old media just doesn’t get it: copy/pastes from Vodafone’s press release, forgets that Twitter SMS is available in the USA, UK and India and may have just missed Twitter’s news of adding Canada, adds word ‘exclusive’: Vodafone scores exclusive Twitter deal
• @nzben: @TelecomNZ Is that a piggy-back on Vodafone’s connection, or a separate agreement? at ~2:00 PM May 12th
  
• @telecomnz: @nzben a seperate agreement with Twitter. at ~2:00 PM May 12th
  
• Google News: “vodafone new zealand” twitter shows that other old-media sources FAIL and think the deal is exclusive, including NetGuide.
• Twitter announces official support to New Zealand SMS, with update support for all, but Twitter to handset delivery for Vodafone NZ customers, with other networks, and Australia support to follow!

Any news, just leave a comment including any and all links to public sources and I’ll do my best to keep this up to date.

My photo “Carpeted Commons” won the Creative Commons Swag Photo Contest for 2007, and here was my prize: 100 postcards with my photo on them! w00t!

My slides for the talk I did (PDF, 180kb)

My slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.  You are free to share and remix my work without limitation as long as you credit me, Brett Taylor, with a link to this blog post.

. . .

I had a really good time at the WDANZ Conference. While there wasn’t a spectacular turn out, the quality of the speakers was second-to-none. I learned an absolutely epic amount of stuff about the business hemisphere of this industry, and met some of the most highly respected developers in New Zealand. I won’t be missing the next WDANZ conference in my city!

“The New Internet: Communicating on Today’s Web” Slides

I had a great time sharing about the exciting new ways to get your audience involved, and the feedback I got from you all was really great — feel free to ask questions in the comments here — cheers!

People, you don’t need to play to Big Media’s rules anymore — the rules are changing, and if your audience is discerning, they’ll follow you as long as you’ve got the goods.  But with great power comes great responsibility: use the tools wisely

Saturday March 10 2007
St James Auckland
$60-90

Get tickets to Weird Al now! I’ll hopefully be going!

Tomek, Nahum, and I are organising a Rails session for newbies this month. We aim to make it the best Rails session yet. We’ve organised some books to give away, a discount for O’Rielly, and will be putting on Pizza (and hopefully beer if we find a sponser. The session will be about building a basic blog app, but the overriding theme will be to get the uninitiated but curious, and the beginners along, and give them a taste of the good stuff. We aim to nuture their curiousity into a love of Rails – which will benefit the entire Wgtn software development scene.

What: Getting started with Ruby on Rails – a community based approach
When: 6:30pm, Tuesday, 31st October 2006
Where: CreativeHQ, 25a Marion Street, Te Aro, Wellington (behind Resene Paint)
Presented by: Nahum Wild
Intended audience: Anyone interested in Ruby on Rails.
Prerequisites: Interest in Ruby on Rails. Knowledge of programming in any language will be useful during the live demo.
Refreshments: Hell pizza
Cost: Free. It’s a community event. It is our turn to give back.

The format will be as follows:

• Arrive between 6:30 and 7pm.
• Start at 7pm: Welcome and introduction
• Quick overview of Ruby on Rails and its main underlying design pattern: Model-View-Controller
• An end to end demonstration of how to build a simple blog application in Rails.
• Q&A time.

Interested? Only 12 places left… Find out more about this event! I’m looking forward to this one…

This one has certainly done the rounds — I don’t believe there’s a net-savvy New Zealander who hasn’t seen it already, but in case you missed it:

LOL ROFL LOL @ TELECOM.

To all those who invested in Telecom shares and got burned recently, Nelson from The Simpsons said it best: HAW-HAW!

Corporate Telecommunication Still Sucks.

SubEthaEdit is basically multiplayer notepad – it allows you to collaborate with others across a network, all editing the same file in different places.

I don’t know if I’d use it personally, but hey, commercial software for free is not something I’d balk at

My first big task as CC was to sign all the diplomas which were only just made available to sign the day I assumed the role.

This was a big deal for me. The diploma document is a symbol of proficiency in a skill; a talisman representative of knowledge and ability, if you will. Identifying myself with these student’s time was kinda scary but in an exciting way. It felt important, and I didn’t feel like I should be the one signing them: I wasn’t the course co-ordinator while they were studying. But seeing as the regular CC was on leave, it fell to me. Proudly, I rose to the occasion.

My existing signature isn’t particularly appealing nor can I consistantly reproduce it, so I spent like a good 15 minutes re-creating and practicing my signature. I like it much better than my old chicken scrawl splat of a signature I had.

And so, armed with a sufficently better signature, I signed the diplomas for the students graduating this Friday. Congratulations to all of them. There are a lot of classes there that had finished before I began at Natcoll, and there are classes there I had a lot to do with, especially last year’s 07s who finished earlier this year.

MacZOT is updated every week day with a new piece of discounted shareware, available for instant purchase, while stocks last. Every so often they mix it up and offer a Myztery ZOT, which is an unknown package of many pieces of software for an amazingly discounted price.

I’m posting this story to maybe scam me a free copy of AppZapper with what MacZOT is calling a “BlogZOT” — every post linking to MacZot will put the price down by five cents. If we get 259 posts about MacZot, 1000 people will get it for FREE…. wooooooot! Be in quick, there’s only like 2h45 minutes to go before the software will be available

And hey, you can help! I need people to sponsor me to make it all worthwhile. This year’s famine is about stopping child labour. For every $300 raised through the famine, World Vision will help a family in India to start a business so they can support themselves without needing their children to work in bonded labour.

And I’ve discovered that you can even sponsor me online! World Vision have set up a system that lets Faminers register their famine books online and get people to sponsor them online! It’s pretty neat.

So you can go pledge your sponsorship of me here:

Even if you only give NZD$2, that little part will go towards helping children from more than twelve countries worldwide. $10 will provide a family of five with a health checkup and basic medical supplies in India. $150 will provide seeds for one Tanzania primary school so they can provide daily meals for their students for a year!

It all adds up! Sponsor me and help change the world!