A blog about my passions. May include some or all of the following: geek stuff (web design & development, CSS, accessibility, usability), environmental activism, my adopted home of New Zealand ('cos it's so totally wonderful), international & green politics (rants from a left-wing perspective), gardening, cats, literature, rugby, and a whole lot of other stuff besides.
Actually, what a great couple of days - snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow, snow! In Wellington! How crazy is that?
By the time we finished band practice last night it was snowing in downtown Wellington - big fat wobbly flakes of snow that reduced most of us to 6-year-olds as we pranced around outside enjoying every cold moment of it.
Hazel and I went to Alice's house for tea (we threw snowballs at Hamish on the way which was very funny) and when it was time for me to drive home it was a veritable blizzard. It was completely surreal driving carefully through the quiet streets as the snow whirled around my car like a swarm of angry white bees - something I don't think I've experienced since I was a student in the UK about a million years ago.
Here are a couple of pictures taken from my house last night:
Street lights illuminating the whirling snow
A wider view of the snow-clad valley
Yesterday's MetService 3-day snow warning for Wellington - saved for posterity
This morning I was very excited to see that some of last night's snow was still there - not much - but it was definitely snow! Too cool....
I thought that was snow on the hills last night - but it was too dark to tell - daylight brings clarity, and I never imagined I'd ever see our little hills with a dusting of the white stuff!
A teeny bit of snow in my back garden this morning
Snow on the Rimutakas
I was in town today - and I'm so glad I was because - not content with giving us a bit of a blizzard last night - it decided to do it all over again today!
Obligatory picture of me in the snow
Snow on Taranaki Street
@stephenfry tweeted about all of us going nuts in the Wellington snow:
And then he tweeted that the whole country was losing the plot:
Bless!
And someone called Ro Tierney made the most beautiful video of snow on Cuba Mall (and how happy it makes people feel). LOVE IT:
I love the way that weird and wonderful natural events bring out the best in people - our inner child was on full display today.
The girl waiting at the bus stop this morning gave me a huge smile as I approached and told me how much she loved my coat (crazy purple felted hippy coat from Sweden).
When it began to snow this morning everyone raced to the windows to look, and then raced outside to take photos and dance around catching snowflakes on their sleeves.
The bus driver this evening was giving us all a running commentary and making sure he told everyone the route had changed 'cos the hill up to Karori was too steep and snowy for the buses to get up.
By the time I got home it was nearly dark, but I got a few shots of my street in the dusky snow-light. Lovely!
Snowy street, snowy cars
Snowy street looking down the valley
Winter wonderland
Snow-clad cabbage tree
My back garden - with somewhat more snow than there was this morning
Yup - for a once-in-50-years experience - this one has been pretty special.
Maybe it'll do it all again tomorrow! Fingers crossed!
I'm a strong believer in Unions and workers rights in general. Many of the rights we have as working people today are thanks to the sterling efforts of Unionists around the globe who fought for better conditions and better pay. We have a great deal to thank them for.
However, I also believe in having a decent strategy when you're fighting for change, and I think it's vital to pick your battles carefully.
Choosing to use the nuclear option at a very early stage by attempting to hold a multi-million dollar corporation to ransom when you have no aces in your hand is a risky strategy at best - and at worst (as we have seem with the whole Hobbit debacle) it can come back and bite you in the ass - hard.
It can also put the jobs of many of your fellow workers in jeopardy - and if you're on the side of the working stiff, as the Equity actors claim to be - surely that should also include the film crew, the pre- and post-production teams, the extras, the support staff and everyone else involved in or affected by the trickle-down effect of shooting (or not shooting) a $500 million movie in New Zealand?
Tomorrow the Warner Brothers executives will be here to hold emergency talks about the future of The Hobbit in New Zealand. They will be deciding on whether to spend their money here, whether to employ our incredibly talented and experienced film crews here, and ultimately they will be deciding whether or not we will be able to keep our unique title of "Middle-earth".
Do I wish that they didn't have that level of power over so many Kiwis' livelihoods? Yes of course - but the fact is, they do - and I'm hoping that a strong turnouts at the nationwide Rally of Hope to support filming of "The Hobbit" in New Zealand will serve to show Warner Brothers how much the people of New Zealand support Peter Jackson's wish to film The Hobbit here, and how hard we'll work to make sure that it happens.
RALLIES FOR ALL NEW ZEALANDERS, Industry & public on Labour Day Monday, 12.30 for 1pm-2pm!
These POSITIVE rallies of support are timed to coincide with the visit of Warner Bros. movie executives to discuss moving The Hobbit away from NZ. We're going to show them that we like them, we want The Hobbit filmed here and we SUPPORT Sir Peter.
These rallies will also emphasize the points other groups like film techs intend to make in the national media to influence Warners.
They are NOT protests against certain groups.
Invite ALL of your friends!!!
"Is the movie going to come or go? We don't know. Warners are coming here next Monday and we've got to fight like hell," Sir Peter Jackson.
Here are my placards:
LOTR Oscars: 17
Premiere of ROTK: 120,000 people
Awesome NZ locations: 268,021 km2
Skilled & experienced crew: thousands
Keeping The Hobbit in NZ: priceless
New Zealand is Middle-earth
...these are cool too - people from all over the world are sending in video messages of support - if you can't make it to one of the rallies, you can do the same. More info on how to contribute a video here - Calling for Video Support! and view all the videos here - videosforclip's Channel.
I'm doing a Snoopy Happy Dance here at home, after the government today announced they were backing down on their plans to mine our National Parks.
Looks like I'm not going to have to chain myself to the bulldozers after all. Well, not right this minute, anyway.
Thank God there's someone in the National Party who's able to see that they got it really, really wrong - and that it would be political suicide to continue with their plans in the face of such enormous opposition.
Mind you, that person is most definitely not Gerry Brownlee - spinning the announcement madly this evening by saying that this is nothing less than a mandate from the people to go ahead and mine the shit out of the rest of the country instead. Just go ahead and try it, Gerry - and I think in many places you'll find the opposition is just as strong as it was for the Schedule 4 areas.
I emailed Gerry Brownlee, John Key and Kate Wilkinson when this whole thing blew up. This is what I said:
I am outraged. How dare you???
Our National Parks and conservation areas are our taonga. They are what makes us special, and unique, and what many of the tourists who spend $9billion a year here come to see. Not for nothing do our many visitors call New Zealand "the most beautiful place in the world".
And you want to dig them up and destroy parts of our precious heritage for ever - in the name of profit - most of which will go to the mining companies? Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation from a mining industry consultant - and without seeking any advice on the impact of mining on our tourism industry? Unbelievable.
You selfish, small-minded, greedy bastards. Yes I'm angry - I'm downright furious. I'm currently listening to Ms Wilkinson ranting on in parliament. My God. If she's the Minister for Conservation, then God help the environment.
"Surgical mining"? Is that like 'scientific whaling' by any chance? Don't lie to us - some people may be fooled, but the majority are not - and for many of us, me included - this is our line in the sand.
I'm sending you this message from the Forest & Bird website. I joined the organisation yesterday - I've never been a member before - specifically because you are trying to prevent DoC staff from discussing mining with F&B. How pathetic. What are you afraid of? They've revealed nothing that isn't true.
In the space of just a few months you have turned me back into a political activist - after 20 years of relative political inactivity. Good for you. I suspect I am not the only one. I also suspect that the passion you have unleashed in those of us who care about our environmental heritage will be far stronger than the vague feelings of greed you have stirred up in those poor deluded fools who actually believe your lies and spin.
National and ACT - the parties that know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Prepare for a fight, because that's what you're gonna get. We're not going to let you do this.
Back when I wrote that email I didn't know just how much opposition there would actually be. I was hopeful - I knew yer average Kiwi was proud of our beautiful National Parks, and I knew there would be many people who were, like me, outraged at the prospect of parts of them being destroyed for 30 pieces of silver - but I wasn't 100% sure that there'd be enough of an outcry to make them stop.
I knew we had to hit them hard and hit them fast - it's much easier to stop plans like these at an early stage than it is to try and stop them when you've reached the chaining-yourself-to-the-bulldozers stage.
I will be forever grateful to the Green Party, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace and all the other groups who joined forces under the banner of 2precious2mine - and who all utilised the power of the internet, social networking, online organising and online submission-making to get 47,000 signatures on the Greens' anti-mining petition, 40,000 people demonstrating against the proposals in Auckland in May, and 37,552 New Zealanders making submissions, the vast majority of which opposed the government's plans. Now that's people power in action.
I was banking on something I mentioned in my email - I suspected that the passion felt by those who opposed the mining would be much stronger than any vague feelings of greed in those who either didn't care about our environmental heritage, or who believed the government's spin that mining was the only possible solution to our economic woes.
From that perspective, I felt that even if we were in the minority, we'd work until we dropped to make sure the mining didn't happen - and that we'd be able to win through sheer force of will, even if we didn't quite have the numbers.
Turns out I underestimated my fellow Kiwis just a bit - and that a majority were opposed to mining anyway, which is awesome - and that a HUGE number of people felt passionately enough about it to get off their asses and make themselves heard - which is extremely awesome.
I think in retrospect, the tipping point was probably the sheer number of National supporters who were also horrified by their party's plans. (Well, that and John Key's desperate need to retain his Mr Popular image). I don't think Brownlee et al saw that coming at all - although, honestly, if they couldn't see the NIMBY vote coming out in full force in Auckland to protect their beautiful playgrounds in the Coromandel and Great Barrier Island, then they're more stupid than I thought.
I was struck by a conversation I had with a friend of mine who is generally "All National, All The Time". We rarely talk politics these days 'cos we never agree and we'd rather stay friends than fight - so I was completely amazed to be discussing the mining proposals with her and to be hearing her say how outraged she was, and how untrustworthy she feels her party has become, and how she doesn't believe much of anything they say any more - and how if there was an election tomorrow she might not be able to bring herself to vote for them!
Holy hell! For me, that was huge. I have no doubt that National's pollsters were well aware of the backlash from their party faithful, and I'm betting that that had a major influence on their decision to do a 180. It's one thing to stir up anger and protest in a bunch of lefties and greenies who are never going to vote for you anyway - and quite another to offend your own party members to such an extent that they begin contemplating not voting for you any more...
I see two dark clouds on the horizon of this otherwise sunny day of celebration.
The first is that the government is changing the rules so that the Energy and Resources Minister will now be included in decisions regarding access to conservation land. Currently those decisions are made by the Minister for Conservation alone.
The fact that the guy trying to promote mining now gets to influence decisions made by the woman who (in theory at least) is supposed to be standing up for the rights of the environment is a big concern, and one which has not escaped the notice of environmental groups, including ECO (Environment and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa New Zealand):
The Government decision not to take areas from Schedule Four is welcome, but the Government decision to give the Minister of Energy and Resources effective control over mining access to conservation land was a major step backwards, the Environment and Conservation Organisations (ECO) said today.
ECO co-chair Cath Wallace said the decision on schedule 4 protected land is a victory for all those who made submissions, marched and signed petitions against the proposal to open up further conservation land to mining. “The government deserves credit for listening to them.”
“The Government should now listen to those submitters and not include the Minister of Economic Development (Gerry Brownlee) in making decisions on other conservation land.”
Ms Wallace said the process showed that neither Gerry Brownlee nor his Ministry understood the real values of conservation areas and the attachment New Zealanders have to it.
The second dark cloud is the direction in which Gerry is already spinning this:
"From my perspective this has been a valuable exercise. I suspect few New Zealanders knew the country had such considerable mineral potential before we undertook this process, and I get a sense that New Zealanders are now much more aware of that potential and how it might contribute to economic growth.
"Essentially the discussion process identified where the minerals industry can and can't go. As many people have pointed out, around 85 per cent of the country is not protected by Schedule 4, and a great deal of that land has mineral potential.
"New Zealanders have given the minerals sector a clear mandate to go and explore that land, and where appropriate, within the constraints of the resource consent process, utilise its mineral resources for everyone's benefit," Mr Brownlee said.
The government has also decided to undertake a significant aeromagnetic survey of non Schedule 4 land in Northland and on the West Coast of the South Island to learn more about which areas have the highest concentrations of valuable minerals.
"I am delighted to announce that the aeromagnetic survey in Northland will be conducted as a partnership between central government and the various agencies of local government in Northland.
"It is our expectation that when that data becomes available there will be an escalation of mineral exploration and extraction in those areas, which will be of benefit to the economies of both regions."
Only a politician could spin an outcry against one thing into a "clear mandate" in favour of something quite similar but not exactly the same.
It was completely obvious to anyone with half a brain that the government never had any intention of mining in the Coromandel or Great Barrier Island - they'd have lost Auckland and therefore the election if they'd pursued that goal - but at the time I figured that these were just a smokescreen.
I figured they'd back down with great fanfare on one or both areas, "Hey look! Aren't we democratic? We listened to the people!" and then go quietly away and mine somewhere else instead while people weren't looking.
Which is essentially what they are planning to do, if Gerry's spin is anything to go by. I thought they'd go away and mine another bit of Schedule 4 land (Paparoa or Stewart Island) so I'm massively pleased that they've also backed away from those plans - but I'm VERY concerned about the "85 per cent of the country [that] is not protected by Schedule 4" which Gerry already has his beady little eyes on.
Northland and the West Coast are definitely at risk now - and I see it as cynical in the extreme to target areas of the country where the population is under-employed and economically vulnerable - and therefore less likely to examine the true economic cost of allowing mining to go ahead in their backyards.
We won the battle today - but we didn't win the war. I don't think we'll ever win the war, to be honest, because there will always be greedy bastards out there anxious to rape and pillage our precious lands, and there will always be greedy shareholders looking to increase their dividends at whatever cost - but we have to keep on fighting - for ever - to protect what's important to us.
To me, that's always been the underlying truth of environmental activism. We fight because it's the right thing to do, not because we know we will always win. We won today, but we return to battle tomorrow.
I've been having a play around making a few placards for tomorrow's No Mining in NZ's National Parks protest.
The protest will be outside Parliament from 12.30 to 1.30pm - Tuesday 29 March. Please come if you care about our National Parks.
Hope you like the placards. I've put links to the downloadable PDF versions at the end of this post.
National: Selling our heritage for 30 pieces of silver:
John Key: Why didn't you mention mining during the election campaign? [edited 30/03/10 to add the "John Key" bit at the beginning]
No mining in our National Parks:
Brownlee's postcard on Eden Park (with a side-by-side comparison of Waihi goldmine and Eden Park):
Surgical mining is a big lie - like scientific whaling: [edited 30/03/10 to make BIG LIE bigger]
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children:
Downloadable, printable placards
Each PDF consists of five A4 pages - the first is the full slogan so you can see what you're getting. The other four contain a quarter of the slogan each - with an overlap. If you print out all four you can trim them and put them together to make an A2-sized placard. Enjoy!
Or... How National And ACT Turned Me Back Into A Political Activist After Many Years Away...
In my dim and distant yoof, when I was still English, I was very politically active. I lived in the UK for most of Thatcher's 17-year reign, and my God it was a tough time to be a leftie.
I protested on behalf of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament); marched for Save the Whales; opposed the government's anti-gay legislation Clause 28; cheered Bishop Desmond Tutu when he spoke out in Hyde Park against the South African apartheid regime; welcomed Nelson Mandela to freedom at the huge concert in his honour at Wembley Stadium; demonstrated against the Falklands War and the first Gulf War; and was a local organiser in the Anti-Poll Tax campaign (I was at that riot in London - scary times indeed!).
One of the reasons why I finally left the UK was that I was just sick to death of banging my head against what seemed like a brick wall at the time. The day the British people voted the Conservatives in for yet another term (after John Major's coup that dethroned Thatcher as party leader) I was sitting on a little yacht in the Bay of Islands reading the paper and thinking "That's it. I resign. I no longer consider myself to be English. The British people are obviously too bloody stupid to be trusted with any kind of a vote on anything that means anything - and I quit." I've considered myself to be "formerly English" ever since.
Fast forward through the last 17-odd years as a New Zealander - I stopped travelling, settled in NZ, made friends, found a job, found a place to live, found another job, became a web designer/developer, moved house a few more times, eventually bought a house with a garden, got a couple of cats, worked my ass off - and somewhere along the way I lost my political activist streak.
I think it's partly because I was so involved in settling in a new country, which took up a lot of my energy, and partly because Kiwis on the whole are much more laid back and a lot less politically active than yer average pom. Or at least that's been my experience. Don't get me wrong - I still follow politics, I still have great political discussions when I get together with my mates, I'm a member of the Green Party - but in terms of actual activism I seemed to have pretty much given it up.
Until now. I have National and ACT to thank for that. Yeah - thanks guys! You rock! Not.
I've watched with growing concern as they attack and dismantle one important part of my adopted homeland after another. National Education standards and closing down night classes, Paula "I used to be a beneficiary but now I'm not and you losers can all just GET FUCKED" Bennett's attacks on those least able to fight back, increasing GST when they specifically said they wouldn't, tax cuts for their rich mates and to hell with the rest of you, the Auckland Super City undemocratic debacle... the list goes on and on and on - not to mention pushing through a whole raft of new and potentially unpopular legislation under the cloak of "urgency" so they don't even have to discuss it in Parliament and no-one gets the chance to oppose it.
The final two straws that broke this particular camel's back have been their attack on Radio New Zealand's funding, and now - most egregious of all in my opinion - their plans to mine in our National Parks.
I'm so outraged by their mining plans I can't even begin to express how outraged I am. Talk about short-sighted! Do they not have children and grandchildren to whom they'd like to leave the few pieces of pristine wilderness we have left? Apparently not - or at least, if they do, they apparently don't care about them too much.
There are not many things that would get me to leave my nice comfortable life and go chain myself to a bulldozer in protest - but this is certainly one of them. This is our taonga, our heritage, it's what makes us special and unique, and it's what brings in billions of dollars a year in tourism - AND YOU WANT TO DIG IT UP???? You greedy bastards. How dare you???
I actually began my reawakening to political activism by joining the Save Radio New Zealand Facebook group a month or so ago. What a cliché eh? Join a Facebook group and do your bit for the protest! Except that... the group grew so quickly and became so motivated to get up off the couch and actually do something, that the media began to take notice. And the politicians, I think, have also begun to pay attention.
Whether this is because yer average pollie doesn't really "get" social media like Facebook but secretly thinks they should, and they hear that Web2.0 is the Next Big Thing and think they should show some interest so as to get down with da kidz - or whether it's because they also know that for every person who actually gets off their ass and joins a Facebook group (easy though it is to do), there are 100 others standing behind them, agreeing with them, but not actually ever getting round to pressing the blue "join" button, I don't know, but it does actually seem to be having some effect.
Anyway, whatever the reason, people-who-count started taking notice and the Facebook group grew and grew. Hundreds and hundreds of members made comments on the group's page (and continue to do so). Gaining 20,000 members in a little over a month is pretty impressive for our small country, even if it is "just" on Facebook.
It soon became clear that the Save Radio New Zealand people weren't all pointy-headed liberals from Wellington like they said we were - we come from all over the country - the world, even; we come from all kinds of different backgrounds and age groups; and perhaps most importantly for those politicians watching, we come from right across the political spectrum. There are many people in the group who voted National and are now wondering what the heck they signed up for. And they are not happy.
Some interesting things start happening when you join a group of any kind. Firstly you realise you're not alone, and that there are tons of others from all over the place who agree with you. That feels good! It gives you hope! Then someone comes up with an idea for more direct action - and all of a sudden instead of trying to persuade a couple of your mates to demonstrate outside Parliament about this thing you care about, you've got hundreds of people to get motivated with - who already care about the same thing that you do. It's brilliant.
As I walked back to work after the Protest Picnic outside Parliament a few weeks ago, my portable transistor radio still switched on, trailing RNZ's music and words behind me like a stream of bubbles in the breeze, it occurred to me that I felt pretty good having got out there and taken the time to stand up for something I believe in. The last time I did that was the massive protest against the War on Iraq, but that was a long time ago.
It also occurred to me that as I'm a web designer/developer, I have a skill that might be of use to the campaign, and that as part of my activist re-awakening, I could actually do something more to help. That night I registered saveradionz.co.nz and offered my services to the campaign organisers. I've spent the last couple of weeks on WordPress finding and re-styling a suitable theme and writing the first 30-odd pages of the website, and we did a soft launch of the site at the weekend. It's getting a lot of hits already.
It's good to be a part of something, and it's good to be back fighting for what I think is right.
Last night I found Metiria Turei's No mining in NZ's National Parks Facebook group, and all day I've watched the number of members creep up. There's a lot of cross-fertilisation that can happen in a social networking environment (hence the term "networking"), and I know there are many people who, like me, have joined both groups. I know, because I invited a whole bunch of 'em myself! That's another awesome thing about Facebook - the "invite friends to join" function. Talk about helping groups to go viral! It's brilliant!
One of the things an online group can do is to help members fight in all the range of legal ways possible - again it's about getting the information out there and the motivation that comes from being part of that group. The No mining in NZ's National Parks group will be helping us to make submissions to the innocently-named Schedule 4 Stocktake discussion paper, and I'm most definitely making a submission with their help. This is too important an issue to sit by and hope someone else does the protesting for me. I have to do it myself, and I have to make my voice heard in every way I can.
I'm hoping the NIMBY vote will kick in in Auckland, especially about Great Barrier Island and the Coromandel, but there's the risk that (assuming this isn't the most politically stupid move ever) they're announcing these two places first so that they can then "back down" in the face of massive opposition - "ooh look we listened to the people!" - and then quietly go and mine somewhere else like the West Coast or Stewart Island where they think the opposition won't be as strong. We need to stop that from happening, and that means we all have to do our bit - including me.
I renewed my Green Party membership today (and gave them a bit of a donation to help the cause) and I also joined Forest & Bird today. Hey government! You want to stop the Department of Conservation from talking to our oldest and most well-respected conservation group? You want to start gagging people like that? Oh yeah - that's really going to work well. In fact - just because you've done that - I think I'll join them. Go check out the banners on their homepage - they're really cool. I particularly like "Forest & Bird. HYSTERICAL about nature since 1923". Ha!
It seems to me that an issue such as freezing (and thereby in reality, cutting) funding to our only remaining public broadcaster and then expecting a change of mindset at said broadcaster in order to live within those diminishing means - or an issue such as opening up our pristine(ish) wilderness to foreign mining companies so that they can rape and pillage te whenua to their heart's content - has to be shut down fast, shut down hard, and shut down now.
If we don't get off our collective arses and force the government to back down fully on both these issues, then elements of our country, our heritage, our culture and our landscape will be lost, and gone for ever.
As Oscar Wilde once said:
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
...which seems to sum up our current government's mindset pretty well.
...and as Joni Mitchell famously said (or, rather, sang):
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot.
Earlier on in the year we were given the opportunity to pitch for a re-design job on the Ministry for the Environment's website, which we won. Sue and I were completely thrilled - it's the first Government client that WebWeaver Productions has pitched for (although I've worked on over 50 government websites as a contractor and/or employee), so to win it was pretty darned cool.
Our primary contact was Dee Guja, the Ministry's senior adviser, Stakeholder Engagement/Publications, and we worked on the project with the Ministry's webmaster, Jennifer Geard. Both Dee and Jennifer are very good at their jobs, and as a result the Ministry has become one of our favourite clients - they absolutely rock!
The brief was tricky, to say the least. The Ministry's website is huge - somewhere around 13,000 pages - and the old site was based on a set of Dreamweaver templates which were pretty old and had a bunch of table-based layouts to contend with. Over the years many different MfE employees have added content to the Ministry site, and in some cases the code used to display the same 'look' has been achieved using a variety of techniques - some of which are now out of date and no longer validate.
Our job was to design and build a new set of e-government compliant best-practice Dreamweaver templates which would seamlessly replace the old ones, together with a stylesheet that would not only control the new template HTML, but would restyle all of the old legacy code within the subnav, main content area and feature column so that it would display properly in the design without the Ministry web team having to rewrite the HTML.
Oh - and it needed to be sufficiently robust and all-encompassing so that Jennifer and her team could be confident that all 13,000 pages would display as expected - without having to check every page before go-live.
Sue worked her magic and produced a beautiful new design which was light years away from the old design. I built a set of 11 HTML/CSS templates which I then converted to Dreamweaver templates, matching the editable regions as closely as possible to their existing ones so that when Jennifer came to do the global 'find and replace' that would replace their old templates with our new ones, the site would hold together.
Our test list consisted of 16 different browser/OS combinations (the number has been somewhat reduced since then), which meant I had to get on TradeMe and buy a bunch of old PCs so that I could get the full range of PC operating systems I needed for testing. The completely awesome standalone versions of IE6 and IE7 no longer work properly when you've got IE8 installed, so I needed separate versions of the same OS in order to test all three versions of IE. Oh joy.
The project began back in April, and the site went live in June, which is not bad going for such a large website. Jennifer and her team are working through the site to remove the worst (legacy) examples of non-compliant code, and the new templates were tested for e-govt compliance by Bruce Aylward of W 3 A. He's an expert on website accessibility, and taught me a bunch of new tricks, which I really appreciated.
All in all a great project to be involved with, and a very satisfactory result. We hope you like the Ministry's new website as much as we do.
Last time I went to the supermarket I bought a block of Whittaker's Fruit and Nut chocolate, instead of the block of Cadbury's I normally buy.
Not an enormously significant act you might say, except that the Cadbury brand has been a very important part of my life ever since I was born, and as far as a person can be wedded to a particular brand, I've been wedded to Cadbury's. The Whittaker's chocolate in my shopping basket was the first I had ever bought, and the first time that I have ever chosen a chocolate brand other than Cadbury's.
Let me explain.
I was born and brought up in Bournville, Birmingham, England. The original home of Cadbury's. The factory is still there, and still makes chocolate. Until I was eleven and ventured outside Bournville to go to secondary school, Cadbury's was suffused into every aspect of my world.
I went to Bournville Infant and Junior Schools, which, we were often reminded, were originally established by George and Elizabeth Cadbury at the turn of the century to "provide education of the highest quality" for the children of his factory workers.
Every Saturday, the music of the 48 bells of the Carillon played by Mr Workman the carillonneur would drift across our garden from its home in the tower on top of the Junior School - and every fifteen minutes of every day we'd hear the bells chime the hour, the half and the quarters.
Mr Aldington, the scariest teacher in the school, had his classroom in the tower, directly beneath the carillon. He was Mr Workman's assistant, and one of the biggest treats of being a pupil at Bournville Juniors was the trip up into the tower during the summer term of our final year to meet Mr Workman and see him play the carillon.
The carillon was (and still is) the sound of Bournville, and as it was housed in George Cadbury's school, we always thought of it as being George Cadbury's very own music.
Our house was a 10-minute walk from the Cadbury factory, and when the wind was in the right direction you could smell the chocolate wafting through the parks and tree-lined lanes of Bournville. It was wonderful. Every afternoon when the hooter sounded to mark the shift change we'd pause and picture the workers streaming in and out of the factory, and we'd wish that we could somehow sneak in with them and be surrounded by that delicious, mystical, magical entity - chocolate. Every spring for at least three months all the girls in the village would practise and practise to perfect the ancient English art of the maypole dance; and in the summer we'd perform at the Maypole festival which was held once a year at the Cadbury factory recreation ground.
The Queen's Basket, The Gypsy's Tent, The Barber's Pole and (trickiest of all) The Chain - I can still remember the steps to each of those dances, and can clearly recall the excitement of performing them in front of hundreds of people. We were all dressed in white, with garlands of flowers in our hair, and the beautiful turn-of-the-century architecture of the factory was itself a somehow fitting backdrop to the show.
Every Christmas the whole school would be invited to the Cadbury factory cinema to watch a hand-picked movie - and apart from the year when the staff unfortunately selected Old Yeller which had three-quarters of the school in hysterical tears by the end - the visit to the Cadbury cinema was another highlight of our year.
I have so many powerful memories of my childhood, much of it spent playing with my friends in the many parks of Bournville. My dad teaching me to ride my bike in a single day in the park at the end of our lane, and later teaching myself to ride it no-handed along the pathways that criss-crossed the yaching pool park. Watching the old men sail their little model boats in the yachting pool, and the great adventure we had the day of the torrential rain when the whole pool flooded and the entire park became a great brown sea of fast-moving water.
Catching stickle-backs in the stream that ran through the park alongside my friend Tania's house, and climbing the great willow tree next to her house. Falling out of another tree a few years later as I put my full weight on a rotten branch, and having to be rescued by my friend Leslie's mum as I clung upside down from a lower branch, too terrified to move.
Building dens and playing make-believe from dawn to dusk in the vast areas of woodland and fields near Leslie's house, watching the cows in the fields between her house and the yachting pool, and learning to ride horses there too.
Marvelling at the display of pink blossom that covered the dozens of ornamental cherry trees along Woodbrooke Road every spring, loving the mass of crocuses that appeared at the same time each year in the park next to our school; the song of the blackbird in the twilight trees that to me will always be the sound of summer; looking forward with great anticipation to the autumn when we could fossick through the fallen chestnut leaves all the way down Oak Tree Lane from our house to the Bournville Village Trust building, searching for the elusive and much-treasured conker; and loving the strange white-light muffled silence that would herald an overnight fall of snow in winter.
For a place that, by the time I lived there, was essentially a suburb of the big industrial city that was Birmingham, it sounds like an idyllic childhood stuck in a time-warp sometime earlier in the century, and in many ways it was. We knew that outside the confines of Bournville village the rest of the world was not like the place in which we lived, and fundamentally we all knew that our peaceful and tree-lined existence was entirely due to the generosity, character and far-sightedness of the Cadbury family.
The whole of Bournville was, and still is, a conservation area (of which we were very proud) because George Cadbury did such a bang-up job of creating a model village for his workers at the turn of the century.
George Cadbury himself, as we all learned at school, was a Good Guy. A Quaker who built a factory on the outskirts of the big city and determined that the houses he would build for his workers would be a hundred times better than the dwellings most working-class people lived in at the time. Indoor loo, plumbing, hot water, semi-detached (not terraced), and each house had a garden with 6 fruit trees planted in it. Parks throughout the village, a village green, recreation grounds adjoining the factory so that the men and women who worked for him could keep fit, no pubs allowed within the village boundaries (to this day!)... quite amazing really.
This wonderful environment in which I spent my childhood was inextricably linked with Cadbury's, and so it was inevitable that I would maintain my loyalty to that product and brand throughout my life. Until now.
I (and everyone else who has ever lived in Bournville) am more Cadbury's than the individuals who now own the international Cadbury brand will ever be - and it's why the other day in the supermarket I chose not to buy Cadbury's any more - and why I felt sure that George Cadbury must have been turning in his grave at the thought of how far from his original enlightened ideals his products have strayed.
Although New Zealand still makes its own Cadbury's assortments and box chocolates in the Dunedin factory, a restructure in 2008 meant that the manufacture of all our Cadbury chocolate bars was shifted to two Australian factories. For a while we had our own combination of ingredients, different from (and better than) the Australian version, but in order to save money, Cadbury's recently made what I think was a very stupid decision.
I'm sure you know that a couple of months ago Cadbury Australia made three very significant changes to their chocolate - each of which in its own way has had a very negative effect on the quality of the chocolate itself, and on the image of the brand in the eyes of me and many other Kiwis.
Firstly they reduced the size of all their chocolate blocks, with the family block going down from 250g to 200g - and disguised this fact by changing the traditional paper and foil packaging to a cardboard casing which mirrored the old size exactly, while containing 50g less chocolate. You can see it here:
Secondly they reduced the cocoa content from 26% down to 21% - which is only one percent more than the minimum required to still call the product "chocolate"; and thirdly, they replaced the traditional (and many would say essential) cocoa butter with vegetable fat including palm oil.
Not a good look, especially when you find out that palm oil is a big big no-no if you care about the environment, global warming, or the threat to the world's few remaining habitats in Indonesia for endangered Sumatran tigers, Javan rhinoceroses and orang-utans.
In April 2008 Greenpeace launched a campaign in a number of countries to push companies at various points along the palm oil supply chain into supporting measures to protect rainforests from further plantation expansion.
Demand for palm oil is growing and fast. At the moment, most of it ends up in hundreds of food products - from margarine and chocolate to cream cheese and oven chips - although it's also used in cosmetics and increasingly, for use in biodiesel. But the cost to the environment and the global climate is devastating - to feed this demand, tropical rainforests and peatlands in South East Asia are being torn up to provide land for oil palm plantations.
When Cadbury's switched to palm oil in their chocolate they claimed that, being a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) meant that they were only using sustainable palm oil, but Greenpeace refutes that claim. They say:
The RSPO was established in 2001 as a market-led initiative to reform the way palm oil is produced, processed and used, with clear standards on the production of sustainable palm oil. Members include companies all along the supply chain, from big name companies such as Unilever, Cadbury's, Nestlé and Tesco, to suppliers such as Cargill, ADM and Indonesian-based Duta Palma.
As it currently stands, even though member companies are paying lip-service to forest and peatland protection, the reality is very different. The existing standards developed by the RSPO will not prevent forest and peatland destruction, and a number of RSPO members are taking no steps to avoid the worst practices of the palm oil industry. Some like palm oil processor Duta Palma, an RSPO member, are directly involved in deforestation. Worse still, at present the RSPO itself is creating the illusion of sustainable palm oil, justifying the expansion of the industry.
The destruction of rainforests and peatlands to make way for palm oil plantations in Indonesia has a devastating effect on the already shrinking habitats of a number of endangered species, and also contributes to global warming. As Greenpeace explains:
The manufacturers of these products - Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever - are sourcing their palm oil from suppliers who aren't picky about where they site their plantations. As the volunteers at the Forest Defenders Camp in Sumatra have seen, this includes tearing up areas of pristine forest then draining and burning the peatlands.
Indonesia's peatlands act as huge carbon stores so replacing them with plantations them not only threatens the amazing biodiversity, including the rare Sumatran tiger, it also releases huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They only cover 0.1 per cent of the land on Earth, but thanks in part to the activities of the palm oil industry they contribute 4 per cent to global emissions. If expansion of the palm oil industry continues unabated, that figure can only rise.
It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I read today that Cadbury's has decided to bow to consumer pressure and will stop using palm oil in its Dairy Milk chocolate. Hooray! Apparently they were inundated with emails and letters from disgruntled Kiwi customers, and if the 3,517-strong Facebook group Take Palm Oil out of Cadbury chocolate bars! is anything to go by, feelings were running pretty high out there in the world of chocolate lovers.
When even the sluggish old mainstream media gets in on the act and starts laying out the case against palm oil, you know you've lost the battle.
Whittaker's brilliantly-timed ad didn't help Cadbury's cause much either:
Especially once it was featured on Campbell Live:
I don't for one minute believe that Cadbury's suddenly went all "Greenpeace" on us (although I'm sure Quaker George would have been a quiet supporter if they'd been around back then). I'm quite sure they didn't suddenly develop a conscience about the fate of the orang-utan or climate change.
No, I think it's pretty clear what changed Cadbury's mind - you only have to read the comments on any of the Stuff articles or YouTube videos I've linked to, to see what's been the driving force behind their abrupt about-turn. It's economics, of course.
But is it all too little, too late? Has Cadbury's lost market share to Whittakers for ever? Here are a few examples from Stuff:
patty too late, i have become addicted to whitakers
Lizbeth I may now consider purchasing Cadbury again - MAY consider! It has been 3 months since my last 'fruit and nut' thick and chunky! lol
Julie That is great to hear - the chocolate just did not taste the same. I wonder if they will also address the fact the pack sizes shrank considerably, meaning we paid the same for not only an inferior product, but we also paid the same for a far smaller size. As soon as I noticed the changes Cadbury had made, I started buying the Kiwi brand Whittaker's... I think I will stay with them for now, as the product is amazing.
Michael This will not change my mind on buying the product. I used to enjoy my block of Dairy Milk but since production moved to Australia it has not been the same in both texture and taste. Whether this was the palm oil I do not know. I now and only will ever buy Whittakers as firstly it is made in New Zealand, and secondly is a far superior product to what Cadbury's is now.
Rob Their decision to use Palm Oil, which only became known via Fair Go so appeared underhanded, single-handedly bombed their position as NZ's most trusted brand. Good decision to now cease using Palm Oil but it will take a very long time to regain the TRUST they once had with the NZ public.
Only time will tell whether Cadbury's will regain the trust of yer average chocolate-loving Kiwi. But one thing's for sure. As Coca Cola also discovered when they changed their recipe - don't mess with a beloved brand. It'll only lead to tears.
As for me, well I have to say I really quite liked my bar of Whittakers Fruit & Nut. I think I might try their Dairy Milk next time - just to see. Cadbury's may have taken the palm oil back out of their Dairy Milk, but they don't say anything about any of their other products in today's press release - and when you compare Whittaker's 33% cocoa with Cadbury's pathetic 21% - well, there's not much competition really is there?
I may be a Cadbury's girl born and bred, but it doesn't mean that at some point I can't explore the world beyond the confines of the village of Bournville...
Whether you're someone who believes that Climate Change is happening and that we're the cause, or you believe it's a load of old hogwash cooked up by rabid greenies trying to take over the planet - you should watch this.
Thanks to Richard Llewellyn who posted the link on Public Address - where a very interesting debate about John Key's new Chief Science Advisor, Peter Gluckman is going on as we speak.
The wind's blowing harder than I've ever seen it blow in Wellington. It freaks me out big-time. I'm shaking like a leaf here, people!
It's 1.00am and there's no way I can go to bed with the wind this bad. I just went out for a cigarette (protected by my house from the worst of it) and watched the cabbage tree at the top of my garden completely freaking out from the strength of the wind. My house faces north-west, and so we get completely mashed when there's a north-wester, and this one's a doozy.
Here's a video of the same cabbage tree (and my shed, which was distinctly wobbly in those days) taken nearly three years ago, the last time I can remember it being this windy.
An hour ago the weather watch for the Wellington (Kelburn) weather station was giving a wind speed of 30km/h, now it's up to 46km/h but that was measured an hour ago at midnight. Goodness knows what that last massive gust was. Way over 100 I should think.
I love Wellington and I adore my house, but sometimes - like tonight - I wish I lived on flat ground instead of on the side of a hill, and I wish my house was protected from the wind. I hatessssss it.
Mark the hedge guy came over today to start trimming the massive privet hedge in my veggie garden, and he's left piles and piles of loose clippings behind, ready to be picked up on Monday. I laughingly said (this afternoon when it was a perfect, beautiful, sunny day) I hoped it didn't get too windy between then and Monday or I'd have bits of hedge flying all over the place...
Now I'm just praying the uncut parts of the hedge will protect the loose bits from the worst of the wind. I just went outside to check and it isn't too bad, but I'm not looking forward to being woken in the middle of the night by flying garden debris hitting my windows. Ugh.
Heh. Apologies for the SHOUTING CAPS in the post title, but I'm a wee bit miffed right now.
A couple of months ago they started dumping piles of earth and gravel at the far end of Appleton Park. There was a digger there and a couple of lorries, but nothing much seemed to be happening, and I wondered if it was being used as a temporary storage area for building materials or something.
Then about a month ago the temporary fence around the dumping area suddenly expanded quite dramatically, and they pulled out a couple of the baby pohutukawas that they only planted there a couple of years ago. "Not good" I thought.
Hmmm. What's going on?
I noticed a big sign had gone up on the fence which said "Any enquiries, please contact the Karori Nature Reserve", which reassured me somewhat. "Oh phew" I thought. "If it's the Nature Reserve it can't be anything bad - they're Good People."
I was wrong, sadly. I called them up and asked them what was going on and was told that they are building a BLOODY GREAT CAR PARK there! It's going to be overflow parking for the Nature Reserve, plus a Park & Ride facility, also for the Nature Reserve.
In an attempt to divert my pissed-off-ness (I was not a happy bunny when I found out) they breezily informed me that it's Road Reserve (this almost one-third of Appleton Park that they are going to cover in bloody tarmac) - as if that would make me feel better!
I don't care whether it's 'officially' a Road Reserve (What's that anyway? Space reserved to build a road, should they want to?) or a park or a Conservation Area or anything else they want to 'officially' call it - to me it's a lovely green expanse of grass and trees that I can see from my house and which I enjoy enormously - and now it's going to to be turned into a bloody great car park. With attendant noise, fumes, cars, buses, people coming and going, rubbish, screaming kids... Great.
Moan moan.
It just seems so ironic that the wonderfulness that is Karori Nature Reserve is now ruining my view (and not theirs, as it happens) by concreting over a perfectly nice piece of open grassy space, just so that more bloody lazy people can drive there and park (and it isn't even very nearby - hence the Park & Ride I suppose).
Why don't they encourage more people to catch the local bus (which plenty of people do already) and then stroll down to the Reserve (which plenty of people also do already) - rather than having this wussy Park & Ride facility - or walk all the way there, or cycle? All much greener, much healthier, much more in keeping with the aims of the Reserve in the first place - and much less of a blight on MY VIEW.
Grumble grumble grumble bloody car parks. Bloody Telecom tower nearby as well.... grump grump.
Street lights illuminating the whirling snow
A wider view of the snow-clad valley
Yesterday's MetService 3-day snow warning for Wellington - saved for posterity
I thought that was snow on the hills last night - but it was too dark to tell - daylight brings clarity, and I never imagined I'd ever see our little hills with a dusting of the white stuff!
A teeny bit of snow in my back garden this morning
Snow on the Rimutakas
Obligatory picture of me in the snow
Snow on Taranaki Street
Bless!
Snowy street, snowy cars
Snowy street looking down the valley
Winter wonderland
Snow-clad cabbage tree
My back garden - with somewhat more snow than there was this morning
