Announcing Sprout, By Paul and Gina

Nugget is super-amped that he’s getting a new buddy, Sprout, or Sproutette – congratulations to Paul and Gina Jacobson for the wonderful news!  It seems the new media glitterati are spawning quicker and quicker these days.

Dread

On a normal day driving to work at 8:15 I sit in traffic, red robots, turning lanes clogged with fools not turning, people blocking the entrance to the M&G building, and so on.

But today, like the Egyptians following Moses, the seas opened up for me.  Green robot after green robot, no people trying to make Jan Smuts between Dunkeld an Rosebank into a three-lane highway, no-one in my turning lane, a really nice person letting me into my entrance with a smile.  The security guard actually recognised me an didn’t try dropping the boom  like the Americans at Nagasaki.

None of the usual evil perpetrated on my way to work.  I am fucked, I thought to myself, something really bad is about to happen.  This is the big one, a heart attack, a meteor, the second coming…

The day proceeded with calm.  So far nothing, in fact my day keeps getting better.

Which leads me to think this may be my last blog entry. It’s been sweet and sorry if you fall within the blast radius.

How to spend Easter Sunday (really)

1. Go to your father-in-law for lunch
2. Spend 2 hours doing maintenance on his PC (i.e. removing spyware that disguises itself as anti-spyware software LOL)
3. Eat a ton of chops and chicken (yes chicken is a vegetable)
4. Drink a few quarts of something
5. Go home and cry about the cricket yesterday
6. Fall asleep worrying about your blog stats
7. Dream about ducks with metal teeth and very, very negative attitudes

Symptoms of long-term World Cup Cricket exposure: initial observations

So far in my experiment to watch all the games my case notes show the following alarming symptoms:

• Mild irritation at the lag on my DSTv decoder remote, with indications that this will develop into all-out rage before the finals.  Quick flipping between SS2 and SS5 is like trying to watch Joost on a 56k modem.
• The stark realisation that there will be hours where there is nothing interesting to drink or nibble on without running the risk of growing an even larger creature up front.
• The sense that the kitchen is now a relatively long distance nfrom the couch, esp when the only real movement that happens during the cricket is my bowels.  This may become problematic later as my muscle mass deteriorates.
• A developing ability to blur my eyes and see HawkEye BEFORE they show it.  Call it umpires intuition.
• A mild grudge against smaller countries
• Increasingly delusional behavior in the workplace.  My calculation: go to bed just after 12, take an hour to fall asleep, wake up at 5 = 20 hours of sleep a week x 2 months = 160 hours of sleep till the final.
• Email is starting to feel good again, because I have time to think about what I want to say.  Time to think is getting increasingly longer between responses.
• The sense, for a few seconds yesterday, that I had to manually beat my heart because my brain was sleeping in its shell.  Pounding my chest at an intersection, someone threw two rands at me.
• A dangerously early awareness of the lack of variety of potato chips and corn chips we get in South Africa.  I find myself longing for Creoles – remember those things that gave you Bankok whore breath?

I will continue to document this experiment, I must keep going…. must keep going.

Welcome back my posties

This week has been interesting to say the least. Since Monday I have not been able to access my own blog, so unable to post.

Today Chilibean announced that Paul and Victoire (Chilibean Media) are going into business, as consultants. Congrats you two and the best of luck with the new venture.

On Thursday I put the News in Photos into beta, a little prematurely I think, judging by the number of changes I made on Friday while people were trying to use it.

Anyway, over the weekend I rewrote the Swarm to make it a little less taxing on the server and probably about 35 changes to different pages to streamline the way they work.

Today we had about 20 reader submissions and there are some great photos coming in so I am happy about that.

From tomorrow I am moving onto my next project in earnest, so hopefully we’ll have something really funky to release in a few weeks (this next thing is quite a bit bigger than the photos site so it’s going to take longer).

Goodbye New Media Lab, Rhodes University

This is my final blog entry as the director of the New Media lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies so figure it’s reflection time. I have been here since April 2004 and, as of Monday, my new job title is strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online. The move is not as big as it might sound because I have lived in or near Johannesburg for most of my life and I was in the thick of the webdev industry there before I left. The new job is also not dramatically different, though my energies will now have to be spent on projects a little more commercially focussed.

Here is my list of highlights from the past two and a half years, in no real order:

• Getting married on the Sunshine Coast
• Ripping the ring out of the Don in Rosebank during the 2005 Commons Sense student fieldtrip
• Attending and speaking at What The Hack! in the Netherlands with Colin Daniels (imagine 3000 hackers, 15km of network cable, phat fibre optic connection to the Dutch backbone, a lot of rain, a few thousand litres of Jolt and some open fields)
• Speaking at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin and partying with Clyde Bentley and Vin Crosby in 6th street
• The 2004 and 2005 festival multimedia coverage done by my students
• The Digital Citizen Indaba on Blogging
• Working with Colin Daniels, the new guru on the block
• Throwing my phone at the wall in the Rat and having it bounce off Elan Lohmann’s head, then writing a masters exam the next morning and getting 74 (who says you have to study to do well at exams?)
• The wall in the old lab, after the students wrote quotes on it
• Moving to the African Media Matrix
• Working with some amazing students, or seeing those with no aptitude suddenly get inspired
• Gregor and the postbox
• Building the Grocott’s Mail web site in two weeks
• Watching Penny walk in with beer after missing a deadline
• Fresh fish for next to nothing
• Sub R10 beer
• The R9 chicken burger special at Olde ‘65
• Meeting Matthew Buckland, the new boss of me and one of the most inspiring people I know
• Playing with an octopus at the Riet River mouth
• Podcasting with Jarred Cinman and Jonathan Ancer during the 2006 Arts Festival

And here is a list of the lowlights:

• Someone stealing the NML web server (triple doh)
• Seeing the photo Cat Murray took of me and a Brazilian dude in some club in Rosebank (I swear it was fake)
• Finding out one of my students had gone mad and tried to ride through Rosebank at 2AM looking for a clinic on a wheelchair
• Staff meetings discussing access control on the new security system
• Stylecops (you know who you are)
• My Dell, for various reasons I don’t want to remember
• Port Elizabeth, for all the mullets
• JDD CMP 2005
• Carrying an Apple cube from Utrecht to Amsterdam, from Charles De Gaulle to Gare De Nord, fighting with ZA customs (I mean really fighting) and then getting home to have it NOT ACTUALLY WORK
• Having Daniella’s favourite cat die of billary
• Not catching a single fish

The interviews for my replacement happen in a week or so and, having browsed the CVs, I am confident that the New Media Lab will continue to thrive. For me being here marked a shift in my career from corporate to media development work and I must admit the long leash I was given was just what I needed to stop being bored with the web. I got to experiment and try new things, and I had excellent resources in my students (also relatively free labour ha ha) so we got the job done.
Big up to everyone involved, I had a great time and be sure to visit when in Gauteng.

PW Botha is dead, finally

I woke up this morning with the news that PW Botha had died last night, and I felt happy. Between the ages of 10 and 18 I lived in a suburb south of Pretoria called Verwoerdburg (after HF Verwoerd), and I would regularly watch the police drive up to the open stretch of velt I had to walk through to get to school and hit the old women people collecting plants there with sjamboks. I didn’t know why this was happening but I found out as I got older. During that time Botha was president.

Aside from the emotional strain the NP put on the entire country, we are still fixing the mess they left behind and most South Africans who lived during that period will never get that stain off.

So good riddance to Mr Botha, I wish it had been sooner. I really don’t understand why the international community are sending condolences for that monster, but I guess you had to be there.

The chaos will go away soon

Okay, so my RSS feeds may seem a little scrambled right now but that’s okay. If you’re not subscribed to my RSS, get the global RSS, which is also my old feed address or go up one level to my new home page.

If I wanted to see mullets I’d go to a fish shop

I can’t actually describe how much I dislike Port Elizabeth but I am going to try anyway by giving some examples.

This morning Daniella (my wife) and I took a drive to PE to get a new scan for McNugget (more about that later). The other part of our mission was to get some salmon and ginger for sushi. So around and around we drive to about six different shops looking for salmon and no-one had the kind we wanted. We literally drove around town in a circle twice.

Then, at Walmer Park, we had a revisit of the Exclusive Box saga. Historical note: when Dan and I arrived in Grahamstown (2004) and then decided to drive to PE to find a decent bookstore we stopped and asked a few PE locals whether there is an Exclusive Books in town. Most people didn’t have a clue what we were talking about and one person thought we were asking for Exlusive Box. Clearly literacy is not a high priority for people working at a butcher shop in PE. I guess you don’t need to understand Shakespeare to chop meat. So, anyway, we can’t find the place today and ask a security guard and she looks at us like we come from Grahamstown.

Then we go get some lunch when the mullet family arrive, distended stomachs and all. Mother, Father and son, a 400kg scrum, walk in and start scratching around for napkins, all the while sporting their matching PE mullets. We bailed.

Not only does the place smell but it has some pretty good examples of industrial squalor. Colin and I likethe place so much that we created a Flickr group called Port Elizabeth, posted a few nice pictures and closed the group so no new members can join.

AND THEN:

Dan and I watched little McNugget (now 4.5cm long) wake up and cause his first bit of havoc in the womb. No wonder Dan’s nauseous all the time. We saw a certain thing, looked sort of like a tail, that confirms he is a boy and we have decided to name him Michael Liam, after my father and Dan’s gran. What a moment. I now understand why expectant mothers and fathers blog so much. Dan is still pretty resistant but she will fold eventually.

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UPDATE
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In order to allay any doubts about my objectivity in this matter I have decided to add a poll to this post so that you, the reader, can decide about the disputed presence of mullets in Port Elizabeth.

Moving to the M&G

So, now that Matthew Buckland has blogged it I guess I can say it here: As of December I will no longer be the director of the New Medial Lab and will be taking up a new position as Strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online.

I can’t discuss in any detail what I will be doing there except that I will be responsible for determining the convergence path and the technical direction of the paper’s online services for the forseeable future. I have always wanted to work with Matthew and look forward to working with the rest of the M&G team. Rhodes University will be advertising my position during the coming weeks so if anyone wants to step into my shoes, let me know.