A month o’ posts

Crumbs, where have I been? Well, one big fat lesson I’ve learnt is that you have to get into the habit of blogging and if you don’t, you easily get out of the habit and a few days turns into a few weeks….

Where have I been? – nowhere really, just not blogging. So, to make up for it and so that it doesn’t look like I just don’t have anything interesting to say or haven’t seen anything interesting recently, this is going to be one very long post that summarises a bunch of stuff I’ve read or seen over the last 6 weeks. Here goes:

• I’ve been admiring the (yes, I have) govt web standards site. An excellent resource for those involved in public sector sites.
• I’ve been reading the posts in the SSC’s blog. Excellent example of practise what you preach, or learn from doing or something like that. Good on to them.
• I’ve been to Wellington to attend the Identity Management Conference. Which was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended, but would only appeal to those interested in the subject, naturally. Also spent a few extra days in not-so-sunny Wellington, but it was nice to go somewhere different for a change.
• I’ve been watching this amusing-but-true video on site design. Maybe there’s a new presentation style to evolve out of it
• I’ve been hitting the publish button on this post before I had finished writing it
• I’ve been watching lots of movies that I had never gotten around to watching thanks to our online movie ordering service thingy we’ve signed up to. They just turn up in the mail. Fab. Gets us over that decision challenge you get when you’re standing in the video store faced with a gazzillion choices and end up walking out with nothing. I feel like I’m making some huge commitment to my choice, and end up not taking a punt on movies that as we are now discovering are really very good. Maybe I’ll start up a movie review page. Ha Ha yeah right like I’d actually get around to doing it.
• I’ve been helping Bob and Oscar make a music video – soon to be available on Kiwi Cats
• I’ve been playing with other video and web related projects
• I’ve been getting the hang of RSS Feeds – have signed up to a bunch of them and can now get completely distracted by interesting tidbits of news. Like this one. Bring on September.
• I’ve been discovering the cool resource that is istock.com
• I’ve been struck with Wiki-love. The project I’m working on has it’s own Wiki and after a few initial grumps, got the hang of it and now find it a wonderful alternative to putting stuff in boring old documents.

Ahhh…run out of breath……

Nothing to do with the web at all

But just had to add a comment after watching the latest Kiwibank ads, which play on NZers sense of patriotism – “It’s ours” etc. I wondered whether this translated into lower mortgage rates for poor old NZ home owners. If they are really a bank that’s for the people, I assume that they are not looking for the huge profite margins that those nasty old foreign owned banks were, and their interest rates would reflect that accordingly – well, not really. Here’s the comparison for a 5 year home loan:

ASB – 9.30 %
Westpac – 9.30%
BNZ – 8.88% if bundled with another product
Kiwibank – 8.95%
National bank – 9.30%
ANZ – 9.14 or 9.35% – couldn’t figure out which one they meant
TSB – from 9.35% for 4 years

Ok – so they’re slightly lower than the others but not sure how this difference translates into $$. Wonder how BNZ can also provide lower rates?

Beginner’s guide to Identity 2.0

Thanks to a reference by Vikram on his Identity and Privacy blog, I checked out (what I gather is a famous) presentation on Identity 2.0. It’s a fantastic explanation of a topic that can be a bit of a mind bender.  But it’s also just a great presentation in terms of style.

I’ll be pinching a few ideas from this one, thanks very much.

Even if you’re not interested in online identities per se, if you are into webbie things in general I’d recommend checking this out.

Hello world!

Welcome to The view from my window. This is my first post – not ever, but on this blog. I’ve tried a couple of times to start a blog but it fell by the wayside, so I’m trying again. Why bother? Because this time I’ve got a reason to to. I’m going to use this to simple record my musings on all things web (as opposed to all things as were previous attempts). Because I use the web everyday, there is inevitably something that catches my eye or wants me to go hmmm…….

So, away we go.