by JAK | Jan 13, 2017 | culture, music
Last Wednesday was the 1st anniversary of my fathers death. Due to the vagaries of timezones he died on the same day as David Bowie last year. (11th of Jan in NZ was 10th of Jan in U.S). Of course Bowie’s passing was big news unlike my Dad. At the funeral I made...
by JAK | Jan 4, 2017 | culture, News
I’m looking forward to a great 2017 however for the next few years it may be that the U.S has become a “no-fly zone” due to the election of a demagogue as incoming President. I am still in shock at this. Here are a few of the back ground research...
by JAK | Dec 21, 2016 | culture, music
Imagine if we lived in a country where 160,000 kids learned songwriting each week and a few hundred of them even got paid and made a living at it? Sounds far fetched? Apparently around 160,000 New Zealanders play rugby every weekend. I’m guessing most of them...
by JAK | Dec 15, 2016 | culture, general business, industry futures, WordPress
It is the end of a school / university year and people are thinking about what to do to become more web savvy. Here are some ideas. The notes below are the latest version of a set of conversations for anyone wanting to explore web development as a job or even as a...
by JAK | Dec 1, 2016 | culture, music
I went to the New Zealand music awards a couple of weeks ago. There were some surprising performances from Shapeshifter and Tami Neilson who were both stunning but not exactly popular music I would have thought. Most of the music was from mainstream popular “not...
by JAK | Nov 8, 2016 | culture
This week is election week in that big noisy neighbours place. You know the one. I’m seeing a lot of uncertainty around my media streams and in New Zealand we get a somewhat filtered view but it is noisy out there. This ‘post’ is not directly about...
by JAK | Oct 26, 2016 | culture, News
Last week I came across two people who seemed to genuinely believe that Hillary Clinton was a terrible choice for U.S President and despite them not liking Trump they seemed to be supporting him. And this makes me think that the U.S election result will be much closer...
by JAK | Oct 21, 2016 | culture, music
Just last week Bob Dylan was awarded a Nobel prize for literature. That was the prompt for dinner conversations about the extent that music and literature can cross over. And then if Bob can win why wasn’t Leonard Cohen also in the frame? Bob has made 37 studio...
by JAK | Oct 1, 2016 | big ideas, culture
There was a fascinating story about rats the other day. Rats are linked to many problems caused in the human population. We generally think we know what those are. Man v rat: could the long war soon be over? Rats spread disease, decimate crops and very occasionally...
by JAK | Sep 16, 2016 | culture, general business, industry futures
Or are they Utopian revolutionaries? Ouch… @bentarnoff has written about why some people hate the tech industry in an article called Gaffes, ignorance and PR nightmares: why it’s so easy to hate the tech industry for the Guardian. “The reality is...
