Digital Talanoa : Now FREE!

I have a love/hate relationship with advertising. My involvement with the industry is as both a consumer of advertising and a creator of advertising. I can use this to fool myself into thinking I have some special insight into the minds of consumers because I’m one myself. That’s the love. The hate side revolves around the unease I feel with the way it sometimes plays a role in my life.

R.I.P. - Lucky Dube

An absolute tragedy to hear of the senseless murder of Lucky Dube, one of reggaes foremost musicians. Shot and killed during an apparent carjacking in South Africa, Lucky will be sorely missed by all those who knew his music and by all those who will come to know his music in the future. Sad day.

Acrobat update : Good user design

I'm a big fan of the simple and little things determining good user design. I'm not referring to aesthetic design though, just user experience design. An Adobe Acrobat v8 modal dialog box includes a simple checkbox which lets the application update itself only when the Internet connection is idle, thereby saving bandwidth until it's more readily available. With slower dial-up and non-broadband speeds in Fiji, this is a welcome addition to any application.

It's a very simple method of not getting in the way of the user's other tasks but still giving them the choice to determine how they want to update their software.

I wish more applications incorporated such obvious user-friendly features.

Left Brain vs. Right Brain

Great optical illusion.
Which way is the dancer turning? Clockwise or counter-clockwise?

If you see her moving clockwise, you use more of the right side of the brain. I had real difficulty seeing the counter-clockwise motion but after concentrating a while (by looking away and back), I was able to do it.

A longer description of left brain vs. right brain attributes can be found at the original article via Australian's Herald Sun.

Digital Talanoa - Music, Piracy, Good Times

My ten-year-old daughter, Kaia, and her friend were sitting at our dining room table this week, chatting excitedly about some music band I had never heard of. I know it’s a bit of a cliché to refer to the sad feeling one gets when younger people are around talking about popular music. Up until last year or so, I considered myself pretty hip musically (I should have known that even the word “hip” is no longer hip). I enjoy the fact that I raised my kids on music ranging from Bob Marley to Miles Davis to The Beatles. I believed that giving my children a foundation is most important and I kind of hoped that my daughter wouldn’t stray too far from the classics. Here’s what I learnt: it doesn’t work that way.