Tongan King Coronation Woes

I've been intrigued and impressed while watching the festivities around the coronation of Tonga's King this week. The drama and hardcore culture of the events taking place are pretty cool.

One of my staff came back from a holiday in Tonga and brought me a coffee mug commemorating the coronation ceremony. Ignoring the obvious commercialisation issues for a moment, it was a nice present to receive.

Here's the mug:

Pretty cool, I think.
Well...the other side of the mug looks like this:

Is that MS Comic Sans???? Yes. Sadly, it is.

The designer of the mug has chosen MS Comic Sans to commemorate the crowning of the Tongan King. In earlier days, this might have resulted in a good old-fashioned beating to the death (had MS Word been in widespread use). Nowadays, no such penalty will occur, thereby dooming yet another serious message to the paralyzing and goofy influence of Comic Sans.

Sigh...

New project work : FAVC and KIDANET

We had a busy week...got two projects launched.

The Fiji Audio Visual Commission has come a long way and they're quite focused on putting effort into developing new content. Will be interesting to see how marketing will impact their site's use.

We also gave a complete design refresh to KIDANET, focusing a bit more on their expansion of services into VoIP and re-organising their content.

So much of website development here in Fiji appears to focus on aesthetics only. It's inevitable that people will have different opinions about what works and what doesn't graphically, too. However, nothing can take the place of a website that can deliver the right content to the person who wants it, when they want it. I'd rather see a grey page with no graphics and just text if it answers the questions I have at that moment. If there is ever a challenge in web design, it's simply being able to understand that one question.

What does the person coming here want?

This is very different from the too-often-heard "This is what I want my website visitors to see."

George W. Bush Sewage

From today's Miami Herald, a motion to name a sewage plant after President Bush.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush's years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot. The measure certified Thursday would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

Supporters say the idea is to commemorate the mess they claim Bush has left behind by actions such as the war in Iraq.

Local Republicans say the plan stinks and they will oppose it.

Digital Talanoa : Digital Dis-Comfort

Users of the popular Facebook social-networking website have come to take advantage of it’s intriguing and wildly popular capacity for connecting friends and colleagues with one-another. Based on an increasing number of “friend requests”, users in Fiji are no exception. A lot of these invitations come from people who I don’t know. Generally, I used to just accept these requests when they came in but I’ve come to re-think that action.

For starters, I don’t know half the people making the request to join my network and that’s a bit odd. It’s not that I’m adverse to meeting new people or finding new friends, though. That’s fine. What ends up bothering me is having to be kept abreast of all these people’s “status” updates. It peaked last week when I was notified that two different people in my network had moved from being married to single, one had gone from being engaged to being “in an open relationship” and one more had updated his status with a description of the impact a bad Indian dinner had on his body.

Technology's Impact on Food Fights

Oh, to be young in today's world. The perfect gift to give to the child of parents who you'd like to make miserable.

As a kid, this item would have been my dream.
As a parent, someone else's kids can have one of these. Available from Amazon

[via Big Contrarian]

New oceanic.com.fj site

Well...we finally got our new oceanic.com.fj out of beta and no longer running alongside the old site. If you've visited this blog before, you can probably see the difference reflected here as well. Although the new site has been online and available for the past few weeks for people to run through, we made a large number of changes during the past week based on the feedback we received. Thanks very much to JS, RU, MS and CT for taking the time to offer comments.

The site is definitely a bit heavier than before but we made the decision to keep the focus on our portfolio and show our work beyond just tiny thumbnails. I'm still amazed going through this process how challenging it is at times to develop your own website...everyone has an opinion and everyone is correct.

At some point soon, I'll take the time to give people a peek into the back-end. Specifically, the portfolio management application the team built is very slick. This version of our site represents a big leap in Oceanic's content management system.

I'm way proud of the job the Oceanic team did on this one, too. Well done, team.

FTIB Making Decisions, People Complaining

I remember a conversation I had with a long-time expat of Fiji when I first arrived in the country. He had been living in Fiji for over twenty years and was a valuable resource insofar as learning Fiji living "survival tactics". His earliest advice to me was something along the lines of "Don't complain about things. It's not the Fijian way."

It's been almost six years now and looking back, I've realised that he was either completely full of shit or had no idea what he was talking about. Possibly a combination of the two. This country (or at least Suva City) can be as good a group of complainers as anywhere in the world. I can be one of them to a certain extent but the first lesson in controlling this beast is identifying when you're doing it.

Digital Talanoa : What's In A Name

In a remarkable story which made headlines around the world last week, a Fiji-based news website erroneously reported that Microsoft would be naming it’s next operating system “Windows Fiji”. In response to that report, the country shifted into high gear in order to prevent the rumour from actually coming true.

The issue has since been dealt with and I’m happy to be the first to report that the next version of Microsoft’s product will instead be called “Windows Nadi”. As part of the deal, Microsoft has also promised to not release the software until the entire world knows how to pronounce “Nadi” properly. Fiji will benefit immensely from this.

Light.com.fj Launch

We launched the LIGHT.com.fj website yesterday to get some proper online marketing behind the Ceelite LEC panels and other hardware we distribute.

The site is a pretty basic overview of what the products we carry are and we'll obviously be highlighting more local installations as we get proper photography. Already, Courts, Jacks, ANZ and Post Fiji are customers and they've all been very impressed with the ease of the product and the energy-saving characteristics.

Any feedback on the Light website, positive or negative, is appreciated.

Visit the Light website.