The Hugo’s to me will always be first and foremost about the written form, but this only makes up a percentage of the categories. While it is hard in New Zealand to find the novels, novellas and short stories that are nominated, the ‘dramatic presentations’, or television and film productions, are generally easier. The nominations for the ’short form’ this year were:

• “The Constant” (Lost) Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof, writers; Jack Bender, director (Bad Robot, ABC studios)
• Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon & Maurissa Tancharoen , writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)
• “Revelations” (Battlestar Galactica) Bradley Thompson & David Weddle, writers; Michael Rymer, director (NBC Universal)
• “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead” (Doctor Who) Steven Moffat, writer; Euros Lyn, director (BBC Wales)
• “Turn Left” (Doctor Who) Russell T. Davies, writer; Graeme Harper, director (BBC Wales)

Neal Stephenson has been a ‘buy on sight’ author for me since Cryptonomicon. His ability to meld intricate scientific and historic themes into works of literary significance, and keep them accessible to the masses was only proved further with Cryptonomicon’s ‘prequel’, the Baroque Cycle.

With his latest door stopper of a novel, Stephenson has left historical fiction for a tour of the multiple cosmi theory of quantum mechanics, and delved deeper than ever into a fantastically realised world. Such is the depth of the immersion that the book contains a preface to explain things such as that it is not set on Earth. A little over the top for my liking, but if it helps to gain the book a wider readership, then it can’t hurt. Of course, not everyone likes this level of immersion…

His publishers appear to have spared no expense at promoting the book, the trailer above bearing remarkable resemblance to one that would be produced for a major motion picture.

The story itself is set on Arbre. Some 3000 years ago, civilisation was in a golden age, not unlike our own. After a series of catastrophic events, scholars were split from the everyday populace, and secluded themselves in strict communes, only having contact with civilisation for ten days once every year, ten years, 100 or 1000 years, depending on the order. Secure in their studies, civilisations have risen and fallen around them while they maintain knowledge.

The Protagonist and teller of the story is Erasmus, a young scholar in a Decenarian order. (One that only has contact with the outside world once every decade). Stephenson uses the the fact that Erasmus is both student and teacher to hide vasts amounts of info-dump, and the story never bogs down. In places the work refers to calca in the appendices to enable some of the more theoretical maths to be broken out, but even these are easily readable, and the story is no worse off if you miss them out.

Mixing philosophical discussions, the aforementioned maths and physics, and a gripping storyline could not have been easy, but Anathem pulls it off. One of Stephenson’s biggest weaknesses from my point of view is his writing of endings. I have not been fully satisfied with any of his books in this respect – but even here I am pleasantly surprised.

****1/2. A most definitely worthy candidate for a Hugo. A must read. If you can find a copy.

Author J. Michael Straczynski tells a moving story about what it meant to him to win a Hugo award. When he was young with no money, his family were constantly moving. He could not visit libraries, and so would pilfer books to read, and then return them undetected to the store. He discovered that books emblazoned with the words ‘Hugo Winner’ were the key to finding quality amongst the chaff. These were the books that he would risk all to read hidden beneath the covers at night.

Growing up, though in a more affluent setting, I also hungered for these pearls of quality. That isn’t to say I didn’t voraciously work my way through any and all libraries, but it was my father’s collection of Hugo and Nebula winners that really opened my eyes to good writing.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the lengths to which book stores in New Zealand will go to hide quality literature. For several years, I have tried to find copies of the five Hugo nominees for best novel as soon as they are announced. They are not stocked. They’ve never even heard of them. They look at you as if you are mad. My goal this year is to find and read at least two before the winners are announced at Anticipation in August.

One of the weird contradictions in life is that the longer and stupider hours I’m working, the more tired I get, the more time I actually have to read. Essentially because I lack the energy to cycle to work, and fall back on buses. This gives me a good uninterrupted 15 minutes each way to lose myself in. First up, a single lone copy of Stephenson’s Anathem was recently spotted in a local bookshop…

The ukulele is known as a Hawaiian instrument, but it is quite pervasive throughout the Island groups of the Pacific. While not a ‘traditional’ instrument of the Cook Island Maori (whose music prior to western cultural influence was heavily rhythmic, with different toned pātē or drums intertwining in counterpoint), the uke is now highly prevalent, and Island made instruments are a common souvenir for tourists.

My eight string uke, a souvenir of Rarotonga

My wife bought me this lovely instrument from the market in Avarua. Ukuleles on the island came in two distinct styles. The first, a half coconut shell formed the sound box, with a thin ply fret board extending out from this. These were commonly painted with island scenes, and resembled the common four string ukes you would find in Hawaii. The more beautiful ones were single blocks of hardwood, with lovely carvings on the face, and an echo chamber hollowed out of the back.

Intricate carvings on the body.

The instrument I bought is tuned in the common ‘C’ tuning. That is, G-C-E-A. The four pairs of strings are all tuned in unison (as opposed to octaves as they would be on a 12 string guitar). This tuning means that chords are simply a fourth above the same fingering on the top four strings of a guitar. ie, finger the common guitar ‘D’, (x-x-0-2-3-2), and you will be playing a ‘G’. Finger a ‘G’ (x-x-0-0-0-3) and you will be playing a ‘C’. etc.

The distinctive strumming sound of this instrument comes from the fact that the A string is not tuned to a fourth above the E string – it is a fifth below it, or a tone above the G string. This means any down strum is going to hit a relatively low note last, which pulls the ear down with it unexpectedly.

With chords easily worked out transposing from the guitar, I needed to practice some ‘island’ strumming patterns. These are taking some – but for now I can make do with more traditional guitar strums. The thing I am finding hardest with the instrument is picking. With eight strings very close together and very low over the body, there is no room to get your fingers in there. I’ve browsed the web for hints and tips, and everyone I’ve seen has a four string uke with inches between the strings! So, does anyone out there have an eight string uke? Is it a strum only instrument? Are my clumsy fingers just too used to nice easy classical guitars? Any tips?

Autumn is upon us, and as any good poem will tell you, with it comes a tonal palette of soft amber hues…

Photos taken during voyages 519 and 546 on STS Spirit of New Zealand, March/April 2008/2009.

For several years, the Spirit of Adventure Trust has been working with the Sir Peter Blake Trust to help clean up New Zealand’s coastlines. We put our forty trainees ashore on a remote beach, and spend a couple of hours collecting and cataloguing any rubbish found. This data is sent back to the organisers who collate it all, and a break down is available on-line. Voyage 546 was a bit different. On the 3rd and 4th of April, a new group called Sustainable Coastlines had organised a huge clean up of Great Barrier Island. As the Spirit of New Zealand was in the vicinity anyway, we were invited to take part. School children and adults were shipped in to Tryphena harbour from all around Auckland, fishing boats played their part collecting the rubbish and taking it away. We were asked if we could handle Katherine bay, and said ’sure’.

Thus began the largest beach clean I have ever been involved in. Katherine Bay comprises more than 20 nautical miles of shoreline, and our 40 trainees and ten crew trawled through a sizeable portion of it throughout the day. Among other things we collected were a massive motorway traffic barrier and half an aluminium boat, along with the more usual piles of plastic, glass and metal fragments. Broken buoys and huge piles of netting from mussel farms were also in large number, posing a huge danger to the fragile marine eco-system.

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New Zealand prides itself on its clean, green, natural reputation. It is quite shocking to consider the reality – that one virtually uninhabited island off the coast has so much rubbish, the majority obviously carried there by the currents from Auckland. Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the SoNZ, most of the rubbish had been collected by another boat, but I am trying to get access to some photos that others in the crew took. I will post them here when I do. Sam Judd has also promised to put more information on their website, and I’ll update this with links if they do.

Our stay in the Cook Islands was split into two – a full week on the main island of Rarotonga, followed by five nights in Aitutaki, a smaller ‘almost atoll’ 225km to the north.

The fishpond by the restaurant

A while ago I implemented an application that performs an email merge, sending customised content to subscribers. All well and good, until I get reports that one particular person is not receiving the notifications.

Much testing followed, her record was analysed and test emails sent. Everything appeared to be working. The email server logs were subjected to more scrutiny than the private life of the latest celebrity. No errors were found.

I filed the bug in the ‘to follow up’ category and promptly forgot about it. Lo, when next the email merge sent, she once again missed out. The bug seemed unreproducible except in live conditions, when sending to greater than 3000 subscribers. Unable to set up conditions to examine it without harassing our subscriber base with unwanted emails, I once again shelved the problem. And there it remained until a chance conversation with a colleague gave me a brain wave – something I had never even considered.

The onUload event handler has been around since JavaScript 1.0. The unload event fires when the user exits a document. It falls down though, in that it cannot cancel itself.

In web page design, this is great. The casual user browsing the web should be in complete control. In the world of DHTML, Ajax and web applications though, it becomes much more desirable. (Purists may still argue that providing a reliable ‘undo’ function is better than a cancel – but this throws up a whole heap of other questions.)

Gmail capturing a window unload event

IE has supported an non-standards compliant handler, onBeforeUnload for a while. What I just realised today, is that Firefox now supports this too. It should have been obvious – on inspection, Gmail uses just this mechanism. (Again, purists may ask why not simply send off an AJAX save request on the unload and let the user know their message is saved in drafts, where they can delete it if they want. I’ll let them!).

Certainly not something to use everyday – but I can think of a couple of apps I will retrofit to give the user a nicer experience.

Other than a very brief two hour layover at 2am in Tahiti, when I first moved to New Zealand, neither my wife or I had ever been to a Pacific Island. Living in such close proximity in New Zealand, we reasoned it would be the perfect honeymoon destination. Our original plan was to Island hop a bit, visit maybe three Island groups, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, and Samoa. After some investigation though, it proved very difficult to get from one Island to another, short of flying back to Auckland. Also, our last holiday to England and Europe had proved very frenetic, not staying in one place longer than three days, and we wanted this break to be somewhat more languid.

So, we settled on just visiting the Cook Islands, and having a longer holiday in one location. After our float plane ride back from the Sounds, we traded up to a newly refitted Boeing 777, and settled down in business class. For such a short trip, there was really no need, but hey, it’s your honeymoon, you might as well splash out! Also, being a short trip it wasn’t insanely expensive. So, we got to indulge in fully lie flat beds in Air New Zealand’s new Business Premier class. As with the float plane, you wouldn’t do it every trip, but it was certainly a nicer experience than the normal economy class.

Rarotonga from the air

Four hours after leaving Auckland, we were circling over Rarotonga. The airport takes up a long strip along the North West coast, and as we approached from the South we could really appreciate the topography of the Island. Formed from multiple volcanic eruptions, Rarotonga is the youngest of the islands that make up the Cooks. The highly fertile soil of the central regions is covered in dense bush as it rises up to the multiple peaks that make up the ‘cloud mountains’ of the interior. Towards the coast the highlands flatten to a large coastal plane that encircles the 30km diameter, out to a rich lagoon, and further out a barrier reef.

The view out our window during one of the tropical storms

We were staying in Muri, a small settlement almost exactly opposite the airport on the South West coast. The lagoon here is a marine reserve, and the four small Motu, or islands, provide a picturesque backdrop to the turquoise and indigo of the water.

The Pacific Resort Rarotonga was a lovely place to stay. Our bungalow was hidden away in lush tropical gardens, but still only 100m from the rich amber hues of the beach. A stream full of fish, fresh water crays and eels, flowed between the two, crossed by several bridges. A restaurant on the beach afforded breathtaking views of the sunsets, while a second restaurant bordered the stream, allowing the ravenous fish to be fed directly from your plate.

Visiting in February, the heat was not as oppressive as I had been expecting it to be. When it did become too much, the sea was only moments away, and was a pleasant alternative to the artificial air conditioning to cool off. Being tropical, the frequent storms were impressive. Out of a clear sky you would hear thunder rolling across the island, followed by the sky darkening, darkening, until the first large rain drops arrived. For ten minutes the rain would be torrential, then as suddenly as it arrived, it would be gone. Another ten minutes, and the ground would be dry again, as if the rain had never been.

Muri beach