Arrived in Wellington, NZ last night after 24 hours of brutalizing travel. Spent the day yesterday trying to stay awake, but I was able to wander around Wellington and try to capture the local flavor through my lens. The following were taken using my Canon 50D and my Fuji X100:
Big thanks to /Filmcast listener Sam for taking me around, and being incredibly patient with me as I got increasingly loopy.
On Sunday, July 24th, I’ll be getting on a plane and heading to Wellington, New Zealand. Paramount Pictures will be funding part of my journey, during which I’ll get to visit WETA, meet Peter Jackson, and chat about his new film The Adventures of Tintin. However, I’m also paying out of my own pocket to stay in New Zealand for a few extra days. My hope is to see some of the spectacular sights of the South Island and visit some locations from Lord of the Rings while I’m at it. If I have time/am conscious, I’ll try to blog about my experiences, although it’s more likely that I’ll save all my content until I return home.
Obviously, updates will be sparse on here for about two weeks, but I plan to take tons of amazing photos that I hope you’ll be pleased by.
If you have any suggestions for places I should definitely visit, please leave them in the comments (along with specific details about how I might get there). I’m planning on being on the South Island for about 2 days.
If any of you New Zealanders would like to meet me, I’ll probably be hanging out at the lobby bar in the Museum Art Hotel in Wellington on Tuesday night (7/26) at around 8 PM. This could easily change though, so do follow me on Twitter to make sure you stay up to date with what’s going.
Wish me safe travels. I’ll see you on the other side.
Paul Ford has a nice meditation on the power of social networks to convey narrative, and why we still need curators (and journalists) to organize all the information out there for us, rather than computer algorithms:
I keep sensing some serious hurt feelings from the older-media side — “Why would you love that thing instead of me?” They act like my wife would if I brought home a RealDoll. But it’s not like that. I don’t think people love Twitter or Facebook in the same way they might love Parks and Recreation or Twilight. Rather, we like the beer and tolerate the bottle. And even if we have those other browser tabs open, we’re still hungry for endings.
Lily Altavena, detailing widespread dissatisfaction with community colleges (via Mike):
As many as four out of five community college students in the United States want to transfer to a four-year institution so they can obtain a bachelor’s degree, according to a report released Thursday by the College Board. The report, on the challenges facing students who transfer from two-year public colleges to four-year institutions, also found that two of every five undergraduates in the United States is enrolled in a community college.
Interested in this whole News of the World debacle, but totally confused about who is hacking whom? Check out this excellent guide that you can read in just a few minutes! (via Jay Rosen)
Virginia Heffernan, on the proliferation of typos online and in print:
Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of “algorithm” or “Albert Pujols” — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage.
From the NYTimes comes a story about a man who tried to kill another man, and how the victim is trying to spare the killer’s life (via Sara):
Q Mr. Stroman has admitted trying to kill you. Why are you trying to save his life?
A I was raised very well by my parents and teachers. They raised me with good morals and strong faith. They taught me to put yourself in others’ shoes. Even if they hurt you, don’t take revenge. Forgive them. Move on. It will bring something good to you and them. My Islamic faith teaches me this too. He said he did this as an act of war and a lot of Americans wanted to do it but he had the courage to do it — to shoot Muslims. After it happened I was just simply struggling to survive in this country. I decided that forgiveness was not enough. That what he did was out of ignorance. I decided I had to do something to save this person’s life. That killing someone in Dallas is not an answer for what happened on Sept. 11.
Borders will close down its 400 stores and its corporate headquarters, leaving over 10,000 people without jobs. Sure, we once hated how megacorporation chains destroyed mom-and-pops, but even the chains are dying out now. In the end, it’s the readers that will lose.