Bret McKenzie stares enigmatically into the mid-distance

Mike's Pith & Wind - Figwit
It’s almost axiomatic, in fact it may actually be axiomatic, that the more you write songs or do anything in the creative arena that relies on popular approval, the less you know about exactly what it is that makes something appealing to the public at large. I’m all too painfully aware of this with practically the first song I ever wrote being adopted as some sort of anthem nation-wide, followed by a long succession of stiff singles and ‘critically well received’ albums, which is, of course, industry code for equally stiff albums. It’s perhaps even more demonstrably true these days with the advent of the Web with its FaceBooks and YouTubes. Take the curious example of Figwit.
I was scanning the papers this morning trying to find an issue that I could discuss in this column that hadn’t already been done to death by every journo or blogger in the universe and I’d turned my attention to Christchurch’s online version of The Press. My attention was initially drawn to some footage of the last calamitous earthquake which answered one query in my mind about how no actual live footage* seemed to have been shot during the quake.
I idly conjured with the notion of discussing the cyclist who pedals into the frame and casually dismounts like some latter day Jacques Tati just as the quake hits and the building over the road heart-stoppingly disintegrates. Maybe not – I’ve already said quite a lot about the earthquakes
I turned to the Entertainment page and.. read more

You wanna learn guitar or buy a classic piece of equipment? Check the classifieds

Dick's Toolbox - The joys of computing
I realised as I poured over specification sheets, internet sites and price lists that I hadn’t bought a computer since 1989 when I commenced a Post Graduate course in Computing at the then Chisholm Institute which was soon subsumed into the cavernous qualification mill of Monash University.
I remember more than twenty years ago venturing with immense fear, doubt, uncertainty and $3000 of my own real non-inflated coin of the realm into a small shop in Station Street, East Malvern. I emerged with a beige box of state of the art computing gear. It possessed, behind its bland exterior adorned with the necessary Turbo button, the astounding memory of one megabyte, of which the operating system could reliably address only 640Kb, and a hard disk of five megabytes. Yes, megabytes and not gigabytes, the latter a term known of in science fiction, but not in the reality of human purchasable... read more