RNZ is under-funded and under-appreciated and has been for years. I worked there for 35 years, and I have many friends who still work there. While the following is a fairly bleak read, I will say that RNZ was a fantastic and fun place to work, and was and is full of passionate and wonderful… Continue reading Saving Public Broadcasting
I am currently working on a project to create a React-based kiosk application framework for use in the GLAM sector. It’s intended to help bootstrap the creation of digital interactive displays. As part of this project I need a carousel component. There are dozens of these out there, but none quite fitted what I needed:… Continue reading A Simple Draggable Carousel that supports React Router
The lawsuit in the United States against Dominos should be of interest to everyone. They’ve asked the Supreme Court to rule that their website should not be required to be accessible to blind visitors due to cost, and a lack of clarity around the actual accessibility requirements. Imagine if they were asking the Supreme Court… Continue reading Website Accessibility is a Human Right
Do a Google search for the myth of multitasking and you’ll learn that it’s bad for productivity, bad for mental health, bad for concentration; it’s just bad all round. (If you are not convinced, read the top 5 results from the above search.) It’s bad because we aren’t really multi-tasking at all, we are switching… Continue reading Context Switching and Management
A friend told me recently he was at peace with a decision he’d made, but I noticed that he continued to revisit that decision and justify why he made it given the slightest opportunity. Each time he gave different reasons why he was right, explored new options, and justified his past choice based on the… Continue reading Pain: Moving from Equilibrium to Peace
“There is no instant pudding” – so said W. Edwards Deming. What he was referring to was the human penchant to want to copy things that worked elsewhere in the belief that they would have the same results in your business. People wanting a formula for, in his case, ‘quality’. These days we call them… Continue reading When best practices are not best
To help you write better stories, here are some tips and tricks, using bad stories as examples. Example #1 As a userI want to click saveSo I can save my work. As a User What user? I consider the term ‘user’ in a user story to be a bit lazy. The term has also taken… Continue reading How to write better user stories
8:42, 8 carriages. All stops. Always plenty of seats, but don’t tell the people who sandwich themselves onto the 8:37, which was two carriages short. Fred the guard, or ‘customer manager’. Hair in a high bun. Click. Thanks very much. Click. Have a happy day. Click. Lovely weather. Click. Have a nice day dear (to… Continue reading Reflections on a daily commute
In the late 1980s it was pretty obvious to even the casual observer that digital editing was going to change the way audio was produced. In 1991 I edited an album – Jubilate, The Central Band of the Royal New Zealand Air Force – on the Sony DAE, a system based on u-matic video recorders.… Continue reading Using ProTools (Version 1.1) in 1992
I was behind the relaunch of the RNZ website in 2005, the release that finally brought RNZ audio and news to the public at one web location, and in early 2006 I turned on the podcast feeds for some of RNZ’s most popular shows. They were an instant success for those in the know; podcasting was… Continue reading Podcasting – Hype or New Hope?
Richard Hulse 