Our Glorious Three Components
Simon Talbot from Kraft Foods said: "The name Vegemite iSnack2.0 was chosen based on its personal call to action, relevance to snacking and clear identification of a new and different Vegemite to the original. We believe these three components completely encapsulate the new brand."
The call to iSnack action
Resounds throughout the land
Our glorious three components
Encapsulate the brand
On darkest breakfast tables
Dank dusty Vegemite
Made snacking near-irrelevant
Until we joined the fight
To feed the millions craving
Difference and novelty
We prayed to Kraft for a miracle
And lo! Processed CREAM CHEESE!
No mortal mind conceived this snack
'Twere born in circuit's glow!
In awe we serve to you on crackers
iSnack Two - Point - Ohhhh!
(iSnack 2.0 will now be known as CheesyBite. It's cheesy... and it bites! Kraft Foods would like to remind you that it is no longer directly related to the Philip Morris tobacco empire, since a whole couple of years ago, and would all you people please just shut up about that.)
Dreamlog: Two Space Dreams
Two space dreams:
1. I am going to be flying on/piloting an experimental space shuttle type craft. For some reason I have to take an ordinary airline flight to get to the space station. I have to convince the airport check-in clerks of my identity. Once I get onto the ship I start the separation process. I think we're going to the Moon but it's all a bit low-budget.
2. I am in a team exploring an 'off-world platform' which seems to be just a building on a hillside. There are teleporters in the rooms which lead to other worlds.
Dreamlog: Miss Havisham
I am in my old house, or what passes for it; two stories with a stair. We are about to have a visitor, my nephew. I walk into the ground-floor bathroom and when my hand touches the tap there is an electrical or sonic buzz and I am immobilised. Not electrical, I think in the dream, since I don't feel any pain from the current. But it is annoying.
My annoyance turns to menace when the nephew arrives, and I realise that the buzzer was his practical-joke device, which he has just bought from the store, and that somehow this could become dangerous. He chases me upstairs, into my bedroom. I'm going to fight back with some devices of my own. There is a struggle for control at the door. He's winning so I scream bloody murder for my parents.
Reality 'pops' upwards and I am looking at this as chapter two of a comic serial version of a Charles Dickens story. It is nineteenth century London, the house is a brick tenement, and we are leaving due to financial problems. In the story I go on to work for 'Miss Havisham' -- but not, it is understood, the one from Great Expectations but a similarly-named character who is a young secretary possibly involved in espionage.
Later in a second dream I am partially lucid. I walk through a city noticing how the skyline seems similar to other dreams I have been in and wondering if it is a real place. I intend to catch the rest of this dream but other than this thought it fades almost completely.
Addington Space (Mark IV)
An all-new look Addington Space website is up! Yay!
About four years ago I first tried setting up a neighbourhood website, based on pmwiki. It sort of worked but not so much. The frameworks just weren't there to do a full Social Network site, which is what I wanted. And I wasn't in the mood to write my own from scratch in PHP, even using Drupal/Joomla/et al. So I figured I ought to try simplifying it as a blog. When that didn't work, I figured I needed to give in and try a fully hosted cloud solution. But I wanted to stay in New Zealand.... but no.
Attempt 1: Pmwiki. Attempt 2: Wordpress. Attempt 3: PeoplesTimes.com. Attempt 4: Ning.com
And finally it looks like we might have a workable platform. Yay! The downsides are Google ads and being hosted in the States. The upsides are really easy setup, automatic self-serve registration, single sign-on across multiple Ning sites, users can post content (the most important bit).
If you live in Addington - or anywhere in Christchurch and interested in social work or community development - try the site out. It's possible we could set up a network of related Ning sites if this works.
Ultimately I still want to find a local, free software, OpenSocial compliant, self-maintaining, 100% organic solution, but getting something that works even as a demo is one small step forward.
Dreamlog: Airport Spy, Ghost News, Sink Oil Filter
I've been trialling logging my dreams on Sawlogs.net. It's fun but I think I need to keep a backup of my data, so I'll relog them here. Social Web: Not Done Yet.
Wordpress doesn't seem to want to backdate permalinks properly so...
Sink Oil Filter
2009-10-03
I am staying with my parents in an old house with strange plumbing. It's night. Something is broken in the water system and we are trying to track it down. I look in one of the rooms; there's what seems to be a kitchen sink fitted with a motor oil filter. The filter comes out easily enough - it's made of white plastic about six inches long and an inch round - and the oil inside is a brown sludge. I know I need to change it but I'm confused as to how. The sink is full of water and there seems to be two separate oil supply and drain lines as well as a drum of fresh oil in the room. The more I fiddle with it the more it looks like I'm just messing it up. Guiltily I try to put the thing back the way I found it and hope my Dad discovers it in the morning.
Ghost News
2009-10-02
It's late afternoon. A fair or festival of some kind has come to town. I am trying to get in before it closes, but I didn't buy a ticket. I try to fake my way past the door by finding old tickets from my wallet, but they don't work.
Later, it's evening. I and some friends are taking shelter in an old wooden cabin-type structure up in the hills. There are multiple rooms full of junk left from a long time ago. At least one of us has been here before and warns us that we need to be prepared. Strange ghost-like people are coming up the hill and we can't keep them out but must interact with them only in certain carefully-defined ways. We need to each tear off a page from an old newspaper and give this to a ghost. That way their hunger will be satisfied for the night and they won't kill us.
The ghosts arrive and we greet them formally and give them their news pages. They stick around and seem to make quite good conversationalists. I begin to wonder if we weren't just prejudiced.
Airport Spy
2009-09-26
I am with friends (or family) in an airport, about to take a flight. We meet a woman who is some kind of spy or secret agent. A chase occurs through airport and plane as we escape with her from 'the conspiracy'. We finally arrive at Nelson.
Pieces are missing. Afterwards, it feels as if the dream shares similar features with other dreams in the 'airport' or 'old house' dreamscapes.
I love dreams. Reading back through my journal for the last couple of years, they're really vivid. I'm glad they keep coming, I just wish I could remember more.
