The Hamilton Halo project has been working hard to bring back native New Zealand birds, such as the tui and bellbird, into Hamilton’s suburbs. Apparently these birds, tui especially, used to be common in this city but predators and loss of habitat caused them to vanish.

When I first moved to Wellington in 2006, I lived in an old house atop a hill in Brooklyn that had a kowhai tree outside my bedroom window. Every morning I’d wake up to the distinctive call* of the tui, and it was amazing, as I’d only ever seen them in free-flight aviaries in zoos.

Now though, back in Hamilton, I’m regularly hearing them, and the other day was lucky enough to see a pair in a tree at my house. It gives me a real sense of being ‘home’ to have these unique New Zealand birds around the place, and hearing them never fails to make me smile.

So good on you Hamilton Halo. What a gift you’re giving Hamilton.

*Call from Environment Waikato site, provided by the Department of Conservation.

Photo: http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o166/jlbyler/FACEPALM.jpg

Got the person’s name wrong at the top of an email
There are variations on this. You might be sending an identical email to a number of people and have left the ‘Dear XXX’ at the top. (Bonus points if it’s an invoice!) Or you might have cut and pasted a previously sent email, and forgotten to change the name at the top. Or, my favourite, you type in ‘Dear wrong-but-very-similar name’ and don’t notice until you’ve hit ‘send’. And there’s nothing you can do but resend the email and hope they don’t notice the name and assume a glitch has caused you to send it twice.

Said the wrong thing at a function
Maybe you had one too many, or you just got a little out of your depth, or you weren’t quite sure if the other person is joking around with you. Whatever, you make a quip or let a naughty word inappropriately slip out, and in that second after, that pause lets you know that you’ve entered Faux Pas country. Time to change the subject or politely excuse yourself.

Answered “Are you busy?” with anything other than “yes”
In a client-provider situation, when the client asks if you’re busy, the only correct answer is yes. This lets them know that you’re successful and well worth the dollars they’re paying you. Telling them “it’s not too bad” or “actually, it’s pretty quiet at the moment” are both wrong answers. When in doubt, treat it like “how are you?” in a social situation – people don’t want to know that you burnt your toast or that you think you’re developing a serious addiction to edamame beans. You always answer “fine, thanks”.

What have you done that makes you cringe?

Image: http://www.narrativetherapy.com.au/blog/

Sometimes I have to work harder to get going than I do on the actual work. This has always been a problem for me – I was always the “I’ve almost started!” kid when it came to homework. But I have never missed a deadline, so a lot of it comes down to knowing your weaknesses, and exploiting them where necessary.

So here are five tricks I’ve learned that work for me; feel free to disagree and give me something better to work with.

1) Get the slacking off out of the way first. When I switch on the computer, I look at my RSS feeds first, including the just-for-fun ones. Then I read my two main news sites. The idea is that I run out of temptation so I have no choice but to get on with the task at hand.

2) Use another web browser for work stuff. This is my favourite. I use Firefox usually, but when I have to look at client sites and do web research for work, I’ve been using Chrome. In Chrome, I have no bookmarks, no RSS feeds, and no saved sites – ergo, nothing to pull my attention away.

3) Take frequent breaks. I’m one of those people who works best in bursts, rather than for long stretches. I know when I can soldier on through, and when my attention has waned to the point that I read the same sentence over and over. That’s when I go and get another coffee or hang out the washing, ready to start again.

4) Do the easy work first. Lots of people say to get the hard stuff done first, but that’s not how I roll, baby. I like to ease myself in; by the time I get to doing the hard stuff, I’m in work mode and I can stay on-task better.

5) Religiously fill out my timesheet. I just use a notepad document for each project and log start/end times each day. It makes me very conscious that it’s work time – and I can see how long it is between bouts of work, which is often a good kick in the pants. It’s vital to do proper timesheets anyway if, like me, you charge by the hour, but this way I’m using it to my advantage.

Any other good tips?

Image: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2008/06/

But the LiveScribe is different. LiveScribe is giving me intense, unrivalled feelings of *WANT*.

It has a pen with embedded digital recorder and computer which, when used with special paper, records what it’s writing for later upload, and syncs those notes with what’s been recorded. For writers, especially those w

ho do a significant amount of interviewing, this could change the world. It’s so much easier to engage in a conversation if you’re not frantically scribbling at the same time, hence why dictaphones became popular. But the joy of these is that it’s nice and discreet, not a box sitting on the table and intimidating your subject. And for someone like me who struggles sometimes to decipher their own scrawl, it would save a lot of time and confused squinting.

Not to mention that every time I used it, I’d feel like I was in James Bond or Get Smart.

You might wonder what rock I’ve been living under, given that according to Wikipedia this product has existed since 2005. In my defence, I live in New Zealand, and unless they’re

from a huge corporation, we often don’t hear about things until long after they’re old news. Even in this world of instant information.

Passion in one’s work is something I’ve thought about a lot in recent years. Do you have to have it to do a good job? I don’t think so. When I was younger and trying to choose a career path, it was stressful because I didn’t know what I was really passionate about, but felt under pressure not to spend a working life doing something I didn’t leap out of bed each morning with a fire, a joyful desperation, to get on with. With each birthday, that idealism has sapped away and been replaced with a more realistic view.

It is important that you at least like what you do. I like writing a lot. I like editing better (geeky as it is, nothing quite compares to the little rush I get from fixing a misplaced apostrophe, or correcting a clunky sentence). But I’m very happy to be doing writing, and I think that shows in my work. I’ve had office jobs that I really didn’t care about, and that also showed. You can’t love everything you write about, but as long as you at least like the process, that’s plenty. When I can combine something that I am passionate about (dog behaviour, animal welfare) with writing, that rocks, and I smile.

There will be people who think that without that elusive great passion, you have no business to be writing. I disagree. It’s cool if you’re one of those people who can make a career out of their passion, but it’s also good to be someone who can stop when they’re finished, step away from the computer, and go and do something else they love, without making their work the feature of their life. After all, if you want your house painted, you don’t hire Picasso.

A lot of the vitriol is directed at so-called ‘content mills’, those sites to which almost anyone can contribute almost anything, sometimes receiving a small (very small) payment for their efforts. Those sites contain a great deal of information, some good, some not so much. The argument against these sites is that it makes writers lazy, they earn three bucks for 15 minutes’ worth of Googling and rewriting what they find, and people shouldn’t get paid so little for writing, anyway. It’s not enough to live on! As well, a lot of people seem to have an idea that because of the nature of web writing (short sentences, bullet points, just give them the basic information without getting lyrical), good writing on teh interwebs is in short supply.

To me, this whole argument is ridiculous and frustrating. The writing community has a huge snobbery contingent. This has probably been true since language was scratched on stones in ancient civilisations.

People, listen. Just because it’s short, to-the-point, and is easy to digest, does not mean that a writer can’t get a point across, and do it well. Hemingway was famously able to tell a whole story in just six words: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. No, we are not all Hemingway (which is probably just as well, the world couldn’t handle that many emos). Yes, there is a lot of drivel on the internet. That is why at school we’re taught to critically analyse texts. Yes, great, informative, to-the-point writing can be found on the internet.

I fully believe that as more writers take the plunge and get into the web writing biz, the overall quality of this very new medium will get better and better. Maybe the snobbery against those who write primarily for the web will die out as the team gets stronger and more visible.

I suspect that too often the good web writing gets overlooked by this elitist group, because they seek crap writing to validate their point, consciously or subconsciously. Seek, and you shall find, as it were. Maybe if their efforts were focused more on ignoring the rubbish (do not feed the troll!) and constructively applauding the good, they might find less need to complain about the quality of web writing. What do you think?

1) Defenestrate – I learned this from Facebook’s Super Poke application a year or two ago, and still haven’t found an opportunity to slip it into conversation. It means ‘to throw out of a window’.

2) Troglodytic – a posh way to say ‘knuckle-dragging’. Ideal for describing some rugby fans and university students.

3) Pus – gross I know, but it’s so descriptive. What else could you possibly call that goo that oozes from an infection? (Note: ‘Ooze’ is also brilliant)

4) Zest – up there with ‘zing’. Both words just sound, and feel, kind of cool.

5) Rudimentary – For some reason, it just amuses me. And I haven’t even seen Galaxy Quest.

1. The University of Otago. In the last 12 months the vast majority of their mentions in the news has been to do with murderous economics tutors and alcohol-fuelled student riots.

2. Kanye West. Whether the MTV thing was a hoax or not, he’s always pissing people off one way or another. It would be a never-ending, thankless job.

3. Wanganui/Whanganui mayor Michael Laws. See comment about Kanye West (less the part about MTV).

4. The All Blacks. The best PR they can get is to win. That’s not something they’ve been doing lately.

5. The Government. Choose a nation. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

You come across them all the time, and usually they contain a lot of the most basic information that could so easily be included in decent copy.

Internet users have notoriously short attention spans, and putting useful information into a section in your FAQs isn’t always a good choice. Only the most dedicated will plow that far into your site – most will simply hit the back button and look elsewhere.

Of course, if you have so many questions that to answer them all in your body copy will turn your site into a lumbering beast, an FAQ page is probably not such a bad idea.

But it never hurts to ask yourself why your copy isn’t already answering your clients’ potential questions.

What really frustrates me is moderation. I do see the need for it in some situations; when spammers get into the comments, when people risk committing libel. But it does bug me to read a slew of comments berating someone for an inflammatory posting and not to be able to judge for myself because the posting is gone.

I think moderators can be a bit click-happy. Even if a comment seems likely to cause upset to the original poster/blogger, I wish (in most cases) it would be allowed to remain. Some might think that’s pretty callous of me but firstly, if you post on the internet you open yourself up to people having – and sharing – opinions about you, fair or not; and secondly, if you post on the internet, you should have some degree of accountability for what you post. So if you post something that marks you out as a complete arsehole, it should remain for all the world to see.

The security and anonymity you get behind a computer screen means that people do often say things online they wouldn’t have the guts to say to someone’s face. Maybe those people might think twice if they knew that their vomit might actually be kept.