New Suppliers...

KIWIreviews in rendered almost speechless with pleasure at welcoming Strata to their library of quality software suppliers. Strata is making the power of 3D an integral part of professional design, illustration and rich media. Strata 3D tools are the choice of professional designers and illustrators all over the world.

KIWIreviews is drooling with delight to welcome Dulce As to our pantry of quality food suppliers. "Dulce As" is a family business dedicated to import sweets and goodies from prestigious and well known suppliers in Argentina. Once these products are in NZ, people can buy them in the online shop and receive them via courier at their home or office.

KIWIreviews are paddling full steam ahead with pleasure at welcoming The Boatshed to our marina of quality tourist attraction suppliers. The Boatshed Kayaks was set up by Richard Clark in 2000 on his property on the edge of Lake Karapiro. It provides a one stop shop for all your kayaking needs whether, hiring, purchasing, or learning new skills. Karapiro offers an exellent venue with sheltered waters and 15 km of lake to explore.

KIWIreviews are chomping with delight at welcoming Mac Snack to their pantry of quality food product suppliers. MacSnack Organic Macadamia nuts are home-grown at the BioGro-certified organic orchard in Tikorangi, named "Greenacres" for over 100 years. As part of the organic approach, the Macadamia nut and Avocado trees are sheltered with native trees, providing Honey from their flowers and animal fodder from their foliage.

Children's book to benefit blind people

A special children's picture book, Colour the Stars, gives children the opportunity to experience a different way of 'seeing' the world.

Written by Dawn McMillan and illustrated by Keinyo White, Colour the Stars is a poignant and uplifting story about two children, Isaac and Luke, which explores the question 'How do you describe a colour to someone who can't see?'.

Dawn is also generously donating the royalties of the book, which is published by Scholastic, to the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind's Guide Dog Services.

"It felt right to support the RNZFB with proceeds from the story. I chose the RNZFB guide dogs as one day a boy like Luke might decide he needs a guide dog," Dawn says.

Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind (RNZFB) Chief Executive, Sandra Budd, says the story will be a great tool to raise awareness of blindness.

"The story conveys vision impairment in such a wonderful way for children to learn and be aware of the different ways blind and partially sighted children discover the world," she says.

Colour the Stars begins when the two boys are sitting together on the banks of a stream in the bush and Isaac asks Luke if he knows about colours. Isaac then uses the non-visual senses of touch and smell to teach Luke the different colours of the rainbow.

Living in a small coastal village on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula, Dawn's inspiration to write the story came when she was sitting in her favourite place in the bush, alongside a ford that crosses a stream.

"I often sit there alone, listening to the water and enjoying the colours and the smells that surround me. One day it seemed as if Luke and Isaac were there with me, wanting to tell their story," she says.

Scholastic has been working with Dawn on Colour the Stars since 2009, when it was accepted for publication. It is Dawn's twentieth picture book and one of her favourite stories.

Colour the Stars is available now from bookstores nationwide.

Read our review of it here!

My Team Monitor

Having recently thought about putting a few of our crew "on the clock" to assess the workload across various parts of our volunteer network, I was presented with a link to the beta site of "My Team Monitor". These people run an online Employee Monitoring Software package that allows an administrator to monitor their workflow and performance, giving them an accurate profile of the actual productivity of that individual. Now, in a volunteer situation like ours, ANY work done is great, but if we can help our volunteers by working around their daily commitments, then everyone comes out better off. We know how many review items tip the balance from "enough" to "too much" and cause them stress and workflow bottlenecks.

The software runs in 'the cloud' - meaning very little software needs to be installed on the worker's machine, and none on yours. Setup takes around 1 minute, and you can install a special 'stealth' version as well, during regular 'software update' sessions. This means you can use the Employee Monitoring Software to see who's getting in there at full throttle, and who's slacking off. This is backed by keystroke and mouse action tracking, screenshot grabbing (to spot those who have Facebook, Twitter or other distractions open as well) and then reward those who have a better work ethic, and thus are more valuable to your company.

In our case, it's more along the lines of seeing what areas of the website are giving our trusty volunteers the most trouble, so we can explore functional redesigns to maximise the ease of use of the site and service as a whole. Though this is not the intended use of the Employee Monitoring Software package offered by this company, it's another potential use for those who want to think outside the box and find out what's really going on from the users' perspective.

Keeping in mind that while this "Software as a Service" is still in it's beta phase, there is bound to be a glitch here and there, but the trade-off is that it is currently free - they'll help you get a better handle on your staffing issues, while you help them get a better product. Worth a peek - we plan to trial it to see how it can help us get a better idea of where the most work needs to be focussed on our site - maybe it could help yours too.

Armageddon Wellington

Stardate April 21st and 22nd 2012. Once again it was time for the annual Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo to grace Wellington's TSB Arena. Having not been to the Armageddon Expo for a number of years, for various reasons, I had completely forgotten how crowded and claustrophobic feeling the venue can get.

Like the previous blog post I really only have one complaint, and no it's not about the Twinkie Hunt as I don't think we had one. No, the complaint was that having the Domino's Pizza stand right in the middle at an intersection of 4 walkways was probably, in hindsight, not the best of ideas as it caused major traffic jams and congestion and really disrupted the flow of the crowds around the venue over the really busy 11-2ish lunchtime period.

One of the things that really stood out for me this year was the number of people who were willing to dress-up as anything and just about everything, and they weren't even competing in the Cosplay contest either... You could say it was a real menagerie of beings.

Body FX Competition - This competition went for 4 hours with the models going from nothing to truly amazing in that time period. The 1st heat was held in Hamilton, This heat here in Wellington was the 2nd (Wellington theme - What is the essence of Armageddon expo), for the finals in Auckland the competitors will not be told what the theme is until just before start of competition so they have no time to prepare their latex appliances and other stuff they may want, however they will have access to all of Body FX's supplies and retail items to use to complete the task. In amongst all this they also found time to gruesome up the general public as well...

Guests:
Julie McNiven - She is truly a wonderful gentle spoken person. It was interesting to hear that her husband is a Kiwi, so of course that makes here and honorary Kiwi. One of the things she would love to do with her career is to come and live and work in NZ, in fact I think she would be perfect in the 3rd Season of The Almighty Johnsons. Another thing with I found surprising was that she would also love to work on Doctor Who..... Who would have guessed???

Paul McGillion - Is a very relaxed person, and even though I know he's Canadian it took a while to get used to him not speaking with a Scottish accent... Of course it didn't help when he would occasionally slip into his Scottish brogue. He is also very prolific actor, writer, producer and director especially in the Actor department and he has done many shows and movies, some of which even he wished he had never done (Hansel the Witch Hunter). It was very apparent that loved his time on Stargate: Atlantis, and that he was genuinely grateful to all the fans that wrote and emailed and protested in other ways when his character was killed off in Season 3 so that he was able to be brought back near the end of Season 4. He was unable to let slip if there was to be a SGA movie or not, but did say a script has been written...

Teryl Rothery - She is vivacious, energetic ( she was referred to as the Energiser Bunny and it was surprising accurate), funny, stunning, oh and short! Like Paul McGillion it was apparent that she loved being on SG1, and of course hated being killed off in Season 7 (producers thought it was to be the last year and wanted to go out with a bang). She had bittersweet feelings about being brought back for her one-off appearance in Season 9's 'Ripple Effect'. Also like Paul, she is a very prolific actress and has also been in many SciFi shows, such as Caprica, Eureka, Babylon 5, Smallville and Supernatural. She also loves the fans, and when it came to the Q & A sessions she was a real hands on person when it comes to the fans, going so far as to come down into the audience to interact with them.

John Levene - He is quite possibly the nicest guy on Earth, in fact quite possibly the nicest guy in all of space and time. He thinks Benton was a great character, and I agree, he is my favourite ancillary character in the early series. He also thinks Russell T. Davies has done an exceptional job of restarting the franchise and he particularly loves David Tennant's Doctor, in fact thinks he has the most marvellous hair. He met David Tennant at a memorial for Nicholas Courtney where he was asked to give the main speech. After the memorial David Tennant came up to him and complimented him on the speech. John said to David that he believed that Jon Pertwee would have loved David's Doctor as he thought it was the perfect embodiment of all the Doctors that had come before, and that small comment brought a tear to David's eye. He is, surprisingly, also a very good stand-up comic. He absoulutely loved working with the late great Jon Pertwee, but he had some troubles working with Tom Baker, so that is one reason why he left.

Stalls - There were many stalls, mainly from various companies selling pulp culture stuff, but what I found really disappointing was the complete lack of any United Sweets of New Zealand stall, I was really looking forward to sampling some of that American candies, etc that you hear abount in TV shows and movies, but alas it was not to be....

Cosplay Competition - some incredible costumes, with obviously a lot of time and effort put into them. The winners of the competition certainly deserved to win, and to be honest I don't know if I would have the time and patience to make up a costume as detailed as some of those that were on show. I also noted that a lot of them seemed to be Manga influenced costumes, and so I had no idea who or what half the people were meant to be, but that didn't stop me from being impressed but them.

Outpost 42 of the 501st Legion - These were the guys dressed up as the Stormtroopers, Clone Troopers, Bounty Hunters and Darth Vader. They were of course collecting for Ronald McDonald house which I think is a great charity. Awesome effort guys.

Armageddon Hamilton

With the final V8's race in Hamilton only a week away, Hamilton was treated to a first... Armageddon Expo's first appearance in this fair city. Held at the Claudelands Event Centre, this was a whopper of a debut in the city.

With a last-minute swapping of star guests - due to scheduling shifts and medical emergencies - I was expecting to see more than a few disappointed visitors... but it was soon apparent that those who turned up weren't overly upset - there was more than enough to keep everyone occupied and entertained throughout the whole weekend... though some areas were clearly more popular than others.

Bad points: There really was only one, and I want to get it out of the way in a constructive manner...
The (Not So) Great Twinkie Hunt: This turned into a fiasco really quickly. Instead of hiding Twinkies or tokens all over the place to be found and redeemed, instead we had four staff members each with a stack of Twinkie boxes. The first was found, and mobbed, and out of stock within seconds. The performance was repeated on the second Twinkie Bearer only moments later. The third was a little harder to find, and the fourth still had Twinkies 10 minutes later, and none mere seconds after that. This was a bit of a gamble, and I don't think it paid off this time. Supposedly starting at 11:00am, we arrived at the meeting place at 10:56am to find they had started 3 minutes earlier and 2 of the Twinkie bearers were already swamped and out of stock. There were a lot of negative comments floating around about the hunt, and I really hope to see a better planned version next year.

Now that's out of the way, it's on to the good stuff!
Guests - A veritable bevvy of talent, ranging from movie and TV stars to graphic novel and special effects artists... there was something there for everyone!
Stalls - from the V "Air Cannon" stand where you had the chance to win some awesome prizes (while slugging back free cans of V Green and V Blue) to swords and silly plastic Viking helmets, comics to American snacks, there had to be at least a dozen stands for anyone's tastes.
Shows and Events - The "Celebrity Panels" were great, with every star showing an interesting and unique side of themselves - from the somewhat shy to the very self-confident "I should have been an American Talkshow Host", it was great to see the "real person" behind the various roles they each played.
Family Fun - Outdoor activities for kids as young as 3, to indoor activities for the bigger kids (and the big kids at heart) - it was better, and cheaper, than Rainbow's End could ever wish to be!

Personal highlights:
Laser Tag - I ended up having about 5 games in the end, just because I was chatting to the bosses and they would sometimes need a couple of extra bods to help make up team numbers. It was a tough job, but someone had to teach these Weekend Warriors what it meant to be on the receiving end of a sniper shot. -evil grin-
Guest Stars for Charity - Having the opportunity to chat briefly with almost all of the stars there, while they signed a KIWIreviews postcard which was then donated to KoruCare to raise funds for their great work for chronically ill kids. Every star I could get to was more than happy to put a few minutes aside to autograph some postcards, and find out more about KoruCare. I hope some of them decide to give more time, and money, to this amazing charity.
Zombie Walk - This was just amazing to watch as the people slowly got processed by the amazingly talented crew at BodyFX and eventually got assembled all together for a group photo. Michael Jackson would have wet himself with delight, thinking it was a cast reunion from his Thriller video. Unfortunately, due to the need to stay at the Events Centre for other events, I wasn't able to see the 'walk' through town, but a few friends who joined in, and a few who work in town, were all very impressed at the turnout... if not the amount of fake blood that needed to be cleaned up off windows and counters afterwards.

Overall, this had to be one of the very best events I have attended at Claudelands Event Centre, and I certainly hope the rumours ARE true, and Armageddon Expo will be back in 2013. Being there the whole weekend, from doors-open to doors-locked, I would estimate there would have been around 11,000 people come through. Well worth the effort to have been, and a good showing that should lead to bigger and better crowds if the expo returns in 2013.