Te Tuhi lemon tree grove, Preston Road reserve, East Otara

I’m pleased to announce that the foraging movement is growing around New Zealand. ha. Growing. Oh, I’m hilarious.

Anyway… Auckland in particular is lush with free fruit and vegetables. The brilliant thing is that Councils are now supporting the movement (among many other fabulous people). East Otara is on it’s way to having the first Freedom Fruit Garden:

The inaugural planting of a Freedom Fruit garden will occur on Friday 25 June from 9.30am, at Preston Road Reserve, East Otara, Auckland. The day of planting will be celebrated with an official opening event, with performances including Rongomai Primary School’s Kapa Haka group and conclude with a hangi.

John Darroch, guerrilla gardener and general horticultural genius, recently appeared on Close Up talking about foraging in Central Auckland. If you want to give it a go but don’t really know where to start, there is a helpful google map of free food sources all around New Zealand. General foraging etiquette applies… in basic terms, be nice. Also, feel free to add your own secret spots to the map. In particular, if you have a feijoa tree and happen to live near Newmarket, I’d be pleased to see your input. Kthx.

I’m on a mission to do some guerrilla gardening of my own. I think the empty section next door would be infinitely more fetching with a giant pumpkin patch on it. Yusssssssss.

Vodafone is making it even easier for people to connect to the internet – wherever they are – with the launch of revamped mobile data pricing and a smart backend that reformats webpages for easy viewing on a mobile screen.

Now, for up to just $1 a day on the days you use it, casual users of the mobile internet can browse the world wide web easily and inexpensively… without committing to a fixed monthly data contract.

The new $1 a day casual rate gives customers up to 10MB of data.

And how do we know this is actually true? Because we’ve got a new Nokia 6121. And even more excitingly, we’ve got one to give away, so you can have a chance to find out for yourself too. Find out how after the jump.

We want to know how you would use your Nokia 6121 in Auckland. Post your answer in the comments section.

Your story could be as simple as:
“I want to be able to use Vodafone’s mobile internet to cheat when I’m doing the pub quiz up at Shadows”

or it could be wildly creative (and we encourage this!) like:

“As I was drinking at the King’s Arms one rainy Sunday, I noticed that my favourite musician was standing at the bar. Thanks to the gossip I read on the Aucklandista I knew he’d just broken up with his girlfriend, and I was hoping he was up for some consolation shagging. But how to get his attention? I’d tried talking to him before at the Rising Sun but he’d ignored me. Hmmm. A flash of inspiration hit me, and I pulled out my phone and quickly downloaded his latest single and set it as my ring tone. Desperate, I know, but his jeans were so tight I needed some way to get into them. A quick text to my friend had her call me when I was standing right next to him. I pretended to blush, as he looked at me and raised his eyebrows. A couple of Epic beers later, and we were on our way to his musty Grey Lynn basement for ‘band practice’…”

The judges will pick five of the best stories and draw the winner at random from those entries.

Here are the rules of the competition.

1. Your answer must include the name of the phone company, and some aspect of Auckland that makes it the awesome city that it is.
2. You must live in Auckland and have a Auckland postal address for us to send the phone to if you win. (Psst, check out the Wellingtonista if you’re not from around here)
3. The members of the Aucklandista and their partners (PAGS) are not eligible to enter, although we encourage them to tell us a story anyway.
4. You have from now until noon Wednesday August 27 to post your entry.
5. The judge’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

To further introduce myself I’ve been instructed to comment on what I love and hate about the city.

I’m an unoriginal hater – here’s a sample

The traffic. Still.

Ponsonby at night. A place where far too many people go clubbing without irony. It’s not that I have a technical objection to the suburb itself, or even the idea of rubbing up against moist strangers while paying for an overpriced hangover, and indeed I’ve indulged before – but let’s face it – the practice is patently hilarious, particularly for those of us over 30 who do, in fact know better, even if we pretend sometimes that we don’t.

Insipid dress sense. All other places in New Zealand have their own looks – messy, a little frayed around the edges, possibly a bit over-wrapped but at least distinctive. Auckland – you are a paean to label rip-offs, terrifyingly tight pants and shoes that regularly cause podiatrists and chiropractors to wake screaming in the night

I guess that brings me to the part where I have to dish up the love. In many ways a harder task

The weather – the tropics are sweatier and the South is colder. Auckland – go the happy medium.

The harbour – filled with pleasure craft, islands of imaginable size and serviced regularly by ferries, an escape from the traffic under what are likely to be fairly pleasant climatic conditions is only a 25 bucks and a cracker away.

That waft of something cosmopolitan. Despite the generally dull sartorial decisions made by its population, Auckland does exhibit an outward-lookingness – a sense of the infinitely possible and a break from what is parochial. This is most probably because such a large chunk of inhabitants aren’t from Auckland. However, I believe it may be the only place in New Zealand to lay genuine claim to this quality and I, for one, do appreciate it. Mwa.

There are lots of other things I have a casual affection for: Crummer Road – the quietest street in Grey Lynn, Ponsonby Video Ezy, Chocolate Boutique Café in Parnell, Cafe Cezanne, Albert Street’s Food Alley, The Big Day Out, an impressive selection of pub gigs, the Academy and Lido Cinemas, Borders, City Libraries, having four universities to choose from….I could go on. And maybe I will – but, next time.

95BFM’s ace film guy Fabian Fanboy recommends Zombie movies [REC] and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, documentaries Bigger, Stronger, Faster (roids), Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains (Rugby players eating their mates), and The King of Kong (video game nerd-off). Fabian also recommends time travel thriller Timecrimes, the original The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Red Balloon – you know, that movie. With the Balloon.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg of course, be sure to check the full programme, which is blocking open just about ever shop door in town (bonus – it should be much easier to navigate than the website). Sick shit fans should check out the Ant Timpson-curated Incredibly Strange Film Festival, his sordid little festival within the festival.

Actually, it was a bit of a laugh.

Sure, unless you were on two wheels, you weren’t going anywhere on Queen Street. Truckies had it fairly well clogged in both directions, but with good humor, happily chatting to anyone who wandered up to their cabs for a yarn.  Pedestrians were laughing at the spectacle, most with a phone-camera at the ready. The media were heavily represented, with photographers clambering over awnings to get the best views, and TV reporters being crossed live to all over the place. For cyclists, it was awesome, with a whole Queen Street lane utterly empty for your swooping pleasure.

This protest was most notable for people trying to high-jack it for their own purposes; one GPS company had branded vehicles parked conspicuously close to the TV cameras, and the guy with the ‘Stop Using Petrol’ sign was doing a lot of work.

Still, no-one in my office was greatly inconvenienced – one North Shore commuter who brazenly left home at 8.00am described it as the best commute ever, and rumours were the North-Western motorway was empty. Even the horns couldn’t drown out the photocopier in our office (a stone’s throw form Queen St). If the truckies wanted media coverage, they got it alright, but did the trucks really cause serious chaos to make their point? This wasn’t farmers in Paris by any stretch, it was too polite by half for that, with the route and times well publicised ahead of time. As far as I could tell, everyone got into town fine, and went home happy.

BarCamps are an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. They are intense events with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. Basically the attendees ARE the conference.

On the day everyone arrives and registers. Shortly afterwards the topics for the day go up on a board and are split into streams where available. If you have something to talk about – you put your topic on a piece of paper and people interested gather in your space at the alloted time.

There is morning tea and lunch catered. There’ll be Wifi, Twitter screens and other tech/web goodness. Each Barcamper, who meets the t-shirt deadline (just under couple of months away yet) will get a free t-shirt that is designed to be re-worn. And finally, there’ll be software give-aways.

Barcampers from all over NZ (some from Wellington, even as far as Christchurch) who are flying up for the event so don’t think just because you aren’t in Auckland you can’t attend!

Sign up now!