Fry Up: The Young Ones

Captured in a screengrab

The Young Ones
Young Ones shouldn’t be afraid and events this week have shown that the latest crop of New Zealand youth is bold and fearless.

On Tuesday InternetNZ hosted a debate for representatives of the main political parties to discuss their ICT policies (according to @vikram_nz it was attended by around 60 in the audience and 1,240 online).

The talking point at the event debrief (which may or may not have taken place in a bar) was how well reps from The Maori Party and ACT spoke (oh and there was also talk about patents, spectrum and @stevenljoyce).


Panel from left: Steven Joyce, Kaapua Smith, Clare Curran, Gareth Hughes, Peter McCaffrey

Neither Kaapua Smith, the Maori Party rangatahi (youth) representative, nor Peter McCaffrey, president of ACT On Campus, are candidates. But seated beside Steven Joyce, Clare Curran and a young-looking Gareth Hughes they more than held their own.

Determined to get to the bottom of this Fry Up emailed a fellow-hack-in-attendance the next day: “What has happened to young people?”

“Guess student loans may have prevented them pickling their brains in alcohol - all I can think of,” was his reply.

Sparks fly at InternetNZ election debate

The Young Ones part two
Self-described law geek Rick Shera provides a poignant reminder in his blog this week about how technology can date us. He wanted to retrieve a dissertation on copyright law that he had stored on a 3.5 inch floppy. When he showed the disk to a Young One on his staff they laughed - apparently they had never seen a floppy disk before.

Internet linking and copyright: A blast from the past

Which has reminded Fry Up about the cupboard under the stairs filled with cassette tape recordings of interviews conducted 100 or so years ago. There is one with Ben Elton where we asked, “when you wrote The Young Ones television series did you expect it to be such a enormous success”. To which he replied “It was like throwing the dice and getting a six.”

Captured in a screengrab
But let’s not get too nostalgic for the floppy disk and cassette tape. The new ways of storing and displaying information get faster results, as this Twitter exchange - captured forever in a screengrab - between tech blogger and commentator Ben Gracewood and Vodafone demonstrates:



It ended happily ever after when Gracewood tweeted later that day: "Had a nice phone call from the @vodafoneNZ complaints team. Also got a nice shiny new @Telecomnz micro-sim. Just prepay for now."


Debt crisis quiz
The European Debt Crisis is beautifully explained by John Clarke and Brian Dawe in the form of a Mastermind round. The video is over a year old, but sadly it is still relevant.

Nice idea, shame about the press release
As part of Fry Up' s occasional series on the strange, weird and desperate press releases that pass through our email inbox, we bring you this from the PM:

Prime Minister John Key today launched the NZ Inc India Strategy at the Cloud in Auckland.“This is the first of what will be many NZ Inc country and regional strategies that will set ambitious medium goals and provide a clear direction for the whole of government effort over a five year period,” said Mr Key.

Who wants to live in NZ Inc?

nz.org sounds like a much nicer place.