I realised why I wrote so many blog posts when we were in Japan — I couldn’t watch TV. We did have a TV at home, but we didn’t subscribe to cable, so we could only get the free-to-air Japanese broadcasts, which I couldn’t really understand. So I spent most of my evenings reading blogs and other stuff online, which gave me lots of food for thought and generated lots of blog posts.

Now I’m plunged into dial-up darkness, and the TV in the corner beckons with its promise of instant relief of boredom. However, watching TV doesn’t really generate good fodder for blog posts. For one thing, the amount of information conveyed per unit of time (even on Discovery channel) is low relative to blog reading (Felix was right). Also, you can’t pause and think occasionally like you can when reading blogs. Typical TV programmes require you to give a lot of attention, where you’re seemingly fully occupied but underemployed at the same time.

Anyway, I will get a 3G phone next week, and hopefully will rejoin the broadband world.

Recent Twitter outages have caused much consternation. These seem to be symptoms of recent rapid growth. With a platform business like Twitter that does not charge its users, it gets no marginal revenue but incurs marginal costs as its user base grows, which leads to cashflow problems.

Obviously the strategy is to raise revenue from other sources such as advertising or making some other use of Twitter data. The problem is that it’s hard to increase these revenues in direct sync with the user base. Scaling problems become more acute in this type of business model where an additional users brings additional costs immediately, but brings marginal revenue later.

Interestingly, some Twitter users are so upset by the outages that they are organising a ‘charity’ drive to raise money for the company to help it buy servers. Another new revenue model?

Following my earlier post about small differences in Japan, here’s a few observations about New Zealand from the point of view of someone who’s lived in Japan for a while:

People are soooo talkative.

Everyone appears to move in slow motion. They sure drive fast though.

Lots of middle-aged women are working, especially in retail.

Everything is so big, and there’s so much empty space, it actually feels a little lonely.

Shop hours are ridiculous. No one is shopping at 9AM, so why bother to open? And closing at 5 or 6? That’s so inconvenient.

So many sounds of birds, and no crows.

I have to care about timetables. The train only comes once per 30 minutes …

There are not so many choices (varieties). Not sure if this is a good or bad thing though.

I’m experimenting with ways of coping with dial-up internet. Google Reader has an offline mode via Google Gears, where I can download all the unread items in my rss feeds in one go, while I’m doing something else. Then I can go offline and read them more quickly. Just one problem, it only downloads the text, but no images. I’m also composing this blog post offline in a text editor, and then I can upload it.

There are some other interesting side-effects associated with having no access to broadband — I started watching TV and I even read the newspaper today.

Anyway, I’m investigating options for getting broadband via the 3G mobile networks here. Hopefully this blog will return to its regularly scheduled programming soon.

We made it back to Auckland with surprisingly few disasters. Currently we’re staying with my parents just outside the city. ADSL doesn’t stretch this far, so we’re on a diet of dial-up internet. It’s quite a shock compared to the 100 megabit connection we had in Japan. On the other hand, the sky is blue …