I happen to have a lot of brilliant friends who are very knowledgeable about all sorts of things.

It also happens that my one true love in life is sitting back and talking about those things with anyone who has an opinion on them.

Something that has come up recently is the development of countries that don’t currently share our monetary wealth. And issues around what works and what doesn’t. What is us just enforcing our way of life and what is actually of help?

I witnessed the aftermath of the boxing day tsunami from an island in Thailand. Where our countries unitied to compete over who would spend the most while locals quietly gathered together their belongings and sent over the stuff they KNEW their families needed.

I have been through Cambodia and witnessed palatial houses and resorts - all owned by people from Korea and elsewhere. The locals slowly became workers in their own country, while it was being bought up from underneath them.

I know one persons view while traveling doesn’t uncover the entire picture but it got me thinking:

1. That we are arrogant to assume we know the best way to develop other countries.
2. That the one greatest thing we can give developing countries is the tools to communicate and collaborate among themselves.

In this world, one thing is for certain - when a company spots an opportunity to make money, it will do its utmost to make it and countries where land and living are relatively cheap are prime targets for exploitation. The only way I can see that people living in any particular country can combat this is through communication with each other.

So now we get onto the tools part. A lot of development experts I know are kind of anti-technology - they see it as the root of many of our problems.

But I say that you simply cannot judge a computer as anything more than a simple tool. It’s just like a hammer, paintbrush or any other tool, the benefits or woes come from how you use it.

We may overuse cellphone to the point we are rude, we may spend half our lives gaming on computers, but that is not the tools fault. We can’t deny people these tools or recommend they will be unhelpful simply because we cannot trust ourselves with them all the time.

The One Laptop Per Child program came into question, and the answer was left open. Is it a good idea to give children in Pacific Island countries, Inidia etc a computer each? Is this their most pressing need?

I would say a resounding “Yes”.

Even if all the computers are used for is connecting the kids in one community with those in another so they can learn from each other their history, their culture and what’s going on in their country… To me, this is about the most valuable, on going thing we can do to help them survive and prosper in a global world. It is not ok to assume that they will treat a computer in the same way we do, or that they will get lost in a world of CNN and Facebook.

I don’t know a lot about development and the ins and outs and potholes of a foreigner going into a country and ‘helping’, but I do know that the internet is probably our most open method of communication and spreading knowledge at the moment. Surely its only a great thing when those who have been forced to remain silent due to lack of money can join the conversation?

I watched an interesting segment on 60 minutes last night about school children.

I expect that NZ is in a much better situation than some countries (After hearing a American friend of mums delighting over the fact the term ‘playgrounds’ in NZ still seems to refer to a place where people PLAY rather than sit in boredom on things that are so safe they numb your brain just to see)… But we’re not that great.

Most of my generation remembers the good old days when split lips, broken legs and bruised knees were a part of our daily routine. Yes it hurt when you fell off those metal bars, but boy was it fun to hang upside down on them. These days, there is hardly a metal bar in sight. It’s the same with all children’s toys these days. We used to give a kid a metal ‘jungle gym’ or some lego blocks and leave them to it. Now we only offer them toys and playgrounds that we have made so thoroughly safe and specked to such a high degree that they literally only have ONE purpose. And that purpose loses your interest after about 2.5 minutes.

The theory of this woman was that children should be allowed to get hurt, but not broken. And by broken, she means permanently damaged. Allowing a child to hurt themselves teaches them an important lesson about knowing their limits while taking risks.

Unfortunately, you can’t avoid all risks and sometimes, when you relax on the safety front, kids do get permanently broken or even killed.

Which left me asking the following questions:

Do we cotton wool ourselves to the extreme in order to stay alive the longest, or do we remove the cotton wool and really LIVE?

What is going to happen to a generation of children who have not been left to explore the limits of what they can do and try to push beyond them? My mum tells me stories of the linkage between learning to crawl and having legible handwriting and there are plenty more examples of necessary developments we have to make in order to ensure other things go well in the future. Our brains simply are not MEANT to be protected while they grow. They are meant to grow freely.

How can we create this ideal world where all children have the ability to play to their limits within reason? Is this more or less important than the fact that some children get sent to school without lunch? Given that we have a limit on funds, is it best to tackle the ‘hierarchy of needs’ on order or is missing one of these vital ‘high level’ needs going to make the entire system crumble?

Is attacking this a ‘nice to have’ or a fundamental to ensuring that our next batch of children grow up as the innovative risk takers we need them to be in order for our country to move further away from farming and into the ‘knowledge economy’?

I think the new ‘Snapper’ cards are a brilliant idea for Wellington transport.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but Wellington has, up, until a month back, relied on paper clip tickets when using bus services. How cool is a swip on/swipe off service?

Except it still doesn’t seem to work.

Every time I sit on the bus, I grimice because as people try to get off, you hear this highly mechanical voice radiating out of the Snapper box, saying: “Sorry, I cannot read your card, please try again”.

Which leaves people in the horrible situation of either frantically re-swiping their card, pushing through all the standing passengers to another door to try another swipe spot, or just disembarking, knowing that their card is raking up fees for a phantom journey. (I’ve now seen all three options tried, and all three cause angry mumbles)

It seems to me that the technology is not that hard - I think it is an exact replicate of systems operating in other cities. This cool ‘new’ invention, combined with operators holding out a little on raising their prices to match petrol prices cold have done a lot for public transport usage in Wellington. As it stands, we seem to be back at square one.

However,I got a pedometer from Claire (who was giving them out in her research). It has changed my life. I think everyone should have one.

Why catch a bus when you could be raking up steps? For a largely lazy/busy nation, pedometers give you the information you need to KNOW that you are indeed just being a lazy sod. To hit 10,000 steps a day, you just need to walk a few kms. That can be done around the office, to and from work or after work in our dazzling sunshine.

But once you hit 10,000kms, you get a little competitive with yourself and up the limit. Journeys you would have once driven, you now walk, journeys you wouldn’t ahve taken (i.e going out for a stroll) you now DO.

It’s a shame that Mc Donalds is sponsoring cheap rubbish pedometers for our school kids (Where do they get off?). And its a shame that the little gizmos can me easily persuaded to give an artificial reading… But all in all, I’m catching onto the craze (like 4 years too late!)

A while ago Rowan Simpson got me thinking about the key to happiness. His keys to success:

• losing a lot and starting again
• having low expectations for happiness

That sounds very depressing doesn’t it?

Until you see all these miserable people walking around who really have no issues at all, and have compensate by inventing them or throwing life out of proportion.

The downside to being human is that we rarely learn to appreciate what we have and we’d rather complain than rejoice.

Which means it is only the people who have actually suffered who realise that to be sad is not in fact fun, it is just sad. Sadness doesn’t equate to the ability to feel things more deeply or a higher level of complexity, it, in the large part, is simply a matter of laziness.

Basically people who have experienced hardship appreciate the ability to be happy, take delight in simple pleasures and have very little time to spend worrying about the mundane issues that plague most of us.

Who would have thought the key to happiness would be despair? But now I think about it, it makes perfect sense.

Yesterday I said goodbye to a friend of mine who has quit her profession and her city to take over a restaurant in the South Island.

Kirsty is one of the most special people I have ever met. She makes the rest of us look totally unintuitive and socially inept by being one of the most sensitive and empathetic people I have ever met… While still being the life of the party.

She has been working for herself for a year or so now and is one of the few people I know whose customers truly do become friends (She is invited to countless hens nights, birthday parties and other events and I do believe every single one of her customers CRIED when she told them she was leaving).

So I am both gutted to be saying goodbye, and excited about the prospect of endless road trips down south. But in the meantime, for the benefit of every reader, next time you are in Te Anau, head to Toscana for a meal you wont forget and service that will blow you away.

In response to my email inviting Graeme (from the survey company) over to share a bottle of wine with the DF crew:

I applied for a free mentor through businessmentors.org.nz. And I know you can’t get anything for free these days, and USUALLY ‘free’ = ‘useless’ but I must say after meeting one, life is so much better that I wonder if maybe in this case, ‘free’ = ‘priceless’

I know a lot of people feel like asking for help means that they are admitting they can’t do something or they are struggling. For us, the reason was the opposite.

We are doing well. I am doing well. I have learned so much in the past few years just figuring things out for myself. So much, in fact that I think it’s time to try learning from someone else.

For me, the big reason is to have someone to talk to who has been there and who doesn’t know me. I want an outside opinion from someone who is not involved, who will listen to me and tell me I’m on the right (or wrong) track.

And Alan has so far done a brilliant job. He is enthusiastic, he got it immediately, and we already have a quick, tidy to do list of all the things I want to go over. He wasn’t pushy and he listened.

This is yet another example of why New Zealand is the best place in the world to start/run a business. If you are one of those business owners, go for it.

Big call I know. But these days you can hardly get a litre of petrol for that much. Mc Donalds certainly doesn’t deliver much for that and real food just costs more.

But for $4.95, you can also get something that will change your LIFE.

I bet you are thinking it is a spiritual guide.

But it is not.

In about 5 seconds Amy is going to accuse me of copying again.

But the best invention ever for $4.95 is Woolen Inner Soles for your shoes. I got mine from the Warehouse the place online costs more and in NZ I don’t think Warehouse sheep get treated any different from online sheep, so it is one of the few things I feel comfortable sacrificing cost for.

Woolen Inner Soles give you TWO KEY benefits:

• You go to work PRETENDING to be all professional, but on the inside, you feel like you are still wearing your dungy old ugg boots. This gives you both warmth and a kind of naughty school kid feeling.
• If you are like me and insist on buying shoes that are too big, the extra woolyness fills in the extra empty space and your feet don’t slip around any more

Brilliant invention. I hope whoever thought of it is now rich off it.

For some reason this leaves you on the ground wetting your pants with laughter. If you don’t understand the way Australians think us Kiwis talk, watch it. It could be considered educational.

There are probably less than ten readers who will know what this post is about, but they are my most important.

After many, many false endings when we all had our fingers crossed and bubbly ready to pop, the big day finally arrived yesterday. For a long time, I thought yesterday would never come. Now its been and gone, I surprise myself with how irrelevant it seemed, that it was almost just another day. Some old friends may find that a miracle (as do I), the fact that some new ones have no idea how much that says about how far I have come, is also, to me, a miracle.

For everyone else who is sitting there confused about what I’m going on about, you have helped too. Non-bloggers have no idea about the friendships that you form with complete strangers and the impact that someone sitting at the end of an internet connection somewhere in the world can have. Even though this is something I will never talk about here, many of the questions, doubts and anger I had through this process found their way, in some form, to this website. And your responses went a long way to restoring my faith that this world is, indeed a wonderful place.

So this is my weird and convoluted thank you to everyone who has made this not only bearable, but something I can now put completely, 100% behind me.

Thank you.