Fumbling my way forward

I’ve just submitted my EruptNZ app to the app store for review. This app reads the RSS feed from Geonet New Zealand and reports back the current alert status for all of New Zealand’s volcanoes. I thought this might be useful for tourists visiting New Zealand and also for people living near or on the many volcanoes here. It will be free.

There’s something quite sweet and satisfying about seeing your app at the app store. Although I still feel a small fear whenever I get an email from Apple, that maybe this is the message in which they tell me I’ve been rumbled, and that they know I’m a fraud and have been fumbling my way through the development process and that they’re striking me off as a developer. But fortunately, that hasn’t happened and I can continue fumbling my way forward.

To further my post from yesterday about urban sprawl, I stumbled across an article this morning which claims that America has too many big houses – 40 million to be precise – in sprawling suburbia where no-one wants to live anymore. They go on to report that generation X (me) and Y want smaller commutes, smaller homes and town centres that can be reached without a car. How long will it take for this realisation to reach the Antipodes?

I wasn’t passionate enough in my anti-urban sprawl sentiment from yesterday. There’s another huge downside to it and that is that it’s aesthetically displeasing. It creates a featureless landscape of McMansions that are lacking in any distinguishing characteristics, boringly monotonous and at odds with the local, traditional architecture. It also presupposes that land is cheap, when in actual fact, it is not. Not here in Auckland anyway, where endless suburbia is swallowing the city whole. Urban sprawl breeds roads and motorways which have no redeeming aesthetic qualities and forces the construction of suburban shopping malls which are concrete prisons of artificial lighting and elevator music that turn the humans that frequent them into zombies. Death to shopping malls, please. Thankfully that seems to have begun in America, so maybe one day, it’ll happen here too.