I missed a generic work-related call at home tonight because I was busy, well, working, and it got me thinking - when I’m busy doing something I find that it’s not particularly productive to be interrupted for something completely off-topic.

On that note, I am a huge advocate of using e-mail for almost all communication and reserving the phone for truly urgent matters. As an example, a suggestion for a new feature or a chase-up on the progress of something is an e-mail. Conversely “The web site is throwing database errors all over the place” is a phone call.

[accidental snip - to be rewritten shortly]

Some recent reports suggest that New Zealand rugby stars Daniel Carter and Nick Evans are looking very likely to head overseas at the end of this year. Naturally this has inspired some calls for overseas-based players to be banned from All Blacks selection.

I don’t think this is the right approach for a couple of reasons. For starters, this already occurs naturally. By playing overseas at a level that isn’t up to the standard of the Super 14, players are very likely to lose their All Black quality without the need for any rules or restrictions.

Secondly - and this is more wishful thinking than anything else - it’d be nice if we could retain our elite athletes with incentives to stay instead of threatening them with bans. I don’t pretend to have any idea how to accomplish this… and apparently nor does the NZRU.

Yesterday afternoon we received a batch of HD DVD movies at clearance prices from suppliers so we’ve created a special “Clearance Sale” page with them all listed at the hot hot hot price of just $14.95.

Unfortunately for me I panicked when HD DVD was discontinued so I had already bought about half a dozen of the titles that are on special at a higher price. D’oh! I picked up two more titles from this shipment though which brings my library up to about 30 movies. So far I’ve watched two of them.

The titles are disappearing quickly but we still have lots of stock of some of the titles including 300 which is definitely a must-have.

I quickly grew tired of my previous blog theme, so did some hunting around and came across this one which is extremely minimalist. The last one was trying a bit hard to make boring content look cool; this look gets to the point.

I’ll be tweaking the colours and fonts a bit and possibly reorganising the post layout, but otherwise I think this theme will be a good fit.

Things have gotten a lot better in recent years with regard to the delay between US and NZ release dates for video games, but often when there is a delay for a PAL release, the UK is a good market to watch because Australasia usually isn’t any more than a few weeks behind.

It was with great interest therefore that I read EA’s announcement yesterday that Rock Band would finally be releasing on May 23rd in the UK after having been unavailable anywhere but the USA since last year. I’ve spent countless hours playing the Guitar Hero series and have been looking forward to Rock Band for a long time.

So that’s the good news, because purely on that information it means that NZ might have a chance of seeing the game before the end of next month.

The bad news however is that the game has been priced at a whopping 180 pounds. Once converted to US dollars, that is more than double the price that US consumers have been paying. What a shocker. That potentially puts the New Zealand price up over $400 and possibly even as high as $500; and the higher the price gets the less likely the game will even make it to NZ. I’m suddenly wondering if our market is big enough for Rock Band… and I won’t be surprised if it isn’t.

Fingers crossed I’m wrong.