Have you been to The Wilderness Down

For a long time I have bitched and moaned about how websites or certain online advertising does not work in Chrome. Being such a Google child I have used Chrome for quite some time and am not a fan of other browsers. Now, as a reward (I feel) Google have started Chrome Experiments which run ONLY on Chrome. As a part of Chrome Experiments there is The Wilderness Down which involves none other than one of my favourite bands (whose new album The Suburbs is awesome) Arcade Fire.

So, you enter your hometown and then it kindly asks you to close down other applications as it takes a bit of processing space apparently.

Now, I wasn't sure what to expect, and I can't explain it in full to you, but it is like taking a multi-window journey into your hometown in a way that you probably thought wasn't possible.

I'm not going to lie, it is not 100% and some of the graphics are a bit naff, but overall it is a beautiful concept set to amazing music.

Where you even get the opportunity to interact and contribute yourself:

Visually stimulating and incredibly engaging - I can only encourage you to click on the link above to take part yourself.

If you don't have Chrome, download it here first.

Ladies, gentlemen, lend me your smarts!

I have a favour to ask of anyone who can answer the following for me.

I have a friend who is on their way back to our fair shores and they are trying to weigh up the freelance/salary options with their wide & varied skill set. (I'm not going to lie - I've worked for this person and they are fabulous, in management and in practice.)

Who can tell me the going hourly rate for following:

• Brand and Marketing planning
• Optiminsation strategies
• Ecommerce marketplace planning
• Adwords and social media management

So, I can understand if you don't want to comment on any of this, but if you have this kind of information and would like to share it with me, please PLEASE email me on monica.wales@gmail.com I'll be your best friend.

WTF ASB?

OK. So I get it, you guys lost the account and Droga are going to take over real soon (they haven't already right?) but what the f**k is this about?

Is there an entire campaign that I have missed. What relevance does this dog have? Or staring? Surely if you wanted to talk about animals that stare you would use an owl? Right? (It's the animal which springs to my mind when you talk about staring.)

All this does, is make me doubt ASB's ability to take itself and it's business seriously. Come on people - financial institution. That's not the client to be pulling your kooky shit with.

It's the first of the month

And you know what that means...

NEW BILLBOARD DAY!

What really gets me though is walking home at about 5am this morning I saw the skin at K Rd & Ponsonby being taken down and a new one going up. For a geek like me, this was exciting - nothing to do with the vodka & sodas which had been consumed earlier in the evening.

The poor installer didn't know what was going on, crazy girl taking photos of him, but I'm sure he will get over it.

It was such a quick process. Dude goes up in the cherry picker:

A quick pull and down it comes:
And up goes the new skin.
Bing, bang, BOOM. Done. I was impressed how quick the whole process was and felt little sorry for the poor guys who were missioning around putting up our skins for us at that time of the morning.

Talking about billboards, not so fussed on the new ones for The Mentalist. Some of the type is way too small. Hard to read.

I almost like the one they have on Richmond Road which says something along the lines of 'You live in Grey Lynn because you know its better than Remuera'. Almost.