On Friday afternoon, Bruce and I took our research proposal to show a guy called Vince at Ultralab. He seemed suitably impressed with our proposal, but averred that our timing was unfortunate: there was a source of funding for exactly the sort of thing we want to do, but applications close on Monday. I got the impression that, as far as he could tell, it was pretty much impossible.

So I looked at Bruce, and Bruce looked at me, and I said that we could do a research proposal over the weekend and e-mail it to the New Zealand Council for Educational Research by 5pm on Monday. Not that either of us had ever done any educational research, but how hard could it be?

The essential task was to present what we wanted to do - making a web-driven database to manage individual learning programmes for a bunch of students - and convince the reader that it is a research project, and one of immense benefit to humanity, available one time only to you, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, for the low low price of thirty thousand dollars.

I worked on it for much of Saturday, then Bruce and I and Bruce’s wife Joanna worked on it for the rest of Saturday, and it’s looking pretty good. Joanna’s assistance was invaluable, as she has recently completed a PhD in Gender Studies and is thus fluent in the language of politico-cultural quangos. She is now listed as one of the researchers, and has a longer blurb than I do. And I wrote the blurbs.

It felt like we were early nineties dot-com entrepeneurs writing a business plans for free-spending venture capitalists. Only our rhetoric was about benefits to society rather than profit.

Like parrot in a flaming tree I know it’s pretty hard to see
Time For A Change, Split Enz

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