Hobbiton Movie Set: The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Trilogies

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 5

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 1

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 2

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 3

New Zealand Travel Blog: Part 4

The humongous and spectacular 1250-acre farmland outside Matamata is where The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Trilogies’ filming took place. Producers discovered the Alexander farm in 1998 and set construction started in 1999.

To create 39 Hobbit Holes, materials such as timber, ply, and polystyrene were used. I was astonished when our tour guide told us that the oak tree that overlooks Bag End is actually an artificial tree. To make this happen, an oak tree was brought in from Matamata and artificial leaves from Taiwan were individually wired onto the tree.

Later on, the tree was rebuilt for the Hobbit Trilogy in 2009. The whole structure of the tree was artificial this time, made of steel and silicon. You can’t even tell the tree is not real if no one tells you.

The Mill and the double arch bridge were made using scaffolding, ply, and polystyrene. Rushes were cut to make the thatch for the roofs of the Green Dragon Inn and The Mill.

The whole movie set structures were made to become permanent and only require maintenance to keep them nice. It took 2 years to finish the full project.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy took 3 months to film starting December 1999. The Hobbit Trilogy took only 12 days starting October 2011. There were 400 people on site at its peak.

There are lots of frogs in the ponds. During filming, the frogs were so noisy that Peter Jackson instructed employees to catch and move them to the next farm. Somehow they kept coming back, so they had to be moved again and again. After filming was completed, all of them were brought back.

How To Self-Manage Yourself

The Concept of Self-Management

Can you manage yourself? When you talk to yourself, do you listen? These may seem like odd questions but they have some very important answers to them. It all comes down to self-management, which involves being able to manage and control who you are. If you are trying to stay away from fast food to lose weight, but find yourself constantly going to a fast food restaurant, then you are not managing yourself or practicing self-management. Self-management turns you into your own manager. You tell yourself what to do and you do that.

So, what does self-management do for you in your life and what does it involve? Well, put simply self-management will turn you into a doer, rather than a sayer, and involves setting goals for yourself and sticking to those goals. You need to have discipline and will power to self manage and reach your goals, but if you follow these tips, you can do just that.

1. Decide what goals you want to have for your life. They can be anything from losing weight to starting a business, but make sure your goals are something you can achieve.

2. Be specific with your goals. Instead of saying you want to make money with a small business in the first three years, decide how much money you want to make. Being self-managed means being specific to what you want. Managers are specific to employees, and you should be to yourself.

3. Put a chart up somewhere so you can see your progress to your goals. This will both motivate and keep you on track. When you see that you are losing weight, you will be motivated to lose more. If you are not losing weight because you are not exercising, looking at that chart will get you back towards your goals.

4. When an employee does something right, they get rewarded by the manager. The same should happen to you when you have success; reward yourself. If you lose 10 pounds, go to a movie. If your business reaches a goal you set, treat yourself to something. It is up to you but make sure your reward is not counter-productive to your goal.

5. You should place post-it notes around your house with your goals written on them. This will not only keep you constantly reminded about your goals, but it will help you stay on track and motivated. You will see those goals and feel guilty for not reaching or trying for them. As a result, you will get back on the track to reaching your goals and that will make you feel better. Then when you reach a goal, you can remove the post-it note, which in itself will create a great feeling of accomplishment.

When you are trying to better yourself you need to become a manager for yourself. You need to become a person who can order you what to do. You are the manager and the employee, so make sure you stay on track with your goals to bettering yourself.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on Oct 28, 2010.

Flip UltraHD And MoviePix MP5A4 HD Digital Video Camera

Watch A View From My Balcony Non-HD

First Published: June 10, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

I have been contemplating buying an HD Camcorder for sometime. However, I was procrastinating because I wanted to buy a Flip UltraHD and it was not yet available in Canada. A couple of days ago I found out that Walmart Canada was selling the Flip UltraHD Digital Camcorder, and I decided to visit Walmart to buy one. As I was about to buy the Flip UltraHD an associate walked up to me and asked why would I want pay double just for a brand name.  He showed me a MoviePix MP5A4 HD cam which cost $127 (Flip UltraHD costs about $270) and had more features than Flip UltraHD. He also said that he tried it himself and he is convinced that it was a better deal at half the cost of a Flip cam. He sounded very convincing and I decided to give it a try.

After coming home (that was Saturday), I spent couple of hours learning various features and trying to get acquainted with my new cam. Today (Sunday), I shot my first clip – and the picture quality is just outstanding. I am pleased with this camera, especially its price. I am going to post a clip for you, and I will post a link to a similar video clip I shot before with a regular video camera. You will be able to see the difference yourself.

I will be using my new HD cam at the Toronto Reference Library in The Spring 2009 Toronto Small Press Book Fair. And from now on, expect to see more video clips capturing interesting stuff as I see them through my eyes.

Bluetooth Toothbrush? Are We Going Crazy?

Are These Apps Wasting Time?

I never thought that we would like to have an overview of what's going on inside our mouth while brushing and want to keep track of that in an app. Recently I came across Bluetooth toothbrushes that can do just that.

These brushes keep track of how you are brushing your teeth, how long you are brushing, where you are putting more pressure, where you are putting less pressure, and many other bizarre things - and then connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. You can have a detailed report of your brushing activity and your phone can also remind you to brush your teeth should you forget.

You can say this is a marvel of modern technology, but I would gladly decline tracking every move we make and have a report to analyze it. How far we can go with things like this? An app to track how we wear our clothes? An app to track how we walk? How our eyes look and if they are seeing properly?

The world is full of distractions and you need to be very selective in what you do and do not use. As our time is limited on earth, you want to appreciate, enjoy and cherish every second of it before it's too late. I already visit my dentist every 4 months and am not willing to give up more time tracking how I brush my teeth.

Rise in Consumer Confidence – a Good Sign?

Global Economy, Consumer Confidence, And Canadians

First Published: Published Date : June 11, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

The state of the global economy in recent times has been the number one story in newspapers and on TV news bulletins for quite some time now, and the negativity and pessimism of reports and predictions has inevitably translated to the consumers out there. In addition, the number of companies laying staff of has led to a further decrease in optimism about the economy. People are concerned about whether they will have a job next month, so concerns over having a plasma screen TV will be unlikely to feature at the top of their priorities. Since the governments of the world admitted one by one that there was a recession in the pipeline, it has been a case of bad news piling on top of bad news.

Amid all of the concerns, the mantra that has been repeated time and again is that the only way for the credit crisis to end is for customers to get out there and start shopping again in order to stimulate the economy. This has as often as not met with a hostile, cynical reaction as described in the first paragraph – if you aren’t sure about whether you will have a job next month, consumer spending becomes less of a priority for you, whatever the banks and politicians might say. The return of consumer confidence needs to be an organic thing – we as consumers need, ourselves, to feel that there is a reason to get out there and start spending. Signs are showing, now, that this might finally be the case.

Consumers surveyed in the last month have for the first time been broadly positive about the state of the economy going forward. A Harris-Decima poll conducted towards the end of May has put the level of consumer confidence among Canadians up at its highest level since February 2008 – before the credit crunch really took hold in a substantial way in terms of consumer understanding. The consumer confidence index, considered the most reliable way of monitoring confidence in the general public, is now sitting at 78.5 – up by 11.5 from the last reading in February 2009. Although this is different from saying that the consumers surveyed are all going to go out and buy expensive items, stimulating the economy massively as a result, it does indicate that people feel ready to spend, having been convinced that the wave of layoffs will not take their job and that they can look to the future with a modicum of confidence.

Among the other headlines of the survey is the fact that on being asked if they expected the economic situation to worsen in the coming twelve months, only 29% said they did, compared with nearly 60% in February. This considerable change in mindset may well be a foreshadowing of the consumer activity which will begin to ease the nation and indeed the world out of the tricky period that currently exists. There are no guarantees as to how things will be going forward, but with other indicators beginning to hint at a stabilization if not a recovery, there is at least some hope for the global economy to get back on track within the next 12 to 18 months.