Just when it was almost late again...

LOCAL NEWS Another National MP has resigned, an electorate one, forcing a by-election. This guy was offered a job he couldn’t refuse. The party should have to pay for the cost of replacement. Barack Obama is in New Zealand. We never get rock stars until they are past it has-beens. The first man (Mrs Jacinda) is now a Guide Dogs ambassador. Apparently some employers are hiring only non-smokers. I don’t blame them. You may not be able to ask, but non-smokers often say so on their CV anyway. It was Pasifika on Saturday, so it rained, but it actually stopped pretty quickly. Then it rained again. The Tuvalu stage show had zero people watching it and five swans not even watching the stage. A police search and rescue training exercise resulted in them finding a body, seems the training worked better than expected. A motel owner is in trouble for his sign which also says “Welcome to Turangi” and gives directions. The directions are correct and it’s in an appropriate place on the edge of Turangi (not Picton). Jacinda met Ed Sheeran. He’s been doing concerts. Jacinda met Lulu, a guide dog puppy we know, in Pt Chev, as did Mrs Jacinda. Lulu didn’t even come see us. A very big chunk of road washed out on state highway 1 in the far north, the good thing was it was very far north, beyond Kaitaia, so the impact is reasonably limited. The gap in the road was 5 metres deep and maybe 10 metres long, even the Dukes of Hazzard couldn’t jump that. WORLD NEWS A study has decided that self-employed people are happier and more engaged, despite working longer hours and having less job security. No surprises, except I call bullshit on the job security question. They avoid being the victim of corporate reorganisation and politics. Someone reckoned a million pounds of rat meat is being sold in the US as boneless chicken wings. Chicken wings are not even meat. It’s kind of funny, and very reminiscent of the story in King Rat. William Shatner turned 87 this week. Some Islamic guy went silly with a gun in a French supermarket. It didn’t end well. So there was some fuss about facebook and privacy and data and so on, people rage quit, etc. It’s not like I put my bank account number on there, I don’t even have my birthday. MY SAD LIFE The teachers had a stop work meeting on Tuesday, so I picked the brats up from school. We started work on a lego version of the Saturn V rocket, which I just happened to have lying around (an accident with a mouse and a credit card). Of course I had to show the twins photos of the real one I saw in Houston, which was in 2012, which seems like a long time ago now. Hannah had a minor power emergency on Wednesday morning, which was readily sorted, Diana dropped some replacement units off. Then I had a money emergency (left my wallet in the wrong magic pants) so I had to borrow money from Hannah so I could coffee. We met another working guide dog this week, recently placed with a local Point Chev resident, his name is Loyal and he is from the same litter as Leo and Lily. Maddie had a big Thursday with the other guide dog puppies. There were 12 black labs and the three golden retrievers. It was mayhem, Then on Friday I took Maddie to Spark for Guide Dog fundraising, we were ferried with two Spark people up to Airedale St, and we went through about six floors in two buildings, including the floors where two of the teams I work with are based, which was nice. I reckon Maddie got patted by well over a hundred people, and she was pretty much knackered by the time we got home about 1:30pm. Koos had his birthday on Saturday. We saw him for a damp dinner then he went to a damp concert with a guy from work. Anna returned home on Friday I think after swanning off on the east coast of the US, and it hadn’t gone all Lord of the Flies with Jono in charge back at base (so I lost money on that bet). We saw Rory again on Saturday, with Hannah J, he got Diana a new phone. It seems to be going okay but selecting a suitable ringtone is problematic. No Bambi walk this week, he’s been in Melbourne for the F1. I am on a quest today to find a place for cubs to sleep for him, it’s a long story. Sammy did a competition in the weekend and got a number of reds and greens. Sarah didn’t say what the competition was actually in, so in my head it was for yak yodelling. I also have no idea what green or red means, and given Sammy told me that green means stop and red means go, if you are eating a tomato, I am basically bereft of all clues. I really should have asked for clarification this morning when I bumped in to them. We popped in to see the Goodins at the beta-house and we wandered down the road for an early lunch on Sunday morning, beforehand we did Big King with Maddie and it was exceedingly pleasant and quite quiet due to the earlier rain. Some confused Mormons where there trying to recruit, dyslexics I think, it’s a dog park, not a god park. Hannah and Allister popped in last night and had dinner with us, as did Koos. I have now done la Francais for 30 days in a row. I sometimes listen to French audio in the car, aussi. I think it is best to describe my progress as steady and modest. I tried to watch a movie in Francais without English subtitles and it was hopeless, I am a very long way off that, and uncertain I will ever be close. I will try to find French movies with English subtitles but even that could be a struggle. Easter this weekend means a relaxing of beach rules for dogs and daylight saving ends. Could be tricky with the dog sleeps. Check out http://retrolens.nz for a look at old aerial photos of New Zealand, it’s pretty cool. Anyway, now seems like a good time to hit send.

The week that God met Stephen Hawking

LOCAL NEWS Some survey reckons getting meth is easier and faster than marijuana. One third of respondents said they could get meth in less than 20 minutes, which is impressive given that a coffee can take that long in some places. The Labour Party seem to be winning at the sexual molestering Olympics at the moment. After the death of two people evading cops, and an innocent bystander, we got the rhetoric about should police chase people. Of course they should, otherwise people will just drive away from police cars at 60km/hr in a 50 zone and wave good bye to the police, that would be ridiculous. On Tuesday night, a couple of young ladies drove into the house on Pt Chev Road at the end of our street, the house was a mess, the car was written off, and the women were unhurt but arrested. Apparently the Honda Torneo is the most stolen car in New Zealand, I’ve never heard of one, apparently it’s the name they use in Japan for the Accord. A parcel that was very obscurely labelled made it to its destination. Social media wet itself because New Zealand Post rarely delivers anything in one piece. Dairy owners want the government to pay for cigarette vending machines in their dairies so they can make money out of something that kills people without the inconvenience of risking getting killed by cigarette thieves. Seriously? Some guy was named in an insider trading trial. He wasn’t very good at it, he sold two days after he got the tip that sales weren’t good, and it was for a lousy $15,000 worth of shares. I mean, if you heard some bad news was coming, wouldn’t you consider selling? I thought Insider Trading was all about people on the board selling their shares before some big secret thing happened, like the Intel guy recently. An 11yo girl died in Ngaruawahia when she was hit by a train on a railway bridge. Apparently most of the laundered money in New Zealand is from drugs and fraud. Not sure how burglary is so much less than drugs because I thought drugs were paid for by burgling. WORLD NEWS Stephen Hawking dying was very big news, not completely unsurprising, he did well to make it to 76. He threw a party for time travellers, and nobody showed up, he didn’t send invitations until afterwards. It was a fun idea. Is it just me or is Russia constantly in the news for doing dodgy deeds? If they’re not annexing property, poisoning people, or swaying elections it’s not a real news day. Meanwhile, the USA proved they can’t swing an election like Russia can as Putin appears to be returning with a bigger majority after their election. The news of a year in space altering 7% of an astronaut’s genes was thoroughly misleading, how some genes were being expressed failed to change back to normal after, on 93% returned to previous. He still has the same DNA, and his telomeres actually increased. Toys R Us is finally closing up shop, they have been in trouble for a long time. I can’t say it is a shame, because they were big but not very good. The collapsed bridge in Miami wasn’t nice, but six people isn’t many, more get shot in Miami before tea time on any given day. St Patrick’s Day happened, people wore green and claimed to be Irish a lot. Trump fired someone else, I think it was the guy who installed the revolving doors in all the high offices. Some news service is forcing people to answer questions to prove they have read the article before they post a comment. What a wonderful idea. Such a simple thing yet it could improve the nonsense out there considerably. MY SAD LIFE Tuesday morning the place was crawling with Year 5s and 6s with luggage off to school camp. On Thursday I saw one of Rory’s old teachers doing the crossing on her own, she asked me how Rory was doing. He had her when he was about seven. I was impressed she remembered. I finally got the new monitor going, not at a very high resolution, I need a better video card. Wednesday’s Bambi walk was in considerable darkness, the most exciting bit was checking out the house hit by a car, and the six herons at the dog park, one of which botched a landing in a tree, it was kind of funny. We then saw the house that got hit by a car, it was messed up, I reckon the whole side wall has been shifted, they are getting a structural engineer to check it out. I posted a letter on Wednesday, that was exciting. $1.20 for a standard post letter within New Zealand! I had to use three .40c stamps, which we have clearly had for a couple of years or maybe ten. Thursday I dropped Hannah and Allister at the airport. Friday morning we had a surprise walk with Maddie’s BFF Lily, it was nice to see her again, they were both very excited. Saturday was even more surprising. We drove out to darkest Flatbush, to Barry Curtis Park, for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Walkathon, they raise money for Guide Dogs each year and so the GDF like to have a presence there. There were 23 people from Guide Dogs, four dogs, including two young puppies (Rossie and Topaz, both about four or five months), Maddie, and a working guide dog called….Mack. This was very exciting, because Mack is Maddie’s brother and littermate, Maddie is #106681 and Mack is #106682. We met his handler, Laura, and Maddie and Mack got to have a bit of a play, then did a lap of the track together, and then chilled with each other while Laura did a couple more laps. We haven’t seen Mack since he was about 12 weeks old, but Laura reckons he’s not really interested in other dogs much and that certainly wasn’t the case with Maddie. Their hospitality at the even was pretty good, they did some food after, and we stayed quite a while. It was quite a big day and by the time we got home we really didn’t achieve very much for the rest of it. Sunday morning, Diana went to pilates on the beach at Takapuna, and I took Maddie up Mt Eden. There was a walking event happening for Downs Syndrome children, which I didn’t know about, so Maddie met a couple of specials. Later we went to the GDF Puppy Fun Day, about fifty different guide dog puppies, breeders, and retired guide dogs. It was mayhem, but plenty of fun, we didn’t go last year because Maddie was in season. The first time we went we were noobs with one of the youngest pups there, this time she was the only non-breeding breeder. Hannah and Allister went to Melbourne for a tournament. Allister won two gold medals and a silver (pretty sure that’s right), I would hope he’s happy with his results. They stayed with Charles and Steph, I didn’t realise it was Steph’s birthday on Friday. The good news is that Hannah and Allister weren’t locked out of there flat so they didn’t show up at our place at 2am this morning. We saw Rory and Hannah J last night, about three weeks since we last saw him, Diana was getting a little grumpy. I am continuing to grind away with my Francais. The DuoLingo program isn’t perfect, so I am supplementing with other things. Diana bought me a French grammar book because she was sick of me swearing when I put mangez instead of manges or mangons or whatever. I am supposedly about halfway through the program but really don’t think I am remotely competent yet. Done 23 days in a row so far. Okay, not too late today by my standards recently.

The week my stack overflowed

LOCAL NEWS The met office confirmed what we already knew, it was a hot summer, they think the hottest on record. They aren’t sure because the records all melted. Gareth Morgan was in the news this week because he is about to qualify for superannuation, and he thinks it is stupid giving it to people that don’t need it. A man was shot in Pukekohe, it’s rough, it’s in South Auckland. Meanwhile policed seized a bunch of some drug called “Brown Sugar”, which I suppose will appeal to Maori, and cash and cars and also $200,000 of cryptocurrencies. Would be interested to know how they found that. Five people were arrested. Apparently we only collect tourist data from proper hotels, not through Airbnb, don’t see why the government can’t ask for info, it’s not like they don’t collect data on a computer somewhere. The country had two less idiots when they died failing to evade police near Nelson on Sunday. Sadly, they took an innocent motorist out with them. Anyone that says police should stop chasing these people are even bigger idiots. A cyclone was due to hit at 2am last night, it’s been in the news for days, Hola it’s called. Nothing’s really happened yet. The new National caretaker leader rearranged his deckchairs, the old school got demoted, mostly, and the new faces got promoted. How Judith Collins is still there I really don’t know. Another fleeing driver got in trouble, not fatally, his car caught fire as he continued to drive on no tyres, then he leapt from a bridge in to the river to escape the fire and possibly police, he didn’t escape police. WORLD NEWS Researchers have worked out a way to separate two liquids using lasers and magic. It will make public swimming pools pee-free by 2023. Apparently Rik Mayall would have been 60 this week, but he’s still dead. Someone reckons they’ve confirmed Amelia Earhart’s bones on a South Pacific Island. It wasn’t Waiheke. Someone else found an aircraft carrier in the Coral Sea, sunk during WWII. They’ve been busy, maybe they were all looking for ML370. It was the 40th anniversary of HHGTTG this week (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). I listened to some of the original radio play this week as I worked, it’s still on my iPod. Of course the more significant anniversary is in two years time (think about it). I haven’t really figured out all this Russian poisoning in Salisbury in the UK, but it seems nasty. Author John Le Carre didn’t die this week, but I learned that it was still possible (that is, he isn’t dead yet). MY SAD LIFE Tuesday night I had a planned outage and upgrade, nothing serious, oracle patches and things. It went fine. I seemed to have considerable difficulty with time this week. I got stuck in to some serious projecty work a couple of days, hit some walls, had Stack Overflow rescue me in six minutes with one thing. Had a new build deployed on Tuesday night so had to work on and off until about 10pm. Then Stack Overflow delivered again overnight. Thursday morning was the Bambi walk, wasn’t very exciting, we had to be fast because I had the GDP walk that day. It was International Women’s Day on Thursday, so Maddie and Lulu asserted their womanhood by going in to the creek. I am going to change her name to Muddie. I got a call from the anti-fraud people at Westpac this week, I was trying to unsubscribe from something and the only way to delete my credit card was use another, and my old expired card was on my desk so I tried that. The website declined it, turned out it tried to charge US$1 on it as a test. They didn’t tell me off, but dayum I was impressed with their speed. I did Big King again with Maddie on Saturday, and Diana tagged along to Onehunga on Sunday. The temperature has been pretty good, and both walks were quite pleasant. Maddie disappeared twice on Saturday at Big King, I was getting genuinely concerned the first time, and after the second time (both were in places where I thought there was limited scope for absconding) I minimised opportunity even further. Koos came over on Saturday, but I kept getting distracted with work. Someone had a planned outage on Friday night from 10pm to 7am and they finally were back up about 5:14pm Saturday afternoon. I got sick of hanging around about lunchtime. Allister visited our house four times on Saturday, we weren’t there for every one, he needed tools. The really cool thing was that he was working on the work bench in the bakery, meaning that I wasn’t. That, I like, a lot. Meanwhile, as an interesting counterpoint to Allister, we haven’t heard anything from Rory since he told Diana he was particularly busy the weekend before last. The dodgy car yard had signage go up, finally, but a couple of days later it was gone. Very, very weird. This morning I had yet another magical reply in my Stack Overflow inbox and yet another minor mystery was solved allowing me to push forward on my testing thing. Have you ever done one little thing that snowballed into a cascading series of ever growing changes? That was me this morning. My main monitor has been annoying me, it’s a television rather than a monitor, so it needed a remote for some silly things, like powering it on. I was stupid enough to purchase a replacement, slightly bigger than the previous, and higher resolution, because that’s how you do this. It arrived this morning and that’s when it all went horribly wrong. The precis version is that it didn’t fit on my desk between the other two, it was too high. This required some really serious bush engineering, I got there in the end but it wasn’t pretty, mistakes were made, swear words may have been uttered. Maddie got tangled in my phone headset and she was trying to pull monitor, laptop and phone off my desk to get away and finally I realised saying “wait” was the trick and she stopped and let me get her loose. It’s sort of done now and my desk is very clean (found an awful lot of Labrador fur on it), but the floor is covered in things to sort out. The whole process took me about two hours. That was until I gave up and went back to the old monitor. I am going to have to figure out how to make the new one work, the PC seems to struggle with it a little. I think this monitor can handle inputs from two computers and display them side by side which would be cool. This week a tried a slightly dubious was of entering a competition. Every purchase got you an entry in the draw, and I needed four units, and I don’t pay for delivery so I placed four separate orders, quadrupling my chances. Let’s see if it pays off. With Hannah still winning things I think it must be my turn. Hannah and Allister are off to Melbourne this Thursday for a TKD tournament, back Sunday night or maybe Monday. I continue with my Francais, 16 days continuously. I have downloaded some more ebooks and audio books to try to supplement the DuoLingo app. Apparently I am now 48% fluent, which I believe is utter bollocks. I could probably slowly get through many basic written things but writing in French is a long way off, as is understanding spoken French with any great success. A SHORT STORY I got a box this week, it was full of shorts. I decided to replace some tired magical pockety shorts, and found someone who had them on special, so I got five pairs. I couldn’t decide which ones to get two of so I got two of both my preferred colours. I have transitioned in to a couple of the new pairs, and actually thrown out one of the old ones. So more of “a shorts story” really. SPEAKING OF CLOTHING My socks keep wearing out, so much so that I now carry spares when I walk so if I blow a sock I can replace it and avoid blisters. They wear out on the heel. Blisters are serious. I have had some complaints about timing of this email. It’s still Monday morning somewhere. You can always apply for a refund.

Another week bites the dust, and it is March already

With summer ending this week, it does feel like the weather has calmed down a little, not so hot, and not so much wet. LOCAL NEWS A woman climbed Mt Maunganui 38 times in one day, she started at 1am and finished at 11pm, apparently it’s the same climb as Everest, but of course she had to climb down in between as well, but she didn’t risk adema. Apparently motivated by something called the Mount Everest Challenge where people are meant to do it 38 times in a month. The Prime Minister is moving out of Point Chevalier, to Sandringham, going all fancy. Or perhaps not. Wellington is considering abolishing free parking on Sunday. We have that in Auckland and it’s bloody handy. There is talk of departure cards for leaving New Zealand being dropped, Australia has already. A man died outside a Flaxmere pub last night, police are investigating. Nobody wants to go like that. A South Auckland man got burned after the car he was working on caught fire, and then he caught fire. There was talk of demolishing a pretty tired block of flats in Greys Ave in Auckland City, then others decided they wanted to save the eyesore. You can’t win. Tomorrow is official census day, but they haven’t bothered with the census taker people coming to houses at all, far as I know. WORLD NEWS Apparently Planet of the Apes, the first movie (with Charlton Heston), was released 50 years ago. New Zealand sent a plane to search after a distress beacon was detected near Tuvalu. I really don’t expect to ever go back there. They reckon Millennials will be the fattest generation. Trump attacked European cars, Canadian steel, and lord knows what else this week. He is also talking about clamping down on video game violence, because people rampaging around schools with an Xbox is what kills people. Now he wants to talk to Kim Jong Un. Sir Roger Bannister, Minnie’s brother, and the first man to be measured to run the mile in less than four minutes, died. So did David Ogden Stiers, actor pretty much known for his role in MASH as Charles Emerson Winchester the Third. After running out of KFC, the UK is running low on bread, milk, and eggs, but it’s no big deal if they can handle their KFC without gravy. Apparently there are 80,000 young people not in work or training. Because they are useless wastes of space, basically. Everyone else has a job. Blah, 90th Academy Awards today. They make far too much of a fuss about it. Happy to see a highlight reel, TBH, at the most. MY SAD LIFE Because the Bambi walks had become a little humdrum, we pushed the boat out this week, we did a one-way walk to Westmere, through Cox’s Bay Reserve, and up the far hill and through some very large and fancy houses to Jervois Road. We put Maddie in her coat, and caught the bus back again, to the bakery, purchased breakfast, and toddled home. The bus was pretty full but I managed to tuck Maddie mostly under a seat, it was tricky when people got off. A Persian youth appeared to be terrified of Maddie and looked like he was seriously considering climbing out the window when Maddie sniffed his seat. On Thursday, I had lunch with Hannah then we wandered off to check out doughnuts that the Z Station are selling for Easter (they were pretty average, TBH), then the new butcher that has replaced the dodgy Mad Butcher guy (their mince was really cheap, $7.99/kg for premium mince). I discovered this week that it is actually really hard to report a crime to the police. It wasn’t actually a crime, but it was the possibility of a crime with four different things that all sort of pointed to a car yard near us being not really a car yard. I took some photos of the cars the next morning, to check the number plates, they aren’t stolen, and the plates match the cars, but I reckon someone was sleeping on one of the cars. That seems less than professional. As well as contacting the police, nothing appears to have been done so far on that one, I sent a request to the Ministry of Commerce under the Official Information Act with regards customers changing electricity providers. A response is due in 20 working days. That’s not anything like the turnaround I gave the Commerce Commission today in their query of telephone number porting today (I gave them a two year history in around 11 minutes). Koos went to a thing with music and people at Western Springs on Saturday, he got there about 11:30 and I think it was probably finishing nearly 12 hours later. I really don’t know why. We went to see the house the Goodins are moving in to during renovations, and we farted about replacing some curtains, it felt very much like how things were about 30 years ago when we first moved in to our first houses (which will be 30 years ago in December this year). Then Caitlin and her mates left while we were in the room over the garage. We emerged to discover we were locked out with all the keys inside, and Kathryn’s shoes, Ross’s car keys, the handbags, you name it. Luckily, I was wearing my magical pockety pants and had my phone, wallet, and glasses. Also luckily, Thomas had retained a set of keys and he came to the rescue on his white stallion (a VW golf, but it was white). Without Thomas having those keys, we would have been breaking a window. It was a bit of unplanned excitement. Then we went down the road for traditional Malaysian takeaway, but had it in the restaurant, which I believe was a first for all of us. Saturday morning, I took Maddie to Big King, it wasn’t too unusual. In the afternoon I took her for a brief walk and bumped in to all sorts of people including the father of a boy who was in Rory’s soccer team, some kids who had a lovely time patting Maddie, a guy who needed directions to the boat club, and finally the twins were in the dairy with Katrina (their grandmother) so we walked a little way with them. We walked around the viaduct on Sunday morning, turned out the Round the Bays run was starting at 9. It wasn’t too busy, surprisingly. Also, tons of hospitality tents and conference things going on because of the Round the World race. Had no clue any of it was going on. On Sunday afternoon we accompanied Koos, and Kay, to the outdoor one in Hobsonville Point, saw Gavin and his kids there also. I also bumped in to a couple who used to work at a customer of mine, she left there about 14 years ago, which is kind of scary. They live in Hobsonville Point also. Koos went to three concerts over the weekend and left two of them when he wanted to. Paul and Patricia have now been married five years. The Hawaii adventure feels a very long time ago now. Sunday night we went to see the movie Ross booked for Saturday (don’t ask). Red Sparrow has some pretty hard core brutal violent moments, it’s not for the faint hearted. The bloody motorway was closed coming home, and the diversion was a stupid route, I nearly went my own way and really should have. Diana didn’t lose her phone this week, but she left it at home this morning. I am now nine days in to my learning of French, still got a very long way to go. I have been quite diligent, exceeding the ambitious minimum I set each day. Apparently I am 35% fluent, but that seems exceedingly optimistic in my view. My comprehension of written French is getting pretty bon, but verbal is tres comme ci comme ca. As for written, forget about it. Autocorrect really doesn’t help. I had an unexpected knock on the door this morning, an old grey haired chap accompanying an older no-haired chap, who wanted to walk down memory lane. He was in his 80s and grew up in our house, I reckon he must have been just about the first occupant. The people in here before us must have been here at least ten years and so it must be a minimum of 30 years ago but I would guess more like 60, minimum. A couple of ladies a little older than me did a similar thing a few years back, they were supposed to email me photos but they never did. Jono, I’ve been thinking about your sister. Tell Lisa she lives in Hobsonville Point. I reckon anything past Villa Rosa is HP. It might be old HP, but it’s still HP. She’s either living there or in denial. Today facebook told me that Diana and I have been tagged in the same photo 40 times. That seems excessive for nearly 30 years of marriage. Meh. Send time.