a general principle about life, told through the lens of road usage behaviour Monday, 8 February 2010 link 

Here's a good principle to keep in mind: dicks stand out.

Which is to say, some people are dicks. They do dick-ish things. Like running red lights; like tailgating; like not stopping at pedestrian crossings; like driving with booming sound systems; like not giving way when required.

But most people aren't dicks. Most people are at worst uninterested, and at best fairly positive. And there's a lot of nice people out there: people who go out of their way to make things work more smoothly. But the dicks are the ones who stand out.

Think about it. You commute in to work. Chances are the vast majority of the other road users follow the rules and it goes smoothly; several people are courteous and make way for you when you merge across lanes; and one fucktard cuts you up something rotten. What do you remember about your commute half an hour later? You remember the dick. You don't remember the vast majority of people who just played along, you don't even remember the people who actively helped to make things go smoothly for you; you remember the fuckwit who cut you up.

This is why people mutter about "bloody cyclists ignoring red lights". When I cycle, the majority of cyclists are actually law-abiding and sensible. But there's always a few who are, and you can see where this is going, dicks. To the average motorist stopped at a red light, the law-abiding cyclists waiting patiently for the light to change are basically invisible. But the fixie twat who blats through the light? That's the cyclist they'll remember. That's who they think of when coming up with a mental picture of a cyclist.

So:

• Don't be a dick. It annoys people, and it doesn't help the already fraught atmosphere out on our roads.
• Appreciate and acknowledge the people who aren't being dicks. Say thanks. To be honest, I set the bar pretty low on this one: when drivers show basic courtesy to me as a cyclist, I try to make my appreciation clear in an unambiguous way. I give them a wave or a salute to say thanks. Yes, it's often just basic courtesy - but the person could be being a dick, and by acknowledging that they aren't, it's helping encourage them not to continue not being a dick.

You may generalise this to other situations as you see fit.

different values of must Friday, 29 January 2010 link 

So. As briefly alluded to, we've moved house. It was a long, stressful process, but it now seems to be all over except the shouting. So how well did it all go?

As these things go, fairly smoothly. There were the expected hiccups. I got a bit too involved in the packing, and forgot to leave some basic cutlery out until the last minute (always have at least one fork). The forecast was for rain. And on the morning of the move, we got a call saying they'd be delayed two hours. That's not going to be a problem, is it?

As it turned out, it wasn't. At 10:45, we got a call that they'd be there at 11 after all. So when they arrived I was still cleaning the fridge. The movers had a quick look around, and then merrily hove to with the moving. Nice blokes, even if one of them was wearing a home detention electronic tag. This was followed at 11:30 by a phone call notifying us that the sale of our house had gone through and that we were thus officially homeless. Excellent. From our chat with the estate agent the night before, we knew that the new owners weren't moving in until the next day, so that wouldn't be a problem.

Except that twenty minutes later, a fully-loaded station wagon pulled down the drive. As it came, I distinctly saw the passenger doing a double-take at the moving truck in the driveway, and lipread what I can only tactfully describe as mild obscenity. I popped out and had a polite chat. To their credit, they were extremely nice about the whole thing. It turned out that they were actually both keen cyclists, and the bloke was heavily tattooed, so with a bit of luck the neighbours might not even notice the change. I finally convinced them to leave by giving them a set of shelves, and we got on with the move.

Around 1:30pm we got confirmation that we own the new place. Handily, this came just as they were closing the doors on the moving truck. So we popped into J'ville and picked up the keys. My word, the security precautions these places take. None whatsover, as it turns out. We went in, asked the receptionist for the keys, and she gave them to us.

The rest of it went pretty smoothly. The movers seemed quite surprised that we'd actually labelled the boxes of stuff, so they could tell where stuff went by simply reading the labels. From their reactions, this is less common than I would expect. Anyway, thanks to my obsessive packing and labelling - together with a remarkably unWellingtonian ease of access at both ends - the move was over by quarter past four. Thank god. We even had time to do a bit of unpacking so the girls' beds were in order before they arrived home.

In the days since, we've mainly been frantically unpacking. To be honest, it's more or less done. We need to spend a bit of time going through the shed, and sorting out a filing cabinet, but that's about it. Result. Here's to not having to bloody well do it again for another few years.

And we now own our own bush section, full of precipitous drops and slippery steps. And a stream.

In other news, Australia's censorship debate once again wanders into batshit insane territory. This time, the censors are demanding bigger breasts in porn. Well, they're treating all porn where the actresses have A-cup breasts as potentially pedophilic. I think this is evidence that some conservative politicians in Australia are seeing patterns that no-one else is; and quite why they're seeing those patterns is left as an exercise for the reader.

yes Monday, 25 January 2010 link 

We survived the move.

We are now firmly ensconced in Johnsonville. The pretentious may weep for us. I stand on my back lawn, look out at the bush slope, hear the stream gurgling at the bottom of the garden, and breathe out.

insert standard 80s hair metal reference Sunday, 17 January 2010 link 

It's Sunday. We move house on Wednesday. You can draw your own conclusions about what we've been up to recently. I've become mildly obsessed with packing; I am, increasingly, made nervous by the simple presence of Stuff That Is Not In A Box Yet. I've been careful to pack stuff in increasing frequency of use. Now the only things left are our minimum set of clothes, food, and cooking implements. But soon I can scratch my itch: with three days to go, I can start merrily boxing up plates, mugs, tins of tomatoes and sacks of rice. Soon, all bets are off, and then I can get some serious work done. The problem is, we started early (during Christmas) so as not to have a huge bolus of packing right at the last minute. But there's some stuff that you simply can't pack until the last minute, and starting early has just drawn this out and stretched the stress and strain until I'm sitting here unable to look around the living room without automatically measuring each item by eye and deciding the type of box required and what I can pad it out with. By 11am Wednesday everything will be packed, and that will be good. And then we get to the new house, and have the immense fun of unpacking all the blasted stuff and deciding where to stick it.

I checked on a map today. As far as I can figure it, we're actually moving 1.8km as the crow flies (that's 1.1 miles for our friends still in old money). There's a rather large hill in the way, which means that the shortest practical distance is more like 3k, but that's the situation on a map.

In the meantime: anyone got any suggestions for keeping a curious two-year old out of half-packed boxes?

live-action tetris Monday, 11 January 2010 link 

A few months ago I made the observation that you never know how much stuff you've got until you have to hide it. As part of the process of selling a house, you do what the estate agents refer to as "depersonalisation" - hiding your own posessions to make the house look more generic, so prospective buyers can imagine themselves in there. You move your stuff to cupboards, you take down your kids' pictures from the fridge, you try to make the place look as tidy and large as possible. But it's still your home: your furniture is in place, your bed is there, your kids' toys are still in their room.

In preparation for our imminent move, we've been packing everything. This isn't depersonalisation, this is deportation. If you can pick it up, into a box it goes. I started over Christmas, and we're most of the way there. By now we're about down to the stage of having packed pretty much everything that we don't use day to day, plus a few things that we do ("Hey, didn't we have oven trays?"). I spent a couple of hours over the weekend taking pictures and mirrors down. Then I went through and carefully pulled the picture hooks off the walls. As I pulled the hooks out, they left small holes from the nails. Occasionally there were rust spots where the hook had touched the wall, or bits of paint knocked off from the wall as pictures had been bumped.

And now the house looks much emptier. It echoes more. Just taking down all the pictures has profoundly affected how the place feels. Before, it was our house, but with a lot of our stuff sitting in boxes the garage: now it's a house that we haven't quite moved all our stuff out of. The replacement of a few paintings with blank expanses of wall, some tiny holes, some rust marks: removing our pictures has somehow removed us from the picture.

In a week and a half we'll be gone. Soon we'll only be scratches and holes.

intermittant summer Wednesday, 6 January 2010 link 

Happy new year to all.

Resolution this year: survive.

I spent the Christmas holidays wavering between packing and administering medical treatment, not least to myself. A variety of virii and bacterial illnesses beset most of the family. I was, understandably, a total wuss about it all. So: not exactly a relaxing getaway, but a change was as good as a rest.

The other day, riding home up the Ngauranga Gorge, I came across a group of skinks basking on the sun-warmed concrete footpath. As I got about two metres away, they leapt up and darted off into the vegetation. This gave a beautiful "bow wave" effect, as the panic about my arrival propagated through the group.

I've found something about walking at night. I've recently acquired a few hoodies. When I'm walking around, listening to stuff on my iPod, I've found that having the hood up helps muffle external noise, so making it easier to hear the iPod. But I've noticed that at night, when I'm wearing the hood up, people avoid eye contact and stride confidently past. I keep wanting to stop them and say, "Hey, I'm actually listening to National Radio." But I can't, because that would be creepy. Humanity, eh?

Tonight, as Heather and I were about to start singing her lullaby, Maggie tried to count us in. "1, 2, 3, 4..." - she's got music in her blood.

Two weeks today until we move. I'd estimate we're about 50% packed. 14 more days to eat an entire pantry's worth of tinned goods. It's going to be fun on the run in to the final day.

better not shout OK Thursday, 24 December 2009 link 

It's on general release now, so the NDA no longer prevents me from pointing out that I'm in the credits for Avatar. I'm rather chuffed. OK, so I'm credited as "Software Developer & Engineer" rather than "Technical Writer", but it's all good. Modesty prevents me from going into any real detail, but suffice to say that any rumours about a more "fundamental" role are true, but I didn't get credited for it. Ahem.

Christmas Eve: when the children alternate between exaggerated hyper-conforming virtue and bouncing off the walls with excitement. I was firmly informed last night that we needed to leave out a bottle of beer for Santa, and about seven carrots for the reindeer: one each, plus two for Rudolf. This morning, she's considered it a bit more and wants to leave 10, in case any of the reindeer lose or drop their carrot. About to take them swimming to burn off some nervous energy.

Ah, the internet. Heather spends twenty minutes searching the net for ham glazing recipes, then gets depressed with the results (who glazes a ham with peanut butter?), tweets her disbelief. Within two minutes the lovely ladies at Filament reply with a link to their Christmas ham recipe, completed with rudeboy crumpet. Excellent.

do not pinch her Saturday, 19 December 2009 link 

At the Capital E Pacific Santa event today, "Mrs Claus" (who Rebecca loudly pointed out bore a striking resemblance to the wonderful Fairy Trina) told the children stories. I spent the time going through the slightly incongruous Happy Christmas Assault Course with Maggie - she was a devil for getting stuck under those nets you crawl under (not joking; I'm still not sure how it fitted with the Christmas theme, but the kids loved it). Ten minutes later, the stories finished and Rebecca ran out to join us. I noticed a certain something in the other parents' eyes from then on. For some, contempt; for others, a certain wistful longing, an almost "If only I dared... but no! Such a course is not for me!"

Four hours later, Rebecca told me that Mrs Claus had been suggesting to the children that they help their parents in the run-up to Christmas. Rebecca had stood bolt upright and said "I know! I can get Daddy beers from the fridge!"

Mind you, this is the same kid who got bored halfway through watching (what had, unbeknownst to us, turned out to be) an animated version of the book of Exodus, and asked to put on Shaun the Sheep. Atheist parenting: win!

that's not hyperbole Thursday, 17 December 2009 link 

I had a good moment this morning. Every Sunday night, I spend a bit of time with Rebecca going through news items so she find something to report to her class on Monday. As I don't particularly want to have to explain the introduction of martial law in the Phillipines or civil war in Congo to a five-year old, we tend to concentrate on the more natural history, sciencey end of the BBC News web site: how hammerhead sharks' eyes work, new astronic telescope arrays, and on one memorable occasion the controversy around the Anglican Church's ordination of its second gay bishop. That was fun putting it into phrases she could write our herself, let me tell you.

So I was quite chuffed this morning when Rebecca piped up apropos of nothing and told me about how octopusses have been observed carrying coconut shells to use as portable shelters. Someone in her class had brought that one into school yesterday. Excellent: I am not the only parent who does this. But c'mon! Octopusses using tools! How much cooler than that could you possibly get?

Which is just one reason why my next planned tattoo is going to be a slightly stylised/abstracted octopus, around my left thigh. That's on the cards for April of next year: plenty of time to save up and get the design worked out.

Speaking of tattoos, I saw a close relative recently who knew that I had tats, but didn't know that I had recently got a few more. She was quite shocked - she thought that I'd got over it. We had a chat about it, and she remained resolutely anti them (while being perfectly pleasant to me). One thing did stick out: she asked whether the tattooist thought it was odd that someone as old as me was getting more tats. I was a bit mystified by this. I am, at present, 34 years old. Yes, I got my first few tats between the ages of 18 and 21; then there was a bit of a hiatus, until I turned 33. But it occurred to me that my relative probably thought of tattoos entirely as something you do when you're young and dumb, then regret after you turn 25. In contrast, I'm actually pretty middle of the range when it comes to people getting tattoos. If nothing else, how many 21-year olds can actually afford a full sleeve? People who ask me where I got my tattoos range in age from 16-year olds to people in their fifties; when I'm in getting inked, the people wandering into the studio for a look follow a similar age range, with a notably bump around the late 20s/early 30s. Indeed, I've had both a GP and the mortgage manager at my bank ask me for tattooist recommendations. Tattoos: not as bad as your elderly relatives may think.

But enough of this idle flim-flam. I'm off to go to a klezmer gig with an accelerometer strapped to me, in the name of SCIENCE!

twitter, misogyny Wednesday, 9 December 2009 link 

It's been an interesting time, and specifically an interesting weekend last week. For various reasons, I won't go into details.

The other day, I achieved a goal of mine. I signed up to Twitter specifically to be able to tweet "Pod of dolphins in Evans Bay now". And on Monday, I got to send that tweet. There was a large pod of dolphins hanging around just by the end of the airport runway; I sent the tweet. I have now officially Won Twitter. Now I need to try a speedrun. Come back, dolphins! Come back!

Or playing it on Hard. That'd be "Killer whales off Lyall Bay" (does happen, just less often).

There's recently been a lot of talk about a major sports star who has allegedly been cheating on his wife, with an ever-increasing number of women coming forward to claim that he's scored holes in one (so to speak). One thing that does rather annoy me about the tenor of the discussion has been the prominent argument that runs something like: "But his wife is so incredibly attractive! How could he want to cheat on her?" This annoys the hell out of me for two reasons:

1. It reduces the wife to a rubber doll. The only thing that matters about her is that she's attractive. How could you want to cheat on someone this beautiful? I mean, look, she's beautiful! Never a word about personality, about what she might want out of life, or about the dynamics of parenting and relationships. Why, taking that into account would imply that she was a real human being who interacts with her husband on a reasonably equal level. No: none of that matters, it's all down to whether the wife's a hottie or not. Way to remove all agency from her, people.
2. And conversely, it implies "Well, of course if she looked like the back end of a bus, then it'd be perfectly understandable and basically fine."

Both of these implications annoy the hell out of me. Look, clearly the bloke's been cheating on his wife; this is (presumably) not something she was OK with, and is thus a problem. But FFS: it's not any better or worse because of how she looks. And if you use her looks as the only descriptor about her, you're reducing her to a doll.

Plus: "He has a beautiful wife at home." Yeah, the "has" there isn't implying ownership at all. She's her own person!

And if I hear one more person make a food-based comparison ("why go out for hamburger when you've got steak at home?", etc) I'll retch. When, oh when, did it become non-dodgy to routinely compare women to food items? How is this not terribly, terribly objectifying?

And finally: there's a serious undercurrent of virgin/whore here. "Why, oh why, would he ignore his beautiful, ash-blond, scandinavian wife, in order to cavort with those cheap sluts?" The wife's on the pedestal, the mistresses are rutting in the dirt. It's the third millennium. Can't we get past this cartoon thinking, this slotting people (living, breathing, complex, real people) into simple roles and using it to form an instant opinion or flog a paper?

I'll be honest: I couldn't give two stuffs either way what the bloke's marital transgressions are. But the reaction, among the media and among people I respect, has really put my teeth on edge. More so that I realised: I thought this would be a three-line throwaway point, but it's rambled on a bit more than that.

When I was a kid, I didn't realise the underlying rationale behind a lot of adult activities. I thought that letters to Santa were an actual way to get Santa to sit up and pay attention to what you want; I also thought that my parents sent me on school holiday programs because they genuinely wanted me to learn more about Maori culture/gymnastics/art. Now, as a parent, I have realised the truth. You get the little buggers to write letters to Santa so you have a fighting chance of finding out what they actually want for Christmas and thus avoiding screaming tears on Christmas morning. You put them in holiday programs so you only have to burn a couple of weeks leave over Christmas and can actually get back to work sometime before February. If they learn to do a forward roll as well, it's a bonus. It's a hard truth, people.

That said: Rebecca has started negotiating to swap her bedtime story for a session on the computer before going to bed. No, not what you think: she's eschewed the joys of barbie.com in favour of Microsoft Word. Yup: every evening, she asks to spend twenty minutes on the PC writing a quick story about whatever's on her mind. Tuesday night, it was hornets. Last night, Cinderella. Tonight: who knows?