more seasonality December 23, 2006  

Have a Cosmic Christmas, Earthlets! with the best Christmas picture ever (2000AD Christmas ed cover 1984).

season brutality December 22, 2006  

I really enjoyed our time in the UK. There's a lot to like about Britain: the history, the pubs, the historic pubs, the Ordnance Survey, the pervading cynicism. Of course, there's a lot to dislike as well: London, chavs, motorway service stations, desultory service culture. But that's the sort of thing that we can say about any country. All countries have their good and bad points; the trick to not being a whining expat is to find the good bits and try to sidestep the bad. But what really made our time in the UK for us was all the people we met there. We met a lot of good people, made a number of good friends, and they (which quite probably means you) were the reason that we ended up staying as long as we did. And it's the people we miss most. Particularly at this time of year, traditionally for reflection; the traditional toast is "absent friends" for a reason. So to all our friends out there, the best wishes of the season and a sincere wish that you all have a great new year. Lift a glass for us; we'll be doing the same for you.

I'm planning what to do next year. I just wrote - in all seriousness - "I need to become a quality gateway."

loads of blood December 18, 2006  

Rebecca had a bad day today. She dropped her glass at nursery, which broke. She then bent down to pick up the pieces, and fell forward, cutting both her hands on the broken glass. Heather got a frantic phone call shortly after and burned rubber to pick her up. She got there to discover Rebecca covered in blood, happily sitting on someone's lap and proclaiming "Mummy, I being very brave!" A zip to the J'ville medical centre and encounters with several nurses and a doctor later, the cuts were cleaned and bandaged. She's in a pretty good mood for someone with severely bandaged hands; she was most annoyed about missing her bath tonight. My poor girl, though; it's heart-rending looking in on her little bandaged hands as she's sleeping.

Had a rather annoying encounter with a motorist who turned straight across my path on Friday. Unfortunately, this was at the bottom of the Ngauranga Gorge, so I was doing about 40kph at the time. One panic stop later, I'd learned that my front brake is indeed good enough to stop me dead from considerable speed - in fact, it stops the front wheel fast enough to send me over the bloody bars. Minor injuries to my right shoulder and leg, but nothing seems to be broken. At the "annoyingly painful" level rather than "worryingly painful" - I mean, I managed to bike in another 6k to work immediately after the accident, and to ride back home that afternoon. Bloody annoying though.

Following in the "potential nicknames suggested for me by coworkers" theme (previous entry: Lisa's suggestion that if I ever became a morbidly obese rapper, I could call myself "2-ton Hydraulic Jack"), one of my coworkers just suggested that if I was the hero of a romance novel I could call myself "Jacques Eldorado". It's got a ring to it.

I was in a meeting with a new project manager at one of our outsourcers the other day. He mentioned that he'd previously been in the IT section of MFAT. I mentioned that I had a friend, Cyrus, who used to work there. "Ah yes," he said, "for some reason I thought you'd know Cyrus." I can only guess that it's some sort of international brotherhood of guys with long blonde hair.

It is surprisingly confusing working on documentation that deals with Oracle Enterprise Manager, as the acronym for this is OEM - which is much better known as Original Equipment Manufacturer, a standard term used both in IT and general procurement. Radically different meanings make for odd headspace and having to remind myself that we're talking about something different.

many tentacles pimpin' on the keys December 12, 2006  

The great part about going to civil service Christmas parties is that you feel that you are, in some small way, drinking back some of your tax bill.

I've just finished reading the brutally good The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross. It's an absolute blinder. Fizzles with a succession of crackling-hot ideas, it ties together contemporary technology and geek culture, legislative stupidity, and civil service life from the inside with Lovecraftian nameless Horrors from Beyond The Stars and makes it all work. High comedy and high horror; a compulsive read, and bloody fluently written to boot. Unresevedly recommended - I kept having to read particularly good bits out to Heather. Some of the jargon might be a bit impenetrable - for instance, one character describes a person who did something Very Silly during a demonic summoning, leading to their death, as having conducted an autoLART - but that's a minor quibble, and it's well worth the effort. My overall verdict is that I'm off to the library at lunch to put a reserve in on the (just-published) sequel - although I know that Mike's got it out at the moment.

Ferg's Rock & Kayak has KMX Karts! As previously mentioned, these are fairly solid recumbent trikes. Recumbent trikes are BIG fun - too low/invisible for riding in traffic, but a great big bag of laughs for mucking around in. I had a chat to the lad there, and they'll be both selling and renting them. Rental prices start at $25 for an hour - I'm planning on heading down and test-driving one in a week or two. They're still putting some of the bits together, but should have the rental fleet rolling by Saturday.

One of the minor pains about working in the CBD is that it's a 15-minute walk to the closest bike shop. All the bike shops are clustered between Victoria St and Courtney Place (well, On Yer Bike is on upper Vivian St, but you get the idea). There's nothing closer than Capital Cycles. Which is why it is with considerable interest that I noted that the empty shop at the bottom of our building (well, next door) is currently being fitted out... and the boxes of stock are marked Vittoria and Topeak. Yup - a branch of Cycle Science (based in Lower Hutt, leans towards triathlon kit) is opening up more or less right under where I work. Now that's both convenient and dangerous.

And finally for today: in the wake of the conservative US denunciation of Happy Feet as dangerously left-wing, the Grauniad weighs in with a political analysis of various animated movies - though I'm suspicious that they don't comment on the deeply elitist message at the heart of The Incredibles.

Now that's steady pimpin'. Not a phrase usually applied to tyres.

biddance December 05, 2006  

On Saturday, Rebecca had an excellent day. At about half eleven, she got to see Santa in the Johnsonville Christmas Parade. At half three, she met him in the flesh and he gave her a present at the ACC kids' Christmas party. Result. Top this off with staying over at her Nana's place on Saturday night and from her perspective it doesn't get much better than this.

The J'ville Christmas parade was actually pretty good. We'd been to Rebecca's swimming lesson, and had to park in the Countdown car park. By the time we left the lesson, all the streets around there were closed off for the parade anyway, so we ended up bowling over and having a watch of the parade. Rebecca got up on my shoulders, got a lollipop in her gob (courtesy of the Zion Chinese Baptist Church), and started cheering and clapping. She particularly liked the Brazilian dancing troupe (who I've seen at a few other parades) and the young unicyclists. By the time Santa came at the end, she was bouncing up and down on my shoulders with excitement. I think we can reasonably say that she enjoyed herself.

Yesterday, Heather was picking Rebecca up from nursery. Rebecca didn't want to have her coat put on; Heather insisted. "NO!!!!!", Rebecca cried, "I'm being a ratbag!"

Telecom's Fair Use Policy on their "unlimited bandwidth" access plan is an interesting one. You're paying for unlimited bandwidth, except that, gosh, if you download more than 700MB between 4pm and midnight you'll get a warning - and if you keep doing it, they'll throttle back your bandwidth for a week. And if you do it for longer, they'll kick you off the plan. So it's "unlimited bandwidth", except don't use it too much. 700MB sounds like a lot, but quite frankly I've burned through 4GB of bandwidth overnight before (thanks TelstraClear!). 700MB/day (which is basically what this is, assuming that these are home connections that are only really used on-peak) is around 20GB/month - which should still be plenty for a standard home connection, but it's not unlimited. They claim that less than 1% of households should be affected, but all you need is two teenagers and one bitTorrent client in the house and I can see that going west.

Memo to self: even when excited about the prospect of a ride home with a gale-force tailwind, I should avoid use of the phrase "off on an extended visit to big ring city" in front of excitable coworkers.

I remember the first day that I was working in the office of the NZ Immigration Service in Wellington as a student job. One of my coworkers demonstrated one of the computer systems by asking me for a friend's name, looking them up, and giving me a list of their history of travel outside of NZ. Familiarity breeds contempt, and if you spend all day dealing with people's highly sensitive data a certain cavalier attitude towards that data tends to eventuate. So I'm surprised at the public astonishment around revelations that police have been misusing the national police database. You have a large-scale database listing important details of the character and history of pretty much everyone in the country. And then you act all surprised when it turns out that the people who look after it for a living tend to, gosh, look stuff up in it that's not strictly related to work. Ultimately, these huge-scale government databases are being used by human beings - human beings with curiousity, with outside interests. Why is it such a huge surprise when people turn out to be looking up the police records on their ex-wife's new partner, or their mum's new tenants, or prospective girlfriends? This is precisely the sort of social problem you can expect. Not that this condones the behaviour - far from it, I think that this should be stamped on quite hard - but just that it's the sort of thing that you should expect. Fans of a surveillance state, take note: this is precisely the sort of thing that happens and will continue to happen. The reason to be worried by what sort of info the state is holding on you is that "the state" is ultimately composed of a lot of individual human beings, with all the fallibility and ulterior motives that comprises.

We have a number of bespoke document templates, which seem to have been defined a while ago. They all share one intensely irritating feature: whichever idiot defined the templates included a number of short-cut keys to the template styles. In itself, that's quite a good idea, except they broke the cardinal rule of customization: don't mess up people who don't want to use your customization (aka "how you like to do it shouldn't preclude how other people like to do it"). Specifically, this complete retard decided to define some short-cut keys that overwrite some of the standard Word short-cuts. This means that anyone who's used to using default Word short-cuts will discover that the short-cut keys they're used to have drastically changed effects. Ctrl-Shift-S, for instance, is one that I use all the time - it allows you to select a style for the current paragraph by shifting focus to the Style box on the menubar. So if you're a touch-typist (as I am), you're halfway through a paragraph, and you decide that you want to change the paragraph to a different style, you can just hit Ctrl-Shift-S, start typing the name of your preferred style, wait for it to autocomplete in the Style box, hit return, and keep typing in your reformatted paragraph - all without breaking your flow or having to move your hands from the keyboard. But some idiot decided that it would be much more efficient to remap this combination to invoke one of their bespoke styles. Nice one. They've overwritten about a dozen standard Word shortcut keys. Twerps.

Saw Overcoming last night, courtesy of Heather getting it out of AroVid. It's a documentary about the Team CSC attempt on the 2004 Tour de France. Excellent doco; a good insight into Team CSC, focussing on Bjarne Riis (Directeur Sportif). Team CSC is defined by Riis' unconventional approach to coaching: he has proved excellent at taking riders with a good track record and coaxing more performance out of them. For the 2004 race, Ivan Basso, Carlos Sastre, Bobby Julich, Jens Voigt, and Jakob Piil (among others) rode; the doco combines the race footage with behind the scenes. It looks great. It's a bit hard to follow the timelines, as it jumps back and forth a little without any indication, but overall it's an excellent documentary. I'm a keen supporter of Team CSC, so that was icing on the cake. Overall, I think it's nudged out by a nose by the excellent Hell on Wheels, but it's still eminently worth checking out. Particularly good for the extras (another two hours of footage edited up into good wee chunks, but cut for reasons of brevity), plus the occasionally hilarious subtitles ('biddance' for 'bidons' [water bottles], for instance).

I would appear to have become more fact-based as I age.

a pretty quick one December 04, 2006  

Bad stuff about tattoos. Good stuff about the Lake Taupo ride.

ping ping twink weedle December 03, 2006  

For everyone who thought that the musical bicycle wheel thing in The Triplets of Belleville was a fake, I give you this year's Specialized Christmas card - the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, performed entirely on bicycle components!

It's actually really nice.

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