traditional christmas gloating December 24, 2007  

And so, as the sun rises slowly over the mangrove swamps near Te Atatu, and I wonder whether we've got enough sunscreen to last through Christmas, it's time for the annual Christmas good wishes. Best of luck to you all out there, merry Christmas and a happy new year etc. For those of you in the Northern hemisphere, rest assured that our main Christmas worry this year is the avoidance of sunburn and how soon after eating we can take the kids down to the beach. Think about that as you sit nestled quietly in the snug of the Fort St George. For those of you in the Southern hemisphere, I know the forecast is for rain but it's a traditional wind-up, OK?

Actually, I have extremely fond memories of our Christmasses in the UK. The most fun were the "everyone together waifs and strays" style of Christmasses, where you all descended on a mate's house and had a big party. These went with a swing, primarily caused by the UK attitude to Christmas, which translated into action on Christmas morning as follows:

NZ Houseguest: Wa br shuf do *cough cough* it's half past six in the morning.
UK host: Ah, you're conscious! Would you like some alcohol?

Yup, Christmas: when celebrating the birth of Our Saviour means you can drink before 7am with a clear conscience.

One more final thought: Rebecca was so eager to arrive up here to see Gran & Grandad that she spent the last two hours in the car periodically calling out "Daddy - I'm going good" so we knew that we didn't need to stop the car and have a break. She's an organised little thing, I'll give her that.

Merry christmas to all, hope you have a good one.

just a quick one December 18, 2007  

It's been on most of the news, so I'm sure that everyone's heard that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. This is a very bad thing. Pratchett is one of my favourite authors. A lot of people get sniffy about Pratchett because of his fans - or rather, because of the perception of his fans. It's worth pointing out that he's the second best selling individual author in the UK, and there aren't that many mouth-breathers with no hygiene out there, so some real people must be buying 'em as well. Anyway, do you slag off Monty Python just because of the obsessive fans? A more literary snark is the criticism that all his plots are the same. This is largely misguided (his plotting has got a lot more interesting recently) and beside the point anyway - P G Wodehouse made one plot go between 96 books, and he was the greatest prose stylist the English language has ever produced. Pratchett uses his Discworld novels to gently satirise current society, while making a few important points along the way. Terry Pratchett bobs nicely along on top of the Sturgeon-point of the fantasy genre, and is one of my favourite authors. Best of luck to him with it.

If you've not read any Pratchett, do yourself a favour and check out The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents - a riff on the Pied Piper versus the Rats of NIMH, while making a few nice points about free will and what it means to be a moral agent. Yes, really.

But it can't all be bad news, and I'm well happy with the news that Sustrans have been awarded £50 million to build up the network of bicycle paths in the UK. Bike paths are like any other network - say, like standard computer networking. The value increases massively as the network gets bigger and you can use it to get to more places. This is why the "little bit here, little bit there" approach to building bike lanes taken by many councils (where the council is required to build x footage of bike lanes, so just paints some green lines on convenient roads/footpaths and leaves it at that) are so frustrating and pointless. The worst cyclepath is one that runs out before you get to your destination. It's the ability to connect things up, to have a network that actually goes where you need to be, that's the value-add here. Sustrans realise this, and want to build an interconnected network; good on them, and good on the British public (with a certain amount of get-out-the-vote agitation from every UK cycling website I read) for voting them the cash.

Anyone else noticed that the new Ministry of Sound chill-out album includes a track by Salmonella Dub? Nice one the lads, there.

The local blackbirds and thrushes have learned that some of the mulch I use has a valuably high worm content. So any time I put mulch in the garden, the little sods immediately swoop down and scratch it all over the place. Now they've started scratching up any other mulch I use, so any time I dump a load of grass clippings under the grapevine it'll be all over the lawn by the end of the day. It's a bit annoying, actually. It's the dark side of using vermicast on the garden: you're socialising the birds that all fertiliser contains wriggly nutrients.

The other night, as I stepped out of the shower after riding home, Rebecca waved my deodorant at me and said "Daddy, I think you're stinky! Put some of this on to stop yourself from being stinky." It's the unconditioning love and respect that I like.

The other day at work someone's cellphone rang. Their ringtone was a very good rendition - I'm assuming it was a sample - of Blue Monday. The effect was magnetic on an office largely full of 30-40 year olds: serious prairie dogging as everyone worked out what it was (it took through to the bit where the bass guitar comes in before most people got it - I recognised the initial drumbeat), trying to figure out whose it was, and reminiscing about the mid 80s. It was a moment.

and my commute's pretty good too December 10, 2007  

This lunchtime, I watched a pod of dolphins swimming around the harbour. Think of that while you're ice-skating around the centre of Cambridge, eh?

So there's a proposal to spend a huge swathe of cash moving the traffic bottlenecks a bit further east. At present, it's just an idea that's up for discussion and consultation, with public feedback welcomed. But that's not what our esteeemed mayor Kerry Prendergast thinks:

‘I think there are some [things] we have to do,’ she told The Dominion Post. ... Ms Prendergast said a new Mt Victoria tunnel should be a high priority, regardless of what submitters to the study say. [Source]

So she's basically predetermined to ignore the result of the consultation process and force it through. This sort of thing is precisely why I voted against her at the last election.

Heather has enabled comments on her blog. Clearly there's a demand for it; her post this morning had two comments before Bloglines picked it up. Speed! I personally remain adamantly true to my vision of this as a broadcast-only medium: Web 2.0 can stuff itself. Or rather, there's a time and a place for a high degree of user interactivity, but this is where I get to blather on and people are left to gnash their teeth in impotent rage (or, rarely, to email me). This is my diary, and when was the last time you let someone else write in your diary?

Plus, I'm worried that Heather would get more comments than me, so I'm ducking the issue altogether.

zombies prevented my OOS December 06, 2007  

Discovered the new Hub Cycles site the other day. Looks good, and looks like it could potentially be competition for Torpedo7. Their range looks a bit smaller, but they've got more roadie kit and they stock more low-end stuff (which is where I tend to buy stuff). They'll have to go a way to beat the Torpedo7 "10 tubes for 30 bucks", though. Postage is comparable, and it looks like a very interesting player in the NZ online cycle shop market (along with Active Kiwi, of course). They also get bonus points for stocking the SRAM PC951 chain, which is my favorite chain in the whole wide world. Cheap, tough, and long-lasting - love 'em.

Yes, I do have a favorite bike chain.

So every sunday night Heather goes off to Klezmer practice; and I lurk around the house looking after the girls. Normally I'd tool around on the internet or attempting to save/blow up the universe on the PC. Recently, I've been having some serious problems with RSI/OOS due to severe work stress. So I've been avoiding spending my evenings working on a keyboard by renting DVDs. So I figure that I might as well watch movies that I know Heather wouldn't want to watch anyway. Specifically, I've been watching a lot of zombie movies. So far, the stand-out is definitely Dawn of the Dead, but I have high hopes for Land of the Dead. It's hanukkah this weekend, Heather's off performing at the Temple, so I'm going to knock off a few of the more contemporary flicks in le genre du zombie. So I'm getting trenchant social commentary, people being ripped apart, and rested arms. It's all good.

Man, I laughed until I was nearly sick over this one. This is the funniest thing I've seen for ages. Yes, it's a lolcat.

pretty busy for mellow December 03, 2007  

Had a very mellow weekend. While, at the same time, running around like blue-arsed flies and getting stuff done. Saturday was spent variously at the swimming pool, Johnsonville Christmas Parade, and the free concert supporting the Urewera 17. Both the girls loved the parade; Maggie thought it was a cavalcade of brightly coloured things making interesting noises, and waved her hands very enthusiastically. Rebecca was very much on board with the people walking at the sides and giving out sweeties, floats that look like easily recognised objects (sleighs, castles, giant swans wearing crowns), and Santa. I, personally, derived a great deal of personal and artistic satisfaction from the Batacuda dancers. The girls were great; Maggie would bounce up and down in your arms, goggling happily as the parade went past. Rebecca would ask questions or make definitive statements; at one point, we thought she'd misidentified a camel as a giraffe, but it turned out that she was looking two floats up the parade. Rebecca's not too crash hot on loud noises, so she did find the two pipe bands a bit much, but we explained that these were the mystic music of her forefathers and she chilled back a bit. Maggie just made "brr brr" noises and blew raspberries.

After a sojourn at home to try and give the girls naps (not as successful as could perhaps have been wished), we headed down to the waterfront for the latter part of E Tu!, which was a pretty good gig. Rebecca spent much of the time climbing trees (she got eight feet up in a pohutakawa) until the Klezmer Rebs came on, then lay across my lap tiredly listening to the set. Maggie just lay down, staring at the grass and listening intently to the music. A smoothie towards the end of the set revived Rebecca, and she got her bounce back just as the set finished. So she started dancing once the music had stopped. The whole vibe was pretty chilled out, possibly due to the large clouds of dope fumes that were drifting around ("Excuse me, do you mind not dakking up next to my 3-year old? Thanks.") The music was good, and the rebs got a good crowd, both in terms of size and willingness to dance. Who'd have thought that Jewish folk music would get such a large crowd? I guess it's the whole bouncy, fun, easily danceable thing that the audience responds to; Klezmer's a good laugh to dance to (except the occasional number that switches from 4/4 to 5/4 halfway through - oy vey!), though I always end up doing a vaguely oompah, sub-Madness sort of comedic running on the spot sort of thing. But on a sunny Saturday afternoon, with scantily-clad hippy chicks floating around and the kids dozing gently, it was a lovely way to spend some time.

After a fairly full-on Saturday, we spent most of Sunday lazing around. Rebecca had spent Saturday night at her Nana's place, and arrived back around midmorning. A fair amount of sitting around the garden occurred, followed by the playing of various games involving running around screaming, and the close observation of several worms. Low grade foraging from the vegetable patch was also observed. Let's hear it for the good weather we've been having recently, eh?

So Sarah Ulmer has retired. I'll still remember fondly her breaking the world record at the 2004 Olympics; particularly because I saw it live. Actually, it was on a BBC report about the cycling (which is why I was watching it); as the anchorman asked the BBC reporter onsite a question about Victoria Pendleton's chances in the individual pursuit, the reporter's face went unexpectedly slack in mid-reply. There was an awkward second or two, you saw a black and silver blur go around the track in the background, and the BBC reporter said "Sorry, but I've just been informed that the New Zealand cyclist Sarah Ulmer has broken the world record on her qualifying lap." Class. We were glued to the telly, she went on to knock two seconds off the world record on the 3000m individual pursuit (easily taking the gold in the process), and my word it was good. I've seen her race in the flesh a couple of times - in fact, in the BikeRadar report on her retirement, we're in the crowd just out of shot to the right - and she's a pretty stellar performer. And I have it on good authority that she's also actually a nice person. There aren't many sportspeople that can unite both my retired auntie and my 3-year old daughter in support; Sarah Ulmer was one. Let's hope we see more of her in some other cycling-related capacity, and that her name marque of bikes continue to do well (yay getting more women on bikes).

Excellent article from Charles Stross on what I reckon will be the next big thing - "skinny client"-style laptops. A comparatively inexpensive machine, fairly downspec, but with enough grunt to do anything you'd actually want to do on the move, and an emphasis on flash memory rather than those annoying heavy hard drives. Excellent.

Basically, I'm a sucker for any tune with an old-skool style house piano break in the middle.

So a few weeks ago, the WCC re-graded the Wakely Gully track to allow heavy machinery access to replace some of the telephone poles by the side of the track. They smoothed out the trail, put gravel in the rough bits, planed off the corners of some of the curves. The end result was a relatively flat, solid trail. No more high-drama starts to the morning commute, skidding around the corners and dodging rocks. Then we had a huge, torrential thunderstorm. The track drainage couldn't cope; a lot of the infill gravel got washed away, leaving exposed rock in places and S-shaped drifts of gravel in others. A few more minor slips happened at the really rocky corner, covering the nicely smoothed bed of rocks with fist-sized lumps of greywacke. Then it didn't rain for two weeks, so the surface is either loose rocks, dust, or loose rocks sitting in dust on an off-camber corner. All this during spring, so the trackside foliage is growing at a rate of knots and is now four foot high in places. So going either way, it's a surprisingly challenging little track; not classically technical, but the surface makes it fairly tricky to ride, especially around the corners, and a lot of the good lines now involve riding to the side of the track with half your body being whipped by heavily flowering weeds. I normally get to the bottom grinning broadly and covered in pollen.

Which is why I was a bit surprised the other day, on the way home, to find that the city council had cut down all the trackside vegetation. I'd thought that a non-vehicular path wouldn't rate the effort, but I was wrong. Mind you, not half as surprised as I was halfway up the track to come around a corner and nearly rear-end the tractor that was doing the cutting. I had not expected the city council to be conscientious enough to be hanging around at 5:30 finishing stuff off.

So what do you do when one of your friends is killed in a high-speed car smash while street-racing in the main street of a small town, when their car hits a tree at sufficient speed to scatter debris over a 200m radius? Blame the tree, of course. I know Gore has a rep as the arsehole of NZ, but this is pretty spectacular bottom-of-the-gene-pool stuff.

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