tallpoppy

a general principle about life, told through the lens of road usage behaviour

2010-02-08T21:04:00.001+13:00

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

2010-01-29T20:33:00.002+13:00

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

2010-01-25T21:27:00.002+13:00

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

2010-01-17T22:27:00.002+13:00

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

2010-01-11T18:19:00.000+13:00

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

2010-01-06T21:11:00.002+13:00

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

2009-12-24T08:29:00.004+13:00

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

2009-12-19T19:21:00.002+13:00

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

2009-12-17T19:18:00.001+13:00

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

2009-12-09T21:18:00.003+13:00

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:

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.
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?

the end of a project

2009-11-18T19:45:00.003+13:00

In the last 6 weeks, as we finish various projects, I have acquired five work-related garments. I am also currently involved in designing/acquiring a t-shirt for my team.

Rather unusually, most of these are garments that I am quite proud to wear in public. It's a step above my "CMMI Level 2 Implementation Team" polo neck, or my ActiveSmart t-shirt.

I'd say I'm going corporate except that my workplace doesn't give two shits if I work barefoot (or, probably, topless, though I've not tried that one yet). So "corporate" probably isn't the word. "Native", possibly.

waffle and a bad pun

2009-11-09T20:58:00.003+13:00

As we all know, it's now a bit illegal to chat away on your mobile phone will driving. But that's just part of the recent revisions to the road rules. There's another few changes that slipped under most people's radar. From a cyclists' perspective, there are a few sensible ones: hook turns are now OK (useful at multi-lane intersections, or for less confident cyclists), cyclists don't have to signal at roundabouts if it's not safe to ride one-handed, and bike lights just have to be visible for 100m, rather than illuminating the road 100m ahead - which indicates that someone's actually worked out that the main use of cycle lights is so that other road users can see you, rather than so you can see where you're going.

But the interesting one is this:

It is proposed that there will be an infringement fee of $100 for a person who rides a cycle, mobility device or wheeled recreational device on a shared path at a hazardous speed.

Amendment concerning use of shared paths.

Basically, it's codifying the "don't be a dick" aspect of using shared paths. Hooning it around is now punishable by a $100 fine. Which is good - the problem with shared paths is that they mix multiple users with different requirements and abilities, so getting it down in black and white that the faster ones need to pay a bit more attention to the slower ones is a good thing. It's simple recognition of the nature of riding in a mixed-use environment.

So this is basically a recognition that cyclepaths are only for people who want to ride at a relaxed, mellow pace. For the rest of us - and I'm speaking as someone who just wants to get to bloody work and doesn't mind sweating a bit - the road's usually faster and often safer.

Anyway. Went for a walk at lunchtime today, ended up going through Strathmore. The name means "Large Valley" in Scots Gaelic, and you can see why: it's a big valley tucked in between the airport and Seatoun. This is the site of the first state housing in the country, presumably because it was cheap land and the valley meant that you could tuck all the poor people neatly out of sight. It's still densely packed with council accomodation, though most of the original state houses now seem to be in private ownership. It's one of the few places in New Zealand where you can see UK-style terrace blocks of state flats. Walking around I felt like I'd landed back in the Hedges (that is, King's Hedges council estate in Cambridge, where we lived for five years). Rather a lot of tinny houses, I'm informed, ditto P. Interesting neighbourhood.

Mocking someone because their name sounds like a rude word: argumentum ad homonym.

Thank you, I'm here all week.

don't ask about the itching

2009-10-28T21:50:00.000+13:00

We have now gone unconditional on the sale of our house, and the purchase of another. Moving in January. So expect our Christmas to be mainly spent putting things in boxes. Anyone got any recommendations for moving companies in Wellington?

In case I hadn't mentioned, we'll be moving from Newlands (civic motto: "Close to Johnsonville!") to Johnsonville (civic motto: "We have a mall, you know!"). We'll be exchanging a view of the neighbour's brick wall and an old shipping container for a bush-clad gully - which we will own most of the visible arc of. So that's quite cheery right there. Plus an extra bedroom, an actual study, and a decent deck. Minus a garage, but you can't have it all. Some form of housewarming party is almost certainly going to occur; watch the skies in late January or early February.

You know how when you fall over on concrete, you can skin your knee? Last weekend, Maggie skinned her forehead. Impressively acrobatic, and looked very painful. Now she has a perfectly ring-shaped scab 3cm across in the middle of her forehead (for some reason, she didn't lose any skin right in the middle of the impact site). We get funny looks, but thankfully Maggie is now prolix enough to be able to say "I fell off a step!" to people.

This is usually followed by "Wiggles!", as she is currently on a Heavy Wiggles Kick. She's obsessed with Dorothy the Dinosaur, and can point all the Wiggles out of a line-up. We have not yet gone through the Greg/Sam distinction, but it will come soon.

What I've been listening to recently.

Gogol Bordello, "Live from Axis Mundi". In the old days, this would be a Peel Sessions album. Sadly, Saint John is no longer with us, so many of the tracks are just marked "BBC Session". It's lovely. Raw, hard, and passionate. It has the immediacy and grit of a live performance, with the advantages of working with serious audio engineers who've put effort into getting a good mix. American Wedding knocks out a few teeth, and Mishto really gets rather frenzied. Worth it. On eMusic if you've still got an account.
The Mamaku Project, "Karekare" and "Mal de Terre". I can't believe I hadn't heard of these guys until recently. Of course, one of the reasons I can't believe that is that they used to gig with the Benka Borodovsky Bordello Band, but the other is that they're intensely good. Mainly jazz influences, with klezmer, dub, and French chanson in the mix. C'est bien, innit. Mellow, but catchy, and with enough of an Eastern European flavour to add spice. Wellingtonians may have heard them (I didn't) doing the intro at the recent World of Wearable Arts. I heard of them from a track played on National Radio (UK: Radio 4; US: PBS), which is possibly less funky than may be expected. But they're definitely worth it.
The Herbaliser, "The Herbaliser Band Sessions". Two albums of instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks performed by a full live band. This may not sound promising to some listeners. It's gold. There's the odd sample or two still in there, but mostly it ends up as a double album of neo-70s soul funk. Upbeat, danceable, and funky as. Pointlessly good. Actually, it seems that the first album was recorded in 2000, and the second has only just come out. Regardless, both most excellent, and both also on eMusic.
Still listening to a fair bit of the Tiger Lillies. The albums blur together after a while, but mostly I've been listening to "Bad Blood & Blasphemy". Not exactly party music, but interesting stuff. The auditory equivalent of an old, waterstained wank mag you find under a tree at the park when you're 13.

hard day again

2009-10-16T21:43:00.005+13:00

Another day, another four hours under the needle. Went out and had my birthday present to myself today: finished my sleeve. Tim out at Pacific Tattoo was excellent as ever, and carefully spent the first three hours going over the rest of the sleeve and reworking where needed to get the full depth of colour (black, mainly). We only had a rather small bit to go, and to be honest the choice of design was pretty obvious: another woven/textured section, to match the top of the inside forearm. We were done by 3pm, and I went and spent an hour walking on Paekakariki Beach before heading home. That's the way to do it.

How NZ works in a nutshell: I tried to tip Tim for his good work; he refused and gave me a free t-shirt instead. Needless to say, I'm booked in for the soonest appointment to start on my left thigh piece. Details to come, but it's a reasonably abstract piece representing an animal, hopefully taking up the whole thigh. Should be good.

You know how there's that stereotype about tattoos, "Yeah, I woke up with this one today!" The drunken sailor archetype. Not to say that it's not applicable in some cases (say, assembly line shops near naval bases), but pretty much every tattooist I've worked with has had long waiting lists. In this case, my original idea for getting a full sleeve on my right arm was this time last year: my birthday present last year was to be getting my arm tattooed, and a year later I've finished. My next project project is well in order and designs are being drawn up: the first session is booked in.

For April 2nd next year.

Because that's the first free appointment he's got. Legitimate tattooists have long waiting lists. So with a bit of luck, by this time next year I might have my leg somewhere near finished.

It'll take a while to get the bodysuit finished, then.

Pictures for the curious here at flickr. Not much new work, to be honest: I didn't have much room left. Mainly we spent today sharpening up the existing bits.

How NZ works, part 2: later, in Johnsonville mall, I popped into the pharmacy. "Some bepanthen, please," I said to the lady behind the counter. She looked me up and down and said "Is it for a tattoo?" "Um, yeah," I said, "... I take it there's a specific market share for this?" "Well," she replied, "it's either for nursing mothers with cracked nipples, or people with tats. It's what my husband uses when he's healing a new one." And we had a two minute chat about good tattooists around Wellington. That's how we roll here in NZ, folks.

raising dust

2009-10-13T21:54:00.000+13:00

An interesting couple of weeks.

Firstly, we spent the first half of the school holidays in Auckland. It hammered bloody rain for six days out of the seven we were up there, necessitating rather a lot of indoor activities. Unfortunately, we were also hit by some serious viral illness: I was flat on my back for two days, Heather similarly, and the kids very sniffly, coughy, and generally vile. Still, we fitted in a trip to the museum, the zoo (on the one sunny day), and a variety of indoor playgrounds and shopping malls (embarassed cough). All the relatives were seen, a certain amount of mucus was produced, and leisure was the winner on the day. I spent a surprising amount of time rather enjoying driving a manual car again (I didn't know any car rental places rented out manuals any more), even if it was a 1.3ltr Daihatsu Sirion (a cross between one of those ride-on scooters for OAPs and a surprisingly grunty go-kart). Ah, second gear: it's the Swiss army knife of driving. There's nothing it can't solve.

While we were away, we missed out on a tender for a house. By $20,000, so we were more annoyed than gutted (gutted would have been missing out by $1,000). This was a bit annoying. But we threw ourselves back into the whirl of open homes, going around a couple of likely-looking places. One place turned out to look quite likely; we offered on it, got a bite, and lo, we had our offer accepted. Cue a certain amount of frantic running around trying to sell our place (our purchase is conditional on the sale of our current house). Anyone want to buy a 3brm character villa in Newlands, completely updated & modernised? It's a nice wee house, and a good neighbourhood.

For the curious: we're moving about 3k, out to Johnsonville. Coincidentally, just off one of Wellington's better road cycling loops. Handy that. Further details once the sales involved actually go unconditional.

You know you're selling your house when you're mowing the lawn at 8am.

Rebecca is currently obsessed with the Lego set Heather got me for my birthday. It's a set of Star Wars lego - Darth Vader's TIE fighter, specifically. Every night, we have to do another ten minutes. Heather bought it for me: I think I've managed to put about three pieces on it. Mostly, it's Rebecca carefully poring over the instructions and slotting bits into place. She's loving it. One of these days I'll have to actually show her the movies.

haunt of coot and hern

2009-09-25T19:02:00.001+12:00

Brian Edwards has clearly read Derailing for Dummies. Or, if not, he's internalised a lot of it. He's posted a rather contentious opinion piece on his blog. A large number of people have leapt on it. I'm particularly impressed with the way that he ignores the well-reasoned comments from people who clearly know what they're talking about, in favour of making snide comments to the more annoyed commentators (thereby subtly equating the serious points with the angry ones). Bonus points for rewriting the original post to remove some of the language that sparked off the vitriol, thus making his commentators look more unhinged. Why, they're flying off the handle at nothing!

Brian Edwards may be a well-respected New Zealand media commentator. But put him on the net and he's just another opinionated blowhard acting like a dick on discussion forums.

In any case, his argument seems to be that writing is hard, so he should get paid more for it. After all, people are taking advantage of his writing by borrowing it from libraries - that's money he's potentially missing out on. Ignoring the various flaws in his argument - check the comments on the original article for an examination of them - I'd just say this. Was he, prior to undertaking this hard work of writing his books, unaware of the relative remuneration? Had someone hidden the existence of libraries from him, and kept him unaware of how they work and the financial consequences thereof? No? He knew all that and decided to do it anyway? Then he can shut his whingeing cake-hole. He knew the deal, there's no bloody point whining now. Tch.

Times have definitely changed. The other day, I had reason to visit my bank manager. I went in the middle of the day, so I was wearing my work kit. My work dress could best be described as scruffy casual. My concession to discussing the loan of a pointlessly large amount of money was to wear long trousers. While I was sitting at the bank waiting, it occurred to me that twenty years ago I'd have felt the need to get dressed up in a suit. Seeing a bank manager was a big deal, and you had to look your best. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, eh?

This was brought more forcibly home on Wednesday night, when the mobile mortgage manager sat back at the end of a discussion about requirements for potential further lending and asked me who my tattooist was. I was in short sleeves, and he liked the forearm tat; turned out he had a backpiece and a half-sleeve. We had an amicable discussion about tattoo styles, and the deal was done. So remember kids: when your parents tell you that getting a tat prevents you from getting a good job, take it with a grain of salt, eh?

And then he txt'ed me to let me know how the pre-approval was going. Truly, we are living in the future.

play misty for me

2009-09-21T21:07:00.003+12:00

One day I shall decide that I never want to get anything productive done again. Upon that day, I shall create an account on facebook.

Which is to say: apologies for the lack of posts, and I don't even have the excuse du jour, facebook is killing blogging. I blame a high workload and the recent purchase of a computer game.

Psychological violence in late 1970s/early 1980s girls comics.

I realised last week that the vast bulk of the music I listen to can be categorised as follows:

Music with accordions. Gogol Bordello, Golem, the Klezmer Rebs, the Tiger Lillies, Kultur Shock, and so on.
Bleepy bleepy twiddle electronic music. Future Sound of London, Orbital, Miss Kittin, DJ Shadow, that sort of thing.
Music by lesbians. Sleater-Kinney, Chicks on Speed, and Le Tigre, mostly.

There are a few border cases - I'm not quite sure about PJ Harvey, for instance - but those three categories do cover about 90% of what was on my iPod at the time.

But recently we've been having a clean-out of the CD collection. We've weeded out a lot of stuff that we don't listen to any more. One consequence of this is that we've come across rather a lot of CDs that we haven't heard for a while. So I got organised and ripped rather a lot of this stuff to iTunes so I can give it a blat on the iPod at work. The net result is that I now have 4GB of stuff I haven't listened to for years knocking around on my current playlist. It's a rather mixed bag: the Aphex Twin, Missy Elliott, Coil, Liz Phair, Autechre, Nine Inch Nails, Meat Beat Manifesto, Front Line Assembly, that sort of thing. It's kind of like, a snapshot of the music that I really liked a decade ago, but not so much that I still listen to it regularly. It's been an interesting exercise, and one I highly recommend.

Sometimes life leaves a hundred dollar bill on your dresser, and you don't realize until later that it's because it fucked you.

Shit My Dad Says

the pusillanimity express

2009-09-01T16:32:00.001+12:00

I was at the supermarket at lunch yesterday. As I went in, I saw a couple with a young child. The father was about 6'2", big with it, with gang tats on his neck and hands. He and a woman, presumably his partner, were doing what looked like the weekly shop, with a preschool kid sitting in the trolley.

After my shop, as I was loading the stuff into the car, I heard a lot of shouting. "What the fuck you looking at?" was interspersed with more general yelling and threats, plus wailing. Looking around, I saw that the family were having a screaming match in the middle of the carpark. The bloke was alternating between screaming at the woman, and turning around to shout threats at any bystanders who appeared to be paying attention. They were also struggling over the young boy - the woman holding him in her arms, the man trying to pull him away. This was in the middle of a busy carpark at lunchtime; counting myself, there must have been about 50 witnesses.

But what struck me was the reaction. All of us kind of expected someone else - maybe someone closer, maybe someone bigger, maybe just someone Not Me - to do something about it. But none of us did. We watched while the dad grabbed the kid and marched off out of the carpark, with the woman sobbing after him.

But that's not true. From where I was, about 20 metres away, I could see three separate people clearly calling the police on cellphones. They were standing just out of sight behind cars, occasionally stepping out to look over and answer some question from the despatcher before stepping back out of sight before the bloke threatened them. As the family left the carpark (on foot, for some reason) you could clearly see these people moving so as to keep a view of what was happening, constantly updating the despatcher on the other end of the phone. And the rest of us relaxed, because someone was doing something.

It just struck me as an odd consequence of our connected world. The ability to call in the appropriate authorities removes the imperative to do things yourself. When no-one else can become involved, there's an onus on those who are there to do something. Cellphones remove that, and we can all go about our cowardly fucking ways with a clean conscience. Or rather, we still feel the need to do something; but "doing something" is now just making a phone call.

In a refreshing contrast to the self-loathing of that last paragraph, it seemed to work. As I drove off, I saw some other bystanders further down the road pointing a police officer towards the couple. The last I saw was the bloke running away as fast as he could across the grassy centre margin of the road, having pulled off his coat to reveal a sleeveless jacket with a Nomads gang patch. So it seems that our disengaged, report-rather-than-remedy culture can get it right on occasion.

Last couple of episodes of the Fabric podcast have been most interesting; Surgeon going through his influences. Nice. I'm a sucker for anyone who drops the Art of Noise, Coil, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop into a DJ set.

Go, go Greg Henderson. Stage 3 of the Vuelta d'Espagna, beating out a lot of the world's best sprinters: well done. He's now second in the standings, after Fabian Cancellara.

formal welcome

2009-08-31T21:08:00.001+12:00

A more formal welcome to my niece Lucy Genevieve Darlowe, born this morning and weighing about 3.3kg. She's a very cute wee thing.

sadly not yet available on prescription

2009-08-30T20:25:00.002+12:00

How to get two small children to go to sleep:

Take them to a gig by the Klezmer Rebs.
Watch them dance energetically for an hour, occasionally singing along.
Take them home and feed them sausages.
Bath & bedtime.

Then sit back and watch them fall into a sound, deep sleep. Klezmer - faster than xanax, more legal than chloroform.

dip dip dip

2009-08-29T18:00:00.003+12:00

This morning, Maggie made her intentions clear. "Swimming!" she told us, lugging the kit bag into our bedroom. So I ended up taking them out to Porirua swimming pool, which is excellent. Man, there's nothing like walking into the pool and seeing someone covered in gang tats to make you a bit careful about where you put your kit. It was fairly packed, but the kids had a great time. Maggie spent most of the time clinging to my back like a koala while Rebecca marauded. The hydroslide was once again a big hit. I did my typical impression of someone who can't see ten feet in front of his face without his glasses (AKA Mr Maggoo with tats), and it all more or less worked out.

We have, for various reasons, acquired about 4kg of premium coffee beans. This drove me to go out after the swim and buy a coffee grinder. I can't stand the taste of coffee, but I'm surprisingly snobbish about the coffee that I'm not drinking. Plus, anything that's basically designed to destroy things in a specific way has got to be an excellent addition to the modern kitchen.

I am going to write a best selling childrens book.

Working title: "Where Have You Little Bastards Hidden Daddy's iPod?"

The other day, Rebecca commented that I'd missed a bit on my arm. "Yeah, I'm going to get that bit filled in in October" I replied. "Good," she said, "you need that bit filled." She paused for a minute and then said, "And you should get the other arm tattooed too. And your legs."

innovative title

2009-08-12T19:48:00.000+12:00

A brief digression on vampires.

I should point out that I don't give two stuffs about vampires, media depictions of vampires, or the current resurgence of interest in them. I, quite frankly, don't care a damn either way. I don't watch Underworld, I never saw the point of Buffy, I don't read/watch Twilight, I never bothered with Anne Rice, and I couldn't give two stuffs about any of it. So it's with some amusement that I'm watching the snitfight in the fantasy/sf end of popular culture about Twilight. Now, it's coming in for a lot of fire from "real" fanboys for being too sparkly. Twilight fans are derided as being teenage girls. Which, in fact, many of them are.

As mentioned, I have no feelings either way about Twilight. But I'm interested to note the undercurrent in the criticisms here: it's just a bit misogynist. Because, you know, vampires are manly! And having them be sensitive and stuff is, like, so gay! And girls like the sparkly stuff! And whatever girls like must be awful!

Compare this to the approved images of vampires. Say, Kate Beckinsale. So a good vampire is a sexually suggestive young woman in tight clothing, but a bad vampire is a sexually suggestive young man with tousled hair. Um, yeah. It's really hard not to read all these reactions as the spoiled, petulant whining of an adolescent boy who is actually a bit scared of young women. It's also very annoying: one of the often-stated problems with fantasy/sf in contemporary culture is the overwhelmingly male component of it. So as soon as young women start getting more into it, watching them getting frantically slagged off by "proper" (male) fans is just cringeworthy. "Why aren't more girls into fantasy/sf? By which I of course mean REAL fantasy/sf, the stuff designed to titillate heterosexual males just like me, not that sparkly stuff that's just for girls..." See also the snobbish attitude a lot of people have to anime, one of the parts of fantasy/sf culture that tends to be more female-friendly and have lots of female fans.

On another level, I'm also finding this a bit amusing, as male homoeroticism has been a big feature of contemporary vampire culture. I knew a number of young women when I was at varsity who loved Interview with a Vampire specifically for the homoerotic byplay.

So don't expect me to join in in making denigrating comments about Twilight. No, Twilight's not my thing. But then, neither are any other vampire stories. And the undercurrents in the slagging it's getting put my teeth on edge.

Apparently one of the things that a "proper" blog should do is stick to one topic per post. Sod that.

A while ago, we triaged our bookshelves and had a book swap party. This worked remarkably well as a means to give away loads of books, but we still ended up with three large boxes of books at the end of things. Yesterday morning, I dropped them off at Arty Bees in town. Arty Bees are one of the best second-hand bookshops in NZ. One of the things I really like about them is their purchase policy. They buy books (obviously), and either give you cash or store credit (obviously, offering more store credit than cash). You can either take the store credit yourself, or choose to add it to someone else's account. We chose to donate the credit to an account for Refugee Migrant Services, so they can use it to buy books for refugees arriving in NZ. And the books the Arty Bees don't want, they drop off to the Downtown Community Mission for their annual book sale. So from our perspective, we've got rid of a couple of boxes of books we don't want, supported a local business, and helped out two separate charities. Not a bad morning, really.

the face behind the mask

2009-08-09T17:01:00.002+12:00

You may have attended one of their gigs. You may have heard the CD. You may even have heard them on Radio New Zealand, talking about how they are librarians, public servants, IT wonks. They sound genteel, cultured, representing a long tradition of scholarship and musicianship.

But once you've seen the Klezmer Rebs playing in the living room of an anarchist squat, passing a bottle of buffalo grass vodka around whoever isn't actually playing a solo at that moment, you get the real picture. And as they sink red-eyed into the bacchanal, the strains of "Anarchia Total" ring out into the night.

Good night last night, in case you can't tell.

some more thoughts

2009-08-03T22:05:00.003+12:00

A while ago, I wrote some thoughts on the proposed national cycleway and why I was a bit worried about it. Over the last couple of months, many of the points I made have been addressed. It's no longer a single national path from Cape Reinga to Bluff, it's a series of local routes that may - at some indeterminate point in the future - be joined up. Now, I think it's great that we're getting the local routes. However, I am a bit worried about the suggestion that the local councils foot part of the bills.

I'm partially worried by this because I think it'll annoy the local councils. It's like someone saying to me, "Hey, man, you should totally pimp out your car and you'll get loads of chicks. Like, it'd be awesome! Tell you what, I'll pay for it." And then they come back to you a month later with a quote to get some mag wheels and say "Yeah, but this turned out to be quite expensive, and I'll totally pay for some of it, but since you're like gonna be the one getting all the chicks, it's really only fair that you shell out too." And you end up shelling out your money for something that you may not have wanted anyway. Spending other people's budgets for them annoys people. And this may alienate local councillors, who could well not have particularly liked the idea of paying for cycle facilities in the first place.

But I'm more worried by the likely consequence of this. When the local councils accept that they're going to end up spending some of their cash on the cycleway, which budgetary pot is it likely to come from? The "improvements to local tourist attractions" budget? Or the "provision of cycling facilities" budget? I'm willing to bet that it'll be the latter. In this respect, the government will be effectively cutting the budgets for encouraging everyday cycle use, by forcing local councils to spend their cycling budgets on facilities aimed at touring and leisure riders. And that really worries me. Local cycling gets short enough shrift from most councils already; this strikes me as offering them a tailormade chance to just hand the cash over to someone else and call that their obligations to cyclists met.

It's not that I think the proposed routes don't look good. They look excellent; I really look forward to riding them when they're complete. It's just that I'm really worried that the law of unintended consequences is going to result in leisure cycling (occasional, definitely a recreational activity, geared towards attracting overseas tourists) being prioritised at the expense of everyday cycling (regular, part of normal life, used by average people). I really hope that doesn't happen, but the government's recent announcement makes me pretty worried.

That said, a gentle pootle down a bike path with the family is a good way to get people on two wheels. Look at all the families taking kids along the Hutt River Trail, or around Wellington's waterfront. So I don't think leisure cycling facilities are useless in terms of encouraging and normalising cycle use - they're an excellent gateway drug.

And as an aside: it turns out that John Key had the brilliant, revenue-generating idea to hold a race on the cycletrack (tentatively titled the Sir Edmund Hillary Explorator). That's a good indication that he doesn't have a single fucking clue what he's talking about. Let's put that in context: it's like suggesting that we hold an F1 Grand Prix on the road up the mountain from Ohakune to Turoa. The proosed bike path was a meandering, family-friendly route designed for cycle tourists. A bike race is fast, hard, and needs decent roads. Unless John Key was proposing a 1200-k re-enactment of the worst parts of Paris-Roubaix (which isn't just called the Hell of the North for the weather), I'm going to suspect that he just didn't know what he was talking about.

Anyway.

I got very annoyed with the Consumer magazine Rent vs Buy comparison page today. It takes a set of details from you and then tells you whether you'd be better off renting or buying a house, and by how much. There are so many things wrong with this page (say, the inability to set the mortgage term to anything other than 20 years) that it's hard to know where to start, but let's have a stab.

First, one of the things it asks you for is the real annual growth in house value, % per annum, averaged over the next 20 years. If you know that, go into the finance industry, you'll make a killing. The rest of us will just have a guess.

Then it asks you for the mortgage interest rate over the next 20 years. They assume 8%. In June 1987, the mortgage interest rate in NZ peaked at 20.5%pa. It's currently around 6.5%. See previous comments about your ability to predict this. So here we go guessing again...

It also asks you to estimate costs like rates, maintenance, etc. If you don't own a house already, you'll probably underestimate these. Have you seen how much it costs to repaint even a small house?

And finally, it assumes that "if you rent, you invest the money you would otherwise have spent on house buying - the deposit, insurance, ongoing mortgage payments (minus rent) etc". So if you're looking at the difference between paying, say, $400 per week rent or $450 per week mortgage, it's assuming that you're going to save that other $50 per week (*cough cough of course you are*). Plus all the money you had saved up for a deposit, etc. And then it asks you for the interest rate you'll be earning on those savings. So again, it's asking you to predict the interest rates for the next two decdates.

So basically, I'm saying that this mortgage calculator is no better than guessing. In fact, it's arguably worse, because it's giving you an unwarranted feeling of confidence about the numbers. In truth, they are no better than numbers you've pulled out of your arse - but since you'll pulled them out of the NZ Consumer's Institute's arse, you'll probably treat them as gospel. Just remember that they aren't.

Vintage Rebecca moment at the weekend. At the library, during Storytime (11am Saturdays in the kids' section, see you there), Stu (the reader/presenter) asks for a parent to help hold a book open. Rebecca leaps up, shouting "My dad! My dad! He'll do it!" and waving her arms.

And another VRM about ten minutes later. At the end of Storytime, after I'd held two books open while Stu played the ukulele and sang the songs of the books (Frog Went A-Courtin' and Don Gato), Stu was thanking everyone for coming and saying he'd see us all next week. Rebecca stood up and said, in a clarion voice, "Excuse me - my daddy has a sore arm, because he has lots of tattoos. Thank you."

Win.

fill the gap with our english dead

2009-07-16T21:25:00.009+12:00

It's the school holidays again. I remember when I was a kid: school holidays were giant events that lurked rarely in our calendar, huge chunks of free time, during which we were invariably packed off to some improving activity which suspiciously happened to take place during business hours and thus let our parents get some time at work. These days, the plethora of diversionary activities is larger and more diverse; but the holidays are more frequent. Like, every two months. Blimey. Blink and there's another set of the damn things. And R is still just our lovely wee girl, so we're taking a bit of time off to look after her. So far, I got the first end of the holidays, and then had a bit of a gap, and now I've got another day tomorrow. At the start of the holidays we checked off all the major things we wanted to do:

Movies: check. Ice Age 3 was good fun; Simon Pegg gives a stand-out performance as a mad weasel. The plot is cobbled together from Jurassic Park 3 (seriously; I can go into boring detail about exactly how precise the rip-off is) with splashes of Moby Dick (again, can be dull, but Buck = Ahab, Rudy = the whale - c'mon, it's even bloody white!) and a kick-off homage to Sir Arther Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" (though to be fair, they probably just got that from Jurassic Park). Find anyone who says "But it's so unrealistic, dinosaurs during the ice age!", and hold them against a wall with a broken bottle to their throat while saying "and what's so fucking realistic about talking mammoths, matie?"
Swimming: check. Porirua pool has a very nicely sized hydroslide and a wave pool. Rebecca loves it. When we went, they even had a miniature inflatable assault course thingie in the kids' pool; they covered it with soap bubbles, with the result of greased toddlers moving at high speed.
Wildlife: check. We went to a morning's talk about wetas at the Karori Sanctuary. And then Rebecca got to make a weta hotel (basically, a wooden box with a perspex cover and a detachable lid, so you can take the lid off but the weta is still safe behind perspex). Due to an hilarious mix-up, there were no hammers, so the session turned into a group re-enactment of early human evolution as we all pounded nails in using rocks. Fun though, and it works fine.

So I've done my duty as a parent. Until tomorrow, of course, when R wants to go see BJ Bear do a teddy bears' picnic at J'ville mall. Wish me luck.

Oh, and we took Rebecca into her first tattooists yesterday. I had another session booked with Tim out at Pacific Tattoo in Paekakariki, and since it was the school holidays, Rebecca came along for the ride. More specifically, Maggie was in creche (we got a casual day for her) and Heather gave me a lift out on the way to take Rebecca to Lindale for honey and llamas. Rebecca thought the studio looked interesting but smelled "stinky" (disinfectant not a hit with the kids), but seemed interested. Before she could warn Tim against hurting me (as she'd been threatening to do), Heather took her off, and Tim and I got down to the serious business of pain.

We kicked off by reworking all the big black areas from the last session, to get a good depth of color and consistent shade. After that, there was a fair bit of work filling in the chevrons we didn't get around to the last session, then a short bit of design to work out what the new bits should look like, then a fair bit more inking. We stopped about every two hours for tea and biscuits, but it was quite a day under the needle. I can say that having the inside of your elbow hurts immeasurably; and the inside of your arm isn't a picnic either. Apparently I'm quite good at staying still while thinking inside my head "Well, this is agony." Not fun on that front, but the results are quite nice. I now have a lot of black chevrons and lines on my inside forearm, and a patterned section inside the blank triangle in the junction of my elbow. When we started this project, I put together a portfolio with the words "Big, bold" on the inside. We've achieved that. Latest pictures are available through flickr.

One interesting moment during the day was when I noticed that the tattoo machine's power supply (an Eikon unit) has a display that showed stats about the current being supplied. One of the stastistics shown was CPS, Cycles Per Second - how fast the needles are going back and forth, in general the frequence of the tattoo machine. This mean that while I was being tattooed I could look over at the power supply and know precisely how much this hertz.

Still have a blank area right around the back of my arm, on the lower back of my tricep. The plan for the next session is to tweak any remaining re-coloring, add some more patterning/texture in the remaining area... and then start work on the next project. But that's another story.