Chrisco guilty over unfair Xmas hamper fees

Tessa's a great believer in them, but I've long been a bit suspicious of hamper companies like Chrisco and this article from the Herald just helps confirm my feeling

"Quite a lot were hit by huge cancellation fees - not huge by most people's standards, but something like $50 which is huge for our clients," Chrisco charges up to $150 to $200 more for its hampers than the individual items cost in low-priced supermarkets. A Consumer NZ survey in March found that the items in Chrisco's "traditional" hamper could be bought online from Woolworths for $327.84 - about $83 less than Chrisco's price of $10.53 a week for 39 weeks ($410.67). NZ Herald News

Add to that, on the day they will deliver your hampers in early December they refuse to give the customer a time of delivery, expecting their customers to waste a day waiting around for Chrisco to deliver. I don't think this is acceptable in today's busy world.

Canterbury earthquake first anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of the September 4 Canterbury earthquake. The one where there was property damage and we congratulated ourselves on how lucky we were that nobody was killed, largely because it was at 4 AM and nobody was on the normally busy shopping streets where there was damage, that and people whose homes were damaged were just plain lucky.

Sixth months later a smaller earthquake in the same area killed 181 people. Like all New Zealanders I still think about where I was when I first heard about these two earthquakes and still mourn the 181 strangers who died.

We were still lucky. On the 12th of May 2008 there was a massive earthquake in Sichuan, China that caused 69,195 deaths, and even that did not match the 2006 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 230,210 people. My thoughts, although a little dimmer, are also with the victims of those and other natural disasters.

Kia kaha, Christchurch

Kia kaha, Aotearoa

Kia kaha

Indians call centre training teaches Australians are stupid

In this morning's Herald was a piece on how trainee Indian call centre staff are taught that Australians are the world dumbest people who drink constantly and are touchy about animals.

The trainees are told to speak slowly as according to the trainer, Australia is the dumbest continent. I'm wondering if the trainer just didn't like being called a "Brown Bastard" (Apparently the Australian name for Indians) or if they have just been closely studying what Kiwis, Yanks and Poms say about Australia.

More on NZ Herald

Heads up to the Indians: The comments about Australians being dumb are just a joke. There are a large number of intelligent, cultured, articulate people in Australia. They crossed the Tasman Sea to get away from here; what's India's excuse?

Google ranking algorithm no longer secret

Or, if you prefer, Black boxes have hair

A "black box" is something that is known only by its inputs and its outputs, in principle nothing is known about what is actually inside the box. It's reasonably well known that if you allow someone to analyse a sufficiently large set of inputs and outputs of the box then they can analyse it. This is the principle behind the belief held by most cryptographers that there is little point keeping the algorithms secret and now this has happened to Google's search ranking algorithm.

Researchers took a limited number of ranking criteria and a set of search results and fed them to a machine learning algorithm. After a bit of churning the machine learning algorithm spat out a formula that gives a reasonably close match to Google's actual ranking. They only used 17 factors while Google actually uses over 200, but they have proved the point that this type of reverse engineering can reveal what's going on inside the black box that is the Googleplex. More Here

 I can see others taking their work forward and doing the analysis on many more factors. Maybe they will publish, maybe they won't but either way the genie's out of the bottle.

It will be interesting to see what Google's reaction is.


Thanks to Leo Kobes for the pointer.

How AV Researchers Deciphered Stuxnet

The fascinating story of the people who decoded the Stuxnet worm and how they did it.

"Stuxnet a one-shot weapon. Once it was discovered, the attackers would never be able to use it or a similar ploy again without Iran growing immediately suspicious of malfunctioning equipment. “The attackers had to bet on the assumption that the victim had no clue about cybersecurity, and that no independent third party would successfully analyze the weapon and make results public early, thereby giving the victim a chance to defuse the weapon in time,” [...]. In the end, Stuxnet’s creators invested years and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attack that was derailed by a single rebooting PC, a trio of naive researchers who knew nothing about centrifuges, and a brash-talking German who didn’t even have an internet connection at home."

More at Wired.com ...

It's also being discussed here in Bruce Schneier's blog.

And the moral of the story is "If you find a USB stick lying around, do not plug it into your computer. Especially if you work for a super secret research facility."

Switching To Debian Testing

We've been using Kubuntu for a few years on all our home PCs, but on Monday Kubuntu on my main desktop machine suffered a "misfortune"; I was halfway through the 11.04 upgrade when the lights went out. When they came back on, Mr PC, he no boot no more.

I probably could have fixed it given enough time and inspiration, but my / partition wouldn't mount despite fsck assuring me it was fine and I've been wanting to try Debian Testing as my main desktop for a while.

Back in 2003 I ran Debian 3.0 Stable as a desktop before reverting back to SuSE and I've used Ubuntu for the last 3 years or so, so Debian isn't exactly a stranger to me. More recently, for the last several months I've had a non-gui Debian Testing VirtualBox client server and Testing seems stable enough for my purposes. The reason why I'm interested in using Testing is to avoid the whole upgrade process and simultaneously avoid Debian's release cycles ... For a production server their philosophy is correct, but I really want to play with newer software.

So far I've installed the base system and added KDE to it. As I refer synaptic, I've added in quite a bit of gnome. I'll probably be rebuilding for a couple of nights more before restoring my home directories. Fingers crossed that that goes smoothly.

I've had one incredibly annoying problem where my screen would flicker every 10 seconds or so and at the same rate all consoles received a message "[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: No native mode, forcing panel scaling" A bit of Googling found me the solution to this on a Debian mailing list

edit /etc/default/grub

change the Linux command line to read
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet drm_kms_helper.poll=0"

sudo update-grub2

reboot

I've also got another annoyance that "sudo kate" (or other X program) can't access the display. I'm working around that for now by running root commands through a terminal session that I've sshed back to localhost

ssh -X -l root localhost

Not the world's most elegant solution, but it works for now, I'm sure I'll find the answer when I budget time to look.

I suspect I'll be finding out more little annoyances as I go, but for now I'm quite happy with how things are going

A Link Builder's Guide To Directory Submission

SEO involves a lot of tasks and one of those tasks is link building, getting other websites to make quality links to your target website. There are only a few sources of quality incoming links, and internet directories are one of those sources.

What many SEO engineers don't realise is that directory owners are also actively involved in SEO, the successful ones have been around for several years and understand exactly what they are doing. They are fully aware that their directory is at least in part an SEO machine. I'm one of "Them", I own and run over a dozen directories, listed at http://www.hosted.co.nz/links/Internet/Directories/, that accept public site submissions; my oldest directory has been running since late 2006, my newest ones have been running just over a week.

You and the directory owner both want to get quality links into their directory and as long as both sides play by the rules, you are allies and not adversaries. This article is to explain the real rules and why those rules exist.

Domain Admin for Drupal 7

With over 100 small sites deployed using a mix of technologies, I'm always on the look-out for things that will make my life easier. I currently have 3 Jojo CMS installs, 8 phpLd directories, 6 active blogs on b2evolution and manage 2 Wordpress installs for family members. Each of these pieces of software has limitations and a lack of scalability so the other 100 odd sites I have are created with straight php, but sharing menu structures within the sites and templates and a simple library in a cross-site back-end. There's no database, no CMS, I edit them with the kate text editor on my home PC and then publish them using rsync. Horrible as this sounds, this scales remarkably well. I can manage it pretty well and see myself being able to manage 2 or 3 times as many sites but eventually it starts to get limiting. Currently I can grep the source for common strings I will want to update, but ....

Fossil fuels deadlier than nuclear power

Interesting snippit.

"Yet again, popular perceptions are wrong. When, in 1975, about 30 dams in central China failed in short succession due to severe flooding, an estimated 230,000 people died. Include the toll from this single event, and fatalities from hydropower far exceed the number of deaths from all other energy sources."New Scientist

So hydro power is more dangerous than fossil fuels which are in turn more dangerous than nuclear? At least the nuclear people don't just dump their spent fuel in the oceans the way the hydro people do :)

New Zealand, Three Countries in One

Today is the first day of Blog4NZ (Facebook) (Twitter #blog4nz). I'm all in favour of this campaign, but what can I say to you about why New Zealand is a great country to visit? I've been pondering it for a couple of days and have come to the conclusion that there isn't really a New Zealand, there's three almost completely different things covered by the concept. And there are three different places.

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Best Interest Rate Home Loans Online

In a bit of a follow-up to yesterday's piece about competitive insurance quotes, what do I find on-line but mortgage services like this one Five Star Mortgages in the US that help people find the lowest cost mortgages. They proudly proclaim "We Specialize in low rate lending across the united states. Lowest Interest rates online!" and go on to say "Our professionals specialize in helping people just like you find the right type of mortgage loan to suit their needs. In addition, our goal is always to find the right program and the right lender to help you save money on your home purchase." In other words they are like an on-line version of Mike Perro with no need to go into the office and with the ability to go through the process at your own pace. Anything like this here? The best I could find was a spreadsheet-like display of current bank mortgage rates, sorted alphabetically.

On a roll

I seem to be on a roll tonight. I had a good day at work documenting a part of our development process ... normally, like most developers, I can't stand doing documentation but this was developer documentation and partially involved writing some skeleton code to improve the way we develop.

The evening started off badly though, after cycling home I got straight off the bike to go for a 6km walk in practice for the Round the Bays this Sunday. I got about a kilometre down the road when the heavens opened. I sheltered under a shop awning until it eased to light rain and then walked briskly home arriving more than a little damp.

Competitive Quotes Car Insurance

There's obviously a lot of margin in car insurance. You only need to look at how much AA Insurance and Tower have spent on their recent TV ads, or if that doesn't convince you go over to clixGalore and have a look at the affiliate scheme offers by major insurance companies, you can see the offers without having an account or logging in. One (I won't name them) are currently on the front page and offering 12% commission.

The Rat Is Back

Sometime around 1995 I started using "Kiore", the Maori word for "Rat" as my nickname for on-line bridge. It became my off-line nickname as well then my ISP email address and in 2000 I registered Kiore.com to get the email address I wanted. The url of this blog comes from the same source, the original name for the blog was My name/Kiore.

Starting a few months before I created the Muffins blog I had Kiore.com set up on my PC at home as a simple php-Nuke CMS that was mostly a blog as an experiment, I eventually exposed it (dynamic IP and all) to the public internet so I could demo it to friends. Eventually it migrated to the same storage as I later set the muffins blog on. Like a rat crossing the motorway, disaster befell it a couple of times, like the muffins site it had to be restored and rebuilt, eventually becoming a Drupal site before dieing badly early in 2007 leading to the, I won't say "abandonment" as I always intended to restore, but failure to actually restore. I still used the domain name, but only for mail until yesterday.

Revision 3 - R3: b2evolution server

After a not very fortunate attempt to set up the b2evolution blog software a few weeks back that was cut short by the 9:37 event, I had another go during the week. As always with these things it took quite a while to get it right. When I did I blew it away & started afresh.

The b2evolution software has multiple domain support built in, but based on what I learned from my experiments, it is clear that the first domain has special properties and I didn't really want my other domains relying on a real domain name, so as this is my third b2evolution install and I was informally referring to it as "R3" I deployed r3.co.nz and the site is now officially  "R3 (Revision 3)".

The earthquake caused substantial damage - Treasury NZ

I love the understatement and the New Zealand Treasury has issued this pearler of one in its latest economic indicators report. To be fair, the report's target audience includes people who are overseas and may have had minimal exposure to the direct information on the earthquake we've had here. The treasury is tasked with providing a best estimate of the amount of damage caused, and without even a reliable deathtoll it must be almost impossible to come up with a financial cost, still they try and only give themselves a 33% confidence level:

"It is still too early to estimate with confidence the financial cost of the damage caused by the February earthquake, but it is likely to be [...] we estimate the combined financial cost of the two earthquakes at around NZ$15 billion. There is considerable uncertainty associated with this estimate (and its components) which is best described as a working assumption rounded to the nearest $5 billion."

Repairs could take over four years They later say

"it is unlikely that all this work will be completed within our four-year forecast period. Except for important infrastructure, this recovery will mainly occur from 2012 onwards because of the planning required and the extent of the damage."

It's worth remembering this. In Bob Parker's famous words, "Christchurch is currently munted" but it will be rebuilt eventually. Full Report

Christchurch Earthquake Community Response

A dedicated volunteer team of Internet people, web masters, programmers, and computer savvy helpers have built the Christchurch Earthquake Community Response site to coordinate help efforts. Anyone who is able to offer help or who needs help because of the earthquake should go there.

Useful Resources Christchurch Earthquake

Christchurch Earthquake Community Response
A dedicated volunteer team of Internet people, web masters, programmers, and computer savvy helpers have built the Christchurch Earthquake Community Response site to coordinate help efforts. If you need help or can offer help, please go there.

Because of the dedicated site, this page is no-longer being maintained.

Christchurch Earthquake Update - Support and Condolences

The following message was sent by The Queen to John Key:

"I have been utterly shocked by the news of another earthquake in
Christchurch. Please convey my deep sympathy to the families and
friends of those who have been killed; my thoughts are with all those who
have been affected by this dreadful event. My thoughts are also with the
emergency services and everyone who is assisting in the rescue efforts.

ELIZABETH R " (Link)

Christchurch Earthquake Update

Edit 28 Feb 2011: The death toll is now nearly 150. The 38 was the confirmed death toll when I wrote this, less than 1 day after the quake. There's about 200 reported missing, so it's reasonable to assume that the confirmed number of quake deaths will grow before the recovery effort is over.

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The official death toll from yesterday's earthquake in Christchurch has been reduced to 38. Looks like they double counted the dead yesterday - with the stress and confusion that was going on I suppose that can be forgiven.

The news media is reporting that the death toll could reach 300 once the rubble is cleared away, one person in 1,000 of the Christchurch population.

 The TV feed continues this morning and the rescue workers are all looking like they had no sleep last night. Two that are being interviewed as I type just said they had about an hours sleep.

Kia kaha Canterbury.

Christchurch Earthquake Two

TV One and TV3 are running continuous programming on the Christchurch earthquake that went off at lunchtime today. To their credit, both of these channels have suspended advertising so we are getting no breaks in the coverage.

It's hard watching it, nothing like as hard for the watchers as for the people there on the ground though.

Back on the bike

Having managed to reunite it with my helmet I was back on my bike today.

Coming home I was stopped on Broadway at the red light at the corner with Khyber Pass  when this idiot on a bike whizzed straight past me at maybe 30km/h straight into the turning traffic from Khyber Pass. How he avoided being hit eludes me. Idiots like him are too stupid to ride push bikes in public and should stick to driving cars.

Go By Bike Day: I missed another one

Normally I ride my push-bike to and from work. 5 days a week. It's my only source of exercise.

Every year they promote have a ride your bike to work day, with a free healthy breakfast if you can be bothered biking into Aotea Square in town ... that's about 4km from work so I can't ever be bothered. This year it's today and it seems to be called "Go By Bike Day"

Last year, for the second year in a row, I wasn't able to ride my bike that day. I can't remember exactly why, but I remember being annoyed that I couldn't ... note to self: blog more often.

Yesterday I was nearly home when my head felt a bit funny, I put my hand up to check my helmet and discovered to my horror that I wasn't wearing it, so I hopped off the bike and walked the rest of the way home. Somehow I'd managed to take my gloves and goggles out of the helmet, put them on and leave my bike helmet on my desk.

This meant I was on the bus today and missed it yet again. In the immortal words of A. A. Milne ""Bother!" Said Poo"

Zinc an effective defence to colds

Finally some good news on alternate medicine NZ Herald: "Zinc supplements have been confirmed in a large international study as an effective treatment of the common cold, shortening symptoms by nearly one day." I'll have to remember this come winter.

Fruit and fruit juice harm fetuses?

The Herald reports:

"An expectant mother could be putting her unborn child at risk by drinking as little as three glasses of juice a day or eating five apples." More...

Well, in rats anyway and the quantities are scaled up from a study done on rats. Humans and rats are both omnivores, but while rats descend from grain eaters, we descended from largely fruit eating ancestors so I really wonder if you can extrapolate from rats to humans in this case. It would be interesting to see if vegans and fitness fanatics, both of whom consume more fruit than the average person have a higher incidence of fetal abnormality. Somehow I doubt it as I'm sure we would have been told if health conscious people were having deformed babies in any significant numbers.

The worst of times, the best of times

There's an old saying "Just once I wish I could have the silver lining without the cloud?" well once again it wasn't my turn.

A week ago I mentioned how I was exhausted after cleaning up domains and sites. Well I continued cleaning and improving over the weekend and by Sunday night was ready for a distraction. I had an on-going problem that my VM was CentOS 4 and current versions of Mediawiki won't run on the XML library in there. I've been looking at upgrading to version 5 for a while but the documentation is scary and advises starting again from scratch. The problem is I didn't really have a good way of doing that, so I decided I needed a distraction. I decided to have a play with the b2evolution blogging software instead. What makes this interesting is that with some minor set-up in the control panel it can support multiple blogs in the one directory. Unlike its cousin (both descend from the now dead b2/cafelog) Wordpress they did this years ago with no add-ins, tweaks, etc. Just point both domains at the save virtual server & tell b2evolution about the blog and you're going.

Although not ideal, blog software will usually do service as CMS substitutes, and Wordpress is often used as a straight CMS so I think b2evolution should easily be able to be made to do the same.

---

Unfortunately my experimentation was cut short by the arrival of 9:37 PM. Suddenly my site was dead. Not just the domains on b2, but all of them. Dead, dead, dead. I went to my hosting company's control panel & the log-in was broken. It flashed up something about not being able to contact the machine my VM was on then reloaded itself ... in a loop. I logged onto their CRM and raised a support ticket. Just over half an hour later they let me know that the disk had crashed hard and they were creating a new VM for me on a different node, what operating system would I like. I decided to ask for CentOS 5 ... at least Mediawiki should work :)

Getting a handle

Today has been flat-out. Actually all week has been much that way. I've made some dreadful mistakes setting up my little mini-site empire:

• Domains that aren't delegated
• Domains with no content
• Domains with no incoming links

You name it, and it exists somewhere in my portfolio. Yesterday I sorted out the domains that are part of the mini-site group that should be delegated or have content ... sorted out meaning I know what they are, not that I've fixed them. On the other hand I've found a new writer and tasked him with completing the work I had started on wales.co.nz a year or so back. If his work is OK, I'll get him onto the next domain and so forth.

Web Directories

I'm taking time out from my normal activities to be a little self serving. In the beginning, the world wide web was both small and either academics or closely related hobbyists. They built small sites and links between their pages based on shared interests. People would find interesting sites based shared interests following links from sites to site. The web grew, the founders of Yahoo came along and built a massive directory, then the search engines arose and largely supplanted the directories. These days web directories are nowhere near as important as they used to be, but some still have a reasonable amount of influence on some web surfers. I've applied to list this blog on a few of the more important and have created this post to share some of the love back at them.

Tessa's big day in

Today has not been a great day.

Earlier this week Tessa had to have a small surgical procedure under a general anesthetic. Today Tessa & I were delivering a wedding cake she'd made for a friend's wedding tomorrow. She is still in a bit of pain so I was doing chauffeur duty.

On the way she was suddenly nauseous so we stopped for a bit then started again, about 1 minutes down the road, same again so we stopped for about 15 minutes while she sat on a park bench. Then we went down to Albany shops & she had a herb tea but still didn't feel any better. We went to the Albany village care pharmacy and Sue Jan, the pharmacist, suggested I should take Tessa straight to hospital. They gave Tessa a couple of ginger lozenges and some tissues and Anne, the assistant, spent some time with us while waiting for Tessa to be well enough wouldn't even accept payment. How's that for kindness to strangers?

Round The Bays

I've just signed up for the annual Round the Bays run, except I'm going to walk it. I have some old damage to a tendon in my leg ... normally it's no problem but the jarring of running can cause it to fire up. Walking, cycling, etc aren't a problem.

It's not until 13 March, so I have 6 weeks to make sure I'm up to walking 8.4km at a steady clip. Look forward to progress reports.

Ironically I haven't been on my bike all week ... need to get back on the bike as well.

The price of Internet is eternal vigilance

I feel I've just done something really dumb. For some time now I've been buying content as part of my project to turn my parked domain names into small sites. I've been offering to buy up unsold articles from article writers at a reduced price. When I wasn't ready to deploy I've simply been archiving.

Unfortunately I've got way behind on developing the sites and I've had a slowly growing backlog of unused articles. In some cases I didn't even read the articles before filing them away. As time has gone on this tendency has got worse.

Icelandic Espionage, perhaps

There's something not quite right in my mind about the recent computer bugging reports from the Icelandic parliament, Althingi. See, for example, the report in Iceland Review Online. As reported, a computer was found attached to the parliamentary LAN in an empty room next to the offices of two minor parliamentary parties, The Movement and the Independence Party. This was back in February 2010. Some key "facts" that have been revealed include

• “All identifiers had been wiped off the computer, all numbers and such, so it couldn’t be traced back to the owner. It was a very suspicious computer but we just couldn’t figure it out and neither could the police,”
• "When the computer was disconnected a program automatically started which deleted all data on the hard drive."
• There has been speculation that Wikileaks may have been behind it (denied by Birgitta Jónsdóttir)

Personally I doubt the Wikilinks speculation. Their style isn't to plant bugs, but to accept data leaked by others, nor was it likely to be a serious attempt to bug Wikileaks collaborators. According to this time-line Wikileaks wasn't to publish the Apache Helicopter video for another two months. At this time very few outside Iceland knew much about the link between Wikileaks and Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Sure the CIA, FSB, MSS, and so on would have had a pretty good idea what was going on, but I can't believe they would employ such a crude bugging attempt ... unless they wanted to send a message.

Next question, if a program started which deleted all data on the hard drive (presumably including system logs) how do they know there was ever anything there to delete? Did it give a nice little "Deleting files" progress bar?

I also find the whole business of the computer wiping its disk when it was found suspicious in the extreme. Any computer forensics worth its salt wouldn't give the rogue computer time to change anything on its disk. I would have thought any parliamentary IT service would have standing instructions to immediately take steps to prevent the computer taking any further activities, naively cut the power ... but I'm not an expert. Perhaps the IT "experts" are genuinely clueless, perhaps they were in on it.

So, who are the culprits? Perhaps an insider in The Movement or Independence party, wanting to monitor their own party, perhaps someone in one of the other minor parliamentary parties, perhaps the whole computer was a dummy designed to send a message and if so, why weren't the affected parties informed for ten months?

This whole thing raises far more questions than have been answered.

Edited to fix some badly worded text regarding knowledge of Birgitta Jónsdóttir - 24/1/2011 07:39 NZT

Unwashed jeans don't get any dirtier

In his book The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp famously remarked "There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse."


The Herald is reporting that the same applies to denim jeans, only more so "Great news for students - jeans left unwashed for a year are no dirtier than those that have been worn for a fortnight."


There is, of course a gotcha ... the wearer's personal hygene becomes very important to the process and the jeans need to be aired.


Seems to me it would just be easier to wash them

Real Physical Security

This photograph is a brilliant metaphor for security mistakes - TechNet Blogs.

Bicycle Typogram

This is absolutely brilliant.  Aaron Kuehn has drawn this typogram of a bicycle. Every element of the bike is made of the name of the element as text (although he does stretch it a little with the front forks). The S of the saddle is superb.

He offers it in a limited edition screen printed form or you can download the PDF from his site and print it yourself.

He even allows re-use of the graphic, with credit.

Way to go Aaron.

Squishy Circuits

Fantastic and fun-looking play to learn idea for kids. Squishy Circuits: "The purpose of this project is to facilitate electronics education to younger students. Our hope is that through the use of this tool, students will better understand electronics concepts, become more interested in engineering, and ultimately participate in playful learning techniques. This page is dedicated to sharing out research and guiding the further use and creation of squishy circuits."

The 2010 New Zealand Ice Cream Awards

The New Zealand Ice Cream Manufacturer's association has called for entries to the 14th New Zealand Ice Cream Awards which are to be judged in Auckland from Monday, 26th APRIL 2010.

The specific objective of the Awards is the raising of standards and promoting the quality of New Zealand Ice Cream.

They have 12 separate categories including Standard, Premium, Low Fat, Gelato and Sorbet. Last year’s supreme award was won by a Licorice Gelato.

The closing date for entries is Wednesday the 14th of April 2010

Full information at The New Zealand Ice Cream Awards:

Frasers Café - Great Customer Service

7 PM on a Sunday night and Tessa and I felt like going out for breakfast. Tessa really felt like bacon and eggs while for me there was no special reason, but on a day that started with cheese and tomato sandwiches, and had cupcakes and Easter biscuits for lunch, having bacon and eggs for dinner seemed somehow logical.

We went up Mt Eden Road and ended up at Frasers Café where we've been several times before and always enjoyed the fare, but it was well past the time when they stop the day menu and switched over to the night menu.

When we asked if they could do us the meal from the day menu, the waitress immediately checked with the kitchen and agreed to our request. So it was a "Power breakfast" at 8PM, cooked to their normal high standard and greatly enjoyed by both Tessa and I.

Full marks to Frasers, both for the food and for the excellent service.

Hush my dear, the bunny's near

It seems like only yesterday were doing Valentine's and now we are only 2 weeks out from Easter. This year seems to be vanishing even faster than last.

It's the first full year of my fiancé, Tessa's, gourmet baking business Sweet Expectations and as each special occasion comes around she needs to do a brand new special page on her site for Les petites gâteries de la saison. Tonight we added the page with her list of Hand made gourmet Easter treats.

 So if you're in Auckland and want some delicious hand made Easter treats,

check out her web page and get on the phone.

Remember, there's only 14 shopping days 'til Easter.



Photos by Tessa Clement (née Shoebridge) and Copyright © 2010. All rights reserved, used by permission.

Musings on change

On Saturday Tessa and I went up to the top of Mt Albert and looked across to what had once been my teenage home, just as I had stood there and looked across a many times when I was a teenager in the 1970s, before I moved away from first home, then Auckland and now back. The trees are taller and it is harder to pick out the house among the trees, but the mountain is the same and in many ways the house. All around there is change, the new motorway, changed buildings, but the basic layout of the roads is unchanged and so is the geography.


Businesses aren't like that, many of the iconic businesses of my youth and early adulthood are still around but merged or changed beyond recognition. I have a life insurance policy taken out in the late 1970s with Norwich Union, this afternoon out of curiosity I visited their web site to discover they are now Aviva and I vaguely remembered hearing of some merger, perhaps it's middle age, but I feel nostalgic for the old name.


Tonight Tessa and I went to another of my old haunts, Albert Park, for the Chinese lantern festival which I really enjoyed. Again things had changed, when I was in my late teens and early twenties and frequently visited the park it was different, Central Auckland was very much a city for the English descendants, now it is a much more vibrant, truly multi-cultural city the festival was attended by a truly multi-ethnic mix of people, another change that has made Auckland better and stronger, just as the business changes make them better and stronger. While we were there we saw the first fresh durian I've seen in Auckland (canned and frozen don't count) we bought some and ate it as we walked ... a middle aged Asian couple stopped and remarked that they thought Europeans didn't like durian.

The mountain and the stream remain, the people change and those of us remaining change with them.

Cool pictures of feathered dinosaurs from New Scientist

Ten artist's drawings of feathered dinosaurs discovered by Chinese Palentologist Xu Xing ranging from the 34cm, 4 winged, Anchiornis huxleyi to Guanlong, a feathered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex and the 1.5 Tonne Gigantoraptor, Fossil finds by Xu Xing and his team have helped show the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. See gallery at New Scientist

Chocolate eggs threated by witches' broom

With Valentine's day this weekend and Easter just around the corner, I Ggoogled a bit and found out that New Scientist reported a year ago that supplies were threatened by a fungus named witches' broom and a virus called CSSV (cacao swollen shoot virus). Cacao is the plant that grows the beans that we grind, ferment and roast to make cocoa ... the raw stuff of chocolate.

Site Cloning Experiment

A few months back I had a few of my domains developed into mini-sites, but for various reasons I didn't switch on Adsense monitoring until a few days back so I didn't actually understand how well or poorly they were doing – silly mistake that I always advise other people against.
Because there's some related keyword pairs I might go after, I've decided not to publicly say exactly which domain name I'm talking about.
While doing some research last night I noticed that one of my better performing minisites that has it's name formed CompoundnounNoun.co.nz (XxxyyyZzz.co.nz) was receiving a lot of hits for the search term Xxx Zzz. It was on the front page of Google for this search but near the bottom.
For an experiment I decided to see what would happen if I cloned it to XxxZzz.co.nz for a perfect match to the keyword. Already I'm seeing some things that surprised me.

Day 1

Log

Here's my log and results (All times NZDT):

9-Feb-10 22:20

Registered the domain name

9-Feb-10 22:20-23:00

• Cloned the XxxYyyZzz.co.nz site to XxxZzz.co.nz on my server
• changing all occurrences of XxxYyy to Xxx and fixing a couple of grammatical errors.
• Added links to the new site on 3 of my sites.
• Registered it with Google Analytics and placed the link code in the pages.

9-Feb-10 23:09

.nz zone file reloaded, DNS resolving and site live. Visited the site and checked it out. The Adsense Mediabot spider visited all the pages I visited.

10-Feb-10 07:28

Googlebot visited the site retrieving robots.txt, and / (Index.php)

10-Feb-10 09:06

Googlebot returned retrieving all the pages linked from index.php.

10-Feb-10 14:08

Yahoo! Slurp retrieved robots.txt, /, and /default.css

10-Feb-10 18:24

Googlebot returned and re-read / (NB: Did not read robots.txt)

11-Feb-10 00:01

Waking up to having missed something I created a Google Alert for Xxx Zzz inurl:.co.nz

Analysis of day 1.

• Mediabot is practically real-time (expected).
• Googlebot found the site fairly quickly. Not sure if this was because of Analytics, Mediabot, or from scanning my other sites. Having read the first page it came back and read the rest fairly promptly.
• Yahoo! Slurp is none too shabby on the initial read either. It didn't have the extra aid I gave Google, yet found a brand new domain in only 15 hours.
• Either Slurp didn't like what it found, or is a lot slower than Googlebot in reading the other new pages. I find it a mystery that it gave priority to reading the css file over reading the other php files though.

Based on experience with adding pages to Tessa's Sweet Expectations site where it took 8 or 9 days for Google to notice an added page to an existing site I'm not expecting anything for a few days. I'll check periodically and update this blog with news of how it progresses.

Day 2

Very Quiet day. The only activity on the site was a return visit by Googlebot at 01:45 which just requested robots.txt - a 404. No sign of Yahoo Slurp or Microsoft's Bing spider.

Day 3

A couple more spiders visited: ScoutJet and Yandex, with a return visit by GoogleBot. In each case they fetched robots.txt and the homepage. Still no sign of Yahoo Slurp or Microsoft's Bing spider.

Day 4

A ScoutJet returned and spidered the site. So far Google and Scoutjet have both spidered the site, Scoutjet's directory isn't publicly usable yet, and Google isn't showing any pages for the site, yet.

Day 5

Yandex returned and read the robots.txt (I'm going to stop reporting minor search engines now, they've obviously found the site). Google re-read the index page and robots.txt only. A ScoutJet returned and spidered the site. So far Google and Scoutjet have both spidered the site, Spandex's directory isn't publicly usable yet, and Google isn't showing any pages for the site, yet.

Google sent its first real traffic today (1 visitor), and it was on the search I expected, I need to wait a few more days to check it wasn't just an aberration before declaring success, but for now at least it's looking hopeful.

Interestingly enough, this is only day 5 on a newly registered site, nearly twice as fast as day 9 on an existing site as in the Sweet Expectations Valentine's day page.

Day 6

Google revisited and re-spidered the site. They also sent another visitor and I received a notification from Google Alerts that the site exists. The visitor sent by Google was on a bit of a long tail keyword phrase that it matched up against the privacy page or all places, still the web browser went to a couple of other pages in the site; not ideal, but better than nothing.

Day 7

Quiet day, Yahoo! Slurp visited today and spidered the site. No sign of Google or any traffic from them but this doesn't matter as they have obviously decided to accept the site. Interestingly enough, still no sign of Bing. Bing sends traffic to one of the sites where I posted a link to the new site so it's either not interested in this site or has just given it a low priority for its spider.

As I've partially achieved my objective, and want to watch things for a few weeks I'm going to shut down this log now, with just occasional updates as significant changes occur.

Summary

Google was very fast off the mark indexing the site, and added it into the index faster than I expected. Slurp indexed the front page pretty fast but was quite a sluggard indexing the rest of the site. Bing has been noticeable by its absence, and I'm wondering if they are sharing their spidering with Slurp already.

Google has also sent traffic a lot sooner than I expected. Given that it's a brand new site (The one I cloned had been registered since 2006 and been in its current form as as a mini-site for 3 months) and there are almost no incoming links I'm surprised it got out of the sandbox at all. The only question in my mind now is will I get enough traffic to justify the registration fee?

Living beach ball, another giant single cell

A while ago I bloggged on Giant Single Cells. Here's another one courtesy of New Scientist The single-celled xenophyophores shun the convention that single cells are microscopic. Syringammina is a brute, growing to a width of 10 centimetres, sometimes even twice that. The cell branches and splits into hundreds of tubes, which ramify and interconnect in a hugely complex network. It also bends the single-cell convention of having only a single nucleus: Syringammina has many, scattered throughout its tubes.

Masterworks in Petri dishes gallery

Ten photos of "Art" made out of growing bacteria at Gallery - Masterworks in Petri dishes - New Scientist Described as "Einstein in E. coli, an apple tree grown from fungi and a fluorescent Mario are just some of the masterworks cast in agar jelly by creative microbiologists, on display at www.microbialart.com". In my opinion, 7 of them are great images, even if manipulated (false colour etc), I won't say which ones left me cold as I'm sure everyone will have their own list.

Why did our species survive, not the Neanderthals?

Interesting article in New Scientist on Neanderthal extinction. It directly contradicts something I thought about Neanderthals and technology / tool creation so I must have a look into it to see if this is something under debate or if I should be changing my mental model.

"The history of the Neanderthals isn't a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph...

"None of these just-so stories quite add up, Finlayson says. There is no clear indication that Neanderthals were any less intelligent than H. sapiens, and genetic evidence has shown that they share with humans key changes in Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language. The distinction between Neanderthal and human technology isn't as clear-cut as palaeoanthropologists sometimes suggest, and Neanderthals hunted smaller game and seafood where it was available. Meanwhile, a first-draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome offers no sign that they contributed to our gene pool."

Article - 08 November 2009 - New Scientist.

Creationism and Islam

In a very similar way to how some extreme fundamentalist Christian sects reject evolution, so do some Islamic people. I haven't watched it recently, but Auckland's Triangle Television community station used to run anti-evolution programs made by these Muslims and I found them fascinating ... not because I agree with them, but for the way they were nearly identical to Christian anti-evolution films.

The biggest single difference was the the Islamic ones would have sound-bites from Jewish and Christian scholars -- presumably to show that their word-view was shared.

In 2008 New Scientist interviewed Salman Hameed an American academic who makes a number of pro-evolution points from an Islamic viewpoint including

• "The Koran itself does not provide a single clear-cut verse that contradicts evolution."
• "One of the big evolution problems from the US creationist perspective is the age of the Earth. Logically speaking, if you believe in a 6000 or 10,000 year-old Earth, then you have to reject evolution"
• "The Catholic church and Anglican church are not, as far as I know, atheistic organisations. These are religious organisations, but they accept evolution as a working principle behind the diversity of species. I think the same argument can and should be made in the Islamic world."

The interview is well worth a read.

Jon Haworth - Mission statement generator

Want to make your small business spout nonsense to compete with government agencies and big business? Mission statement generator is a tool that effortlessly produces prose like "Our goal is to professionally and synergistically fashion economically sound and cost-effective information that provide key differentiators between us and our competitors." and "Our company exists to collaboratively create economically sound, emerging and competitive products to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace."

Google's Halloween Joke

When the Web was new, the first search engines were created and listed every page they could find. Often site owners were unhappy with this for a number of reasons:

• Confidential information could be displayed (Actually an indication of a misconfigured website, but blame the messenger)
• Inner pages could be displayed bypassing "guard" pages
• The spiders could consume a lot of (then) expensive bandwidth

AltaVista which was the first popular search engine, designed a special file "robots.txt" for webmasters to include. This file could be used to instruct robots not to index part of a site. Most people never see this file as it is usually uninteresting, but it's often there and creating it is one of the less interesting parts of creating a website

Tonight is Halloween and Google has added these lines to the bottom of their robots.txt file

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Another stupid crook leaves name, number

Dumb robber leaves name, number: "A regular customer of Penny Lane Records in Sydenham, Christchurch took his opportunity just before closing on Friday to reach over the counter and grab a wad of cash and flee.

According to the owner, just a few minutes earlier, the man had put a CD on lay-by and had left his name, address and phone number with staff. In addition, he is a regular customer and well-known to staff." Doh!

Orwell and Shakespeare. Hamlet and 1984.

This is of necessity a draft. I want to talk about the artistic process and the way we misinterpret the art of past ages by imposing on the work of former eras the values and standards of our times. I haven't yet figured out all I want to say on the matter, so I will revisit this theme at some future time.

In his Ab Urbe condita (Literally “From the founding of the city”, but usually rendered as Early History of Rome) Titus Livius had historical or semi mythical people from the early days of Rome speaking and acting like Romans of the late republic, his era.

Most English speaking people today, and for at least the last century, regard William Shakespeare as a genius in writing plays. To the modern ear his language has dated and his political world view and concerned are that of a bygone age. If you ask a modern person what was so great about Shakespeare they will usually say that it is the originality of his plots.

In this they couldn't be more wrong. Shakespeare's plays usually retold well known stories and the Elizabethan audience expected to be presented with familiar plots and scenes. Romeo and Juliet was from earlier Italian tales ultimately named Giulietta e Romeo and presenting much the same plot, according to the Wikipedia article on Romeo and Juliet “The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Romeo and Juliet are all from Italian novelle.” Shakespeare's greatest play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is based on earlier stories, including the Roman legend of Brutus, Scandinavian legends and an earlier “Ur-Hamlet” possibly by Thomas Kyd (See Sources of Hamlet on Wikipedia ) . To the Elizabethan mind, Shakespeare's greatness wasn't the originality of his tales, but how well he told them; by the standards of the day he was a great playwright. Normally we never get to hear this, today we demand novelty, especially originality in plots, and Shakespeare was great, so we must think of him as conforming to today's standards of greatness which requires original plots so Shakespeare must have had original plots. so the antecedents of Shakespeare's plays are conveniently forgotten.

A similar thing has happened with George Orwell, one of my favourite authors. Today Orwell is primarily remembered for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four and occasionally for Animal Farm, his Satire of the Russian revolution and the early USSR, most of the rest of his writings are conveniently forgotten.

Felix, the knitted toy

The earliest toy I can remember was a simple knitted "rag doll" style soft toy I called "Felix" that one of my parents' friends in England had made me.

My earliest memories are from when we first lived in Auckland, New Zealand when I was three and Felix was my constant companion. I don't know if we brought him overland with us when my parents drove their car halfway around the world from the UK to Aotearoa, or if it had been mailed out, but the one thing I do recall is that he was there and I have no memory of being given him.

In those days we lived in Takapuna and when I was four we moved to the East Coast Bays, Mairangi Bay was home, but my grandparents lived in Murray's Bay and the other bays were visited often enough for shopping or picnics. Back then this was an idyllic corner of NZ for kids. Like all children I had a vivid imagination and as everyone we knew seemed to live in a bay, I invented "Stingins Bay" (with a soft G sound) where Felix's father lived, and I was forever trying to find it. Looking back I have no idea why he didn't have a mother -- just one of those kid things, I guess. Being only a few km away we kept in touch with the next door family from Takapuna which was good as I had made good friends with their son who my own age.

We moved again when I was five, this time about 400km south to New Plymouth and in the summer holidays visited Auckland, including our old friends in Takapuna as well as the friends in Mairangi Bay.

Disaster Felix went missing! There was a search, but he could not be found and I could not be consoled. For weeks I was heartbroken.

Here's were it gets weirder. Several months later, Felix turned up, he'd been pushed down behind the sofa at the Takapuna friends house. He was returned to me, but the magic had been broken and I don't think I ever played with him again.

This would have been 1964 or 1965 and as Peter, Paul and as Mary sang a couple of years earlier in Puff, the magic dragon "Dragons live forever, but not so little boys. Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys." I'd moved on and now had little room in my life for soft toys.

Looking back from forty-four years later it makes little sense that Felix should have been so important, perhaps we had him on the trip and it was that he had been my travel companion as we drove half way around the world, perhaps he just represented stability as as we moved three times before finding a permanent home in NZ. As I write this I find myself wondering what did eventually happen to Felix? I still have a wind-up toy from that same era, now no-longer working, but occupying pride of place above my desk at home.

 Originally published on Qondio

Big ribbons a better luggage tag

When you fly with checked luggage, at the end of your journey the bags and suitcases of hundreds of people all end up on the same carousel. If your luggage is a standard type it can have a dozen or more close twins as travel "companions".

When you get close to the bag it's usually possible to tell your bag, but even if you haven't done it yourself I'm sure you've seen people pick up a bag, then see it isn't theirs and put it back.

As people pick up their bags and leave the luggage collection area the crush around the carousel dies down, but if your bag is one of the first ones out it can be quite a mission to get to the front just as your bag comes past.

Distinctive luggage tags can help, but if they are small they don't help when the bag is in the distance and bags can be treated pretty roughly in transit and if the tags are large they can get caught and detach from your case.

A few years ago a travel companion put me onto a great idea. Get a large (minimum 2" - 5cm), distinctive ribbon, and wrap it tightly around the outside of the case, through the handle, and securely tie it. Now when my bags come onto the carousel I can see them from a distance and get to them as they come past.

I've used this technique flying from New Zealand to Australia, Singapore, India, back to NZ and internally in good old Aotearoa without problem. Wide stripes and bright ribbons work best, but anything that contrasts with your suitcase will do. If you can't find a unique ribbon, just get two or more thinner ones and tie them beside each other.

If you're traveling on holiday or for a tourist vacation you can pretty much use any pattern, but on business trips you might want to be a little more sedate. You should also consider any cultural issues when choosing your ribbons. Many countries use a tricolor (three stripes) as a flag and national symbol. Flying into Pakistan with something looking like the national flag of India might not be the wisest thing you can do.

Finally, don't forget that this is an aid to help you identify your luggage at a distance, it isn't a substitute for clearly marking your bags with your name and contact details. You need that in case your bags are mislaid by the airline and they need to get them to you later.

I've often considered painting a large identifying mark on my bags, but have so far refrained. The ribbon can be cut off and discarded at journey's end but the paint is there forever.

Originally published on Qondio

Help improve Wikipedia

Do you use Wikipedia as a reference site? Do you find that there are times when you look something up and find a short "stub" article? Would you like Wikipedia to be better?

Wikipedia is a volunteer effort. There are people who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia trying to improve it. Unfortunately they can spend a lot of their time doing very trivial changes such as correcting typographical errors, spelling mistakes, and rewording clumsy grammar because these are important things to fix and while, each one only takes a small amount of time, collectively they take a long time because there are so many of them.

As an ordinary user of Wikipedia you can easily take over some of this load. When you are browsing Wikipedia and you notice a small error, hit the edit button and fiix it. For example, in the last sentence I wrote "fiix" rather than "fix". If this was Wikipedia you could simply fix it. It's only a tiny change, but there are so many people visiting Wikipedia on a regular basis that if everyone who visited fixed them they'd soon be gone.

The only thing to watch out for is, despite what you were taught at school, English doesn't have a standard spelling, it has several. British spelling is different to American spelling and Canadian spelling is different to both in significant ways. New Zealand, Australia, India and Singapore are all close to British spelling but all have slight regional differences of their own. Wikipedia can't make up its mind which form of English should be used; the rule is whichever form of English is first used in an article should be retained. So resist the temptation to change labour to labor or aluminum to aluminium.

After typos, the other thing that really needs doing is fixing the dreaded disambiguation page. When a word has two (or more) meanings or several people share the same name and you go to the page for them you come to a "disambiguation page", a page that (hopefully) points you to the right article. This is great when entering Wikipedia, but if you are reading a page on computers and click on a link for Apple, you expect to reach a page on Apple computers, not a page giving you a choice of the fruit, computers, etc. When you find you've followed an internal link to one of these pages, click the back button, fix the link so it bypasses the disambiguation page and you've just improved Wikipedia.

As the old Scots saying goes, "A wheen o' mickles mak's a muckle" (Many small items add up to a large thing).

Remember, it wasn't a single raindrop that carved the USA's Grand Canyon, it was the collective action of uncountable billions of raindrops that carved it, but each one helped.

Originally published on Qondio

Wikipedia The untrustworthy reference book

Want to find out about something on the web? The chances are you'll end up at Wikipedia, either directly or because Google sees Wikipedia as important and ranks its results highly. Wikipedia is available in many languages and I really only know the English language version that is edited by talented people from all over the world, but largely by editors in English speaking countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom as well as it's home country the United States.

A lot of people trust the information they get from Wikipedia and generally the information there is pretty good, but unfortunately Wikipedia can't be relied on to provide accurate answers and the reason for this is also the same reason that it has been such a success. Wikipedia is a contraction of Wiki Encyclopedia and anyone can edit practically any page at Wikipedia. You can edit, I can edit, bored school children can edit. This means that at any moment the page you retrieve is probably good, but may contain anything from biased information or commercial spam to a puerile string of rude words.

The puerile strings of rude words are usually removed very quickly, sometimes automatically and sometimes by a small army of volunteer editors from all over the world. I know, I'm one of these volunteer editors. Every so often I look at the recent changes by anonymous users page and try to remove bad edits that the robots missed. Because spammers are pretty dumb, spam links are usually very easy to spot, but more subtle vandalism is something that only an expert in a field is likely to spot, and because very few people are experts in many fields, random Wikipedia editors looking at random pages are unlikely to spot the vandalism and it can stay there for a very long time.

The other problem with the vandalism is that talented and dedicated editors from all over the world who should be working on improving Wikipedia are spending a lot of time reverting this vandalism. Specialists should be editing articles on their area of expertise, other editors could be editing and improving articles on things they know, such as their country or home town. British editors could be improving articles on England, Scotland, Wales, etc. I could be improving articles on NZ.

How do you as a user of Wikipedia protect yourself? The official answer is that just like a paper encyclopedia, all information in Wikipedia is supposed to be referenced to source documents. Unfortunately a very large number of pages are not properly sourced and those that are sourced can have sources that general readers would have trouble understanding.

The next best way to protect yourself is to use common sense, if you see something that looks like arrant nonsense, wait a minute and refresh the page, if the nonsense goes away, you're probably safe. For extra safety every page has history and discussion pages and a quick look there will show if the page is frequently edited or has known problems.

If you spot something you know to be wrong, you can always fix it. Be careful, that's the start of the process that got me started as a regular Wikipedia editor.

The late Douglas Adams described the fictional Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe as being definitive as

"though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it was always reality that's got it wrong."

Sometimes I feel like this about Wikipedia. I'd hate to live without the wealth of information it provides, but I always treat it with caution.

Originally published on Qondio

My Wellington GP

I lived for 19 years in Wellington, New Zealand and naturally I had a doctor when I was down there. By the time I started seeing Dr Lowe I had already had three different doctors during my time there, one retired, one I wasn't happy with, and one was just too far from where I shifted to for easy access.

Following a minor motorbike accident where I was picked up by some helpful road workers and deposited a the nearest doctors practice, I had become a patient at a multiple doctor general practice in Karori. I switched to them largely for my convenience and ease of getting an appointment. For some reason I've never really understood, these practices like to assign patients they might only see once a year to individual doctors and I needed to see a doctor, but my "normal" doctor was unavailable.

The receptionist explained that they had a young doctor available who was a fully qualified doctor doing the practical section of his general practice training under supervision and would I mind seeing him. I had some fairly trivial ailment and had no problems seeing him. As it happened I ended up seeing him two or three times and he was pretty good; young and clued up.

Several months later I needed to see a doctor again and the receptionist explained that my "normal" doctor was away on maternity leave, but did I remember Dr Lowe? Apparently the student doctor was now a fully qualified general practitioner and had joined the practice. I was very happy to see him and he fixed me up.

As well as being a very competent medical practitioner, he had a great sense of humour and we established a rapport. Finally I understood why having a regular doctor at a multi-doctor practice was a good idea. I can't remember if it was after the first or second visit, but I quickly informed the receptionist that I would like to make him my "normal" doctor.

I kept seeing him for 5 or 6 years until I moved back to Auckland, NZ, ten years ago. I haven't found a doctor up here that I relate to as well as I related to him, and it's something I miss.

Originally published on Qassia

Why I Won't Have A Car

I travel around by bicycle. I don't do it for pleasure, I don't do it to save money, I simply do it for exercise.

The truth of the matter is I'm lazy. I don't play sport, I never go for power walks and I'm quite capable of joining a gym, and stop going after a week or two. It's the bike or obesity and if I had a car, I'd find some reason to go to work in it every morning.

By simply choosing not to have a car, I deprive myself of that choice. Sure I can take public transport, but if I'm at home in Epsom, Auckland, and I need to get to work in under 1/2 an hour, I have no choice but to get on my bike, and once my bike's at work, I have little choice but to ride it home. Fortunately the weather here in Aotearoa (NZ) is pretty mild, so I can pretty much ride the bike all year round.

On the other hand, I'm no luddite. We have a car, Tessa uses for going to work and we can use it for shopping (Although it's amazing how much you can carry on a bike). When the weather is really nasty, we can always pop the wheels off and throw it in the car.

Originally published on Qondio

My Ancient GPS

I've been to India as a tourist three times. The first time was in 1996 and I toured the southern part of the country, Kerela, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Before I left my then home in Wellington, New Zealand, I did my homework, got vaccinated, devoured guidebooks, checked the nascent web for travel warnings, redirected my email. I thought I was prepared, until I was in a smaller city and discovered that the street signs were only in Malayalam, a Dravidian language with its own script that is totally unreadable to someone who only knows the Roman script we use in English.

I was in trouble. I'd been covering a fair amount of ground that day, and was miles from my hotel. I wanted to get a bus back to the city I was staying in, and there were plenty of buses, but they were only marked in Malayalam and I couldn't read the destination signs. I got lucky, there was a family standing at the bus stop and the son spoke English; he was able to tell me which bus to catch and it only cost me a few minutes telling him about my country. I had a couple of other experiences like this and once hired a Taxi to go around the corner.

When I got home to Aotearoa I knew I would go back to see Mumbai in Maharashtra and continue up through Rajastan, Gujarat and the Punjab and I didn't want to get lost again. It took me 18 months to go again and in that time primitive hand held Global Positioning System (GPS) units became affordable and available. These early models didn't have maps or tell you to "Take the second exit at the roundabout", but I knew I could use it so I bought a Garmin one.

Once my destination was programmed in, it could point an arrow there, give me straight-line distance to it, and it could remember about 100 or so destinations. This was really all I needed, when I arrived at a town I recorded the location of the bus or train station and my hotel. If the tourist map told me a destination was close I'd program a guessed location for it and could follow the arrow. This method of navigation took me to some interesting places where tourists normally don't go: sedate farmers' vegetable markets, a street of jobbing arc welding businesses, busy chicken markets; real India and not just the tourist destinations.

I had to use my commonsense too. If the little arrow was telling me to walk through a brick wall it was obvious I needed to detour, but sometimes it wasn't quite so obvious. I ended up in a couple of "interesting" locations where I got cheerful hellos from the locals, but strongly felt it was safest to smile, wave, say hello back, but keep walking. I also once got steered straight through a squatter camp, I knew where I was going, but by the time I knew it I had a choice of walking through or detouring over a mile.

Thanks to my little Garmin GPS I never got lost again and enjoyed my second and third trips with far more confidence than my first. Twelve years later I still have it, and it still works. We now have one with a map and spoken instructions for the car, but the arrow and distance still serves me well for navigation on foot or for long distance cycling. When it does finally wear out I'll replace it and I'd never consider doing another overseas trip without a hand held GPS.

Originally published on Qondio

World's Worst Tasting Cough Medicine, But It Worked!

n January 2007 my partner Tessa & I were touring in India and after nearly a month on the road we were in the beautiful city of Bhubaneswar in India's Orissa state.

Tessa came down with a cold and it sparked her asthma off. She hadn't been to a doctor since we left our home in Auckland, New Zealand and even though I knew she needed help she was determined not to make a fuss. I can't really blame her, a week or two earlier I had resisted getting help for one of my travel ailments. Admittedly neither of us would have run for the doctor back in Aotearoa NZ either.

During the day we had passed a closed shop front not far from our hotel claiming to be a doctor's evening surgery and that evening I "accidentally" steered Tessa past it. Inside the now open store was a professionally dressed man sitting at a desk with a minimal amount of medical equipment, an assistant and a curtained off examination area. At first I was a little dubious that he was the real thing, but when he started examining Tessa he did exactly what a real doctor would do anywhere and asked familiar questions. After a couple of minutes he wrote a prescription and when I asked for the bill only asked for 50 Rupees ... at that stage a little less than two dollars!

I was a little surprised at the minimal fee, but paid up and we went to get the script filled. The pharmacy dispensed some antibiotics and an allegedly cherry tasting cough mixture. These medicines were all fairly cheap, but still cost more than the doctor's fee.

Tessa told me it was the worst tasting cough mixture she had ever had ... but it worked better than anything she could remember. Within a day she was back playing the tourist with gusto.

Since leaving India and coming home to Auckland I've often wondered what was in that cough mixture, as I'm sure it must come with other syrups.

I've also wondered about that doctor. I sometimes think we might have wandered in on a charity clinic and if so he was probably as surprised at me asking for a bill as I was at the low fee, but again it's something I'll probably never know.

Originally published on Qondio

Garlic For Coughs And Colds

Whenever I have a cough, a cold or a generic viral fever I take fresh raw garlic as a herbal remedy to help myself recover faster. I take it twice a day, first thing in the morning and about 12 hours later at night.

My method is to take a large clove of garlic, place it on a chopping board and lightly crush it with the blade of a large kitchen knife, when I say lightly I mean so it is bruised and maybe a little split, but not turned to pulp. After that I peel it and cut it into pieces about 1 cm (the size of a broad bean). Once prepared I swallow the pieces whole with water.

I make sure I get fresh New Zealand garlic rather than the cheaper imported Chinese garlic. I'm sure that China's garlic is just as good, but buying locally grown produce means I'm getting it fresher. If you're planning to try this, I suggest you buy local produce from your home area for the freshness factor.

Does it help? I like to think so, but as every cold is different it's hard to say. I do know that within an hour of taking it I can feel the garlic working in my lungs (yes, this could be psychological) and scientific studies have shown that garlic contains compounds with antibiotic properties.

Even if it doesn't work, the aroma of garlic means other people are warned and will stand further back so you're less likely to pass the cold onto them.

I've used this method or a close variation for over 10 years. It is based on my personal experience and the results may not be typical.

Originally posted on Qondio

Mystery Gift

This morning while I was having my bath there was a knock at the door. Outside was a courier with a box clearly addressed to me. It had my name, street address, and suburb in large type with no clue as to the sender or the contents.I guess it was sent from somewhere in Auckland as it didn't name the city or country

I didn't open it as I thought it might be something Tessa had ordered and I wasn't supposed to see until the 25th. Tessa had already left for work and when I got the chance to ask her she was as much in the dark as I was.

It was the last night of bridge for the year and as I hadn't had a chance to come home before going up to the club, it was nearly 11PM when I got home and opened the box. Inside was a confectionery hamper from SweetzRUs a.k.a Lollies online with Toblerone chocolate, a teddy bear, some loose wrapped chocolates and three packets of Sweet Love products. Still no clue as to the sender.

I'm working on the basis that either there was a miscommunication and the card was accidentally left out or it was someone I've done a favour for over the last year who wished to do something nice for me anonymously, and if that person is reading this: thank you, it's appreciated, but you shouldn't have :)

While on the subject of giving, if there's anyone else out there thinking of doing something nice for a stranger or near stranger, can I suggest making a donation to the Tear Fund's Gift for life campaign, or a similar fund, they help people in the third world lift themselves out of poverty by providing a loan of livestock, tools, training, or capital to start a business.

I guess nothing much remains but to wish you all a very merry XMAS.

Seven unsolved medical mysteries - New Scientist

"In this week's issue of New Scientist [the author] edited a profile of a doctor who is the real-life version of TV's House MD. William Gahl recently set up the Undiagnosed Diseases Program to hunt for the answer to mysterious diseases that have defied all other medical experts (read the interview at New Scientist). "This got [him] thinking about ailments that have perplexed the medical profession. Here is a selection of the most unusual."

Fertile women more open to corny chat-up lines

Psychologists carried out a test where men rated as good looking by women approached strange women and attempted to set up a drink later, getting their phone number. Afterwards the women were approached by a female researcher who asked questions designed to determine their fertility. The result, women are considerably more open to advances from good looking men when they are at their most fertile -- New Scientist

The surprise, of course, is that this is a surprise. You only need to consider the evolutionary pressure to reproduce and look at the behaviour of other mammals to understand why this makes perfect sense. The only reason it wouldn't make sense is if we believed that somehow the rules of evolution didn't apply to our species.

John Key Joke

After being sworn in as Prime Minister, John Key walked out of Government house and got into his ministerial limousine for the first time. The chauffeur turned to him and said "Where to Mr Key?"

Without even a moment's hesitation Key replied "I'm National, so signal right and turn left, of course."

---

Ever wonder where jokes come from? This was originally a joke about Argentine President Juan Peron, only in his case it was signal left, turn right. I read it and felt it ideal for our own JK, so I translated -- Julia.

In Defense of Alchemy

Alchemy, and by that I mean the attempt to change base metal into gold (chrysopoeia), has a really bad name today, but was it as bad as we are led to believe?

Today we can look at alchemy and say it was pseudo-science, occultism, and just plain crazy. We have images of an unkempt train spotter (or should that be coach spotter?) in the medieval equivalent of an anorak hunched over his heated retort adding foaming chemicals to something nameless at the bottom. We know it was crazy because gold is an element and you can not change one element to another by chemical means. Copper will always be copper, and to change it you need the type of energy found in the heart of dying stars.

To understand alchemy it is necessary to understand a little about the cultural context and the knowledge of that era. Well before they learned how to make metal from ores, our ancestors probably discovered naturally occurring gold, the native American civilizations who never transitioned from the stone age certainly did. Some time in the late neolithic (stone age) our ancestors discovered how to use heat and chemicals to treat stones "ores" containing metallic salts and oxides to turn the compounds into metal. The metals created from this were soft ones like copper and tin. South Americans made sewing needles out of gold and Ötzi the Austrian Iceman carried a copper axe, so these primitive metals were usable.

Our ancestors were as smart as we are, and experimented and learned. After a while they discovered that if they mixed soft metals together they could make harder metals and the bronze age was born. Later came the discovery of iron, and how to mix iron with other chemicals to make harder forms of iron and eventually steel.

Meanwhile gold hadn't been forgotten, it was then as it is now a highly desirable and precious metal. Enter the alchemist who reasoned "If mixing different metals makes hard alloys, and I know that some ores make harder versions of the original metals, presumably because ores already contain more than one type of metal, and gold is soft, then if I can remove the impurities from other metals I should end up with gold and be rich." These alchemists didn't have our knowledge of elements, so the logic was entirely reasonable for that age. It was further enhanced by the "four elements" theory of antiquity, this held that all physical objects were made from different combinations of only 4 elements.

With the knowledge of the time, the alchemist's theory wasn't actually too bad. Mixtures are hard, I want soft, so I'll un-mix. Unfortunately the theory was flawed, and they began casting around for better theories, these theories led them further and further down unproductive roads, and further from what we now regard as the truth. Eventually starting with people like Robert Boyle and his book The Sceptical Chymist, the experimental and more logical aspects of alchemy became chemistry while the more bizarre elements wandered off to become a true pseudoscience. Robert Boyle himself is largely regarded as having his roots in alchemy, yet his book is regarded as the start of modern chemistry and chemistry as distinct from alchemy dates from its publication in 1661.

For over two thousand years (and possibly several thousand years, depending on when Egyptian alchemy began) alchemists slaved away in secret on their impossible mission, and in the meantime made a large number of important discoveries and laid the basis of modern inorganic chemistry including a lot of the laboratory equipment that early modern chemists used, in China the alchemists searched for and made medicinal discoveries some of which are in use today.

We should salute these explorers as early scientists and while we must never forget their excesses we need to balance these against the benefits they bought us.

Of course the final irony is that even if they had succeeded and found how to make virtually unlimited quantities of gold, rather than becoming incredibly rich they would have just devalued the value of gold and we'd be using it to roof houses. A similar thing happened in the time of the conquistadors when they brought large amounts of Aztec gold back to Spain and invented inflation.

Who Was Behind The Mumbai Terror Attack?

The world is reeling from the reports of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Attacks that were dealt with in a highly professional and effective manner by the Indian security forces, both police and army. Unfortunately before they were stopped the terrorists killed over 200 innocent people.

Now attention is turning to attributing the blame. We understand that one of the terrorists has been captured, but we don't yet know if he even knows who was behind the attacks. What we know, so far, is that they apparently hijacked an Indian trawler, killed all the crew, except one, and forced that crew member to sail them off the Mumbai coast. Based on a GPS found on the boat it seems that their route included Pakistan and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is an obvious candidate for being behind the attack, but is that really what happened?

As always the internet is abuzz with conspiracy theories and the finger has been pointed at the CIA, the ISI, the shadowy figures behind the Yorkshire 7/7 attacks, Dawood Ibrahim and even Al Quaeda. Personally I find the claims that the CIA was behind the attacks bizarre as they are reported as having alerted the Indian authorities to the possibility of an attack on the Mumbai Taj hotel.

Whoever was behind these attacks, they intended to damage India by attacking foreigners in India and frightening them into staying away. It's also highly likely that they intended to damage the slowly improving relationship between India and Pakistan. It's difficult to see how the government of Pakistan can see an advantage in goading India into an attack, which suggests that whoever in Pakistan assisted the attack was acting against the interests of their own country and their government. This suggests it is either some disaffected faction in Pakistan's security services or an extralegal force such as Ibriham or Al Quaeda. I wonder if the truth will ever be revealed.

Who do you think was behind the attack?

Originally published on Qondio

Giant Single Cells

I've been fascinated by something I read a couple of days back. Most cells are microscopic, the largest bacteria is a little under a millimetre in length and the largest amoebozoa (amoeba and similar protists) gets to about 3 millimetres and all is well with the world. These large bacteria and amoebozoa face difficulties with life as giant cells and many of them resort to having a large number of copies of their DNA (In the case of protists multiple nucleoli) in the cell. The giant bacteria can have 100,000 to 200,000 copies of its DNA.

A few days back I read about a recent discovery, an even larger protoist named Gromia sphaerica There's a nicer photo of it on the Discovery web site. This is one weird looking beast, and I'd so like to know more about it.

But wait, there's more. It seems that gromia leaves trails as it crosses the sea floor ... trails that are identical to the pre-Cambrian trace fossils which were previously taken as evidence there were multicellular animals before the Cambrian explosion.

I remember being fascinated when I was much younger by the question "what's the largest cell" ... and the answer was "An ostrich egg", which it was, if in a fugacious way. Only now the answer isn't so simple. Sure an ostrich egg is a lot bigger than gromia, but it turns out there are even bigger candidates. Some seaweeds are made up of giant single cells Caulerpa can be up to three metres long, and it's all one cell! Sir Arthur Eddington was right when he said "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." and it isn't just the universe, there's enough here at home to baffle and amaze.

Photo credit Eurakalert.org.

Tessa's Graduation

Tessa's school NSIA had its graduation ceremony today and we attended. It's been about 6 weeks since the end of lessons and Tessa's been working as the baker at an Ellerslie cafe (which foolishly doesn't have a web-site) in the meanwhile. She's been really looking forward to the graduation.

We got there about 90 minutes before it was due to start and Tessa had a great time catching up with her classmates. She also showed me around the school and introduced me to several of the staff. Being an adult student, Tessa is more the age group of the staff than the students and with the NSIA's emphasis on foreign students was also only one of three (or possibly 4, I'm not sure about the heritage of the Brazilian student) Caucasians in the graduating class.

Each member of the class was called up in order, by name, except for Tessa. When the presiding tutor called her he said a few extra words about how good and how helpful she had been.

Afterwards the school put on a lunch and there was a chance to say goodbyes.

Submitting sites to reciprocal directories

If you've tried getting your domains listed in reciprocal internet directories, you've probably noticed that it's getting a lot harder to get accepted than it used to be. What's more, it's going to get harder to get into any directory that vets submissions.

I own several directories and I'm getting so badly spammed by directory submission services that I've had to get a lot tougher.

The problems they present me with are that they completely ignore the submission guidelines and they attempt to trick me out of my reciprocal link. They do this by either having a links page that isn't linked to from the rest of the site or sometimes just trying to claim an existing link as their reciprocal ... in one case they had the cheek to claim a link on one of my own sites.

It's the reciprocal links that make my directories worthwhile and if they can't even be bothered supplying that I'm not interested in helping them out.

These spam submissions have increased my workload to the point where I have become quite brutal about deleting them. I used to try and help out submissions that almost made the grade, but now if I don't find exactly what I'm looking for I'm likely to just toss the submission. I know this is harsh, but that's the reality of a very marginal businesses, here just isn't a margin to support any more detailed examination. Occasionally I spot a really good site that almost makes the grade and I'll still email them to try and clear it up, but I'll only email once.

I'm sure other directory owners are finding themselves with much the same problem as I have and you can look for them taking a tough line. Sorry, but it's a matter of survival.

If you want to get your site listed in directories:

• Read the guidelines ... if your site doesn't fit, move along to the next directory. There's thousands of them out there, you'll just save yourself time.
• Create the required back-link. Put it on a page that's in your site map. If the directory requires some special condition for the back-link, either follow it or move along. It isn't worth your effort to try a submission that doesn't fit.
• Describe your site in a real sentence or two. Have a look at the directory you are submitting to, if it's of any value, it will have real sentences, not just strings of keywords. I always slightly reword submissions to avoid duplicate content, but I like to have a sentence to start with. Other directories will simply incorporate your text, as long as it's real English.
• Give a real email address that you actually monitor. It's possible that the directory owner might try and contact you, if you don't respond to the email your submission is history.
• Now, and only now, submit.

Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Want to know the official way to SEO your site? Google have published a 22 page guide giving their preferred way for you to do it.

That's not really a fair summary. The guide does explain how to make your site list well on Google, how to make it display correctly in the search results and how to select which pages are indexed, but the 22 pages also offer a wealth of simple to understand gems on how to make a site that is both useful to your visitors while being easy for Google and other search engines to analyse and index. There is little in here that is new to the experienced designer of well indexed sites, but there is a lot that people who have never really considered the search engines could learn from it.

Finally, they've kindly published it under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Licence, so it would be possible for annotated versions to be produced, the guide is at http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.